Later that morning I heard Bobbi and Parakeet coming up the stairs and I dashed out of my room, camera in hand, and took her picture in the stairwell.
"Smile," I said, and Bobbi stuck her tongue out at me.
"That should be a good shot," I said. "So, you want to take a walk later?"
Bobbi looked at me and I couldn't read her expression. Was she disgusted or perplexed?
"A walk?"
"Yeah. It's such a nice day out, and—"
"What window you been looking out? It's pouring rain."
"I mean inside. It's a nice day inside. I thought we could take a walk around the house, you know, stroll around Larry's table, take in the living room, the dining room..."
"Strange, O'Brien, very strange," Bobbi said, continuing up the narrow steps, pressing her back against the wall to avoid touching me as she did so. Parakeet trotted up after her, also avoiding me.
"Is that a no?" I asked.
She waved her hand above her head, not looking back. "You got it."
I didn't know what I was doing. I knew I was acting obnoxious, but I couldn't help myself. I'd never felt this way before. I felt stupid and goofy and drunk.
I searched for her again later and found her out on the glassed-in porch, singing "What Child Is This?" to Susan's guitar playing. I stood in the living room and listened through the glass door that separated the two rooms. I drew in my breath and closed my eyes and felt her song fill me and drain me at the same time. So many emotions ran through me: joy, despair, love, longing, peace, anxiety. My body went limp; my arms, which I'd been holding up with the camera in my hands, ready to catch a quick shot when Bobbi and Susan happened through the door, dropped to my sides, and the camera fell to the floor. I thought it was my heart. The singing stopped and I stopped breathing. And I thought, Her singing breathes life into me. I cannot live without her voice.
Then Bobbi came to the door and looked at me through the glass. She looked cross. She opened the door a crack and stuck her head out. "What are you doing now, O'Brien?"
My mouth opened and shut a couple of times, and then I said, "You two should sing that song for us after dinner. You could put on a show."
"Maybe if you'd give us a little peace instead of tossing your camera on the floor to get attention, we could practice enough so we could do that." She looked down at the camera a second and then back at me. "Scram!" she said.
I picked up the camera and took her picture. She gave me a disgusted look and closed the door.
Christmas dinner was the usual—noise, laughter, arguing—chaos. Mam, Melanie, and Susan had moved the large Christmas tree with everybody's homemade ornaments and popcorn and cranberries draped in its branches over to the corner of the dining room, to clear a space for Larry's table. Up to that point the dining room had had no furniture in it at all, just a lot of Pap's plants and everyone else's junk brought from the backs of their cars and dumped on the floors.
I had planned to sit next to Bobbi at dinner, but Ben had set out place cards and I ended up between Pap, who sat at the head of the table, and Larry. I couldn't even pay much attention to Bobbi, because loudmouth Larry dominated the conversation. He acted as if he were the star of the show, with his perfect antique table, his Christmas dinner, and all his friends gathered around him. He acted as if he, instead of Pap, sat at the head of the table. He played the great host, talking too loudly and trying to entertain us and make everyone laugh. He and Ben had put on mime costumes, black stretchy pants and black-and-white-striped shirts. I couldn't tell if the costumes were all one piece, but I knew I wouldn't be caught dead wearing one. They clung to Larry's and Ben's bodies like Saran Wrap, and Ben, still built like the football player he used to be, looked like a huge piece of furniture, an armoire or a grand piano. They weren't in white face, but Larry had shaved off his goatee and had pulled his hair back and tucked it under the hat. 1 didn't know what the two of them were up to, but their miming at the table had everyone howling with laughter except me. I'd never seen Mam enjoy herself more, or Bobbi laugh so much.
I watched her laughing. The sun had come out. Its light streamed through the window behind me and lit up her face. And I looked at the others seated around the table and said in my head, You want poetry? Bobbi's poetry. Look at her face, her eyes are blue poems, her lips red and small like a haiku, her skin buttery smooth and glowing—a sonnet. She's in your midst every day and you don't even see it. You can't even recognize true poetry when you see it, because you're all phonies.
