Dead Cat Lady

My husband Loren told me he didn't want me going over to the dead cat lady's house to help the county animal control officer clean out the cats.

"You'll just end up bringing more of those damned cats home, Mary Ann," he said. "I know how you are and I'm telling you I'm not going to put up with it anymore."

"I ain't bringing home no more cats, so just shut up about it," I said, hating that he knew me so well.

Actually, I DIDN'T want no more cats, that was the truth of it. I'd made up my mind when I brought home that year-old kutten that was hanging around the back of the WalMart when I was on my smoker's break. Lord knows Loren put up enough of a fuss about it then and he was right about that one, too. It looked sick and was sick and we had to take it to the vet and have the vet put it down because it kept sneezing up blood. He resented every veterinary bill that those cats cost him and he was getting meaner and nastier about it each time a new cat appeared.

I should be satisfied with the six cats we had --- Tallulah, Blooper, Curiosity, Smokey, Peanut Butter and Maybloom III. But I can't help it. Them cats are my babies --- Loren and me, we don't have kids, Loren's got a low sperm count. I just love their little faces and their little cat noises. And if I pick one up and he starts in purring, well, I just melt like butter in a microwave.

The animal control officer, Kelly Howland, called me and Margaret up to help her catch the dead cat lady's cats. Me and Margaret, we're both in the local humane society and we both know how to handle cats. Some people think dogs are harder, but I know there's nothing worse than a cat that doesn't want to be picked up. A dog'll just try o bite you and you can usually see it coming and smack him away. A cat you got to be watching all the time because when they're tired of being held, like as not they'll scratch your face and bite your hand all in one movement, if you don't let 'em go right when they want to be let go.

So Saturday morning, me and Margaret, we drove over in my minivan --- Loren wouldn't let us use the pickup, even if we did promise to keep the cats in cat cages --- and met Kelly at the dead cat lady's house. Kelly's a big fat girl --- well, she ain't so much fat as she is beefy-looking. She's strong as an ox from working her daddy's dairy farm all her life and she's got as many muscles as she's got curves and at 200 pounds, she's got a lot of them. She stands about six foot in her stocking feet and cuts an impressive sight in her uniform, with her holstered gun on one of her big hips. You might not even think she was a gal right off if you didn't see her hair hanging down in a single braid down to her waist.


Kelly was talking to Dick Pickley, the county sheriff's chief deputy. Dick was there on duty, officially in charge of the operation but mostly thhere to stand by and lend a hand if Kelly needed one, which no one expected her to. Dick was an OK fellow --- me and Margaret went to school with him back in you-never-mind-back-when. To be honest, I don't rememkber much about him other than he was there in some of my classes and he always was a little fat and pimply and wore short-sleeved plaid shirts with a white T-shirt collar sticking out at the neck. He wore black-rimmed glasses back then and wore contact lenses now, which, along with a loss of some baby fat and a close-cropped haircut to cover up a receding hairline, made him look a lot better in middle-age than when he was a teenager. Unlike Loren, whose muscles and greased lightning hood hair went to lardass and greasy combovers within six months of when we got married.

Me and Margaret, we was walking over to Kelly and Dick when Vonda Winters, the real estate woman, drove up in her BMW. Vonda used to be Vonda Vickery, our class's queen of the white trash with flash, who crossed the tracks to eleveate herself by marrying Junior Winters, the only son of the local rent-to-own mogul. While Junior toiled at his daddy's store, Vonda quietly put herself through night school to get her real estate license while Junior's mother put Vonda through hell on a daily basis. To her credit, Vonda never complained, because she was a goal-oriented person. When Vonda and Junior's only son, Trey, was old enough for kindergarten, Vonda took her real estate license and opened up a little business, which turned into a big operation that made her financially independent enough that she was able to tell Junior and Trey there were going to be some changes made in their home life. While she was at it, Vonda also told Junior's mother that if she didn't want her take Junior and the kid and move somewhere without leaving a forwarding address, she'd lay off being such a big-haired critical bitch because Vonda had made enough money in five years selling real estate to control the purse strings in her own house.

People loved Vonda because they loved it when small-town assholes like the Winterses get showed up by someone from the worng side of the tracjs. Vonda had put out like a coke machine when she was in high school, looking for the right clown to latch herself on to. She earned herself a bad rep, and didn't seem to mind, so even when the guys she hadn't slept with said they had, she just shrugged and smiled and the poor guys appreciated her for being a good sport. When she went into business for herself, her old boyfriends always to their business to her first, just because they remembered her as a girl who wouldn't kiss and tell and sometimes wouldn't tell who she didn't kiss, if you know what I mean.



