True to Form

  I remember the time I fell off a clothesline pole I was hanging from and knocked the breath out of myself, and I came running into the kitchen to find her, I was so scared. She pulled me onto her lap and put her hand on top of my head, and my breathing came back like a miracle. She was wearing the apron with ruffles around the edges and the heart-shaped pocket on it; I remember this now as though it just happened. Her hands smelled like lemons. I think, Every room in this house has a memory of my mother, she was everywhere in it. Then I think of the living room sofa, where she lay dying those last couple of weeks, and the day she called me to her and took my hands in hers and started to say something, but then didn’t; just pushed my hair back behind my ears and smiled this so beautiful smile, I’m all right, I’m all right. The sun against the side of her face. Her paleness.

  I swallow hard, take in a deep breath. No, I don’t want to see someone else’s things where she used to be. If I were a priest, I would bless this house from outside, say those beautiful Latin words that seem so red and gold, and make the sign of the cross big in the air. Instead, I just tell Cherylanne, “Let’s go.”

  We start out down the street, and everything I see seems to talk to me, and every sentence starts with the same word: “Remember . . . ?” And inside I am answering with the most tender, Yes, yes, yes.

  One thing I know: Anything we have, we are only borrowing. Anything. Any time.

  DO YOU LIKE TEXAS OR Missouri better?” Bubba asks. We are having dinner, and Belle has made her famous buttermilk fried chicken. Bubba has about nine hundred pieces on his plate.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve kind of gotten used to Missouri, finally.”

  “Texas can kick Missouri’s ass,” Bubba says, and Belle says, “Bubba!”

  Cherylanne’s father is out of town and Bubba is sitting in his chair. I guess this makes him think he’s the man of the house and can do whatever he wants. But he still listens to Belle; one word from her and he is suddenly very interested in his plate.

  “I thought Darren was coming to dinner,” Belle says, and Cherylanne’s mouth turns into a tight, straight line. “He couldn’t,” she says.

  Belle looks at her, but Cherylanne won’t look back.

  “Well, maybe another night,” Belle says.

  Cherylanne tosses her hair back. “We’ll see.” She is even prettier than she used to be, but I have to say I don’t exactly understand what I used to find so interesting about her. All she will talk about is Darren. When I said I was thinking about college, she said the only degree a woman needed was an MRS. Then she showed me how she has started a hope chest, with some pillowcases she embroidered with hearts at the edges made out of little Xs. When I tried to tell her about the airplane trip, how it was so exciting to see the patterns in the land like giants had played in a sandbox, and how the stewardesses were so pretty and so nice, she stopped me in the middle without even knowing I was in the middle.

  The phone rings, and Bubba practically knocks his chair over to run and answer it. Then, “Hey, Katie!” he yells. “It’s for you!”

  I feel like it’s kind of rude that someone else’s phone rings and it’s for you, but then Belle says, “Go right ahead, honey, it’s probably your dad.”

  “It’s a girl,” Bubba says, and he’s kind of right; it’s Ginger. “I just wanted to see how you’re doing,” she says.

  “I’m fine,” I say, and I think of how she’s there and I’m here, and how different my life is from how it used to be here. I tell her a little about what we’ve been doing, and she tells me what she’s been doing, then my father gets on and I tell him, and then there is a long silence. Finally he says, “All right, then, we’ll see you at the airport the day after tomorrow. You behave,” he adds.

  I go back to the table and look at the familiar faces around it and I realize something: I don’t live here anymore at all. Every part of me has gone from here. It’s not a sad feeling, or a bad one. It’s like a page turned in a notebook you will always keep, but now you are on the new page. I think something in me knew that I had to see this place again to understand that, and that is why when Fab Freddy said where, I said here.

  WE ARE LYING IN CHERYLANNE’S bed just about to go to sleep, when all of a sudden I hear her burst into tears. At first I just lie still, not knowing what to do. Then I reach out my hand to turn on the bedside lamp.