I wanted to say all this to Bobbi, I wanted to catch her eye across the table and let her read my mind, but she was still laughing, watching Larry and Ben drinking from invisible dribble glasses, and I wished she were enjoying me, laughing with me, and I wished I thought the pantomime were funny instead of stupid. But all I could do was sit tongue-tied, unable to find any way to contribute to the nonsensical conversations and chaos.
After dinner we all cleaned up and the household exploded in rowdiness, with everyone, except me, snapping dish towels at each other and chasing one another around the house. I stayed at the sink and scrubbed pots and pans caked with dried-out sticky stuff and charcoal, and thought how it might help if Larry could ever think to use a bit of oil or butter in his cookware.
Hours after the meal had begun, we finished cleaning up and gathered in the parlor for the big show. I was the only one who didn't have an act. I hadn't known there was even going to be a show except for Bobbi and Susan's duet, but somehow, without clueing me in, everyone had planned to perform something after the Christmas dinner. Pap insisted on going first. He sat down at the piano and sang "I've Been Working on the Railroad," "O Christmas Tree," and "We Three Kings."
Mam showed us her winter drawings of the pear trees that stood barren in the backyard, the holly bush by the porch, and the cabin in the woods.
I kept eyeing Bobbi, looking for a sign that she would be next. That's all I wanted, to hear her sing again, but then we had poetry-reading time and Bobbi sat still, on the floor, her legs stretched out in front of her and her hands propping her up behind. Every once in a while she'd let her head fall back and she'd tilt it side to side so her hair would swing left and right, brushing the backs of her arms. The whole motion seemed seductive to me, sexy and private and exciting.
She caught me staring at her and I felt myself blush. I turned my attention back to the poetry.
Larry read a poem he had named "Survivors of the Waste Land," alluding to T. S. Eliot's poem Waste Land, and later to John Donne's line about no man being an island.
It was hard for me to follow. He asked the question, Who are the survivors of the Waste Land? But then I couldn't tell what he thought the Waste Land was. In Eliot's poem, which I had studied in school, the Waste Land was pretense, meaningless, dead lives. Larry's Waste Land seemed to be disease. Diseases of the body, AIDS and cancer; disease of the earth and sky and sea. Then he brought it closer to home and it was the deterioration of neighborhoods and the family, and then the Waste Land was the internet and television and the media, and he claimed we were all islands now, broken off from one another, isolated, nothing connecting us but wires and electromagnetic fields.
I had sat still during the dinner conversation, but this time I couldn't keep quiet.
"Are you saying you think the computer and the internet are waste lands?" I began.
"Waste lands. Yes." Larry nodded, and his hat fell forward. Pap laughed and knocked on the top of his hat "They're supposed to be time-savers, connecting us to the rest of the world, but it's all so cold and remote, isn't it? And all that time we save, we spend doing even more work, faster. It's all 'Faster, faster, hurry up, faster.'" Larry used a lot of hand motions with his explanation and Pap imitated him.
Ben said, "We should let him wear a mime costume. Pap, I bet you'd be great."
I eyed Ben. I didn't want him changing the subject when I had something to say.
"You sound as if computers were singlehandedly destroying life, whe
n in reality computers show us life, how it all works," I said. "We know more about life now and the way the mind works than we ever did, because of computers. Have you ever played the Game of Life on a computer?"
"Who needs the game when the real thing is tough enough?" Larry said, laughing. "Really, JP—play the Game of Life, maybe that's your problem. You play the Game of Life so much you don't have a clue—"
"All right!" Mam cut in before Larry could finish. "You both just have a difference of opinion, don't make it personal."
"It's okay," I said to her. "No, the Game of Life is no substitute and it's not meant to be, but what's so fascinating, if you'd ever played it, is that it's made up of just the simplest rules, and yet the patterns, the beauty that's created—it—it's like life. The rich complexity of life is just made up of a few simple rules. I mean, it's like the pattern in a fern leaf or a snowflake or..." I'd gotten excited, thinking of all the possibilities, remembering working on equations with Mr. Commer, the lab teacher, anxious to explain it all to everyone. I looked at them all watching me, listening to me. "I could show you, I could get some paper and I could show you. It's better on a computer, but the idea works on plain paper." I stood up and started out of the room to fetch a piece of paper, but then Ben, who lately had taken it upon himself to become Larry's most devoted fan, said, "You know, Larry, you should enter that poem in the poetry slam. What's the place where they hold the slam every week?"