Vonda was there to assess the property of the dead cat lady, whose name was Ada Rae Frazee. She'd died of a massive heart attack about 10 days before, but it was a nearly a week before the postal carrier noticed the old gal's mail was piling up and called the sheriff's office to check in on her. What they found were about three dozen half-wild and half-starved cats, some of whom tried to attack the deputies, who shot them on the spot. When they got through to Mrs. Frazee's bedroom, they found her lying there in her bed, wearing a long-sleeved yellow cotton nightie with little blue cornflowers on it. She obviusly had died in her sleep and had been dead for a while and it was obvious some of the cats had been gnawing on her a bit to ease their hunger pangs.

Marv Minthorne, the newspaper editor, wrote a front page piece on Mrs. Frazee being found and it caused a big stink because of the deputies shooting the attacking cats. We had a special meeting at the humane society and some of the real crazy animal lovers --- not me and Margaret --- wrote in a bunch of letters to the editor calling for an investigation and that they didn't believe a cat would attack anyone, no matter how starved. Me and Margaret, we knew better. All cats arebeautiful, but not all of them are nice. Anyone who works with cats a long time knows that.

Poor old Mrs. Frazee, she was my first grade teacher years and years, well maybe not that many years, ago. That's when me and Margaredt first met, in Mrs. Frazee's class. Loren didn't join us until a few years later when he was held back in the sixth grade. But nearly everyone of our generation had Mrs. Frazee for first grade.

Ada Rae Frazee had been kind of pretty back then, although she must have been middle-aged, although maybe she wasn't --- just don't go trying to figure out how old I am by counting her age backwards. She was kind of old-fashioned --- she wore her hair in long braids which she would roll up on the sides of her head, like Carrie Fisher in those Star Wars movies. Sometimes, she'd twine it up all around like a little coronet on top and every once in a while she'd wear them in big loops that she'd let the kids untie during recess.



She always spoke in this soft voice, like a librarian's or Miss Frances on the Old Ding Dong School. Her first day greeting was always the same:

My name is Mrs. Frazee,
It rhymes with daisy,
I open the door
To teach you some more.

Back then, it was kind of cute and friendly and made starting the first grade a lot nicer. Of course, after they consolidated some of the rural schools and started shifting some of the elementary teachers around, Mrs. Frazee's "daisy" routine seemed a little creepy, especially when they moved her to teach eighth grade social studies. I remember Loren and a bunch of his greaseball friends reciting:

My name is Mrs. Frazee,
It rhymes with crazy,
I'll show you my ass
In front of the class.

In defense of the kids, Mrs. Frazee brought a lot of it on herself. She did start to act crazy after they transferred her over to the junior high. Me and Margaret, we remember the time Arnella Boudreau --- Loren always called her "Arnella Boudoir" --- started holding her hands to imitate Mrs. Frazee's limp-wristed old lady way. She'd do it every time Mrs. Frazee turned her back on the class and the class would bust out laughing, especially the big dumb boys like Loren's friends, and then Mrs. Frazee would turn around and the class would stop. It became a game that went on way too long for several weeks. At first, Mrs. Frazee would appear to be unaware, but then me and Margaret, we noticed that her hands would start to shake when she'd write on the chalk board, and then she just started turning around at the sound of any laughter and she'd hardly get anything written on the board. She'd just turn and the laughter would start and she'd turn back and it would stop.

Finally, one day, she started to turn and Arnella started up with the limp wrists, but Mrs. Frazee, if she was crazy it was like a fox, because instead of turning to the chalk board, she reversed herself and caught Arnella in the act. Arnella, she was real bold, and even though her face started to turn red at getting caught, she just leaned back in her chair with her sock-stuffed brassiere pushing out like the bow of The Titanic and her chin out like she was daring Mrs. Frazee to do something.



Mrs. Frazee took the dare and slapped Arnella so hard that she and the desk both went over. I remember, me and Margaret. we thought Arnella was knocked out, but after she lay there a minute, half in her overturned desk chair and half on the floor with a great big run in her pantyhose, she started to get up. One of the boys tried to help her, but she elbowed him in the stomach and walked right up to Mrs. Frazee like she was going to beat the crap out of her. Mrs. Frazee, who couldn't have been much more than five-two, just stood there with only a chalk eraser in her raised-up hand. Arnella was breathing hard and breathing fire, but Mrs. Frazee just stood there with that eraser i her hand, wearing a look like some kind of avenging angel that mated with a peony bush. I think if Arnella had made one false move, that old lady would have made her eat the eraser and a box of chalk for dessert.

