What Are You Afraid Of?

her hollywood

herhollywood S The girl was Mary Alice Bunt and they found her by the river. My brother Wade and I thought we’d see the print her body made but rain came and the river jumped its banks before we could find the spot. It’s a good thing the search party found her when they did. She’s liable to have been washed away and lost because everything came rushing in that brown flood: flat tires, TV antennas, a doll carriage like one I used to push. Mary Alice Bunt was pretty. I know this for two reasons. The first is because her picture was front-page in both the morning and evening Dispatch. The next day they put her picture in the obituary section too, except smaller. The second reason I know Mary Alice Bunt was pretty is because my mother said so. Wade 1 and I’d just come home from school and there Mom was bawling her eyes out. Her make-up wasn’t smeared so I figured she hadn’t been crying long. “Always the pretty ones that die,” she was saying over and over, and she didn’t have to say anything else because I know she was thinking I was safe as could be. Plain Jane she liked to call me, teasing me to hear me shout that my name was Constance , Connie, not stupid Jane. She got a big kick out of it and laughed like it was the joke of the century. Even when she’d let me sit down beside her at the vanity she’d start comparing our faces, hers with mine, and she’d always throw in “You can thank your father for that nose.”The way she said it I knew I didn’t need to be thanking anybody. When Mom was crying about Mary Alice, Wade and I tried to give her a hug because that’s what I thought she was expecting but she pushed us out of the way and started walking around the kitchen—her head bent a little bit to the side—moving like a statue would move if it could. I don’t need to tell you that my mother was an actress at the community theater. She taught me and Wade from the very start about drama, which she said translated into English as meaning “larger than life.” Thanks to her, Wade and I were drama experts. We’d have to be, the way she changed moods like clothing. Sometimes, she even claimed she could read important messages in the clouds. We all remember Mom’s Mary Alice act as one of her final performances because ten days later she left us for Hollywood. It’s strange how those two things happened, one right after the other, that girl dying and my mother going away. I didn’t know Mary Alice Bunt. She was three grades below me at the junior-senior high, in the sixth grade with my brother Wade. Wade didn’t know her either but that was because Wade didn’t know anybody. He wasn’t smart about people or in general but I 2 what are you afraid of? still loved him in the way you have to love dogs that can only stare at you when you’ve thrown a stick for them to fetch. At school the kids called Wade LD. He was in the special class for kids with Learning Disabilities. There were only three other LDs at our school. They had class in one room painted bright yellow over the cinderblocks. “Hey LD,” kids said when they saw Wade in the hall. “Hey, LD, what’s 1 + 1?” Like Mom said once: Wade’s head’s just not what it’s supposed to be. He’ll never be like other kids, no matter how hard he studies or practices or tries. When she was alive I never would’ve cared who Mary Alice Bunt was. Or anyone like her. And since Wade wasn’t smart about people and since I didn’t care about them, he and I were always together. I’d find him each lunch period standing at the front of the cafeteria, straining his neck one-hundred-eighty degrees until he’d see me. The kids at school made fun of us both because we were together so much. Somebody saw me dragging him by the hand...