An April Love Story: A Cooney Classic Romance

  I caught my breath from sheer love of the sound, and when it finally ceased, the silence seemed reverent and soothing. I became aware of the shaft of sunlight warming my back, working its way through the fleece lining of my denim jacket. I began to feel toasted and sleepy. It was a feeling of deep contentment, like August, when nothing needs doing and nothing takes worrying. In a few minutes I’d be back on the bus sitting next to Joel, who just might ask me to the senior prom. Or to a movie. Or at the very least, get me another bag of chestnuts.

  “Marnie, do you mean to say you honestly don’t know what I’m talking about?” Lucas’ voice was full of contempt. If he’d been an ant I’d have stepped on him for ruining my mood. I settled for a killing glare but it regrettably had no effect on Lucas’ lifespan.

  “Don’t you ever talk to your parents, Marnie? Don’t they ever discuss things with you?”

  “Of course they do,” I said irritably, but even as I protested I was remembering my parents saying Slow down, Marnie, we need to talk, there are some important things… But I’m in a hurry, I told them, rushing out, thinking of Joel and school and chorus and ninety-five things to tell Susannah.

  I lifted my binoculars to focus on Joel Fiori.

  “Marnie, you are amazingly self-centered,” said Lucas.

  I was saved from doing violence to Lucas’ body because Mr. Ricks blew his police whistle with a blast so shattering I tipped over. Lucas didn’t even notice, he was so busy telling me how rotten I was. The groans, moans, and complaints of twenty-nine people who knew now they could cross bird-watching off their list of possible future careers filled the air.

  “My feet are killing me,” said Holly.

  “Feet!” said Susannah, tottering over to me and helping me up. “I have frostbite of the fanny.”

  “The temperature,” said Mr. Ricks witheringly, “is, as is typical of late March, well above freezing.”

  “But I saw a redheaded woodpecker,” said Chuck helpfully.

  “Oh, yeah, where?” said Kay. “Caught in the logarithm tables?”

  Chuck blushed.

  Joel came loping over to me. Oh! how he ran. Graceful as an Olympian. And they wanted us to watch birds!

  “What was the bird that sang?” Joel asked Mr. Ricks. “The one like a music box just a few minutes ago?”

  I felt a deep pleasure that he, too, had been affected by that song. It was a sort of cement between us, I thought.

  “I’m not entirely sure, Joel, as this is a little far from its normal late winter habitat, but I would not be at all surprised if it were the winter wren. Latin name troglodytes, troglodytes.”

  Joel shouted with laughter. “Sounds like a troll. Lurking under a dark and rotting bridge waiting for innocent maidens.” He turned to me, spread his jacket threateningly, and hovered over me. I cowered obligingly. “If you don’t watch out,” said Joel hollowly, “the troglodytes will get you.”

  Susannah looked at us wistfully. We promised each other in seventh grade we would date together. We didn’t understand at the time that boys wouldn’t necessarily ask us together. Joel reached for my hand.

  And Lucas got between us. “I have to talk to Marnie,” he said.

  Joel looked a little startled but he said, “Sure. I’ll save a seat for you, Marnie.”

  “Looks like she’ll be sitting with Lucas,” said Eve. “I’ll sit with you, Joel.”

  “I’m sitting with Joel,” I said firmly, and Joel grinned and went on. Eve flounced after him. Mr. Ricks gathered the school binoculars and Lucas and I brought up the procession. I was seething with anger.

  “Tell me this, Marnie,” said Lucas, not noticing my wrath, “have you ever wondered what my parents’ hobbies are?”

  “No, Lucas, I can categorically state that I have never wondered nor cared what your parents’ hobbies are. If you press me to guess, I would probably expect your father to dabble in oil price-fixing and your mother to be an amateur strike breaker, but I could be wrong.”

  “My parents,” said Lucas through his teeth, “are gardeners. We have a half-acre organic garden in my grandparents’ backyard in the suburbs, which they spend every weekend tending. It is their lifelong goal to have a few hundred acres, a woodlot, a log cabin, a woodstove, a quilt frame, some goats and chickens, and a good cash crop like strawberries.”

