Chapter 9
I end up grabbing my slate, planning on just pulling up a clip from my junior AIS final. Oo. I grab Camillo’s violin from the guestroom before tromping down the stairs.
Andrew and my zizi, and a bunch of little kids cram around to witness a tiny version of me in a long black dress, waving around a stick at an orchestra. About a minute in I’m declared an excellent conductor. I say thank you.
“And Andrew, you just have to hear this. It’s my brother that’s the real talent of the family. Milo, here.”
I smile, and, since he doesn’t take the proffered violin, I get up and arrange the thing so it sits properly on his collar. Then I look on adoringly.
“Sure, man, I’d love to hear you play.”
“Go on, Camillo. Your sister asked you.”
My brother grabs the thing without looking at any of us and walks clear across the meetinghall.
I see everyone’s heads turn until all are twisted to Milo, their backs so soft and dry after the dunked-in-summer-drippings day. He wipes his hair back and starts playing.
My chest hurts as I watch. Probably because I’m trying not to disturb him and the music with my breathing. It’s beautiful, and he finally looks less angry. I settle into the boy still next to me.
When it’s done, there’s a good silence. The kind you always want, as a conductor. The kind that’s full of silent magic, I liked to imagine, when I would stand there on the box and hold my arms up until they ached. Then the shouts start coming, and the spell is broken. I smile.
It’s nice and cool in my room. I start undressing, when Eleni comes in. She closes the door gently behind her.
“Hey. So…how are you?”
“Good. I’m tired, though. Did you have fun?”
“Oh, I had a great time. I think I found someone.”
I whip around from my dresser.
“Who? Where? How’d you do that?”
She bounces over, drawing a scrap of newspaper from under one breast. I take it and peel it open, fold by fold. It’s a little limp and smudgy from being tucked where it was all night, but I know which one he is. I know which one Eleni would pick.
There’s a sketch, just lines, so his box stands out whiter and brighter than the others, capturing a handsome young man. Square jaw, pleasing eyes, and nose and mouth. And I think something about the distance from feature to feature, or the combination of them or something, makes you believe the artist drew what he actually saw. Not like the poor boy in the next column whose chin is represented by a rather inattentive c.
“He’s lovely,” I say, handing the paper back. She holds it over a candle and examines it again, delighted.
“You didn’t read it.”
“I did,” glance it over.
She huffs and comes to pinch the fastening at the back of my dress. She then throws herself on my bed.
“He’s from Farmington. My mother already ran up to the base gate and called them. He has a phone right in his house. His maid answered it, can you believe that? It’s fate. She said he was out so she gave the phone to the mother, and she said that she thinks I’m perfect for her son. My father is down getting the boat ready to go get him now. They’re leaving tomorrow morning. Your aunt said I could put him in Milo’s room.”
“Oh.”
Well. I hope Camillo won’t be needing it any time soon. Probably won’t. And I suppose I’ll have to drag the toybox out of the crawlspace again.
“It’s already a done deal so he can’t stay in that guestroom. Honestly, it’s incredible anyone ever manages to keep a suitor on the island for more than a day. I’d rather camp out on the green than stay in that room.”
“Huh.” I wonder if I can make Milo drag it at least out to the middle of my room before he leaves. The thing was built by a grandfather of mine who used to carve out longboats. I currently use it as a doorstop for when people’s suitors are here.
Because people who are falling in love really love to talk about it, I’ve found. With my cousin Berto’s wife, I ended up living out of a snow shelter in the old graveyard for a whole week. I didn’t really mind, in the end, because I ended up passing Winter Survival Skills with a Great Proficient.
Thank you cousin Berto.
“So, what did you think of Andrew?” I gather up my nightgown and flop in the bed next to her.
“I like him. What do you think?” she giggles. I’m pretty sure she finds the whole me getting married thing hilarious.
I grin, surprising myself even, I guess, and say, “I like him, too.”
“I liked his boat.”
“Yeah, it was a nice boat.”
“Weird stairs.”
“Very weird stairs.”
“Was the crisp any good?”
“Oh, yeah, people liked it.”
“Good. Your salad was very pretty, too.”
“Thanks. I added the strawberries at the end.”
“So they didn’t get mushy and make everything soggy.”
“Exactly.”
“Did you meet those two new boys?”
“Hale and Lium? Yeah. Everyone was talking about them. Did you hear?”
