Rowing in Eden (29 page)

Ryan Marvell slipped in behind the wheel. So—
jaunty
, he looked. It made her even angrier with him. “The thing is,” he said, “your sister did it with him, Fran.”

“
Did
it with him? Martie liked Louie when she was in sixth grade. She kissed him once under Rubners' pagoda when they went there with Deedee Pierce and Max Hawkins to smoke lake reeds.” Franny paused, then added a fervent, “Also, Ryan, if she
had
done it with him, I wouldn't think she was some kind of awful person.”

He raised his eyebrows and smiled, as if she had said something pleasantly damning. She didn't care. “I mean it,” she said.

“Okay, honey! Okay!” He pulled her over to him. “Take it easy, now.”

She let him hold her. She wanted him to hold her, but after a few minutes, she looked at the little clock on the dash, and she said, oh, four-thirty, if it were four-thirty, she had to get home.

He sat back in the seat after he had switched on the ignition. He let his head drop forward and looked at her out of the corner of one eye. “You know, sometimes I wonder, why couldn't we just have met in the future, when you were, like, eighteen?”

She smiled at him, then, though the idea made her heart constrict. He would rather not be with her now? When all she wanted in the world was to be with him? Still, such thoughts did not change her plans, and soon after, when they came in view of the Poddigbattes Camp sign, to make certain that he had the impression she needed to be careful—
someone at home could be watching
—she asked that he let her out at the rise before the Nearys' farm, and she made her way on foot to the empty house from there.

I
N THE MORNING, WHEN SHE AWOKE, THE HOUSE STOOD COMPLETELY
silent, as if her parents had not returned at all. A squirrel or a chipmunk chattered in the trees—she could not tell which. Somewhere, a motor droned. Barefoot, frightened by the possibility that she had spent the night all alone, she stepped warily into the hall. Filled with morning sunshine, even Martie's room seemed more vacant than it had the night before.

She hesitated before she looked into her parents' bedroom. From the door, she knew, you could see the end of the mattress.

There were her father's big feet, pink, hanging over the end of the bed, but she found this less reassuring than she had imagined.

Impossible that her parents would not know where she had gone and what she had done the day before. Still, they slept on while she made coffee and read the Sunday paper and ate a bowl of cereal. On and on.

For company, she took Snoopy out of his cage. He seemed tired, irritated. She set him on her shoulder while she added food to his dish though he hardly seemed to have eaten anything from the day before.

“You okay, buddy?” she whispered. “You okay, little pal?”

It was almost eleven when her parents began to move back and forth between their bedroom and the bathroom. As she could not bear the suspense a minute longer, she started up the stairs, calling ahead of herself, “Hi, you guys. How was your trip?”

Through yawns, they said good, Roz got off fine, they'd had a nice visit with the Malcolms in Iowa City.

And that was that.

Back in her own room, she lay down on the bottom bunk. She pulled a chunk of covers over her feet and took out the notebook marked “Franny Wahl's Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson.” She wished she could write something about her afternoon in the bedroom at Richie's Craft house, but she hardly knew how she felt about it. Because she loved Ryan Marvell, the afternoon had had great weight, emotional density, yet hadn't it lacked the erotic luster of those childhood games of slaves and king in which everything was imagination, untrammeled by the awkward reality of disrobing, touching actual body parts?

“So maybe the Dickinson poem was wrong? Paste is sometimes more than pearl?” she wrote. Then closed the notebook and her eyes.

When she woke up, she felt disoriented. It seemed to be late afternoon, and there were voices downstairs—in the living room, she guessed, which meant company.

She paused at the top of the stairs to listen:

Her father's partner, Walter Trelore. She could not remember Mr. Trelore's being a guest in their house for some time, but she recognized his pleasant, rumbling voice as he said, “We can't afford to get a reputation for this sort of thing when we have bills to collect ourselves. And, you know, Harold, if you make enemies where you owe money—especially if you're drinking too much—they're more likely to talk.”

“Oh, Christ, Walter”—

Franny could tell her father barely contained his anger.

“—we're talking peanuts, here! These people know they'll get their money in the end, but, at the moment, I'm putting two girls through college. And, I might add, a number of the good citizens of our town owe me dough!”

Franny could hear her mother and another woman—presumably Mrs. Trelore—exchange quiet, regretful remarks.
It's a shame we don't see each other more often.
That sort of thing. Then the sighs and squeaks of people standing up from chairs and sofas sounded, and shoes scuffed on the floor.

