Rowing in Eden (18 page)

“You have to go
down.
”

When she pushed on his chest, he rocked back precariously. “Whoa!” he said, and while he grasped the banister to keep from falling, she hurried down the hall to her room. She closed the door behind herself and leaned against it.

“Hey,” he called. “Where'd you go?”

Several moments passed before she heard his footsteps descend the stairs. There. Gone. She did not move away from the door. The room before her had turned queer: poisoned and brilliant. The wooden walls and floors were odd and grainy in the light from the ceiling fixture. Each dark knothole in the wood formed the spinning center of a galaxy, a beautiful and active part of some vastness that signalled either great meaning or meaninglessness. And if it were meaninglessness—well, it became meaningful from sheer grandeur.

She jumped at a knock on the door at her back.

“Who is it?”

“Me.” Rosamund. “One of Timmy's little friends wants to dance with you.”

Franny opened the door. “Who?”

“That doll who was just up here?” Rosamund laughed. “I doubt you missed him!”

Franny flipped through pages of the poetry book in her hand. Oh, yes, she was just casually looking through a book of poems. That was how fast her heart had gone undercover. Because she knew that if Rosamund sensed the way it had instantly rebuilt itself from go-cart to dragster, she would put a stop to it, quick.

Rosamund—Franny could imagine how Rosamund saw things: Rosamund was taking Franny to her junior high's basketball game as a kind of mascot. Or Rosamund saw the moment as a little like the time that she and Martie had made up Franny's face and teased and sprayed her hair into a French twist and brought her downstairs to show off their handiwork to Roger Dale.

“So, can I tell him you're coming?”

“I'd have to—comb my hair.” Franny hesitated. “And what about Martie?”

“Don't worry about her.” Rosamund smiled. “I'm supposed to tell you he'll be waiting at the bottom of the stairs.”

If he were not at the bottom of the stairs as soon as she arrived . . .

She arranged her face in what she thought of as her toughest “drop-dead” look, but knew, already, this moment was nothing for which she could prepare herself beyond the sort of steadying a person might do in anticipation of the doctor's inserting a needle.

He was waiting. He looked up at her as he took a sip from the can of beer in his hand. In the brighter light that shone into the living room from the den, his beard announced itself a granite that did not belong on boys even close to her own age. Worse, what she felt when he took her hand already seemed historical, like some substance that had sat too long unused and turned corrosive.

“I'm thirteen,” she said.

He bent nearer than necessary, breath canny with booze and cigarettes and coffee. “What's that?”

“I'm thirteen.”

“
Thirteen?
” He threw back his head and gave a raucous laugh. So the whole thing was a joke? Maybe something cooked up by Tim Gleason? Sickened, she turned to go.

“No! No!” With a fervor she had never heard from a real-life male, ever—except behind anger—he said, “Don't go! Please.”

She did not want to be aware of Al Castor and the others watching from the big green couch. Dancing Nancy-something-or-other and her boyfriend: watching. Franny was Cinderella at the ball, but
undisguised. Cinderella still wearing her cinder rags, her bare feet.

“Thanks for coming down,” he whispered. He wore a V-necked sweater but no shirt and the skin along his collarbone bloomed pink and tan, absolutely tantalizing. His hair was longer than the hair of the boys she knew, thick, brushing his collar. He took a long drink from his beer and there was his man's neck . . .

“You're quiet,” he said. “So. Thirteen. I don't remember, do thirteen-year-olds know how to dance?”

“I know how to dance.”

The song was a fast one, but he kept his fingers on her shoulder, a profound and confusing intimacy. Really, the only dancing she had ever done, she had done in front of the hall mirrors or with Christy Strawberry and Joan Harvett. The only male she had ever danced with in her entire life was Al Castor; at the Fourth of July picnic, Al had asked her to dance because he loved the song “Peppermint Man” and the big girls were taken.

“Hey, Frances Jean”—Deedee Pierce called from the dining room—“isn't it time for you to go to bed?”

“With
whom
?” another guest cackled, and then Al Castor yowled, “Don't put any ideas in Marvell's head, man!”

