Saving Elijah

presumably because it was as far from my own body as you could get.
    More likely than not that summer we could be found hanging out in my room in the air-conditioning, play-acting our Barbie games, which had become quite elaborate by that time. I’d become a great fan of ghost stories and gruesome tales, and I’d recently read a book about Marie Antoinette. One morning Julie and I made a working guillotine out of two shirt cardboards and a piece of string. We’d line up the dolls as the audience, kneel the accused doll down, shout, “Off with her head,” drop our cardboard blade, then pull off the doll’s head and laugh hysterically.
    When we tired of that one, we played a game we called Humiliation, in which the Kens were modeling in a fashion show, and the Barbies were the audience, only the Kens all came out on our runway without their pants. Julie, who had asthma, was laughing so hard she started to wheeze, and our giggling woke my brother, fourteen and already keeping a teenager’s hours. He banged on the wall between our rooms.
    “Shut the hell up! Some of us are trying to sleep.”
    We left the dolls in a jumble in the middle of my bedroom, said goodbye to Nelda, in the kitchen, and rode our bikes over to the original Charlotte’s Petal. It was about a three-mile ride, and both of us were huffing and wheezing by the time we got there. We bought a soda at the luncheonette across the street, then headed for trouble.
    Charlotte wasn’t there that day, she now had eight stores to attend to, and my father had quit his law practice to go in with her. There was only one customer in the store, a really fat lady, fatter even than me. The saleslady’s name was Bea Stern and she was trying desperately to find something to fit that customer, who’d told her she was a size twelve. Poor Bea kept pulling dresses off the size-twelve rack and handing them to the lady’s arm through a crack in the dressing room door, only to have the customer hand them back and say, “This is too old-looking for me,” or “This isn’t my color.” Finally, Bea pulled a pink mini dress in a crinkled fabric off the size-fourteen rack.
    “This is a fabulous Pucci,” she said through the dressing room door. “They run a little small, so I thought you’d need the next size. If not, I can get you the twelve. It just came in, you must try it on.” The saleslady was new, but she’d already mastered my mother’s style.
    “P-ucci!” Julie whispered, spitting out the P. “P-ucci, P-ucci, P-ucci!” she kept whispering and spitting, and soon we were both giggling.
    Finally, the lady came out of the dressing room in the dress and gazed at herself in the mirror. The dress was much too tight on her, she was more of a sixteen than a twelve, and it was very, very short, exposing very fat knees and thighs like tree trunks.
    “Oh, it’s you!” Bea Stern said, standing behind her.
    This sent Julie and I into fits of laughter. I cupped my hand over my mouth and said in a stage whisper, “Yeah, it’s you if you’re Ten Ton Tessie.”
    The customer heard it, Bea Stern glowered, Julie and I ran.

    *    *    *

    “Maybe she won’t tell your mother.” Julie was on her back, staring up at the late afternoon sky through the trees. We’d laid our bikes down on the hill in the park next to the monument to the war dead, and we were horizontal beneath a stand of tall pine trees by the duck pond.
    “Right,” I said. “And maybe the moon’ll forget to show up tonight.” Julie rolled over and propped herself up on an elbow. “Why’d you say it so loud, anyway? Your mom is going to kill you.”
    “Maybe what I ought to do is just never go home again. Dan would certainly be happy about that.”
    “You can always come to my house.”
    “Can I live in your room?”
    “Sure. You can sleep in my other bed. Wouldn’t that be the greatest, if we could be like sisters?”
    I pictured myself living at Julie’s house. Sharing her room at night, being able to whisper at three o’clock in the morning if we wanted. Eating dinner with her dad, and her brother, Scott, who loved playing kid tricks like putting fake plastic throw up on Julie’s bed, and her mom, who baked cookies and the famous Bronstein strudel, and was so sweet she could make you sick, my mom always said. It wouldn’t be so bad at Julie’s, but I’d miss my gerbil, and Nelda, who was teaching me to speak Spanish, and my room, and my beloved books, and all my stuff. And