I don't know what all would have happened, but the end-of-class bell rang and a couple of Arnella's girlfriends hustled her out of the classroom. Me and Margaret, we were the last ones to leave, and I remember us walking out the door together and looking back to see Mrs. Frazee still standing there with her chalk eraser in her hand, staring at the spot where she had faced down Arnella.

I don't know why I was thinking about all this when Vonda came up to me and brought me and Margaret back to reality by saying, "I've got the keys. You two want to go in now? There's still a lot of cats and kittens in therhe."

Vonda was always dressed to kill --- I remember me and Margaret thinking back when we were growing up that she was as pretty as Marlo Thomas and then after we were grown up, she had enough glamour to be Jackie Kennedy. Even today, she was wearing a really nice burgundy suit and matching shoes that had expensive written all over them even though there wasn't a bit of flashiness to it. Of course, it was pretty inappropriate for going into Mrs. Frazee's house, which by all accounts, was a mess.

Vonda, she must have read my mind --- I guess me and Margaret, we couldn't keep our eyes off that pretty burgundy suit --- because she smiled and said, "I suppose I'll have to hire some girls to come in and clean the place before I can put it on the market."



"You've already got the estate up for sale?" Deputy Dick said, coming up behind us, followed by Kelly. Vonda looked over her shoulder and gave him a sweet, sexy look from those brown eyes of hers and seemed to smile when Dick blushed a little.

"You know, Dick, that's a funny thing," she said, making room for him to walk between her and me and Margaret. Kelly stayed a couple steps behind. "Mrs. Frazee contacted me last month and said that she had made arrangements with old Judge Mitchell to handle her affairs after she died and that if I heard of her dying, I was to get in touch with him and he'd tell me how to handle it."

Earl Mitchell was the retired probate judge in our county. Most old folks, like Mrs. Frazee, took their legal work to him, but all he did was take the credit after his daughter and law partner, Lyndalee, did the hands-on stuff.

"So after I read about her being found in the paper, I placed a call that same morning to Judge Mitchell, and instead of Lyndalee taking the call, I got put right on through to old Earl himself, and you know, he told me the paperwork was ready and all I had to do was come onnin and pick it up and do what was needed to be done to get the house on the market," Vonda said. "She didn't have any heirs, he said, just a small savings account which she had willed to the county animal shelter."

I could tell Margaret wanted to ask how much was in the account, but I wouldn't let her.

By now the five of us, we were at the front door of Mrs. Frazee's house. There was the remains of a little flower bed in front, but it looked like it hadn't been worked on for awhile except by some of the cats. As a matter of fact, there were two of them --- a little yellow-orange kitten and a nasty looking pregnant calico with some green stuff coming out of her nose --- sitting in the flower bed. I reached down, but the kitten ran away and the calico took a step forward and hissed at me. I backed off.

"That one reminds me of Arnella Boudoir," Vonda chuckled. I looked at her, feeling like I'd seen a ghost. That was the second time Vonda seemed to have read my mind in the past five minutes.

Vonda had the keys to the house and handed them to Dick. The back of his neck seemed to color up as their hands brushed against each other. He fumbeld with the lock a couple of seconds and then opened the door.



Immediately, about six cats came running out, followed by the most awful animal scent I've ever smelled in my life. it was like kitty litter filtered through stale beer and barfed up pizza. I know about those smells, from ahving cats and Loren under the same roof. Margaret acted like she was gonna puke but I kept it under control. You confront all forts of things, dealing with cats and other animals.

The smell didn't seem to phase Vonda. She stepped in through the front door, flipped a light switch and then pulled out a handkerchief and wiped off her fingers. You might have thought she was coming in for Sunday brunch out at the golf course.

Me and Margaret, we'd been in Mrs. Frazee's place a couple times as kids, when we were selling Girl Scout cookies, but that'd been way back in never-you-mind.

Kelly stepped ahead of her and looked around like Marshal Matt Dillon surveying Dodge City. That is, if Dodge City was made of maple and chintz and cat hair and cat turds.

Inside Mrs. Frazee's living room tehre were about eight cats. There was a gray tabby on the coffee table, walking across a Ladies Home Journal. There were two curled up on the couch and another one using it to sharpen its claws. We heard a plinky-plunky sound and turned to see another one --- pure black except for three white paws --- strolling like the Easter Parade across an upright piano's keys.

A couple of kittens sat on a window sill and anotehr one looked out at us through a bunch of knocked over ferns.

What had been a beige carpet was covered with cat mess. Like I said, it had been a while since I'd been to Mrs. Frazee's, but it sure hadn't looked like this.