  “Lucas, I grieve for them. I fail to see, however, that it is any concern of mine whether you Petersons raise strawberries or not. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m catching up to Joel.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “You didn’t warn me about anything except that your flaky parents want to keep goats. I don’t plan to visit their goat and strawberry complex, so what does it have to do with me?”

  “Your parents want to go along, Marnie, that’s what it has to do with you.”

  I was absolutely furious with him. “What are you talking about?” I demanded. “Go along where?”

  “To raise goats. If you weren’t so thick and self-centered, and full of your own shallow dreams, you’d have noticed the people around you have a few dreams of their own.”

  I didn’t even bother to laugh at Lucas. The idea of my parents wanting to go to some farm somewhere and raise goats was so ludicrous I couldn’t even waste time yelling at dumb Lucas about it.

  I ran to get my seat next to Joel before Eve slid over too close.

  Chapter II

  “YOU DON’T NEED TO spend fifteen minutes closing your locker door today,” teased Susannah. “Joel has an away game. He can’t walk you home.”

  “Let’s go over to my house,” I said. “I bought some new makeup with my baby-sitting money. We can practice mascara.”

  “Pretty soon you won’t have time to baby-sit. All these handsome men will be taking you out all the time.”

  “Susannah, wouldn’t that be neat? But Joel and I haven’t had a real date yet. He hasn’t actually asked me anyplace.”

  “I can’t get over the way you can talk to Joel. So easily. Honestly, Marnie, if it were me, the conversation would be Joel’s interesting sentence, my duh, Joel’s clever remark, my uh, Joel’s probing question, and my hmmmm.”

  I giggled. “I’m not very good yet, myself. When we were coming back from the field trip Joel kept telling me about the intricacies of various basketball plays, and I was so busy trying to think of what I would say next that I didn’t pay enough attention to what he said to be able to say anything next!”

  Susannah got her Latin book, I got my French, and we both had math and English homework together. We liked having classes together. It was hard to juggle our schedules to match, but this year we shared three classes and next year we wanted to try to do the same thing.

  “What did old Lucas want?” she asked.

  “Who knows. He was hounding me about his parents’ hobbies, or something. I didn’t pay much attention.”

  “Your magnetic personality again.”

  “No doubt.”

  We giggled again. Susannah and I started giggling in May of the fourth grade when we were in a sack race together, and we’ve never stopped. My mother says it drives her berserk. You’re supposed to outgrow that giggly stage, she complains.

  “Walk you home, Marnie?” said Joel.

  Susannah grinned at me and faded away. We had an unspoken agreement that if a boy appeared, all else must cease to matter. I waved good-bye to her. “What happened to your game, Joel?” I said.

  “The other team’s gym has a serious leak in the roof and we couldn’t transfer the game to our high school because there’s a gymnastics meet scheduled there, so I’ve got the afternoon off.”

  I decided to ask Joel in to our apartment. Mother had made a carrot cake a few days ago and carrot cakes were yummy and kept well. Marnie, help me cook … I’m in a hurry, Mother … We need to talk, Marnie … Here, I’ll grate the carrots for you, did I tell you I’m in charge of the French class banquet and Susannah and I made semi-final tryouts in cheerleading and we ha
ve a special rehearsal for the spring concert … ? That’s wonderful, Marnie, but … Bye, Mother!

  I thought, I really must make time to talk to Mother one of these days. Then I thought, Joel and I can sit on the loveseat and eat cake. It must be called a loveseat for a reason. Maybe we’ll kiss. A real grown-up kiss.

  When I was very small my favorite picture book involved a little boy who detested toy tools that broke and pretend toys that weren’t real. What he wanted was a real shovel to dig a real hole, the biggest hole in the world. Well, I never wanted a shovel or dirt, but I always wanted real grown-up things. Like kisses.

  Every time I went to a junior high dance, afterward the boy would look at me very nervously, and we would kind of leap at each other, lips first. We pretended those were kisses. We both knew kisses had better be better than that, or the heck with the whole thing.

  “… some chestnuts, Marnie?”

