disdain. God, this sucked, she thought. Why am I tanning? By the time we get back home it will be time to go back to her summer job for just long enough before summer ended and school started to completely lose the glow. Delcie was dark skinned to begin with. Dark eyed, dark haired, olive skinned, her heritage was half Mediterranean, with a Greek father and an Irish mother. Mom contributed some telltale freckles and a Celtic nose and eyes, but other than that, she could almost pass for Indian. When she was younger, she’d hated this and wanted to look like all the Barbies she collected – blonde, tall, thin, statuesque. She had to settle for petite, curvy and dark, but it seemed to work. She was aware of the fact by the 8th grade that she could date any boy she wanted. By age 16 she was modeling for a large department store chain.
Her real name, Dulcinea, was banned from household use. When asked what her real name was the response was almost always a sarcastic “Isn’t Delcie real enough for you?”, unless it was a cute guy whom she had yet to date. Then it was “Just Delcie. My parents were hippies”. Actually her parents were professors, and she was forced to read “Don Quixote” by her mother one summer simply so she would get the significance of her name. She skimmed, searched for synopses on the web and kept the book long enough so that she could reasonably have been expected to finish it. She was named for a woman who didn’t even exist, not even within the fiction of the book, any more than the windmills Quixote tilted at.
She was an only child, and one of privilege. Her folks did OK as college profs, but their real wealth came from her mother’s side. Her maternal grandfather had been a Glidden, one of the inventors of barb wire. There was an awful lot of barb wire in the world, she’d learned as a child. Privilege was fine with her. Having no siblings was, too, after the first 5 years or so of her life where she began to think that her childhood would consist of playing tea with bored Hispanic nannies. Now she had close friends, but they were all “summering” at Lake Geneva with their privileged families on huge three storied yachts, while her desperately earthy parents insisted on this godforsaken cabin on this godforsaken lake in the middle of the godforsaken woods. She threatened not to come at all this year, and was willing to follow through on it, but was trapped, to some degree, in her old annual lie – which she was “summering” at some chic lakeside community. Having told this to all her friends, she had to go somewhere, so this was it.
Delcie wore Shannon’s class ring. Shannon wasn’t so much a boyfriend as he was a good career decision. He was, as the captain of her school’s lacrosse team, class president, and one of the cutest guys around, the best political choice for the role of Delcie’s boyfriend, although a bit dull and self-centered, a position she filled with as much scrutiny and research as a corporation hiring a six figure CEO.
But here she was, trapped for two weeks watching her parents attempt to fly fish, or make homemade bread or some such crap. God, what a horrid summer, she thought.
In Town
“Delcie, you know you won’t use that here. Why can’t you just wait until we get home to buy makeup?”
Delcie looked disgustedly at her mother. She loved her but she was really getting on her nerves. She’d wanted to come to town by herself, but her mother (trying to run interference on Delcie with the “townies” as she called them; the local boys, far beneath “their station.” It was crappy makeup anyway, Delcie thought.
She really hated coming to town. It reminded her of what a hick, hillbilly little armpit this place was. She missed her mall. She missed her little Asian fingernail salon, even though it was kind of divey. Best French polish in town.
She missed Shannon, sort of. She missed the sex, for sure. He was going to get one hell of a coming home present when this annual nightmare in the woods was over. And she kind of missed his warmth, and smile. It wasn’t love, but it would do. There was actually a boy in Shannon’s chemistry class that was way cuter, but he was a not a jock, and she had to think of appearances.
“I’m just getting some eyeliner, Mom.” She said with a light salt of sarcasm. Five dollars, already. You’ll survive, she thought. They wandered the hopelessly dusty and grey aisles of the store and eventually went through checkout where some dim little towny with no smile ritually checked them out, never once making eye contact. When they left, Delcie made a point of saying “Thank you!” as loudly and sarcastically as she could to the checkout lady. But to her, Delcie no longer even existed, and perhaps hadn’t in the first place. She was checking out the next customer, a towny mother with two brats in a cart, and gave them the same exact degree of warmth as they had with Delcie and her mom. Screw her, Delcie thought. Then chuckled to herself. “Probably exactly what she needs!”
