True to Form

  “From what?”

  “I don’t know. The camp-out, for one thing.”

  It’s a good thing I’m here. Cynthia has become desperate. “You won’t have to do that,” I say. “We’ll both talk to her, one at a time, and then together.”

  She sighs. “You don’t know my mother.”

  “Yes, I do,” I say, grimly. In my mind is the fixed smile of Mrs. O’Connell. “Don’t worry, we’ll think of something. But first . . . ” I hold up the bag from the drugstore, pull out the QT.

  “You got it!” She gives me a sly, sideways look. “Guess what I thought of?”

  “What?”

  “We could be tan all over.”

  Although Cynthia has become my good friend, my only one here, really, I am not too comfortable about the idea of being bare naked with her. Plus, if her mother saw that, she’d drop dead. “I think I just want to do bathing suits,” I say.

  Cynthia shrugs. “Okay.”

  I take off my shorts and shirt to reveal my bathing suit. It’s black-and-white checked and has daisies on it.

  “Is that new?” Cynthia asks, and I tell her it is; I got it from Ginger for my trip.

  “I have a new one, too,” Cynthia says. “Wait till you see. I’ll go put it on. Don’t start till I get back.”

  I sit down on the floor to wait, even though I’m dying to get going. In only three hours, I will have a beautiful tan—I’m going to double-dose myself.

  When Cynthia comes back in, she is wearing a black bikini. I can’t believe it. The last suit I saw her in was pink-and-white polka dots and it had a little skirt. “Where’d you get that?”

  “I sent away for it in a magazine. With the money my grandmother sent me for my birthday.”

  I swallow, try to think of something to say. I remember something I saw in one of Mrs. Wexler’s magazines: “Be Boston in public and French in private.” This is pretty French.

  “Do you like it?” Cynthia asks, and the shadow of doubt is upon her.

  “I love it!” I say, and she smiles. Then I ask, “Did your mother see it?”

  Cynthia looks at me and her face is a billboard of the answer no! “I hid it in a shoebox in a closet in the basement,” she says. “This is the first time I’ve worn it.” She stands on her tiptoes to see as much of herself as she can in her dresser mirror. Her belly button goes out, but mine goes in. She slides her shoulder straps down and says, “If you do my back, I’ll do yours.”

  I look at the clock. At one, we’ll be done.

  AT TWO O’CLOCK, I ring the bell at the Randolphs’. Mr. Randolph opens it right away and his smile drops off his face. “Oh, my.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “What happened?”

  “QT.” I wish he would let me in.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s supposed to be a quick tan, from a bottle. But . . . ” I look down at my orange self. I could throw up.

  “Ah,” he says. “Well, it will fade. Surely it will fade.”

  “I guess,” I say. And then, “Do you think you should tell your wife before I go in there so she isn’t too shocked?” I see her clutching her chest, her eyes bugging out, “Henry?????”

  “I think she’ll be just fine,” he says, and he’s right. When we walk into Mrs. Randolph’s room, she’s sitting up in the wheelchair beside her bed. When she sees me, at first she holds really still, and we just stare at each other. In my head, there’s a little voice counting, “One . . . two . . . ” And then Mrs. Randolph slaps her knee and starts laughing so hard nothing comes out but wheezing. And I start laughing too. And I know at this moment that Cynthia isn’t my only friend.

  “QT?” she asks.

  I nod. “I used a little too much.”

  “I’ve seen the ads for it,” she said. “I thought that’s what would happen!”

  “Well, I wish you’d told me first,” I say.

  “What’s that?” she says, and I repeat myself louder.

  “It won’t last,” she says, kind. And then we laugh out the last little bit of our dismay.

  THIS IS THE KIND OF sunset that makes you believe in God. I’m sitting out in the backyard looking at a sky so full of pale pink and lavender I feel like crying. I have Bones, the big skinny mutt, on one side of me and Bridgett, the almost-cocker spaniel, on the other, and even they seem affected, lying so quietly with serious looks on their dog faces.

