"Say hello to your parents for me," Karen's mother called as I walked back to my bike. I turned and saw her smile and close the door.
She was a pretty woman, who, despite being older than Mr. Pearson, looked younger.
"Darlene Pearson is the sort of woman who will never look her age," my mother once told me. I could hear the underlying tone of jealousy. "She doesn't have to do anything but get up in the morning. Her skin will look like the skin of a teenager right into her sixties and seventies, and her hair will be thick and rich no matter what. The genetic pool," she added.
"What's that?"
"She inherited everything."
"Everything but good luck," my father commented. He often would sit and look as if he was reading a brief or a book and suddenly raise his eyes and reveal he was listening closely to everything my mother had been saying. "Don't forget she lost her husband."
"And don't forget she married a mama's boy with money," my mother countered. "She has him wrapped around her pinky by now, I'm sure."
Just like that, they were off to play ping-pong with words and arguments.
"How can that possibly compensate for the loss? She has a daughter without her real father." "She'll spend her way out of unhappiness." "Would you? Could you?"
"
I am not Darlene Pearson."
My father turned to me.
"Your Honor, would you please instruct the witness to answer the question."
"What?"
"You're such an idiot, Michael," my mother told my father. He lowered his eyes to his reading.
But I couldn't forget what she had said about Karen's mother. Every time I looked at her now, I looked at her more closely. Karen had her soft blue eyes and small nose. They both had perfectly shaped full lips. Karen's face was more angular, more like her father's, from the pictures of him I had seen. Both she and her mother had a similar shade of light brown hair. Her mother wore hers short, not quite to the bottoms of her ears. Karen, like me, had hair that reached her shoulders.
Her mother was what women called a fullfigured woman with long enough legs to be a Rockette dancer at Radio City Music Hall. She didn't dance and was never in show business, but no one had any difficulty figuring out why Harry Pearson would walk over his mother to marry Karen's mother. Most men in the village envied him for that. I could see it in their eyes whenever Karen, her mother, and I were in the drugstore. They stood off to the side, watching and listening and smiling at one another, all probably thinking the same thing: Harry Pearson couldn't satisfy a woman like that, but I could.
I looked back at the Pearson house and then up at the window I knew to be Karen's. I thought I saw her peering out at me between the curtains, but I couldn't be sure. There was too much of a glare.
This wasn't like her at all, I thought. She probably did get involved with a boy. Who knows? Maybe he was upstairs with her right this moment. Maybe he had snuck in, and she didn't want her mother to know. All sorts of scenarios and
explanations stampeded through my brain and bounced about all during my much slower ride home.
I said nothing to my mother, whom I caught taking secret glances at me from time to time. I guess it was because I was unusually quiet at dinner. Mothers, I was told and now can confirm, have a special sensitivity when it comes to their children, because their children were once part of their bodies. It was always easier to hide my feelings from my father, and I imagined it was easier for Jesse as well.
After dinner and cleanup, I retreated to my room. My mother stopped by only once, knocking on the door. I couldn't remember exactly when she and my father had started doing that, but one day, they just stopped barging right in and always knocked to get permission first. Something had happened to tell them that they should respect my privacy. It worked both ways. I no longer barged in on them, either. I recognized that this was one of many things telling me I was no longer a child, not in their eyes and not in my own.
"Yes?"
She poked her head in and asked, "Everything all right, Zipporah?"
"Yes," I said. The weight of the lie was so great that it almost didn't escape my lips and barely made it to her ears.
She just looked at me a moment, decided not to pursue, smiled, and closed the door.
Suddenly, my worry and concern, all my curiosity, turned to anger.
What had I done to deserve to be pushed away like this?
If Karen and I were best friends, why wouldn't she share whatever it was that bothered her?
Now I resented all the secret and intimate things I had revealed to her lately. I had even told her things about Jesse that Jesse wouldn't have liked me telling. Where was her reciprocation? She was taking and not giving, and I felt the fool because of it.