Love & Darts

like all the decent children?”

  Finally, she is ready to play elsewhere and stop making all those irritating waves. Good. Her father is up. His friend is glowering but it doesn’t matter. She wants to go home. She wants to watch NASCAR and do the laundry. She wants a soybean burger and chips.

  Resistance dissipates. They leave.

  The pool is quiet again and my husband is snoring.

  It doesn’t matter. I hear the cicadas live their loud surges after seventeen years. I am watching the side of the mountain play dress-up with the clouds curling by, romantic-like. And we are finally alone again at the pool just like I wanted to be after an electrical storm in the summer.

  JEANIE

  Girls with something to prove aren’t the best to fall in love with. The best type of girl to fall for is one who has given up altogether—a girl who wants nothing and can’t remember if she ever cared anyway. The best type of girl, if you’re looking for girls, is a girl who can offer you only herself. You’ll know when you meet her. She’ll have hollow eyes and never enough to do. But not everyone listens, and sometimes a girl, a stubborn and beautiful girl, gets herself fallen in love with. And then I say, pitying, pompous, loving, kind: Why don’t you ever listen?

  “No. I don’t want to, and I won’t.” Her childhood bedroom door muffled Jeanie’s voice.

  Her mother held the locked doorknob and leaned heavily against the door, hoping pressure might help her reach her daughter. “But he’s come all this way, sweetheart. Don’t you want to talk to him? Hear him out?” There was only silence. After a minute her mother heard a page turn. Her daughter was reading and relaxed with no intention of speaking to anyone.

  Mrs. B. turned slowly in the hall trying to come up with the right words to offer this young man with his earnest intentions. She didn’t want to see his face again. No one had expected him from the way Jeanie made things sound, and yet here he was. He drove over two days to face a family that hated him and a girl who didn’t want to open her door. It wasn’t right. Mrs. B. pictured the poor boy waiting in the living room. His eyes filled with misunderstanding. His limbs loose and unwanted. His hair meant that he had given up and his smile was too vigorous.

  Mrs. B. slipped her hands into the pockets of her apron and leaned back against the hallway wall. Her head knocked a picture frame and she sprang away to prevent it from falling. As it swung on the tiny nail, she looked at the picture. It was from some professional photography studio. Jeanie was two or three in the picture and smiling brightly into the dark hallway across time. Mrs. B. remembered fighting and piling everyone into the car that day. Jeanie had cried all the way to the studio and all the way home, but for a few minutes under the big silver umbrellas of light, which intimidated some of the most brave children, Jeanie basked happily, smiling, and cooing for the camera.

  The picture was beginning to turn yellow.

  Next to it there was a shot of Jeanie in ballet. She was third from the end in a long row of Saturday morning ballerinas. The other thin little figures stood with their feet together and their arms at their sides. Among them, Jeanie stood resolutely with her arms thrown open and her feet planted wide apart. None of the girls was over six years old, and Jeanie was certainly one of the smaller ones, but somehow the command of her stance filled her smiling mother with courage. It was impossible to know what was going on that moment, whether Jeanie were stretching, behind a step, or just plain ignoring directions, but the picture led one to believe that it was Jeanie, little tiny round-bellied Jeanie, who was bounds ahead of the rest and quickly catching on to the newest motion.

  It’s probably more foolish for a bunch of little girls from a nowhere town to ever think they could become ballerinas than for them to believe in Santa Claus. But then it’s even funnier that mothers and aunts go on encouraging hopes of Nutcracker stardom long after Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy become the silly forgotten nonsense of childhood.

