“Well,” Ashley said with the sort of finality she used whenever we fought and she was getting ready to stalk out of the room, “I guess we just can’t discuss this anymore. This is a side of you I didn’t know before tonight, Lewis.”
“Ashley, for God’s sake.” I sat up. “I understand you weren’t in the mood for their input, but they’re my family, flawed or not, and I’m not going to sit here and trash them to make you feel better. I’m just not.” It sounded like Lewis was growing a spine, finally, right there in the Chevette.
I expected lightning to flash, stars to fall from the sky, the earth to shake and rumble at its core, but instead I heard only the slam of the car door and Ashley saying, “Then there is nothing left to discuss. I don’t want to be with you right now, Lewis. I don’t know when, actually, I’ll want to be with you again.”
“Ashley.” And there it was, just as she was coming up the walk, the plaintive whine: Lewis lost his new bravado and returned to his old self. But it was too late. Ashley was In A Mood and he’d have to ride it out, like it or not, like the rest of us always did.
She came stomping up the steps, saw me, and stopped just long enough to shoot me a look. She was wearing the holy dress, and in the porch light she seemed to be almost glowing. She kicked her shoes to the far end of the porch and climbed into the swing, making quite a racket as the chains clanked before settling into a nice, smooth to and fro. Lewis was still out in the driveway, waiting in the car.
“What happened?” I asked after a few solid minutes of her heavy sighs overlaying the occasional yap of the Weavers’ dog from across the street, a fat little sausage of a dog that had a bark like a duck. There was something wrong with it, some kind of vocal problem. My father had called it Duckdog, upsetting Mrs. Weaver, who liked to dress it in sweaters, galoshes when it rained.
Ashley leaned further back in the swing and waited awhile before answering, like she wasn’t sure it was worth the trouble. “They hate me,” she said simply. “They all ganged up on me when we started talking about the caterer and they all hate me.”
The Chevette started up now, softly, and I wondered if Lewis was actually going to leave. I’d imagined him sitting all night in the driveway, sleeping upright rather than leaving angry. But there he was, pulling into the street with one last long pause in front of the house before driving off.
“I’m sure they don’t hate you,” I said, sounding just like my mother, who was too busy dancing with middle-aged men at the Holiday Inn to be here for this latest crisis.
“All I said was that I hadn’t felt like arguing with the caterer about salmon. If it was going to be that much trouble, we’d have chicken. I mean, by this point I have to pick my battles, right? But with just the mention of the salmon issue the whole table looks at me and Mrs. Warsher says, ‘If you wanted salmon, you should have pursued it. The caterer is working for you, not the other way around.”’ Her voice was high and nasal, spiteful. She still had it in her.
“You fought with his family about salmon?” Now that I knew the core of the dispute was fish, it seemed less exciting. I’d expected something major, something involving sex or religion at least.
“Oh, not just salmon. Lewis decided to tell them about Carol, too. Oh, and the invitations and how the typesetter forgot to put the date the first time around. And that’s not even counting what he said about Daddy.”
“Daddy. What about him?”
“Well, they asked”—she waved her hand around in summary as if it would take too long to explain—“about the family and all, and Lewis tells them about the divorce, which is fine, but then he has to go into the whole Lorna thing, and the TV station thing and how she’s a weathergirl and Dad’s a sportscaster and on and on and on. It was just too much.”
“Well, Ash, it is the truth,” I said. “Embarrassing or not.”
“But he made it sound so awful. I mean, there’s Lewis’s whole family all grouped around the table like the Waltons and he’s telling them about Daddy and Lorna and I can only imagine what they’d think if they knew Mom was out dancing with Lydia Catrell. I mean, these people go to church, Haven.”
“So? It doesn’t make them better than you.”
She sighed, blowing hot air through her bangs. “You don’t understand. You don’t have anyone you have to impress now. It’s different when you’re older. What your family does reflects on you a lot more, especially when it’s as twisted as ours is.”
“A lot of people get divorced, Ash,” I said. “It’s not just us.”