“Well,” said Walter Trelore, “your father was my best friend, Harold, and he's not here now, and I feel—” He paused. “Even if you'd take care of just that one bill at the country club—apparently you ruffled some feathers there—I think that'd do a lot of good.”

If her father made a response to this bit of advice, Franny did not hear it. The next sounds were goodbyes. A car starting. And, then, there was arguing, in the kitchen.

Peg wanted to know why Brick had not paid off the bill at the country club with the check his mother had given him. Brick answered that he had used that money to pay off the bill for the enameling kiln he had given Peg.

“That kiln didn't cost anywhere near nine hundred dollars!” Peg protested. “And I wouldn't have wanted it at all if I'd known we had bills to pay!”

“We always have bills, dear.” Brick's voice was dull and slightly sarcastic, as if he spoke to an ignorant child for whom he cared little. “I figured the kiln would save us money since you were running up such big gas bills going back and forth to the Hobby Shack.”

“Ha!” said Peg. “If you hadn't insisted on moving out here, I could still
walk
to the Hobby Shack!”

Franny waited to see if Peg would also say something about the fact that Brick had given Mr. Trelore the impression that he was paying for the big girls to go to college; but, abruptly, the argument stopped. Footsteps sounded on the stairs to the landing, and Franny bolted down the hall to her room. Maybe they were coming to see her, now. Her heart beat hard both from her rabbitlike bolt, her fear. Maybe while she slept, the Trelores had told her parents something about yesterday. Someone had seen Franny with Ryan Marvell and told the Trelores.

But her parents did not come down the hall. They went into their own bedroom and closed the door, and she never heard anything about Mr. Trelore's visit again.

That fall, the weather remained unseasonably warm. On Wednesday afternoons, Franny usually skipped Y-Teens, and Ryan Marvell
picked her up at the public library and they drove around Pynch Lake with the windows down. If WLS came in on the radio, there were bouncy advertisements for Imprevu Perfume and H.I.S. jeans and events in Chicago, and Franny felt their romance gained a certain sophistication from contact with that world without their needing to participate in it. They climbed out of the Ford at Woolf Beach and took walks through the now empty campsites. They drove down odd roads and sat in the deep grass by bits of creeks that neither one of them had ever seen before. Thursdays were always activity days for Franny, with cheerleading practice or football games after school, but Fridays she got off the bus at Karlins' and Ryan Marvell called her at the grocery's pay telephone and they established their weekend plans.

They had few choices, of course. Once, he talked about sneaking her into the dorm room of an SFF friend—just to watch TV, he said, wouldn't it be fun just to watch TV together?—but, to her relief, he abandoned that idea. They could never have gone to a football game together. Not a football game, a restaurant, not even to his father's own Lake Theater—

“And I could get us both in free!” he teased. “I can't even impress you by waltzing you through the door without a ticket!”

Usually, when they saw each other at night, they spent some time parked in the country or at Woolf Beach. Afterward, they stopped at a hamburger stand if he were hungry. She never felt hungry in his company. She could not imagine eating in front of him.

She was embarrassed the time they went to his father's
drive-in
movie theater. Everyone knew what people did at drive-in movies—and to make matters worse, she had to be back at Mr. Pizza by ten, and the movie he wanted to see had not even started by then.

He joked about it, later: “Now all I need is a girlfriend who can't go out
before
ten o'clock at night.”

They were at Woolf Beach, at the time. The Ford sat under the trees where they could look out over the sand at the choppy water, the darkening sky. Other cars parked alongside them, most containing couples, a few empty while their owners huddled close to
picnic fires along the shore. Ryan Marvell had beer in a cooler in the backseat, and while he fetched himself a can, and opened it, he told Franny how, the night before, he and a friend from SFF had made a trip to Des Moines to fetch several cases of liquor purchased by the friend's parents.

“These are cool people. They know we can make good money selling the stuff on campus, so they're glad to help.”

Franny smiled and nodded, but she did not want to admire these strangers in Des Moines. She wanted to admire only Ryan Marvell, and for him to admire only her. That would keep things simpler, wouldn't it? She leaned back against the passenger side door and tucked her stockinged feet under his hip. He was so handsome. So happy. But where did he get that happiness? He never told her anything about himself, really. Nothing about what he felt except that he loved her.

Later that night, in view of everything else that happened, she supposed it was not so awful that while they had sat at Woolf State, one of his SFF friends came up to the brown and white Ford and threw open the door she leaned against.

