Rowing in Eden (8 page)

“Were they anybody you know?”

“Oh, Bob.” She laughed. As if she were just a little weary of male attention, so used to it that she no longer gave it a second's thought; she was, in fact, almost Rosamund herself. “They were probably from out of town. We didn't exactly
chat
with them, you know.”

The boy folded his big arms across his chest, a gesture that enhanced his look of junior-hit-man/thug-in-training, which Franny sometimes found appealing; sometimes, appalling. “Anybody bugs you,” he said, “I'll kick his teeth in.”

For Susan Thomas's benefit, Franny crossed her eyes. Then did her best to conceal the fact that she glanced up the bank toward the house. Just as she suspected, there stood her mother, a watchful shimmer behind the screened front porch.
Tom Pocaski.
So Peg referred to Bob Prohaski.
John Polaski.
Always the wrong name. And always with a face, as if the name were a piece of hair she hurried to remove from her tongue. Because he looked older? Because she knew he came from battered Tanglefoot, where the dirt roads left the houses looking as if big animals came in the night to rub their backs against the siding? The one time that Franny had seen the Prohaski house, a big piece of plywood filled the picture-window frame and gave the place a forlorn and dangerous air, almost as if it was a clubhouse for criminals.

“Wait,” Franny murmured as she stepped from the boat and Bob Prohaski reached out to embrace her, “my mom's up there.”

“Oh, yeah?” The boy turned toward the house and bowed.

“Don't do that! Please. I've got enough trouble.”

“Sheesh!” On hands and knees, Susan Thomas clambered onto the dock. “Why are your parents so paranoid, Wahl?”

A word Franny had learned from Susan: paranoid. Used by Susan the time she overheard Brick and Peg berate Martie for including on her school insurance form the fact that Brick's father had died of complications from diabetes.

Did Bob Prohaski know what “paranoid” meant when he brought his broad-boned face close to Franny's own, and said, “Yeah, Franny, why are your parents so paranoid?”

“Bob”—she stared at a gash that ran through one of the boy's dark eyebrows, the blood still bright beneath a slick of salve—“what happened there?”

“Oh.” He grinned and tapped a finger against the cut, apparently to prove the thing did not hurt; then he winced at his own touch. “It's no big deal. My old man took a swing at me. He'd had too much to drink, is all.”

Susan Thomas gasped. “Your
dad
hit you?”

Bob Prohaski laughed. Tweaked Franny's chin. “You ain't going to cry about it, are you, Franny? Remember when we seen that dog—”

“I am
not
going to cry.” Franny bent to tie the painter to the dock. Still, for the boy's dad to hit him hard enough to break the skin—it did make her feel like crying. And it frightened her, too, that Bob Prohaski had told them about the blow. And that his dad had had too much to drink. There was no denying that, sometimes, her own home trembled and shook with slaps and screams and terrible threats. Once, just after they had moved from town to the old lodge, she had crawled out of her bunk and into the narrow space between the mattress and the cold wooden floor because a madman chased Martie through the house.
Whore
, the madman called Martie, and
filthy bitch
, and Franny could hear that he hit Martie with something that snapped against her skin and made her cry out, and Franny wet her pants, certain the madman already had killed Rosamund and her mother and father, and would find her next. Of
course, the madman turned out to
be
her father, and no Wahl ever mentioned the incident again. Such incidents did not happen. Or they happened in every house? Now and then, some parent hit some kid with a belt or a brush, a shoe, but—that was not who they were, not the Wahls, and Franny wished Susan Thomas would be quiet, and not embarrass Bob Prohaski by going on and on about how it wasn't right—

“Hey.” As if he did not hear Susan Thomas at all, Bob Prohaski moved in close to Franny, and began to tickle her, hard.

“Stop it!” She wriggled away from him; then—just in case she had sounded too grouchy and hurt his feelings—she drummed up a smile. “Goofy,” she murmured.

“Do your sisters have company up there?” Susan glanced toward the top of the bank. “I hate walking by their company.”

Bob Prohaski hawked and spit in the lake. “They don't bother me. I could whip any of those guys.”

“Oh,
well
.” Franny started up the stairs at a brisk pace. “Just—ignore them, both of you.”