She climbed out of the swing, leaving it to rock empty behind her. She leaned far over the edge of the rail and balanced her weight on her palms while the holy dress, translucent, blew around her legs. Her hair hung down over her face, hiding her mouth as she said, “I know, Haven. But no one else has our parents.”
A car blew by on the street, radio blasting; a cigarette hit the pavement with a shower of sparks. Then it was quiet again, except for Duckdog’s barking.
“I saw Sumner tonight,” I said quietly.
“Who?” She was still leaning over, her feet dangling.
“Sumner.”
“Sumner Lee?”
“Yeah.”
A pause; then she righted herself and brushed her hair back. “Really. What’d he say?”
“We just caught up for a while. He asked about you.”
“Did he.” Her voice was flat. “Well. That’s nice.”
“He’s working over at Vengo,” I went on. “And some other job, too.”
“What’s he doing back in town? I thought he was in college.”
“He’s thinking about taking some time off.”
“Dropping out?” she said.
“No.” I spoke slowly. “Just time off. And anyway he hasn’t decided yet.” I was beginning to regret I’d even mentioned it. Ashley had a way of taking anything good and ruining it.
“Well, that sounds like Sumner,” she said dismissively. “He never was very ambitious.”
“He told me to congratulate you,” I answered, suddenly wanting to keep talking. She didn’t have to be so nasty. “He wishes you the best.”
“That’s nice.” She was bored with it already. She walked to the door, reaching for the knob. “If Lewis calls, tell him I’m sleeping. I don’t feel like talking to anyone right now.”
“Ashley.”
She turned, having already opened the door. “What?”
“He was really happy for you.” She had that look on her face, like I was wasting her time so late at night. “I thought ... I thought you’d have more of a reaction.”
She shook her head, moving inside. “Haven, I’m getting married in less than a month. I don’t have time to think about old boyfriends. I don’t even have time to think about myself.”
“I was happy to see him,” I said.
“You didn’t know him the way I did.” She rubbed one foot with the other, that classic Ashley gesture. “Just tell Lewis I’m asleep, okay?”
“Okay.”
I’d let it go now, just like I’d learned to let all things go that brought out that tired voice and impatient gesture in my sister. Being in her good graces was still important to me. I sat out on the porch for a long time, not sure what I was waiting for. Not for the Town Car, which didn’t come home with my mother tucked safely inside until much later, when I was in bed half-asleep, making myself stay lucid until I heard her key in the lock. Not for Lewis’s call, which came and I let ring, on and on, long after Ashley had pretended to be sleeping or was asleep. There was time for waiting, even if I wasn’t sure what to wait for. It was still summer, at least for a while.
Chapter Six
There were two homecomings in the first week of August for our neighborhood. One was little, not mattering much to anyone but me. And one was big news.
The little one was the return of my best friend, Casey Melvin, from 4-H camp, where she’d spent most of the summer letting boys go up her shirt and writing me long, dramatic
letters in pink magic marker sealed with a lipstick kiss. She came back plumper, cuter, and wearing a green T-shirt that belonged to her new long-distance boyfriend, a seventeen-year-old from Hershey, Pennsylvania, named Rick. She had a lot to tell me.
“God, Haven, you would just die if you met him. He is so much better looking than any of the guys around here.” We were in her room drinking Cokes and going through what seemed like eighteen packs of pictures, double prints, all of smiling people posing in front of log cabins, bodies of water, and the occasional flag. They had to salute the flag three times a day, apparently. That seemed to be the only 4-H activity involved, at least for Casey. In the mere month and a half that she’d been gone, she had become what my mother would politely call “fast.”
There were at least twenty pictures of Rick in the small stack I’d already gone through, half of which featured Casey hanging off of some part of him. He was good looking, but not stunning. Casey was lying on her stomach beside me, naming all the people.
“Oh, that’s Lucy in the red shirt. She was so crazy, I swear. She was sneaking around with one of the counselors-this college guy? And she got sent home the third week. It was too bad because she was loads of fun. She’d do anything if you double dog dared her.”
“Double dog dared?” I said.