  I wonder sometimes if dogs think about humans, about how we act. I wonder if they see us getting dressed and think, Hmmm, now why in the world are they doing that? I wonder if they see us get into cars and think, Why don’t they just run there? I’ll bet they think we’re crazy for not spending a lot more time outdoors.

  I’m out here to try to cool off after taking a boiling hot shower. My father’s idea. When he saw my QT glow, he didn’t know what to do. Ginger, laughing, told him that it happened all the time, that she in fact had once turned herself orange, and that seemed to help him from getting mad. He pulled me over to the sink and rubbed my arm with some dish soap and water: nothing. Then cleanser. Nothing. Then he told me to go take a long, hot shower. And that did seem to help some, but basically I guess time will have to do the trick. I wish I could arrest whoever made QT. It is a pure lie. But all I can do is write a letter to the company to at least try to get my money back; that was Ginger’s idea. She said she wished she had thought of it when it happened to her. I said I could ask for two-for-one, but she said never mind, she would just cosign my letter about myself.

  I lie back and Bridgett rests her nose on my stomach, like she feels sorry for me. Say what you want about dogs, I think they’re smarter than humans. You don’t see them walking around turned orange from trying to be tan. If they did get tan, they wouldn’t think it was a big deal anyway; they’d just be interested to know when the next meal was coming or the next rabbit running by. Bones caught a rabbit once and killed him. I hate those things where it’s just nature but it hurts your feelings so bad. A lot of things in life are like that. In fact, you could say life is like that.

  I take in a huge breath and look at the sky as hard as I can. I feel like I’m trying to eat it with my eyes. I wish there would be certain things you come across and you could say, Okay, that’s one. Put that away for me to pull out later just exactly as it is now. My dream is for me to be a poet who could make things like this sky come to life for someone else. If you see a sunset and try and describe it to someone in normal words, all you can say is, “Boy, I saw a great sunset last night.” But if you are a poet, you give it to someone to feel for themselves. Like you make a little seed of what you saw, they swallow it, and it blooms again inside their own heart.

  I see the shadow of my father at the screen door. I know he’ll stand there for a minute, and then turn on the yellow porch light and call me in. I wish I could stay out longer. The air is so soft and warm, the fireflies are coming, and time has that slowed down feeling. If a summer were a girl, she’d always be lying stretched out in the grass in a long white dress, her arms over her head, her eyes half closed.

  Now the sky is dark, and the stars come out, arranged in their ancient patterns. There is the belt of Orion. The Big Dipper. The North Star. What a name that is, North Star. It’s as satisfying to say as a good dinner is to eat.

  The porch light goes on. Every time I feel like this and have to come in, I lie in bed and feel the earth whisper my name, like it’s trying to tell me I forgot something out there, and to come back and get it. But I won’t ask to stay out longer. It could start an argument, and the sound of angry words at this moment would be like desecrating a church. I get up and head inside. I wish I could leave a trail of gratefulness behind me that you could see, glowing thanks. I would pay to see stars, but I never have to. This to me is one of those miracles.

  SO, MRS. O’CONNELL,” I say. I clear my throat. “First, I want to thank you for letting me talk to you in private.” We are sitting at the kitchen table, and my hands are folded and restin
g exactly in front of me, which is the way world leaders do it when they have peace talks. Except for Mr. Khrushchev, who is fond of using his shoe to bang on the table. “I really appreciate it,” I say. Cynthia is waiting in her bedroom, probably biting her nails to the quick.

  “That’s quite all right,” Mrs. O’Connell says, and she’s so stiff her lips hardly move at all when she says this. She tries a little smile that gets an F.

  “This is about the Girl Scout troop idea,” I say, and Mrs. O’Connell says, “I’m well aware of that.” She stirs her coffee with her fancy little spoon from Belgium. She has a whole wooden rack of spoons from different countries hung up on the wall of the kitchen. Each day she uses a different one for her coffee. She’s wearing a lime green shift, and has a filmy yellow scarf tied in her hair. If you didn’t know her, you’d see her and think, What a pretty woman. But after you talked to her about five minutes, you would only think, Eeeeeeyikes! Ordinarily I would be nervous about talking to her about anything; I mostly just like to avoid her. But I feel so bad for Cynthia. And I don’t know why, but the fact that I’m going to Texas in three days makes me feel strong.

