Authors: Paula McLain
From the bed in her private room, Berna communicated to Nelson in her slurred way that something had to be done about me.
“I can keep her fine until you come home,” he insisted.
“What if I never go home?” It took her a full minute to push the words out around her tongue.
Finally someone was saying out loud the thoughts that had been with me for weeks, but Nelson dismissed her. “Don’t be silly,” he said, patting the bedrail near Berna’s hand. “Of course you’re coming home.”
“We should call Raymond. Raymond can take her for a while.”
“Don’t you think she’d be better off here?”
“No. It’s time for a change,” she said, spit chasing the words out of her mouth. Nelson daubed at her lips with a tissue and shushed her and told her okay, he’d make the call if that’s what she felt was best.
Meanwhile, I sat in one corner on a plastic visitor’s chair and felt the unmistakable beginnings of a spell. I sucked hard on my inhaler, sending the metallic-tasting mist past my tonsils and down to the wet forest of my lungs. I panted shallowly, bit my bluing lip.
Raymond lived in Moline, Illinois, which might as well have been the moon to me, since I’d never been out of the state of California. The last time my uncle had visited, I’d been twelve or thirteen. He had come barreling up the drive in a dented yellow El Camino with fake wood trim. He wore an old brown T-shirt and worn, tawny corduroys and a braided leather belt over which a slight paunch rested. His hair was too long. Sideburns swooped down from his temples and flared, threatening to take over his still-handsome face. I had always found him a little bit frightening. When he came once a year or so, he would sit in the big chair in the living room, nursing a Coors and what seemed to me a very private suffering. He was never mean, never gruff even, just very quiet. I’d sit on the couch or circle awkwardly near him, trying to guess what he was thinking. If I passed near
him, he might reach out to lightly bump my rib cage or he might not notice me at all.
It terrified me, the idea of moving to Moline with Raymond, but no more than the possibility that I wouldn’t. That I would stay here waiting for the next bad thing to happen. I was pretty certain that if Berna asked Raymond to take me, he’d do it—not because he felt any affection for me (we hardly knew each other, after all), but because I was the only child of his only sister. And what about Suzette? Berna’s stroke had brought everything into question again, brought the image of my mother looming onto the horizon like a cloud of worry or dread or longing. Wherever she was, did she know Berna was sick and could die? Would Raymond have contacted her? It was possible he didn’t know where she was living, that she was as much a missing person to him as she was to me. Still, he might talk about her, want to summon her with talking, like a séance. And if we did that, called Suzette like a ghost, would she come?
E
ight years earlier, Raymond had been in the shower when the phone rang, water flooding past his ears so that the trill, when he heard it, sounded high and unbroken and ignorable. He closed his eyes, staying under until the water ran cold. Afterward, he stood on the square white bath mat, put his towel on his head, and sighed into its dampness; he was still pleasantly drunk. Stepping into a pair of jockey shorts, he padded through the quiet house. The rooms became darker as he moved farther from the streetlight. He bumped into a door frame with his hip and felt a humming between his ears, as if he were a human tuning fork, a clumsy, rubbery gong. In the living room, he groped his way toward the sofa, sat down, and rested awhile. The apartment was like a tree house in the dark. Along the flank of double-paned windows, leaves pushed in, blotting out the street and the parking lot behind, and light, which came through only when wind moved the branches to allow it in.
The phone had rung earlier too. Raymond had been with a woman then—a film student he’d picked up in the Haight-Ashbury, with a round, pretty face and tan flat feet, and he hadn’t
even considered answering. She’d visibly stiffened after ten or fifteen rings, expecting him to get up, maybe, or expecting worse, perhaps another girlfriend or wife. But he’d ignored it anyway, or pretended to, and eventually the ringing had stopped. He knew then it was Suzette, of course it was. And though it had been nearly three months since he’d heard from her, some small and mean part of him was glad she couldn’t reach him whenever she wanted, that she had to wait, the way that
he’d
had to wait and wonder where and how she was.
Suzette never called when she was happy. That was one of the many unspoken rules between them. She didn’t want advice unless she asked for it. She didn’t want to hear from him unless it was an emergency, didn’t want to know anything about his private life, that he even
had
a life that didn’t involve her. And when she was happy—wrapped up in some new relationship or job or scheme—she kept it fiercely to herself, as if telling Raymond or even saying it out loud would jinx it, let reality seep in, sink in, drag her down. Raymond understood this, and he hated it. He hated how when he didn’t know where his sister was, who she was spending time with, or what she was doing for money, he walked around in a cloud of dread, thinking about her all the time, even when he wasn’t aware of it, even though he knew, ostensibly, that the reason he hadn’t heard was because things were okay and she was still afloat.
