Rowing in Eden (30 page)

“That's not what I want. I just wondered—” She lay her hand on his arm, and he lowered the arm, moving away from her touch.

“You're sure?” he said—so casually, so casually. “'Cause I can take you now, if that's what you want.”

“I want to be with you. You know I want to be with you.”

“I don't know what you want. Just—don't sound sad, okay?”

He drove the car out into the country then. By the light of the moon, he removed her clothes. She made her best effort to pour her love into him, to fill him up. He breathed furiously above her. Drove his penis against the crotch of her underwear and kissed her breasts in a way that she felt certain would leave a mark. Still, she did not cry out—No!—until he made a thrust that moved the penis beneath the edge of her underwear and flesh touched flesh.

No!

He sat up. His bare shoulder was as round and gray as marble in the moonlight and she kissed him there and whispered, “I'm sorry, but you know I can't do that.”

“Yeah.” He yanked on his pants, his T-shirt. Started up the car.

“I'm not dressed,” she said, and quickly began to feel around on the floor for her things.

“Hey. Wait.” His hand ran down her bare back. “Don't get dressed. Just—grab me one of those beers, and, then, sit in my lap. Like that, in your panties. Facing me. It'll be nice. It'll be fun. Come on.”

It would not be nice or fun. She knew that even before she maneuvered herself between him and the steering wheel, but he laughed and he seemed to be happy with her again, so she did not mind so much. She focused on the night sky beyond the driver's-side window. Stars. White farmhouses gone blue. After a while, he began to drive a little faster, to pump the gas pedal in time to a song on the radio. This made the Ford lurch, which was meant to be funny, she supposed, and so she tried to laugh, but when the song ended, he drove even faster, and, now and again, the Ford skidded in those
spots where the road graders had pushed the gravel into ridges.

“Maybe you shouldn't have any more beer,” she said the next time they came to a stop.

“A little while ago you said you liked me better when I was drinking.” He nuzzled her bare shoulder. “And remember the night we met?
You
were a little drunk that night.”

She sat back against the steering wheel, crossing her forearms over her breasts. “I wasn't drunk. I had maybe two sips of your beer.”

He sucked in his cheeks. “Well, you sure didn't fight me off.”

So he wanted to believed that she had been drunk? That her being drunk would explain her lying down with him on the bank?

When he began to drive again, the sound of asphalt beneath the tires—the absence of the crisp snap of the gravel—let her know that the car now travelled a main road once more. They headed toward Lakeside, she realized, as a sign for Woolf Beach appeared. A car coming from the opposite direction drove past, its headlights on her skin a scald.

“You've got to stop, Ryan. Let me get dressed.”

“But I like you like this.”

The Ford whirled along the curve that straightened as they passed Woolf Beach and, then, the miniature golf course. “Eighty,” he murmured, “eighty-five,” just the way he murmured his love to her at other times. “Ninety.” The car rattled. It slipped onto the shoulder, and rocked, and she cried out.

“That was close!” he said. He sounded cheerful.

“Do you want to get us killed? Just—stop!”

He downshifted, then. Braked. The car scraped up to the gas pumps in front of Karlins' Grocery.

“Ryan!” She scrambled off of him in a mad attempt to cover herself while he—in stockinged feet, pants, and T-shirt—jumped from the car.

“Here!” With a laugh, he turned and threw his hunting jacket her way, then called out a greeting to the sleepy-looking Karlin boy who emerged from the store, shrugging into a sweater. “Put in two dollars of regular, man. I'm going inside for smokes.”

The Karlin boy laughed. “Hey, Marvell, you lost your shoes!”

He stuck his head into the open driver's-side door just as Franny covered her back with the hunting jacket and began to work her hands—as awkward as flippers—into the armholes.

“So how you doing tonight? Franny, right?”

“Good. Fine.” Bent forward beneath the tent of the jacket, she pretended to scout for something on the floor.

“Getting cold,” the clerk said, and stomped his feet while the gas ran into the tank and then, as Ryan Marvell came merrily hopping and shivering across the lot, “Ryan's a cool guy, isn't he? Hey, Ryan, how's SFF, man?”

“Oh, hell, I'm flunking out! Gotta go, man!”

While Ryan Marvell turned the car around in the lot and headed back toward town, Franny hurried into the rest of her clothes. He behaved as if he were alone in the car now. He sang along with a song on the radio—he had never done that before—and to remind him of her presence, she finally got up the nerve to ask, “So, are you really flunking out?”

“Oh, yeah.” He steered the car with his elbows as he worked a cigarette from the fresh pack. “Going to have to start hitting the books or I'll get drafted. Hell, I might even enlist!” He grinned her way. “What would you think of that? Me as your soldier boy?”

Her breath collapsed in upon itself. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched his cigarette catch on the bright filaments of the Ford's automatic lighter. Her soldier boy? The prospect terrified and exhilarated her. It was not impossible that he would die if he became a soldier, and maybe death was the answer. If he died, she could love him forever, but not have to see him anymore.

