Rowing in Eden (15 page)

She supposed the door to her left might lead to a powder room, but, no, that was the broom closet, and she blushed as if caught snooping. The next door—its handle sticky with honey or jam—led to a set of basement stairs; but then came a hall in which she could
see, through a far door, the ticking of a bare mattress, a tumble of sheets and blankets on the floor—

Someone was crying. A girl, of course. It seemed Franny could hardly go anywhere lately without finding a girl, crying.

“Hello?” She stepped into the hall, then walked a bit farther until, on her left, a door opened onto the bathroom that seemed to hold the crying girl.

“You okay in there?” Franny called.

“Who's that?”

Franny stepped through the doorway. On the wall were a pair of the plaster mermaids Franny remembered people hanging in bathrooms back in the fifties—though someone had modified these two: added four red paint nipples, one of which had dripped all the way to the tip of the mermaid's tail.

“Over here.”

In the room's pink tub, behind a pink shower curtain, lay Richie Craft's girlfriend, stretched out, toes pressed against the spigot end of the tub. “I've seen you before,” the girlfriend said—
growled.
Suddenly self-possessed, the girl sat up and wiped away her tears. “What are you doing here?”

Back in the living room, the band began to play “Green Fields” and, hoping to appear nonchalant, Franny waved a hand toward the music. “We just came to hear the practice. Are you okay?”

“‘Are you okay?'” The girl gave Franny a murderous look. She held up an aspirin bottle. Empty. White with dust. “Take this to Richie,” she said. “Tell him I took every last pill in here, and the bottle was full when I started.”

At Franny's interruption of “Green Fields,” Martie's face went red in anger and shame. The band members looked peeved, too, but when they understood what Franny said, they rushed to the bathroom.

Because Franny led the way, and Martie followed, by the time the others pressed into the room, the two sisters found themselves awkwardly boxed into the far corner, one of them on either side of the pink toilet.
How many aspirin were in the bottle
, Richie Craft
pleaded with the girl, and Martie called toward the door, “Get an ambulance!”

“What is that bitch doing here?” the caramel-corn girl demanded. “Tell her to get out of here!”

“She's just trying to help, Patty. Now stop it,” said Richie Craft, and then he and the pompadoured drummer climbed into the pink tub and lifted the girl out.

“Put her in my car!” Martie said. “I'll take her!”

“I'm not going anywhere with you!” The girl stuck out her tongue at Martie, and then at Franny, too. “You bitches stay away from Richie or I'll scratch your faces off!”

Sorry
,
Richie mouthed to Martie as he and the drummer backed out of the bathroom with the girl, who alternately struggled and hung like dead weight.

From the bathroom window, Franny and Martie watched the group pile into the car. When Martie sighed, Franny thought she understood: It was difficult not to feel left behind. After the car disappeared up the road, the house sat solidly silent. There was no sound but the twitter of birds outside the bathroom window, the whir of water leaking from the toilet tank.

Franny reached down and jiggled the handle on the tank. It was an automatic gesture, like turning off the lights when you left the room. You never let a toilet run or Peg would yell, “Somebody jiggle that handle!”

“Hey, look.” Martie pointed at the toilet: A small heap of white stuff—cottage cheese?—rested in the base of the bowl. When Franny recoiled, Martie said, “It's
aspirin.
That girl dumped the aspirin in there but the toilet didn't flush them all.”

It was irrational, she knew, but Franny felt cheated, almost disappointed by the news. “So, she was just
faking
?”

Martie leaned over the sink to the medicine cabinet mirror and wiped at the makeup smeared beneath her eyes. She had been crying a little, Franny realized.

“Well,” Martie said, “it's for sure she wasn't faking being pregnant.”

“Pregnant? How do you know she's pregnant?”

“What do you think she was wearing, Fran?”

“Shorty pajamas?”

“
Maternity
clothes.” Martie glanced at the toilet, then pressed down on the handle until all signs of the aspirin were gone.

