SHOPPING WITH LEIGH!!!!! (broken bracelet) SHOPPING WITH LEIGH!!!!!!
Ginger sets her mouth in a firm line. “We’ll get it.” She opens the bottom of the vacuum and starts pulling things out. Dog hair, dirt, and then a charm. Then another, and then part of the chain. I think of handing the pieces of bracelet back to Leigh, how her face will look, and how she will be thinking, I never should have let her borrow it. I should have known what kind of person she is. She’s out.
“Maybe we can get it fixed,” Ginger says, but then she pulls another charm out that is all twisted. “Or buy another one,” she says, quietly.
“I don’t have any idea where she got it,” I say, sadly. I sit back on my heels, sigh. I wish I had gotten out of bed to put the bracelet on my desk; I was pure lazy. But then I get an idea. I tell Ginger, “Maybe I can just call her and tell her I like it so much I want one, too. And we can quick go get one before she comes to pick me up.”
Ginger nods. “It’s worth a try.”
Leigh and her mother are coming at one; I need to call quickly. I go out into the hall to look up her number in the phone book. When the phone rings, Leigh answers. “Hi,” I say, “it’s Katie.”
“Oh, hi!” she says, and when I heard the warmth in her voice I feel happy all over again to be in the circle, even though I have destroyed the first thing she lent me. “Are you still coming?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, “but I was just sitting here with my stepmother, and we were talking about your bracelet, and we wondered where you got it—I’d like to get one, too.”
“Oh, my grandmother sent me that. She and my grandfather own a jewelry store in Arizona.”
“Oh,” I say. I am sunk.
“But you can have it,” she says. “Just keep it.”
“Oh, no.”
“I hardly ever wear it. Really.”
“Well, okay if you’re sure.” If my heart was a body, it would be turning cartwheels.
“I have to go, now,” Leigh says. “Kristi just got here. So we’ll see you at one?”
“Yes,” I say. “At one.”
I wonder what they’ll wear. I need to go and look in my closet and try some things out. This could take a while. When you get in a group like this, you have to start doing things right.
IT IS NINE-THIRTY, and there’s nothing good on the channel that comes in well at the Wexlers’. I am sitting on the sofa, thinking about the last time I was here, and Cynthia and I looked at a movie magazine. Maybe I’ll call her to come over. I’m so bored I actually did some cleaning here—dusted the living room, swept the kitchen floor, scoured the bathroom sink.
I go into the kitchen and dial Cynthia’s number. She picks up on the first ring. “Cynthia!” I say. “It’s me, Katie.” There is silence, then a gentle click, then a dial tone. Well, what is wrong with this phone?
I dial again, and this time Cynthia’s mother picks up. “Hi,” I say. “It’s Katie. I just got disconnected from Cynthia. Can you put her back on?”
“She’s not here.”
“Pardon?”
“She is not here. She went out with some friends.”
Ho. This is a pretty good joke, since Cynthia’s “friends” consist of me. “Well,” I say. “When she comes back, will you ask her to call me at the Wexlers’? I’ll give you the number.”
“I don’t need the number,” Mrs. O’Connell says.
“You have it?” I say. I wonder why she has it.
“I don’t need it. Cynthia doesn’t need it. She won’t be calling you again, Katie.”
Everything stops. Even my breathing. Sitting here alone in this kitchen, I feel as though a million eyes are suddenly on me. I can’t think of anything to say, and the silence takes on a terrible weight.
Finally, I clear my throat and start to ask how long Cynthia will be “gone,” but Mrs. O’Connell interrupts me. “I think that’s all we have to say to you,” she says, and I think, Oh, Cynthia. Don’t let your mother talk for you. But I don’t say that, I just say, “Oh, okay,” and hang up the phone. I sit still, my hands folded for a long time, thinking. And then, I can’t help it, I dial Cynthia’s number again.
“Hello?”
Mrs. O’Connell again.
