“You don’t know a thing about it,” Cherylanne says. “You don’t know what we do with that basket.”
“Espionage, I suppose,” he says.
“Let’s go,” Cherylanne tells me, and slams out the front door. Once outside, she asks, “What’s espionage?”
“James Bond,” I say. “Spies.”
“Well,” she says, midway between flattered and insulted.
“We could pay him back, you know,” I say.
“Who?”
“Bubba.”
She sighs. “No, no, you can’t. You can never get Bubba back. He will only do twice as much back to you. You can’t do anything to him.”
Sometimes I feel as if I am Cherylanne’s mother. I feel sorry for her in the tender, smiley way. “You just do it wrong,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“You try to do things to him yourself.”
“Well, what else?”
“Sit down,” I tell her, indicating our alcove in the backyard bushes. This is where we sit in the heat of the day sometimes, watching life work around us. Cherylanne sits down, sighs. I like when something’s almost lost and you are there to save it. I sit beside her, then ask, “What does Bubba really love?”
Cherylanne frowns. “Janie Atkinson, of course. What do you think?”
Of course. I hadn’t thought of that, though I should have. Bubba’s love for Janie Atkinson nearly wears out his face every time he sees her. The only thing good about Janie, with her smooth heart face and her everyday nylon stockings and her mother driving her back and forth to school like she has a problem, the only thing good about her is that so far she has resisted Bubba’s charms. No other girls have. He has so much ammunition it can be discouraging.
“Let’s call her,” I tell Cherylanne.
“Janie? For what?”
I shrug. “To wreck it.” Sometimes things are just there, just like that. You step out of the shower and see something on your skin. You feel an unwelcome prickle moving along your arm and know that it is a live thing before you look. Here is the knowledge, so easy and mean: find what they love, and wreck it. Simple.
“What do we say to her?” Cherylanne asks.
“Something about him, about Bubba. Something disgusting so that every time she sees him, that’s all she’ll think.”
Cherylanne frowns, bites her lip. She is wearing Love that Mango, the newest shade in her collection. The case has a little fake tip of lipstick on top. “I could tell her that when I was five he stood right in front of me and ate my goldfish—alive.”
I must be patient. “No, Cherylanne. You don’t say who you are. If she knows it’s you, she’ll think you’re lying.”
“Well, what, then!” She gets mad fast when she’s not the leader.
“You just real quick tell Janie something bad about Bubba that doesn’t have you in it. You can make something up. Then you hang up.”
She looks at me, kind of in wonder. “Like say anything I want?”
“Yes.” I lean back, pull a drop-shaped leaf from the bush, rub it between my fingers, smell it.
“I could say …” she stops, blushes.
“It’s good,” I say. “Tell me.”
“It’s bad,” she says. “It’s really disgusting.”
“Good!”
Her eyes narrow. “You know Simon LeBlanc?”
“Ugh, yes.” Way too big to be in ninth grade. Creepy skin and hair. Hates everything. Wears things that jingle like the clasps on galoshes when he walks. But they’re not galoshes, of course. Not in Texas. Galoshes and Texas don’t match.
“I heard about this thing he did at a party.” She shivers happily. “It is so disgusting I could puke right now!”
Oh, the day has turned so interesting. “What?” I ask.
She turns to put her head close to mine, talks quietly and fiercely between her teeth. “Don’t you tell I told you.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t you tell anyone else.”
“I won’t.”
She sits back, lips prissy-pursed with anticipation. “Well. There was this party, and of course they were playing spin the bottle.” She widens her eyes, shudders deliciously and long. I want to ask how come Simon got invited, anyway, but that will only make her take longer.
“So,” she says. “Simon got the bottle, and he said, ‘I can screw this.’” She covers her mouth with her hand, dainty, then pulls it down fast. “And eeuuuwwww, he does it!!!”
“Wait,” I say.
“Can you believe it?”
“Wait.”
“What?”
