was perplexed. “Two names,” she explained, her humorless lack of inflection coming on as provocative.
“Right,” he said. Then to make up for not having asked, he asked her, “Lou Ella what?”
“Tuohy.”
He tried to wipe from his face the look that had congealed there—too late. “Excuse me?”
“Sounds like somebody spit, don’t it? It’s a real trailer trash name because, hey, trailer trash c’est moi.” Again she seemed to be waiting in defiance for some remark. When it didn’t come, she added as if by way of vindication, “It’s Irish. The name, it’s Irish.”
“Uh-huh,” was all Bernie could manage, thinking: This is getting out of hand. Here he was being shmoozed by a creature (make that critter) from a South he knew only from hearsay, the unreconstructed South of tarpaper shacks and cotton-eyed sharecroppers with teeth like potsherds. She seemed a misfit even in a school full of every variety of freak, but she was also a girl. She had legs, however gangly, and breasts, if barely developed, and no doubt what the rebbe would have called oyse mokem, a you-know-what. What’s more, she dared to talk to him even as she dared him to talk to her. Then before he could decide which of them was the more jeopardized by their mutual commerce, mirabile dictu, they were walking together into the cloudy February afternoon.
IF SHE’D BEEN homely maybe he wouldn’t have felt so squeamish. But pretty trumped trailer trash, and he knew that if she’d wanted she could have run with the semipopulars; in her case outcast was something she seemed to have elected to be. As it was, while Bernie never sought her out, she continued to turn up, and though he told himself she was a nuisance who distracted him from more pressing concerns, he was flattered by the attention she paid him. During lunch in the turd-green Nutrition Center where he was used to sitting alone over half-eaten fishsticks, or after school in front of the flagpole from which a disturbed student had once hanged himself, she would corner him. Usually she was on her own, though once or twice he’d seen her peel away from girls even more stateless than herself to catch up with him. She had followed him to the bus stop and on one occasion, when he’d foregone his afternoon trip to the downtown shul (on her account?), part-way home. He thought about telling her flatly to leave him alone, then thought better of it when he realized that he would miss her; yet he never felt quite at ease in her company. After their initial conversation concerning his trances the subject was never broached again, though Bernie knew it was always on her mind. Why else would she hang around? He could feel it in her vigilance: She wanted to be there when he lapsed into rapture again. But when they spoke, always sporadically—for neither seemed able to find a topic beyond the elephant in their midst—they talked mostly about neutral matters: the pathologies of certain teachers and classmates, the utter pointlessness of going to school.
She never smiled, though once, acting on an erratic impulse, Bernie had tried to make her. “Two cannibals are eating a clown,” offering the single joke in his repertoire. “One says to the other, ‘Does this taste funny to you?’” Nothing, not a snicker, though his delivery wasn’t all it might have been; still, she needn’t have looked at him as if he’d passed gas. Occasionally she would volunteer some unsolicited piece of information about her past: She had come to Memphis from the Arkansas Ozarks when her mother landed a clerical job at Federal Express that had somehow fizzled, leaving her consigned thereafter to manual labor. She had no idea where her worthless-as-tits-on-a-boar father was, nor any interest in finding out. She missed the mountains and the piney woods, though she liked living close to the Wolf River, a minor tributary of the Mississippi which to Bernie’s mind was little more than a glorified drainage ditch. She didn’t actually live in a trailer, though their tract house—a shotgun affair in a treeless subdivision the other side of the interstate—was no more commodious than a double-wide. It was largely empty but for some sticks of rented furniture and the teething toys of her baby sister, Sue Lily, whom she adored and cared for while her mother was at work. Her room she described as if it existed in another dimension: how it was littered with books you had