Rowing in Eden (2 page)

In winter, on Sundays, there were times when the Wahls drove the five miles into town from their own house on the far side of the lake without encountering a single car, but, in July, any day of the week, a trip “in” turned up flocks of cars with out-of-town plates. Shopping at the supermarket could involve parking a block or more from the store, and if you drove through town in the evening, you were bound to see the moth-pale flicker of little kids in light pajamas at play on the cots that their parents had set out on the porches and side yards of crowded rental cottages.

One of that pack of people who now crossed the Lakeside intersection was a clowning, blond-haired boy. Shirtless, teenaged, bright orange flip-flops on his feet. Franny wanted to see his face—was he handsome?—but the boy held his bare arms high, as if to shield himself from the drivers' fury. Oh. It was only Tim Gleason, the local boy Rosamund had chosen to be her summer “buddy.” Tim Gleason had graduated from the Catholic high school that spring, then met Rosamund at Lindt's, the gift shop where both held summer jobs.

An attractive boy, Franny supposed. Though Rosamund's buddies did not
have
to be particularly attractive, Tim Gleason had silky blond hair, lime green eyes. His skin, however, looked a little raw, didn't it? Puckered from some sort of face scrub he had used too zealously? Franny started to raise a hand to wave, then lowered it. Risky to let Tim Gleason think she dared presume that he was her friend as well as Rosamund's—

“There must be some mistake, though. I mean, the check must have gotten lost in the mail or something.”

Franny glanced back at the counter. Rosamund no longer spoke to the clerk, but to an older man, his face drawn, apologetic.

“You tell your dad to come in, Miss Wahl. We'll be more than happy to let you charge again once he takes care of his end. Your granddad was one of my favorite people.”

The man smoothed his hands across what was clearly some sort
of ledger. Thin hands with wiry black hairs on their backs and fingers. A class ring. If Franny's father had been there, he would have made them laugh at that man, his flushed cheeks, the ring with the big red stone.
An honest-to-god graduate of Rinky Dink High!
her father would have said. Something like that.

Eyes wide with fury, Rosamund strode toward Franny. “What an ass!” she whispered. “Dad's check must have gotten lost in the mail or something, so that
ass
is saying the account's overdue and we can't charge!”

Franny raised and lowered her chin—serenely, she thought—to acknowledge that she heard what Rosamund said. Peg Wahl—Miss Johnson County of 1940—had trained all three of her daughters, by example and knuckles in the back, to maintain a ramrod-perfect posture at all times, and Franny had found that, sometimes, in tandem with the posture, she could execute an impeccable pivot away from distress. She could look, oh, as if she had never even intended to make the purchase when the lady in the hosiery department at Drew's announced,
I'm sorry, miss, but that account is delinquent.
If her father happened to drink too much over Sunday dinner at the Top Hat Club, Franny could slowly rise from the table and walk to the powder room and stay there until it was time to go home—

“Here comes Timmy.” Rosamund pointed out the window. “He called before we left. I'm taking him skiing later.” She glanced toward the register. The clerk now stood with back turned, straightening a row of oars. His stiff movements hinted that he felt embarrassed for Rosamund or himself or both.

“How humiliating!” Rosamund whispered, but Franny fixed her own attention on Tim Gleason. Did he check his approaching reflection in the big marina window? The self-conscious fillip of arrangement he gave to his hair suggested he had yet to spot Rosamund beyond the glass.

“Anyone can see Tim's crazy about you,” Franny whispered.

“But it won't be fun if I see!” Rosamund gave Franny a hug and smiled. “Tim's cute, but wait. If Turner Haskin comes to visit this summer, every girl in Pynch will be in love with him.” Rosamund
raised the back of her hand to her mouth as she laughed. She had once explained to Franny how she had lifted this gesture from a British movie star for both its look of elegance and the fact that it concealed a gray mark left on her right canine by orthodontia.

“And no doubt”—Rosamund fluffed her bright hair with her fingertips—“our crazy sister will be first in line to throw herself at Turner's feet!”

The idea of Martie falling for a college friend of Rosamund's did not strike Franny as particularly funny, but she still smarted from Rosamund's remark on the dock—
We don't do that
—and so she laughed along at the image of Martie, head over heels for someone named Turner Haskin.