“What?”
“The story is, they’re off of some pirate boat.”
“Did they jump ship?”
“Well they didn’t fall out of the sky, Crusa. You know, you were probably too in love to notice, but everyone was all upset at one point because the little boys were talking about how these two scary guys came running after them when Benito and Gino got hurt. They thought that the guys thought there was a fight going on over that stupid cow because of all the yelling. And our boys thought they were from Angie’s side and Angie’s thought they were from ours, so they all thought the new guys were going to go after them. They all say they would have fought them, but out of respect for zizi they were waiting for them to make the first move.”
Eleni and I both roll with laughter, and then tell each other to hush, they’ll hear.
“They were petrified. You should have seen their faces.” She sighs and flops onto her back, “Can you blame them, though? I mean, that one guy’s just plain scary, and that other one? He’s just massive. That one’s handsome, too, you have to admit. It’s too bad he’s so poor. Zizi says the poor age faster, and he probably won’t be so handsome in a few years, but I don’t think so. I think someone that handsome will make money.”
“If they stay here, they don’t really need money.”
“Nah, they won’t stay here. Everyone was saying they were definitely into something before coming here, so I bet they’ll lay low for just a little while. You see all those scars and tattoos? Zizi said they’ve come out of whatever it was better than they could have, so that’s why she’s allowing them into the house now.”
“Huh. And is there’s a tattoo lecture I missed out on?”
“There is. And a piracy one. You’re lucky you were too busy with your new husband to hear it, trust me.”
“What if I got a tattoo?” I say dreamily.
“Grandmothers, Crusa, don’t even joke. Zizi would kill you and I’d have to dig your grave myself.”
I kick her and she squeaks, so I laugh at her.
“You know you’d have to get stuck with needles over and over again, right?”
“Eh. Yeah, I don’t think I would like that. But what if it was something really pretty?”
“Crusa. Stop it.”
“Like a flower.”
“Crusa!” She smothers me with the pillow. I tear it off and whack her with it.
“Relax Len, I’m not going to get a tattoo. I was just wondering what it would be like.”
“It would be exactly like chopping off your own head with a shovel. Like I just told you.”
I roll my eyes. My cousin, always so vivid. “You know Andrew wants to build our own house?”
“A new one?”
“Yup.” Eleni and I spend a good long while picking out the perfect hypothetica
l location for my new hypothetical house. We even pull out some of my chalk and sketch a rough blueprint on the wall. It’s fine because the chalk is just for backup, in case my real slate dies. Plus we draw it with the yellow, even working the sticks down to stubs, because in the program yellow is reserved for catastrophic error, and it’s obvious if you’ve made one of those, so I don’t really get the point of color-coding it. Eleni insists on a corner room for visitors, namely herself, with a wraparound balcony. I say I like balconies so sure.
“Crusa, what are you doing?”
“I’m erasing this.”
“Why?”
“It’s completely not to scale, Eleni. Look at it. You drew the cornstalks higher than the second story windows.”
“So?”
“So, I’d rather not assume Andrew and I are building our new house on a radioactive plot of land.”
“Can it really do that?”
“I don’t know. It might be nice, though, if it did. We could have corn-trees instead of corn-stalks. They wouldn’t get flat and soggy after a rainstorm, and you could grow more corn in less space because it would stand up better on its own, you know? Do you think if the stalks were huge, then the ears would be too? Then you could eat the kernels like apples or nectarines or something, if the ears didn’t fall on your head like coconuts. I bet they would make a nice pie. I don’t know if they’d be sweet, though. Being so huge and all.”
I shrug and draw in a mutant ear of corn by the house.
“That’s why I love you, Crusy. You always have such good ideas.”
“Thanks.”
Later that night, I lay in bed with my cousin and listen to the kgowa-kgowa-kgowa-kgowa of the peep frogs. My day unlaces through my brain. I hit a few knots, definitely. One bad one even makes me positively squirm. My only solace is that it’s made up of thoughts I never spoke out loud. Thank goodness. Because when I first saw that obnoxious man Lium? After the whole thing with the little boys. I have to admit that my first instinct was to be rather suspicious that he was an angel. An angel sent to watch over Benito and Gino, obviously. He even brought something to wipe up Benito’s blood. Yes, I really thought he might be one.
Then he smiled and called me beautiful.