M
ID
-O
CTOBER.

Across the road from the house, the swamp and the meadow sat empty and brown. A faint, scintillating reddish brown.
Sedge.
Franny climbed down from the school bus and stood beneath the old camp sign, looking out. As if at the sea. But it did not have to be the sea. Enough that it was what it was—with the school bus making a brilliant patch of yellow against the gray day and groaning around the next curve, hauling its load of farm kids farther out into the country.

“Sedge” was a word Franny wanted to use in a poem, but she did not have any other words quite like it. “Sedge” was not a verb, but it put most of her verbs to shame.

She smiled a little. She prized this day, and the word “sedge,” and the lowering sky, the mist that hung over the meadow and swamp and made the bark on the Nearys' apple tree perfectly black.

“Tamp”? A soft, almost moist word, but firm, too. “Tamp.” A brown sugar sort of word with twin connotations of compression and filling up one thing with another.

Head bowed against the wind, she started for the mailbox. Charlotte Brontë crossing the moors, that was who she wanted to be then. With a fringed wool shawl to pull up over her head. Some slip of a fay creature instead of Franny Wahl, with big breasts and big nose and bright green
R
on the front of her cheerleading sweater, green and white pompons in a dry cleaner's bag.

Gimme an
R! R!
Gimme an
O! O!

At that time of year, the mailbox always contained a few uncollected letters for summer people who would not be back until May. The Wahls had been directed by the mailman to toss the summer people's letters toward the back of the box so that he might, periodically, reroute them to winter addresses. Today, however, all of the new mail in the box was for the Wahls.

Dear comrades
—so began the fat letter from Martie that Franny read on her way to the house.

The letter ran on for several more pages. It was, Franny thought, as thick as the letter the ROTC boy had sent to Brick and Peg when he decided to break up with Martie.

Idiot stuff
, that was what Brick would say in response to the letter.
If she doesn't change her tune fast, I'll pull her out of that zoo so fast her head will spin.

When she opened the front door, Franny could hear the sounds of both the TV set and her mother's telephone voice (always crisper, more modulated). Peg covered the receiver when Franny
entered the kitchen—“It's Roz”—and Franny waved Martie's letter at Peg and said, “Here. From Martie! Let me talk!”

Peg took the letter, but stayed on the line, and Franny sat down to wait. Drew her legs up under her skirt. Started to remove her jacket, then changed her mind. The weekend before, she and Peg had installed curtain rods over several doorways, and Franny could see that Peg had spent the afternoon in front of the TV, sewing curtain hooks to old blankets. Peg's plan: to hang the blankets on the curtain rods and trap in the kitchen and den whatever heat the poor old furnace could supply.

On the TV, a news program showed footage of trash-filled American rivers, and rivers with freakish, bubbling brine at their edges. Then there were soldiers. One of them, anonymous beneath his helmet, darted out from behind a tank with arm raised in a signal that made him look like something right out of a movie, and Franny wiggled her fingers at Peg, and said, again, “Let me talk.” She wanted to let Rosamund know about the newspaper article on Darren Rutiger. Darren Rutiger had been injured in a truck accident at his training camp, and though the newspaper article had not provided details, Ginny Weston had heard that Darren lost a leg.

“Mom,” Franny protested as Peg set the receiver into its cradle, “I wanted to talk to her, too!”

Immediately, the telephone began to ring and, as Peg answered, Franny said, “If that's Roz again, let me say hi.”

Peg grinned. “It's that McCartney boy from John Adams,” she mouthed, as if today she and Franny existed in some cozy world in which Mom and Daughter await Daughter's call from Mr. Right.

What was that all about?

While Franny spoke to the boy—a nice boy from the other junior high; too bad she could not like him—she watched Peg read Martie's letter, shake her head.

The boy wanted to know if Franny meant to go to the high school football game that Friday. Oh, she couldn't say just yet, she told him. A lie. Why lie to him? Already, she had lied to her mother about Friday night:
The Coles are coming to their cottage for the weekend, and
they called to find out if I could baby-sit.
That had been a daring move. Suppose her parents drove by the Cole cottage on Friday night and saw the place all dark. Or suppose the Coles really did drive up from Des Moines for the weekend. Franny had picked the Coles because they kept their cottage open all year, but suppose the Coles ran into Brick and Peg at Karlins' Grocery or the gas station.

Or, suppose, she thought when Friday night arrived—suppose the Coles were to drive up just now, and their headlights swept over Franny as she sat on their front stoop, quaking with the cold, waiting for Ryan Marvell to arrive.

“The Coles will drive me home,” she had told Peg, “and I said I'd just walk down.”

Most of the cottages stood closed for the season. The dark walk down Lakeside had taken Franny by surprise. And she should have worn a heavier jacket, gloves. The noise of her footsteps on the road's shoulders sounded louder than in summer, almost as if it would drown out any warning she might need to hear.

