Gillian has taken a job at the Hamburger Shack on the Turnpike, where all the teenage boys have fallen madly in love with her, ordering cheeseburgers they don’t want and gallons of ginger ale and Coke just to be near her.
“Work is what people have to do in order to have the bucks to party,” Gillian announced last night, an attitude that has already hindered her plan of heading out to California, since she is drawn to shopping malls—shoe stores in particular tend to call out to her—and can’t seem to save a cent.
That evening they were having hot dogs made out of tofu and some sort of bean that is supposed to be good for you, even though it tastes, in Kylie’s opinion, like the tires of a truck. Sally refuses to have meat, fish, or fowl at their table in spite of her daughters’ complaints. She has to close her eyes when she walks past the packaged chicken legs in the market, and still she’s always reminded of the dove the aunts used for their most serious love charm.
“Tell that to a brain surgeon,” Sally had responded to her sister’s remark about the limited worth of work. “Tell that to a nuclear physicist or a poet.”
“Okay.” Gillian was still smoking, although she made new plans to quit every morning, and was well aware that the smoke drove everyone but Kylie crazy. She puffed quickly, as though that would lessen anyone’s distaste. “Go on and find me a poet or a physicist. Are there any in this neighborhood?”
Kylie was pleased by this putdown of their formless suburb, a place with no beginning and no end, but with plenty of gossips. Everyone is always giving her friend Gideon a hard time, even more so now that he’s shaved his head. He said he didn’t give a damn and insisted that most of their neighbors had minds as small as weasels’, but lately he got flustered when anyone spoke to him directly, and when they walked alongside the Turnpike and a car horn honked he sometimes jumped, as though somehow he’d been insulted.
People were looking to talk, for any reason. Anything different or slightly unusual would do. Already, most people on their street had discussed the fact that Gillian did not wear the top half of her bathing suit when she sunbathed in the backyard. They all knew exactly what the tattoo on her wrist looked like, and that she’d had at least a six-pack at the block party—maybe even more—and then had gone and turned Ed Borelli down flat when he asked her out, even though he was the vice-principal and her sister’s boss as well. The Owenses’ neighbor Linda Bennett refused to have the optometrist she was dating come to her house to collect her before darkness fell, that’s how nervous she was about having someone who looked like Gillian living right next door. Everyone agreed that Sally’s sister was confusing. There were times when you’d meet her at the grocery and she’d insist you come on over and let her play around with her tarot cards for you, and other times when you’d say hello to her on the street only to have her look right through you, as if she were a million miles away, say in a place like Tucson, where life was a lot more interesting.
As far as Kylie was concerned, Gillian had the ability to make any place interesting; even a dump like their block could look sparkly in the right kind of light. The lilacs had gone absolutely wild since Gillian’s arrival, as though paying homage to her beauty and her grace, and had spilled out from the backyard into the front, a purple bower hanging over the fence and the driveway. Lilacs were not supposed to bloom in July, that was a simple botanical fact, at least it had been until now. Girls in the neighborhood had begun to whisper that if you kissed the boy you loved beneath the Owenses’ lilacs he’d be yours forever, whether he wanted to be or not. The State University, in Stony Brook, had sent two botanists to study the bud formations of these amazing plants going mad out of season, growing taller and more lush with every passing hour. Sally had refused to let the botanists into the yard; she had sprayed them with the garden hose to make them go away, but occasionally the scientists would park across from the driveway, mooning over the specimens they couldn’t get to, debating whether it was ethical to run across the lawn with some gardening shears and take whatever they wanted.
Somehow, the lilacs have affected everyone. Late last night, Kylie woke and heard crying. She got out of bed and went to her window. There, beside the lilacs, was her aunt Gillian, in tears. Kylie watched for a while, until Gillian wiped her eyes dry and took a cigarette out of her pocket. As she crept back to bed, Kylie felt certain that someday she, too, would be crying in a garden at midnight, unlike her mother, who was always in bed by eleven and who didn’t seem to have anything in her life that was even worth crying about. Kylie wondered if her mother had ever cried for their father, or if perhaps the moment of his death was when she’d lost the ability to weep.
