New Year's Eve

  The O’Connors were probably dancing when this discussion took place. Mr. O’C was always swinging Mrs. O’C around the room and tilting her backward like ballroom dancers. She would protest that her spine was going to snap and he would say, A little submission to authority now and then never hurt anybody, my dear. (This was always a good opening for a little yelling.)

  The snow continued to fall.

  “I love you, Matt.”

  He stopped quoting his grandfather. He curled her fingers around his. “I—uh—” his voice caught. He blew a long slow puff of air out toward the frosted windows. “I love you, too, M&M.”

  “Well, what was I supposed to do?” Kip yelled.

  “He looks like a jerk!” Mike yelled. “And he’s gonna act like one, too, all night long. I can’t believe he punched every single floor on that elevator. If you think I’m hanging out with your dumb brother all night, you’re wrong!”

  “Well, you had no right to grab my arm and yank me out of the elevator!” Kip stormed.

  “You expected me to stand there for twenty-two floors with those fools? Let your darling Lee and your sweet little Anne and your boring pal Beth Rose stop at twenty-two floors.”

  He’d dragged her out on the fifth floor. The wallpaper was a silver geometric pattern: it gave Kip crossed eyes. An urn for cigarettes was between the elevators: the logo of The Hadley was neatly printed in the white sand. Ferns so green and lovely they must be plastic hung before the enormous window at the end of the elevator hall. Kip felt the ferns. Nope. Real. Somebody had a green thumb. In a place the size of The Hadley, it must be a green fist.

  Viciously Mike punched the up button. No elevator arrived.

  “Come on, come on,” Mike said irritably. No elevator arrived. “I know what happened. They got one floor further up. They’re on six. Now Beth Rose is holding the elevator open, and your stupid worthless brother is racing into all the other elevators and punching all the buttons on those elevators, too, and all five elevators are going to make twenty-two stops apiece.”

  Mike whacked the up buttons as if he could set off bombs that way.

  “Michael,” Kip said as calmly as she could, “George was just nervous and it was something to do. Everybody else was laughing. He’s only fifteen, Michael, and—”

  “Don’t call me Michael!”

  How distorting rage was to a face. Did her own face twist like that when she was furious? No wonder her little brothers got scared when she screamed at them. Mike, who was so handsome—had such a great smile—looked like an animal. She stared at his cummerbund instead: civilized satin.

  “You love to sound superior, Kip,” Mike said, “and that’s one way you do it. And don’t tell me to call you Katharine either.”

  The elevator arrived.

  The doors opened silently. Already riding up were a pair of businessmen, holding briefcases.

  While Mike had simply postponed his fight with her until they were alone in the elevator, Kip had forgotten the fight. There was something more interesting to consider. As they rose toward the sixteenth floor she said, “I’m really interested. What kind of business are you transacting on New Year’s Eve? Most people are carrying noisemakers, not briefcases.”

  If Mike had been embarrassed by George pushing elevator buttons, he was horrified by Kip interrogating strange men. “Kip, shut up. It’s not your business.” He said to the men, “I’m sorry—she’s on something, you’ll have to excuse her.”

  “I am not!” Kip said. “I’ve never been on something in my life. I’m just curious. How dare you say that! What’s the matter with you, Michael Robinson?” The sound of her flat hand smacking against his cheek would be so satisfying. How had she ever found Mike Robinson attractive?

  One businessman leaned forward and swiftly punched a button. The elevator stopped on eighteen and they got off without having spoken a syllable. The doors closed.

  “You have your nerve, Mike!”

  “Well, so do you! Where do you get off, interrogating hotel guests about why they have briefcases?”

  “It was just a friendly question.”

  “No! It wasn’t! You think you can run the world, Kip. You think people ought to explain themselves to you. It drives me crazy. I don’t know why I go out with you.”

  He slumped back against his side of the elevator while she stood unsupported in the middle.

  “This is typical,” Mike said. “I lean on something. You just stand there in total control.”