  “Don’t!” she says, and I turn it off.

  I lie back, wait for a moment, and then say softly, “What’s wrong?”

  “Only everything!”

  “Darren?” I ask, and she says, “Yes.”

  “Well, what about him?” This afternoon when we were out walking she made him sound like the best boyfriend in the world. She said when I met him I would understand completely why she is through looking. “He is soooo cute,” she said, her eyes half closed with the intensity of her emotion. “He is thoughtful and courageous and a tremendous genius. We’re getting married as soon as senior year ends.”

  “Wow,” I said, and she turned suddenly and said, “Oh Katie, if only you could meet someone like him, too.”

  I smiled.

  “Don’t worry. There’s still time for you to find someone.”

  “I know that,” I said. “There’s a lot of time. For one thing, I really do want to go to college first.”

  She sighed. “That again. Why in the world are you so fixed on going to more school? Isn’t twelve years enough?”

  “I just want to go.”

  “But what for?” She pulled some leaves off a bush we walked past, then scattered them behind her as we walked. “I’m going to scatter rose petals at my wedding. Pink and ivory.”

  I was almost ready to tell her that I want to go to college to study poetry, but it’s too important to me to risk telling anyone. So I told her I want to study anthropology.

  She stopped walking. “Anthropology! What’s that? Just the name of it puts me in a bad mood.”

  “It’s the study of people,” I said.

  “What about people?”

  “Just . . . them,” I said. The truth is, I don’t know that much about anthropology. I just saw Margaret Mead once in a film in science class, and she seemed so wonderful. Smart and brave and so taken up with all she was doing, that distance thing in her eyes, where she was seeing something so much bigger than what was in front of her. I liked the notion of learning about how, in other parts of the world, nothing is like it is for you. Wake up in the morning, and Whoa! Different food, different shelter, different transportation, different smell to the air. Different landscape, different weather, even different light in the sky. Religions that have nothing to do with what you’ve been taught, jobs that are nothing you have ever seen or heard of. Women with baskets on their head, women wearing wooden shoes, women walking with goats down narrow cobblestone streets. Oxen here, penguins there. Tigers padding silently through the jungle, beneath parrots with feathers so bright and beautiful, and monkeys shrieking and hanging by one arm while they use the other one to dig in their armpit. Really, if you ever think about all that is going on in the world at any given moment, it’s enough to make you stand still in wonder. And you have to think, What all happened that I am here in this place and not in another?

  “Well, studying anthremology is the dumbest idea I ever heard of,” Cherylanne said. “If you don’t mind my saying so. I mean, going to school to learn about people, when you are one!”

  “But there are many different types,” I said. “You know, like different cultures. Have you ever heard of Margaret Mead?”

  Cherylanne frowned. “What was she in?”

  “In?”

  “What movies?”

  “She’s not an actress. She’s an anthropologist. Like a woman scientist.”

  “Well, there you go, right there is trouble,” Cherylanne said. “Any woman scientist is going to be one ugly and bitter woman.”

  I sighed, turned my head away from her to look at the playground we were walking past. A b
unch of kids laughing, having fun. I thought of the night Cynthia and I went to the school playground and rode the merry-go-round under the stars. I asked her that night to tell me honestly if she thought I could ever be famous, and she said, Yes, her face serious and true. Then she asked me if I thought she could be, and I said, Yes, too.

  “If you start messing around with science, it’s a cinch you’re going to have a very hard time catching a husband,” Cherylanne said. “One thing men do not enjoy is a woman with too many brains. Their feminine allure is sucked right out of them, and they often have bad breath. They have no idea at all how to dress, especially shoes. If you are a scientist, you will be a spinster and you will die unfulfilled, if you know what I mean. You don’t want that. Believe me, it is not too soon to start living your life in such a way as to guarantee finding a good husband. Darren came to me accidentally that’s true, but also, I was ready.”

