Janet Peery

Shortly after Halloween, Ruthie Wittenberg, round-faced, black bangs clasped at her temples by blue plastic My Merry barrettes I coveted, the only girl in the class shorter than I, befriended me. From Ruthie I learned many things: how to fold the Land O’Lakes butter box so the Indian girl’s knees turned into boobies (Ruthie’s word; I didn’t admit to mine), the naughty version of the Bosco song. I learned why there were no Polish people in our school or in our neighborhood, though Milwaukee was full of them. They had to live, Ruthie told me, south of the Kinnickkinnick River, in basements. “Because they never wash,” Ruthie explained. They used their bathtubs for storing coal. They farted all the time from the odd food they ate: dogs, Ruthie said, among other things. I nodded. Back in Oklahoma we had Indians, pretty much the same. When I asked how you could tell if somebody was Polish, Ruthie said, “You’ll know it when you smell one.”

People have a way of wanting to know why, and even if they didn’t, it’s a thing you have to ask yourself. “Why’d you do a thing like that?” “What made you decide to do it?” Like everything you do in life is something you decide. I’m not sure why I went there  by myself, but I do know this: the why of a thing doesn’t matter once it’s done, and all the reasons in the world won’t make it right or wrong, they just make it done, and once it’s done, it is. It’s just a thing you did, whyever. Sometimes you have to put the cart before the horse on purpose, do the thing and figure out the reasons later. Or make some up. Either way, it doesn’t matter. The closest I can come to why is that I figured I was half in love with him. So I went to the place and sat on a rock and one minute I didn’t see anything and the next he was standing right in front of me.

I didn’t think. I ran into the rubble and the ashes and I grabbed the teapot. The handle seared my skin but I held on and ran toward him as he walked away. The sound my throat made was a noise like none I’d ever heard—a terrible dark language or another tongue—that wouldn’t cease until I threw the teapot at him, hard. It struck him in the back, a clank, a rattle hollow as a far-off clap of thunder. He stopped, stood still, began to turn, then caught himself and kept on walking into rain that came in short, quick gusts and then began to fall like rain, like only rain.