Local Girls (16 page)

Today the weather is hot, a June day close to perfection. Bees are hovering above the lawn; Gretel can hear them, in spite of the noise echoing from the Southern State Parkway. She sits cross-legged on the grass, although this is no longer her house and hasn't been for some time, nearly five years. She leans down and listens to the droning of bees and she can't help but wonder why she never heard them during all those years when she lived here. Maybe she wasn't paying attention, but she's paying attention now. There's Jill, Gretel's oldest friend in the world, walking down the street. Gretel can divine Jill's presence intuitively; she knows the slap of Jill's clogs on the cement and the bone-chilling squeak Jill's son Leonardo manages to summon forth when he rides his bicycle.

“What are you doing over there?” Jill calls.

Gretel waves from the lawn, then shades her eyes against the sun so she can see her childhood friend more clearly. There Jill is, at the edge of the driveway, with her three children: Leonardo, aged seven; Eddie junior, who's called Doc; and the baby, Angela, who at eleven months is already walking. Jill's blond hair is pulled into a ponytail; even after three pregnancies, she still has the legs to wear short shorts. Now she plops the baby down on the lawn and marches over to Gretel.

“Are you crazy? We hate these people.” She nods to Gretel's old house. “Nobody in the neighborhood talks to them. Get up.” She gives Gretel a little kick in the shin to prove her point. “Move it.”

“Ow,” Gretel says, but she moves it all the same.

“They're a horrible family.” Jill heads for Angela, who is tearing leaves from an ornamental shrub. “If they see us on their property, they'll call the police. Pigs,” she calls over her shoulder. “They never come to the block party,” she tells Gretel. “But then again, neither did you.”

“There used to be block parties?” Gretel asks.

Jill shakes her head when she considers what a pathetic specimen Gretel was, and perhaps still is, in spite of her degree from NYU and the five years she's spent in Manhattan. “Every August,” she informs Gretel, who clearly still has her head in the clouds. “My mother always made macaroni salad. Your mother was always working.”

Gretel and Jill have looped arms; they're following Jill's kids down the street to the Harringtons' house, Jill's house now, since her parents have moved to a condo in Fort Lauderdale, allowing Jill and her husband to take over the mortgage.

“We'll still be paying it off from our graves,” Jill has cheerfully told Gretel, not that she has to tell anyone that Eddie is not exactly a financial genius. Luckily, the LoPaccas have taken him into the family business, and he's got his own delivery route, way out on the Island. His sister, Terry, is the real heir apparent, and runs the LoPaccas' bread factory.

“Terry has a shrine to your brother set up in her bedroom,” Jill tells Gretel as they follow the kids along.

“Still? You'd think she'd be over him.”

“Jason's like a saint in her eyes. I think she's forgotten anything negative. I pity her husband.”

“She got married?” Gretel asks. Everyone's doing it, it seems. Except for her.

“Hey!” Jill suddenly stops, hands on her hips. “What do you think you're doing?” she asks Leonardo, her oldest, who has just narrowly escaped being hit by a car.

“Nothing,” he answers.

“You'd better watch where you're going,” she tells her son. “No driver's going to watch out for you.”

Gretel feels so dreamy being back here in June. It was always her favorite time of the year, this glorious, untrustworthy month when anything seems possible. Here they are at Jill's house, a destination Gretel has reached a million times before. She takes a good look now and realizes how small the house is, how impossibly green the grass seems to be.

“Is this real?” Gretel leans over and pulls out a handful of turf.

“Yes, it's real,” Jill says. It's never easy to tell whether or not Jill's insulted; she still has a permanent pout. “Eddie works like a dog on this lawn. You're just used to asphalt and cement.”

There's a little pool set out in the backyard, just as there was when Jill and Gretel were kids. Back then, Jill's mother was too distracted and depressed to notice much of what they were doing, but Jill watches her children carefully.

“Don't you push your sister,” she shouts at Doc as she fills the pool up with the hose. “And don't think I can't see everything you do.”

Doc, who's just turned five, sits contritely on the grass. They can all hear Leo's bike out on the street, squeaking and whining as he rides in circles and figure eights. Gretel sprawls in a lawn chair. She used to see this yard from her own bedroom window, but no one in her family lives here anymore. Her mother and brother are dead, her father lives on the North Shore with his second wife, even her cousin Margot moved to Florida, where she lives with her husband and their son, Frankie, a sweet little whirlwind who likes to call Gretel on the phone and tell knock-knock jokes.

Jill has gone into the kitchen for some Kool-Aid and paper cups, and after she returns to give everyone a drink, she throws herself down on the plastic lawn chair beside Gretel's. “Give me the strength to go on,” she cries. Jill pulls a pack of cigarettes from her shorts pocket and offers one to Gretel.

“I quit,” Gretel informs her friend.

“Seriously? Completely?”

Whenever Jill came into the city, she and Gretel would go to clubs and smoke and drink and complain about their lives, but of course Jill hasn't been into the city since Angela was born, and during that time Gretel has quit a lot of things. She stopped cutting her own hair, for instance, and now pays for it to be styled. She stopped crying in the middle of the night. She stopped feeling that everyone's bad fortune was her responsibility—all right, maybe she feels it occasionally, but whenever she does, she goes out and buys a new pair of earrings, or a blouse she can't afford, and that seems to help. Now she has gone even further: at the base of her wrist is a small blue tattoo—
—the symbol for courage.