A gray-and-white longhair came up and started doing fiogure eights between me and Margaret's legs. I knew Margaret would want to see her up close, so I bent down and picked the cat up. She purred and rubbed her head against my jacket.

"Jesus!"

That was Deputy Dick, behind me.

"Jesus H. Fucking Christ!"

"It's a sad old tale, I reckon," I heard Kelly say. I just looked down at the gary-and-white in my arms. She was purring and content, her eyes half-closed.

"Jesus!" Dick said again. "Je-SUS!"

Kelly looked at the cat in my arms.



"Well, you got the first one, Mary Ann," she said. "Dick, why don't you take it out and put it in one of the cages in the truck?" I handed the gray-and-white over to Dick who scowled as he took it. One of the cat's claws had to be pried loose from my jacket, but otherwise, it went out with Dick OK, with just one protest "meow."

"I used to come here when I was a little girl," Vonda said, looking around at the mess. "Mrs. Frazee would invite me over for tea sometimes after school. This place was beautiful then. Like something out of an old-fashioned storybook. Louisa May Alcott. She always brought real tea out in this little doll's tea set and pour it from this tiny teapot into tiny cups. I loved to come here. It was different from my home. I used to pretend she was my grandma or my fairy godmother or something."

"That so?" Kelly said, trying to squeeze her big butt behind a fern plant without knocking it over. "Come here, cat." The ktten she was reaching for backed out of her reach and under a nearby chair.

"She always said she wanted a little girl of her own --- that's why she had the tea set," Vonda said. "It had been her mother's and she wanted to pass it on to her own child someday. But she said she and Mr. Frazee weren't able to have children."

I'd forgotten there was a Mrs. Frazee. I remember seeing him the first time --- again, it was on a Girl Socut visit. He'd been a kind of stocky, rough-looking man in a sleeveless T-shirt with a really red face, sort of like Loren's after he;s been out at the bowling alley drinking with Turk and Lucky. He looked at me and Margaret in our matching Girl Scout uniforms like we were some kind of space aliens but then yelled for his wife. He disappeared before she got there, wiping her hands on a dish towel and looking worried. When she saw it was us, she smiled that toothy, Eleanor Roosevelt smile of hers and welcomed us in.

She only had one cat back then, I remember, an old near-toothless tom that she called Jeremiah. He was fat and lazy but would come over and rub up against us when she called him.

The other thing I remember was that she had her braids down. They were long, well below her waist, and were a beautiful chestnut color.

"Did you ever see her with her hair down," I asked Vonda.



"Oh, yes," she said, looking at me oddly. "She let me brush it one time when I came over. She'd have me take handsful of it and brush each section 100 times. She'd sing some song --- what was it? Soemthing about 'Afton.'"

"'Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,'" said Kelly, crawling on her knees toward trhe kitten under the chair. "I remember it." Her huge butt was raised higher than her head, just like a cat stalking a mouse.

"Tes,'Sweet Afton,'" Vonda said, looking thoughtfully at Kelly. "I'd brush her hair and she'd sing that song and then she'd show me how to braid it back up. One time she even braided mine, although it wasn't thick and pretty like hers."

"Gotcha!" Kelly said, as she nabbed the kitten. Clumsily, she got off her knees and on to her feet and walked to the door and yelled for Dick a couple of times before swearing and going out after him, the kitten still clutched in both hands.

Vonda watched Kelly's exit with amusement.

"I didn't reaklize she was one of Mrs. Frazee's girls, too," she said.

"Huh?"

"Oh, you know --- she always had some little girl she'd take under her wibng. I was one of them. You were one of them, too, you know. You remember, don't you?"

I didn't know what she was talking about. Margaret didn't, either. Vonda looked at her reflection in a grimy mirror on the wall and touched an eyelash --- they were so long and stiff a fly could have landed on one and done a swan dive.

"She'd look for girls who seemed to be on the sidelines --- the ones no one else would play with or who didn't seem to have anyone in their corner," Vonda said. "I can see why she was drawn to me. I was a mean, angry little roughneck. I'd go around beating up boys and girls alike, especially if they came from some fancy home. I didn't have nothing --- anything, I mean. Mom was working and my stepdad was home all the time." She paused and just stared in the mirror for a second. The expression just drained out of her face like a dead woman's and then there was this sly curve to her mouth and another one of those sidelong glances.

"She wanted a little girl and she wanted one who she could help," she said. "I wanted something nice in my life and she was the best thing I saw around at the time. She was old and silly, evcen then, but she was nice to me. And I needed that. You needed that, too. You were all alone, just like me."