  That would teach me to daydream. “Oh, Joel, that’s nice of you. But I’ve got some homemade cake at home. How about that instead?”

  “Sounds good. You like cooking?”

  “Actually I don’t know anything about cooking. Mother assigns me the chopping or the scraping or the peeling, but she’s the one who actually cooks.”

  “You’re lucky. I have to clean up. My mother says she’s not raising any male chauvinist pig, so I scour pots and mop floors and do laundry and scrub the oven.”

  “How horrible. The only thing I ever do is make my bed. What’s your attitude after all that housekeeping? Are you a male chauvinist?”

  “I am someone who definitely plans to earn enough money to hire somebody to clean for me.”

  “What do you want to do, anyhow?”

  “I have no idea. It really worries me, Marnie. A person should at least have some faint remote glimmer of his future by the time he’s eighteen, but I don’t.”

  I poked the up button for the elevator to our apartment.

  “You know what?” I confided to Joel. “Every time I ride in an elevator, I wonder what I should do if the cable breaks. Should I be calm and stoic, accepting my squashed fate, holding the elbows of old ladies and speaking gently to little children? Or should I leap up and down, trying to be on an up jump when the elevator whacks the bottom?”

  Joel howled with laughter. “I vote for being on an up jump,” he said, and immediately began leaping up and down. Basketball players tend to be good leapers.

  “Stop it!” I said. “What if the elevator stops and somebody sees you leaping all over the place like Super Frog?”

  He leaped harder.

  “You’re going to break the cable just jumping,” I protested.

  But he kept jumping, and when the doors opened at our floor one of our neighbors was standing there, looking at Joel as if he were a disease she thought the World Health Organization had eradicated. I blushed nine shades of red, but Joel simply bowed to her and swept me out of the elevator to our door. Oh, to be a senior and not blush!

  “Mother?” I yelled, unlocking the door. But nobody was home. I was delighted. I am fond of my parents, but conversation that is interesting and funny when I’m alone with another kid is stilted and difficult when my folks are around. I’m not sure why. Mother is polite, but no matter who is with me—even Susannah—I always feel she wishes I had found somebody better.

  “So. What’s to eat?” said Joel.

  “There are quite a few choices, but you’re not going to like most of them any more than you did last time. Mother is still deep into her natural foods kick.”

  “That carrot juice she foisted off on me last week was nauseating.”

  “Well, today we’re featuring pomegranate juice, iced herb tea, buttermilk, carrot cake made with whole wheat and pineapple, and four varieties of tasty cheese.”

  “Carrot cake? Cake made with carrots? I thought you meant real cake, not rabbit food.”

  “Actually carrot cake is moist and good and you don’t even know the carrots are there.”

  “Then why add them?” Scowling, Joel broke off a corner of cake. “Hey. It is good. Okay. I’ll have carrot cake and … and … and ice water.”

  We took our food into the living room to eat.

  I love our living room. I never want to move or change a thing, because it is perfect. My mother has bought every interior decorating magazine ever printed and she has a wonderful color sense, anyway. The walls are a warm, welcoming yellow, not blatty gold or pumpkiny orange or little girl weak, but a cozy, rich yellow. Lots of cherry and walnut furniture with neutral upholstery and pillows and a forest of green plants on the south window ledge. An oil painting my parents got for an investment splashes a sort of half-eaten rainbow over the dining table. Everywhere are magazines, books, and lovely pieces of pottery. People who visit us invariably exclaim that ours is the handsomest, homiest room they’ve ever seen. “Like the country,” they say happily, as if a room that was “like the city” wouldn’t be half so nice.

  “You have to take lots of vitamins and pills with this natural diet, Marnie?”

  “Oh, no, absolutely not. Mother believes an honest diet from wholesome foods supplies you with every nutrient you need.”

  “I saw you getting a candy bar from the vending machine.”

  “I know. I sin. Mother wouldn’t be pleased. She thinks she’s taught me enough about the evils of refined sugar and artificial additives that I’ll make informed choices. And I do.”