“I can't believe it!” Jill cries. “You went and got that without telling me!” Jill is actually jealous. Of Gretel. Jill's husband, Eddie, would never allow her to have a tattoo. Why, he won't even let her have Angela's ears pierced, even though she would look so cute with little pearl studs. Sure, Jill could sneak Angela over to her cousin Marianne, who pierces ears with a sharp needle right at her kitchen table, but it wouldn't be worth the fight she'd have to have with Eddie. Not that she listens to him. Not really. He never liked her going into the city to see Gretel, to all those crummy apartments, with all those weird room-mates, and that never stopped Jill. If Eddie knew the half of it, the ratty clubs they went to, the lunatic roommate who stood out on a window ledge above Fourteenth Street convinced she could fly, he would have gone berserk.

The real reason Jill and Gretel haven't seen each other much in the past two years has nothing to do with Eddie, at least not in that way. It's jealousy, that's the problem; it's coveting something you'd never actually want in real life, but still desire in your dreams, the silliest dreams, the ones you simply can't shake, even now, when you're not a kid anymore and should know better than to traffic in envy. Each wants a bit of the other's life. Not the whole thing of course, not the loneliness or the exhaustion; just the best parts, the prizes.

“Angela is the cutest girl in the world,” Gretel decides.

The late afternoon is more scorching than ever, even in Jill's shady backyard. Gretel has been drinking Kool-Aid, which is a great deal sweeter than she had remembered; the kids are all in the pool, making so much noise the sound blends together into one deafening blast. She believes her appraisal of Angela to be unbiased, even though she is the child's godmother.

“I know,” Jill agrees. “Especially when she's sleeping.”

They can hear Eddie's truck when he pulls into the driveway, sputtering with a defective muffler, and they look at each other and laugh. Eddie always made sure you knew he was around.

“Hey,” he shouts when he sees Jill and Gretel. “Great to see you,” he tells Gretel as she greets him. He puts his arm around her and pulls her too close. “You have never looked better. Wow.”

“Oh, shut up,” Jill tells him.

“You shut up,” he says, and he leans down to kiss her, a real kiss, as if they were madly in love.

Maybe Jill and Eddie are still crazy about each other, maybe they always have been. Gretel has always had a difficult time understanding why people are drawn to each other, and why they break apart. Still, she knows one thing for certain: Never judge a relationship unless you're the one wrapped up in its arms.

“Terry's coming for dinner,” Eddie says as he heads for the house to take a shower.

“Thanks for telling me,” Jill shouts after him. “How about some notice next time?” When he turns on the porch to take a bow, Jill laughs in spite of herself. “Idiot,” she says warmly.

Gretel can't help but wonder if she's genetically incapable of forming a lasting relationship. Her only real boyfriend in high school was a disaster, and everyone she dated in college was a disappointment of one sort or another. She's here at Jill's for the weekend before heading to California, where Eugene Kessler, an old friend of her brother's who disappeared years ago, has resurfaced to publish a magazine in Menlo Park. Gretel has been hired as associate editor, and Jill is green with envy. At last.

“You'll have an expense account.” Lately, Jill gets a shimmery look whenever she talks about Gretel's future. You'd think she was the one who'd soon be returning people's manuscripts and fixing French-roast coffee. “You'll wear really short skirts.”

“I don't think so.” Although if she did they would all be black—her color.

They're carrying cups and toys into the kitchen, which is broiling-hot. There's a lasagna in the oven, hopefully enough now that Terry and her husband have been added to the dinner table.

“You'll meet somebody in a band the first week you're in California. A guitarist. No, a drummer. They're cuter and they don't have such big egos.”

“Dream on.” Gretel laughs, but all the same, she's feeling little pinpricks of hope.

By the time the salad is fixed, and the kids' hands washed, Terry and her husband, Tim, who works in the accounting department at the LoPaccas' bakery, have arrived.

“Oh, my God, Gretel, you look terrific.” Terry hugs Gretel as if they were once best friends, instead of acquaintances who might or might not smile when they passed each other on the street. “Jason's sister,” Terry informs her husband. “It still breaks my heart,” she tells Gretel. “Every time I think about what might have been.”

When Eddie comes in, his hair wet from the shower, he makes a show of greeting his guests, as though the overcrowded, stifling kitchen really was his castle.

“No lasagna for me,” Tim says when Jill is about to serve him. “Just salad.”

“You don't like lasagna?” Eddie asks.

“Let me put it this way,” Tim says. He has always been a fanatical Beatles fan, and refers to the group to prove any possible point. “I used to be Paul. Now I'm John.”

For some reason Gretel laughs out loud, then quickly covers her mouth with her hand.

Eddie stares at his brother-in-law. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“Eddie,” Jill warns as she serves Terry, then the kids.

“No, really. Is that supposed to mean something?”

“It means nothing,” Terry tells Eddie. “Why are you even listening to him?”

“Who's the walrus?” Tim goads his brother-in-law.

“Am I supposed to be Paul, and you're John because you're a superior being? Is that what you're saying?” Eddie asks Tim.

“Will you just shut up?” Jill says. “Maybe you're Ringo.”

“I don't think so.” Eddie grins. “No way.”

When he smiles, Gretel can see why Jill fell for him in the first place. He definitely has his appeal. Later, as Jill is putting the two youngest kids to bed, and Terry is clearing the table, Eddie comes up behind Gretel while she's washing the dishes.

“Did you ever think all you needed was a really great fuck?” he asks Gretel. He loves to do this, play with her, test her loyalty to Jill.

“You know what I'd really like?” Gretel whispers, her voice low and sweet.

Eddie puts his hands on her waist and moves closer.

“For you to do the pots.”

“Hey, baby, it's your loss,” Eddie tells her when she tosses him the sopping-wet sponge. “Suffer.”