  “I have talked a lot with Cynthia about it,” I say, “and she so much appreciates your asking her and everything like that, but we were wondering if maybe she isn’t a little old to be doing this.”

  “Too old to be doing what?”

  I stare at her for a moment, then shrug. “Well . . . like . . . camping out.” Then, in a smaller voice, “In the living room.”

  “Well,” she laughs. “I hardly think she’s too old to be camping out. Many adults camp out. In fact, you have to be old enough to camp out; there are many dangerous things you have to learn to do. For example, do you know how to start a fire, Katie?”

  “No, ma’am,” I say, and in the back of my brain is: “It’s not something that comes up for me to have to do too often. These days, we have stoves and heat built right in.”

  “Would you know what to prepare to eat in the woods?”

  “No, ma’am.” Ditto the same kind of thing in the back of my brain, having to do with grocery stores and kitchens.

  “What about protection from wildlife?”

  “Well,” I say, “excuse me, but I don’t think there’s going to be too much wildlife in your living room.”

  “That is hardly the point,” she says. If she were a cartoon lady, icicles would be hanging from her word bubble. “If you were in the real woods, you might not run across any wildlife, either. But you should be prepared. It is a skill that can serve you all your life, to know how to survive in the woods. You never know, Katie. You just never know.”

  I sigh. “Mrs. O’Connell, the thing is, it’s kind of embarrassing to be a Girl Scout when you’re a teenager. Like maybe in the old days it was good, but now it’s kind of embarrassing.”

  She sits up straighter and I see the flash of hurt in her eyes. Her mouth tightens a notch more.

  “I mean, it’s a really good idea for you to do it for the ones that want to. But Cynthia is the kind of kid that Girl Scouts is not a good idea for. And me, too, no offense against the Girl Scouts, but we are just not the right type.”

  “Uh huh. And I wonder why it is that Cynthia hasn’t told me this.”

  “She tried.”

  “Oh, no, she didn’t. Uh-uh. She certainly did not.”

  I know what she thinks. She thinks I, Katie Nash, juvenile delinquent, have corrupted her daughter, who was so excited about wearing her dumb green beret and holding up fingers to say the Girl Scout pledge, until I had to go and ruin it. I shift a bit on my chair, and then say, “Yes, ma’am, she did try to tell you, but you aren’t too good a listener.”

  Silence like a roar.

  And now I might as well go all the way, because I’m probably going to get kicked out of here and will have to see Cynthia on the sly, like Romeo and Juliet, only two girls. “You are hard to talk to; you mostly are always just telling her what to do. And you treat her like she doesn’t know how to take care of herself, but she does. Like she knows when she’s cold and when she has had enough to eat; she isn’t a baby. Plus, you shouldn’t expect that she should always have to tell you everything, because we are teens now, and some things should be private.” I am not even looking at her. I am looking my hands and just talking away, and I am saying everything to Mrs. O’Connell about Cynthia, but I am also saying everything about myself to my own parents. “Kids need to have some respect too. Like you don’t let her put any pictures from magazines up on her walls, and even my dad lets me do that, and he’s really strict.”

  I hear loud breathing coming from Mrs. O’Connell. Here it comes. She will say something about would I like to escort myself out or should she help me find the door. But when I look up, I see her staring into her coffee cup and there are two tears perched on the edge of her lids.

  I swallow, then look around the kitchen for help. Like Dear Abby will pop out of the walls and sit down at the table and say, “Well, now, let’s just wake up and smell the coffee.” But it is just us two, and I have said too much. “Mrs. O’Connell?”

  She waves her hand, no.

  “Um . . . I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.”