“Whoa!” the friend said as she toppled backward. Franny had looked up with a gasp at a large young man who now helped her regain her seat in the car.

“Nice going, Monk,” Ryan Marvell said. “You okay, Franny?”

“She's okay,” said Ryan's friend, and lowered himself onto his big haunches outside the open car door. “Sorry, Franny. Hey, I'm Monk, one of Ryan's buddies.”

Ryan Marvell tilted his head back on the seat and made a noise of dismay—a soft nickering—that caused his friend to laugh:

“I can tell you're overjoyed to see me, Marvell. So this is the jailbait, huh?” Monk gave Ryan Marvell the thumbs-up sign, then tapped Franny's shoulder. “You don't have any sisters at home, do you?”

“Listen, Monk”—Ryan started up the Ford—“we were just getting ready to take off. Catch you later, okay, buddy?”

“Jailbait?” Franny said as he backed the Ford from its spot under the trees.

“I didn't call you that.” He tossed his now empty beer can over the seat, and it hit the floor with a soft
ping.
“Of course, I could go to jail because of you.”

She kept her face straight forward, watching the way the headlights swing across the beach and the tree trunks and—as Ryan Marvell shifted into drive—that sere stretch of grass leading back toward the main road. “But who's going to press charges against you?” she asked.

“Your parents. The law. Actually, just about anybody could if we got caught together.”

They drove toward town in silence. She felt as if she would like to bite him, hard, on the arm or leg, hit him with something, a stick, a bat, again and again. But when she looked his way, he appeared calm. Smoking a cigarette, fiddling with the radio.

When they finally reached the business district, he turned off Lakeside Drive and drove up Clay. Her father's office sat on the right. She supposed he must drive by her father's office often, as he went about his day. Did he think of her when he drove by and saw the name that was her name?

She suspected he did not, while—with no provocation at all—she was forever thinking of him.

He turned the Ford onto Main. Scooping the loop. He had never before scooped the loop with her in the car. She might have teased him about it if things had not been tense between them just then.

They passed Tony's Shoe Repair and Ralph's Bicycle Shop. The Card and Party Place. These were shops she went into in her regular life. The man in the shoe repair shop was not Tony, but a gnomish Negro named Elliot, and Elliot's shop fit like a tiny cave into the front of an old red sandstone apartment building. The Elgin. Supposedly, The Elgin had been impressive once upon a time. Supposedly . . .

She glanced over at Ryan Marvell. He was driving slower and
slower. When they came up to a red light, he stopped, and lay his cheek against the steering wheel. He looked across the space between them with eyes that seemed sad, worn. “I've been thinking,” he said, “what if I put on a jacket and a tie and tried meeting your folks again? You know, played the gentleman? The whole bit?”

Oh. She found the offer breathtakingly dear. And terrifying. Once again, her father grabbed her by the hair and threw her into the wall, and once again, the pain did no good, the pain bought her nothing, and she did not know what to say to Ryan Marvell, she could only slide across the car seat and, knees folded beneath herself, lay her arm over his shoulder. “I think I like you best when you've been drinking.” That was what she said. “You're sweetest when you've been drinking.”

“I'm serious. And, when you're sixteen, we could get married. You ever think of that? You and me getting a little cottage?”

A cottage. She stared at the dashboard clock. Its glow-in-the-dark hands read eight-fourteen. The word “cottage” was as sweet and promising as Ryan Marvell's chewed-down nails. Ryan Marvell had said he wanted to marry her. At eight-fourteen. On October ninth. 1965. She wanted to box up the moment, save it—please, let him save it, too, because how could she possibly use it now when she was thirteen and still had to finish high school and, then, college?

Behind them, a car began to honk. Ryan Marvell pulled into the intersection. Sounding both downcast and confused, he said, “You know you're driving me nuts, right? You send me messages or something, right? Like, by thinking about me when we're not together?”

Though she let the corners of her mouth turn up in a smile, Franny felt uneasy. Suppose she had tricked Ryan Marvell into love by her persistent song? He would be like those lovers in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
whose love was only the result of a potion, and not based on something real that occurred between the two.

“Is your clock right?” Her voice came out nervous, wrong. She pointed to the chamber of commerce light board. “Your clock says eight-fifteen and theirs—”

“What's this about?” He turned toward her sharply, then looked away. “You want me to drop you at Mr. Pizza right now? I can take you there right now, if that's what you want.”