“Yeah.” She sat up, plunking another stack of pictures into my hands. “And Rick called me last night, can you believe it? Long distance. He said he misses me so much he wanted to go back to camp for the first time in his life. But I’m going up there for Thanksgiving; we already asked his parents and everything. But that’s four months. I think I’ll die if I don’t see him for four months.”
I watched my best friend, boy crazed, as she rolled on the bed clutching the stack of Rick pictures to her chest. Sometimes love can be an ugly thing.
“So what did I miss here?”
I shrugged, taking another sip of my Coke. “Nothing. Dad got married. But that’s about it.”
“How was the wedding? Was it awful?”
“No,” I said, but I was glad that she asked. Only your very best friend knows when to ask that kind of question. “It was weird. And Ashley’s practically psychotic with her wedding so close. And my mother is going to Europe in the fall with Lydia.”
“Lydia? For how long?”
“Months, I think. A long time.”
“God.” She pushed her hair out of her face. Casey was a redhead, actually an orange-head, with that brassy kind of pumpkin, colored hair. She’d had masses of freck, les when we were little, which thankfully faded as she got older; but her hair stayed basically unmanageable, a mop of wild orange curls. “Hey, who are you gonna stay with while she’s gone?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t talked about that yet.”
“Cool, the whole house to yourself! Man, that will be awesome. We can have a party or something.”
“Yeah. Whatever.” I tossed the pictures back to her, all the strange faces tumbling together. I didn’t know these people. It was like a whole world in a different language.
She got up and put the pictures on her desk, then tugged on her cutoffs, which dangled fringe down the back of her leg. Suddenly she spun around and said, “God! I can’t believe I forgot to tell you!”
“Tell me what?”
“About Gwendolyn Rogers.” She jumped back onto the bed, shaking it so madly that the headboard banged against the wall. Casey was always taking flight or crashing into things. My father called her the whirling dervish.
“What about her?” I had that image again of Gwendolyn walking her dog, the leash reaching far up to her hand.
“She’s back. She came home,” she said ominously (I could always tell when something big was coming), “because she had a nervous breakdown.” She sat back, nodding her head.
“You’re kidding.”
“Her mother is friends with Mrs. Oliver, who is in my mother’s walking group and was sworn to secrecy but can’t keep anything quiet so she told everyone but made them all swear not to pass it further.”
“So your mom tells you.”
“She didn’t tell me. She told Mrs. Caster next door and I overheard because I was out on the roof smoking a cigarette. They never think to look up.”
“You smoke now?”
She laughed. “I have since the beginning of the summer. I want to quit, but it’s just so hard. You want one?”
“No,” I said, still trying to catch up with all this new information. “Why’d she have a nervous breakdown?”
“Because”—she went over to her dresser, reaching far under the sweaters she never wore to retrieve a box with a rumpled pack of cigarettes and some matches in it—“she was badly hurt by a man. And the modeling industry. It’s a hard life for a small-town girl, Haven.”
Something told me these were not her own words. “What man?”
“A photographer. He took all those pictures of her that we saw in Cosmo; you know, the ones in that tight red sweater that showed her nipples.” She shook out a cigarette and put it in her mouth, then took it out. “She was going to marry him, but then she found him in bed with a sixteen-year-old girl.”
“God,” I said.
“And another man,” she added with a flourish, popping the cigarette back into her mouth. “Could you die?”
“That’s horrible,” I said. I felt guilty knowing this about a stranger, some poor girl who knew no shameful secrets of mine. With Mrs. Melvin’s mouth, it had to be all over the neighborhood by now.
“She flew in last Friday, and Mrs. Oliver said she took right to her bed in her old room and slept for forty hours straight. Poor Mrs. Rogers thought she was dying of some horrible disease ’cause Gwendolyn wouldn’t say what was wrong or why she came home or anything.” She reached over and opened the window, then lit a match and touched it to the end of the cigarette. “She woke up at four A.M. and made pancakes, and when Mrs. Rogers went downstairs to see what was going on, that was when Gwendolyn told her. Standing there at the stove flipping pancakes at four A.M. and telling this horrible story. She ate ten pancakes and burst into tears and Mrs. Rogers said she is just at a loss as to what action to take. And since then, Mrs. Oliver says, Gwendolyn hasn’t said a word.”