A cluster of out-of-town guests sat on the far picnic table, another had gathered around the glider. Two boys, faces red and contorted, did pull-ups on opposing limbs of a small hackberry.

“Here come Franny and her little friends!” one of the girl guests said. Nothing too dreadful, and Franny smiled the girl's way. But, then, Susan Thomas made a mistake. She scratched at her ear and, immediately, a boy on the glider gave a high-pitched moan, “Oh, daddy!” and let his tongue loll while he twirled his fingers about in his ears—apparently to suggest that he mirrored some lust-crazed look on the girl's face.

“I have a mosquito bite!” Susan Thomas protested.

“Come on!” Franny shepherded the pair onto the screened porch where, Rosamund and Tim Gleason sat, side by side, on a wrought-iron loveseat recently cast off by Brick's mother. Had Franny and her friends disturbed an intimate moment between Tim and Rosamund? No. Rosamund was showing the boy her photo albums of university life.

Those albums. Franny knew their photographs by heart: Excitingly messy dorm rooms in which pretty girls stuck their tongues out at the camera and hoisted glasses filled with the gold of beer. Peach and blue sunset beaches where big boys stood with their arms wrapped around the bare shoulders of Rosamund. There—Franny could recognize the photo even upside down—a black-and-white Rosamund wore a banner of paper towels upon which someone had scribbled G
IRL WITH
S
MALLEST
S
HOE
. And, there, Rosamund in cameo pink stood on a stage at a formal dance. Beside her was a boy known campus-wide as a “stud”—so Rosamund had explained the first time that Franny inspected the photos—and the “stud” grasped the microphone upon which he was making a drunken announcement to the entire assembly:

He didn't want anyone to have the wrong idea about his dating Rosamund Wahl. “This,” the stud announced via the microphone, “is a girl as pure as the driven snow.”

As pure as the driven snow.

Tim Gleason gave Bob Prohaski a sardonic up and down. “Hey, Franny,” he said, “your mom's been looking for you.”

“I was in the bay the whole time,” she protested.

“Sh. I want to hear.” Rosamund turned, smiling, toward the set of French doors that stood open to the living room. Something went on, there—Peg Wahl's voice rose above a ripple of low titters and hoots:

“Now,
Ron
, dear!”

On the living room's shantung couch, just beyond Peg, Franny could see the boy guest named Ron. Prone. A plastic bag of ice cubes clutched to his forehead.

“No, Peg, please,” said the boy with a weak laugh.

“Now, Ron!” Peg rose up on her bare toes. Showed her big white smile. In her hands were two pot lids, and she lifted the lids high in the air, as if she were about to crash them together. “Is it really true, Ron, that you wanted me to come out here to practice my cymbals?”

The boy waved a feeble hand her way while the others in the living room laughed all the harder, and called, “Come on, Ron, you
know it'd do you good.” A girl at the opposite end of the shantung couch was applying polish to her toenails, and did not look up from her task, but her shoulders trembled with laughter.

“So, Franny”—Franny and Susan Thomas and Bob Prohaski turned back from Franny's mother to Rosamund—“I'm going to take Timmy skiing this afternoon. You guys want to be spotters?”

“Oh,” Franny said, but before she could ask Susan Thomas and Bob Prohaski what they thought, Peg stepped onto the porch, pot lids lowered to her sides.

“Frances Jean,” she said.

“I never went beyond the Point, Mom.”

“
And
I told you not to wear that T-shirt anymore.”

“I forgot.” A lie. But there was nothing wrong with the T-shirt. It was just a big T-shirt from the men's department of Drew's. Crew neck. Short sleeves. Red and white stripes.

“Come to the kitchen after you see your friends to the door,” Peg said.

“But they just got here!”

“Did you clear it with me? Have you done your piano?”

No.

“All right, then.”

When Franny entered the kitchen, she found Peg yanking open and slamming shut the cabinets' old wooden drawers and doors—a number of which did not want to open or close at all because of the summer's humidity. “Twenty-three sixty-seven,” Peg muttered with a glance Franny's way.

“What?”