"You think so? I don't know. I entered one once and really got slammed."
Everyone encouraged him to enter and Mam asked him to read the poem again. "Only slower, this time," she said. "You've got a lot of images there, let them each sink in. You're reading too fast and it really is good."
I looked down at Mam sitting on the floor, with Susan sitting between her legs and leaning against Mam's chest, and Mam pulling her hair back off her face and holding it back in a ponytail. I looked at Bobbi sitting with Harold and Leon, and the three of them were saying, "Yeah, come on, read it again." I looked for Jerusha and found her next to Pap with her knees drawn up under her chin and biting on a nail. She shrugged at me, as if to say, Sorry, you lose.
Nobody was interested in the Game of Life, or me. I turned to leave and the doorbell rang.
"Get it, would you, JP?" Mam said, talking over Susan's head.
Pap jumped up. "It's company!"
He joined me at the door, ready to hug whoever stood on the other side of it, but it was Mr. Polanski. Pap stood back from the door and hung his head.
Mr. Polanski cleared his throat. "I come to fetch Bobbi home for Christmas dinner. She should be with her family—her—uh—her mother misses her."
"Bobbi already ate," I said, grabbing the doorknob and attempting to close the door in his face.
Mr. Polanski stuck his body in and called out, "Bobbi? You in there?"
"Daddy?" Bobbi called from the parlor. She and Parakeet came out into the hallway. Bobbi smoothed down her hair as she hurried toward us.
"Daddy?"
"Hey, baby. Look at your old man, all cleaned up." He pushed the rest of the way through the door and shrugged his lopsided shoulders, then he kneed Parakeet in the chest to keep her from jumping up on him.
Bobbi reached for Parakeet's collar and held her back.
"Look at you, Daddy. You're wearing a suit."
Mr. Polanski shrugged again and cleared his throat. "I'm all clean now, and—" He cleared his throat again. "We'd like you home for a while, so how 'bout it?"
Bobbi didn't answer right away and he added, "Just for the rest of vacation, maybe."
Bobbi looked back toward the parlor. We could hear Larry reciting his poem again. She turned back to her father. "Yeah, all right. Let me get some of my things and I'll be right back." Then she hesitated, took a step toward him, and gave him a peck on the cheek.
Mr. Polanski broke into a smile and nodded. "Okay, then, I'll be waitin' in the car."
Bobbi left him and dashed up the stairs. Parakeet and I ran up after her, and I caught up with her on the third-floor steps.
"You're not really leaving, are you?" I asked.
Bobbi continued on up the steps. I followed behind.
"Don't say anything, JP, okay? I'm just going home for a couple of days. Just for the holidays, and then I'll be back." She had grabbed a grocery bag and was stuffing her clothes into it.
"But how could you—"
"I said, lay off!" She glared at me. "I swear, what is it with you?"
I shrugged. "I—I've decided—it's just that I like you—I guess."
Bobbi hoisted her bag onto her left hip and reached her free hand out toward me. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it.
"Thanks. I'll see you in a few days." She let go and knelt down to give Parakeet a hug. Then she looked up at me. "Look after her while I'm gone, will you?" She hugged her again, kissed her on her muzzle, and stood up. She started toward the door and then turned around. "So aren't you going to take my picture?"
"What? Oh yeah, sure." I fumbled with the camera hanging from my neck. She lowered her bag and smiled for me, and it was a smile full of hope and good memories, and friendship. Her smile, her singing, and her kiss were the nicest presents I'd received that Christmas.
Chapter Seventeen
BOBBI LEFT, YET I couldn't stop thinking, or dreaming, or fantasizing about her. I thought about her all the time, especially at night. I imagined us together in my room again, whispering about life and chaos. I imagined her kissing me, and better yet, me kissing her, the real thing this time.
