The Road Out. Deborah Hicks
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get in your face every bit as much as my girls in their finest moments. And there were even some literary classics, favorites of girls across the generations: The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables.
I stood back and soaked in the scene with a teacher’s sense of well-being. The girls were well fed, the morning light was angling in from our east-facing windows, open to let in a thankfully cool morning breeze. The neighborhood outside was still quiet at this hour, not yet nine. I watched as the girls meandered toward the bookshelves. We had no hard and fast rules about which books the girls had to read. I pushed my literary titles, marketing these like a savvy sales rep. I read from them, displayed them in inviting ways on the shelves, put up attractive posters. But I also wanted the girls to make their final selections for themselves. It was summer, after all, a time for indulging ourselves a little even if we were in school. And some part of me was more curious learner than stern schoolteacher. I stood back to watch as the girls made their choices. That summer I had given in and set aside one shelf of our bookshelves for paperback books for the young connoisseur of scary fiction. The girls huddled excitedly around that shelf: they couldn’t wait to get their hands on the three-book series, The House on Cherry Street, that was the summer’s hottest read. It was a tale of a haunted house that began with The Haunting, moved on to The Horror, and reached its riotous conclusion in The Final Nightmare.3
That night I sat up in bed with a copy of the book Blair had brought to my class, confronting my misgivings about so young a girl reading horror. After I had finished teaching for the day and driven Blair home, I managed to find a copy of her King book at a local bookstore. Sleep didn’t come easily that night, and it wasn’t just because Rose Madder was a page-turner. The story scared the hell out of me. As I read, I felt more like a helpless little girl than a grown woman, a professional educator, living in a safe top-floor apartment.
In one scene, Rose’s psychopath husband, Norman, goes after Pam, a sweet blonde hotel maid. Pam once lived at the home for abused women where Rose resides, and Norman thinks she can reveal Rose’s whereabouts. Norman traps Pam in a hotel laundry room, trying to squeeze the information out of her. But his interrogation quickly turns gruesome. He grabs Pam by the throat; she slips out of his grasp and lunges for the door.
She looked almost nailed to the door, and as Norman stepped forward, he saw that, in a way, she was. There was a coathook on the back of the damned thing. She’d torn free of his hand, plunged forward, and impaled herself. The coathook was buried in her left eye. . . .
[Norman] yanked Pam off the coathook. There was an unspeakable gristly sound as she came. Her one good eye—bluer than ever, it seemed to Norman—stared at him in wordless horror.
Then she opened her mouth and shrieked.4
The next morning I sat at my kitchen table, nursing a soothing cup of coffee. My eyes were bloodshot and puffy. I still felt foggy from a sleep that started late and ended at six with the shrill sound of a digital alarm clock. But even so my mind was at work, trying to make sense of Blair’s words. The parts of the story jammed against one another: a young girl, Stephen King, horror. This wasn’t what I had in mind when I had created my literature class for girls. I thought I knew what Blair needed. She was growing up in a poor neighborhood. And public school wasn’t exactly a sanctuary, not the uplifting school experience of the Hollywood cliché, with the wide-eyed children in their thrift-store clothing, discovering a slice of the American Dream. In a time when more and more seemed to hinge on single-shot yearly tests, girls attending public school in poor neighborhoods spent much of their school days in an endless rehearsal for the big March tests. I wanted my class to be about something different: the gift of literature, a chance to expand their minds through the world of books and to share stories and life dreams. I wanted to open the door to what Robert Coles once termed a literature of social reflection. We needed a place, I believed, to read and talk about fiction, and about all the real-world things that make life for a poor white girl so complicated and hard and beautiful—all at the same time.
But Stephen King?
When I was still a girl, about the same age as Blair, I had my own share of childhood ghosts. There was my family, as complicated as Blair’s in its own way, though we were not as severely poor. And there was school, where I sat for years in a kind of quiet daze, a combination of boredom and acquiescence to my fate. A girl was not supposed to be outspoken, so I held my peace, without anyone realizing that here was a girl with a curious mind and dreams about the world. The mountain landscape was my closest friend in those days. Always a child in search of adventure, I would go off for long walks, during which my imagination was free to wander as well. And very early I began to form a sense of my destiny around the idea that I would leave. At home was my mother, lost in the fog of her depression; my brother, already on the miserable life course of a disturbed kid without the benefit of medical help or therapy; and my father, an angry man—the son of an alcoholic who had never recovered from his own dirt-poor childhood. In my walks, I created my own form of leaving until one day I had the chance to go off to college and become an educator.
And now here I was, like a woman who had traveled in a time machine. I was trying to be a teacher for a girl struggling to find her own way in a crazy world. I felt lost and confused about Blair’s love for a kind of fiction that was gruesome and freakish—or at least, that freaked me out. But I didn’t want to be the kind of teacher who just taught skills without trying to get to the heart of her students’ stories. I felt that Blair was trying to tell me something with her fascination with Stephen King stories. So rather than closing the door to her version of childhood ghosts, I went in the other direction. I listened carefully, until I could almost hear the faint voice of a character she was beginning to create. Rose.
Later that morning, I sat with Blair, who was lounging comfortably in one of our armchairs. Blair’s hair had earlier in the summer been cut into a sweet pageboy. It made her pale face look even more childlike, though her small gray eyes had an older-girl edginess. Something about her was different that morning, and I struggled to make sense of it. Her hair was slicked down with baby oil; it looked nearly wet. Later I learned why. Oil was a good antidote to lice. If you got nits or lice in your hair, the nasty things would slither right off. With so many little ones in the house just then, Blair didn’t want to take chances. She herself looked small in the ample armchair. An oversized T-shirt, a thrift-store find, hung down nearly below her knees. The fan placed near an open window was rotating, making its whirring sounds, and we began to talk about fiction.
Ghost Rose.
Blair had been putting the finishing touches on a story she was writing about a ghost in her attic, a girl named Rose, Ghost Rose. Rose does a terrible thing: she gets in a fight and beats up a girl she doesn’t like. When Rose gets home, she tells her father what has happened. He tells Rose to go to her room, like he always did when she did something wrong. But then he takes her up to the attic and locks her in. He never lets her out for anything. When it is time for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, he always brings her food. She can drink only water or orange juice. After some years, Rose dies in the attic.
Rose was still in the attic, Blair assured me as we talked. In her hand was a copy of The Final Nightmare, the last of the books in the House on Cherry Street paperback series.
Life in the rooms below Blair’s attic, where the spirit of Rose resided, had been crazy and unsettling that summer. Blair’s half brothers were wired with a frenzied energy, their gangly adolescent limbs in constant motion as they ran hoodlum-like around the house and the street in search of trouble and entertainment. Both boys had been in trouble in school throughout the year; it was rumored that their behavior had been affected by the drugs in their systems at birth. With her smart mouth, Blair frequently found herself caught in the path of their blows. The real stability was in her grandma’s bedroom, where Blair slept, the door locked to make sure one of the boys didn’t come in and wake the younger ones. In spite of these precautions, Blair often complained of lack of sleep.
There were fights on the streets on hot summer evenings. An ordinary argument, with its shouting and cussing and stepping up to the brink of blows, would cross the line into