Rowing in Eden (9 page)

Tim and Rosamund did not look up from the movie ads they studied, but Franny said hello to Martie and the girl behind her, a high school pal named Deedee Pierce. Peg waved at the girls. “Twenty-three sixty-seven,” she repeated, then, again, turned to dig about in the purse on the counter.

“Uh, Roz? Tim?” Martie cocked her head to one side. “Hellooooo, you guys!”

Deedee Pierce—a large girl given to leaning against walls and talking out of the side of her mouth like a cowpoke—Deedee Pierce said with a drawl, “They're probably hiding their happiness at seeing you, Martie. They're probably the bashful type.”

Rosamund gave Deedee Pierce a glance that Franny thought was too cool. Rosamund could not abide Deedee (“She's a vulgar cow! Of course she can't get a date!”) but, really, Deedee sometimes could be nice, and funny, too—

“Well!” Sandals snapping, Martie did a bit of a tap dance across the kitchen floor. Swung her arms this way and that. Stopped with a flourish, hands high. “Bashful or not, here we are!
And
we picked up a birthday cake for Roz!”

Franny sneaked a peek at Rosamund, who had made it clear that, this year, she had decided to stop celebrating her birthdays, and would appreciate it if everyone else would comply.

“Rozzie?” Martie cupped a hand to her ear. “Do I hear a thankyou?”

Rosamund stood up from the kitchen table and raised her hands before her face, palms outward, suggesting Martie was a gale that blew twigs and trash into Rosamund's eyes and nose. “Thank you, Martie,” she said—her voice now slightly choked by all that
debris—“but I think I made it clear a birthday celebration wasn't necessary this year.”

The crestfallen Martie asked, “So you don't
want
a cake?”

“You may have your cake, Martie.” Rosamund smoothed her hands across the pages of the
Gazette.
“Let's just not make a big deal of it, okay?”

“Will you look at this?” Peg lifted the missing checkbook from her purse. Gave Franny a look that suggested she believed the girl had just planted it there.

“So.” Martie leaned her forehead into Deedee Pierce's broad upper arm. “I don't suppose anybody bothered to take messages for me while I was gone?”

“That Ed from Lake Okoboji called,” Peg said. “He'll call back. And, oh, Roz, I forgot: Mike Zanios called while you and Tim walked down to the mailbox. He wanted to know if you'd like to hear some visiting piano player on Monday night.”

“Jeez”—Martie grinned and set her hands on her hips, some imitation of comic exasperation—“why's Mike never asked any of the
rest
of us to come listen?” Then, without waiting for an answer, she hurried on, “By the way, Frances Jean, I saw that Prohaski out on the road, hitchhiking. Was he here again?”

Tim Gleason began to whistle the refrain from an old Sonny James song called “Young Love.” Rosamund slapped his wrist—playfully—and Deedee Pierce laughed. “You don't know the half of it, Tim,” Deedee said, and launched into a story of how, as a small girl, Franny had sat in front of the Ash Street house and pretended to baby-sit an even smaller girl. “She was trying to make the big guys driving by in their cars fall in love with her, weren't you, Fran?”

Franny rolled her eyes, though the story was true. She felt thankful that she could change the subject by announcing, “Someone's coming up the drive.”

“Eduardo?” Martie said with a smile for Deedee Pierce. Deedee smiled back, but when Martie ran for the front hall, it was all that Franny could do to keep from calling, “
Martie
, beware!
Remember Roger! Remember Steve and Mark and Daryl!”

“Eduardo?”
Tim Gleason raised an eyebrow as he pronounced the name. He lifted one of Peg's copper aspic molds—a leaping fish—off its peg on the kitchen wall, and cradled it in his arms. “Eduardo?” he crooned to the fish.

Rosamund sputtered a laugh at this, but Deedee Pierce growled a low, “Shut up, you two.”

“Now, now,” said Peg, but she grinned at Tim Gleason and Rosamund, and what did that mean? Franny felt right in
not
laughing—really, she did not see what was funny about Tim and the fish, and she appreciated Deedee Pierce's defending Martie—yet
not
laughing made Franny feel somewhat superior, and surely that contaminated whatever was right about not laughing.

“Here's Eduardo, everybody!” Martie called as she pulled into the kitchen a handsome, fair-haired boy who grinned rather shyly, perhaps because his nose was painted with a slick, white coat of zinc oxide.

