It was Gwendolyn Rogers. Or at least the back of Gwendolyn Rogers. Her hair was pulled up in a high ponytail and she was wearing a black string bikini top, standing there in the backyard all by herself. She had her hands on her hips and was staring off across the yard, over the wall and into the next yard. She was standing very, very still.
I heard a woman’s voice, suddenly, wafting out from the open downstairs windows of the house. “Gwendolyn? Gwennie, are you down here? Gwendolyn?” It was a mother’s voice.
Gwendolyn didn’t move, so still and tall, so much like the trees around her. She was enormous, and for the first time in so long I felt small, no bigger than a minute.
Casey was still pulling on my shirt, pointing like I hadn’t seen anything and saying, “That’s her, God, Haven, look.”
I was looking. And listening to Mrs. Rogers’s voice as it moved past one window after another, growing louder, then fading. Finally she came out on the back porch, where we could only see the top of her head over the wall, being that she was normal sized. Softly, she said, “Gwendolyn?” The top of her head moved across the yard, until it was flush with the middle of Gwendolyn’s spine. I saw a hand come up, tiny, and take one of the long, thin arms. “Let’s go in, honey, okay? Maybe you should lie down for a little while.”
Her voice was very clear and soft, the kind you hear at your bedside when you’re sick and throwing up and your mother brings cold compresses and ginger ale and oyster crackers. Mrs. Rogers rubbed her hand up and down Gwendolyn’s arm, talking now in a low voice that I couldn’t make out; but Gwendolyn didn’t move a muscle. Finally, Gwendolyn turned. I saw her face then, the same one we’d seen on all those magazine covers and on MTV. But it wasn’t the same: it wasn’t bronzed, with pink lips and lashes a mile long; no hair blowing back in the wind, framing her face; no diamonds flashing out of the wild blue of her eyes. Instead, I saw just a tall girl with a blank, plain expression, thin and angular and lost. Her cheeks were hollow and her mouth small, not luscious, more like a slit drawn hastily with a marker or a child’s crayon. I don’t know if she saw us. She was looking our way, her eyes on us, but there was no way of telling what she saw. It could have been us or the trees behind us or maybe another place or faces of other people. She only looked at us for a few moments, with that haunted, gaunt expression before her mother prodded her along and she ducked into the doorway, vanishing.
“Did you see her?” Casey was standing in their yard now, craning her head to get a look inside. “God, can you believe it? She looks horrible.”
“We should go,” I said, now aware that they could be in any of those windows, watching us. It seemed like too small a house to hold someone so big, like a doll’s house with tiny plates and newspapers.
I practically had to drag Casey down the sidewalk. She was sure Gwendolyn was going to make another appearance, or burst out the door for another hysterical walk through the neighborhood.
“Come on,” I said, then gave up trying to move her forcibly and just took off myself, much the way I always did when she was doing something that could get us both in trouble.
She came along, complaining all the way. “If we’d stayed, she might have come out and talked to us. She’s probably lonely.”
“She doesn’t even know us,” I said as we turned back onto our street. Mrs. Melvin’s flag, emblazoned with a strawberry, flapped in the breeze a few houses down. The bike gang passed again, this time in the street, yelling and shooting us the finger. They were all elementary school kids.
“She knows we feel her pain,” said Casey, who suddenly had personal insight into this herself. “I know what it feels like.”
“You do not,” I said as we came up to the Melvins’ house. “All you know is loving some dumb guy in Pennsylvania.”
“Love is love is love,” Casey said, stubborn. “We women know.”
We were passing her house anyway, so Casey stopped for the first half-hour check. Mrs. Melvin was in the kitchen, making some kind of fancy meal that required the peeling of an eggplant. Baby Ronald was at the kitchen table eating baloney slices and playing with his Star Trek action figures.
“Just to let you know I haven’t run off to Pennsylvania,” Casey said, heading straight to the fridge. The room smelled like burnt rice. I could hear Charlie Baker, news anchorman, talking about national affairs from the small TV that sat on the counter by the bananas.
“Not funny.” Mrs. Melvin put down the eggplant, which was a sickly brown color without its purple skin. “Don’t forget we have dinner at six-fifteen. It’s family night.”
Casey pulled out two cans of Diet Pepsi and made a face at me. “God, how much time do I have to spend with you guys, anyway?”
Mrs. Melvin went back to the eggplant, her mouth in that tight little line that meant she was cranky. “I’m not in the mood to answer that question.”
“Hey, baby Ronald,” I said, pulling out a chair and sitting down across from him.
He scowled, wrinkling his nose. Freckles folded in, then out. “Shut up.”
“Ronald,” Mrs. Melvin snapped. “That’s rude.”
“I’m not a baby,” he protested.
“Yes you are,” Casey said.
“Well, you’re in trouble,” Ronald said indignantly, slapping a piece of baloney on the table and marching a Klingon across it.