Rowing in Eden (24 page)

“Hey, Ryan,” Christy Strawberry called, “Franny talked to that Larry! He's not going to beat you up!”

“Well, that's nice.” Ryan Marvell laughed. “What'd you say to him, Franny?”

She shrugged. “I just told him it wasn't your fault.”

“Every boy in trouble needs a girl like you, huh? But, wait! You're the one who got me in trouble in the first place!” He wrapped his arms around her when she began to object. “Just kidding. So, come on! I got a car over by the drugstore.”

“But—” Franny gestured toward Christy.

“That's okay. You come, too, Franny's friend.”

“Christy,” Franny said.

“Christy. Either of you girls ever tried schnapps?”

“My dad—” Franny began, then broke off.

“Your dad?” Ryan Marvell gave a comical scratch to the top of his head—a Stan Laurel sort of scratch—and he clicked his heels together. “Your dad—uses colorful language when he's been drinking, doesn't he?” He winked at Christy Strawberry. “Her dad didn't think too much of my coming by the house.”

The car to which Ryan Marvell led the girls was a black Cadillac, brand-new, shining. His father's car, he explained as he unlocked the door. It seemed that, the night before, Ryan had put his own Ford into a ditch. With a laugh, he explained how a farmer had pulled out the Ford with his tractor, then invited Ryan and his friends—Tim Gleason and some other boys—to come inside his farmhouse for a drink of what turned out to be wine that the farmer had made from Hi-C and rhubarb.

“Then we had to compare vintages.” Ryan Marvell lay his forehead on the steering wheel and laughed weakly. “Grape Kool-Aid versus Tropical Punch. June versus May.” Later, trying to leave the farmyard, Ryan had put the Ford in another ditch, and then the farmer put the tractor in the ditch while trying, again, to help with the Ford; and Ryan and his friends had ended up sleeping on the farmer's porch until morning, when a second farmer with a tractor came to help.

Franny thought of, but did not mention, the fact that her own parents had met under similar, if less colorful, circumstances.

“Here.” He pulled a fifth of schnapps from under the seat and handed it to Franny.

“No, thanks,” she said, but Christy not only wanted a sip, she was eager to pass the bottle back and forth over Franny's lap. Very soon, Christy was singing along with the radio, very loud, and Ryan Marvell said, “Listen—Christy, right?—do you mind if I kiss your friend in the backseat for a minute or two?”

“My friend in the backseat?” With much hilarity, Christy Strawberry twisted around and rose up on her knees to face the backseat—one of her bony elbows knocking Franny hard in the temple—“I don't have a friend in the
back
seat,” she said, “but Franny's my friend, and I know she'd love to kiss you!”

“Are you getting drunk, Christy?” Franny whispered while Ryan Marvell opened the driver's-side door and climbed out of the Cadillac.

“I'm fine! Go on! I won't look!”

It was wonderful to be in those arms—she lightened, lightened—but then Ryan Marvell began pressing her down on the seat, trying to get her under him. He slipped his hand between her thighs, an area that she had not dreamed she would need to guard for years. Not that she did not want to give herself to him entirely. She did. But she did not want whatever that sly hand thought it wanted, and implied could be shared, and so she felt only grateful when—with a whoop—Christy Strawberry spilled right over the Cadillac's front seat and into their laps.

“I'm drunk, you guys! Look at me! I'm drunk!”

After they had untangled themselves from Christy Strawberry, in an effort to sober up the girl, Ryan Marvell and Franny began to walk her back toward the carnival. Which was nice. To be out of the car, working on a problem together.

“I suppose I can't hold your hand here?” he asked.

“Better not.”

“He wants to hold your h-a-a-and,” Christy sang, making others in the street turn and laugh. They had reached the chamber of commerce building by then, the spot where Franny's mother was to pick up the girls. Franny set her hands on Christy's shoulders, and said, “Christy, listen, do you think you can act okay in front of my mom?”

Christy Strawberry grinned. Reached into the bag of popcorn she had been carrying around with her all night and scrubbed her face with the popcorn.

“Great. That looks real normal, Chris.”

Ryan Marvell was not much better. “Look, Franny.” He slipped into an indentation in the face of the chamber of commerce building. “I'll stand right here, and we can talk until your mom comes, and she'll never see me!”

