her nose was thin and pointed. But they never said this in front of the boys they knew. Helen’s eyes were a clear blue, and her nose straight and small, but her lips were full, as though they’d been inflated, and her hair was full, too, full and glossy. Mrs. Malone sometimes said that at the hospital they’d given her Liz Taylor’s baby by mistake.
But, more important, her beauty seemed to stand for something inside her, a kind of apartness, and a feeling that she knew exactly where she was going and how she was going to get there, and that she would go, happily, alone. She rarely spoke, never gossiped, was never silly, and had never seemed young. She was grown up, and had been for as long as anyone could remember. Perhaps this was what obsessed Maggie and Debbie about her most. They rifled through her drawers constantly, trying on her old prom dresses and tossing her underwear back and forth as though they were playing hot potato, embarrassed by their curiosity but compelled by it, too. There were always letters from boys they had never heard of, and some of them wrote poems. “I long to peel you like a ripe peach,” someone named Edward with an address at Cornell University had written, and Debbie had read it over and over. “What does that mean?” she said, her freckled cheeks scarlet.
“You don’t even peel peaches,” Maggie said, and Debbie looked at her pityingly. “What do you want him to say, that he wants to peel her like an orange?” Maggie stared at the envelope. “The stamp is upside down for love,” she said.
Last year, Maggie remembered, Sister Regina Marie had asked them to write down, without thinking, the answer to the question: Who are you? It was the only time in her school career Maggie could remember not knowing an answer. It had been a kind of psychological trick, really; Sister didn’t even ask them to hand the papers in, just told them to put the answers in their pockets and think about what they had found to say about themselves.
“What did you write, Mag?” Debbie had asked on the playground, blinking her blue eyes, like Helen’s but paler, smoothing back her black hair, like Helen’s but kinky. In fact Debbie looked like a blurred version of Helen, angles blunted, colors muted. “I put that I am still becoming who I am,” Maggie said. “God,” Debbie sighed. “That’s why you get As and I get stupid Cs.” And she took a piece of paper out of her pocket and handed it to Maggie. In Debbie’s rounded writing, with the circles dotting the i’s, was written, “I am Helen Malone’s sister.”
Afterward, when she was in her own room, Maggie had taken her own paper from her blazer pocket, unfolded it and put it on her bureau. It was blank.
Helen was the only Malone child with a room of her own. On its door was a small blackboard for messages. It was always full. Maggie passed it now on her way to Debbie’s room, up beneath the slanting roof of the third floor. “In by 11!” Mrs. Malone had written at the top in capital letters, and below “John Kelly called—will call again” and “Can I wear your white eyelet blouse tonight? Aggie (I’ll wash it).” Underneath the second was written neatly in blue chalk “NO.” Her neat penmanship on the blackboard and a glass in the sink were often the only signs of Helen in the Malone house for days at a time.
Debbie was lying on her bed staring at the ceiling, still wearing her nightgown. “Summer’s just started and I’m bored already,” she said as Maggie came in.
Maggie sat on the edge of the bed, silent. Debbie shut her eyes. Her nose was sunburned. “Today she got a dozen red roses,” she said finally.
“Really?” said Maggie. “From who?”
“Who knows?” Debbie said. “Some guy. She stuck the card down the front of her shirt.”
“Can we see?”
“They’re in the living room. She said she’d put them where the whole family could enjoy them. I think that means they’re from somebody she doesn’t like that much.”
Maggie sighed. “Amazing.” The two girls stared into space. Maggie bit a cuticle. “Your mother said she’ll drive us to the club,” she said.
“Same old thing,” said Debbie. “Boring, boring, boring.” But she got up and started to put on her clothes just the same. “I’d better get boobs soon,” she said, her voice muffled