“I want to stop by the library for a few minutes, Delse.” Her mother said.
“Do I HAVE to go?!” she said with great drama.
“No, that’s fine. Just don’t wander off. I’ll meet you at the car in 30 minutes.
Wander off? Where? Into the woods? Believe me, if there were somewhere to wander off to, she’d be headed there already.
It was sunny, and she thought about the valuable tan time she was losing, and unconsciously looked at her flat little tummy to check for tan. Fading, she thought. Then she remembered being out of baby oil, which she lathered on herself to tan. She turned on her heels and headed back to the small department store where the bored towny stared blankly out the front window as she entered. She combed the sad little baby products aisle, finally finding a small dusty bottle of baby oil. She picked it up as if it were contaminated with radiation, holding it gingerly in her thumb and forefinger. Yeeww. Don’t they ever clean here?
A boy stood at the end of the aisle as she turned to head to the front of the store. He had apparently entered the aisle after she had, although she hadn’t heard him. A little startled at first, she walked towards him, slowly, noticing as she got closer that he was kind of cute. Scruffy kind of grunge hair, tawny freckled skin. The boy turned and smiled at her.
”Hey!” he said in a low voice, as their eyes met.
“Hey!’ she said back in a semi-cute voice. Not too “come on-y” but just a note of enticement in case he turned out not to be some local hoodlum.
The boy smiled, broke the gaze and looked back at the box he held in his hands.
Ok. She thought. I won’t pursue. He’s not that cute.
“Hey, check this out.” The boy said as she passed. She was mildly surprised at the surprising familiarity, but turned anyway, smiling still. The boy stood holding his hands out towards her, still smiling. She was surprised to find that he held the bud of a single white rose in his hands; it’s petals as delicate and fresh as if it had just been pulled from its stem. There were even droplets of moisture on it. It was as if he had pulled off some small sleight of hand.
“That’s so pretty! Where’d you find it?” she said with enough flirty in her voice to keep him on the line, but not too much.
“It’s for you.” Was all he said, holding it forth again. She took it from his hands, which were surprisingly wet as well. Damp, as if he had just come from a dew strewn morning garden. It was real, and very pretty.
“Thank you!” she said. “My name’s Delcie.” He looked down, now embarrassed at his forwardness, she guessed. How cute! She thought.
“Maybe I’ll see you around?” he glanced up through bangs, piercing brown eyes fixing hers.
“Yeah, for sure!” she said as the boy lowered his head and walked past her. He’s so cute, and really shy! She thought. Not faking it at all. She took her dirty bottle of oil and newly received flower to the checkout and put them on the moving belt as the robotic grey faced woman checker ran the belt towards her, already punching in some keys. This time she stopped, though. Hesitating first, then looking up at Delcie.
“Did you find this in the aisle?” she asked with a wrinkled frown on her face. Delcie shot her back a nasty look before looking down at her purchases. The dusty bottle of baby oil sat next to a dusty, dead, greyish dried
rose.
Uncle Jay
Tanner was always surprised to see his uncle. Not because of any infrequency of visits, but by how much his father and Uncle Jay looked so different. His father was tall and thin. Rangy shoulders, like Tanner, but not much meat on them. Uncle Jay was nothing but meat. Hugging him was like hugging a 90-gallon oil drum. It wasn’t fat, either. His dad had told him that Uncle Jay had been second team all-State in football in high school and had a couple of scholarships to play center on some small state schools. He’d opted for a bigger school, one with a good medical school. His dad had become happily settled into a very middle class occupation, but Jay, on sheer smarts alone, and a couple of educational scholarships, had graduated second in his class undergraduate, first in medical school. He did his residency at some flea-bitten inner city hospital, earning him some real street cred as well as professional esteem once he came home to their town’s hospital. Refusing to specialize in something high paying, he stayed in general practice, in true Uncle Jay altruistic form, but still made a pretty good bit of money, mostly from books he’d written that were now used as texts in medical schools he could never have afforded to go to.
His dad and Jay had grown up near here. It was why they