“What do you mean?”
Cherylanne rolls her eyes. “He screwed the Coke bottle!”
I think for a while. Then I say, “I don’t get it.”
She sighs loudly. “You know what screw means, right?”
I look up nervously at the windows of my house. I know he’s at the golf course, but it’s a habit. Then I make a face at Cherylanne while I say, “Yes, I know what screw means!”
“So?”
“So, how do you screw a Coke bottle?”
She looks away. “Well, I just don’t believe this.”
“You are the one,” I tell her, “who told me how big it gets. You showed me, remember? You drew on my history paper how big around it gets. That would not fit in a Coke bottle.”
She speaks slowly, wags her head from side to side to punctuate each word. “Well, I guess I know that.”
“So what are you talking about?”
She stands up, stamps her foot. “He screwed into it, you dummy! Into it!”
Well, I don’t know. There are some things you only can wait for time to give you.
“Oh!” I say, just to be done with it all.
“So that’s what I’ll tell Janie, that Bubba did that!”
“Euuww!” I say. “Yep. That should work.”
We use my phone. Cherylanne looks up Janie’s phone number. Wouldn’t you know it, a lot of sevens. Even her phone number is lucky. I give Cherylanne a Kleenex to put over the mouthpiece so she can disguise herself; then, for safety’s sake, give her two more. She dials the number. I hear a faint ring, then an eager, “Hello?”
“Yes,” Cherylanne says. “Is this … Miss Atkinson?”
So professional. Cherylanne is good at this.
I hear a faint reply. Probably she said, “Why, yes, it is,” and sat down with her legs crossed like she was going to win a million dollars.
“Well,” Cherylanne says, “we have some information that may be of use to you.”
A short response.
“First of all, Bubba Benson’s real name is Irwin Edgar Hammacker.” Cherylanne widens her eyes at me, holds back a laugh. I cover my mouth, nod at her. Go on, go on.
“Also, we think you should know he screwed into a Coke bottle in front of everyone at a party.”
A longer response. Cherylanne stops laughing and hangs up.
“What’d she say, what’d she say?” I ask.
She turns slowly toward me. “You want to know what she said?”
“Yes!”
“She said, ‘That was Simon LeBlanc, Cherylanne Benson. I was there, and you were not.’”
I have lost all my inside air.
Cherylanne is pale with fury. “I cannot believe I listened to your stupid idea!”
“Well,” I say.
“I cannot believe I did.” I start to follow Cherylanne out the door. She turns around, eyes wide. “Don’t even think of coming with me!”
“I wasn’t. I’m going out.”
“I am ruined. My reputation is just in shreds starting right now on account of you.”
“Well, I don’t think—”
She holds up a hand. “Don’t even say it. Don’t even try. I cannot believe I listened to your stupid idea.” She goes out the door.
I lean my forehead against the screen, watch her walk away. “It was your idea, anyway,” I say.
She turns aroun
d, murder in her eyes. “What?”
“Nothing.”
She walks off toward Vicky Andrews’s house. I go outside, do a handstand against the wall, look at the concrete close up.
I hear a truck coming. I kick down, straighten my blouse. Dickie lets Diane out. “See you tonight!” she yells after him, then walks up to stand before me. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.” I follow her into the house. “Where you been?”
“Out.”
She never tells me. “You can’t go out tonight,” I say. “It’s Sunday.” We go to the Officer’s Club for dinner every Sunday night, wear dresses, he wears a suit.
“After,” Diane says.
“He’ll say no.”
She turns to me, decides yes, tells me, “He won’t know.”
“Oh.”
She goes upstairs. I hear the door to her room close. I wonder what she does in there all the time. It’s a small room. She plays records, I know, paints her nails. But then what? I am more an outside type.
I think for one second about getting Cherylanne to go swimming, then remember. She wouldn’t even go to the PX with me, now. She’ll be off limits for a good three days.
I go up to Diane’s room, knock on the door. “Can I come in?”
