Haunted Houses Read Online Free PDF Page B

stuck to her fingers. She learned that men who ran candy stores liked to see a young girl’s breasts pressed against the glass cabinet and that, if the girl did that she could get some candy, or something for free, or for very little.
    Boys learn the value of a dollar by taking girls out on dates, Ruth told her, and girls have to learn the value of a dollar too. Grace was forced to baby-sit for neighborhood families. Usually she took care of older children, but one night she was hired to care for an infant, the son of a young married couple. It was a night job. She turned on the TV and heard the baby crying. She let him cry a while, then went to talk to him, but he didn’t stop. She walked out and turned up the volume. The baby kept crying. She tried to change his diapers but he wriggled out of her grip and screamed as if she were killing him. She saw red. Shut up, she yelled, but the baby yelled louder and her grip got tighter. Grace slapped his little ass very hard, leaving a white handprint. He screamed louder and she left the room. She couldn’t stand the sound. She ate all the junk food in the refrigerator, and decided that babies, like dolls, were for other girls.
    While Grace was determined not to have children, she was equally dead set against remaining a virgin. She had passed through some of the preliminaries described to Celia as no big deal. She didn’t really care that her reputation was shot to hell, like her souvenir target from shooting live bullets at Coney Island. She wasn’t, after all, going to live in Brooklyn her whole life, about that she was certain. She chose an older guy who had graduated from high school, gone early to Vietnam, and returned to the neighborhood, a man, she thought, he’d have to be. He was necessarily different from the other boys and wouldn’t talk about the war, so he, too, had a secret. Her intensity was equal to his, if coming from a place where he had never fought. She was intent upon showing abandon, by ceding herself to the enemy, and very deliberately surrendering, without knowing the terms of the peace. She told Celia that she hadn’t bled.
    Her last winter in high school was as cold a one as she could recall. But even on the coldest days, visiting the zoo in Central Park was a relief, a small vacation from, her crowd and her reputation. It was so cold that the skin on her ankles dried, stretching too tightly across the bone like leather. The skin cracked and bled, something Grace imagined happened only to old people. After a hot chocolate in the cafeteria, Grace walked toward the polar bears lying in the winter sun, their massive coats keeping them warm. As nature intended, Ruth might’ve put it thought Grace, as she pulled her coat closer to her. She walked past them, into the park.
    Everything in the park seemed sharp, crisp, enclosed by the cold blue sky. The landscape was a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces could all break apart if touched. From nowhere fifty or more stray cats moved toward her in a group. They were skinny and sick. She thought they might devour her, and though it was crazy, she ran back to the cafeteria and bought as many frankfurters as she had money for, returning to the cats who were waiting, it seemed, for her. She tore the meat and bread into little pieces and threw the food to them. Tribute, or bribe, or sacrifice, the pieces were gone in no time. Turning to leave, Grace saw an old woman coming down the path. She said she fed them every day, that the park wanted to get rid of them, kill them. I won’t let them, the frail white-haired woman declared. The ASPCA really hates animals, she told Grace. Had Grace been on speaking terms with her mother, she might have told her that.
    Celia applied to college, but Grace’s grades were low, and it looked like she might not get into one. I may become an artist or an actress, she told Celia. I love movies. And circuitously hearing about Grace and the Vietnam vet, her brother had a talk with her in which