The Beresfords (10 page)

My face heated with mixed pleasure and dismay at this left-handed compliment. I had watched every one of Tracy
Caulkins
’ races during last year’s Olympics. Dismay won out when Jonathan said, “Well, Frannie never can get the timing down on breaststroke, but otherwise she isn’t bad. Or she won’t be, once she grows into all her limbs.” Grew into my limbs! I knew I was gawky and I knew everyone knew I was gawky, but it made me feel like a downright sideshow of
gangliness
to hear Jonathan say it. Did even he think I was so awkward?

“And I can brag about Frannie,” he went on (if that was bragging, you could just shoot me right there), “because I’m the one who taught her to swim.”

Caroline Grant turned a wondering face to him. “You did?”

“I did. At our cabin. The summer after she came to us. She was—what—six? Nearly seven?”

I remembered the day well.

We pulled up at the cabin, and the first thing my cousins did after the four-hour drive was pile over me to get out of the station wagon and take off for the creek, racing each other and hollering. Only Jonathan paused and turned back to where I was still belted in the way back, the air of the open door chilling my face and neck where sweat had made my hair stick.

“You coming, Frannie?”

I looked to my aunt Marie, fanning herself as she swung her legs out of the car. “That drive gets longer every time,” she sighed.

The tailgate swung open and Aunt Terri peered in at me. “What are you doing just sitting there, Frannie? Look at all this stuff that needs carried in, and there you sit with the cooler on your lap. You’re going to make the ice melt.”

Tom was the one who stuck me with it as we pulled out of the driveway hours before. He needed more leg room, he said, and all us girls had short legs, so one cooler wouldn’t make a
difference. But Rachel wouldn’t have it by her feet, and neither would Julie, who already felt oppressed by the mountain of sleeping bags. Which left my lap.

Guiltily I tore the Igloo from my sweaty legs and tried to spring up, banging my head on the wagon roof. I didn’t have to look at Aunt Terri to know she was rolling her eyes, a lecture on clumsiness building like thunderheads on the horizon. But then I heard Jonathan again: “C’mon, Frannie. I’ll show you the Waterhole.” Before my aunt’s storm could break over me, I dashed to catch up with my cousin.

The Waterhole was exactly that: a bend in the green, cool creek where water piled up behind rocks. No bigger than a Doughboy pool, but murky and opaque in the shade of the trees. Tom appeared from nowhere, jumping from an overhanging limb and curling in a cannonball. “Bombs away!” The resulting splash spattered the rest of us, and Rachel and Julie leapt in to climb their older brother’s shoulders and dunk him again when he surfaced.

Jonathan laughed and started peeling off his shirt. Soon all my cousins were treading water, shrieking and splashing. Tom would gulp mouthfuls of the green water and spit it in a stream at his sisters. “Ooh!” protested Rachel, “You’re sucking up amoebas!” I didn’t know what amoebas were then, but I didn’t ask. Then Tom and Jonathan skimmed their arms over the surface, tossing up walls of drops. The girls kicked at them and fought back. When Rachel and Julie and Tom ganged up on Jonathan, driving him toward the shore, he laughed up at me. “What are you waiting for? Help me, Frannie! I’m your favorite cousin!”

He was. I had to help him. Without even kicking off my shoes, I floundered in. The
creekbed
was a mixture of loose silt and slippery rocks across which I skated and lurched before a sudden increase in depth had me stepping off my mossy rock into nothingness. No foothold anywhere. The Waterhole swallowed me as I sank, my hair fanning across the surface like flotsam from a shipwreck. The cold water made me gasp and swallow a lungful of it. My wheeling feet kicked something—someone—my hands grasped hair—and then a hand clutched my upper arm and hauled me out.

“What were you doing, Frannie?” I heard Jonathan say accusingly over my undignified coughs and water belches when I lay on the bank again.

“Kicking
me
, that’s what,” said Julie.

“And that was
my
hair you pulled,” put in Rachel.