  Kip read the little notice about elevator inspections. Somebody with the initials CSH had done the last two. Once he wrote in pencil and once in ball point.

  I never thought of it like that, Kip thought. Maybe I’m not friendly; maybe I have to be in charge of everyone. Including strangers who have the bad luck to be in my elevator. My elevator.

  I even thought of it as mine, and the people in it as my passengers. Riding with me. But in fact, the businessmen were in it first. If it was anybody’s elevator, it was theirs. And they had a right to their privacy.

  She saw herself from far away, and she didn’t like it. A girl who expected the globe to revolve around her.

  They reached twenty-two.

  The doors opened.

  Kip could not join a celebration. She had to consider this vision of herself. Deal with it. Make peace with Mike, and—

  “Well?” Mike said irritably. “You gonna move or not?”

  The doors silently came back together. Mike leaped forward, sticking his hand between them. Still silently, the doors obeyed his touch and moved apart again. “Now who’s in control?” Kip said, trying to smile.

  Mike took a deep breath.

  He forced a smile, although he did not look at her.

  Our usual, Kip thought. Silent truce.

  Mike also offered an arm. She took both arm and truce. They walked out onto the thick, dark green carpet and were enveloped in a crowd of teenagers screaming, “Happy New Year! Happy New Year!”

  Oh, yeah, I’m happy all right, Kip thought.

  Beth Rose got into the spirit of things. Each time the doors opened, she and George cheered for that floor. “Let’s hear it for twelve!” they shouted.

  The elevators went on, as if they had their own lives to follow and could not linger.

  “Thirteen!” Beth Rose shouted. They did a little tap dance.

  “Fourteen!” George yelled next.

  “Let’s hear it for fifteen!” she yelled.

  George stuck his head out. Four people were waiting for a down elevator. “Nice little floor you’ve got here,” George told them, smiling. They stared. George waved good-bye as their elevator doors closed.

  “I’d rather hear it for twenty-two,” Anne said. “And don’t dance so hard. You might make the elevator fall.”

  George looked interested in this idea.

  Lee said, “Don’t worry, Anne. If it falls, we’ll just jump up and down. When it hits bottom, we’ll be in the air jumping and we won’t get hurt at all.”

  “I wonder if you could really do that,” George said.

  “Let’s not find out,” Anne said.

  Beth Rose said, “You know, we’ve only explored one elevator, George.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “There are four others. We should do a comparison check.”

  “I think,” Anne said, “If anybody were to ask me, my opinion would be that you should examine the stairs. Twenty-two whole flights, George! A person could spend his entire New Year’s Eve testing those.”

  “Anne, Anne, getting snippy,” Lee said.

  “Getting elevator-sick,” Anne said, but this time when the elevator doors whispered apart she joined in. “Let’s hear it for seventeen!” Anne shouted with Beth Rose and George. “We’re in the home stretch now, Lee,” she said, smiling up at him, “only five to go!”

  Lee put an arm around Anne’s slim shoulders. His black jacket was even darker than her black gown. Her golden hair lay under his arm. He could not believe that
this elegant girl was his second girlfriend. “Sixteen,” Lee said patiently, “we’re only at sixteen.”

  Anne looked out at sixteen. It bore a remarkable resemblance to fifteen and fourteen. “I always was a dreamer,” she said.

  Lee laughed. He would never have thought of Anne as a dreamer. But she was a good sport. More than he could say for Mike, ripping Kip out of here like a page from a book. Had that hurt Kip’s arm, to be yanked like that? Was Kip really having a good time with Mike? Lee resented it passionately that Kip could have a better time with that jerk than with him.

  How incredibly in love he had been with Kip last summer. First love had swamped him—really swamped him. Lee’s thoughts were caught in Kip like ankles in mud.

  At first that seemed like a dumb comparison for the obsessive joyous feelings he’d had for Kip.

  But it was mud, he thought. I have to face that. Puppy love is mud love. It turns out to be dark and drowning instead of sweet and sunny.

  Anne. Was she sweet and sunny?

  She seemed a reflection rather than a person: all beauty.