R
OSAMUND
W
AHL NEVER DID SAY JUST WHEN
T
URNER
H
ASKIN
would arrive in Pynch Lake. “He'll come when he comes, if he comes at all,” she said lightly, and, using that same light voice, on the last day of July, she strolled into the den and jingled her key ring, and asked Franny and Joan Harvett—the girls were watching
P.M. Matinee
—if they would like to ride out to the airport to pick up Turner Haskin.

Very cool. As if the arrival of Turner Haskin were a trip to the Dairy Queen. In the car, however—driving at speeds that thrilled the girls—Rosamund did speak of Turner Haskin with some ardor:

In acting class, he had learned to speak to a camera as if it were flesh and blood. Rosamund once saw a clip of him and was truly impressed. “He's not sure acting is his path, but I know he could have a career like some of those serious but terribly good-looking stars. Like, Laurence Harvey or Montgomery Clift.”

In addition, Rosamund informed the girls, Turner Haskin could tell if you were a virgin just by watching the way you walked. “We'd all be at the beach or a club and a girl would go by, and he'd say, ‘That one, yes, that one, no.'”

“That's so cool!” Joan Harvett squealed, and abandoned her attempts to curl her eyelashes in the sunshade mirror, and fell back against the car seat. Franny doubted anyone possessed Turner Haskin's supposed skill, but she wanted to participate in Joan's wonderment, and so she added, “His dad has a mistress and she's been trying to seduce Turner.”

“
Franny
,”
Rosamund demurred.

“You said it was no big deal.”

“Still.”

In the airport parking lot, Rosamund offered around her tube of Pure Pearl lipstick and Joan gave it a try. “Do I look awful?” she whispered to Franny as they climbed from the car.

“You look fine.”

Joan moaned. Tugged at her short-shorts. She was a sturdy, excitable girl, a compulsive hair-comber and executor of sit-ups for her board-hard little belly. The only thing that looked a bit off about Joan was the four pink patches left on her cheeks by the Scotch tape she used to “set” her cheek curls each night.

“I bet he thinks I'm a turd, Franny.”

“Hsss!” Franny raised her hands in cat's claws at the girl, then whispered, “He's coming to see
Roz
, Joan.”

The Pynch Airport was a simple, concrete-block structure, just large enough to support a coffee shop frequented not so much by travelers as by the farmers and businessmen who stopped in for the cinnamon rolls. Franny had rarely visited the place, and with the big fans blowing her shirt against her skin, and the polished concrete under her bare feet, she felt foreign, there, uprooted.

“Oh, my god,” Joan Harvett yowled when Turner Haskin (tall and dark and handsome, yes, and perfectly stylish in baby blue pants and cordovan loafers) ducked out from one of the small planes that served the airport.

“What'd I tell you?” Rosamund said, then stepped away from the girls and up to the gate.

“Let's give them privacy,” Franny said. She led Joan Harvett back to the terminal's front doors. A long panel of lawn and pink and yellow snapdragons had been planted between the two roads that led up to and away from the building. On the outer edges of the roads, broad swaths of mowed grass ran for a hundred yards or so, up to fenced fields of corn, the stalks tall now, their long leaves stirring, a little eerie in the sunlight.

Isn't it green here
?
Those were the first words she heard Turner
Haskin say as he and Rosamund came up toward the doors.
Isn't it green?

Over a candlelit dinner that night, Turner Haskin told the Wahls all about his opera-singer mother. “She could have had a brilliant career but some fascinating man always wanted her to fly somewhere with him. How could she stay home to practice
Un Ballo in Maschera
when Mr. Mankowitz needed her opinion on where to build a villa on the Côte d'Azur?” Turner Haskin threw his hands in the air in imitation of his mother's pleasant dismay. The evening air was soft and warm on the skin, and everyone laughed. Brick and Peg smiled and nodded. Rosamund looked proud. Martie, who had been disgruntled about giving Turner Haskin the use of her room, now stretched her arms so far across the dining room table that she gripped the other side.

“The family of a friend of mine has a place on the Riviera! Such lovely people!” Martie tossed back a gulp of the Beaujolais Brick was pouring as he made his way around the table. “They know how to live!” She paused to shake her head and grin at Brick and Peg in some sort of loving reproof. “They have a maid, and the maid wears a uniform, and—it's cool, it's professional.”

