Authors: Paula McLain
A
t the corner of Nineteenth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, a parked ice cream truck tinkled random notes, not a song so much as a jumble of snatches from childhood tunes that all sounded alike—“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “Hickory Dickory Dock,” “Three Blind Mice”—the same five notes scaling the humid afternoon air, mesmerizing a line of sweaty kids waiting for Fudgsicles and missiles and push-up bars. It was the end of July and hot as hell.
“What’s going on with you and Tom?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Fawn’s face was blank, indecipherable, though I was sure Fawn knew exactly what I meant. For the past week, instead of going to the park at night, we had walked to the nearest package store and waited outside until Fawn spotted someone who looked pliable enough, and then approached him about buying us two bottles of strawberry-flavored Boone’s Farm wine. Armed with the pink bottles, we walked back to Queen of Peace, to the greenhouse, and then, when we were sufficiently drunk, cruised the neighborhood looking for houses with banked lights and no car in the drive, and broke into their garages. So far we had taken nothing much. What was there to take in most garages anyway? A hammer? A socket wrench? But
I had to admit I liked the charged feeling I got from knowing we could get caught any minute. It was a heady sensation that, coupled with the Boone’s Farm, made me feel slightly invincible. I was having a good time with Fawn, and didn’t miss the competition for Fawn’s attention that Tom presented, but something had clearly happened to cool their relationship down, and whatever that something was, Fawn wasn’t telling.
“I just meant, you know, that we haven’t seen him for a few days.”
“What’s it to you?”
I shook my head,
no reason
, dug in my pocket for change. Fifty yards down the street, two boys took turns kicking a volleyball against a parked VW bus. “I hope that’s their car,” I said.
“Pretty stupid to bang up your own car, don’t you think?” Fawn smirked.
The line inched forward.
“So. Tom?” I pressed.
“You’re awfully interested in my social life all of a sudden. Why don’t you worry about your own? How’s little candy-pants Collin? Is he your husband now?” She made a loud smooching noise and hip-bumped me farther up the line.
“Shut up. Collin and I are just friends.”
“All right then, Tom’s just a friend too.”
Later that day, we decided to head over to see Claudia. Actually, it was Fawn’s idea, which made me think that either Claudia was beginning to grow on Fawn, or Fawn was using her as a way to spend even more time with Tom, no matter what she’d just said about their being “friends.” The sky lowered as we walked, growing yellower and more ominous-looking. With a sharp report, it cracked open and we found ourselves in the middle of a downpour. Fawn suggested we make a run for it, and by the time we stood on the rubber mat in front of the Fletchers’ door, we were completely drenched. Fawn rang the bell with the
hand not holding her dripping flip-flops. Her hair was plastered in strands to her neck and the back of her shirt; her eyelashes were wet. She looked amazing. I pulled at the legs of my soaked shorts, hoping I looked half as good.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” said Claudia when she opened the door. “My mom would freak if you dripped on the carpet. Wait here and I’ll get you some towels.” She trotted off down a long hallway, where we could hear her calling out for Tom.
“Oh brother,” Fawn said with an exaggerated sigh.
“He does live here, you know. If you didn’t want to see him, why did we come?”
“It’s fine. What do I care?” she said. It was becoming obvious she did care, a lot, but for some reason she couldn’t simply tell me that.
Claudia came back with towels and led us into the kitchen, which was papered with a vivid yellow daisy pattern. In fact, just about everything in the room was yellow, the range and refrigerator and countertop, the tasseled tablecloth and vinyl chairs, even the cabinetry, each piece of which was adorned with lemon-yellow pull knobs.
“How cheery,” Fawn said wryly.
“I know,” Claudia said. “My mother’s insane. She read something in a magazine. Yellow’s supposed to keep you happy all the time. Blue’s supposed to make you calm or sleepy or something. All of our bedrooms are blue. I hate blue.”
“Really?” I asked. “Who hates blue?”
Claudia shrugged. “Call me crazy.”
“Crazy,” said Tom, who was just coming in the door. Collin trailed slightly behind him. When he saw me, Collin smiled, and then hopped casually up on the countertop by the sink, his sneakers bumping lightly against the base cabinet.
