Piper Laurie Ate My Homework

A snow storm claimed the city on the Easter weekend. The temperature dived to almost minus ten in the morning, and although it was sunny, it remained very cold outside. Alexandra bought a whole chicken for Easter dinner, and she and her husband ate almost the entire bird in one sitting on Good Friday. It was the mother of all overeating, and the enormous bowl of fruit salad, accompanied by a five-deciliter double cream as dessert, whipped into a delicious white cloud almost double the liquid’s volume, physics one-o’-one, didn’t help. Some people drink at an open bar as if alcohol as substance is about to evaporate from the universe. Well, that is how Alexandra and her husband eat.

She urged him to rub what was left of the basil onto the chicken, and prepared a cardiovascular-unfriendly side dish of carrots and potatoes and onions, cut roughly in twos or fours, in more double cream and a chunk of butter the size of a basketball, gave it all a good toss or two, and chucked it in the oven with the chicken. The whipped cream was peppered with vanilla, and even the very expensive strawberries, a luxury they could ill afford, were relatively sweet and not at all cardboardy, the way winter strawberries so many times taste.

As Alexandra rushes across town, the next night, through the unwelcome snow, her belly uncomfortably tight inside her most comfy pants, a pair of slacks that had once belonged to her father, she worries about her damn juniper in the yard. She had already stripped it from its protective tarp, the old man juniper, as well as the white cedars, who are younger and thus not as stern or weather proof. She doesn’t really know why she bothers with the juniper, it is browning from the bottom, every year a little more, and she really should just cut it down. The juniper is a protected plant, though, but even more than breaking the law, Alexandra is more worried about something else, and doesn’t dare cut it down.

It is because of the spider.

The first, and only, time she saw it, was when they were having lunch outside, many years ago, when the patio furniture still used to be situated next to the giant shrub. She was finishing her food, when, all of a sudden, she spied a gigantic spider, just laying still, in the web he had woven in the branches. It was enormous, bigger than she had ever seen live in nature, as large as her thumb at least. She couldn’t stop looking at it, but he didn’t move, it just – hung out, waiting, looking. For some reason, she couldn’t bring herself to say anything about it, although she was going to her grave swearing to having seen it, but instead, mesmerized in awe and horror, made up some excuse about the spot being drafty and why not move the furniture further down the yard, where the sun was a little more visible through the trees. The draft excuse sounded like she was part of the cast of Girl, Interrupted, even to her own ears, but her husband, bless his silly little heart, either bought it, or, more likely, chose to not go into battle over where in the yard there was the least draft, and moved the table and chairs.

She never dared to get too close to the juniper, or its devastating resident, Pennywise, again. She felt alternatively blessed for having to, by law, keep her distance from the tree, and feeling horrified all over again for having to live in the same time zone with the main attraction of Arachnophobia. She knew naming him after the big bad of one of her favorite books was, well, sort of ludicrous, and asking for being scared, even more so when her husband wanted to save all spiders, never killing the ones that by accident got indoors (Accident my ass, thought Alexandra), claiming that they brought good look lest one killed one; then, surely, seven years of awful luck and unhappiness. Alexandra kept trying to tell him no, it was if you broke a mirror, but folk wisdom was always as true or untrue as the people discussing it, so they were never able to reach any kind of conclusion, and the debate was on-going.

She also knew she shouldn’t have started calling it by a personal pronoun, or made any kind of connection between her harmless – or was it? – little domestic yard pet, and Stephen King’s diegetic universe, but the fact that Pennywise lived in the juniper tree – juniper, Juniper Hill Asylum, there the conclusion was, just sitting there, and it hadn’t been much of a jump, either. Now she was living in a house with a villain from hell in her goddamn front yard, in the shrubbery next to the peony bush.

