“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.
“Hi. So this is where you live? It’s nice.”
“No it’s not.” I grimaced.
“I just meant,” he said, trying to recover, “that it’s nice to see you.” He paused, looking for courage, it seemed, in the scuffed tops of his sneakers. “I feel really bad about the other day. I shouldn’t have said, you know, what I said.”
“I’m sorry too. I was just in a really bad mood, I guess.”
“Good, then,” he said. “Great. Do you want to come over to my house? I could give you another piano lesson?”
I felt ill, knowing what had to be done. “That’s really nice of you,” I said, my voice hardening with each syllable, growing a shell. “But I don’t think so.”
I meant to be kind. I meant to explain things as gently and clearly as possible, but instead, I was an iceberg, my eyes hard and focused as I told Collin I didn’t like him, had never liked him, and didn’t want to see him again after that day.
As I saw it, I didn’t have a choice. Fawn would never accept Collin as boyfriend material, but even if he was completely cool and had had Fawn’s stamp of approval, I’d still be breaking up with him. Fawn was single now, and we’d be spending all our time together again, alone. I didn’t have time for a boyfriend.
Collin shriveled as I delivered the verdict. He hung his head and listed on the curb, kicking one shoe toe against the cement. It was a version of the kicked-puppy routine I had seen him enact over and over again with Tom, and I had a sudden flash of insight. Did Tom kick Collin because Tom was an asshole, or because Collin was begging to be kicked? Similarly, if Fawn didn’t exactly treat me like a queen, as Collin had said, maybe it was because she didn’t have to. I would go on catering to Fawn regardless, stroking her ego, attentive to her every whim. Fawn ordered me around, yes, but wasn’t I sort of asking for it?
Collin continued to kick the curb in an even rhythm. He wouldn’t look up. I felt a little bad for him, but also knew that if I gave in now, I would be condemned forever—that Collin and I would be puppies together, timid and loyal and stuck. I didn’t want to be a sweet boy’s sweet girlfriend. I wanted to be Fawn’s equal, the kind of girl who stood up for herself and took care of business, who cut guys loose when it was required.
“Look,” I said. “It’s not going to happen. Why don’t you just get out of here???
? As soon as the words left my mouth, I wanted to take them back again. But there was no going back.
And if Fawn was watching us, as she most certainly was. If Skinny Man peered at us from a hairline crack in his venetian blinds, or Timmy Romelin from the dusty window of his attic bedroom next door, or the crow, black and glassy, on the maypole clothesline. If the cicadas were watching through jeweled eyes from their billion and one adjacent stations on the maples above, they would have seen a boy standing as if his feet were hardening in cement. He had his right arm crossed behind his back, cradling his left elbow. The girl shoved her hands deep in the pockets of her cutoff denim shorts as if she might find something there, among the sand kernels and lint, to help her make sense of what she was doing, who she had become.
“I gotta go,” I finally said, and left Collin on the curb. He stayed rooted there, even after I went back in the house; after I’d huddled behind the door, allowing myself half a minute of crying, and then went down the hall to rinse my face. He was still there when I opened the door to the screened porch and began to tell Fawn an acceptable version of what had happened. And later that evening, as I looked out the front screen at a red-tinged and sinking sun, I thought I could still see Collin there by the mailbox, like a statue. Like something that didn’t belong in the yard, in my summer, my world even, but was there nonetheless, tender and solid. Perfectly, magically still.
GET OFF MY CLOUD
Raymond liked to drive at night. DJs had different voices then, less falsely chipper, more sultry and remote, seeming not to care if he or anyone at all was listening, and Raymond felt this as a kind of grace. The songs they played at night seemed to have very little to do with his life. Perry Como sang “Dream On, Little Dreamer.” Jonathan King sang “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon.” Mick Jagger wanted someone to get off his cloud, but there were no hidden messages for Raymond, no moments where the lyrics unpinned themselves and lodged in his thoughts as either questions or answers. He could just drive, drink cold coffee, and pop the Dexedrine he’d begged from Suzette for the trip. He felt his eyes glowing in the dark like discrete pieces of neon, and after checking his mirrors for lurking highway patrolmen, he decided he could risk another ten miles per hour.
While Raymond drove, Suzette snored lightly in the back, curled on her side on the bench seat, Raymond’s jacket pulled up to her chin. She slept through LA and the winding section of highway called the Grapevine and beyond; slept while Raymond guided the car past the city limits into downtown Bakersfield. He passed the high school with its gymnasium looking small and withered in predawn light, and the empty granary, and the hospital and the Foster’s Freeze and the Rodeo Café. He took a detour to drive by The Blackboard, where as a teenager he’d gone to see Bill Woods and Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, pioneers of that Bakersfield sound, which didn’t yet have a name or a reputation in Nashville, just a particular feeling, raw and twangy, that tugged at parts of you when you heard the songs. When he was eighteen and Suzette was just twelve, she’d wear him down until he’d promise to take her. Knowing Berna would object, he snuck her out. They walked up the dirt road in the dark and waited for his best friend, Billy Buell, to drive by in his truck and collect them.
At twelve, Suzette was leggy and bold. She’d say anything to anyone, and flirted openly with Raymond’s friends who thought it was funny until some line got crossed and it wasn’t anymore. He guessed they felt surprised—hijacked, even—by the way they could be attracted to her. She was just a kid, after all, and pretty, but not in the expected way, with big dark eyes that spooked you if you looked too long, and very fine dark hair she wore in a low ponytail with sideswept bangs. He remembered clearly the night he came out of the club to filch a cigarette, and found Billy and Suzette standing way too close out by the truck. When he walked up they separated, and he didn’t know until later that he’d just missed Suzette’s first kiss. That she’d been crying a moment before because Billy had pulled away the next moment, apologizing, ruining everything.