  She kept talking, but I stopped listening. I was thinking about what my life might be like if I were a spinster. I would like to have a husband, but if I don’t, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. You could live in your own house with whatever furniture and dishes and things that you picked out. You could do whatever you wanted, with no one saying, Now what time are you coming home? I imagined myself living somewhere alone. There I was, in a room with cheerful yellow walls, sunshine streaming in through the windows. There was my cat, a handsome gray tabby, curled up on my lap as I worked at my rolltop desk. I used thick, cream-colored paper and a black fountain pen with a gold tip. An idea for a poem appeared like an exotic creature peeking out from behind the bushes, and I wrote it down, then sat quietly before it, sipping tea and smiling.

  I needed to nearly cover my mouth from the excitement of the thought. It seems like sometimes you know some things about your life in the future even though you’re only a kid, and this is one thing I know: If I could be a poet, I would not mind living alone. I just don’t think so.

  But now here is Cherylanne lying in the bed sobbing away, saying she doesn’t know what to do, she can all of a sudden feel Darren getting cool toward her, he is just not as interested as he used to be, and this after she has gone ahead and done it, but don’t tell anyone.

  “Done what?” I ask.

  “It!” She raises her head to look at me. Her lashes are all wet and spiky with tears.

  I gasp. “You did that?”

  She nods.

  “Did it hurt?”

  “A little.”

  “But did you like it anyway?”

  She nods again, half smiles, then lies back and starts crying again.

  I start to say something, but can’t. I think of preachers I’ve seen standing up high behind their pulpits, waving around their Bibles and yelling, “Fornication,” the flesh of their fat chins shaking. That’s now how I feel about what Cherylanne has done. I don’t think she’s committed a big sin and hurt God. I just feel sorry for her that she doesn’t have any better ideas. She reminds me of those horses tied up to a metal spoke, their heads down as they go around and around and around.

  Cherylanne sits up and rubs angrily at her eyes, wiping away the tears. “I don’t care what anybody says about what we did, we’re practically officially engaged!” I try to think of Cherylanne and Darren going all the way, but all that comes into my head is a picture of Belle standing in the kitchen, holding a dishtowel down at her side and saying, Oh, Cherylanne.

  SEATED NEXT TO ME ON the airplane going home is a businessman, his head thrown back and snoring so loud I’m surprised the window isn’t rattling. He got the window seat and he isn’t even looking outside. But when I lean forward, I can see around him. There’s nothing but clouds, but they are so grand, huge and puffed out and right there.

  I never did get to meet Darren. Cherylanne felt so bad, and I didn’t want to tell her that meeting Darren was not my main goal in coming, because I thought it would make her feel worse than she already does. So I said I’d meet him next time, although probably there will not be a next time. It seems so amazing to me that I used to want to be just like her, and now I don’t want to be like her at all.

  I remember once when we were moving, driving across country, and it was raining so hard, the windshield wipers going fast and squeaking, and then: nothing. It stopped. I looked out the window ahead of me and it was clear. I looked out the back and there was the rain, still going. Nobody said anything, but there it was, a near miracle, a rain line, a way of seeing just where something starts, when usually you are just in the middle of it before you notice it. That’s how it feels to me now, to not want to be like Cherylanne anymore. I see the line.

  The businessman snorts so loud, he wakes himself up. He moves his mouth around to unstick everything. Then he looks over at me and says, “Was I snoring, little lady?”

  I smile.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “That’s all right.”

  “Tell you what, why don’t we trade seats? I’ll bet you’d like the window.”

  “Okay.” We stand up and trade, and the part where we bump bodies is a little embarrassing. “Excuse me,” we both say. But then I settle in and look down the whole way home and I feel like I’m seeing the best movie ever. The clouds break and I can see little toy cars on ribbons of highways. The shine of a long, crooked river. Big square blocks of buildings, the tops of trees, dots of turquoise where people have pools. I wish I could have told Cherylanne about flying, how much I like it. How you can look at the big wing of the plane outside your window and think, What if I were riding out there, and give yourself the shivers. But I feel too that you can just have your own storehouse of things. Someday when I’m in math class I’ll be able to pull out the memory of looking down after we had just taken off and seeing a whole flight of birds traveling across the sky, their wings moving together like they had a conductor.