Out in the yard, night after night, Gillian was still crying over Jimmy. She just couldn’t seem to stop herself, even now. She, who had vowed never to let passion control her, had been hooked but good. She’d been trying to muster the courage and the nerve to walk out the door for so long, almost this whole year. She had written Jimmy’s name on a piece of paper and burned it on the first Friday of every month when there was a quarter moon, to try to rid herself of her desire for him. But that didn’t help her to stop wanting him. After more than twenty years of flirtations and fucking around and refusing to ever commit, she had to go and fall in love with someone like him, someone so bad that on the day they moved their furniture into their rented house in Tucson, the mice had all fled, because even the field mice had more sense than she did.
Now that he’s dead, Jimmy seems much sweeter. Gillian keeps remembering how scorching his kisses were, and the memory alone can turn her inside out. He could burn her up alive; he could do it in a minute flat, and that’s not easy to forget. She’s been hoping that the damn lilacs will stop blooming, because the scent filters through the house and all along the block, and sometimes she swears she can even smell it at the Hamburger Shack, a good half-mile down the Turnpike. People in the neighborhood are all excited about the lilacs—there’s already been a photograph on the front page of
News
day—but the cloying smell is driving Gillian nuts. It’s getting into her clothes and her hair, and maybe that’s why she’s been smoking so much, to replace that lilac scent with one that’s dirtier and more filled with fire.
She can’t stop thinking about how Jimmy used to keep his eyes open when he kissed her—it shocked her to realize he was watching her. A man who doesn’t close his eyes, even for a kiss, is a man who wants to keep control at all times. Jimmy’s eyes had cold little flecks in the center, and each time she kissed him Gillian wondered if what she was doing wasn’t a little like making a pact with the devil. That’s what it felt like sometimes, especially when she’d see a woman who could be herself out in public without fearing that her husband or boyfriend would snap at her. “I told you not to park there,” some woman would say to her husband outside a movie theater or a flea market, and those words would move Gillian to tears. How wonderful to say whatever you wanted without having to go over it in your mind, again and again, to make certain it wouldn’t set him off.
She’ll give herself credit for fighting the best battle she could against what she simply couldn’t defeat on her own. She tried everything to stop Jimmy from drinking, the old cures as well as the new. Owl eggs, scrambled and disguised with Tabasco sauce and hot pepper as huevos rancheros. Garlic left under his pillow. A paste of sunflower seeds in his cereal. Hiding the bottles, suggesting AA, daring to pick a fight with him, when she knew she couldn’t win. She had even tried the aunts’ particular favorite of waiting until he was good and plastered, then slipping a tiny live minnow into his bottle of bourbon. The fish’s gills stopped dead the instant the poor thing hit the liquor, and Gillian had been racked with guilt about it, but Jimmy hadn’t even noticed anything amiss. He drank that minnow in one big gulp, without even blinking, then was violently ill for the rest of the evening, although afterward his taste for alcohol seemed to have doubled. That was when she got the idea for the nightshade, which seemed such a modest plan at the time, just a little something to take the edge off and get him to sleep before he got good and drunk.
When she sits beside the lilacs at night, Gillian is trying to decide whether or not she feels as if she’s committed murder. Well, she doesn’t. There was no intent and no premeditation. If Gillian could take it all back, she would, although she’d change a few things while she was at it. She actually feels more friendly toward Jimmy than she has in ages; there’s a closeness and a tenderness that sure weren’t there before. She doesn’t want to leave him all alone in the cold earth. She wants to be near and tell him about her day and hear the jokes he used to tell when he was in a good mood. He hated lawyers, since none had ever saved him from serving jail time, and he collected attorney jokes. He had a million of them, and nothing could stop him from telling one when he had a mind to. Just before they’d pulled into the rest area in New Jersey, Jimmy had asked her what was brown and black and looked good on a lawyer. “A rottweiler,” he’d told her. He seemed so happy at that moment, as if he’d had his whole life ahead of him. “Think about it,” he’d said. “You get it?”