“Ten pancakes?” I said. This, to me, seemed like the most unbelievable part of the story.
“Haven, honestly.” Casey hated when anyone tried to take away from whatever story she was telling. “And that was when Gwendolyn took to walking.”
“Walking?”
She puffed on her cigarette, then blew the smoke out the window, where it circled across the roof and into the sky. “She walks all night long, Haven, through the neighborhood. She can’t sleep, or won’t, and Mrs. Oliver says she’s like a ghost passing on the sidewalk, long legged and freaky looking. All night long.”
Suddenly I had chills, the kind you get during the climax of a good ghost story, when you realize the scratching on the roof is the disembodied hand or that the ribbon holds her head on. I could see Gwendolyn loping along on her thin legs, casting a giant shadow across the green lawns of our subdivision. Gwendolyn Rogers, supermodel, wandering lost on the streets of her childhood and mine.
“Creepy, huh?” Casey said, taking another long drag off her cigarette and fanning the smoke outside. “Mom says she bets modeling made Gwendolyn crazy. It’s a horrible industry, you know.”
“So you said.” I thought of the Lakeview Models in their pumps and matching T-shirts, posing in front of giant fake leaves. And Gwendolyn, the town’s pride and joy, walking mad in the streets.
“It’ll be all over the papers, and People magazine, soon,” she went on, waving her hand in front of her face to fan off the smoke. “You know, it’s big news when someone like Gwendolyn goes nuts.”
“It’s so sad,” I said again. If even supermodel and beautiful hometown girl Gwendolyn Rogers could crash and burn, what would become of me ... or anyone? She’d been profiled in one of Casey’s Teen World magazines just a f
ew months before, sharing her Biggest Secrets: her favorite food (pizza), band (R.E.M.), and beauty secret (cucumbers on her eyes to reduce puffiness after long days of shooting). And we knew these things about her, just as we did about Cindy and Elle and Claudia, girls who didn’t even need last names. Girls that could have been our friends by the details we memorized about them, or the girl next door. As Gwendolyn, supermodel and Lakeview girl, tall like me, had once been.
“Casey?” There was a sudden knock on the door and Mrs. Melvin’s thick New York accent, which always made her sound irritated even when she wasn’t, boomed through the wall. “It’s time for dinner and it’s your turn to set the table. Haven can stay if she wants to.”
“Just a minute,” Casey yelled, tossing the cigarette out the window, where it rolled down to the gutter and caught a wad of pine needles on fire. Casey, busy running around the room spraying White Shoulders on everything, didn’t notice.
“Casey,” I whispered, pointing out the window at the small blaze. “Look.”
“Not now,” she snapped in a low voice, still waving her arms. “God, Haven, help me.”
“Wait,” I whispered, getting up and going to the window. “Don’t open the door yet.”
“Can you smell it?” she said, whirling around. “Can you?”
“No, but—”
Mrs. Melvin knocked again, harder. “Casey, open the door.”
“Okay, okay, one second.” She put the perfume on the dresser and went to the door, passing the window without noticing the flame burning in the gutter. She unlocked the door. “God, come on in then.”
As Mrs. Melvin came in I was leaning against the windowsill, attempting to appear casual with my Coke in my hand and trying not to cough as a thick cloud of White Shoulders settled over me. She took one step, stopping in the frame to take two short sniffs of the air. She was a small woman, like Casey, with the same shock of red hair, only hers was styled in a bob, ends curling down neatly over her shoulders. She wore stirrup pants and a long white shirt, with huge gold hoops dangling from her ears. Her eyeliner, as always, drew my attention next: onyx black, thick on upper and lower lids, curving out past her eye to a neat flourish that made her look like a cat. It must have taken half a jar of cold cream to remove and was a bit much, especially in our neighborhood, but it was her trademark. That and her incredible sense of smell.