“It’s Katie,” I say. “I know what you just said, but can I please speak to Cynthia? I know she’s there; she just answered the phone. Could you just let me talk to her?”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
I laugh a little, but quietly. Mrs. O’Connell doesn’t know. What does she know about me and Cynthia? Nothing. “I know she’s kind of mad at me, but I just need to explain something to her. Could you please tell her I’m on the phone and that . . . Could you just ask her if she’d come and talk to me?”
A long moment. And then, “Yes. I will ask her, Katie. But I don’t think she will want to come to the phone, and frankly, I don’t blame her.”
So Cynthia told her mother what happened. Oh, I wish she hadn’t told her. At the other end of the phone line, I hear Mrs. O’Connell breathing. Well, what does she want? Finally, I just say, “I’ll just wait and see,” and then the phone gets put down. In the distance, I hear, “Cynthia? It’s Katie, again. Do you want to talk to her?” There is a long pause. And then I hear the phone being picked up. Thank goodness. Now I can tell Cynthia why I did what I did, that it was nothing against her, really, we can still be friends, she and I will just be in a different group, this is what I have decided. It was wrong to think that I would no longer have her as a friend. I care about her, there is a place to put her. She can come over tonight and we can talk some more and get ourselves right again. But it is not Cynthia on the phone. It is her mother, Mrs. Icicle, saying “Well, it’s just as I told you, Katie. She doesn’t want to talk to you. Please don’t call anymore, now.”
I can feel something in my throat growing larger, and it makes my voice not quite itself when I say, “Well, could you just tell her one thing?”
Mrs. O’Connell sighs.
“Will you just tell her to call me when she’s ready?”
“Yes.” She says it so quickly, I know she won’t do it.
“Thank you,” I say, and Mrs. O’Connell hangs up. No You’re welcome, no good-bye, no nothing. I wonder where she will go now. Will she go into Cynthia’s room and rub her back, which I happen to know Cynthia doesn’t even like? Will she pop popcorn for them to eat together while they watch TV? Will they talk about me? Is it my turn now to be the one outside the door? It feels terrible to think about, even if it’s only Mrs. O’Connell gossiping about you, and who cares what she thinks.
I sit for a while staring at the kitchen window over the sink. It is a square of blackness, now. When I got here, I could look out and see birds, see flowers, see kids playing hopscotch. Now there is just the sight of my own dumb face, reflected back.
I go upstairs to look in at Mark and David. They are sound asleep; there is a smell in the air of it. Then I go into Henry’s room. I watch him sleeping for a while, then whisper his name. Nothing. I go to stand beside his bed, call him again. Still nothing. I shake his shoulder, and he frowns, then opens his eyes. He looks strange without his glasses, like a newborn bird without feathers. “What,” he says, his voice thick with sleep.
“Want to come downstairs?” I ask.
“What for?” He’s a little crabby.
“You can watch TV with me, or we can play a game, just you and me. We won’t tell your brothers, it’ll be just you and me.”
He closes his eyes again.
“Henry?”
“What?” His eyes still closed.
“Want to come down with me? Want to stay up late?”
He turns away from me, resettles on his side. “I’m tired. Stop waking me up.”
“Okay,” I say. “Sorry.”
I head downstairs, stop at the landing, and stare at the empty living room. The sofa and the chairs seem to have turned around to stare back at me. I will now have to sit for about six thousand h
ours doing nothing. And I can’t talk to Cynthia. I feel like someone has abruptly removed a coat I didn’t know I had on.
I turn on the television again, but it is only a boring talk show host, fake smiling and slapping his knee like the joke is so funny, but mainly his eyeballs look to see: Is the camera on him?
I get up and head for the junk drawer of the kitchen to find some scrap paper. I will write a poem about a bare bulb in a room without furniture. This poem will belong to me, and I will not be sharing it with anyone. I stare at the paper, stare at the paper, then put the pencil down.