“No.”
I slide under my bed, regard the dust motes. Sometimes they are beautiful. They are how you can see air. I think about Simon LeBlanc. Sex is so shaky and mysterious. I will never unravel it. “Mom,” I whisper. “Are you there?” Not today.
There are times I try to understand. “He was raised by very cruel parents,” my mother said. She was wearing the blue apron, making apple crisp. She shook her head, waved her arm like she was pushing her own thoughts away. “Believe me, you don’t want to know what he went through.”
I think, what else? What else could have happened to him? He might have had another job, and been different. I do not believe the army is a good idea for people with regular human hearts. He could have been a thing like a janitor in a school. Everyone likes the janitor at my school, a gentle Mexican man named Juan who speaks no English but smiles and nods at every one of us like friends. He stands with his mop like a dancing partner, smiling, smiling. We have a special relationship, Juan and I. I once asked too late to be excused to go to the bathroom, and I vomited on the hall floor. Juan was at the other end. He started walking toward me. I wiped my mouth quick with the hem of my dress. I was so ashamed that he would have to clean up after me, and I began to cry and say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He touched my shoulder and shrugged, said, “Hey, is okay, okay,” and then some soft things in Spanish, and I didn’t feel embarrassed anymore. I don’t know, there are everyday miracles: that mess lying in the hall, and I felt fine in front of a stranger.
So maybe my father could have been a janitor. Or the owner of a bakery. Or of a toy store. He could have been something where he wasn’t supposed to yell. I think that would have helped.
We are at the table, waiting for dinner to come. I ordered a club sandwich. I need to say more than thank you, which is not enough. When the sandwich comes, I will admire the tomatoes, say how red they are. I won’t leave anything over, of course.
My father’s suit is dark blue, his shirt so white against it, it is shocking. He wears a tie, sideways stripes of red, white, and blue. He has gold cuff links with blue stones in them. My mother, on his birthday, “Do you like them?” her hands clasped and held close to her heart until he looks up and she can see yes.
Diane sighs. My father raises his eyebrows at her. “You got a problem?” he asks.
She almost starts to laugh. “No. I don’t have a problem.”
“Good.” A little too loud, but nothing will happen here. Still, you can see the sides of his cheeks going in and out, his prelude to anger. When you see that, you don’t provoke him, my mother said. You just don’t push him. Or you are asking for it.
They are at each other a lot, he and Diane. It seems almost constant lately. Maybe Diane is just too old.
“Are we getting dessert?” I ask, though I know.
“Yes,” he says, “you can have dessert.”
“Are you?” I ask Diane.
“No.” We both look at her. “I just don’t want any dessert, all right?”
He looks away, scowls, and nods, agreeing with himself.
The food comes. Oh, the food is here, and we can eat.
I am in bed that night when I hear Diane’s door open. It is so quiet, but I hear it. I see her shadow going down the hall. She is doing it, sneaking out with Dickie. I cannot imagine her courage. I go to look out her window and see her meet him across the street. He is in the shadows at first, but then he steps forward to hold her. Only to hold her! I wonder where his truck is. I sleep a little, but not much, until she comes home two hours later. I hear the front door, her movement up the stairs, then her bedroom door shut. Then silence. She has done it. I close my eyes tight, squeeze them with relief. I imagine Diane lying back on her bed, quietly removing her shoes, exhaling a long line of air noiselessly. Her room is dark, the edges of her furniture softened by the dimness. Her eyes are wide open, and she is thinking.
After several days, Cherylanne still has not forgiven me. We are infected. She spoke to me only to say that perhaps we are drifting apart. I reminded her that we are not characters in her stupid magazine stories and there you are, I earned more time.
I read, I write poems to keep in my red folder, I take walks along the creek bed. I see schools of minnows, excited with their new lives, swimming fast to somewhere they’ve never been. I want to bring some home, but they will only die. And so I lie on my belly to watch them, make defective dams out of my fingers for them to swim through. I wonder if for them, their lives are long.
