Someone by Alice McDermott Read Free Book Online

father said it, there was a wink about the words that also said he understood what a bland and tedious thing it was to be a good girl, little pagan that I was. When my father said it, he was asking me to pretend, at least. He was saying he would admire me all the more for my pretending. But my brother meant what he said. Beside him on the table was the single glass of water he now allowed himself in the afternoon, his sustenance between breakfast and supper, some preparation for his life in the seminary come fall.
    “I have to go to church,” I told him. I said, “A lady I met at Gerty’s house asked me to light a candle for her and I promised I would. She gave me a penny.”
    I held out my palm to show him the black coin, as if he mightotherwise not have seen it. He looked at the penny, and then he looked at my face. I saw that he understood there was some deception here, if only in the extravagance of my gesture. I saw a subtle disappointment, a kind of sadness, cross his eyes. He wanted me to be good.
    I closed my fist around the penny. “I won’t be long,” I said, and turned to leave again.
    “Don’t be,” he said, “for Momma’s sake.”
    Outside, the boys were well involved in their game and the girls who pretended not to watch them every afternoon were gathered on the steps just beyond the Chehabs’ house. Some of them were friends of mine from school, others were older girls who made me feel shy.
    They were all leaning over their laps as they liked to do, their arms tucked under their knees, their skirts tucked up against their thighs to keep their underwear out of view. They called to me, and with the penny in my fist and no intention of going into the church alone, I joined them. There was a stirring of bare legs, socks and shoes, and raw knees as they made room. I sat on a low step, tucking my own skirt under my lap while the other girls leaned down to ask if I had heard the news. They were breathless as they spoke, and even those who said nothing, who only leaned to listen, held their mouths carefully, as if they felt the words as an ache in their teeth and their jaws.
    On her wedding night, they whispered, Dora Ryan discovered that the man she had married wasn’t a man at all.
    Was a woman, they said. A woman dressed up like a man.
    Their astonishment was all in their mouths and their jaws. They leaned forward, their chins over their knees. Some of them had freckles, and some of them had chapped lips or pimples or sharp breath. Some were pretty, or bound to be. Someone’s teeth were chattering, as if with the cold. But there was delight in it, too. In what they were saying, a giddy shifting in their eyes, amad pride of sorts, pride in how strange and terrible life might prove to be. They hugged their thighs against their chests. Down the street, the boys were cheering in thin voices.
    I shook my head. I wished above all that Gerty were there to turn to.
    “How could that be?” I said. “Who would do such a thing?”
    But there wasn’t a single girl among them who was as smart as Gertrude Hanson. They shifted their feet around me. They frowned, looked to one another with shallow and delighted eyes, eyes that just skimmed over the surface of things without understanding. A mean trick was the best they could come up with: simple meanness, a mean schoolyard trick, the best explanation they could offer. A lousy mean trick to pull on poor fat Dora Ryan, a woman pretending to be a man, dressing up like a man and fooling her right through her wedding day. Standing in front of the priest like that. Kissing her on the lips. Putting her hand on Dora Ryan’s hand when they cut the wedding cake together. And then laughing, the way they figured it, laughing right in her face when they took off their clothes.
    Which led to further speculation still, about the matter of a wedding night and the shedding of clothes. A matter mysterious and complicated to us all, in those days, but now with sheer meanness added