At some point, Raymond gave up and went to bed, and it was more than an hour later, when he was dead asleep, that the phone rang again. This time he bolted to the kitchen to answer it, steering his way through the dark house on adrenaline alone.
She couldn’t speak at first, but when she did, it was to say, “Where were you?” accusingly. “I called before. I didn’t know what to do.”
“Shhh,” he said, knowing better than to try to explain or defend himself. “I’m here now. Where are you?”
“Down south. Oxnard.”
“Why? Who with?”
There was a long pause before she said, “No one. Not anymore.” She laughed a dark, shrill laugh that alluded to a darker private joke, and then began crying softly and steadily, not so much into her end of the receiver as into Raymond’s ear. Whatever distance was between them closed. He could see her as clearly as if he floated just above the phone booth. There was a busy intersection. Cars sped by, their headlights swinging over her backward. Behind the weathered safety glass, her face was pitted with shadows. The phone book had been torn out of its socket; strangers’ names crawled along the hinge work in pencil and Magic Marker and nail polish. Her breath coming through the wire was ragged and snotty, and it made Raymond want to cry too. This was as much a part of their arrangement as anything, how Suzette could break his heart in two seconds flat no matter what harm had already been done. It was hers to break.
“Can you tell me what happened, Suzy? I can’t help if you don’t tell me what’s wrong.”
But she couldn’t stop crying. He sensed that she was afraid more than sad, and hoped she would tell him what of. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said, trying to both soothe her and leave her space to fill in with her own words in her own time. As he waited, he reassured himself that it would be okay now. Her breath was coming clearer, and she was sighing. Sighing was a good sign.
Then the operator broke in, a reedy ant voice asking for a dollar and fifteen cents. Raymond looked helplessly at his own phone as if he could will a slot to deposit change.
“Ray!” Suzette’s voice rose with alarm. “I don’t know what to do.”
And just when he was thinking, with frustration,
She doesn’t know how to work the phone?
the connection knocked closed. “Shit,” he said, and let the receiver fall.
Raymond was still there in the kitchen, pacing between the table and a sink full of empty beer cans when Leon came in from his night out. It was nearly two a.m.
“What are you doing in the dark?” Leon asked, but didn’t turn on the light.
“I think I’m waiting for a phone call.”
“You think?” Leon chuckled. “Must be your sister.”
Leon had been Raymond’s roommate and best friend for five years and knew every part of Raymond’s story that was worth talking about—late at night, in bars over black and tans or bourbon, in their own living room, passing a homemade glass water pipe between them. He knew Suzette’s highs and lows, mostly because Raymond was the barometer, and because Raymond simply took off every few months, dropping everything to go and straighten or bail her out. A few times he’d brought her back to stay with them. Leon knew about the boyfriends, the bankruptcy, the Dexedrine that kept her thin and brutally optimistic, like a clench of thrumming wires. He knew about the baby she’d sent to live with her and Raymond’s mother, Berna, years before, and knew most of all that no matter what she did, Raymond protected her, looked the other way, turned the other cheek.
“The girl’s trouble,” Leon had said more than once, and it didn’t need saying. She
was
trouble. Troubled. Was
in
trouble every time Raymond turned around. But what was he supposed to do? Just walk away? After all of the mistakes, the ridiculous choices, the self-destructiveness, it wasn’t easy to go on caring about Suzette, but sometimes love wasn’t easy, Raymond told himself. He told himself he had no choice. Being born into the same family meant they belonged to each other. No matter how messy things got or how it looked to other people, this was an indestructible fact.
After Leon went to bed, Raymond waited for another half hour or so, but the phone stayed dead. His first instinct was to get in the car and go find her, but where in Oxnard was she? And would she still be there when he arrived, some six hours later? Another part of him wanted to rip the phone out of the wall. It was one of those heavy-as-a-dumbbell phones, and pitching it into anything—the wall, maybe the refrigerator—would feel satisfying. It would jangle on impact. It would leave a dent.
He found himself thinking of the play telephones he and Suzette had made as kids with paper cups and kite string or yarn. They never worked, those phones. Maybe they’d never gotten far enough away from each other, or drew the string tight enough, but he’d never heard what he was supposed to, the vibration of her voice traveling to arrive, incredibly, in the cup. He’d heard her, yes, but the way he always had—because her voice carried, because he was listening hard. No matter how clear his instructions, she’d hold the cup right up to her mouth, like a mega-phone, so that not a single word came through ungarbled. And no matter how many times the game failed, come a rainy day, a dull day, they tried again, dragging out new cups and string.
