Hardly Knew Her

Instead he sold the family dog, a purebred collie, or so her father had said when he brought the puppy home three months ago. It turned out that Shemp had the wrong kind of papers, some initials other than AKC. The man who agreed to buy Shemp from them had lectured her father, accusing him of being taken in by the Me

Sofia, sitting in the passenger seat of her father’s car-she had insisted on accompanying him, thinking it would shame her father, but in the end she was the one who was ashamed that she had chosen her guitar over Shemp-chewed over this fact. Her father was so gullible that he could be duped by Me

Her father spoke of his fortune as if it were the weather, a matter of temperature outside his control. “I was hot,” her father crowed coming through the door Saturday morning, carrying a box of doughnuts. “I’ve never seen a colder deck,” he’d say, heading out Saturday afternoon after a long morning nap on the sofa. “I couldn’t catch a break.”

You just can’t bluff, Sofia thought. But then, neither could she. Perhaps it was in her genes. That was why she had to outrun the boys on the other team. Go long and I’ll hit you, Joe told her, and that’s what she did, play after play. She outran her competition or she didn’t, but she never tried to fool the other players or faulted anyone else when she failed to catch a ball that was thrown right at her. She didn’t think of herself as hot or cold, or try to blame the ball for what she failed to do. A level playing field was not a figure of speech to Sofia. It was all she knew. She made a point of learning every square inch of the vacant lot-the slight depressions where you could turn an ankle if you came down wrong, the sections that stayed mushy long after the rain, the slope in one of their improvised end zones that made it tricky to set up for the pass. With just a little homework, Sofia believed, you could control for every possibility.

Sofia ’s stubborn devotion to football probably led to the onslaught of oh-so-girly gifts on her next birthday-a pink dress, perfume, and a silver necklace with purplish jewels that her mother said were amethysts. “Semiprecious,” she added. There were three of them, one large oval guarded by two small ones, set in a reddish gold. The necklace was the most beautiful thing that Sofia had ever seen.

“Maybe you’ll go to the winter dance up at school, Fee,” her mother suggested hopefully, fastening the necklace around her neck.

“Someone has to ask you first,” Sofia said, pretending not to be impressed by her own reflection.

“Oh, it’s okay to go with a group of girls, too,” her mother said.

Sofia didn’t know any girls, actually. She was friendly with most of them, but not friends. The girls at school seemed split about her: some thought her love of football was genuine, if odd, while others proclaimed it an awfully creative way to be a tramp. This second group of girls whispered that Sofia was fast, fast in the bad way, that football wasn’t the only game she played with all those boys in the vacant lot behind Gordon’s Tavern. What would they say if she actually danced with one, much less let him walk her home?

“I’d be scared to wear this out of the house,” she said, placing a tentative finger on the large amethyst. “Something might happen to it.”

“Your aunt would want you to wear it and enjoy it,” her mother said. “It’s an heirloom. It belonged to Aunt Polly, and her aunt before her, and their grandmother before that. But Tammy didn’t have any girls, so she gave it to me a few years ago, said to put it away for a special birthday. This one’s as special as any, I think.”

“What if I lost it?”

“You can’t,” her mother said. “It has a special catch-see?”

But Sofia wasn’t worried about the catch. Or, rather, she was worried about the other catch, the hidden rules that were always changing. She was trying to figure out if the necklace qualified as a real gift, one that her father couldn’t reclaim. It hadn’t been purchased in a store. It had come from her father’s side of the family. And although it was a birthday gift, it hadn’t been wrapped up in paper and ribbons. She put it back in its box, a velvety once-black rectangle that was all the more beautiful for having faded to gray. Where would her father never look for it?

Three weeks later, Sofia awoke one Saturday to find her father standing over her guitar. Her father must not have known how guitar strings were attached because he cut them with a pocketknife, sliced them right down the middle and reached into the hole to extract the velvet box, which had been anchored in a tea towel at the bottom, so it wouldn’t make an obvious swishing noise if someone picked up the guitar and shook it. How had he known it was there? Perhaps he had reached for the guitar again and felt the extra weight. Perhaps he simply knew Sofia too well, a far more disturbing thought. At any rate, he held the velvet box in his hand.

“I’ll buy you new ones,” he said.

He meant the strings, of course, not the necklace or the amethysts.

“But you can’t sell it,” she said, groping for the word her mother had invoked so lovingly. “It’s a hair-loom.”

“Oh, Fee, it’s nothing special. I’ll buy you something much better when my luck changes.”

“Take something else, anything else. Take the guitar.”

“Strings cut,” he said, as if he had found it that way and believed it beyond repair. “Besides, I told this fellow about it and he said he’ll take it in lieu of…in lieu of debts owed, if he finds it satisfactory. I don’t even have to go to the trouble of pawning it.”

“But if you don’t pawn it, we can’t ever get it back.”

“Honey, when did we ever redeem a pawnshop ticket?”

This was true, but at least the pawnshop held open the promise of recovering things. If the necklace went to a person, it would be gone as Shemp. Sofia imagined it on the neck of a smug girl, like one of the ones who whispered about her up at school. A girl who would say: Oh, my father bought me this at the pawnshop. It’s an antique. My father said the people who owned it probably didn’t know it was valuable. But Sofia did and her mother did. It was only her father who didn’t value it, except as a way to cover his losses.

“Please don’t take it,” she said. She tried to make her face do whatever it had done the day he had backed down before, but it was dim in her room and her father was resolved. He pocketed the beautiful box and left.

But he didn’t leave the house right away. He never did, not on the glum Saturdays that followed his bad nights, the ones that came and went without doughnuts. He went down to the breakfast table and wolfed down a plate of fried eggs. Sofia followed him down to the table, staring at him silently, but he refused to meet her gaze. Her mother might intervene if she told her, but Sofia didn’t feel that she had earned anyone’s help. She had sat by while the candlesticks left, turned her back when Brad cried over his bicycle. She was on her own.

Her father took a long nap on the sofa, opening his eyes from time to time to comment on whatever television program was drifting by. “Super Bowl’s going to be a snorer this year.” “Wrestling’s fixed, everyone knows that.” It was going on three by the time he left the house and Sofia followed behind, shadowing him in the alleys that ran parallel to Brighton Avenue. She thought she might show up at the last minute, shaming her father, then remembered that hadn’t worked with Shemp. Instead, she crouched behind a row of yew bushes at the end of the property that bordered the vacant lot. She had retrieved many a mis-thrown football from these bushes, so she knew how thick and full they were. She also knew that the red berries were poison, a piece of vital information that had been passed from child to child as long as anyone in the neighborhood could remember. Don’t eat them little red berries. They look like cherries, but one bite will kill you. When she was little, when she was still okay with being Fee, she had gathered berries from the bushes and used them in her Hi Ho! Cherry-O game at home. For some reason it had been far more satisfying, watching these real-if-inedible berries tumble out of the little plastic bucket. She was always careful to make sure that Brad didn’t put any in his mouth, schooling him as she had been schooled.