"Gretel"

It was a bad summer, and we all knew it. We liked to phrase it that way, as if what was happening was an aberration - a single season of pain and doubt - instead of all out informing people that our lives were falling apart, plain and simple as pie. I knew too much for someone who was fifteen, and with the way my luck was running, I'd probably soon know more. I was no longer one of those human beings who stupidly assume that everything can't go wrong at the same time. Even my best friend, Jill, who was without a doubt the most cheerful person I'd ever met, shook her head and said "Wow" whenever I told her what was going on in our family. She sat cross-legged on my bed, obsessively eating M&Ms, and informed me that in light of my family's bad luck what was happening to me was probably a crisis of confidence. But Jill was good-natured and liked to see the best in every situation. Frankly, I didn't see the difference between a crisis of confidence and a nervous breakdown.

At least I was in the right place. People in our town had nervous breakdowns all the time. It was one of Franconia's claims to fame. The candy store, owned by a woman named Ruby, who no one would dare mouth off to, was a regular hotbed of lunatics. Not that you could tell by looking at them. They appeared normal enough, or at least they did at first glance. But if you kept on looking you'd see that the woman who had ordered black coffee was crying hot tears into her cup, and the man beside her, who liked his eggs sunnyside up, was talking to himself, having a grand old conversation, with the person he most respected. Even Jill's mom, who was the head of the PTA and made the best chocolate chip cookies in town, had received shock treatments last fall, and although she was nowhere as depressed as she'd been before, her baking was the victim of her new emotional state; it was all bland and soapy now, not worth the calories or the time it took to chew? My mother had always been an eyewitness to other people's problems, yet refused to have any of her own. She was smart and funny; she told good jokes and smoked Salem cigarettes and continued to believe in true love even though she had married my father, who could put anyone through a crisis of confidence.

After he left, my father became involved with a woman named Thea, whom he married on the Fourth of July. Anyone needing to know the facts about the wedding had better ask someone else, since I was not invited. I didn't even find out about it until a week after it happened, when my brother came over to Jill's house, something he never did. Jason was going off to college in the fall, or at least that had been the plan, but lately he didn't seem to be going anywhere fast. The week after his best friend, my former business partner, Eugene, had run off to California, Jason had gotten himself a job at the Food Star, in the deli department, and something had shifted. He was starting to seem comfortable in the deli. He was even dating a girl who worked in fruits and vegetables–Terry LoPacca, who wore huge hoop earrings and was so inarticulate she merely smiled if you asked her a question. To be honest, Jason wouldn't have looked at Terry when he was still in school. He probably didn't even know she was alive until he found her beside the lemons and the limes, her pretty face upturned, alight with her glorious smile.

When my brother came to get me at Jill's he didn't even look like himself. Who was he? That's what I wanted to know. What was happening to our family, anyway? Jason had won every science prize at school and had gotten early admission to Harvard, but now- he wore an old, grungy T-shirt and was smoking a Salem that he'd swiped from my mother; he had smoked that cigarette right down to the filter, and he wasn't done with it yet. I think he had stopped sleeping, because his face, which was usually open and sweet, had a twisted look. Even Jill, Miss I-See-theSilver-Lining, could detect the toll our family's bad fortune had taken on Jason.

"Wow," she said when she saw him coming, cutting across the Fishers' yard, completely unaware that he was trampling the impatiens and the dahlias. "He looks awful," she sighed in her sunny little voice, which made everything seem even more hopeless than it was.

The worst thing, of course, was that our mother was sick. She'd been diagnosed in May, but she'd kept her illness from us. At first we thought she was sleeping all the time because she was depressed that our father had taken up with Thea, who, naturally, was ten years younger than my mother, just to add insult to the injury of their affair. My mother, you understand, was not a person who slept much under normal circumstances. Ordinarily, she'd still be talking to her friends on the telephone at midnight, or trying out a new recipe; at the oddest hours imaginable you'd find her repainting the kitchen tiger-lily orange or pale green. Her eyes were fiery and black and she talked back to the TV. Big shot, she'd say to the actors who treated their women all wrong. Get a life, she'd cry to any woman who dissolved in a heap of makeup and tears. But now things had changed. She stayed in bed all afternoon, and she'd lost a lot of weight; late at night, when she thought I was asleep, I could hear her crying.

It was Jill's mom who told me that my mother had cancer. I was over for dinner and Mrs. Harrington took me into their backyard and put her hands on my shoulders as we stood beside the jungle gym we were all too old for, and then she told me. Right there and for my own good. That's the way we always found out things about our own family, in a roundabout fashion that made us feel even sadder than we would have if we'd known the truth straight out. Now, in July, when the heat was unbearable and the cicadas sang a maddened song all day long, my brother nodded to me in the manner he'd recently affected, as if there was nothing he cared about in the whole wide world.

We didn't talk until we'd left Jill's house and were headed for home. All around us the asphalt was melting, and we were most likely thinking the same thing–that good old Eugene Kessler, who had run away in June, was surely in a much, much better place than we were right now.

"They got married," my brother told me. He had that look on his face, the twisted one.

I had no idea who he was referring to, but I kept my mouth shut until I figured out he was talking about my father and Thea. I was wearing a lot of mascara in those days, so it often seemed that I was tearful, even when I was not.

"Cut it out," my brother said to me in a mean voice. He never used to sound that way, but I had to face it. He sounded like that now.

"Cut what out?" I said. I suppose he thought I was crying, which I absolutely was not. "Does Mom know?" I asked when our house came into sight. It was just like every other house on the street, but for some reason it looked more decrepit than all the rest. At least to me.

I guess it was no longer possible for my brother to answer a direct question. "They're picking us up at six," he told me, and he slammed through the front door.

