Bridget nodded.
“Well, nice to meet you, Gilda,” the woman who was her grandmother called after her.
“The restaurant was really fabulous. I thought we’d just go to a neighborhood place, but he’d made a reservation at Josephine. Can you believe that? I was worried I was underdressed, but he said I looked perfect. Those were his exact words. ‘You look perfect.’ Can you believe that? I spent the longest time trying to figure out what to order so I wouldn’t end up with béarnaise sauce down the front of my blouse or salad in my teeth.”
Christina laughed so heartily it was as though no one had ever soldiered through that predicament before her.
Carmen looked down at her whole-wheat toaster waffle. The four middle squares contained full pools of syrup and the rest of it lay dry. The things her mother was saying were things Carmen should have been saying. She couldn’t help noting the irony with a certain amount of sourness. Carmen wasn’t saying them because her mother was saying them and saying them and saying them and not shutting up.
Christina widened her eyes dramatically. “Carmen, I wish you could have tasted the dessert. It was to die for. It was called tarte tatin.”
The overeager French accent with the uptilting snap of Puerto Rican just under the surface made Carmen unable to be as mad at her mother as she wanted to be.
“Yum,” Carmen said dully.
“He was so sweet. Such a gentleman. He opened the car door for me. When was the last time that happened?” Christina looked at her like she really wanted an answer.
Carmen shrugged. “Never?”
“He graduated from Stanford University. Did I say that already?”
Carmen nodded. Christina looked so pathetically proud, Carmen couldn’t help thinking shamefully about her own pride the night before when she’d said her dad went to Williams.
Carefully Carmen tipped the syrup bottle, attempting to fill each individual square of her waffle with its own small puddle. “What’s his name again?”
“David.” Christina seemed to enjoy the taste of it even more than tarte tatin.
“How old did you say he was?”
Christina depuffed a little. “He’s thirty-four. That’s only four years’ difference, though.”
“More like five,” Carmen said. It was a mean thing to say masquerading as a true thing to say. Her mother was turning thirty-nine in less than a month. “But he does sound really nice,” Carmen added to make up for it.
That was all her mother needed. “He is. He really is.” And she proceeded to rattle on about just how nice he was straight through two additional waffles. About how he had brought her coffee a few times at the office and helped her when her computer froze.
“He’s a third-year associate,” Christina blabbed informatively, as if Carmen would care at all. “He didn’t go to law school right after college. He worked for a newspaper in Memphis. I think that’s what makes him so interesting.” Christina said the word like it had only ever deserved to be used this one time.
Carmen poured herself a glass of milk. She hadn’t had a glass of milk since she was about thirteen. She wondered, with a scientific sort of curiosity, how long her mother would keep talking if she herself didn’t say anything at all?
“He’s always been so friendly and helpful, but I never imagined he would want to take me out on a date. Never!” Christina took the opportunity to circle the small room a few times. Her church shoes clack clacked on the peach linoleum.
“I know it’s probably not a good idea to date somebody from the office, but on the other hand, we don’t work in the same department or even on the same floor.” She waved her arm, grandly allowing the concept of an office romance before she’d even finished disallowing it.
“I mean, last night, watching you go, I felt so old and lonely thinking about how it would be with you gone next year. And then this! The timing is straight from God, I think.”
Carmen made herself not mention that God had a lot of better things to think about.
“I shouldn’t leap ahead. What if it goes nowhere? What if he isn’t looking for a real relationship? What if he’s in a different place than me?”
First off, Carmen hated when her mother used the word place like some great metaphysician. And second, since when was her mother looking for a relationship?
She hadn’t gone out with a guy since Carmen was in fourth grade.
Not answering didn’t do the job. Even going to the bathroom didn’t stem her mother’s flow of words. Carmen wondered whether actually leaving the apartment would make her mother stop talking.
At last Carmen consulted the clock. It was never on her side. For the first time in Carmen-Christina history it said they were not late for church. “We oughta get going,” Carmen suggested anyway.
Her mother nodded and followed her companionably from the kitchen, talking all the while. She didn’t take a break until they pulled into the church parking lot.
“Tell me, nena,” Christina asked as she dropped her keys into her purse and steered Carmen into church. “How was your evening?”
Lenny,
I know you’re just a few blocks away and I’ll be shoving the Pants into your arms in about five (okay, ten) minutes when I pick you up (okay, late) for work. But it made me a little sad not to be writing a letter from a faraway place, and then I thought, well, hey, just because we can e-mail and call and see each other all we want this summer doesn’t meant I can’t write a letter from a near place, does it? That’s not exactly a felony, is it?
So, Lenny, I know it’s not like last summer. You don’t miss me, because you saw me several times yesterday and then I blabbed you into a near coma last night. But even though you are about to see me and possibly yell at me for being late (again), I can still take this opportunity to tell you that you are the best, greatest, awesomest Lenny ever and I love you a lot. So go crazy in these Pants, chickadee.