I was shocked. I looked around for Margaret, but she had disappeared somewhere, probably chasing a cat. I looked at Vonda's slanted dark eyes shining out above her odd smile and the perfect burgundy suit and I felt really uncomfortable.

"I wasn't alone," I said. "I had friends. I had Margaret."

"Margaret." Vonda smiled again. "Oh, yes, Margaret. Mrs. Frazee told me about how she introduced the two of you. Said you were two lonely little girls who weren't lonely anymore. Mary Ann and Margaret."

I froze. I couldn't hear Margaret anywhere.

"She introduced us??" I think I heard myself say.

"Sure. You were one of her girls, just like me. One that no one else wanted anything to do with."

I followed her into Mrs. Frazee's kitchen, like Vonda was Frances Dee and I was that dead rich lady in "I Walked with a Zombie." A headache was starting to build in my head. Where the heck was Margaret?

"I figured it out pretty early on that Mrs. Frazee was a lonely old lady and had been one all her life, even when she was a little girl," Vonda said, as she flipped on the light switch to the kitchen, startling some more cats walking across some greasy-looking dishes in the sink. One of them arched its back and hissed at us. Another licked its paws and then jumped down and walked over to Vonda, as if it wanted to rub against her legs. Vonda gracefully stepped over it and walked across the kitchen to a work table. She took out a handkerchief and wiped off a couple of chair seats and shooed another cat off the table. She motioned for me to sit down. I hesitated, looking over my shoulder for Margaret, and then sat down.

"You see, I figure she'd been weird all her life --- I mean, what kind of person would recite that "it rhymes with daisy" thing all those years?" Vonda said, pulling over a dirty bowl that looked like it had once held Cream of Wheat in it several weeks before. She lit up a cigarette.

"But I liked her, just the same," she continued. "She was nice to me, you know. And I could come here and play with the cat and drink tea out of her nice china and most importantly, not have to go home. I could jsut call my mom and tell her that I was at Mrs. Frazee's being tutored and not get hassled by her." She flicked her ashes into the moldy Cream of Wheat.



"She had a way of seeing which kids --- which little girls --- were the unhappy ones," she said. "I was one of them, of course. Little Vonda Vickery from down in the south end of town. Little Vonda whose mom was a waitress at the Hoot Owl. Little Vonda with her great big tits. Little Vonda, everybody's good time.

"I kept coming here, even after she lost interest in me, you know. I'd stop by and she always was nice, but I didn't always come in because she'd have some younger girl here. She liked the little girls, the ones who were like her little dolls, you know. When I staretd to get to be eleven or twelve, she stopped inviting me to come over. I'd drop in, but you could tell she was nervous about having me here.

"That's when I started hanging out on the front porch and looking in," she said, stubbing out the butt of her cigarette. "That's when I'd see I wasn't the only special little girl in her life. There were others. You were one of them. I hated you all. Not really you, I mean. Just the idea of you or anyone taking my place because I got too old."

She looked at me with a puzzled look on her face.

"You don't remember, do you?"

I had a flash of memory --- Mr. Frazee at the door in his T-shirt. I pushed it away.

"Me and Margaret, we never came here except to sell Girl Scout cookies," I said.

Vonda frowned and looked at her cold cigarette butt sticking out of the Cream of Wheat. She looked like she was trying to decide what words to use.

"Mary Ann, I don't know about your friend Margaret, but I know I saw you and Mrs. Frazee in the parlor together on more than one occasion,d rinking tea and playing with her little doll house. You must have been about nine or ten. I saw yoiu from the porch window."

"She asked us to come inside one time, when we were selling Girl Scout cookies ..."

"I saw you playing tea party with her, just like I sued to, and I saw her take down her braids and let you brush her hair, just like I used to, and then I'd see her talking you through rebraiding her hair."



I could picture it in my mind. I could hear Mrs. Frazee's singy-songy voice telling me how to make the braids:

Cross the left one over and it becomes the center, honey.
Now cross the right one over, and it becomes the center, dear.
The center never goes away but it never wants tgo stay.
Cross it over, cross it over, yes, that's the way ...

I looked at Vonda. Those beautiful dark eyes, penetrating and sharp, like a cross between a former Miss America and an owl. I took a deep breath and faced her down.

"You've got it mixed up," I said. "I never braided her hair. Maybe it was Margaret you saw."

Vonda's brow furrowed.

"She introduced you and Margaret, I know she did," Vonda said gently. "She introduced Margaret to me, but we didn't hit it off like you did, Mary Ann. You and Margaret connected, just like glue. I wanted to have Margaret in my life, but I didn't dare bring her home. I didn't dare bring any part of Mrs. Frazee's life into my house. It would have dirtied it."