Franny pretended not to hear the remarks, and this made—Marvell?—laugh. He brought his face close. “Too tough to care?” he murmured.

She supposed he imagined her merely embarrassed; in fact, to Franny, many things simply appeared extraneous: her parents, the friends of Martie and Rosamund, Martie and Rosamund themselves. They existed like the blinking yard lights of homes across the lake: small, colorless, too far away to be of consequence. She could not think about them. She had to dance. She had to consider this moment to which she was pinned like a warrior by an arrow to a tree, at the same time that she had to consider very small rules, like the fact that she could not even ask, “What's your name?”

To ask “What's your name?” might be to ask too much.

And, of course, when the song ended, she would have to walk away immediately—in case he meant only
one
dance. And then the
song did end, which broke her heart; the magician pulled back his cape and not just the rabbit but the magician and the entire stage disappeared, too.

“Thanks,” she said, and started toward the stairs.

“Don't go!” He clasped her hand in his. No one had ever looked in her eyes that way. He was a little drunk, of course. She knew that. Still, his gaze was steady and full. Unfortunately, she could not return it—not without acting, at any rate. Not without the most terrible strain. And what did that mean? That she was not meant to be a lover? She
felt
like a lover, but maybe being a lover meant a willingness to act in a way that was not natural to you?

They began to move to the music again, his hand, once more, miraculously, on her shoulder, but surely everything would stop any moment now. She would turn back into a pumpkin, bombs would fall, the filmstrip inside her head would break—

“Don't you even want to know my name?”

What difference did it make if she knew his name? She felt sick with happiness and confusion. The living room where they danced was her family's living room but now it was something else, too, something charged with significance.

“I'm Ryan Marvell. Like in the comic books? You want some of this?” He offered his can of beer to her. When she took a sip, he laughed. “Don't get drunk now!” he said.

It disappointed her that he could disappoint her—this offering her something, then warning her against it—but she accepted the disappointment, and said, “I've tasted beer before.”

“Yeah?” He pulled his face long, as if to hold back a laugh. “Your dad give you a sip? Uh-oh!” He squeezed her hand. “Somebody over there looks like she'd like to bite my head off!”

In the dining room, Martie now stood in glowering conversation with Deedee Pierce.

“That's my sister,” Franny said—just as Rosamund looked toward Franny and waved with a flourish that reminded Franny of the waves that parents gave their children while the children rode the merry-go-round.

“I've met Roz,” Ryan Marvell whispered, “but the other one's making me nervous.”

Still, he did not leave. He put his hands on her shoulders and guided her toward the screened porch—dark that night, closed off because of the weather.

“Franny,” he said. “I like that.” He squinted into the darkened porch. “Where do you sit here, Franny? I can't see.”

The table lamp she flicked on was too much, he said, and she flicked it off and, eyes flashing with adjustment—heart juddering with joy—she led him by the hand to the wrought-iron loveseat. “Here,” she said.

With a laugh, he pulled her down beside him. “You know, I think my parents met your parents at some parties before,” he said. “Your dad's the lawyer, right?”

She nodded.

“Thirteen.” In the half-light, with one eyebrow raised, he seemed skeptical, almost amused, but then he rubbed his chest with the flat of his hand as if it ached, and she could almost believe that he felt as baffled and heartsick as she did.

She folded her hands in her lap and entwined the fingers. This is the church. This is the steeple. He began to tell her a story of how, the day before, he and Tim Gleason and their buddy Warren had been at City Beach, and met a group of silly girls from Waterloo, and convinced the girls that he was the drummer for the Beach Boys.

“They wanted my autograph!” Ryan Marvell laughed with a boy's delight. “I gave them my autograph! Me,
Denny Wilson
!”

Franny laughed, partly in thanks that she was not one of the tricked girls, but instead the girl who learned of the trick. Being the girl who learned of the trick made her feel a little like Rosamund. Ryan Marvell's story was the sort of story that Rosamund often told, a story in which she was immune.