  Joel grinned. “When you eat junk, at least you know it’s junk, huh?” He got himself another piece of cake and began leafing through the magazines that filled an enormous brass bucket by Mother’s painstakingly constructed false fireplace. “Strange stuff,” he commented. Organic Gardening. The Mother Earth News. Dairy Goat Journal. Alternative Energy Sourcebook. Country Living. “Hmmm. Do I want to learn how to make my compost quicker and better?”

  I tried to laugh, but a quiver of Lucas-induced fear was darting around in my brain. What had happened to House Beautiful and Fortune and Glamour?

  “Catnip as a cash crop,” read Joel. “Say. I’ve been worried about my college major, but with this article I can get my whole future squared away.”

  “And look over here,” I said. “How to grind your own bread flour. How to make windchimes out of discarded Coke bottle bottoms. How to tighten a fence.”

  “Tighten a fence,” said Joel. “Who would have thought that fences had to be tightened?” He stared at a photo of an apparently self-sufficient couple posed, beaming, in front of a shack in which they actually lived. They wore shapeless bib overalls and were knee deep in huge overgrown leaves that looked like a vegetable’s nightmare and turned out to be rhubarb. “I can’t even stand the thought of gardening,” said Joel. “All those bugs and worms, sinking up to my ankles in dirt. That field trip today was enough country to last me for years.”

  I fought my fears, telling myself Lucas was a fool and a creep and nothing he ever said was worth two cents, but I was suddenly aware that in the last year there had been an awful lot of changes in our household.

  “Look at these classified ads,” exclaimed Joel. “‘Sincere, virile, outdoor-type philosopher looking for willing companion interested in sunshine, common sense, holistic living, and pigs to help run my farm in the Ozarks.’” Joel choked on his carrot cake. “Don’t know why the man specifies common sense. It’s a cinch he’s not offering any.”

  I was seeing my mother reading seed catalogs the way she used to read Redbook. My father thumbing through the farm and ranch edition of the Sears catalog looking at beehive equipment. The library books, not mysteries or spy novels these days, but How to Raise Chickens and Ducks, How to Buy Country Property, Your Best Woodstove Buy.

  Both my parents would read anything. From the ingredients on the Cheerios box to forty-five things to do with Arm & Hammer Baking Soda. From coffee table photograph collections of Andes Mountains civilizations to guides for getting ham radio licenses.

  So they were reading about farming now
. So what? It was just this year’s winter entertainment. That was all.

  “Enough of this rural stuff,” said Joel, a sentiment with which I heartily agreed. “Back to what matters. There’s a new Burt Reynolds movie playing at that theater down by the school. You want to go tonight after supper?”

  He had asked me. A really truly date with Joel Fiori. I couldn’t wait to telephone Susannah. And what should I wear? What would … “I’d love to, Joel,” I said. We leaned toward each other just a fraction, kind of apprehensively, but very eagerly, and I thought, Do I want my first real grown-up kiss to be with my eyes closed, or—

  “Yoo hoo, I’m home!” shouted my mother.

  Joel leaned back and turned the page in the magazine. Thus went my first grown-up kiss.

  “Hello, Marnie. Hello, Joel. How are you?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but bustled on into the kitchen to put down her packages.

  “Mother, Joel and I are going to the movies tonight after supper, okay?” I knew it would be okay. Susannah and I go out by ourselves lots of times and Mother never objects. And with Joel!

  But Mother appeared in the kitchen door and said no. She actually said no. An expression of disgust fleetingly crossed Joel’s face, as if I had lied to him about my age, and he hadn’t realized I was going to turn out to be some little girl.

  “But, Mother—”

  “I’m sorry, Marnie. I didn’t know you were making plans or I’d’ve told you not to. Today we found out—well, things have rapidly come to a head, Marnie, and tonight we have something to talk about.”

  “We can talk over supper,” I offered, “or when I get back from the movies.”

  “No, Marnie. You wouldn’t listen then.”

  Joel was trying to look as if he were a passing traveling salesman. He got up and his whole body took on a leaving-now look.

  “Marnie,” said my mother, “all you do is whip from one thing to another. This is serious and you have to sit still and give it the amount of time it deserves. The Petersons are coming over for dinner to talk about it with us and you are not going anywhere.”