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This appears in a pre-2010 issue
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Suzanne the Bitch
Pat Dixon
Suzanne Roberts stared down at me with her mouth open, blood streaming freely from both nostrils, and large tears streaming less copiously from both eyes. Then words began to stream from her mouth as well.
“Ronald! Hit him! Castrate him! Kill him! You saw what this little bastard just did to me! This little bastard! Hurt him bad! Kill him!”
She said a lot more, but I was looking at Ronald to see how he was reacting. I felt scared, but not about being hit by him. We had been having a really great time, he and I, until she had ridden up on her skinny-tire three-speed English bike, the girl’s equivalent of the kind Ronald rode. We’d spent about forty minutes scooping tadpoles out of the shallow half-acre pond, putting them into the quart mayonnaise jars we’d brought with us on that cloudless July day. I was ten then and happy and proud that Ronald, who was just thirteen, was my best friend and liked hanging out with me.
He and I and my beige half-pug Beige had been in the woods just having fun the way kids in that part of southern Connecticut used to do after World War Two, before housing developers came in and changed things. The woods there were criss-crossed by colonial-era stone walls where there’d once been farms, and we knew where three dry stone-lined wells and two empty stone family crypts were, as well as a couple of small family graveyards and deserted houses and barns—all deep in the woods, sometimes as much as two miles from the nearest modern house where people were living.
That day Ronald and Beige and I were only about a quarter of a mile from my home. Behind us, on the deep-rutted dirt road leading to the pond, I’d heard Suzanne’s voice about a hundred feet away calling out a big cheery “Hi, Ronald!” We both looked around as she rode up and parked her bike beside ours. Ronald seemed glad to see her, though I was not.
Suzanne was twelve years old, about five inches taller than I was, had medium-length dark auburn hair, and wore light blue shorts and a yellow short-sleeved cotton pullover sweater. Form-fitting T-shirts as women’s outerwear hadn’t been invented yet, but the effect of her sweater was probably nearly the same. In any case, Ronald seemed unable to take his eyes from her, especially the front of her yellow sweater, which covered two of the four largest breasts in our school, not counting those of the grandmotherly seventh-grade teacher, that is.
“I was hoping to find you here, Ronald,” she said. “Your mom thought you might be over at the school yard, but your sister said you’d left about an hour ago with this peanut and had a couple of jars and your fish tank net with you.”
“Yeah,” said Ronald, unusually tongue-tied.
I didn’t say anything, but my dislike for her must have radiated from my eyes. Suzanne glanced at me, met my unblinking stare, and walked towards me with jocular confidence and determination.
She stopped about eight inches from me, smiled down at me, and said, “Well, little boy, why don’t you just hop on your little bike over there and let us big folks have a chance to talk in private for a bit?”
I felt as if I had been put into some horrifying variation of the typical Charles Atlas ad on the back of most comic books where a bully at the beach kicks sand all over a little guy or otherwise shoves him around. I glowered up at Suzanne and said nothing.
Then the deadlock was broken. She put both her hands on my chest and pushed me backwards. Tears of fury and frustration and hatred formed in the corners of my eyes. At that point something, as they say, must have snapped inside my brain the way it has done only twice in the years since then. I remembered the advice my father had given me four years earlier when I’d been having some trouble with a little neighbor girl: “If a female doesn’t act like a lady, don’t treat her like one.” My brain seized on that advice, and my mind and body became one—my fist shot up. I punched Suzanne in the nose.
As she was shouting for Ronald to do me grievous harm, I was chiefly afraid that he would take her side and I wouldn’t have him as my best friend anymore. I was right about this. He beckoned me aside and said in a low voice that he thought it would be best for me to get on my bike and leave because he really didn’t want to hit me for her sake. I felt betrayed and swore at him and her and the whole world as I stomped over to my old fat-tire bike beside their two tall, sleek, expensive English jobs.
I called to Beige as I pedaled down the dirt road. She, Beige, disregarded me, as was her custom, choosing instead to remain with Ronald and Suzanne. About two hundred feet away, I skidded to a stop, turned, and shouted towards the three of them, “You damn bitch! You damn bitch! You—bitch!”
I was looking at Suzanne, and we all understood I meant her, not Beige. Then I sped out of there and rode furiously home.
In September, when school began again, I made a point of sitting in the back of the school bus and loudly saying “Bitch!” without moving my lips whenever Suzanne climbed onto the bus. She would sit beside Ronald near the front of the bus, and it irritated me considerably that neither one of them acknowledged my insults. Except for when she or I missed school because of illness, which wasn’t often, I did this five days a week all the way up to the middle of December.
In mid-December that shallow pond near my home used to be a good place for ice skating. The pond has all been filled in for thirty years now and has five or six identical development houses where it used to be. Back in those days, however, when it got cold, many of us would check the thickness of the ice to see if it was ready for us or not. That was what Suzanne did one Saturday afternoon—rode her fancy English bike there all by herself.
Well, not entirely by herself. My stupid, faithless dog Beige, who would always leave our yard every morning to beg for food from every house for about half a mile around, did her usual Beigey thing and followed Suzanne to the pond in the woods.
When they got there, I later learned, the ice was still too thin for a person, but ol’ Beige just trotted right out onto it and was somewhere near the middle when she fell through. She dog-paddled to the edge of the ice and put her paws on it to try to get out, only each time she tried the ice broke under her weight. And each time she started to get up on the ice, she got a little weaker until she barely could keep afloat, let alone climb out.
I’m pretty sure it crossed Suzanne’s mind that if Beige went under and she herself said nothing, it would remain a mystery until next summer or even longer. She probably thought that the little punk who had bloodied her nose and who had called out dozens of insults from the back of the school bus deserved to be punished in some manner. What place was more fitting than the scene of the first atrocity he had committed against her? The way she chose to punish me, however, was more fitting.
Wading out into the pond, breaking ice as she went, Suzanne was chest deep in the numbing water when she reached Beige. She scooped Beige up in her arms, returned to the shore, and wrapped the dog in the dry coat she’d had the presence of mind to take off and leave on the frosty bank. Then Suzanne carried Beige the quarter of a mile in the cold gray afternoon to my house.
Around five-thirty that afternoon, when I returned home from playing with a couple of friends my own age, my mother told me how Suzanne had arrived at our doorstep with my dog. My mother had put them both into a hot bath together, had given Suzanne some hot tea, a large bowl of vegetable clam chowder, and one of her own dresses and a pair of shoes to wear, and then had driven Suzanne home, where Suzanne’s mom had put her to bed. Suzanne’s dad drove their station wagon down to the old pond to retrieve her bicycle.
The next Monday when Suzanne got on the bus and sat beside Ronald, she didn’t have even a trace of a cold. I watched her to see if she would look at me, but she didn’t. I was still convinced in my almost-eleven-year-old mind that Suzanne was basically unfit for human consumption, but over the weekend I had revised my thinking slightly. Instead of being a total degenerate, she at least had a partly decent spot in her as far as some small animals were concerned.
A year and a half later, Suzanne Roberts’ dad died. About four months after that, she and her mom and her kid sister all moved away somewhere and were never heard from again that I knew of. In all that time, I never did walk up and thank her or even speak to her—but I never again called out “Bitch!” when she got on the bus.
And I never forgot what she did, though as of now it was half a century ago.