Peg raised a finger—
shh
—and made what Franny thought of as her “devil face”: one brow cocked high, eyes open demoniacally wide, a look that would have been funny had Franny not known better. Always, in the past, there had been both the mother and father whom she loved, and who loved her back, and the monster mother and father—who maybe wanted to kill her for not doing or being what they wanted. The monsters had been almost transparent, hard
to see, a little like ghosts. Now, however, they were increasingly opaque if not yet entirely familiar, and they fitted themselves over the mother and father in such a way that, sometimes, for days on end, Franny could not make out even an edge of a loving parent.

“Twenty-three sixty-seven.” Peg began to rifle through the contents of the purse on the counter.

“Mom”—Tim Gleason in tow, Rosamund entered from the dining room—“do you know where this morning's paper is? Timmy and I want to see what's at the movies this week.”

Peg pointed to one of the ladder-back chairs at the breakfast table. “There,” she muttered, and “twenty-three sixty-seven,” and then, “oh!” She gave a derisive snort. “Guess who I saw at Hayes's, Roz? Cynthia Sandvig! With that
thing
she married!”

Rosamund laughed. “So what was ‘the thing' like?”

“A goop! He sat there the whole time we drank coffee and he had this goopy smile on his face”—Peg produced an imitation of the “goop's” buck-toothed, simpleton smile—“and he never said ‘boo' or, ‘Gee, Mrs. Wahl, I've heard such nice things about you!' or anything else for that matter.”

“‘Goop,'” said Tim Gleason. “That's a new one to me, Mrs. Wahl.”

“Twenty-three sixty-seven.” Again, Peg opened the purse on the counter. “Franny, you haven't done something with my checkbook, have you?”

“Of course not. And how am I supposed to practice piano with all those people in the living room?”

Peg waved the question aside, then turned with a smile to Tim Gleason. “You don't know the Goops, Tim? The girls
loved
the Goops. ‘The Goops they lick their fingers, the Goops they lick their knives'”—

While Rosamund and her mother recited the “Goops” poem for smiling Tim, Franny edged into the back hall. It was darker in the back hall, and even a little cooler. That flicker of noise from a few feet off meant that her hamster, Snoopy, was shifting positions as he slept away the day. She drew closer to the cage, its toasty perfume
of animal heat and cedar bedding. “Hey, Snoopy,” she whispered. She pressed a finger against the tiny metal bars of the cage, and stroked the bit of soft, soft fur that poked through. The weekend before, a party guest had put beer in the water bottle that hung on the side of Snoopy's cage, and, this afternoon, sometime, Franny meant to sneak the cage up to her bedroom for safekeeping.

“Here's one that's supposed to be good, Tim,” Rosamund said. “
The Pawnbroker.”

Tim Gleason groaned. “It's depressing, right? Why's your daughter have to go for all these gloomy movies, Mrs. Wahl?”

Peg laughed, and told Tim Gleason if he wanted to see something cute he should see
Do Not Disturb
at the Lake—Franny noted the way in which Peg paused before she pronounced “theater,” no doubt wondering if the pronunciation that sounded best to her mental ear were correct. Long
a
. The way her farming parents had said it. Franny hoped Tim Gleason did not hold such things against Peg.

On the blackboard that hung between the kitchen and the back hall, Franny drew a small asterisk. “Creamettes,” Peg had written on the board. “Peas.” Did an asterisk have a connection with asters, those flowers the flower lady brought around in autumn, tiny bundles of sky blue that went straight to your heart? Franny studied the tips of her fingers, now dusted in yellow chalk.
Whorls.
Even when she merely mouthed the word, she felt as if a marble pressed down on the middle of her tongue.

“Don't mess up my shopping list, there, Fran!”

Franny edged away from the blackboard to lean on the sill of a window so old its rusty screen gave the countryside below a sepia tone that made the view appear antique—until a shiny white convertible came over the rise past the Nearys' barn: Peg's Wildcat, top down, Martie behind the wheel.

“You don't suppose one of your friends picked up my checkbook, do you, Fran?”

“Mother,”
Rosamund chided while Franny turned from the window to ask, “You mean, stole it? My friends wouldn't steal your checkbook!”

In the driveway, Martie gave the horn the toot that she and her high school friends had shared: a set of three longs, followed by two sets of two shorts. Then the front door of the house opened, and Martie leapt into the kitchen, one sandalled foot and tanned calf preceding the rest of her. “We're ho-me!” Martie sang, and did a spin that twirled the ends of the bandanna print blouse tied up in rabbit ears above her belly.