I take Riff to walk along the edge of the golf course. When I go into the PX, he lies outside by the door, waiting for me. In my backyard I sit close to him, watch the movement of his busy eyes, the back-and-forth movement of his tongue when he pants. Once, on a daring day, I call Paul Arnold, but I hang up before the phone rings. I lie on the living room floor, my legs up against the bookcase, contemplating human circulation.
One evening after dishes, Diane comes into my room. “What’s up?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
She holds up my bottle of Evening in Paris, checks the level, puts it carefully back down in place. “How come you’re all alone?”
“I’m doing my homework.”
“I mean alone all the time. Are you fighting with Cherylanne?”
“I don’t know. She is.”
“How come?”
“She’s just that way sometimes. She just is. She’s not my only friend.”
I am hoping Diane doesn’t ask for a list of others. She doesn’t. She stretches out on my bed. “Ummm,” she says. “You have a good bed.”
I get up from my desk, sit down beside her. “Diane?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you ever think about leaving, about running away?”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I just … Nothing happened. I just think sometimes I’d like to live somewhere else.”
There is a shift in her face. “Where you’re not a punching bag, huh?”
It is too bold, how she does it. It is too much out.
“I don’t know, I mean just … I think I would just like to leave, that’s all. Go somewhere else.”
“Without Dad.”
“Well, yeah. I think he likes it here.”
Diane’s laugh is like a short cry. “I don’t. I don’t think he likes it anywhere.”
“If you asked Dickie, would he take you away?”
Diane stands up, goes over to my window. “If I asked Dickie to do anything, he would do it.” Her back is to me. The truth of what she is saying is in the line of her spine: she stands tall with it. Then she turns around, a half smile on her face. “Why? You want to come?”
I once wanted a certain ring for Chri
stmas. It was a gold oval, and you could get your initials engraved in the center. It was too much, but I asked anyway. And one day in early December, when I was looking through my mother’s nightgowns in her dresser drawers, I found a velvet box with the ring inside it. My initials. In fancy, fragile script. I looked up. There was my face in the mirror, tight with happiness. I put the ring back, closed the drawer, waited until Christmas, and opened the box I knew it was in last.
“I would come,” I tell Diane.
She sighs. “I’m going to finish high school, Katie, and then I’m gone.”
“Oh.”
“I can’t bring you.”
“Oh, I know.”
She starts to say something, then stops. It is hard for her, what is in her face. She pulls her beautiful hair back, holds it for a moment in one hand. “You want to come swimming with us tonight? It’s open till ten.”
I nod.
“Okay,” she says. “We’ll do that.”
Even when Cherylanne and I are fighting, we don’t knock. I go into her house, yell, “Hello?” There are the smells I’ve missed: new carpet and the food and the sun trapped in the fabric of the sofa, that ironed smell. My mother: “Now, fold his handkerchiefs exact when you iron them. He likes them straight.”
I hear Cherylanne’s bedroom door open, and she starts to come down the stairs, then stops halfway to look coolly at me. “What?” Her hand is graceful on the railing, like she thinks she’s Loretta Young.
“I’m going swimming tonight with Dickie and Diane. You want to come?” This is it. If she says no, this is it.
There is a heavy moment of silence. She is wringing out the cloth but good. But then she shrugs, says, “I guess.”
Here happiness must be quiet and slow. I say, “So what are you doing now?”
“Come on up,” she says. She plays me a forty-five she bought yesterday. She shows me how she is now the darkest Coppertone girl possible, holding her skin next to the magazine page. She is right: she couldn’t be tanner. “You’ve moved up, too,” she says. “You’re in between the best and the next-best now. In a way that’s even better, because you still have a dream.” I show her the new blond streak in my hair, sun-done, not fake. She says we could make some cookies. We talk faster and faster. I can feel relief in my throat like a cold.