In a way, Raymond thought grimly, they were always playing the telephone game. When they were kids, Raymond’s bedroom and Suzette’s were next to each other. The house was old, with sloped walls and creaking floorboards that functioned as a kind of clairvoyance. He always knew where she was in her room, what she was doing. He knew the instant she woke up in the morning and the instant she dropped off to sleep as well. Suzette was born when Raymond was six, so it was sort of his job to look after her, but it was also more than his job. He always knew what she was thinking or believed he did.
And now, as he sat guessing in the dark, trying to pinpoint her in space and time, to will her to call him back, he thought
he might as well have been using weightless string and Styrofoam. She would call again or she wouldn’t. She would be okay or not.
Ray, I don’t know what to do
, he heard again, a cracked bell sounding in his head, but the phone in his kitchen was mute and useless. He went to bed insisting to himself that she’d call in the morning, and when she didn’t, he grabbed a map, put coffee in a thermos, and went to find her.
I
n the car on the way home from O’Hare, Fawn mostly talked to Raymond, filling him in on details from home. Her mom was fine. Her dad was working a lot. Her little brother Guy had had pneumonia in the spring, but he was better now, and was even playing soccer again. Raymond listened and nodded, occasionally asking about one thing or another. I looked out the window, my mind ticking, trying to think of the perfect thing to say—witty, worldly, memorable—that would show Fawn how fundamentally great I was. But my tongue was dead in my mouth. My brain felt leaky and unreliable.
When we reached the house, we sat on the couch in front of TV trays and ate burgers we’d picked up from A&W, Fawn slathering her onion rings with French’s mustard. (Mustard!) After dinner, we watched the Movie of the Week, which was about a mischievous but brilliant chimpanzee that helped his detective owner solve a murder mystery. He knew sign language, and when he found various clues, he would shriek and sign wildly to the detective, who was apparently an idiot. I thought this was a
totally unbelievable story, but Fawn laughed and seemed into it, so I was too.
At bedtime, Fawn had her turn at the bathroom first and when she came out she wore an actual nightgown made of a pale blue eyelet. There was a white satin bow affixed to the center of the neckline and just above it, she wore a tear-shaped amber pendant on a silver chain so fine it could have been spun out of confectioner’s sugar. I hadn’t noticed the pendant before, but I had noticed Fawn’s hair, which was gleaming as she brushed it now with long, even strokes. In the car, I had been mesmerized by the way the sun transformed the somewhat ordinary brown into a dazzling, minky ribbon. A thick strand lay across the back of Fawn’s seat, and I felt it pulling magnetically on my hand, which was lying, for the moment, tame in my lap. If I moved slowly, the way pickpockets did, I could reach up without anyone seeing, stroke just once, and then know exactly how soft it was, how fine. But I resisted. Wasn’t it weird to want to touch someone else’s hair? And what if I was caught? What would Fawn think of me then?
What Fawn did or didn’t think of me was to become my principal obsession that summer, so much so that it would fully eclipse and cancel out its reverse: what I thought of her. It never occurred to me to ask myself if I liked Fawn. The real question, the only question, was did she like
me
? If not, how could I make her like me? If yes, then how much? And when? And why?
In the days after Fawn’s arrival, nothing and everything happened. Raymond took a personal day from work and drove us up the Great River Road all the way to Dubuque, where we went up a steep hill in a rickety funicular that delivered a spectacular view of the Mississippi. At the top, a college-age boy took our twenty-five cents. Long rust-brown hair fell fetchingly into his eyes, and he sported a dimple in his right cheek deep enough to swallow a blueberry.
“They sure do grow them cute out here,” Fawn said to me as we walked away, and I puffed up, feeling pride though we were in Iowa, not Illinois.
Out here
was a broad enough swath, I thought, and regardless, Fawn thought we had something to offer her. Maybe we actually did.
It was on the way home from Dubuque that I first learned Fawn could sing. Raymond had Gordon Lightfoot on the eight-track; he was a sucker for “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and knew it word for word. When “Spanish Moss” came around, Fawn began to hum and then to sing properly, her throat loosing notes so low and so mournful I thought I might cry on the spot. When she’d finished, Raymond clapped his right hand lightly against the steering wheel. Generally I was too shy to sing in front of other people, but Fawn’s voice swept me up and carried me along with it. And as soon as I opened my mouth, I knew it was going to be okay. She wouldn’t make fun of me and neither would Raymond, because I sounded great. Together, Fawn and I sounded better than great. For the rest of the ride home we listened to the
Jesus Christ Superstar
sound track, pulling into the drive just as “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” was hitting its stride. Instead of turning the truck off, Raymond sat patiently and let us belt out “I never thought I’d come to this, what’s it all about?” to the darkened cab. He seemed to get a kick out of watching us sing, out of seeing us having a good time. It was the best day Raymond and I had had together, no contest, and I wondered if he knew too that it was all Fawn’s doing.