“You're nuts,” she said, his enthusiasm for her both a thrill and a terror. She scanned the street for the Wildcat, the old worry washing over her:
Her mother would not come at all.
She moved closer to grinning Ryan and his peppermint breath. She wanted to tell him how crazy her parents had been after he came to visit, but suppose he took that story as a sign of sickness with which he would not wish to be associated.

“I love to breathe!” Christy Strawberry cried. She gulped at air and grabbed her fingers toward the sky. “Breathing is fun! Do you know that, you guys? I have pores—everywhere! I have pores in my eyes! I'm mentholated!”

Franny stroked the girl's back. “But you have to settle down, honey. And you”—she shook her head at Ryan Marvell—“you've got to go!”

“I can't!” Head cocked to one side, he pressed himself flat to the chamber of commerce wall. “Your charms have turned me to stone. I can't move!”

“Her mom's always late anyway,” Christy Strawberry said.

“Christy!” Franny protested. “That's not true!”

“Almost always,” Christy said, ducking as two boys with peashooters ran past, laughing, jostling people, forcing an old finned Dodge to stop with a terrible screech.

She could walk north, Franny thought, pretend she saw her mother's car farther up the street, waiting. She squinted in that direction to make the pretense real.

“Hey!” Christy tugged at her arm. “There she is! No—it's like your mom's car, but it's a guy.”

Franny nodded and pretended she merely continued staring up the street, watching for Peg—while Darren Rutiger drove by in Peg's Wildcat, Martie's head on his shoulder.

She could not have said precisely why she felt she should pretend not to see. Because she suspected Martie would feel embarrassed at being with Darren after he had behaved so badly at that party? Or because Rosamund might expect Franny to tell her if Franny were to see the pair together?

“There's Brick!” Christy Strawberry pointed to the old Mercedes, now inching forward along that section of Main narrowed with rides and booths and people making their way on foot. “Better stay back, Ryan.” Christy shook a finger at Ryan Marvell and he made a funny face of fear that kept the girls laughing even as Brick Wahl drove them toward home.

I
T HAPPENED, EVERY NOW AND THEN, THAT
B
RICK
W
AHL TOLD
an old air corps story of how, in the mess hall, certain men who were too full for their desserts, but wanted to save them for later, would stand up in plain sight of the other men and spit on the dessert, a piece of pie, a slice of cake.

“It was important you did this very publicly,” Brick would say with a laugh, “because men were less concerned with eating food some other fellow spit on than being
known
as a person who would eat food another fellow spit on.”

In her bedroom, the curtains bouncing in the late morning breeze, Franny wrote Brick's air corps story into her journal with the secret notion that she would use the story, years later, as a means of remembering that ugly night when Eduardo from Lake Okoboji—and that entire party crowd—had watched Martie stumble up the drive with Darren Rutiger. She could not imagine that she would
not
remember that night—or the more recent night at the carnival when she saw Martie with Darren and pretended not to—still, the people around her seemed to remember things incorrectly more and more often. Rosamund already needed prompting from Franny in order to recall the names of girls with whom she had been high school friends just two years before.

In memory of her own experience of the carnival—with the girls and Ryan Marvell and Larry Prohaski, too—Franny copied #320 in her journal:

She had entered a strange world, hadn't she? The carefree world that she once imagined awaited her—the big game, 45's spinning at the sock hop, you and your honey sipping one malted milk with two straws—maybe that world had never existed. Though something like it must have existed. There was evidence: the big girls' formals in plastic bags in the cedar closet, Martie's dried corsages and ticket stubs, Rosamund's photo albums.

At any rate, Franny's world had collapsed in upon itself like a sinkhole, and, like a sinkhole, it had its own climate. Really, she could scarcely see the world above from her sinkhole—though who cared when such rare flowers grew there?

Not that she believed that Ryan Marvell loved her as she loved him. Not that she could convince herself that he was actually with her in the sinkhole. Still, he was with her, somewhere. They met in an echo, maybe, and when he laughed, his laugh sounded like something out of a book—that is, he had the sort of laugh that, whether high or low or beautiful or not, the writer let you know, that laugh was a kind of natural wonder, not to be forgotten.

“Franny.” Spray bottle of window cleaner in hand, Ginny Weston stood in the bedroom doorway. “Your dad wants you. Kitchen.”

Franny called down from the top of the stairs, “Dad?” At noon, her mother was to take her to meet friends at Woolf Beach—though not really; really, Franny meant to go across the road to Mother Goose to see Ryan Marvell. “Did you need me?”

