Saving Elijah

Miserable, pathetic excuse for a man. How could you have married him?"
    "I loved him."
    "Pshh. You just wanted a husband."
    "I wanted love, like any girl."
    The ghost was beside me again, zip, blink. "So much that you were willing to do what you did to Julie? Dinah isn't much of a friend, now is she? No wonder your friends have all abandoned you now. Evens up the score. No?"
    I felt a cool flush at my neck, a buzzing in my head. "How do you know about Julie?"
    "I've already told you, babe, I'm only for you. I know everything." He winked. Then he vanished in a theatrical puff of smoke.

seven
    I was six when Julie Bronstein showed up on my front lawn on a  warm Sunday morning, new to the neighborhood, and bearing gifts, a Barbie doll in one hand, a large speckled frog in the other. We’d moved only a few weeks before to the new development of split levels in Great Neck from a small apartment in Queens, and I didn’t yet know a soul on the block except the little boy next door, who only wanted to play with Dan. My mother, who as years went on became only more irritable and short-tempered, even abusive, had screamed at me earlier because I’d left my breakfast dish on the table. Nelda was off that day. Didn’t she, Charlotte, have a right to a day off, too?
    “All I ask is that you place your dishes in the sink,” she’d snapped. “That’s all!”
    I was outside sulking. We’d gotten back from Cape Canaveral a few days before. It had been so much fun. My mother had been calm and relaxed, I was thrilled by her beauty, the way people would look at her with a kind of longing. We’d played cards in the hotel room, she’d bought me a pair of white pointy sunglasses just like hers, and Dad had taken a picture of us wearing them, our arms around each other. Now she was back to screaming at me.
    I’d never seen anyone who looked quite like Julie, that riot of fire-orange frizz, pulled away from her forehead with a blue headband, the freckles covering every inch of her—face, arms, legs. She was wearing thongs. Even her feet had spots.
    “Hi, I’m Julie. I found this in my yard. Wanna see?” She presented the frog, its legs dangling out from her grasp.
    I reached out to take it, but the creature slipped away from her and dropped to the ground. We spent the next half hour chasing it around the yard, imitating its hops and giggling until we finally cornered and caught it.
    “What should we do with it now?” Julie said, panting, laughing, gripping the thing with both hands now.
    I motioned toward the Chevy parked in the driveway. “I know. Let’s put it in my mother’s car.” My mother’s stores were closed, and she was home.
    Julie’s eyes widened. “Won’t she be mad?”
    “Oh no,” I said. “She can take a joke.”
    “Wow!” said Julie. “My mother hates frogs.”
    We put it in the car, I got my own Barbie doll, and we sat on the front step, playing Barbie and telling each other about our summer vacations. Julie thought Cape Canaveral was much better, but in a way I was jealous because she’d gone to see her grandparents in Maryland, and we never went to see mine. The two of us played and talked and giggled all morning, just waiting until Charlotte came out to go somewhere. Which she did, around noon. When she opened the car door, the frog hopped right out. She jumped backward and let out a short little shriek that sounded like a bark. “What was that?”
    “We don’t know,” I said.
    Her eyes narrowed, she advanced on me and loomed. (Julie would later name her mad expression the gargoyle face.) “Don’t lie, Dinah!”
    “We’re not lying,” Julie said, amazed, she told me later, that someone who was so beautiful could look so ugly. “Frogs can get into really, really small places. It must have climbed in through the engine. I’m Julie, we moved in over there.” She pointed at the house across the street. For my part, I was amazed that she could fib with such a straight face.
    My mother clucked a bit, and shook her head a few times, then got into the car and drove away. We held our breaths until we could no longer see her, then we let loose and giggled until our stomachs hurt.
    I had a co-conspirator and a new best friend.

    *    *    *

    By the time Julie and I were ten, we had thirty-five Barbie dolls between us, counting Julie’s ten. Charlotte just loved to buy me Barbie dolls, I think because she was trying to convince me that Barbie’s was the body I should go for,