She said okay, although still she expected the drive to end at the dentist’s office-the eighth grader who had fetched her had said so, and so had Mrs. Walters when she called her to the front of the class. She could already smell the cinnamon and alcohol of the place. Hear the hateful sound of the drill. The office was in the basement of the dentist’s house. There was a long concrete stairwell, damp and steep, that went down to the door. The floor of the waiting room was black and white. There would be a shoe box full of charms and toy jewelry from which she could pick two when it was over.
Her brother put his arm across the seat and slowly backed out of his space. He drove first through the length of the narrow lot, past the candy store, the hardware store, the five-and-dime. “That’s where the ‘hoochie-koochie-koo’ man used to stand,” he said. He pointed to a row of shopping carts in a corner near the grocery store. “When I was your age,” he said. “He was just a crazy old man, always kind of drooling. If he got close enough to you, he’d pinch your cheek and say, ‘Hoochie-koochie-koo.’ ” He looked over his shoulder as he turned out of the lot. He was smaller than their father, but he had the same seriousness when he drove. “People said he was shell-shocked. From the war.” He made another turn, driving slowly, slower than she could walk. “I don’t know when he stopped being there.” He drove past the bowling alley and told her he’d been on a bowling team in eighth grade. He was so bad, he said, that he never broke a hundred. He said he used to sit there and pray, waiting for his turn. Just one spare, he used to say. Not even a strike. You don’t have to make me good, he used to tell God. “Just average.” He looked at her and laughed. She laughed, too, mostly because it was the middle of the morning and she was supposed to be in school and she wasn’t. She was sitting beside her brother in his car. He raised his arm and pointed and then quickly returned his hand to the steering wheel. “That’s where we used to go for our polio shots, when we were little. And then they changed it to those little sugar cubes.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I guess they worked,” he said. He looked at her. “I’ve never had polio, have you?”
She laughed, not exactly certain it was a joke. “No,” she said.
He put the turn signal on again and once more pulled out into the road. It was a familiar route, the one that led from the church or the school to home, but it was made strange and new by the fact that it was mid-morning and she should have been in school, by the fact that she was alone with her brother, in his car, and they were driving even more slowly than she could walk. They passed the playing field at the back of the school, beside the cemetery. Without a word, the two of them turned their heads to watch it go by. The grass was balding and the fence behind home plate was bent and torn. There was still something of summer’s dust over the whole thing although the leaves on the trees at the far end were yellow and red. They turned again, down another street, this one lined with houses like their own. Lawns and driveways and sidewalks. Jacob named the friends who lived in some of them-Louie, Kevin Malloy, Ted Fish. He told her a story about one Halloween. He turned again. Lori Ballinger’s house. Michael took her to the prom. Bobby Kent’s house. Bobby cried in sixth grade when people wouldn’t stop calling him Clark. He turned again. Now they were off the familiar route to church and school and she began to suspect once again that he was taking her to the dentist.
“Did you ever see this house?” he asked her and once more raised his hand from the steering wheel. She looked. A house like all the others but as they passed she saw that the bushes beneath the front windows were scattered with garden gnomes, maybe a dozen of them. And then that the front steps were full of ceramic animals-dogs, geese, rabbits. And then, as they passed, that the garage door was painted with a huge, colorful portrait of the Blessed Mother, surrounded by stars and rainbows. “Not sure what’s going on there,” he said.
She said, “It’s pretty.”
They passed a woman pushing a baby carriage. Lawns with sprinklers going. He reached to turn on the radio. He said, “Don’t let me hear you listening to anybody but the Good Guys while I’m gone.”
She said, “I won’t,” and remembered for the first time that last night before she went to bed her mother had said that when she got home from school today Jacob would be gone off to the army. Like their father had done.
He turned again, the signal making a ticking sound, and she recognized the street once more. They were nearly home. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Scoot down.” She looked at him, unsure. “Scoot down,” he said, more urgently. He put his hand on the top of her head, over her beanie, and pushed her a little. The terry-cloth cover slid with her. He did not increase his speed. “Just in case Mom’s looking out the window,” he said.
All she could see were the tops of the trees and the blue sky, but she knew they were passing their house, the driveway and the lawn, the white shingles and the dark red trim, the sheer white curtains in the front window and the drapes upstairs, in their parents’ room.
She knew her brother had turned and was looking at their house over the top of her head. It was like a dream of passing her own house and not turning in. There was a slow song on the radio and the tick tick tick of the turn signal seemed to mar it somehow. Jacob looked down at her over the rolled-up sleeve of his arm. Her beanie had come down over her forehead and she had buried her chin in her chest. He glanced back at the street and then reached out to touch her thin elbow. “Okay,” he said, softly. “Sit up again.” But the terry-cloth cover was slipping under her and it was more of a struggle than she would have imagined. She wiggled and pressed her palms against the seat and raised her legs and pulled at her skirt. Her saddle shoes flashed black and white beneath the dashboard. He watched her, his eyes going back and forth from the windshield. “Jeepers,” he said, finally, when she had settled herself, pushed the beanie to the back of her head. “A little spastic there,” he said, and although he was smiling, not teasing, she pouted at him anyway, for saying spastic. He reached out again and put his palm on her head.
They drove on, through an intersection and up a hill and then around the front of the high school with its long row of gray doors. Past the football field and the tennis courts, then, turning again, back among houses that over here were all single-story with long front lawns. He gave names to only a few of them. He was mostly listening to the music, only occasionally, softly, singing along. His sleeves were rolled up and his arms looked strong to her, although his hands, fingers and nails, were pale and thin, like her own. He said, “This can be Michael’s car when he gets home from school, Thanksgiving and Christmas. But Dad’s got to go out and turn the engine over every other day or so. Remind him.”
She said okay. They were driving back down the hill. She could see the wiry spire stuck on top of St. Gabriel’s round roof. There was the stubble of a beard on her brother’s cheek and his hair brushed the collar of his shirt. She was beginning to feel the first pinpricks of doubt, or guilt. The morning was growing long. The sun was now hot through the windshield. She was supposed to be in school. Surely it was not her first memory of her older brother-he had once helped her make a bus for dolls out of a cardboard box and pushed it across the living-room carpet, from bus stop to bus stop-but it was, perhaps, the first memory in which she saw him distinctly, on his own, apart from their house and their family, separate. He took his hands from the steering wheel one at a time and rubbed the palms against his jeans. He glanced at her again. “Got me a ticket for an aeroplane,” he said, and grinned, but stopped at a light at the next intersection, he leaned his head back and blew air at the cloth ceiling. He closed his eyes and for a moment she was afraid that he had forgotten about her completely. But then the car behind them beeped to get them going again. “Hold your horses,” he said, his eyes on the rearview mirror. There was a brown scapular, a small picture of the Sacred Heart, dangling from it. They were now passing the far side of the church and her school, the cemetery and the gray incinerators.