“Eduardo!” Peg cried, and Rosamund, too, “Hey, Eduardo!”

Eduardo! Eduardo! As if they'd been missing him! Eduardo was no object of ridicule! Eduardo was their pal! Embarrassed, confused, Franny edged into the back hall. Who was this Eduardo from Lake Okoboji, and would they all hate him tomorrow, and did they even like him today?

Farther down the hall, Franny peered in at the hamster. Still asleep. “Snoopy,” she whispered. She wished he were awake. But this was not his time to be awake. She listened to the laughing and talking of the others in the kitchen; then, as quietly as possible, she picked up the cage and made her way out through the garage and around the house to the screened porch. There were guests out there, but they ignored her and, after a little grappling with the door, she managed to carry the cage back into the house, and up the stairs to her bedroom, and there she set it on the floor of her closet for concealment and safekeeping.

A
NOTHER WEEKEND
. A
NOTHER PARTY ABOUT TO BEGIN
. T
HE
song Franny's father played for the young guests who stood in a circle around his baby grand: “Satin Doll.” “Satin Doll” was one of Franny's favorites of the songs Brick played, and she sat on the stairs and she listened through the banisters.

Apparently, none of that evening's guests knew the lyrics to the song, but each time that Brick reached the refrain, the group blurted a raucous “My Satin Doll!” and howled with laughter. Which would have irritated Brick under certain circumstances, Franny knew—she had learned, long ago, that Brick did not like people to sing along with him—but this evening he smiled. At the engaged girl. At Al Castor, who was using a barefoot toe to slide back and forth on the floor the shot glass that Brick had brought out with his bottle of scotch. A strawberry blonde stood by the piano, too (swaying, eyes closed, slender arms hugged to her sides). That morning, in the kitchen, the strawberry blonde had declared, “Man, it's hard to get Brick off the ivories once he gets started,” after which a second guest cut her eyes in the direction of Franny, just then putting bread into the toaster. “I mean,” the blonde continued in a rush, “because he loves to play so much! He's so good!” At the time, Franny had felt too hurt on her father's behalf, and too embarrassed, yes, to speak up in his defense, and so pretended to have heard neither the insult nor its retraction.

But look at Brick, now, tossing his big head back and holding it there, mouth open wide while his long, chubby fingers leapt so nimbly across the keys. And look at the smiling guests. They did like to
hear him play. At least, sometimes. But, sometimes, it was true, he did play beyond his welcome, or when he was in no shape to play more than two or three measures in a row without an error—

“What's going on down there?” Peg stepped out of her bedroom and into the upstairs hall, then hiked up her skirt and began to pull her blouse straight beneath the skirt's waistband.

How did she dare do that? What if someone saw? Franny did not mean to see—pretended not to see—those little pillows of flesh that pooched out between the tops of Peg's nylons and the binding rubber of her girdle. “Better hurry, Mom,” she said, but, by then, Peg had lowered the skirt, and stood pouting at her backside from over one shoulder.

“Martie told me my stomach sticks out, Mom,” Franny said.

“Oh, you girls are ridiculous.”

“But do you think I should do sit-ups or something?”

“
I
think I should have had sons! Now, remember, if anybody comes upstairs after your dad and I leave, you tell them they are not allowed up here. And
you
—are not allowed down there.”

“That's right!”

Both Peg and Franny started at the voice from the landing below: Martie, peering through a plume of cigarette smoke shot baby blue by the rays of the falling sun that now reached deep into the house. Pretty rose-pink shorts. Matching tank top. Curtain of marmalade hair concealing one eye; a corny provocation in Franny's book, but apparently not in the mind of “Eduardo,” who meant to drive all the way from Lake Okoboji for that evening's party.

“And no
bugging
the guests, either,” Martie said.

“Bugging the guests? I'm glad to be
away
from your guests.”

“Mother—”

“Hush, both of you,” Peg said.

With a wave of her arm, Martie heralded Peg's descent to the group below. “And
heeeere
she comes, folks!”

Brick just had begun his intro to “I've Got a Crush on You” but he abandoned it now in order to take up the “Miss America” theme.

“'Scuse me!” Rosamund rushed past Franny and down the stairs, and, a few minutes later, along with the other guests, she called “Bye-bye” to Peg and Brick, and “Have a good time” and “You kids be in by one!” As if Brick and Peg headed to a party as lively as their own, and not to dinner at the Top Hat Club.