If Cynthia had just come over, I would have apologized so truly. And then I would have told her about this afternoon, about all the mistakes I made. How I got dressed up to go to the mall, even tied a scarf around my neck trying to look French, and sprayed myself with Intimate perfume, and wore nylons and a new pair of flats that Ginger just got me for school, when the rest of the girls wore jeans and blouses, loafers with socks. I would have told her how when we had lunch, I got the worst seat, the most outside one, and that I dripped ketchup on my blouse and the girls made eyes at each other that they thought I didn’t see, but I did. I would have told her that they asked a lot about my writing—they knew it was because of that that I got admitted into their school. They even asked me to tell one of my poems, and I did, I recited the one called “Love,” where the wave comes up onto the sand and takes away only a few grains of sand from all that is available to it. I wanted so much for them to like it. But when I was through, they just looked at me like, “What?” and I had to try to explain it to them, which did not come out so well. It was not like when Cynthia read it and then looked up at me all thoughtful and said, “And yet if it took too much sand, it wouldn’t be water anymore.”
Sitting here in the quiet, I feel like I have come to the end of a dead-end road. I have to face up to the fact that the reason the Bartlett girls are interested in me is that they want me to help them write the papers we have to turn in about the books we have to read this summer. That’s all. It is not because of my sparkling personality and winning ways. It is not that I have suddenly become one of them. Leigh wants me to write a poem about her and her boyfriend, too, and when I told her I would do it, I felt robbed.
I would have told Cynthia about how one time I lagged way behind them as we walked, just to see if they would notice, and they did not. How in the car on the way back they talked about people and things I knew nothing about, until their mother said, “How about including Katie in the conversation?” which was even worse. Cynthia would have said something good after I told her all that. Something funny. And some part of myself that felt like it had fallen off the shelf would have been put back up again. As it turns out, it is just me alone, thinking, How do I fix everything? and coming up with nothing.
I wish for the first time in my life that I was a boy. I don’t think things work for them in the same way as girls; they have thicker skin. If I were a boy and Cynthia were a boy, she wouldn’t have told her mother about what happened. She wouldn’t have said anything; she would have just gone to bed. Probably without washing her face. And then the next day I could have gone over and just socked her on the arm and she could have said cut it out, dickhead, and things would have been back to normal, just like that. We would go out and do some rough things and then power ride our bikes over to McDonald’s, get about forty-five cheeseburgers apiece, and have a belching contest. Then we could sit on the curb not talking, just knowing we were locked into our friendship no matter what. And that night we’d go behind a garage and smoke, toss the lit butts up in the air to make an arc of light before they landed. Not think about girls or how to impress them, because they did all the worrying for us. Yes. At this moment, I wish I were a boy named Jack Armstrong who did not just mess up his only good friendship for the sake of a bunch of phonies.
IT’S LATE AFTERNOON, and I am out in one of the fields that surround this community of houses where I live. It’s so hard to think that these fields exist when, day after day, you walk down a sidewalk past house after house after house. But go far enough out and you see how it was before everything started. Which I believe is true of all things.
It’s beautiful outside, the kind of day where the sun touches you like mothers touch their babies’ cheeks. Your breath rides in your chest like a slow-swaying hammock, and your eyes see in the rich way: Yellow isn’t yellow, it’s butterscotch; the red on the roses is velvet. On days like this, you wish everything would slow down; you wish time could just stop for a while. But of course that never happens. When a good thing comes along, time is like a flirty girl lifting her skirt and running away, laughing over her shoulder at you. But let the dentist at that cavity way in the back of your mouth, and you will see how time can work the other way.
In my pocket is a letter from Cherylanne. I told her about what happened with Cynthia, and, judging from the thickness of the envelope, she has a lot of advice to give me. Now that I am alone and sure that no one can interrupt me, I will read it.
Dear Katie,
Well, it is the job of a friend to a friend to speak the truth and so I am going to tell you yes, you are right you have screwed up royally. You have to follow certain rules when you are talking about somebody, and the most important of course is MAKE SURE THE PERSON IS NOT THERE. Or you will have to bear the consequences. Which now you know all about.