The rest of the afternoon went this way: Tom gave Fawn a tour of the house, although as far as I could tell, they never
made it past his bedroom. Claudia, Collin, and I headed downstairs to the basement, which had dark wood paneling on all the walls, a TV, stereo, pool table, and an old upright piano. Several pieces of low furniture were covered with an orange plaid. Tangerine curtains hung from the garden-level windows and there were two end tables upon which orange ceramic lamps squatted, fat as pumpkins.
“What’s orange supposed to do?” I asked.
“I don’t remember,” said Claudia. “Make you hungry, I think.”
“It’s working then,” said Collin. “I’m starving.”
Claudia went upstairs to get us chips and sodas, and we played cutthroat pool until she had to leave for her piano lesson. “I’m having a birthday party on Saturday night,” she said as she headed out. “A sleepover. You and Fawn should come. It’ll be fun.”
“Great,” I said. “We’ll have to check with my uncle, but I’m sure it’ll be fine.” I tried to keep my voice level as I answered her, but in fact I was thrilled that she’d thought to include us.
“Good. Eight o’clock, then,” Claudia said, and bounded up the stairs.
As soon as we couldn’t hear her anymore, Collin said, “I’ve been looking for you at the park. I thought maybe you were moving back to California or something.”
“No, nothing like that. We’ve just been busy.”
“Yeah, I know how that goes,” he said, though I could tell he didn’t know at all.
“Do you play?” Collin asked. He walked over to the upright piano and straddled the bench familiarly.
“Hmm mm,” I shook my head.
“Lucky,” he said. “I’ve had lessons since I was five, still do. Every Thursday. Same teacher Claudia goes to, Mrs. Ritchie the tyrant.”
“Can you play well?”
“I play all right,” he said, and then proceeded to knock my socks off. He played “Time in a Bottle,” and “American Pie,” and “Morning Has Broken,” all from memory. He played “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and switched the rhythm halfway through, so that it was super-syncopated, and then moved right from there into a meltingly slow version of “Baby I’m-a Want You.”
“You’re really good,” I said when he stopped. “How many songs do you know by heart?”
“I don’t know. Tons of popular stuff, I guess. I have a really good memory for music. I usually only have to listen to something a couple of times before I can play it.”
“Really? That’s amazing. I’d love to do that.”
“You probably already can. Think about it. When you really like a song and play it over and over on the stereo, how many times does it take before you can sing it alone? Just a few, right? Same thing with the piano. If I know the notes, it’s easy to make chords from there. Not so special, really.”
“Teach me something,” I said. “Something easy.”
I sat next to Collin on the bench and let him position my fingers on the keys. He then placed his lightly on top of mine and showed me several chords. On the bench, our knees kissed and stayed that way, the fine hair on his leg tickling me pleasantly. The sensation began to preoccupy me. I wanted it to continue, to change, even, becoming something else, a firmer touching, a wet kiss, but Collin seemed entirely content with where we were. Within ten minutes, I could plink out the first two bars of “Rocket Man,” but he hadn’t so much as held my hand. Meanwhile, Fawn and Tom,
just friends
, were upstairs in Tom’s room, only a few dozen vertical feet away. So close, in fact, that the Styrofoam-looking ceiling panels over my head vibrated lightly from Tom’s stereo, Seals and Crofts crooning,
Hummingbird don’t fly away fly away
.
“So why do you hang out with Tom anyway?” I asked, suddenly angry. “I mean, why do you let him kick you around?”
“He doesn’t mean it,” Collin said, clearly taken aback. “It’s a joke. He’s just like that, he thinks it’s funny to give me a hard time.”
“Well it’s not funny.” I got up from the bench and paced back and forth on the shag, my eyes on the tracks my feet were leaving in the pile. “I think it’s pretty lousy, in fact.”
“Oh yeah?
You’re
one to talk. Fawn doesn’t exactly treat you like a queen.”
I stopped where I was, flopping down into a beanbag chair. Suddenly, I felt sick. “Screw you,” I said. It was barely a whisper, but Collin heard me with perfect clarity.
“No, screw
you
,” he said, and clomped loudly up the stairs.