From Peg and Brick's own bedroom window, Franny watched her parents go. In the dusky light, convertible top lowered, the white Wildcat and its white leather interior made a kind of gorgeous cloud in which Peg and Brick floated down the long driveway toward Lakeside, and, for a moment, it was almost possible to believe that the world continued to belong to them. They were Peg and Brick, and she was pretty and fun, and he was big and popular, and their living in Pynch Lake was just a temporary affair, soon they'd be on to bigger and better things.

There was no denying, however, that at the end of the long driveway another car sat, idling. That second car was also a white convertible, but full of young partygoers who politely waited for the parental car to clear the drive before making their own approach.

Honk, honk, honk!
Hey, how you doing?

The passengers of both cars waved and called to one another, and beeped their horns as the Wildcat pulled onto Lakeside Drive. So pretty, the taillights of the Wildcat advancing up Lakeside. Twin rubies. Still, Franny felt queer as the lights disappeared at the crest above the Nearys' farm. Disassembled. As if someone could pass a hand between her torso and her limbs or push her head right off to either side of her neck. For a moment, she wished she were accompanying Christy Strawberry and Joan Harvett to City Park's bandshell—but, no, she could not have borne the company of the noisy juvenile delinquents her friends had set their hearts upon.

Also, the last time Joan Harvett had stayed at the house, Franny's mother had sworn to Franny that she had heard the girl talking about Franny on the telephone. “You'd gone into the bathroom,” Peg said with what seemed to Franny grim satisfaction, “and I surprised her!” Franny was not sure she wanted to know what Peg
had heard, but Peg had continued, “Mostly, it was ha-ha-ha stuff, but she acted plenty nervous when I walked in.”

“Here you go, dog!” In the yard below her parents' window, one of the male guests threw a ball or something out into the yard for Al Castor's Great Dane, Mr. Ed. In the dusk, Franny could not make out the face that belonged to the voice—it was a dark cloud, a stone, but the boy's bleached T-shirt glowed like coals gone to white ash, a thing so simple yet so beautiful it took Franny's breath away, and when the extension on her mother's bedside table began to ring, she jumped.

“It's me.” Bob Prohaski. But Martie was on the kitchen telephone, and Martie said, “You can't talk now, Frances! Eduardo may be calling me! He may have had car trouble!”

“Well, give me at least a minute, Martie.”

“
One
minute. And that's it!”

“So, you're staying upstairs, right?” Bob Prohaski said after the kitchen's receiver clicked in its cradle.

Franny lay back on the bed, and explained how Peg had assigned her both to stay upstairs and to keep the guests downstairs. “It's like being a vestal virgin,” she said, then gave an awkward laugh because maybe she should not have said “virgin” in front of a boy—the word was so loaded—and, indeed, Bob Prohaski responded with a gruff, “You better be a virgin—”

“
Jesus Christ
, Frances!”

Franny winced and raised her head from her mother's pillow as Martie zoomed into the room and around the bed.

“Have a little consideration!” Martie grabbed the receiver from Franny's hand, and barked into the mouthpiece—“She can't talk now!”—and hung up the telephone.

“Damn it, Martie!”

Imaginary skirt held out to the sides, Martie dropped a curtsy. “Watch your mouth, dear!” she said, then bounded out the door and down the stairs.

Under the circumstances, Franny supposed it would not be so
dreadful to call Bob Prohaski back in order to say, “Sorry about my sister.” But she had never called a boy on the telephone and, just now, did not care so much about the lost call as Martie's meanness.

“Stay there, Dick!” Another voice from the yard below. This time a girl. When Franny stepped to the window, she could see a boy in the driveway. Dick, she supposed. And the girl must be the glimmer now hurrying toward the ghostly slab of concrete that had once formed the foundation for the church of the Baptist campers.

The rough noise of vomiting reached Franny, then, and she felt a little queasy, and she worried for the girl, too, but, almost immediately, the girl (white shirt, white pants) came back through the tall grasses around the slab and toward the lawn.

The boyfriend rubbed the girl's neck as they passed beneath the lavender light from the lamp above the drive. Neither of them seemed to notice the old car lumbering up the drive. No—now the car stopped. Began to back
down
the drive, apparently having determined it was at the wrong address, or that other guests already had filled every possible patch of drive or lawn closer to the house.

