“Get… in… here!”
Meg shouts.
The horn honks again, a bright splash of sound, and then silence.
“Please!”
We stand up from the frozen ground. Getting out of the field proves a lot more efficient than getting in: we find a furrow
and keep to it, back toward the car lights, straight across the shining patches of snow. We emerge behind them, sneak up,
and throw open the back doors, causing the driver and her idiot friend to shriek and claw at each other, Whinny losing her
cigarette somewhere on the floor and the two of them diving for it, bumping heads with an audible crack.
Felicia and I crawl into the dark backseat as they clutch their foreheads and moan. The heat is blasting, which feels good.
I spend the next afternoon mentally preparing for the party by hiding out behind the green velvet chair in the corner of the
living room. When I was younger and shorter, I made a reading nest for myself by stuffing a couch pillow back here and an
old afghan and then crawling in with my book, staying all day if they let me, creeping out only to get provisions. Now I have
to fold myself in sideways, with the register jabbing into me and my feet sticking out. Tammy waits until I’ve got it all
arranged and am still before she gingerly climbs in and over, to settle behind my knees.
I still like it back here—the familiar scuffs and scribbles above the baseboard, the bright, unfaded back of the green chair,
the headless carpet tack you have to watch out for. This is where the pivotal events of my childhood unfolded, while I ate
banana and root beer Popsicles, two by two, tucking the sticks neatly under the skirt of the chair. It’s where Sunnybank Lad
met Lady, Ken met his friend Flicka, Atlanta burned,
Manderley burned, Lassie came home, Jim ran away, Alice got small, Wilbur got big, David Copperfield was born, Beth died,
and, on an endless, gloomy winter afternoon, Jody shot his yearling. The pretty little deer named Flag, staggering and bloodied,
doomed from his romp through the tender shoots of corn and the mother’s bad aim, pursued by the desperate, crazed boy who
had to put him out of his suffering. All the fault of mothers and corn. My own mother had had to come in and pull the chair
out in order to see what was going on that day. She was sympathetic until she saw the Popsicle sticks.
“That’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it?” she says now, passing by on her way somewhere and seeing me crammed into my old space.
“What’s ridiculous is that there’s nowhere in this house to do homework,” I reply.
“What do you call that big table in the dining room?”
“What do you call the crap all over it that I’m sick of cleaning up?”
She peers over the top of the chair at me. I open
The Tempest
and stare into it.
“Listen, smart-ass. If this is how you talk to your family, you’ll stay home tonight.”
“How I talk? You just called me ridiculous!” I say to my book.
“I did not,” she answers. “Look at me.”
I look up at her. She has rollers in her hair.
“I did not. I said it might be a
bit
ridiculous to be jammed in there like that when there are plenty of other places you could read in this house.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“I actually don’t give a shit what you heard, and I’m not going to stand here arguing with a teenager about what I did
or didn’t say.” And with that, she wanders away, because she knows she’s in the wrong.
I’m sick of being a teenager. Being a teenager so far hasn’t gotten me anything beyond period cramps and nameless yearning,
which I had as a kid too, but this is a new kind of nameless yearning that has boys attached to it. And one thing is for sure:
there are boys close behind wherever cheerleaders are, like wolves following the campfires. What if they show up at Patti
Michaels’s grandmother’s house tonight, what will I do then? What if there are popular boys there, ones who aren’t used to
being around uncute girls? I think about getting up to call Felicia to see how nervous she is, but the register is pouring
out heat, and the dog and I have melted together.
“Ray?” I call.
No answer. Everyone is somewhere else.
“Raymond!” I call again.
A moment later his face appears over the top of the chair. “I found a harpoon in the alley,” he says.
“What?” I ask. “Would you get me the phone?”
“Okay,” he says. “It’s a harpoon, for whales, that I found in the alley.”
He stretches the phone from the hall as far as its cord will allow and then brings me the receiver.
“How will I dial?” I ask him.
“I can,” he offers.
I tell him the number and he dials. Stephanie answers.
“Flea is not allowed to talk on the telephone for more than two minutes,” Stephanie says severely. “My mother asked her to
do things that have to be done by the time she gets home from work, and she’s getting home in”—she leaves the phone and comes
back—“forty-seven minutes.”
“I doubt if you know the exact minute she’s walking in the house,” I say.
She drops the phone.
“Hi,” Felicia says.