  “Oh, I know you’re only trying to help,” Mrs. O’Connell says. “I know she hates me. She’s my only child and she . . . ” She sniffles, holds back a sob. “I know she hates me. I thought this would . . . I’m only trying . . . ” And now tears really do come gushing out of this grown woman. “I never had good mothering myself,” she says. “And I wanted so much, when I had a daughter, to be close to her, to be her friend. And I thought if we could just try this . . . ” She stops crying suddenly. “Oh, my. Look at me.”

  She gets up and goes to the sink, like there is some sudden emergency over there. But she just wants a way to have her back to me. There she is, all dressed up like she is every day, standing around in her kitchen with no place to go. I feel sorry for her. She is just a bad mother who doesn’t mean to be.

  “Mrs. O’Connell?”

  When she turns around, I hear myself say, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll come to the camp-out, too. Cynthia and I can give it a try together.”

  “Oh, Katie, really? That would be wonderful.”

  My brain is reeling. But I have a plan. A compromise. Cynthia and I go to the camp-out. Afterward, we say, that was very nice, but Scouts are not for us, okay? Then at least Mrs. O’Connell will get something and we don’t lose too much.

  Mrs. O’Connell may feel all cheered up, but I am full of dread. I go down the hall toward Cynthia’s room on feet that would like so much to go in the opposite direction. I open the bedroom door. There is her upturned face, already full of relief. “Did you get me out?” she asks, and I say, “Not exactly.”

  I tell her what happened. If she were to say, “With friends like you, who needs enemies?” I would understand. But she doesn’t. Instead, she hangs her head down and says softly, “I knew it.” Which is worse. I feel huge, like a hairy giant. I have no idea where to put myself.

  Cynthia looks up at me and smiles. Shrugs. “Oh, well.”

  Bingo, forgiven. I sit down on the floor beside her and we start looking at magazines and not saying one word, only just occasionally pointing at something we know the other will understand.

  I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. There it is. The place where I used to live. After Belle and Cherylanne picked me up at the airport and we came back to their house, I put my bag in Cherylanne’s room and didn’t even unpack—Cherylanne and I were eager to go out and take a walk so we could talk in private. But first we are just standing in front of my old house.

  “I never did this before,” I say.

  “Did what? Spied?”

  “I’m not spying!” I laugh, and Cherylanne looks a little hurt.

  “I don’t know what else you’d call it,” she says, sniffing, and I start to answer back and then think, oh, let her have it.

  “When you stand outside a house that is not your
s looking in, that’s calling spying,” Cherylanne says.

  “What I meant,” I say, “is that I never got to see a place again after I left it.” It seems so funny to me that my house is still there, looking just like it did when I lived there, only I don’t live there anymore.

  “Do you want to ask if you can look inside?” Cherylanne says. “They’re real nice. They’re messy, but they’re real nice.”

  I think about this, then shake my head no. I would like to see the rooms again, but they would be all different now, and I think that would bother me. This is the last place my mother lived, and I don’t want to see it changed. But I do appreciate seeing the outside again, the porch steps where I sat so many summer afternoons, the little strip of garden that runs along the front, the mailbox with its spot of rust that looks like a big comma.

  Then, as I stare at the outside, the inside rooms start coming into my mind like waves that just cannot be stopped. I see my bedroom, the wall next to my bed where I used to make shadow puppets, the floor underneath the bed where I kept my Halloween candy and where I used to go to think things over, or to hide. Diane’s room was always so neat and full of interesting things—tubes of red lipstick, pictures of Elvis, letters locked up in her jewelry box. We all lived there, our whole family, with my mother alive and all of our things in the same place. It feels so sad and marvelous to me.

  I think of the bathroom where I shaved my legs for the first time, and the mirror I used to stare into, wishing for so many things. I think of the living room, the green chair in the corner where my mother sat at night to do her sewing. I see her biting off the end of the thread, the television screen reflected in her glasses. I see her bedroom, her lying under the covers with a library book propped up on her stomach, her brow furrowed with how much she was believing every word she read. She used to love reading. I see the kitchen, the way she folded towels at the table, and I see us all gathered there again for just a normal dinner, the flowered tablecloth, the round, cut-glass salt and pepper shakers, a stick of yellow butter on a saucer.