Carmen Electrifying
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
—Winston Churchill
Lena didn’t go crazy in the Pants. The first day she left them at home in her room on top of the pile of letters from Kostos. The second day she wore them to work, got reprimanded by Mrs. Duffers, and had to take them off before lunchtime. She left them on the chair in the back of the store, where a customer saw them and tried to buy them.
Her heart was still pounding from the horror of that experience when Effie strode in. It was closing time, and Lena hadn’t finished cleaning out the fitting rooms.
“So guess who called today?” Effie demanded.
“Who?” Lena hated Effie’s guessing games, especially when she was tired.
“Guess.” Effie followed her back to the fitting rooms.
“No!”
Effie looked sour. “Fine. Fine.” She cast her eyes upward for patience. “Grandma. I talked to her.”
“You did?” Lena stopped picking up clothes. “How is she? How’s Bapi?”
“They’re great. They had a big anniversary party in the old restaurant last month. The whole town was there.”
“Ohhh.” Lena could picture it. Her mind drifted slowly to Fira, to the view of the Caldera from the terrace of the restaurant her grandparents owned. “That’s so nice,” she said distantly. Picturing the harbor of course made her picture Kostos. Picturing Kostos gave her that zoomy feeling in the bottom of her abdomen.
Lena cleared her throat and resumed gathering clothing. “How are the Dounases?” she asked evenly.
“Good.”
“Yeah?” Lena didn’t want to ask about Kostos outright.
“Sure. Grandma said Kostos brought a girl from Ammoudi to the party.”
Lena tried very hard not to move her face one single millimeter.
Effie’s eyebrows went down. “Lenny, why do you look like that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like … that.” Effie pointed at Lena’s tight, miserabl
e face. “You’re the one who broke up with him.”
“I know.” Lena bumped her foot spasmodically against the mirror. “Your point being …?” Lena needed to play stupid. Otherwise she might cry.
“I don’t get you. If you feel this way, why did you break up with him?” Effie asked, not seeming to care that they weren’t having the same conversation.
“Feel what way? How do you know I feel any which way?” Lena asked. She began sorting pants by size.
Effie shook her head, as though Lena were a hopeless and pitiable moron. “If it makes you feel better, Grandma doesn’t like the girl he brought.”
Lena pretended very hard not to care about that.
“And she also said, and I quote, ‘Dis girl is not nearly as boootiful as Lena.’”
Lena kept up with the pretending.
“Does that make it any better?” Effie wheedled.
Lena shrugged, impassive.
“So I said, ‘Grandma, that girl probably didn’t break up with him for no reason.’”
Lena threw the clothes down. “Forget it,” she stated. “You are not getting a ride to work.”
“Lenny! You promised!” Effie said. “Besides, what do you care? I thought you said you didn’t care.”
Effie always won. Always.
“I don’t care,” Lena mumbled babyishly.
“So drive me to work like you promised.” Effie was a genius at turning a favor into an obligation.
The sky had turned so dark Lena couldn’t believe it wasn’t nighttime. Cradling the Pants in one arm, she locked the front door and pulled down the gate. Outside, heavy, warm splashes of rain landed in her hair and dripped down her forehead. Effie ran to the car and Lena walked, protecting the Pants under her shirt. She liked rain.
The Olive Vine was less than two miles from the shop. Effie bounded into the restaurant in a couple of giant strides.
Lena drove on. The rain drummed and the windshield wipers squeaked. She liked being alone at the wheel when nobody was expecting her anyplace. Sometime in the last few months she had passed into the stage of driving where she didn’t have to think consciously about how to do it anymore. She didn’t have to think Okay, blinker. Brakes. Turn. She just drove. It left her mind free to wander.
She found herself driving past the mailbox where she used to mail the old letters, before she had stopped caring so much. Or before she had started pretending she had stopped caring so much.
She still held the Pants close to her body. She’d worn them when she and Kostos had kissed so exquisitely at the very end of the summer. She took a deep breath. Maybe a few of his cells still clung to them. Maybe.
Having the Pants with her now on this rainy night, far away from Kostos, gave her a deep, melancholic feeling of loss.
So that was how it was. Kostos had a new girlfriend. Lena had a mean sister and a job selling beige clothing.
Who, exactly, had come out on top?
At first Bridget thought she remembered nothing from Burgess. Then, as she ambled around town, a few little things jogged her memory. One was the peanut machine outside the hard-ware store. Even as a six-year-old, she’d thought it was weird and old-fashioned that the gumball machine dispensed peanuts. And yet, here it still was. She strongly suspected the peanuts were as old as she was.
Another thing was the rusted black cannon from the Civil War, in the grassy patch in front of the courthouse.
A pyramid of stuck-together cannonballs stood by its base. She remembered clowning around—sticking her head in it as though she were a cartoon character and making Perry laugh.
She also remembered climbing on the high wall next to the bank, and her grandmother shrieking at her to get down. She’d been such a monkey as a little kid. She’d been the best tree climber in her neighborhood, even among boys and older kids. She’d felt so light and rubbery then compared to now.
Bridget let her feet guide her, because they seemed to have a better memory than her head. She walked farther along Market Street until the village stretched out a little. There were hydrangeas in bloom in front of every house—big purple balls.