When the cold front took everybody by surprise, despite it having been drummed in the weather channels for over a week (but who cares about the weather channel, with the social media to follow every day to the fullest?), Alexandra is returning home from her part-time job. It is sort of late, but because it is April, the nights aren’t the black holes of despair the way they are in winter time, but it is just beginning to grow a little blue. She doesn’t have a hat with her and feels immediately like an idiot. She always has a hat on and an umbrella and three layers of wool cardigans until midsummer, and her husband mused just today over morning coffee, that he was not going to change the tires this weekend after all, due to the weather forecast.

She has to be inventive, and puts on her huge earphones, saying a quick prayer of a hypocrite that hopefully the snow won’t have enough time to damage her expensive sound system, and just tries to stand right in the middle of her cold pants at the bus stop, a superstitious gimmick thought up just after high school, when she and her then circle of friends used to go gallivanting in thin clothes whenever, that silly part of being young, when you just think that freezing feet are what winter is all about, and not wearing wool socks with boots a size bigger than summer shoes so that the socks will fit.

Alexandra hastily chooses Erykah Badu’s Baduism on her earphones, from her library of her chosen music streaming service, but has to go sit in the very back of the bus in front of some extremely drunken middle aged punks, who still think, not unlike Robert Smith of the Cure with his dark goth attire and look, that you can pull off Mohawk in your forties. But their aggressive Sid Vicious -attitude is spot on, and she can feel them debating behind her, whether they are going to pass on the lady with the inappropriate drumbeat of R&B music oozing out of her earphones, I mean look at her, she doesn’t even look like rap or R&B, and she senses the moment they decide to just let it lie, and start telling each other stories of whatever it is that drunken middle aged punks in leather jackets and leather pants and studs all over on both their clothes as well as faces tell each other, and Alexandra is very aware that had she been a man, this show of mercy would have never occurred.

The weekend crowd is always a little different from the everyday crowd, and she has seen this group of old punks getting on the bus, smashed, before. It is endearing, really, in a gross sort of way, to be so over the top drunk the whole bus starts to immediately smell of alcohol, at nine in the evening, and then ride the bus home, and to a faraway home, because Alexandra lives far from the town, and the punks remain inside when it is her stop. She has always wondered about the die-hard punks, anyway, and all heavily made up subculture representatives, ever since in high school. Did they dress like that at home, too, carefully applying the black eyeliner and wearing capes to take out the thrash if they were goths, or, if they were punks, blow drying their Mohawks until it was sharp as knives just to hang around the house?

Sometimes she thinks that she relies too heavily on the fact that she is a pretty woman, and when she is done being pretty, she herself won’t notice, but will continue dismissing danger because there was a time when she was untouchable because of her looks. Like with the punks and her music, chosen on purpose, because she will not cave in front of a bunch of nay-sayers, but will listen to whatever.

But not these forty-something punks, though. They are the ones who dutifully dig out their club cards at the grocery store, or Ikea, to earn those bonus points, they may go to clubs and scream at by-standers about fornication or socialism, but really they are useful members of society, not anarchists at all. This is something Alexandra knows from her brief stint working at a convenience store, where she had the eye-opening experience of what the insides of wallets of hard-core punks really looked like. So she thinks she is going to be fine, here. The soul of Sex Pistols has died among these men playing dress up. They are all show, and just feel the need to say something sarcastic about a person who obviously has such different taste in music from theirs.

Alexandra experiences a sudden desire to whisk off her earphones, turn around, and state proudly, that she also listens to Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bowie, The Velvet Underground, Iggy and the Stooges, and Claude Debussy, and it might be a good idea to think outside the box sometimes, but then she sees something in the corner of her eye, behind her, on the floor among the punk palaver. A muzzle.

She can’t help but turn a little bit, and there he most definitely is, a brown lab, sitting, rather uncomfortably, in the small foot area. Oh, joy! Alexandra all but exclaims. These tired punks, they are dog people! She is instantly ecstatic, so happy to be sitting so near the beautiful dog, whose leash goes straight to the lap of the designated driver of the group, an obviously sober woman among the thrashed men, obviously just looking to get the damn bus ride over with and to get home. Like Alexandra.