  Whereas Kip was action, energy, demands, exuberance.

  Lee took a deep breath.

  And Mike’s, he reminded himself.

  Chapter 8

  GWYNNIE DANCED ON A chair, holding Gary’s collar instead of his hand. Her white rope-knot of hair stuck up toward the ceiling, and the red carnation looked like The Jewels of Opar. She had been tripping on black ends of her feather boa, so she wrapped it around her neck until it was off the ground, and now it covered not only her neck but also her chin and her cheeks. Her white feathers bounced. Her scarlet heels ground into the metal chair.

  The dance floor had been planned for light, and light reflecting off light. The miniature bulbs strung on the dark red walls and ceilings sparkled like handfuls of sunshine. The chandeliers hung just high enough that even the tallest basketball player in the crowd could not quite leap up to make them swing. The glass walls reflected. The room revolved slowly, a prism of sparkling glass and shimmering light.

  At the back of the crowd, Beth’s dinosaurs floated.

  She held her breath, waiting for the first remarks.

  “Oh, that is so neat!” a girl Beth barely knew screamed. “Oh, Jared, why didn’t we think of that!” She tugged on Beth’s lines and stroked the dinosaurs as if they were cuddly, furry bears. “Oh, Beth, you have so many! Could I have one? Just one? Please, please, please, please?”

  My goodness, Beth thought. “Well …” she said, as if giving up a dinosaur was a hard thing to do. “Well, just one,” Beth said at last, and the girl screamed with delight.

  Down two, Beth thought, pleased, and she looked around to see who else might be yearning for a Mylar pterodactyl.

  Gwynnie tired of the chair. Hiking up the bird feather skirt, she sat on Gary’s shoulders, hanging onto his collar tightly enough for murder. Gary appeared to enjoy this. He gave her a ride to the refreshments. She twirled her black boa in mid air.

  The crowd that had gathered in the door scattered and began dancing, talking or joining Gwynnie and Gary for something to eat.

  “Wow,” said George reverently. “Wow, isn’t she something?”

  “Exactly,” Mike agreed. “Something.”

  Oh, no, Beth thought. Mike and Kip are back beside us again. They’ll pick on George. Kip would say something and George would do something embarrassing and Kip would fight back. How do I get us away from them? Beth Rose thought.

  Probably by starting another disagreement. Over Gwynnie? Beth Rose didn’t like the way Mike said Gwynnie was “something.” And yet it was partially true: Gwynnie did not have a human aura; she was a thing up there, behind her sunglasses, under her wig.

  “What is she?” Lee said, who had never seen nor heard of Gwynnie before.

  “Gary’s date,” Anne explained. “We’re all going to her party after this dance.”

  Lee looked alarmed. “Her party?”

  They all laughed. “We’re dying to see her under normal home-life circumstances,” Kip said.

  “I find it hard to believe that that creature has a normal anything,” Lee said.

  An unknown couple tapped Beth Rose on the shoulder. “You don’t know me,” the girl said, “but I’m Josie Schmidt from Lynnwood, and I’m dying to have a dinosaur, too.”

  “Five dollars,” George said immediately.

  “George!” Kip yelled. “You can at least give them away!”

  “Absolutely not,” Josie’s date said, handing over five dollars as if this were a perfectly reasonable price for a balloon. “Thanks. This is great. Wow, that’s a beautiful balloon.”

  Three down, Beth Rose thought. I’m going to keep the rest. She said to George, “Stop selling off my dinosaurs.”

  “You like them, huh?” George beamed. He does have an asset besides being tall, Beth Rose thought. He has a great smile. I can see it right over the braces. “I told you she’d like them, Kip,” George said, picking up the argument begun in the seventh floor apartment hours before. “I was right, too.”

  “You don’t really like them, do you, Beth Rose?” Mike said instantly. “She’s just polite, George.”

  Aaaaah, Beth thought. This room had better revolve us away from Mike. Or he’s going to be thrown off the twenty-second floor, not George.