I saw Margaret's face out of the corner of my eye. She was still beautiful, just like the first time Mrs. Frazee introduced us. Her hair thick and black, her skin with an olive cast, like a Spanish dancer's, her lips red and --- what did Mrs. Frazee call them? --- bee-stung.

"Mrs. Frazee didn't introduce us," I said. "You got it wrong. Margaret and I met in second grade. She was the new girl. I was assigned to show her around."

"No one assigned you to show her around," Vonda said gently. "They wouldn't ask you. They'd ask Susie Everly or Darlene Henricks or Bette Anne Bradshaw, but they wouldn't ask you or me or anyone else that didn't fit into the right mold. Anyone whose parents weren't in the PTA or who didn't live on the north side or who was a Catholic, like you, Mary Ann. They wouldn't ask any white trash like me or one of the colored kids or someone with chubby cheeks and glasses and a fat butt like you, hon. We just weren't the ones the teachers picked for special things like showing the new kids around."

I could still see Margaret out of the corner of my eye. Then she disappeared.

"I remember watching Mrs. Frazee introduce you to Margaret at one of her tea parties," Vonda said. "She set a special place for her, just like she did when I was her special little girl. I wanted to cry because I remembered how special Margaret was to her and how special it made me feel when I got to sit next to her."



"I remember the day you met Margaret because it was the day Mr. Frazee left," Vonda said.

Mr. Frazee in his T-shirt behind the screened door.

"I don't remember anything," I said, feeling like I was going into my eleventh hour of treading water.

"I remember it," Vonda said. "I was walking home from school. I didn't want to go home, as usual. My mother and stepdad would both be waiting there, her waiting to scream at me, and him drunk as usual, waiting to touch me if I couldn't get by him quick enough." She put the cigarette to her mouth, realized it was out, and frowned.

"I was too old to be one of Mrs. Frazee's girls," she said. "She discouraged us from coming around when we got too big. I used to think it was because she didn't like me or I wasn't cute anymore. But the day you met Margaret was the day I finally understood."

Where are you, Margaret, I thought. I need to get out of here. Vonda was starting to creep me out. I didn't want to hear any of this.

"I went up to the house, to the porch," Vonda continued. "I just wanted to look in, to see who was visiting her. I knew she had another girl in there. I just didn't know who."

Lord, I'm gonna kill you, Margaret. I felt something furry rub against my ankle. It was an orangy-brown long-haired Persian, meowing hungrily at me. I pushed it away with my foot, but it came right back, weaving between my ankles.

"Before I could look in the window, I saw Mr. Frazee at the screen door ..."

... in his T-shirt ...

"... he had a tattoo on his arm, a mermaid or something ..."

... it was a masthead woman like you'd see on the bow of a ship. It was ugly. His T-shirt was stained with something yellow-orange, like varnish ...

"He was disgusting, like my stepfather. He looked drunk, but I don't think he was ..."

,,, at the screened door ...

"Mary Ann, are you listening to me?" Vonda said.

Mary Ann, are you listening to me?" Mrs. Frazee said ...

I wasn't listening to her at all. I was holding Margaret. She was the mostg beautiful thing I'd ever seen. She had curls like Shirley Temple, bvut her face was like a grown-up movie star's, Linda Darnell or Kathryn Grayson or someone. Her eyes would close when you leaned her head back and then open, revelaing a deep dark blue. She had red cheeks and those bee-stung lips and her mouth was slightly open, revealing ivory teeth.



They were really ivory. I was convinced of it. She looked real. She looked beautiful. And Mrs. Frazee was letting me hold her while we sipped tea out of tiny doll-sized teacups.

Margaret was the most beautiful of all the beautiful dolls Mrs. Frazee had in her collection, sitting and standing neartly in rows of the glass-walled cabinet, like something you'd see in a store-display window. Mrs. Frazee was pink with pleasure as she watched me. I know I must have looked like I was in heaven.

"I've always liked her the best, too," Mrs. Frazee said. "She's so beautiful. She could be a little girl or a great lady. She can be whatever you want her to be, little Mary Ann."

I was so busy looking at Margaret, touching the blue ribbons on her crisp white dress and her straw hat that I didn't hear the screen door open. My back was to the doorway of Mrs. Frazee's parlor and if she looked up in horror when Mr. Frazee violated the pristine sanctuary by walking in with his tattoo and T-shirt, I didn't see her. I was holding Margaret, thinking about how pretty she was and how I wished I looked like her.