Our house was dark in the summer, because of the two cypresses my father had planted in the front yard, but it was still stuffy and hot. I went to the doorway of my mother's bedroom. She was under her quilt in spite of the heat, and I couldn't tell if she was sleeping or not.

"I hear the stinker is coming to see you," she said.

Since she was awake I went to sit on the edge of the bed. She had cups of water and orange juice on her night table, but she didn't care; her throat was too raw to swallow anything. Her eyes were more fevered than ever. Sometimes it seemed as if she could see everything, as if she could look directly into your soul.

"If he takes you to a restaurant, order the most expensive thing on the menu," my mother instructed. "It doesn't matter if you eat it or not. Have three appetizers. Start with shrimp cocktail."

We laughed over that, since my father hated to spend money. He also hated unkempt girls, he thought they were a terrible disgrace, so I put on my oldest jeans and a shirt that was torn and stained. My hair was growing out from a horrible haircut I'd given myself only a few weeks earlier. I looked pretty much the way I felt, and I didn't bother to talk when Jason came out to wait with me on the stoop.

At six-fifteen my father's car pulled up to the curb. That awful Thea was behind the wheel. We'd met her a couple of times, but hadn't paid much attention. Now, as she honked the horn, I realized she was my mother's exact Opposite–self-centered and ravenous. That was the thing about my mother–there was hardly anything she'd ever wanted for herself. She'd had her eye on a dining room set once, and she never even got to have that.

"Hurry up," Thea called to us. "We'll be late."

It turned out my father was coming directly from work and would meet us at the restaurant, Luarano's over in Rose Village, an expensive place a few towns past ours that I'd never been to before, although I was pretty certain they'd have shrimp cocktail. If I was lucky, they'd have oysters too.

Thea tore through our neighborhood as if running over some kid playing kickball would be a far better option than keeping my father waiting at a restaurant. The windows were open and when the car turned onto the parkway the air was like a rocket of pure heat blasting right through us.

Thea was talking about what a great place we were going to for dinner, and how they liked people to dress nicely, which of course was a dig at me, not that I cared about her sense of style. Then she started in on her real agenda–how the house she and my father had recently bought might look big, but it was really just right for two people. I guess she wanted to squelch any ideas we might have about moving in with them, although frankly we would have preferred to nest with spiders. I could see Jason's profile, and he looked absolutely blank. He was doing that lately. You could knock and knock, but he wouldn't let you in. During a period of three months he'd gone from someone who had always planned his career at Harvard to a deli boy who appeared to have undergone a lobotomy.

Thea was driving much too fast and talking even faster. I guess she was telling us the score, in her sly, understated manner, informing us that we were second-class citizens, as if we didn't already know that. If my mother had been one of the passengers, she would have demanded Thea pull over. Once, when we were little, my mother went right up to our bus driver who'd been speeding all the way to Atlantic City, and smacked him. Some of the other passengers actually applauded, and you can bet the driver slowed down after that.

Thea finally turned off the parkway, but she kept right on speeding. Every minute she was spending with us was probably killing her, so she took the shortcut through the forest. It was a creepy stretch where the county police sometimes trained recruits; some people said that beneath the ivy and the wild grass, there were sinkholes that could suck you right into the ground if you wandered off in the wrong direction.

Though it was dark in the woods, Thea didn't bother to switch on her fog lights. She was too busy talking about the furniture she'd just picked out. That's when I started to take things out of her purse. It had been sitting there beside me on the back seat all this time, a fat leather bag with gold clasps and a nasty disposition. The first thing I got was her wallet, crammed with credit cards. I slipped them out the open window, one by one, then went on to the cash. It felt so wonderful to release all those tens and twenties into the wind; I couldn't have felt any better if I'd been freeing caged parakeets to nest among tropical palms. I should have kept it to that, nice flat items like money and credit cards, but instead I went on to harder stuff: vials of prescriptions, silver tubes of lipstick, brushes, tortoiseshell combs, opal earrings in a velvet box.

Maybe Thea caught sight of what I was doing, or maybe she looked in her rearview mirror and spied her belongings scattered across the road. There was her chiffon scarf, caught in the bushes. There were her sunglasses, floating in the drainage ditch. She pulled the car over so fast our heads snapped back. We probably would have had just cause to call a personal injury lawyer and claim whiplash, but Thea wasn't the type to give you time to consider your options.

"Your father is right," she said to me. She formed her words carefully, the way people do when they want to hurt you. "You are a little bitch."

Our mother always told us that people will surely reveal what they're made of, if you only give them the chance. What's deep inside always surfaces, no matter how hidden.

"Wait a minute," Jason said to our new stepmother. "You can't talk to my sister like that."

But the truth was, she could. She told us to get out and get out fast. She was already putting the car into gear.

"Here?" Jason said. "You'd just leave us?"

He had a funny look on his face, and for a moment it seemed as if he might actually hit Thea, simply reach over and slap her. But instead, he slammed the door open and got out. I followed just in time; Thea stepped on the gas before I could close the door, and as the car took off down the road the door flapped open and shut, like a broken wing.

"You are a moron," my brother told me as the car exhaust rose above us in thick black clouds.

I thought about how people threw each other away, as if they were tissues or trash. I thought about my mother, asleep beneath her quilt on this hot summer evening, and the way things moved away from you if you weren't careful, if you didn't hold on tight.

"Don't worry," I told my brother. "I know the way home."

The sky was the color of ashes and we both studied it carefully for some sort of sign. Behind us was a ribbon of road and woods so thick you'd need an ax to find your way. It was only dinnertime, but it felt later.

"Face it," my brother finally said to me. "We're lost."