Franny was not immune, and knew that Ryan Marvell knew that she was not immune. It was acting on his part that he pretended to believe she were immune, and she almost wished that she were a
girl who did not have to think: This is something he can do, and do well—watch out.

He was it, after all. The one.

She could not help feeling joy at meeting the one, though surely it was all too good to be true. He seemed as joyous as she was. He wrote her name in the air with the coal of his lighted cigarette. Before too long, he would put his arm around her. She would like that, but regretted that it would happen so soon because, now, side by side on the loveseat—a loveseat in her very own house, rendered permanently, irrevocably magical—they smiled at each other, smiles so broad they could have been a couple of five-year-olds, just tucked in for their first sleepover.

There. He came close, his chin grazing her cheek. A nervous laugh jarred loose from her, and he murmured, “I like the way your breasts move when you laugh.”

Oh. She looked away, her teeth beginning to chatter. She would have preferred to leave her breasts out of it, but he went on, in a whisper, “It's a compliment, honey.”

Honey. As if to keep her company, he drew up his shoulders and made his own teeth chatter. “Okay,” he said through chattering teeth, “look. I work at the miniature golf course. Tomorrow, you could come there, couldn't you? There's no problem with that, is there? And—Roz takes Tim skiing. We could get her to take us along, right? That'd be one way we could see each other.”

Franny did not say that Tim and Rosamund saw her as a kid, not someone to include in what would amount to a double date. She looked out the porch screens. There: the familiar dark and bouncing limbs of shaggy oaks, the night sky strangely white with the cold. Like your breath in the cold. The earth's warm breath, and when he leaned in to kiss her, she did not shut her eyes. She did not want to lose a minute of his face, any sensory information she could get while this lasted—

“FRANCES JEAN WAHL!”

Bits of light shot through the flower pattern of the table lamp's cut-paper shade: slice of leaf and petal, dots of stigma. A startling portion of Martie's face loomed above the shade.

“Remember who you are, where you are, what you are!”

Franny managed a shaky laugh. “Jeez, we're not Hanovers, Martie,” she said, delighted to finally use a line she had invented for imaginary repartee with her parents.

“We are Wahls!” Martie glared at Ryan Marvell. “And you leave that light on, Frances! If Mother and Father were to come home and catch you—” She exited with a fling of her hair.

Ryan Marvell laughed. “Do you guys really call your dad ‘Father'?” He pretended to nibble on fingernails he plainly did gnaw at other times: down to the quick, a devastation Franny took as a sign of a sensitive nature. A good sign.

“
I
call him ‘Dad,'” Franny said. “I don't know where Martie got that ‘Father' stuff. Some old movie, maybe. You know, like, the hoity-toity family's eating breakfast and—yeah, the maid's pouring the daughter her cup of coffee—and the daughter goes, ‘Father, dear, could I take the car to the city today?'”

Ryan Marvell threw his head back and laughed and kissed her hand. “Do you know what a terrific girl you are?”

“We better go back in the other room,” she said, and stood up, fast. She wanted to shed his words, hold on to them for dear life, not believe them at all.

He held out his hands to her and she pulled him to his feet. The expression on his face was a tender one. If it were an act, so be it. He ran the play she wanted to be in, again and again. “Thirteen,” he said. “That isn't good for us.”

At “for us” she tried to laugh. She did not want to hear another one of his wonderful words, and she kissed him, just to stop his mouth—

“Hey, Franny!” Laughing, peering around one of the porch's French doors, Deedee Pierce called, “What would your boyfriend with the tight pants think about all this?”

Ryan Marvell smoothed his hand down Franny's back. “Let's go outside,” he whispered, and she nodded, okay.

Later, she would not understand how it was that she let him lie down on top of her on the bank. “Let me keep you warm,” he said, but, of course, they would have been warmer in the house. His beard scratched her chin. That was new. His kisses assumed open mouths and tongues and when he pressed against her she understood that he meant for her to feel the ridge of his penis. Which was all right, now that she knew this was a natural thing. She tried, however, to detach that moment with Ryan Marvell from the word the engaged girl had used: hard-on. She wanted her experience entirely uncolored by the rest of them.