  The next picture showed Jeanie with her brothers and sisters and a number of other children at the beach. Her mother remembered the day. Jeanie had organized every child in a two-mile radius into an elaborate game. There were children running along a jetty diligently scraping barnacles and directing the water traffic. There were children pulling beach grass and raking seaweed into enormous piles that other children were building into fortresses. There were children who ran, children who cleared rocks, and children who defended boulders. There were children making piles of clam shells, and mussel shells, and there were children grinding the shells, in exact proportions, into a medicinal slag with rounded stones in the bottoms of six brightly-colored pails. There were children clearing the ravine of the sharpest rocks, and children screaming to one another from king-of-the-mountain vantage points. There were two tiny children looking for live periwinkles for the sake of an activity, and there were some bigger children who stood awkwardly nearby, wishing they were younger so as to be less inhibited and more involved. No one understood the rules. Jeanie was at the center of it all and the children swarmed around her looking for tactical advice, reassurance, a reassessment or clarification of the rules, and guidance. They brought their products for her approval and asked her to mull over this or that strategy and plan.

  Most of the children were running nonstop the entire morning but Jeanie sat in her emerald green suit and dark tan on top of a rock dictating the show and making sure to include everyone. When no one needed her she sat looking at the water. Sometimes she looked out at the horizon with conviction. Sometimes she looked down into the shadow of the rock and watched the clinging seaweed thrash in the water. Mrs. B. remembered so much motion from those hours of that day but in the picture Jeanie’s little feet were drawn up close to her body. Amid the ocean and the swarm of children she was tiny. Waves crashed all around the huge rock.

  To get the best picture, her mother had strolled up, in the way that mothers sometimes do in their broad-brimmed hats, and dropped in to visit the self-appointed queen. When she asked her daughter to explain the game, Mrs. B. remembered Jeanie's saying to her, from behind Mickey Mouse sunglasses, “It’s like war, Mommy. No one understands it, so someone just has to pretend so that nobody will be scared. Then everyone will be okay.” The game ended late in the day when the troops were exhausted and the queen’s throne was overcome by the tide. Even when every child on the beach fights as hard as any full-grown squadron can, they don’t defeat the tide.

  There were other pictures on the wall but Mrs. B. looked past them and let her eyes rest on another one of Jeanie. She was onstage lighting a candle. It was the honor society induction ceremony her freshman year of high school. No one in the family had heard about the upcoming event. There was no mention of it from Jeanie. Mr. B. had been reading the paper and saw his own daughter’s name among those listed to be honored that evening. Confounded, frustrated, confused, he stood up and wandered into the utility room where Mrs. B. was folding towels. He read the article aloud to his wife and then stared at her. It was close to six o’clock. The paper said the ceremony started at seven thirty. They had decided to confront their child with the paper and had gone together down this hall to their daughter’s door to ask Jeanie about it. She said that, yes, she was being inducted but that she didn’t understand why they had to make a big deal out of it. There was no reason to go. She didn’t feel like going. Mr. B. said he didn’t really care what she felt like and that it wasn’t her decision to make. This had escalated to a loud altercation mainly between Mr. B. and Jeanie.

  At seven fifteen the whole family was in the van and they were all in foul moods. There were several complaints of hunger, as dinner was left in cold pots on the stove. B comes early in the alphabet so they hurried. Mrs. B. watched her daughter walk up to the candle and light it without pride. She noticed the smug looks on some of the other students’ faces. She witnessed the honor that some students felt, or even the discomfort at being in the midst of such a formal affair. But as all the inductees stood in a row at the end of the ceremony, there was
no contempt in Jeanie’s face. No hostility. No smug countenance. Her face wasn’t blank, really. She just smiled faintly, and waited. Mrs. B. realized that out of all the kids on the stage she only recognized her daughter. None of Jeanie’s friends was there with her; such a simple explanation for all her stubborn noise at the house.

  Mrs. B. ran her finger along the top of the frame, dusting it.

  Another picture on the wall in the hall was of Jeanie and her grandmother. It was the last picture of the two of them before her grandmother had passed away. They were sitting in the garden under a tree with their backs to the camera. The light filtered through the leaves in such a way that only their faces were lit by the sun. Both of them looked at a single pink rose which had struggled its way through the weeds to stand out in the full sun. The profiles of the women were identical. The old lady’s lips were parted in explanation of life, and the young woman listened. It was funny enough to smile, even laugh alone in a hallway, because Jeanie never listened to anyone else but her grandmother. And at the funeral Mrs. B. remembered how Jeanie had insisted on speaking. She had also read a Bible