Great American

In August, Madison and her mother moved into the battered blue house three doors up from us that had been empty for months. There was another empty one across the street--more of a shack, really--and our neighbors to the left, the Taylors, had had a For Sale sign up for two years. Corinth, New York, was a town you wanted to get out of, not arrive in. Madison would walk up and down the broken sidewalk kicking stones, bouncing them off car tires, sending them skittering out into the street. I was trying to learn the ukelele, but the one I had, which I'd picked up out of a junk pile on Mulberry Street, wouldn't stay tuned. The day she invited herself in, I was on the porch with it and one of my dad's Heinekens in a paper bag.

"Sounds awful," she called out.

"It's Coltrane--'A Love Supreme."' My parents had the album, and this song--three notes repeated over and over--was something I'd figured out I could play.

"They ought to call it 'Torturing the Cat,"' she said. She had a round face and bangs. Her eyes were big, too, set wide apart, and a lively blue. She was pretty, but in a way that probably wouldn't last--it was more like a stage she was passing through. There was something about her expression that said she knew this. She had dark hair and prominent eyebrows, and wore painter's pants. I liked how there was a gap where they met her shirt--your eyes were drawn to that shadowy place whether you liked it or not. "You got another of those beers?"

She followed me up and into the house, and I gave her one, even though I knew I'd have to explain later. The old man wouldn't notice one missing, but two was different.

"It's kind of a mess," I said, as we passed back into the living room. "I'm supposed to clean, but I don't."

"What's your pop do?" She rested one hand on her hip.

"School psychologist. That's a joke, because I'm ADD, among other things."

"Got rits?"

In my bedroom, I shook out some pills. She did five. "You can kiss me if you want to," she said, hopping backward on my bed. I did. She tasted slightly sour, like old smoke, and bitter from the medicine. Her tongue introduced itself to the various parts of my mouth. I reached down, but she pushed my hand aside and quit kissing. "I gotta keep you thinking about something, don't I?"

I asked if she went to Central.

"I don't go to school. We moved over here on account of my mom got a job at Faxton Hospital. She's an ICU nurse. I start down at Great American on Monday." She stuck her tongue deep into my ear and squeezed my crotch, then stood up. "Come by and see me."

"You're a checker?" I'd been going to that market most of my life. The people who worked there were side-show freaks: Billy Carnevale, with an ass the size of a car door, bearded Norma Kellogg, whose arms looked like a chimpanzee's. I wondered if there were something wrong with Madison, too, and if so, what it was, and what it meant that I was hot for her.

"I don't know what I do yet. But it's just temporary. I'm going to be famous."

"Famous how?" I figured she meant she was going to be on TV someday, or win the Lotto. Everybody wants to be famous, a little bit. At least when they are young. Then life goes on and they settle for their own individual kind of fame. My dad was famous for never having eaten a vegetarian meal, and for barbecuing every New Year's Eve, no matter what the weather. My mother had once ridden in an elevator with Loretta Swit.

"I'm going to kill someone," she said.

The person she planned to kill was her father. He lived in Westfield, and was a drunk who had, according to Madison, "messed with her on a regular basis" from the age of seven on. He had a contracting business, and was often out late on jobs, and rather than wake his wife up, he'd sleep in the den. He would visit Madison first. Her parents had divorced a year and a half ago, mother and daughter moving first to neighboring Cazenovia, then here, to the outskirts of Utica. She had never told her mom, she'd just decided to someday get even.

I agreed that he ought to have his throat slit ear to ear at the very least, but not before he was forced to get down on his pitiful knees and pray for forgiveness. In fact, I had my doubts. Her story was a little too TV-movie for me, and certain details didn't add up. For instance, her tenth birthday, which she told me that he missed completely because he was sleeping off a drunk but then later told me was the night she was first officially "deflowered" by him. How could both things be true? Still, I suspected that at least some of what she said had happened, and I was angry for her. If she was given to over-dramatization, that was just who she was.

My parents didn't realize Madison wasn't in school, and in the evenings, after dinner, I'd head over to her place to do "homework." I ate fast. I knew my parents wanted a divorce, that if I hadn't existed, they would probably have called it quits long ago, and our daily half-hour of forced civility made me feel like I'd landed on stage in a play without ever having been shown a script. In the background there was always the television, or NPR, or something droning to provide a focus and a way for us to pretend that we weren't bored with each other and just waiting for it all to end. I understood the ending would be up to me. It was assumed I'd go off to college, even though reading gave me a headache, and my grades were poor.