Practice to Deceive

amorphous as their memories were, and dreaded some unknown danger that might attack one of them.
    It doesn’t take a trained psychiatrist to spot the reasons behind their anxiety. As the years passed, none of the children born to Mary Ellen Stackhouse ever found out exactly what had happened to her. She was there one night when they went to bed, and she was lost to them in the morning. Some of her six children remembered seeing her bloodied form on the floor, while others blocked that image or were too young to understand. A dark horror sometimes consumed them—especially Brenda. She still cried out in her sleep in terror.
    She always would.
    Wakened, she could not remember what her nightmare was about.
    One morning when Brenda was ten, Rhonda nine, and Robby was six or seven, they waited for the school bus in the pouring rain. Suddenly, Robby broke away from his sisters and ran to get at the front of the line of students waiting to board. But he slipped on the loose gravel and puddles, and fell. The bus driver didn’t see him, and drove the massive bus right over him.
    The other youngsters shouted to her to “Get off of him!” totally confusing her so that she put the bus in reverse and backed over him.
    “We thought he was dead,” Rhonda says. “We had seen him pulling with his arms to try to get out from under the bus, and at first he was screaming. We got pushed onto the bus and Doris told us we had to go to school. No one would tell us how he was. The school called an immediate special assembly on bus safety, and we thought that meant for sure that Robby was dead.
    “ Finally, they got around to telling Brenda and me that Robby was alive, but he was in the hospital. He was hurt quite badly; his ankle was crushed and his shoulder was dislocated. He came home in a wheelchair with his injuries in casts. It took him several weeks to recover.”
    And, once again, the truth had been withheld from the Stackhouse children, which made them feel that they were standing on unstable ground.
    Peggy Sue had a more solid childhood; she lived with her natural mother and father, all of her half siblings loved her, and she got virtually anything she asked for.
    She had no awful memories to repress. Like Sue and Amy, Peggy Sue slept in the room next to Doris. If she had a bad dream, she could run to her mother and be comforted in seconds. Doris would always favor her youngest daughter.
    Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda slept far away in another part of the house. When they had bad dreams or believed that someone—or something—was trying to get into their rooms, Doris pooh-poohed their anxiety, saying “Don’t be silly.”
    Doris gave Rhonda a two-by-four and told her to shove it up under the doorknob. “And nothing can get you.”
    That didn’t help. Many nights, they lay awake, frightened of what might be hiding in the dark.
    Doris and Jimmie’s marriage lost much of its luster as the years passed. The older children were in middle school and then high school. They were, of course, several grades ahead of Peggy Sue.
    All of Jimmie’s children were natural athletes, and even the girls excelled at basketball and baseball. Tom played football and basketball with his teammate Jim Huden. At that time, Jim was sixteen and Peggy Sue was only seven and their paths didn’t cross.
    Peggy Sue would be a basketball star when she reached high school, not just because she was six feet tall but because she was strong and graceful. She was the only girl in an Everett basketball league, and they were glad to have her.
    “Peggy Sue was good !” Rhonda said.
    Besides sports, Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda also developed an interest in the opposite sex. They were all pretty and popular, as were Doris’s girls, Sue and Amy. It was probably ordained that little Peggy Sue would grow up fast and be eager to date.
    Sometimes her rebelliousness was funny and sometimes it was troubling.
    In her teens, Peggy Sue entered a Jell-O wrestling contest where she and her opponents wore bathing suits and jumped into a huge vat of orange Jell-O!
    “We went to see that and it was hilarious,” Rhonda recalls.
    When she was fourteen or fifteen, Peggy often hitchhiked out of town—whether it was to go to a party or to run away, and she hitched a ride with the Wonder Bread man! She got home safely, and the Stackhouse girls—Peggy included—laughed about it for years.
    Rhonda remembers that Peggy once asked her to lie and give her an alibi. She had a date