One thing I want to tell you is not to feel bad that you felt the urge to gossip because it is a basic need like cereal. It is not nice, but we all like to do it. Except saints, who nobody can stand to be around. It will not do any good for me to tell you the obvious such as you never should have invited Cynthia to a party with girls like that, to speak frankly but I hope it doesn’t hurt your feelings, you would not have been invited either except that you got in their school and probably they have to have welcome parties which their moms make them do. I have heard about that. Not to hurt your feelings. But anyway, once she was invited probably you should have explained some things not to do, and for sure you should never have talked so loud behind a closed door when it was every possibility someone could listen, especially the disaster person, Cynthia herself. But again, there is no sense in going on about the past is the past.
So now what you have to do in my opinion is a very hard thing, which is you have to do nothing. That is so you can wait for the balm of time to do its magic, time really does heal all wounds. Most of them. So, just do other things and do NOT call her again as her mother might answer for one thing and there is nothing she would like better than to make you feel bad because you made her daughter feel bad. This is how mothers are, which I know a lot more about now that the hormones of motherhood are racing through me like Andy Granatelli. I have feelings like I never had before and it is all on account of the baby growing inside. I don’t even care how Darren has become somewhat cold, at least he is going to do right by me. After a while, he will get used to being married and my goal besides having a healthy baby is to make sure Darren ends up having a spring in his step as he comes up the walk to our home. And I will do that, you know how when I get determined, I can do anything.
But we are talking about you, right. So Katie you must trust that if you had a good friendship the rags of it will come together and mend into a new garment. It will not be exactly like before of course, because you have done a hateful thing. Which sort of you couldn’t help it, it was the intense peer pressure of adolescence (remember how I used to tell you about that?). You could try praying, although so far that has not always worked out for me, but many others swear by it.
I wish we weren’t so far apart now and I could invite you over to have a glass of limeade at the kitchen table and we could talk both at the same time instead of I write a letter, you write a letter, and then about a thousand years go by and then we write again. But even if that is so, just know that I am here in my heart for you because we used to be good friends and that always stays and that is what you will come to see about Cynthia, sh
e will come around like an old cat.
I guess that’s it for now, and to summarize, just remember: do nothing for now. Just wait.
Bubba is in heaven because he was in the newspaper for football and now he is even worse to live with. It is only the paper they give away at the supermarket, but Bubba’s fat face was right on page one and now he sits around on the front porch like he is waiting for Hollywood to drive by and say at last we’ve found our leading man forever. He did try to do one nice thing, believe it or not. He came in my room the other night when I was a little bit crying which is not unusual for someone in my position. And he sat on my bed with his stupid football in his lap and he said, “I’ll bet your baby turns out to be good looking because look at us. And it could have my genes for sports talent, too. Probably it will if it’s a boy.” I said thanks Bubba, and he said you’re welcome and then he stood around for a while like an elephant in a china shop and then he made some grunt and said, “See you,” and left. I’m telling you I had to smile after he closed the door so soft and caretaking.
My parents are fine, and if my mother could advise you about your problem I know just what she would say, don’t you? “Well, sweetheart, there’s no point in crying over spilt milk, you might as well get right back up on the horse that bit you.” Followed up by a kiss and a hug. And then of course she would feed you which we hate to admit it but it almost always does feel good to eat something someone has fixed for us when we are hurting. (P.S. My mother has given me her chili recipe which as you know was always TOP SECRET. Because I am going to be married and I’ll need it. Believe it or not, one of the secret ingredients is orange juice!!!!)
I have a little pot belly now which as you know I would never ever have had otherwise. It is offset by how my hair and nails are growing. And I probably glow, although it is a bit hard for me to see it, even though Lord knows I have tried in every kind of light. But others have said it’s so. Soon all I will wear is maternity clothes, which believe me, they are not the height of fashion.