The Cole property was a funny little pink and white place with a ragged picket fence, maybe just the sort of cottage Ryan Marvell had thought of sharing with her.

There was little traffic that night. Each time a car approached, she could not help smiling a wild smile that she covered with her hand. After a while, though, her cheeks hurt from the smiles, and the cold, too. A more sure sign, she decided, would be a slow-moving car, and then a car did go by slowly, and the sound of its engine pressed against her heart as the car continued up the road.

She rubbed at her legs, bare between knee socks and wool Bermudas. She should have worn a watch. She could not recall Ryan Marvell ever wearing a watch but the Ford had its dashboard clock with the turquoise glow-in-the-dark lines and the red second hand that moved with a click when you were very quiet.

Maybe something had happened. She felt sure, however, that she would know if something had happened. An accident. A flat tire. Somewhere—from Martie?—she had heard that human
beings had an excellent sense of time. They were generally able to guess the correct time within fifteen minutes, either way.

If that were so, he was a good hour late.

Unless she had misunderstood. Unless he had meant tomorrow night, or maybe eight o'clock. No. He had said tonight. Seven.

A group of oak trees stood across the road from the Coles' cottage and now that her eyes were adjusted to the dark—she could see practically everything now, even the tiny rocks in the concrete stoop beneath her—now she could see the way a yard light down the road cast a yellow fog on one side of each oak tree's trunk.

The spring before, in late May, Susan Thomas and her mother had driven up to Pynch Lake one day to gather mushrooms, and they had invited Franny along. A rainy Saturday, and they all got soaked, and after finding nothing for hours in all kinds of obscure patches of woods around Pynch Lake, they had discovered a perfect patch of morels, right there, in among those oaks, and they took them to the Thomas cottage, and cooked them in butter, and ate them right from the pan.

The car that now approached was a dark sedan and, oh, it passed the picket fence, but then it turned in at the driveway of a cottage two doors down, and hadn't Ryan Marvell come for her in different cars on occasion? There had been the station wagon of his friend Warren. The Rambler belonging to Timmy Gleason's mother . . .

Breathless, she waited for a sign. The car came to a stop, the yard light down the road silhouetting the heads of numerous passengers. It seemed to Franny, however, that at least one of those heads belonged to a female with a bouffant hairdo; and, almost immediately, the sedan backed out of the drive and returned, moving much faster, in the direction from which it had come.

So. No Ryan Marvell.

Inside the Cole cottage, the telephone began to ring. She leapt at the sound. Suppose it were her mother, calling to check on Franny. Suppose her mother and father drove down to the Coles' cottage when Franny did not answer.

Would they do that?

Just in case, she went to stand on the lakefront side of the cottage and peer around the building toward the road. If Peg and Brick drove up, she would pretend she had just come out the lakefront door. She would say,
Hey, are you guys here to take me home?

Say that, and see what happened next.

But they did not come. No one came. She waited on the lakefront side of the cottage for what was surely another hour, then went back to the stoop. She tried to clench her ice-cold hands together the way she had that first morning after she met Ryan Marvell. Diamonds from coal. Pearls from paste. It seemed her heart could hardly move her blood.

The moment she entered the house—quiet, but from the back hall she could see lights in the den and over the kitchen sink—she went straight into the downstairs bathroom. “STAFF ONLY,” said the old stencil on the door, preserved as a joke by Peg and Brick, and there was her face in the medicine cabinet mirror. The face that Ryan Marvell no longer loved? Red from the hours outside. Its clown's nose ran and she shook with cold as she wiped away the ridiculous snot with tissue from the toilet paper roll. She let the hot water thunder into the sink until steam rose to the ceiling, and when she sank her red hands in the water, distorted, they looked like the hands of her father.

“Is that you, Franny?” Peg called from the den when Franny finally walked into the kitchen.

“Didn't you hear me come in earlier? I've been in the bathroom.”

“How'd things go?”

“Fine.” She could not stop herself from checking the kitchen clock—ten thirty-two—before she opened the refrigerator and moved jars and bowls around to generate some sort of commonplace noise. “Hey, did you try to telephone me at the Coles'?”

“No. Why?”

She pulled an apple from the refrigerator, some leathery thing that had been in there for months. For a disguise, she took a bite from
it; now she was one of the Cleaver boys home from school, and she said around the mush, “Oh, somebody called, but Mrs. Cole had told me not to answer so I didn't. I thought it might have been you.”

“No. Not me.”

“Hi, Fran.” Brick stepped into the kitchen from the den, sci-fi paperback in one hand, empty glass in the other.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Getting chilly out there, huh?” he said as he drew his bottle of scotch from its nighttime position by the toaster. She did not look while he poured. Let him pour. Just then, she felt, what the hell? They were all in this mess together, and she kissed his cheek and said “'Night” before she walked out to the den to kiss her mother, too.