I didn't realize the scream that I heard was Mrs. Frazee's --- I'm still not sure; it could have been mine. I had never had a grown-up grab me like Mr. Frazee did, pulling me off my tiny child's chair so quickly that my feet kicked over the tea table. Margaret fell from my hands and I looked down at her, relieved to see that she was not broken or her beautiful face scratched. I remember thinking how hard her head must be under those soft curls.

As I looked at Margaret on the floor, I noticed Mr. Frazee's hard, brown hands holding me by the waist. I was tensed up, of course. No one ever touched me where he was touching me, below my waist. No one ha dtouched me for a long time, not my mother, not my father. I was at that stage where baby chubbiness has long disappeared to chunkiness. I was all round and solid, nothing to hug. I understood that and was starting to accept it.

That's why Mr. Frazee's hands on me felt all wrong. Still holding me, he started to trun away from his wife and walk to another part of the house.

"You filthy pig! You goddamned filthy pig!"

Mrs. Frazee was screaming at her husband. I looked over his shoulder, just barely able to see her face, which had transformed from pleasant pink to a raging reddish purple. She swore at him, words I had never heard and could not repeat. She sounded like a drunk woman my mother and I once saw when we were in the old part of downtown, where the houses and stores were faded and shabby looking.



She rushed at him and grabbed at me, missing as he stepped forward, her fingernails scraping his shoulders in a way that would have been funny if I had been stepping aside. He stopped and turned around and with one quick backhand, knocked her flat. I started to cry when I saw her on the ground, the bobbypins that held her braids in place starting to fall or hang loosely.

He started to walk again and I looked up at him. The flesh on his face was sunburned and dark. I could see lines between the stubbly hairs of his beard. He smelled strong, not sweet and cool like my father in the morning when he stepped out of the shower and was shaving. Mr. Frazee just smelled.

Fear was starting to come over me and tears were spilling onto my cheeks. I didn't know what was happening but I also knew. And it wasn't right. I was the wrong girl, not the one that this should be done to.

I was still looking at Mr. Frazee's face when Margaret's head flew against his skull. His grip on me weakened and I fell to the ground. Mr. Frazee's knees bent and he fell on top of me, pinning me in place. I was half on my side and half on my belly and I remember thinking that I couldn't breathe and that his smell was even worse.

Mrs. Frazee was straddling us, screaming obscentities and incoherencies. All I could see were her feet --- she was wearing only one of her sensible shoes --- I remember she was wearing hose with the toe and heel darker than the rest of it and that the toe looked like it had been darned recently.

She was doing something to Mr. Frazee, whose body kept twitching and jerking every time she did it. She was swinging something and it was doing damage to him. I tried to get out from under him, but he was too heavy. I looked over my shoulder and saw, just beyond where his head should be, a pool of blood oozing across the floor.

I turned back and looked straight head of me. Margaret's beautiful head --- what was left of it --- lay on the floor in front of me, some kind of slimy gray substance on her forehead and in one of her beautiful eyes. There was a crack in one of her pink cheeks and it looked like one of those ivory teeth were missing.



I heard a thud and looked over to see Margaret's stuffed body drop to the floor. The blue ribbons were spattered with what I realized was Mr. Frazee's blood.

There was a silence. Nothing but Mrs. Frazee's deep, heaving breaths. I bit my lip to keep myself from making a sound.

I heard Mrs. Frazee leave the room and the screen door open. It closed with a quiet slam. I stayed still, barely breathing through my nose.

" ,,, She came outside, stood there for a moment and stared at nothing. Then she turned, as if she were going to sit down on the porch glider, and she saw me."

Vonda had relit her cigarette. She looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and concern.

"You DO remember this, don't you?"

I stared at her, well, not really at her. I stared in her direction, that's all. Then I breathed.

"Yes," I said. The words barely sounded like me.

"How couldn't you?" Vonda said. "I've never forgotten. Mrs. Frazee tried to, but you see what that did to her." She gestured at the cat at my ankles and then at the whole untidy house, which was far from tghe sanctuary that me and Vonda and Mrs. Frazee's other girls had known.

"Mrs. Frazee and I spent a long time staring at each other on that porch," Vonda said. She finally opened her mouth like she had something to say, but closed it again. Then she said to me, 'I'm sorry.' That's all. Sort of an understatement under the circumstances, wouldn't you say? But I knew what she meant."

"That was when I stopped being afraid of anyone and anything," Vonda said. "That was when I knew that nobody, no grown up or kid, was capable of bringing me down. That was when I knew that whatever I needed to do, I could do it."

... Come on! Come on and help me! I can't do this by myself!

