I looked at the boxes and made a quieter kind of bargain: If I can’t stand doing this anymore in twenty minutes, I’ll burn the whole lot.
The first box came apart easily, one side collapsing as soon as I pulled off the tape. Inside, at the top of the pile, was a concert T-shirt for The Police that was my mom’s, food-stained and extremely soft.
Eighteen minutes.
Below that was a rubberbanded bunch of notebooks, all Debby’s. I flipped through random pages:
Harry S Truman was the 33rd American
president and from Missouri.
The heart is the pump of the body it keeps blood
going all over the body.
Under that was a pile of notes, from Michelle to me, from me to Debby, from Debby to Michelle. Sifting through these, I plucked out a birthday card with an ice-cream sundae on the front, its cherry made with red sequins.
Dear Debby, wrote my mom in her cramped handwriting.
We are so lucky to have such a sweet, kind, helpful girl in our
family. You are my cherry on top! Mom
She never wrote Mommy, I thought, we never called her that even as kids. I want my mommy, I thought. We never said that. I want my mom. I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn’t have loosened. A stitch come undone.
Fourteen minutes.
I rummaged through more notes, putting the boring, inane ones aside for the Kill Club, missing my sisters, laughing at some of them, the strange worries we had, the coded messages, the primitive drawings, the lists of people we liked and didn’t like. I’d forgotten we were tight, the Day girls. I wouldn’t have said we were, but now, studying our writings like a spinster anthropologist, I realized it was true.
Eleven minutes. Here were Michelle’s diaries, all rubberbanded together in a faux-leathery bundle. Every year she got two for Christmas—she needed twice as many as a normal girl. She’d always start the new one right there while we were still under the tree, chronicling every gift each of us got, keeping score.
I flipped open one from 1983 and remembered what a rotten busybody Michelle was, even at age nine. The day’s entry talked about how she heard her favorite teacher, Miss Berdall, saying dirty things to a man on the phone in the teachers’ lounge—and Miss Berdall wasn’t even married. Michelle wondered if she confronted her, maybe Miss Berdall would bring her something nice for lunch. (Apparently Miss Berdall had once given Michelle half her jelly donut, which had left Michelle permanently fixated on Miss Berdall and her brown paper bags. Teachers were usually reliable for half a sandwich or a piece of fruit if you stared at them long enough. You just couldn’t do it too much or you’d get a note sent home and Mom would cry.) Michelle’s diaries were filled with drama and innuendo of a very grade-school level: At recess, Mr. McNany smoked just outside the boys’ locker room, and then used breath spray (breath spray underlined several times) so no one would know. Mrs. Joekep from church was drinking in her car … and when Michelle asked Mrs. Joekep if she had the flu, since why was she drinking from that bottle, Mrs. Joekep laughed and gave her $20 for Girl Scout cookies, even though Michelle wasn’t a Girl Scout.
Hell, she even wrote things about me: she knew, for instance, I lied to Mom about punching Jessica O’Donnell. This was true, I gave the poor girl a black eye but swore to my mom she fell off a swing. Libby told me the Devil made her do it, Michelle wrote. Think I should tell Mom?
I closed the book on 1983, browsed through 1982 and 1984. The diary for the second half of 1984 I read carefully, in case Michelle said anything noteworthy about Ben. Not much, except repeated claims that he was a big jerk and no one liked him. I wondered if the cops had had the same idea. I pictured some poor rookie, eating Chinese food at midnight while reading about how Michelle’s best friend got her period.
Nine minutes. More birthday cards and letters, and then I dug up a note that was folded more expertly than the rest, origami’d so it looked almost phallic, which, I supposed, was the intention, as the word STUD was written at the top. I opened it up, and read the rounded girlish writing:
11/5/84
Dear Stud,
I’m in biology and I’m fingering myself under the desk I am so hot for you. Can you picture my pussy? It’s still nice and red from you. Come over to my house after school today, K? I want to jump your bones!!! I’m so horny, even now. I wish you’d just live with me whenever my parents are gone. Your mom won’t know, she’s so spacy! Why would you stay at home when you could be with me?! Get some balls and tell your mom to go to hell. I’d hate for you to come for a visit one day and find me getting some action somewhere else. JK! Oh I want to cum so much. Meet me at my car after school, I’ll park over on Passel St.