Sometimes, when Gillian sits on the grass and closes her eyes, she could swear Jimmy is beside her. She can almost sense him reaching for her, the way he used to when he was drunk and mad and wanted to hit her or fuck her—she never quite knew which it would be until the very last moment. But as soon as he’d start to twist that silver ring on his finger, she knew she’d better watch out. When he feels too substantial out in the yard, and Gillian begins thinking about the way things used to be—really—Jimmy’s presence doesn’t feel friendly anymore. When that happens, Gillian runs inside and locks the back door and looks at the lilacs from behind the safety of the glass. He used to scare her pretty good; he used to make her do things she wouldn’t even say aloud.
Truthfully, she’s glad that she’s been sharing a room with her niece; she’s scared to sleep alone, so she’s happy to make the trade-off of not having much privacy. This morning, for example, when Gillian opens her eyes, Kylie is already sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at her. It’s only seven o’clock, and Gillian doesn’t have to report to work until lunchtime. She groans and pulls the quilt over her head.
“I’m thirteen,” Kylie says with surprise, as though she herself were mystified that this has happened to her. It’s the one thing she’s wanted her whole life long, and now she’s actually got it.
Gillian immediately sits up in bed and hugs her niece. She remembers exactly what a surprise it was to grow up, how disturbing and thrilling it was, how all-of-a-sudden.
“I feel different,” Kylie whispers.
“Of course you do,” Gillian says. “You are.”
Her niece has been confiding in her more and more, maybe because they share a room and can whisper to each other, late at night, after the lights are out. Gillian is touched by the way Kylie studies her, as though she were a textbook on how to be a woman. She can’t remember anybody ever looking up to her before, and the experience is intoxicating and puzzling at the same time.
“Happy birthday,” Gillian announces. “It will be the best one yet.”
The scent of those damn lilacs has mixed in with the breakfast Sally is already cooking in the kitchen. But there’s coffee, too, so Gillian crawls out of bed and gathers the clothes she left scattered on the floor last night.
“Wait till later,” Gillian tells her niece. “When you get your present from me, you’ll be completely transformed. One hundred and fifty percent. People will see you on the street and they’ll flip.”
In honor of Kylie’s birthday, Sally has fixed pancakes and fresh orange juice and fruit salad topped with coconut and raisins. Earlier in the morning, before the birds were awake, she went out to the rear of the yard and cut some of the lilacs, which she’s arranged in a crystal vase. The flowers seem to glow, as if each petal emitted a plum-colored ray of light. They’re hypnotizing, if you look too long. Sally sat at the table staring at them, and before she knew it she had tears in her eyes and her first batch of pancakes had burned on the griddle.
Last night, Sally dreamed the ground beneath the lilacs turned red as blood, and the grass made a crying sound when the wind rose. She dreamed that the swans that haunt her on restless nights were pulling out their white feathers, one by one; they were building a nest large enough for a man. Sally awoke to find that her sheets were damp with sweat; her forehead felt as though it had been locked in a vise. But that was nothing compared to the night before, when she dreamed there was a dead man here at her table, and he wasn’t pleased with what she’d served him for dinner, which was vegetarian lasagna. With one fierce breath he blew every dish off the table; in an instant there was broken china everywhere, a sharp and savage carpet, strewn across the floor.
She’s been dreaming about Jimmy so much, seeing his cold, clear eyes, that sometimes she can’t think of anything else. She’s carrying this guy around with her, when she never even knew him in the first place, and it just doesn’t seem fair. The awful thing is, her relationship with this dead man is deeper than anything she’s had with any other man in the past ten years, and that’s frightening.
This morning Sally isn’t certain if she’s shaky from her dreams of Jimmy, or if it’s the coffee she’s already had that’s affecting her, or if it’s simply because her baby has now turned thirteen. It may be the potency of all three factors combined. Well, thirteen is still young, it doesn’t mean Kylie is all grown. At least that’s what Sally’s telling herself. But when Kylie and Gillian come in for breakfast, their arms looped around each other, Sally bursts into tears. There’s one factor she forgot to figure into her anxiety equation, and that’s jealousy.
“Well, good morning to you, too,” Gillian says.