The next day Raymond went back to work, and Fawn and I were left in the house to figure each other out. Raymond was part of a contracted crew that mostly did roadwork for the state of Illinois. He wrangled school bus–colored earthmovers and backhoes, trenchers and dozers, ripping up concrete or laying asphalt on Interstate 80. Sometimes he simply raked down the median on a big John Deere bar-cutter mower.
“He really works outside all day?” Fawn asked me incredulously. We were painting our toenails for the second time that morning, our feet perched on the side of the coffee table, cotton balls between our splayed toes.
“I think he likes being outside,” I said, daubing at my nearly invisible pinky nail with the wet brush and flubbing it. “He says he wouldn’t want to have to be at a desk wearing a suit and tie.”
“Men look
great
in suits. Middle-aged men, anyway.” Fawn looked at my handiwork and grimaced. “I’d better save you from yourself,” she said. Taking up the polish remover and a Q-tip, she held my foot in her lap and went around the nails with a light but precise stroke, all of my swerving outside the lines disappearing. “Raymond’s pretty good-looking, don’t you think?” Fawn mused. “He could probably be a model or something. One of those guys in the Sears catalog wearing a flannel shirt and holding a shovel. Lumberjack guy.”
I nodded, laughing. Raymond was handsome, I had to agree, but I had never tried to imagine him doing anything other than what he did, being anyone other than my uncle Raymond—though who that was exactly remained pretty murky territory.
“Do you ever look at the underwear sections in those catalogs? Men’s underwear is so stupid. There’s that little flipty-do crotch thing that they’re supposed to put their peckers through. Whose bright idea was that?”
“Raymond could be an underwear model,” I suggested.
“Perfect,” Fawn said, blowing on my now-finished toes. “We could go raid his dresser and find an outfit for him.”
I hesitated. It wasn’t even noon on our first day alone, and already Fawn was suggesting a level of trespass that hadn’t occurred to me in the seven months I’d lived with Raymond. “Do you think that’s a good idea?” I said quickly. “I’m sure he wouldn’t want us going in his room.”
“Chicken.” Fawn huffed and pushed her bangs out of her
eyes. “Well, we have to do something. I’m bored out of my
brain
.” She slumped on the couch, letting her eyes rove critically around the room, from the cracked veneer of the coffee table to the filmy, burbling aquarium. Finally she settled on me. “I know what. We’ll give you a makeover.”
“Me?”
“Who else, stupid?”
The good news was I had potential; the bad news was I would have to apply myself. Did I know what that meant? Fawn wanted to know.
“I have to go on a diet?”
“That’s a start. But there’s more to it.” We stood at the mouth of my closet, Fawn flipping through the hangers, rejecting each item with a “No. No. Nope.” And then, “Have you been living under a rock or something?”
It took Fawn about two seconds to declare my closet a disaster area. I would have to borrow her clothes until we could do a proper shopping. That was all there was to it.
“You do have a great figure, though,” she said. “I’d kill for your boobs.”
“Thanks.” I brightened. Assets were assets, and it was the only way I felt myself to have any advantage (if you could even call it that) over Fawn who, though she was nearly a year older, was too slender to have breasts.
“Your eyes are nice too, a very pretty brown,” Fawn said, stepping closer. “But you’ve got so much hair, they get lost.”
“I could push it back,” I suggested, securing handfuls behind an imaginary headband.
“Too Alice in Wonderland. You don’t want to look younger. You want to look…mysterious,” she said, trying the word on, then repeating it.
What Fawn decided on was a radical cut similar to Mia Far
row’s in
Rosemary’s Baby
. I tentatively agreed. I understood that Fawn had decided to make me a project—like a new recipe in a test kitchen—and was flattered, of course.
But would I turn out?
What if Fawn thought she was making a chocolate soufflé and I was more like one of those cake mixes that come with the Easy-Bake Oven?
“Do you have any money?” Fawn asked.
“No. Raymond gives me five dollars allowance every two weeks, but I’m not very good at saving.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t mind giving us a loan,” she said, and walked down the hall to his room. I followed and stood at the door, watching, as Fawn went over to Raymond’s dresser and rifled through a pile of bills sitting on top. She came back out with a ten and some singles.