  Anne intercepted like a pro ball player. “Gwynnie doesn’t have friends the way other people do, Lee,” she said smoothly. “But she’s in some of my classes, and she has more than once eaten my dessert.”

  “Well, hey,” George said, “that’s certainly how I define a friend. A person who’ll let you steal their dessert.”

  Across the room, Gary backed up to a large sofa. It was hotel size: at least ten people could have strewn themselves on it comfortably. It was the same dark, dark green as the thick carpet. Gary tilted backward. Gwynnie threw her hands into the air and fell stiff as a telephone pole down into the soft yielding sofa. Beth Rose expected the impact to dislodge the crazy wig, but it didn’t,

  “That wig must be welded to her head,” George said.

  Gwynnie hopped to her feet and danced in the upholstery.

  “Her red high heels should really be doing a number on the stuffing of that couch,” Lee remarked.

  Anne giggled. “She kicked them off, didn’t you see? One of them hit the wall and is under a chair and the other shoe landed perfectly. It’s sitting next to the punch bowl on the lace tablecloth.”

  The past year after she started dating Gary, Beth Rose changed her whole class schedule in order to meet him in the halls every day. This fall she had changed her entire class schedule in order not to run into Gary in the halls every day. The guidance counselor was an unsympathetic jerk and Beth fibbed to convince him to sign the changes. The guidance counselor wrote down all her lies, so she felt terribly trapped: until she graduated from this place, she’d have to remember all the dumb things she said. Now she also felt sick whenever she saw the guidance counselor. But not so sick as when Gary smiled vaguely at her, as if he only sort of remembered their year together.

  There is nothing worse, Beth Rose thought, than your old boyfriend being polite.

  Amazingly enough, seeing Gary with Gwynnie did not ruin her night. She could look at him without cringing.

  Gary fetched both Gwynnie’s shoes. Gwynnie put them back on. Gwynnie’s wig had come askew after all; the topknot was leaning like the Tower of Pisa.

  “What happened to her hair?” Lee asked.

  “It’s just a wig,” Anne explained. “She might fix it or she might not. Gwynnie doesn’t usually do what any other girl would do.”

  And then Gwynnie saw Beth Rose. She actually pushed her orange sunglasses down on the bridge of her nose to examine Beth more carefully. She started with the hem of the purple dress. Moved up to the red hair. Tilted way back to look into the bouquet of dinosaurs.

  Then she checked out George.

  Bumpy head, no cummerbund, dock shoes slapping, sh
irttail out, and pants slowly slipping.

  Gwynnie said something to Gary.

  Beth Rose did not have to read lips to know Gwynnie wanted to meet George.

  Here’s the test, Beth Rose thought.

  Anne muttered, “Oh, well, if you start to cry, you can just duck behind tyrannosaurus rex.”

  “Do you have any Kleenex?” Beth whispered.

  “Do I have any Kleenex? Weeping willow that I am? This is not a purse you see in my hand, Bethie, this is an upholstered Kleenex box. All I ask is that you leave some for me so I can mop up after I see Jade.”

  Gwynnie marched toward them. Gary was a little tugboat trying to nudge her in a more appropriate direction, but Gwynnie was not easily nudged. Like a revolving tower of white feathers, Gwynnie circled them twice, whipping her black boa in curls.

  “They’re not slaves for sale, Gwynnie,” Anne said. “You may not circle a third time.”

  Gwynnie paid George the ultimate honor. She took off her sunglasses to see him more clearly. All the while she swung her boa.

  “Practicing for a rodeo?” George said, hypnotized. “You going to rope a wild bull or something?”

  “Already did,” Gwynnie said, and she wrapped Gary in her black boa. Gary just laughed.

  “You!” Gwynnie accused, staring up into George’s eyes. “You stopped the elevator on every floor.”

  George nodded.

  “You wore deck shoes to a formal dance,” Gwynnie accused.

  Everybody who had not yet noticed George’s feet noticed now.

  Beth Rose said, “So far those feet things have been called moccasins, deck shoes, dock shoes, and boat shoes.”