“How does thy bounteous sister?” I say in a British accent.
“Hey, that’s what I’m reading too—a tempest in a pee-pot,” Felicia says. “How’re the tampons working out?”
“Fine, if you don’t mind sitting on a spatula.”
“It means you’re doing it wrong, but I know,” she says, sighing. “So, are you getting nervous about tonight?”
“Are you?” I ask. “I mean, it was your idea to go, so I think you probably know it will be okay.”
“No! Are you kidding—I just said to go see what it was like, but it wasn’t my idea. You’re the one who brought the whole thing
up. If it was anyone’s idea, it was yours!”
“Really, it was her idea. Patti Michaels.”
“Patti Michaels,” Felicia repeats.
We think for a minute.
“I have to clean my stuff and Stephanie’s before my mother gets home, otherwise the little skrizz is gonna tell on me,” she
says finally. “And I washed my hair at eight
A.M.
and it still looks like a wad of hay.”
“Your hair is pretty,” I say.
“Yours is,” she says, yawning.
“What’s Stephanie telling on?”
“We were fighting and I threw a bowl of macaroni out the upstairs window.”
“Ha.”
“My mom wouldn’t care about the macaroni, but the bowl went too.”
“Don’t let her tell,” I say nervously.
“Okay, I’m hanging up.”
Now I have the phone receiver and no brother. When I yell for him, Tammy’s eyes fly open for a second, and then she burrows
deeper.
“Let me see your harpoon,” I say, handing Raymond the receiver. He disappears and reappears a moment later with a rusted fireplace
poker.
“This is it,” he says.
One of the more memorable things I ever read back here were the Cliff’s Notes for
Moby-Dick,
which I found in a box of old comic books my mother brought home. It was a gripping story, but also sickening. Mostly what
I took from it was that nobody on a whaling ship has much sympathy for a whale.
“Don’t let Mom see it,” I say.
“Why not?”
“Because it actually is a harpoon. I thought it wasn’t.”
“It is?” he asks incredulously. “It’s a har
poon?
”
“Hey,” I ask him, “how do you think I look?”
“Okay,” he says uneasily, looking not at me but around. “I don’t know. I have to go hide this harpoon.”
Then again, who really cares? Somebody has to be the sidekick. Somebody has to be Ringo. Without him, no Beatles, and I hope
these people know that.
“I wish I had this house and they had a better one,” my mother says, taking a right turn into the circular drive at Patti
Michaels’s grandmother’s house. There are lights shining from
under the bushes, lanterns hanging on the carriage house, and a stone bench and table with a spotlight on them. She drives
up to the stone archway and stops.
“Don’t stop here!” I say. “This isn’t where you stop!”
In the backseat, Felicia peers out, chewing the inside of her lip.
“Yes, it is,” my mother says, leaning over me to look at the front door. Actually two doors, painted dark green, with a brass
knocker and a medieval-looking latch. On either side of the steps are the cement lions, who tonight have birthday hats on,
set at a rakish angle. “Ooh, those are cute.”
“This isn’t where you stop,” I insist.
“You better notice everything they’ve got,” she says. “Because your mother is going to want to hear about it. Now get out,
because somebody’s coming up behind me.”
We crawl out with our gear and stand there between the lions. As my mother pulls away and the other car pulls up, the green
doors open and there’s Patti and several girls. Behind them is a large space with black-and-white flooring at the bottom and
a huge chandelier at the top. Somewhere in the middle is a blur of curving staircase and gold railing. The girls with Patti
we’ve never seen before; the girls coming up behind us are our own cheerleaders.
Help.
I step back, pressed against a lion, while everyone surges together, sleeping bags are being dropped, people are saying things,
somehow Felicia is standing on the black-and-white floor with the rest of them, but I’m still out here with the lion, whose
back I’ve momentarily sat down on. Directly below the sparkling chandelier is a round, marble-topped table, in the center
of which sits a big silver bowl filled with malted milk
balls. Hundreds of them. The grandmother walks into the room, tall, with a cloud of white hair and high cheekbones: a wealthy
person who has somehow gotten old.
“Come in, come in!” she calls gaily. “Don’t be a stranger, my dear.”
Everyone turns to peer out the door. Oh. They mean me. There’s nothing to do but go inside with my stuff, letting them close
the door.