Maybe that was the beginning of Suzette’s trouble with boys—or maybe it had been brewing well before. Boys were on her radar long before Raymond could be prepared for it, mattering too much to her, doing damage, leaving scars. In the fifth grade, David Tilden accidentally, with his foot, sent a rubber kickball flying into Suzette’s face. The blow had thrown her backward into a chain-link fence and given her a bruise she wore with pride for a week. Unfortunately, the crush she had on David after that day was slower to fade. She made it a point to sidle near him in the lunch line, at recess. When they’d take a test, she’d wait until David was finished to walk her paper to the teacher; that way, their answers and even their penciled names would rub together, creating, what, a kind of voodoo that would carry over to more satisfying contact? But David had ignored her. The more desperate Suzette grew, the more he retreated, passing her unopened love notes on to his friends, who’d howl with laughter. Raymond heard all about this on bus rides home from school, at the kitchen table where she’d tear crusts off her bread and push green beans around with her fork, too miserable to eat.
“Can’t you just talk to him?” Suzette wanted to know.
“What would I say?”
“I don’t know, that I’m really nice?”
“It doesn’t work that way, Suzy. I can’t make him like you if he doesn’t.”
Suzette had left the table crying. Up in her room, she cried some more and then wrote a long letter to David that she had no choice but to rip into pieces. At bedtime, she showed up at Raymond’s door wanting to be let in.
“Aren’t you getting a little old for this?” he asked. “You should sleep in your own bed.”
Raymond was worried that they were both getting a little too old to sleep together, but looking into her small, tearstained face dissolved any willpower he had. He couldn’t make David like her, it was true, but he could pet her hair and rock her back and forth with his body until she fell asleep. He could go to sleep himself to the smell of her shampoo, and her low, regular breathing, feeling awful for her and necessary too. Feeling like a brother loved without question, loved all the way through.
This particular drama had been revised and revisited more times than Raymond could count, accumulating with force until Suzette found Benny. He had never known what to make of Benny, even in high school when they’d wrestled together. They’d been in the same class, though the two had run in different circles. At the time, Benny had been a clean enough kid from an Armenian family that ran a grocery in town, but Raymond felt there was something about him that wasn’t quite right. Maybe it was the overbite that gave him an anxious, rabbity look when he opened his mouth, or the way he gnawed his fingernails down to the quick, drawing blood. Or maybe it wasn’t anything he did, just something that was in the eyes or not there—something important missing from the equation.
Benny and Raymond had both graduated before Suzette entered high school, and as far as Raymond knew, Benny and Suzette had never said a word to each other before she ran into him randomly at a dog track in Reno in 1957. She was nineteen then and had been living on her own for a few years, or with various boyfriends she followed around the state. That was how she got to Reno. When she found Benny, she latched onto him immediately, forgetting about the guy who’d been supporting her for six months, and Benny seemed to latch right back, believing it was fate that had drawn them together, two Bakersfield kids that had grown up just a few miles from each other. It probably was fate, Raymond thought later, but not the good kind.
When Suzette hooked up with him, Benny was working the kennels—shoveling pens, feeding the dogs, bathing them as he chattered away in a soft and dreamy voice that must have reminded Suzette of the way Earl was with animals. It did Raymond, but instead of reassuring him, the similarity set the hairs on the back of his neck quivering. True to form, Suzette wasn’t in touch with Raymond for the first few months after she and Benny had found one another. By the time she did call and agree to Raymond’s suggestion
that he drive out to visit them for a day or two, Suzette was already nearly five months pregnant. She greeted him at the door of the apartment she shared with Benny, dressed for work in a white blouse and short black skirt. A black half-apron was tied snugly over the knuckle of her belly.
“Well?” she said. He’d been standing there with his mouth open. “Are you coming in or what?”
He was shocked to find her pregnant, of course, but more than this, she just didn’t look good. Her skin was sallow, her hair pulled into a brittle ponytail that looked like it might come off in her hands. And she was so thin that the curve of the baby she carried looked hard and unforgiving, like a bowling ball or an enormous unripe apple. “Oh, honey. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What good would it have done? Besides, you know now.”
They went inside and sat in the kitchen, where Suzette still had half a cigarette burning in an ashtray next to an open window. “I’ve got twenty minutes, but Benny should be home soon. He’ll keep you company.”
“Are you taking care of yourself? How are you feeling?”
“Tired.” She ran a hand over her blunt bangs, smoothing them. “Fat. I’m worried they’re going to fire me soon. The club likes their girls sexy, and I’m definitely not that these days. Although my boobs are bigger.” She plucked an invisible filament of tobacco off her tongue. “That’s one plus, I guess.”
“Did you guys plan this?” Raymond asked. “I mean, I don’t remember you saying you wanted kids anytime soon.”
“Do you plan everything that happens to you, Ray? Maybe you do,” she said, stabbing her spent butt into the nearly full ashtray. “But surprises aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Are you trying to say you don’t think I can do this, that I shouldn’t be a mother?”
“Of course not,” he said, lying outright, hoping she wouldn’t see it in his face—but maybe she already had. Maybe it had been obvious when she opened the door, the disappointment and misgiving he felt—the certainty that nothing good could surface at the end of this particular story. Suzette was only nineteen and could barely take care of herself, let alone a baby. And the idea of Benny as a father was nothing short of ridiculous. What had they been thinking?