Mam asked me one morning when she caught me staring into my bowl of cereal for too long, "JP, are you feeling all right?"
I felt surprised, even nervous, that she had caught me. Did she know I turned out my lights early in the evenings and climbed under the covers and fantasized about Bobbi? Did she know how long I stayed in bed in the mornings, how long my showers now took?
I told her I felt tired from so much studying. I said I'd be fine by the time vacation ended, and in my mind added, when Bobbi gets back.
I decided I would invite her to stay in my room again when she returned. I bought boxes of strawberry Pop-Tarts without the frosting, her favorite food in all the world, she once declared. I stacked them on my bookshelf so she'd see them when she first entered the room. I bought a case of Dr. Pepper, her favorite drink, and set it on the floor beneath the Pop-Tarts. I had walked through the woods and gathered pinecones and dry leaves and stones. I stashed my schoolbooks under my bed and created a nature display on my desk, imagining Bobbi glancing over it, picking up a stone to feel its heft, rubbing her thumb across its uneven surface, touching a pinecone and pricking her finger, twirling a leaf and smelling its brown earthiness, all while she talked to me, told me her fears and dreams. I would listen to her, and then I'd say what I should have said that Christmas Eve when she told me about her father. I'd tell her that I would take care of her, that I'd always treat her right.
I brought Mam and Pap's five poinsettia plants up from the parlor and set them about the room to add a touch of cheer and warmth, and I had my film from Christmas Day developed. I glued all my pictures of Bobbi on the sheet of posterboard I had left over from one of my science projects and taped the poster to the slanting part of my ceiling, above my bed. Then I sat back and surveyed the room and the photographs with satisfaction. All it needed was Bobbi.
The others were worried about her. We hadn't heard a word from her since she'd left, but I knew she was all right. I felt certain her father hadn't hurt her and everything was going well; she'd be back at the end of vacation. I figured my will alone would bring her safely home again. She had had on the Einstein T-shirt I had given her for Christmas when she left, and I imagined her wearing it every day and thinking of me as I thought of her. We were connected I knew she'd come back.
Mam wished she would call. She said she'd feel better if Bobbi would call. I didn't want to hear her voice over the telephone. I was happy to have the time to plan, to
prepare for her homecoming, to set it up just right Speaking to her then, over the phone, would break the spell. We would not speak until we were alone in my room. It had to be just right, just perfect.
Larry suggested we all drive over to the old neighborhood and check up on her, but before we could do it, before I could object, Bobbi showed up, a grocery bag filled with clothes in one arm and a new boyfriend linked in the other.
His name was Don Delveccio, a twenty-eight-year-old whom Larry, Mam, and I recognized as the guy who used to go door-to-door offering to paint the houses in our old neighborhood or fix the plumbing or time the car. Word got around that he didn't know what he was doing and no one would hire him anymore, and we figured he had moved on, but there he stood in our entrance, arm in arm with Bobbi, while she introduced him, her face glowing.
I watched her set her bag down on the dining room table. I saw her take her free hand and, together with the one holding on to Don, use it to squeeze Don's biceps, biceps about four times as big as mine. He smiled at her, cocky and proud, and Bobbi glowed. She glowed as though all of heaven's light shone on her. I stood in the shadows behind the others and tried to swallow, to breathe, but something, some invisible hand, was pressing on my Adam's apple.
No one else minded Don, not his age, not his reputation, not his looks. Those looks. He was good-looking to the point of being too good-looking, as if his looks were a mask, as if there were some ugliness hidden beneath that smooth tanned skin of his, behind his deep, blue-eyed stare, his firm jaw. He moved as if he were watching himself, noting his own every gesture, calculating, timing every action, every sentence he uttered. He was just too careful with himself, as though holding himself in check, guarding himself. I knew he was trouble, but Bobbi believed she'd found everything she had been looking for, in him. Even Bobbi's father feared Don, and that's what she wanted, she told me later, after Don had left and she had come to my room to retrieve her sleeping bag and raft, which still lay on the floor next to my bed.