The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,2

fancy bedside lamps. Gran’s lips were pursed, but she wrote it all down anyway in a big black book with “Property of the United States Government” printed on the front.

“Nobody in Birch Park had a washer or dryer,” I said to Gran that night at dinner.

Gran said nothing.

“Can we get a washer and dryer?” asked Lily.

“Don’t be silly,” Gran snapped.

“But they lied,” I said. “Nobody had all that nice stuff.”

“It’s not our job to make people accountable.”

“But you’re volunteering for the government. It is your job.”

Gran’s eyes narrowed.

“You do not tell me what is and isn’t my job, young lady.”

I looked down at the paper plate in my lap. The canned beets had bled into the Spam, which wasn’t even real meat. I wanted a dripping piece of fresh backstrap or nothing. I folded my plate in two, smashing all the food together. No one said a word as I crossed the room, even as a trail of bloody beet juice spilled from the corner of the plate, down my leg, and onto the floor. I pushed the whole thing deep into the garbage can, as if it were my own heart, all beat out.

At some point I stopped waiting for Mama to come back. It’s hard to hold on to a five-year-old dream, and even harder to remember people after ten years. But I never stopped believing there had to be something better than Birch Park, something better than living with Gran.

When I was sixteen I thought maybe it was a boy named Ray Stevens. His father was a private detective and a hunting guide in the bush. His family had just built a new house on a lake where they parked their floatplane, and in winter they could snow-machine all the way down Moose Creek from their back door.

The Stevenses’ whole house was made of fresh-cut cedar. All of Ray’s clothes smelled like cedar, and it made me sneeze when I got close to him, but I got close anyway.

Cedar is the smell of swim team parties at their house and the big eight-by-ten-inch Richard Nixon photograph that hung in the living room. Cedar is the smell of Republicans. It’s the smell of sneaking from Ray’s older sister’s room (Anna also swam on my relay team; I befriended her out of necessity) and into Ray’s room, where I crawled into his queen-sized bed facing the sliding glass doors that looked out on the lake. How many sixteen-year-old boys had a queen-sized bed? I’m guessing one, and it had sheets that smelled like cedar and Tide, and they held a boy with curly blond hair, bleached from the swimming pool. He was the best diver in the state and I was only on a dumb relay team, but he sought me out anyway. We could have drowned in our combined smells of chlorine and ignorance—guess which part I was?

He knew how to French-kiss, which tasted like a forest of promises once I got used to it. Because I was Catholic, and smelled stiff instead of wild, he promised not to do anything but touch me lightly and only in certain places, where the smell wouldn’t give me away when I went back to my own house, which held nothing but the faint scent of mold in secondhand furniture—also known as guilt and sin.

At the Stevenses’, everything was fresh, like it had just been flown in from Outside, and there were no rules. Their shag carpet was so thick that in the morning I followed my deep orange footprints back to Ray’s sister’s room and pretended I’d been there all night.

—

I only joined the swim team because ballet hadn’t worked out. Gran was sure that any kind of dancing was just a slippery slope that butted right up to the gates of vanity. In her opinion, there was nothing worse than being vain. Lily and I paid for our vanity little by little. We paid by hiding good report cards, deflecting compliments, and staying out of sight. We paid in the confessional on Sundays. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I smiled at myself in the mirror today.”

I did that. Once. Felt so good about myself that I smiled into a mirror and twirled and danced as if I held the world in my six-year-old hands. I was going to my first dance class in my fancy pink tutu and my long blond hair was all the way down to my butt. It really was so thick and long