Let the car belong to Eduardo. Though she was angry with Martie, Franny thought, Let it be him, and let him tell Martie he loves her and make him really mean it, and then Martie can do the same, and be safe, comforted, quieted.

She pressed her nose to the window screen while the driver backed into a spot near the road. The first door of the car to open was the passenger-side door. A slender boy climbed out and plucked at his pants legs, stomped his feet. Dark pants, light short-sleeved shirt. It was not until he stepped from the shadows of the trees that lined the drive that Franny recognized him as Artie Stokes, who, along with handsome Darren Rutiger, had been one of Rosamund's “buddies” in high school.

How vulnerable former bad-boy Artie Stokes looked now! As if he were on his humble way to some humble church to seek absolution for past sins—cherry bombs in the rest room toilets, drag racing—that no one cared about anymore. Poor Artie. Even his blond hoodlum's pompadour now signalled obsolescence.

Franny had heard that Artie Stokes had tried to enlist in the army but been found to be too skinny. At any rate, whatever he had done in the two years since he and Rosamund finished school, it had not made him appear as confident as the boys in madras button-downs who strutted and yowled at the party below.

“Oh, Artie,” Franny whispered. She would not have been surprised to find out the boy had a tie stashed in the glove compartment. Just in case. And Darren Rutiger, now emerging from the driver's side of the car—despite the fact that Darren Rutiger had a good fifty pounds on Artie, Darren looked pretty defenseless, too. But maybe Franny imagined that. They were having fun, weren't they? Exchanging a flicker of fake punches as they made their way up the drive and into the yard light?

She opened her mouth to call down a greeting, then balked. It had been almost a year since she had last seen the pair, and that had been at Karlins' Grocery, when Peg stopped to pick up a gallon of milk. “Is this necessary?” Peg murmured when Franny gave the boys a hug. Franny had blushed, but the answer was
yes
. Artie and Darren had been kind to Franny. In the old days, they had not objected to her coming along when they took Roz for a drive. When Peg and Brick were out of town and the big girls had parties, Darren and Artie had given Franny cigarettes and sips of beer, and Artie used to sing “Nature Boy” for Franny, and then listened, without laughing, when she sang, “Where Is Your Heart?”

Of course, she understood that the boys' kindness was largely the product of the fact that both were half in love with Rosamund. Still, they were kind, and, once, when Darren Rutiger felt dejected, and talked to Rosamund about a quarrel with his dad, he had held Franny in his lap, and stroked the back of her head for a good fifteen minutes.

Impossible not to smile at the way that Artie Stokes now leaned his raised forearm against the front door as he waited for someone to answer the bell. So familiar, that posture! It suggested a casual, rakish attitude toward life, yes? That hot-rod, James Dean attitude so popular with boys in the fifties?

But how long could you keep your arm up like that—sustain
that attitude—if no one came to see who waited at the door? To spare the boy the answer, Franny called down a croaking, “Hey, Darren! Artie!”

Both rolled their heads back on their necks. “Franny?”

“How're you guys doing?”

Darren Rutiger laughed. “Well, pretty good, but nobody's answering the door!”

Franny smiled. She felt happy—happy and excited and useful. “Just wait. I'll tell Roz you're here.”

“Attagirl.” Darren's voice was smoky, languorous, just as Franny remembered it. “A movie-star voice,” Martie always said. Neither she nor Franny had understood why Rosamund was not crazy about the boy.

“Oh, Franny!” With a jerk of her chin, Rosamund indicated that Franny should follow her out of the noisy, party-crowded kitchen and into the dark and empty dining room.

“So—where are they, Franny?”

Franny pointed toward the front door. “Out there.”

“I was
hoping
they'd leave if we didn't answer.” Rosamund sighed. “Okay. You—stay here,” she said, then edged around a couple cuddling in the kitchen doorway.

The young men who followed Rosamund into the dining room a minute later were a pair Franny thought of as The Golfers (large specimens, very tanned, always wearing the sort of coordinated country club clothes that Franny's father wore on his days off).

“Franny, I'd like to introduce you to my new boyfriend,” Rosamund said, with a wink at the taller of the two young men.

Franny flushed. “You're not even going to let Darren and Artie come in?”

“Franny.” Rosamund rested her head on Franny's shoulder. “If they come in, they might start a fight with somebody, and who knows what all?”

“But—”