Brick Wahl stuck his head into the stairwell. He looked aggrieved. “Hurry it up. Your mother's stuck at the dentist and she says I've got to haul you to the beach.”

“But, I don't need to go for another hour.”

“Well, I'm here now, so you're going now. Chop, chop.”

Chop, chop. She raced to her room. She was not ready at all. Luckily, she had laid out her yellow shorts and top; however, when she went to pull the top over her head, some string or tag caught in the three rollers in her hair—

WA-SAAAH!
An inboard ripped past the house with a terrible blast of its air horn.
WAH-SAAH!

She dashed to the window. Suppose Ryan Marvell had sounded that air horn. Suppose it contained a message for her. Stay home. Go away. Come now.

The inboard had disappeared when she pulled back the curtain, but upon the wake the boat left behind—no question about it—there floated Franny's rowboat, loose, a good fifty yards from shore.

Long, short, short, Brick honked in the drive.

“Franny?” Ginny Weston called. “He's getting mad!”

“I'm coming!”

The boat could not go far, she supposed. It had a license. Surely someone would call if it washed up on their beach.

Brick frowned when she climbed into the car. “I don't like people who keep me waiting,” he said.

I don't like people who keep me waiting? Well, he was preposterous, she thought, and relished the silence that followed as they moved up the road. The sharp morning had lost its edges and it seemed to puff up, leaven, as the sun climbed to its midpoint in the sky.
No. Please, don't talk
, she thought when Brick made the peculiar bee buzz deep in his throat that signalled he meant to speak:

“You know, I'd be more than willing to haul your friends back to the house rather than have you at that crummy beach.”

She tried to sit up straighter in her seat, and to remind herself that she could not be too angry with him for trying to change plans that were all lies, anyway.

“We
want
to be at the beach,” she said, then added—the name sounding almost like an afterthought, or an accusation—“Dad.”

Dad. She blushed and looked down into the depths of her beach bag. She hoped her interest in the beach bag suggested she had not the slightest interest in the miniature golf course, now coming up on their right.

“Say”—his voice was suddenly lively—“you ever notice that spot, there, Fran?” He pointed to a scrubby area that lay just between the miniature golf and the trailer court. “There used to be a road through there not—four or five years ago. Remember that? I used to take it all the time, when I was going south. It hooked up with a gravel stretch that met Highway 65, but some dumb bunny closed it off—who knows why—and now it's almost disappeared! A solid road! That's how quick nature takes things back!”

She nodded. She remembered driving on that road with him, or maybe the big girls, once or twice. She wanted to share the moment with him, but he made her feel too helpless. Loving her, pushing her around. Where did one end and one begin?

“Damned mutt!” Brick gave his horn a toot as the trailer-court setter—barking, tongue lolling—careened toward the Mercedes. To Franny's relief, the creature did not follow when Brick turned into Woolf Beach, and began to make his way past the fields of stubbly grass that served as parking lots for the overflow of summer visitors.

“Where you supposed to meet your gang?”

“Anywhere's fine.” She put her hand on the doorknob, waiting for him to stop. “They're probably on the beach.”

“Hm,” Brick said, and turned onto a dusty, narrow road that wound back into the park campgrounds.

“This—isn't the right way,” she said, but quietly, quietly, hoping he might almost imagine the words his own thoughts.

M
EN
read the grainy stencil on that small concrete block building alongside of which her father stopped the car. She could smell the sewage, but he leaned forward over the wheel and looked this way and that as if he did not notice a thing. “I hate to have you wander
around in here all by yourself,” he said. He glanced her way. He smiled. Tenderly, she thought, and, instantly, she was ready to give up, go home—

“But then I ask myself”—Brick lowered his forehead to the steering wheel and began to laugh—“what kind of nut would come to a dump like this when they've got a lovely beach of their own?”

The remark not only offended her—did he believe her too dumb to see through such easy manipulations?—worse, it made her feel unsafe in his company. Which released her from guilt. Before she could climb out, however, he began to drive again. They passed a section where tents and makeshift clotheslines could be seen through the trees. More campground.

“This isn't the right way,” she said stiffly. “It's back the other way.”

“Puh!” He drew his mouth into a purse of disgust, then braked hard enough that she had to put a hand on the dash to stop herself from falling forward, and a woman alongside the road grabbed up her small child with a shriek. “Settle down, babe,” Brick muttered as he brought the car around and began to drive out from the trees and toward the beach area once more.