Suddenly she no longer feels any sarcasm or resentment of her own towards the group. It is the dog. If these people own this animal, there is no way they can do anybody any harm. She feels ashamed for having harbored fear or worry about sitting so close to them. She even forgives, sort of, the Mohawk, clearly a leader figure of the group, for spitting continuously on the floor. And most of all, her heart goes to the woman, having to mother the entire drunken lot from the bus and lord knows where else, and to take care of the dog, too. Alexandra doesn’t think about how it is so strange, the presence of the dog, what did they do, go walk him, and decide to have a beer in town while at it? She doesn’t think about it, because it is best not to. It isn’t her problem, and the animal seems to be alright, just crammed in a small space. Alexandra is beat, broke, has indigestion issues, and her own tired feet, and now that she knows there is a woman sitting there, she feels like she can think about her own things and not about the people behind her. Women truly are all sisters, Alexandra muses, as she gets off the bus.

Erykah Badu jams on in her earphones, and she is lulled in a false feeling of safety, with the all-white, brand new, if destined for the briefest of stay, snow all around her, and her own familiar neighborhood, and she is thinking the shrubs are going to be fine even in this chilly wind, when she sees it.

The clown is standing maybe fifty steps from her gateway, on the driveway that leads nowhere. It is looking towards the empty dead end of the drive, not noticing, or handing out an appearance of not noticing, Alexandra. Even from behind Pennywise looks horrifying, not at all like she had imagined from the book and film, but, also, somehow looking exactly like she had imagined. Alexandra freezes, too scared to move a muscle. Her eyes are flown totally open, and all the hairs on her arms inside her denim jacket stand on ends out of acute, deafening fear. She no longer hears the music, although it is playing quite loud. The clown seems to be hovering a foot above the ground, in suspended animation, and its enormous head is tilted awkwardly to the left, as if in deep sleep.

Alexandra is covered in cold sweat. She thinks, briefly, of making a run for it, but thinks that getting inside the perimeter of her hawthorn hedge would make no difference, it’s not like running to home base in baseball. She won’t be safe there. Or will she? The clown isn’t moving at all, and in the darkening evening Alexandra is having trouble making out the exact outline of the creature. Why, why didn’t I cut down the fucking tree? she thinks, in horror and desperation, knowing it is insane, and that she cannot be seeing this, it is a vision, it is because she thought about the stupid scrub at the bus stop.

Slowly, Alexandra lowers her head and closes her eyes, opening them only a little so she can see only the ground and nothing else. She starts towards the gateway, slowly, not looking at Pennywise, sensing that it is there, the horrible presence clear in her mind, the decaying costume ruffling a little in the wind, the sonic frequency of the drive way altered so that all around her she feels a low rumble, maybe the sound of distraction, maybe he is asleep.

She takes small steps, making sure she doesn’t look at it, at all, and forces herself to listen to the music. If she doesn’t acknowledge its presence, maybe it won’t look. Maybe it won’t wake up. Inside the music, she is going to be fine, in the music she will be safe, she suddenly realizes, in the way the truth sometimes comes to us. She focuses solely on the music, Badu’s soft, beautiful voice, the song is Rimshot, the last song on the record, she knows this because she owns the physical record as well, it is tucked in its place inside the house, inside the square perimeter of the hawthorn hedge, inside, where there are chicken leftovers, and all her Stephen Kings neatly in line, and all the lights are on, and her husband is watching some documentary about WW2.

The song is about two minutes long, and if she can get inside while it is still playing, she will be fine. The clown won’t look, or wake up, and tomorrow, when the snow has melted, it won’t be there anymore. It is just a fluke, it came with the storm. Alexandra takes baby steps, one, two. Now she sees some roots of the hedge, visible above ground, on her far right. A little more, and she is in her yard. The clown is behind her now. Baby steps, no looking, just baby steps. As long as the music plays, it can’t get her.

Dedicated, with the utmost respect and love, to the master story-teller, and my first reason for wanting to be a writer when I was a girl, Stephen King