“It’s no big deal,” she said, reading the unvoiced disapproval on my face. “I do it all the time at home and no one cares. My parents don’t even notice. I say it’s their loss for leaving money lying around. They should be more careful.” She smiled a Cheshire Cat smile and told me to grab my purse.
To catch the bus downtown, we waited in front of Keaton Intermediate, where I had finished eighth grade the spring before. Across the street sat an empty lot filled with waist-high couch grass, end to end, broken only by the occasional tire rut and by charred-bare rounds where brave kids or those who didn’t care if they were busted by Moline’s finest, had built pit fires.
“What’s out there?” Fawn asked.
“Not much. Kids get drunk there and make out.”
“There’s one in every town. Back home we go to a place we call The Cellar. It’s just this room in the basement of an old warehouse, but people have dragged furniture down there. Mattresses and old sofas. So it’s pretty cozy.”
I tried to imagine “cozy” from these details and came up short.
“You go out there?” Fawn asked, gesturing toward the lot with her chin.
“Not much,” I said. In truth, I’d crossed it only once, thinking it a shortcut home, and instantly regretted it. It had looked perfectly tame, even scenic from the road. But once I was out there, I couldn’t go ten feet without seeing the smashed brown stars of exploded Michelob bottles. Crushed White Castle boxes flecked the weeds and mud holes, as well as wadded wrappers of every kind—gum, candy, condom. I even saw a balled-up pair of white panties lying a few feet off the path. If you’d have told me then that by the end of the summer I’d be utterly unfazed by this sort of landscape, that I’d know what to do with a joint, a condom, ruined panties, I’d have said you were crazy. At my middle school in Bakersfield there’d been drinking, drugs, sex, but the action came nowhere near me. I was and had always been young for my age, stunted. At fifteen I’d had a kiss, yes, but a disastrous one, delivered badly by sweet and puny Patrick Fettle, a neighbor boy in Bakersfield who might as well have been my brother.
When I was growing up, Patrick and Myron Fettle had been my only real friends, particularly during the summer months when other friends were far off and September was farther still. The Fettles’ house sat within a mile of a reservoir, which was banked by levees made of pebbly gray dirt. Myron loved to hunt bullfrogs there, the BBs from his Daisy rifle raining down on the green water, skittering then sinking fast. Patrick didn’t like to shoot; instead, he and I poked holes in the mud with pointy sticks and collected polliwogs in metal coffee cans stripped of their labeling. We collected lots of things in those coffee cans: algae-slicked ferns and pussy willows, white quartz stones with rough edges, and bait worms and kissing bugs.
Kissing bug
was Berna’s term for a box elder bug, even though they didn’t kiss anything. They bit and bit hard whatever they landed on, the
grayish skin around a knee, the lightly furred lobe of an ear. The bugs were red-edged, eyeless, with legs like filaments and antennae like black thread. They were everywhere in the summer months, which was why, I suppose, we collected them. It was either that or collect their stings, from which would rise itchy pink anthills of skin.
Then, when I turned eleven (Patrick was my age, in my grade at Truxton Middle School, and Myron was two years older), something irrevocable happened. I began to grow breasts. Suddenly, I no longer resembled a girl. I was one. Myron shunned me overnight and altogether, forgetting me as one does a mangled toy. Patrick, always more sensitive, was slower to give in to the obvious: boys and girls were retreating from each other everywhere, on playgrounds and ball fields, in neighborhoods in towns all over the map and even out in the sticks, where no one was looking. Patrick and I could have stayed friends in secret, I suppose, but we didn’t.
One summer afternoon, I put on a T-shirt that was two sizes too big and went looking for Patrick. It was a hot, dry day. By the time I finally found him in the vineyard that bordered the main road, there was a yellow film on my legs and arms, and collars of dust around each of my sockless ankles. Patrick was down on his knees in one of the furrows, digging in the loamy dirt with his hands. He didn’t look up as I approached, but I braved ahead anyway, shaking my T-shirt out and blousing it around my waist.
When I came nearer, I saw there was a dead partridge on the ground next to his left knee. It was an adult male, about the size of a small peahen, with a bluish ruff.
“He’s beautiful,” I said. “Where’d you find him?”
Patrick grunted something I couldn’t decipher and went on digging methodically, the mound of dirt to one side growing slowly. The soil on top was darker and damper, and looked cool to the touch.
I sat down near the dirt pile and watched him dig. It was nearing dinnertime, maybe five o’clock, and the light was changing. The grape leaves around us glowed, backlit, and I saw, under a heavy swag of vine, a spider’s egg, netted and white and so fragile-looking it seemed to be crocheted out of air.