Brick paused at Turner Haskin's elbow to say, “You should understand, Turner, this comes from a girl who, a few months back, didn't think we should have cleaning help at all. At Christmas, we were capitalist pigs, right, Martie?”

Martie smiled at Brick and raised her glass in a solitary toast. “Oink, oink,” she said gaily, then confided to Turner Haskin, “My father likes to tease me about the period when I dated a member of SDS. Milton Altman. Have you ever heard of him? Apparently, his family was of B. Altman fame, but Milton ends up helping write the Port Huron Statement—”

“Oh, Martie, Martie,” Peg Wahl said quite merrily, “if I were you, I'd take some of those stories from school with a grain of salt.” Peg had exceeded her usual single glass of wine that evening, and she now began to relate a story in which she happened to make a
surprise visit to a girlfriend at Iowa State. “In all innocence, with her roommates right there, I said, ‘Celia, why have you got a picture of the library on your dresser?'—not knowing Celia had been passing it off as a photo of her family home!”

While everyone laughed at Peg's story, Brick, poised behind Franny's chair, set his bottle of wine over Franny's empty glass of milk, then said, “What the hell?” and filled it.

Everyone laughed at that, too, and they laughed again when Franny said, imitating Brick's basso voice, “What the hell?” and took a swig of the slightly gray concoction.

“Brick!” Peg cried. “She'll make herself sick! Franny!”

Franny grinned at Brick, and finished off the glass, and that made everyone laugh, too.

Turner Haskin had lived in Milan and New York City as well as several Florida resort areas. Turner Haskin made being the child of divorced parents sound like a treat. Of course, he had received the best of care. Been spoiled by doting relatives and the staff at his father's hotel. If his mother did go on tour, his Italian grandmother stuffed him with candy apples and cannelloni—

“Candy apples,” Brick broke in. “Boy, that brings back memories! When I was in college, working in the kitchen of this little breakfast joint—Barney's—my sis stopped by one day.” Brick took a sip from his wine. “My parents thought a boy should put himself through school, but sis had everything nice, and she lived in the sorority house and all. So this one day she shows up at Barney's with a big box of gorgeous candy apples! ‘Gosh, sis,' I said—I was mopping the floor at the time—‘I'd sure love to have one of those,' and she looks straight at me”—Brick reared back and made his voice high with girlish indignation—“‘But, Harold, I have just enough for the sisters!'” Brick laughed wryly. “As if I weren't her actual brother, you see?”

Peg leaned forward to tap Turner Haskin on the arm. “She was spoiled rotten. Got everything while Brick had to scramble.”

Turner Haskin smiled at Brick. “Well, someone should have told you, Brick, that the best way to avoid trouble with brothers and sisters is to be an only child.”

“Ah hah”—Peg threw herself back in her chair so hard it gave an ominous rock, but that did not stop her from continuing—“accidents do happen, though!”

“Ahem, dear,” said Brick, and looked down at the table.

“Oh, no, Dad!” Martie grinned. She fanned a hand in front of her face—like a person who smelled a bad odor—then went teary-eyed. “Let Mom tell how she rode back and forth over the railroad tracks, trying to miscarry me—”

“That's enough,” Brick murmured, and turned what Franny thought of as his mad bulldog stare on Martie. As for pale-faced Peg—the rest of the Wahls held their breaths while Turner Haskin turned toward Peg and began to explain how, because of her beauty, for a time his mother had been pursued by RCA as a possible torch singer, “Someone like Helen Merrill—”

The name Helen Merrill meant nothing to Franny, but in an effort to wipe out these last moments, she jumped in, too. “If I was a singer”—

“For Christsake,” interrupted Brick, “don't they teach you kids the subjunctive anymore?”

Franny supposed her teeth might look a little inky, but she smiled as she climbed onto the arm of her chair and warbled to the tune of “Begin the Beguine”:

“When they subjunct the subjunctive—”

“What the hell does she think she's doing?” Brick asked Peg.