“Were you putting on a show,” persisted Jonathan, “or do you really not know how to swim?”

“Not know how to
swim
?” the girls echoed, incredulous. This was that period when much time was spent cataloguing my deficiencies. But worse than having my cousins think me ignorant was having Jonathan think I was playing for attention. Pretending to drown to make them notice me. No way—better the shame than the misunderstanding. I confessed my lapse.

This new revelation sent Tom and Rachel and Julie into another round of contempt-tinged amazement, but it didn’t matter because the anger on Jonathan’s face evaporated. He grinned at me. “Well, if you’re gonna live in this family, you better learn. It’s easy. I’ll teach you. First thing, Frannie, you have to take off your shoes.”

An hour later, hungry and bored by my ineptitude, Tom and the girls headed back to the cabin. I thought Jonathan would want to go too, but he insisted on one more try.

“Stop thrashing.”

“Don’t let go—okay?”

“Have I let go even once today? I won’t let go. Lay back. Chin up. Stomach up.” One hand pressed my resistant forehead back. The other pushed up under the small of my back. “Relax. You’ll see. You’ll float. You don’t weigh a thing.”

“Don’t let go, Jonathan—promise!”

“I won’t let go till you tell me to. Till you’re floating.”

His serene blue eyes met my panicking ones. I drew a hissing breath through my teeth. Taking courage from the solid anchor of his hand beneath me, I raised my chin slowly. Head back. Chin up. Stomach up.

I floated.

“…I’m a lot older than Frannie was,” I heard Caroline, when my mind returned from its far places.

“It doesn’t matter. The principles are the same.”

“No!” Her little fists were clenched. “I’m too embarrassed! I don’t want anyone to see me.”

“No one’s here,” Jonathan persisted. “There’s no one watching.”

I retreated a step from the window. I didn’t want to see any more, hear any more, anyway. Of course she would give in. His kindness was irresistible, even if her resistance were genuine. But I hated it. His kindness, her fakeness—everything! My eyes filled. It was like Caroline Grant was rewriting history. Taking a precious memory and cheapening it. Jonathan taught me to swim not because he was my closest, most special friend who loved me best in the world, but because he was a nice guy. He would teach anyone, even flirty college girls. Especially flirty college girls.

I drew a ragged breath.

“Okay,” she said finally. “But just while no one’s here. It has to be our secret. Promise?”

And the catch of amusement in Jonathan’s voice. “Promise.”

Clapping my hands to my ears, I spun on my heel and fled upstairs.

I was not a junior high youth group regular. In fact, I had never gone once. Tammy urged me to try it out when I finished sixth grade, but I resisted. “I’m almost older than the eighth graders,” I pointed out. “And I’m definitely taller than them. Besides I’m used to being around much older kids because of my cousins.”

“Those are all the reasons you could provide the junior high group with some leadership, Frannie,” Tammy replied,
unswayed
. “Plus it would be good for you. You could work on your shyness.” The last thing a shy person wants to do is work on her shyness. I ignored Tammy. Church for me consisted of sitting beside my aunts and uncles during the main service and staying far away from people my own age.

Tammy was more successful in recruiting me to help her occasionally with the little kids, and this summer she signed me up to scoop ice cream on the last day of Vacation Bible School. We set up the table on the patio separating the sanctuary from the church offices.

“This is like old times, isn’t it Frannie? Remember how you were in my group of sixth graders?”

Of course I remembered. By sixth grade, just about every other kid was allowed to drop out of Vacation Bible School, but Aunt Terri insisted I go. So it was me and Nelson Franco in his headgear and Tanya Nguyen and Minh
Tranh
who didn’t speak much English. “It turned out to be kind of fun,” I said to Tammy. “You were fun, and the other kids were nice.” Actually, Tanya and Minh were the closest thing I had to friends at the junior high. They admitted me to their clique of Vietnamese girls—all daughters of parents who had been doctors and lawyers and scholars in Vietnam, but who were now dry cleaners and restaurant workers in America—but our relationship was a school thing. After school and during vacations they were helping their families. VBS had been allowed because it was free day camp.