Past the Methodist church, a wide field stretched out, green and lush. It went along for three blocks, bordered by giant, ancient oak trees and pretty iron benches. At the far end she noticed soccer goals marking a beautiful green regulation field. She felt breathless as she looked at it. There was a rumbling, creaking feeling in her brain as it searched its many dusty, unconsidered files.
She sat on a bench and closed her eyes. She remembered running and she remembered a soccer ball, and then she started remembering many, many things all in a rush. She remembered her grandfather teaching her and Perry how to kick the ball when they were only three or four. Perry had hated it and tripped over his feet, but Bridget had loved it. She remembered holding her hands behind her back to remind herself that soccer was only kicking.
She remembered dribbling past her grandpa and him shouting proudly after her, “Folks, I think we have a natural!” even though there was nobody else on the field.
The summer she was five, her grandpa had stuck her in the Limestone County Boys’ League, amid loud protests from the other parents. Bridget remembered forcing her grandmother to cut her hair short, like a boy’s, and she also remembered her mother crying when she saw Bridget at the end of the summer. Bridget led the Burgess Honey Bees to a trophy for two summers straight, and the parents stopped complaining.
God, she had forgotten about that team until this very minute. And it had been so meaningful to her then—the coincidence of her nickname and the team name. “She’s the Bee-all! She’s the Bee’s Knees!” her grandpa used to shout from the sidelines, thinking he was so funny. Her father had never cared for sports, but her grandpa had adored them.
Had her father known when her grandfather died?
She let her mind drift. She’d never stopped to think about how soccer had started for her, but this was it. This was the beginning.
There was a strange thing about her memory, and she had noticed it before this. When she was eleven and the terrible stuff had happened, her brain had sort of erased itself. Everything from that time or before she’d either forgotten completely or remembered as though it had happened to somebody else. They’d made her see a psychiatrist for a few months after her mom died, and he had said her brain had formed scar tissue. She had never liked that image much.
She sat there, resting her scarred head on the back of the bench for a long time, until, as though in a dream, she heard footsteps and shouts and the beloved thunk of a foot against a soccer ball. She opened her eyes and watched, startled, as a group of boys took over the field. There were fifteen or twenty of them, and they appeared to be around her age, maybe a little older.
When one of the boys passed close by, she couldn’t help flagging him down. “Are you part of a team?” she asked.
He nodded. “The Burgess Mavericks,” he said.
“Is there still a summer league?” she asked.
“Sure.” He was holding a soccer ball. Though Bridget hadn’t touched one in more than nine months, she looked at his with longing.
“You have practice now?” she asked.
“Tuesday and Thursday evenings,” he answered in his twangy Alabama way. People seemed to talk with more syllables down here.
She remembered loving that accent, listening to it magically insert itself into her own vowels and consonants by the middle of August. And then she’d go back up north, her friends would giggle at the way she talked, and by October it would be gone again.
The guy kept turning his head to look at the drills starting up on the field. He was polite, but he didn’t want to talk to her anymore.
“And you play games on Saturday?” she asked.
“Yep. All summer long. I gotta go.”
“Okay. Thanks,” she said after him as he joined his friends on the field.
It was still strange to her how she related to the world now. A year ago, this same boy
would’ve taken a look at her hair and been happy to tell her anything she wanted to know. He would have been show-offy and loud so his friends would see that he was talking to her.
Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen Bridget had attracted more wolf whistles and phone numbers and corny pickup lines than she could count. It wasn’t because she was—had been—beautiful. Lena was beautiful, truly and uniquely, and boys mostly looked scared when she passed by. It was that Bridget had been thin and striking and outgoing, and, of course, she’d had the hair.
She watched them kick around and run a few drills. When they started a scrimmage, she walked a bit closer to the sidelines. Already some girls—probably girlfriends—had appeared. As she studied the faces of the players, a few of them transformed from strangers into long-ago teammates before her eyes. Amazing. There was a ball hog she definitely recognized, what was his name? Corey Something-or-other. And the midfielder with red hair. He looked and played almost exactly the same as when he was seven. She was sure she recognized one of the goalies, and then there was … Oh my. Bridget clasped her hands to her chest. The name jumped right into her head: Billy Kline. Oh, my God! He had been the second-best player on the team and her best pal off the field. She remembered him distinctly now. She probably even had a letter or two from him stuffed away somewhere back home.
Unbelievable.
He had grown up very nicely, she couldn’t help noting. He was both wiry and muscular, her favorite type. His hair was darker and wavier, but his face was the same. She’d loved his face when she was a little kid.
She watched him with a pounding heart and a scrambling mind. His house was down close to the river. They’d spent hours and hours collecting rocks together, certain that every one was an ancient arrowhead and that they could sell it for big bucks to the Indian Mound Museum in downtown Florence.
Billy threw the ball in from the sidelines. She moved quickly out of his way. He looked at her and through her.
She wasn’t worried about him recognizing her. Back then she’d been skinny, yellow-haired, and full of joy. Now she was heavy, muddy-haired, and full of care. She might as well be a different person.