Followed Rosamund out the marina door.

Looked at the lake while Rosamund and Tim Gleason talked.

“I want just one
bite
of Dairy Queen. One bite,” Rosamund said. “So, if I get a cone, will you eat it?”

Tim Gleason shook a teasing finger at Rosamund. “Just one bite? I know you! I'll
hold
the cone, but you'll eat it!”

“Meany!” Rosamund said, but her laugh lightened the word, which rose like a bubble, a toy, and when she looked out over the top of her sunglasses—Franny recognized the deft parody of the starlet in the old poster for
Lolita
—Tim Gleason laughed at that, too.

Franny's own perverse set of scruples—or self-consciousness, vanity, whatever it was—prevented her from even buying sunglasses: horror at the possibility that someone might imagine that she, Franny Wahl, imagined herself resembling any sort of celebrity! So it was that she had to squint as she looked out at the glittering lake.

What kind of name was Turner Haskin, anyway?

Beyond a moored houseboat, a “C” sailed past. The crewman stood on the leeboards, and even Franny knew that this would not be necessary if the skipper would let out more sheet.

Turner Haskin. Pinot noir. Yesterday, Martie and Rosamund had argued over how to pronounce the
y
in “Bob Dylan.” Rosamund insisted the
y
was long, while Martie said, no, no, he took the name
from Dylan Thomas, and Rosamund said,
yes
, that's why it's long, and Franny did not know which sister was right.

It would
not
be good if Martie fell in love with Turner Haskin, but Rosamund was right about one thing: Martie did fall in love with some regularity. The last heartbreak had come via an ROTC member from Des Moines. Funny, handsome in his uniform, that boyfriend possessed a handful of tricks with which to entertain a little sister (he could blow smoke rings through smoke rings; open his Zippo lighter with a swipe down the leg of his pants, and then, on the up-swipe, strike the thing to flame). As good as a brother, Franny thought the ROTC member, until he wrote a lengthy letter to Brick and Peg Wahl to let them know that he would not be seeing Martie anymore. He was sorry to say so, but, since starting college that fall, Martie had begun to swear and smoke and drink and generally behave in an unladylike manner.

“Read this!” Franny's father had rattled the blue stationery in Franny's face. “Read this, and see what nice boys think of crude behavior!” Peg shook and cried over the letter, but it only made Franny hate the ROTC boy for betraying Martie, and after she had handed it back, Franny went to her own room and climbed into her closet to dim the voices of her parents as they berated Martie over the long-distance wires:

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

Pretty is as pretty does!

So.

Were those little kids sailing past on the sunfish going to tip over? They half-wanted to, you could tell, but, no, a frightened mother shrilled from the marina dock, “You kids keep that boat upright or else!”

It might be
interesting
if beautiful Turner Haskin came to visit Pynch Lake—Franny was interested in beauty, all right—but she did not want him to come if his visit broke Martie's heart.

What time would that evening's party begin?
Tim Gleason asked Rosamund.
Would there be a keg, or should Tim bring beer? Could some of Tim's buddies come by, too?

Franny pressed her bare toes into the fat slugs of tar that someone had used to fill a seam where the sidewalk slumped away from the marina wall, and Tim Gleason teased Rosamund about one of his friends. “You remember Ryan. You said he was so good-looking.” Then Tim launched into a story of how, the night before, this Ryan had been very drunk and playing leapfrog on the parking meters in front of Viccio's.

“Everybody in Viccio's had put down their cues and come outside to watch, and Ryan figures he ought to do something for a finale, so he drops his pants, and before anybody can think—we're all laughing our heads off—he leaps the next meter and, man, his pants catch on the pole and he belly flops right on the sidewalk!” Timmy Gleason began to laugh. “Christ, he's flat on his face, trying to reach around to untie his shoes so he can get free, and he's, like, come help me, you guys, but we're laughing too hard, and up comes that young cop, Haggerty. Haggerty asks what's going on, and Ryan—with his pants around his ankles and his bare ass in the air—he looks up at Haggerty and he says, ‘I'm sorry, Officer, but I can't seem to get my laces untied.'”