Tammy shook rainbow-colored sprinkles into a bowl. “It
was
fun. And getting to know you gave me the nerve to go over and talk to Jonathan in youth group.” She got a faraway expression, and some of the sprinkles pinged off the table.

“Uh-huh,” was all I said. This was dangerous territory.

“He’s one of a kind, your cousin.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How many spoons do we have?” I showed her and she reached for a second box of
plasticware
. “In fact, out of all the guys I met at Azusa Pacific, there wasn’t a single one like Jonathan.”

“No?”

She poured the spoons onto the table. “Not one. Jonathan Beresford is a good, good guy.”

I arranged the Hershey’s syrup bottles. First in a line and then in a square.

“He actually thinks about other people,” she went on. “And Jonathan never talks just to hear himself talk or to fill up air space.”

“No.”

She glanced at her watch and then went to sit in the shade of the A-frame sanctuary. “It’s too soon to get the ice cream out. Let’s take a break.”

“Did you like some of the other guys at Azusa?” I asked when we were leaning against the wall, legs tucked. I was hoping to divert her.

“They were okay. The thing is, Frannie—you know how Jesus says to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves? It’s like Jonathan’s innocent as a dove, but I don’t think he’s wise as a serpent. Know what I mean?”

I shook my head. “I think Jonathan is wise.”

“Wise, yes, but in that passage Jesus means something more like ‘cunning.’ He means he wants us to know what’s going on and how the world operates. He means, don’t take part in it—be ‘innocent’—but don’t be naïve. Get it?”

I did not get it. It must have been apparent from my face because Tammy got her determined look and plunged onward. “Take, for example, my family’s dating rules. They’re strict: group dates in high school, nothing past a hug or holding hands, parents have to be around, and so on. But Mom and Dad didn’t just give me the rules. They told me why. They told me about sex and marriage and how God feels about it all. They told me about what can happen if you put the cart before the horse and have sex outside of marriage. They told me where babies come from.”

“Jonathan knows where babies come from,” I said, totally confused. “In public school everyone takes Health in ninth grade. Julie said how embarrassing it was and how the teacher always called on the girls to identify boy parts and the boys to identify girl parts.”

“I know he knows where babies come from, Frannie,” Tammy said impatiently. “That wasn’t what I was getting at. I meant there are things he has no clue about. Like when it comes to how women think—and how women can
manipulate
guys—Jonathan is a babe in the woods.”

I swallowed a gasp. Surely Tammy didn’t know about me perched on the roof, listening to her tell Jonathan that God wanted him to marry her! So far I didn’t think she’d been one bit successful in manipulating my cousin, and he seemed to be taking everything with a grain of salt, which was a sure sign of cunning. Did she want to confess to me? Or did she know Jonathan sometimes confided in me, and she wanted to put out feelers?

“Oh, Frannie,” growled Tammy, thumping her leg with her fist, “don’t look so mystified! You know I’m talking about that Grant girl!”

O-o-o-o-o-oh! Suddenly it all made sense. This was not about Tammy. This was not a confession. It was an investigation. Tammy had dropped by unannounced on Monday and caught the tail end of one of Caroline Grant’s swimming lessons. Her arrival nearly coincided with Tom and Eric’s, and Tammy had left soon after, but I guess ten minutes had been long enough to arouse suspicions that Jonathan was not spending as much time praying over his marital destiny as might be hoped.

“How long have those so-called swim lessons been going on?”

“Uh—a week maybe. She’s kind of hopeless.”

“Of
course
she’s hopeless! She likes—she likes him having to hold her up. She likes grabbing him around the neck.”

There was no denying that. I made the same observation myself. But I had my own memories of grabbing him around the neck when he was trying to teach me and knew that some portion of it was genuine panic. “She doesn’t do it as much as she did the first day,” I mumbled. “I think you saw her struggling again because she wanted him to teach her breaststroke.”