“Lovely, girls!” the grandmother cries, clapping her hands and looking around animatedly. “You’re all just the loveliest things!”
And with that, she walks suddenly out of the room, as though summoned.
Patti must have just taken her curlers out—her hair is so soft and bouncy, making her more like Gidget than ever. There’s
a girl who looks vaguely like Hayley Mills as well—she’s not one of ours, but a small, doll-like girl with a thick cap of
yellow hair—and one that looks like Patty Duke, only slightly chubbier. The Patty Duke one seems like the ringleader of the
other girls, while the ringleader of our girls is and always has been tall, black-haired Cindy Falk, who looks like an unsmiling
version of That Girl. She stands now, staring around at the room thoughtfully. Finally she glances at me.
“I knew somebody who had a house like this,” she says. “Only it was bigger.”
“Really?” I answer, flooded with gratitude. Everyone says Cindy Falk is a huge stuck-up snot, but here she is, talking to
me right off the bat.
“Mm-hmm,” she says, looking over my head.
After a moment I slide my sleeping bag across the gleaming floor until it’s next to Felicia’s. “Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” she says back.
“This house is just like one Cindy Falk’s friend or somebody used to have,” I say so it looks like we’re talking.
“Really?” she says.
“Only bigger, I guess. The friend’s house was.”
“Really?” she says, her eyes swiveling.
“Yeah.”
“Really?” she says, still not looking at me.
“Why do you keep saying ‘really’?” I ask her.
She blinks. “Because I’m just trying to keep talking here.”
“Oh. Yes, we’re talking away. Talking, talking.”
“Happy and laughing,” she murmurs, “because what we’re saying is really good.”
“What you’re saying is
so
funny,” I tell her, and then laugh.
She laughs too. “I’m saying something very true and funny and then I’m listening to the funny, true things you say back.”
“And yes, blah-blah, what do we do if someone wants to know what’s so funny and true?”
“Then we’re up shit creek, so disperse,” she says, turning away to look at a painting on the wall. The painting is a mishmash
of blue, green, and yellow blobs connected up with spidery black lines. Here and there, little crimson worms inch their way
across the blobs. It might be something Ringgold would like.
I slide my sleeping bag over to the pile of other sleeping bags and stand there with an interested look on my face until Patti
notices me.
“Hey, what were you laughing about?” she asks.
“Not really anything,” I tell her.
“But you were laughing with Flea,” she insists.
“Oh, that was about something from earlier.”
“But what?” Patti says.
“Just something she did today, that was earlier,” I say. “Not about anything here.” The black-and-white tile is creating some
kind of optical illusion that’s making me feel like my legs are too short.
“But what?” Patti persists. Everyone now seems to be listening. Dizzy from the fun-house floor, I put my hand on the marble
table beside me. It feels like a cemetery monument, not the sort of thing you want to fall and crack your head on.
“Uh, she threw a bowl of macaroni out the window,” I say.
Everyone stares at Felicia as she stares at the blobs. For a few seconds there is a flush-faced silence and then Patti guffaws.
“I threw half a bag of marshmallows out my bedroom window the other night,” she says. “They were making me sick.”
Felicia turns from the painting to look at me, swinging her hair back from her face, which is bright with courage. “Now we
know why it was taking
you
so long to come inside.”
There’s a pause as everyone pictures me out there scrounging marshmallows off the cold ground. I laugh and then everyone laughs.
Felicia and I don’t look at each other.
“ ’Za, girls! The ’za has arrived!” the grandmother says, sweeping in to lead us from the hallway, past a living room filled
with couches, trees and a grand piano, down a carpeted corridor, into a dining room with a long, quiet table surrounded by
upholstered chairs, through a swinging door, and into a big, bright kitchen. A wagon-wheel chandelier with false candles hangs
over a long, ranch-style table with benches. On one wall is a display of shining copper pans, and on another wall is a large
painting of fruit, a pheasant, and a deceased rabbit.
The appliances are avocado and the floor is brown-speckled tile, shining with wax. The pizzas are served on pedestals, three
of them, and there are eleven places set around the table, each with two forks and two glasses. I have no idea what two forks
could mean in terms of pizza. Everyone crowds around the table, with me on the end of the bench. The napkins match the tablecloth—green,
orange, and turquoise plaid—and have been rolled and stuffed into wooden napkin rings carved to look like zoo animals. Mine
is a monkey.