Still lying under Mr. Frazee, I heard the screen door oipoen again. The pool of his blood was getting larger, going under his body and starting to touch me.

"Lift him up! Come on, we've got to get him off her!" It wasn't Mrs. Frazee's voice giving the orders.

I saw Mrs. Frazee's sensible shoes and a pair of young legs in girl's neakers and then felt Mr. Frazee being lifted off me. I was pulled out. Vonda was in front of me, looking me over.



"Go upstairs to the bathroom and wash yourself. Strip off your clothes and giev them to me, now!" Her face told me I should do anjything she told me. I reached for the top button of my dress.

Once I was naked, Vonda told me to get to the bathtub and stay there until they came to get me. I started to walk, then ran toward the stairs while Vonda took my clothes. I looked back as Mrs. Frazee, kneeling over her husband's body. She looked at me.

"I'm sorry."

I ran up the stairs.

I shut my eyes. Vonda touched my arm, her cigarette dropping an ash on me.

"What I did, I put your clothes in the washtub," Vonda said, gesturing toward the the laundry room just beyond the kitchen. "I got it running. Then I went back to Mrs. Frazee and together, we hid his body."

Expecting more, I stared at her. She met my gaze, took a puff, then stood up and faced the laundry room door. She looked back again after a moment.

"Of course that was a long time ago," she said. "That was back when she still ha dthe dolls."

... The dolls. Margaret's broken face ...

When Vonda came upstairs to get me, she brought my clothes with her. Although she still used an old wringer washer, out in the laundry room, Mrs. Frazee had a used clothes dryer. The garments were still warm.

As we started down the stairs, Vonda told me not to look at the parlor when we walked through, just look straight ahead. Of course, I couldn't help myself.

Mr. Frazee's body was gone. Mrs. Frazee was kneeling by the spot where he fell. The pool of blood was gone, a bucket and mop in its place. So was Margaret.

... I saw Margaret in a corner of the laundry room, just oevr Vonda's right shoulder. A corner next to the long flat deep freezer, across from the wringer washer. It was chained shut and padlocked.

"She and I never spoke at school," Vonda was saying. "But I'd see her from time to time. One day I came over and found her sitting on her couch, crying. The doll cabinet was all smashed and the dolls were all missing. She told me they were in the laundry room. I went back and found them all in pieces and flattened out. She'd put them through the wringers of the washer.

"A week later she took her retirement and only came back as a substitute once in a while. Eventually, they stopped calling her in even for that.



"'Poor old Mrs. Frazee,' everyone would say. 'Went to pieces after her husband left her.'"

Vonda paused and looked right in my face.

"I'd say more than Mrs. Frazee went to pieces around here, wouldn't you, Mary Ann?"

Margaret was standing right behind her now. I looked down at the Persian cat at my ankles and picked it up.

"Poor old thing," I said, stroking the cat.

"Yes, poor old thing," Vonda echoed.

"POor old thing," I heard Margaret say.

Kelly and Dick entered the laundry room. Dick was holding his left hand, which was bandaged.

"I hate to tell you this, but you might ought to have to get a rabies shot," Kelly said.

"Goddamned cats!" was all Dick muttered.

"You know, I think I'd like to see what's in this freezer before I have it hauled off," Vonda said, winking at me. "I think I've got the key here."

"Probably just some frozen cat food," Kelly said.

"Maybe it's Mr. Frazee," Vonda said with a chuckle as she fiddled with the padlock. Me and Margaret, we looked at each other and shivered.

Vonda opened the lock, pushed back the chains and opened the lid.

"Oh, my God!"

Dick, holding his mouth, ran out of the laundry room.

Kelly tried to speak but nothing came out.

Me and Margaret, we stepped forward. Vonda just stood there, with a blank expression, looking down at the rows and rows of flattened cats stacked in the deep freeze.

She looked up at me, her lips trembling. I stepped back. Vonda looked at the rows again and then burst out laughing.

"They're color-coordinated," she said. "She's got all the orange ones together, the grays and look, there's a pile of calicos!"

I backed away, bumping my rear end into the washer. The cat in my arms let out a screech. Vonda turned around and dropped the lid.

"Why don't you take that thing out of here?" she said.



I ran past Kelly, through the living room and the front parlor and out the screen door. I did not look.

As I was driving home, I looked down at the Persian sitting on my lap, half-dozing.

"The hell with Loren," I said. "The hell with 'em all." I looked over to where Margaret usually sat, by the door on the passennger side of the car. Where was she?

... She can be whoever you want her to be, little Mary Ann ...

I looked down at Margaret in my lap. She was purring.


Copyright 2010 by James-Clifton Spires. All rights reserved.