Tim Gleason told the story well—craning his neck around for the last line, as if he lay flat on the ground and spoke to someone above him—but Franny did not know if she were allowed to laugh along with Rosamund, or if Tim Gleason would give her a look that said, “That wasn't for you.” This summer, Franny often did not know what to do, and she did not want to do what she had done in summers past. Did
not
want to fish for crappies and bullheads. To make loom pot holders or drive go-carts or play miniature golf or endless games of Michigan rummy and Monopoly. To crew on the sailboat of the girl from down the beach—

“Be right back, Roz.” Quick, she stepped from the curb and between the front and rear ends of two cars moving up Lakeside. No time to quake at the honks and shouts of the drivers. Just—try to look cool. Stay alive.

From the other side of the street, she turned to wave to Rosamund, who shook her head, but grinned just as she had the
night she found Christy Strawberry and Franny smoking on the window ledge of Franny's room. An admiring smile. Maybe Rosamund had heard that shout from a passing car: “Hey, buttercup!” Which might have been meant for Franny? Because of her yellow shorts and shirt? Peg had told Franny that she should change before going to town, but Rosamund said, “She's fine, Mom,” and now Franny was glad, glad, so glad she had to hold her face down to conceal her smile as she joined the line in front of the Dairy Queen stand—

Oh, the song that poured from the Dairy Queen speakers. It took her by the shoulders. It shoved her and her broken heart out into a cold, dark night, both terrible and delicious.

Though who had broken her heart? Who?

Misty-eyed, she surveyed the DQ patrons, the poor acne-pitted girl clerk behind the service window. At the back of the stand, the chubby owner shuffled around with a bucket and mop, a cinnamon-colored dachshund underfoot. Sweet thing.

Could that “buttercup” really have been meant for her?

Sometimes, it seemed to Franny that she did look pretty, but the next moment she might pass by a mirror and out would leap a creature so queer she might have been one of the Picasso ladies from the books at the home of her piano teacher; not just limbs akimbo, but nose and eyes, too, her face a primitive mask from which speech would surely issue in foghorn blasts, bovine bellows. To make matters worse: Recently, after a quarrel among herself and Christy Strawberry and Joan Harvett, Christy had telephoned to tearfully admit that, while angry at Franny, she had told Joan Harvett—
not that I really believe it, Franny
—that Franny's nose was too big.

A too big nose was a personal defect that had never occurred to Franny, but as soon as Christy Strawberry said it, Franny realized it must be true.

“What can I get you?” asked the girl behind the DQ's tiny screen window.

“Three medium cones, please.” Surely ordering Tim Gleason a cone was the polite thing to do. If he rejected his, fine, she'd pitch it
in a trash can.
No big deal. No hurt feelings here, man.
An odd boy, Tim. Sometimes, he was like a fish in the shallows, holding so still you did not see him; then, as if he did not want to be completely forgotten, he would make a leap, show himself. Franny would have liked to ask her sister Martie what she thought of the boy and of Rosamund's friendship with him, but Martie could be a whirlpool that sucked your words into her spin until your words were no longer your own. They became just—fuel for some dark momentum that Martie seemed to require to know that she existed.

While the DQ girl made up the cones, Franny watched Mike Zanios, owner of the Top Hat Club, cross the drive between his club's brick building and the marina. Mike Zanios and Rosamund called to each other, and Franny knew, any moment now, Zanios would give Rosamund a hug that lifted her off the ground—

There.

The Wahls had eaten Sunday buffets (prime rib, moussaka, chicken) at the Top Hat for as long as Franny could remember. Her father left his law offices each noon for lunch at the place. Still, Franny could not help wondering how Tim Gleason felt about that hug. Mike Zanios might be a family friend, but Rosamund and Martie both spoke of how charming they found his blue eyes and the brows that met in an ashen smudge, the silver streaks in his dark blond curls, the way he dressed in sandals and boat-necked sweaters. In addition, lately, Mike Zanios often drove out to the Wahl house after dinner, and while Brick Wahl mixed him a drink, Zanios invariably would shout up the stairs, “Roz, come on down and tell us the news of the American youth!” Something like that. Then Rosamund would wind up perched on the arm of whatever chair he sat in, and though she did not drink alcohol, she sometimes drizzled a bit of the man's bourbon onto a scoop of ice cream, and, later, as if there were nothing extraordinary about it, he would take her to the Top Hat to listen to the combo that played there in the evenings.