I was alone in the basement, surrounded by artifacts of abandoned childhood. On a nearby shelf sat beat-up game boxes, Life, Parcheesi, Chutes and Ladders, Risk. Part of me wanted to run after Collin and apologize, to drag him back downstairs by the hand and make him play Candy Land with me. Part of me wanted to march upstairs, fling Tom’s door open, and scream, “Just friends, huh?” In a way, Collin was right. Fawn didn’t treat me very well sometimes. Like right now. Once, she had told me everything, all her secrets, but lately I suspected she was revealing just enough so that I would help her get what she wanted. Tom, for instance.
And what about Collin? Had I gone too far for him to ever want to be my boyfriend? And if so, did it really matter? Did I really want to be Collin’s girlfriend, to wait around forever for him to muster the courage to touch my foot again? I wanted to be with someone like Tom.
Like
Tom? No. Tom himself. I wanted to feel his hot tongue in my mouth, his hand inching up my belly.
But on what planet would that ever happen? I had more of a chance of somersaulting to the moon than stealing Tom away
from Fawn. So I sat where I was on the beanbag chair, feeling it give under my weight, the beans trickling away and into some corner until it felt like I was sitting on top of myself, my elbows and knees jutting into each other. I thought about getting up and going home, but somehow it seemed like too much work to pick a fight with Fawn right then, which is certainly what would happen if I left without her. So I waited. Again.
Out on the street an hour later, we headed home, orienting ourselves the way people do when leaving a movie theater, blinking, sighing as the heat found us and realigned itself with our bodies. Not only had the rain stopped, but the sky was radiantly clear. Storms happened this way a lot in the summer. Green-or yellow-or plum-colored clouds would roll in from Iowa or Missouri as if on casters and then boil, massing, until the lightning started to come in noisy tears, ripping toward earth as through fabric, depositing the singed and eggy smell of sulfur. And then, just as quickly, the chaos would roll away east or north, bright day reappearing.
For a few blocks, we walked slightly uphill while water rivered the other way in the gutter, pushing mossy clumps of pollen and twigs. Later, I knew, the gutters would bake dry, leaving eddy marks in the mud as if they were finger-sculpted there.
“I broke up with Tom,” Fawn suddenly said, breaking away from my side to splash her foot into the gutter, her flip-flop sending water up around it in a fountain.
“You did?”
“Yeah,” she said. “It was time. He was getting all serious on me, I had to cut him loose.”
“Wow,” I said. I hadn’t seen this coming at all. “You were up in his room so long today, I was sure you guys were totally together now.”
“He took it pretty hard, actually. I had to sit with him for a while. I couldn’t just leave him there, could I?”
“No, you did the right thing. That was sweet.”
“It’s not like I hate him or anything. We’re not sworn enemies now.” She paused thoughtfully. “I think he’ll understand in time.”
I nodded. In the gutter, grass cuttings and whirligigs and drowned spider carcasses sped by silently.
“But now I’m free. It’s a relief, really. I’ll get to spend some time on my own. And with you of course,” she said, reaching to hook my arm into her own, pinning my elbow to her rib cage. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you too,” I said, and squinted as the sunlight flared against a patch of sidewalk bleached so white after the storm that for a moment it blinded me.
“Romeo’s here,” Fawn said, “out on the curb.”
It was the next afternoon, an ordinary day, long and hot and punctuated only by the new issue of
’Teen
titled “Question Your Looks,” which I was reading through for the second time, highlighting key paragraphs in the subsections “How Can I Hide My Flaws?” and “Why Can’t I Do More with My Hair?” Now, I looked through the screen, and there stood Collin, eyeing Raymond’s house from the street. He took two or three steps up the driveway toward the door, then stopped and backed away. While Fawn snickered, I watched him walk slowly along the sidewalk to the stop sign at the corner. When he got there, he flipped a U-turn, then came back to the mailbox where he rested, one hand on the letter flag, both eyes on the door as if he might be able to see through it.
“This is too pathetic for words,” Fawn said.
“I wonder what he wants.”
“What he wants? He
loves
you of course. What an infant.” Fawn turned back to her own magazine and said, not to me but to the perfectly glossy pages, “Go on now. Don’t keep your little lover boy waiting.”
I flushed. “I don’t
like
him. I didn’t tell him he could come over or anything.”
“Whatever,” Fawn said. “I think you’re made for each other.”
When I came through the front door, Collin brightened visibly.
“Hey,” I said, walking up to where he stood on the curb, my hands in my pockets.