  When I come off the plane, I see Ginger and my father right away. Ginger hugs me and then my father does. My father does it too. It’s the first time. I walk so straight and careful out to the car. I sit on my knees in the backseat and look out the rear window, my way of getting some privacy. I feel so much happiness and so much sadness. My father asks if I’m glad I went back to Texas and I say yes. In my mind, I see once more the house where we lived, only I see it from high up like I’m back on the airplane. The image grows smaller and smaller, and then it is gone. I turn around, headed for the home I have now.

  I ONCE OVERHEAD TWO WOMEN in a restaurant talking about vacation. One was saying to the other that it just wasn’t worth it. “I know what you mean,” the other woman said. “You come home and you have four times the amount of work to do.”

  Now I know what they were talking about. I am doing double duty baby-sitting today: first the Randolphs, and right after that, the Wexlers. And the Wexlers are going out somewhere fancy and they won’t be home until really late. The good thing is that Mrs. Wexler said if I wanted to, I could have a friend over. So Cynthia will come, and we will have Loser Girls Who Never Date Have a Party with Popcorn.

  It is such a fine day, that kind that makes people in good moods. Not hot, not cold, just that perfect temperature where you can’t really feel any temperature, you have to move your arm around to know you’re out in the air. I find some yellow and white wildflowers growing at the base of a telephone pole and I pick a few for Mrs. Randolph. When Mr. Randolph opens the door, he notices them right away and it makes him smile. I don’t think there are many men who would pay attention to flowers, but Mr. Randolph is one who does. He takes the little bouquet from me to put into water, and I head down to the bedroom.

  “There she is,” Mrs. Randolph says. “How was your trip, dear?”

  “It was good.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It was good!”

  “Oh, I’m glad. Traveling is wonderful; it enriches the soul. We used to go to Europe every year before I got sick. I’ll show you pictures, if you like.”

  “I would like to see them.” Europe!
I think, and that song comes in my head, There’s a place in France, where the women do a dance. . . . I kind of want to ask if there really is such a place where women dance like that, but of course that would be such a dumb question. This happens to me all the time, really, that I see or hear something and there is this raring up of a desire to know all these other things about it. Like once in art class, the teacher showed a picture by the artist Gauguin, who went to Tahiti. And she talked a little about the painting, but I wanted to know other things, too. Like, where is Tahiti, really? I can find it on the globe, but where is it really? Like, how does it feel to be there? And why did Gauguin go there? How did he get there? How long did it take and what did he think when he took his first step onto that land? What kind of clothes did he wear when it was just a regular day? What did he eat for breakfast, and did he have a wife and children? Where did he get his paints in Tahiti, and what did he talk about with the person he got them from? What was his favorite color? How long did he paint at a time, and what was the first thing he did with the painting when he was done? Was he short or tall? I looked him up in the encyclopedia, but of course it did not exactly answer all these things. It happens all the time that I want to ask questions like a machine gun, but I am too shy. Plus, it can be dangerous: Ask too many questions in school and you can get a reputation for being a weirdo.

  I have just gotten out the supplies for Mrs. Randolph’s bath when Mr. Randolph comes in with the flowers I picked, arranged in a jelly jar. He shows his wife and she acts like it’s the huge bouquet of roses Miss America carries down the runway after she wins, crying to beat the band, with her crown usually crooked. “Where are these from?” she asks, and I tell her I found them at the side of the street.

  “Ah,” she says, and gets that glassed over, kind of longing look.

  “It’s really nice today,” I tell her. “Not hot at all. Maybe you’d like to go out.”