An old trick of his: to suggest that what she was about to do would bring her shame, and she could avoid that shame if she behaved as Brick wanted. In self-defense, Franny plunged right into a throaty version of “I Can't Get Started.”

“For Christsake,” Brick muttered, but she did not stop, she did not dare stop. Rosamund—looking both amused and skeptical—smiled and sat back in her chair to listen. Peg—still waxy from Martie's words—began to clear the table, and Brick looked down into his lap the way he did when he considered the sermons of the minister at St. Mark's too solemn. It was Martie who seemed most inclined to knock Franny off her perch, clamp a hand over Franny's
mouth. Martie's eyes had gone perfectly round with dislike.

Terrible to keep singing, impossible to stop—the top of Franny's head ached—but at least now it did not matter so much that Martie had brought up Peg's attempts at miscarriage because now Franny was the monster, just hatched, and Franny wanted to be the monster because—because the monster was the only thing to be. Be the monster or be nothing.

“That was good!” Rosamund said when Franny finished, and Turner Haskin smiled, though Brick and Martie shook their heads, and, from the door to the kitchen, Peg said only, “So where does your mother live these days, Turner?”

Peg and Brick were charmed by their guest. In the kitchen, later, Franny overheard Peg whisper to Rosamund, “He knows how to ignore a clod like Martie, doesn't he?” and while the girls finished cleaning-up, Peg showed Turner Haskin where she kept the extra keys for her Wildcat, and Brick explained that Turner could charge gas to the family's account at the Sinclair station on the way into town.

“Believe me,” Brick said, “if you're around for any length of time, you'll need to get away from this brood!”

In an effort to demonstrate that she had her own life, Franny decided that she would go upstairs with the hamster and the copy of George Orwell's
1984
she had found in the boxes of books the big girls had brought home from school; however, while she was on her way to fetch Snoopy, Tim Gleason—fresh from a shower and clearly unaware of the arrival of Turner Haskin—showed up at the front door. Franny had to let Tim in, and then Deedee Pierce, who was wearing a violently pink turban. “I got a hideous haircut,” Deedee Pierce whispered to Franny, “but Martie said I had to come by, immediately, to see this Turner.”

Since the bad party, it seemed that Martie spent most of her time with Deedee Pierce, and Franny felt grateful that Martie had a friend in Deedee, and she joined the pair, now, in peeking across the landing and into the living room:

Turner Haskin sat next to Rosamund on the shantung couch
and looked at the liner notes of a record album he had brought from Florida. Poor Tim Gleason slouched in the wing-back chair, apparently studying the patterns his knuckles made where they pressed out against the pockets of his jeans.

“You hear that?” Martie said to Deedee Pierce. “When
I
tried to get Roz to listen to Mose Allison, she dismissed me entirely!”

Deedee Pierce drew her head back into the kitchen once more. In addition to the turban, she wore an elaborate, rattling seashell necklace that she twiddled with her fingers. “What do you say, Franny? That's some serious hunkiness, there, right?”

Franny's shrug made Martie and Deedee laugh, but it was true, she did feel vaguely disappointed by Turner Haskin. He was good-looking and his voice was low and well-modulated and he moved smoothly and said amusing things. She was
impressed
by the value that Rosamund ascribed to him in much the same way she would have been impressed by a painting if someone had told her it was worth a million dollars. Even if she had not cared for the painting, she would have found it hard not to think: a million dollars! Still.

“He's handsome and all,” she whispered, “but he reminds me too much of those guys who model underwear in catalogues.”

“Some complaint,” said Deedee Pierce.

Franny turned to Martie for support. “You know what I mean. He's not as
sexy
as, like”—she hesitated—“Darren. I don't think. Do you?”

As if uncertain how to answer, Martie looked toward Deedee Pierce, who began to laugh uproariously. “Oh, Franny,” Deedee Pierce said, “you're so naive!”

Franny shrugged, then proceeded with her plan to go upstairs with Snoopy and the copy of
1984.

The very next night, she finished the book. She looked forward to talking to someone about it in the morning. Unfortunately, she discovered that no one wanted to talk about anything but Turner Haskin.