Franny's heart beat fast. Could he tell? Like a wild dog who turned wilder if it sensed your fear? Up ahead, by the concession stand, there stood a heavy girl in a red swimsuit and she was familiar, yes, a girl who had gone to Roosevelt the first semester of seventh and then transferred out. Anita Grant—she had sat near Franny in homeroom, and Franny said, “There's Anita!” not exactly to Brick, but for his benefit. “Hey, Anita!” she called from the car window.

The girl, chewing on a bite of hot dog, turned to peer sullenly at the old Mercedes.

“
That's
a friend of yours?” Brick said.

“That's Anita. The other girls are probably in the bathhouse, changing.”

“She looks awful rough,” Brick said.

“Well, thanks for the ride.” Franny gave him a peck on the
cheek and climbed from the car. She could feel precisely how he bent over the steering wheel, watching her, waiting. Then the driver behind him laid on a horn and Brick moved down the road.

Anita Grant pointed her hot dog—the white of its bun daubed rose with lipstick—in Franny's direction. “I remember you.”

“So are you going to Adams now?” Franny asked, eyes on the Mercedes, making certain Brick headed to town.

Anita Grant nodded. “I shoulda always gone there. It's a million times cooler than Roosevelt.”

Franny stared at the back of the refreshment stand. People had gouged names and telephone numbers and obscenities, there, exposing the cheap fiberboard beneath the stand's coat of white paint. In one spot, the
F
in a certain “FUCK” had been worked at so hard and long you could actually see through the F-shaped hole to something moving inside the stand. The dark pants leg of some worker?

“Was that your dad that dropped you?” Anita Grant asked.

Franny said yes, then excused herself,
Guess I better change.

The high odor of bathhouse mildew mingled with the smells of wet concrete and shampoo and hair spray. Immediately, she locked herself in one of the toilet stalls. Inspected her face in the compact she had recently purchased on a trip downtown. At the drugstore, the sales lady said, “You have lovely skin! Honey Kiss is your perfect color!” At the time, it had seemed the selection of the perfect color might make a world of difference, but Franny had not yet been able to bring herself actually to use the compact.

Only once did someone knock on the door during the forty-five minutes that Franny sat in the stall, waiting for it to be time for her to cross the road to Mother Goose. Still, it was dank and uncomfortable to sit there. She dabbed at her underarms with tissue from the toilet paper dispenser. Suppose Ryan Marvell had changed his mind. Suppose he did not want her to come. He had never seen her in the sunlight. Suppose he did not like her in the sunlight.

When she emerged from the bathhouse, Anita Grant was gone. Franny made her way through the rows of parked cars to Lakeside Drive. Looked right and left—a good pedestrian—then, heart
trembling with fear and happiness, she hurried across the road.

Ryan Marvell stood in the Mother Goose parking lot, dumping a small trash can into the larger trash barrel. For a moment, from behind, she did not recognize him. His beautiful hair had been cropped into the familiar muffin of her male classmates; on top, some concession had been made to the desire for length, but the rest was chopped short.

Shyly, he ran a hand over his head, a display of vulnerability that made her love swell into new lands. “So, can you still like a guy who looks this goofy?” he asked.

She nodded.

“That's good,” he said, smiling, drawing his finger down her nose, “since I'm in love with you.”

She reached up for his hand and squeezed it and wished she knew how to let the love show on her face in just the right way. The way he did. What she felt—she wanted to offer it to him in its finest form, like some perfect song or poem from which she had removed all dross—

“Hey, I picked a name for you to use here,” he whispered. “You're ‘Michelle,' okay?”

Both of them glanced, then, toward the house where the golf course manager lived. Though it was a shabby little bungalow with a plastic O
FFICE
sign over the front door, when Ryan hurried off to help a customer at the snack shack, Franny imagined fixing up the house for the two of them. She would paint it, of course. Maybe just white. Plain white. And replace the torn screen door. Get rid of the dead Christmas tree and other trash by the garage . . .

The day had turned out hot but she was thrilled to sit on the split-rail fence encircling the little course and watch Ryan Marvell sweep the sidewalks and dispense golf clubs and balls and packets of potato chips, bottles of pop. The setter from the trailer court ambled through the course, and she called to it—funny and wonderful to see the animal up close, look into its big brown eyes. She smoothed her hands over its silky head, delighting in the fine bones. “What a sweetie you are,” she crooned.

Ryan Marvell turned from his sweeping to laugh. “That mutt?”