She rolled her eyes. “All they do is complain. The toilet smells. All of the baby food except the vanilla pudding tastes awful. The seeds for their experiment didn’t sprout. They’re bored.” She sighed. “I’m bored. Here, you talk to them. I’m going inside and get my suit.”
I pressed the button on the walkie-talkie. “Hey,” I said, “Earth to Paul.”
“Lynn?” Paul’s voice crackled back.
Somehow it seemed easier to talk to him when I couldn’t see him. “Jesse,” I said, “you know, the girl who saved your life.”
“Well, hello there, lifesaver.” I asked him what he was doing, and he said they were playing poker for the last jars of pudding. After that, all that was left was strained peas and fruitcake.
“Can you see me?” I asked, looking at my reflection in the Airstream. The curve of aluminum skin made me look tall, languid, like a model by the side of some gorgeous blue magazine pool.
“No, not unless I peeked under the aluminum foil,” Paul said, “and that would be cheating.”
“You wouldn’t cheat?”
“No,” Paul said, “I wouldn’t.”
But one of the other boys was less scrupulous. I heard him say, “Hey, who’s the skinny kid in the swimsuit? Your girl—” Then Paul released the button, cutting communications. My face turned bright red with embarrassment. Who’s the skinny kid?
Lynn reappeared. She didn’t seem to notice. “Come on,” she said. “We’re late.”
We needn’t have hurried though. We were supposed to be practicing our diving—I could never keep my feet together-—but as soon as we got in the pool it started to thunder and lightning. Then it poured. “Out of the pool, girls,” Mrs. Henry said, clapping her hands. We sat out the downpour on Mrs. Henry’s long screened porch, which had a Ping-Pong table and big piles of magazines. In the summer the porch was filled with kids waiting for the next hour of lessons and parents waiting to take their young swimmers home. By October, most of the classes were over, only Lynn and I had stayed on to finish our lifesaving class and practice our diving. Mrs. Henry disappeared into the pump house beside the pool to do something with the filters. Lynn and I played a mad game of Ping-Pong, bouncing the ball off the low ceiling, the screens, the concrete block walls. Then we sat and flipped through fashion magazines, peeling apart pages stuck together by the humidity to peer at women with wide eyes, lashes sticky with black mascara, and chests almost as flat as ours.
In my house, we never had these kinds of magazines, only Time, Reader’s Digest, and National Geographic. I suppose my mother thought women’s magazines were foolish, full of unnecessary and frivolous advice. In some ways, I agreed. Surely there was more to life than the makeup and diet tips their covers promised when I saw them at the supermarket. But at least the magazines were willing to offer advice on what it took to be a woman. The year before, when my mother had noticed the little bust I’d managed to develop, she’d taken me to the lingerie department at Belk’s for a fitting and turned me over to a very busty white-haired clerk with a measuring tape around her neck. Mom had announced, “This young lady needs a good-quality bra.” Other than that, I’d been on my own.
Mrs. Maltezo arrived, pulling her Cadillac up close to the screened backdoor so Lynn could run out. She rolled down her window a crack and offered to give me a lift home, but I yelled back through the rain that my father was supposed to stop for me after picking up Carol from chorus practice. They drove off. I could have gone with them anyway. Carol, if not my father, would guess the lesson was rained out. Or Mrs. Henry would have told him. But I hated the idea of being in the house with only Bertha, Lucky, and my drugged mother. Now that Gretel was gone, the house reminded me of a creepy mansion in some movie where people start mysteriously disappearing one by one.
I picked up another magazine. Ten Ways Men Like to Be Kissed!! Page 154!! the cover read. I was trying to unstick page 154 from 155 when Mrs. Henry reappeared with two tall aluminum tumblers of iced tea. She set them on the Ping-Pong table, glancing at the magazine. She lit a mentholated cigarette. “What is it you need to know about kissing?” she said. She was wearing a white two-piece suit, and her skin was the deep, even brown of dark Karo syrup.
I thought about it. I needed to know everything. “How do you get a boy to kiss you?”
Mrs. Henry didn’t laugh. She took a deep drag on her cigarette, giving the question serious thought. “Pretend I’m a boy. Stand up,” she said. “Closer.” She took my shoulders between two of her slender brown fingers and maneuvered me until my toes were touching hers. “First tilt your head back,” she said, putting one finger under my chin and lifting it, “and wet your lips.” I licked them nervously, once, twice. “Now” Mrs. Henry said, breathing out a cloud of mentholated smoke, “close your eyes.” Mrs. Henry lightly touched her lips to mine. I smelled suntan lotion and the chlorine in her hair. “There,” she said, stepping back. “Easy as pie. Any boy would have to be crazy not to want to kiss you.”
She handed me my glass of tea. I licked my lips. They tasted like Mrs. Henry.
IN THE END, Mrs. Henry drove me home. My father forgot—not that unusual—but for the first time ever, Carol forgot to remind him. By the time I got home, I was ready to be mad at her. I found her in the kitchen, standing at the refrigerator, pouring a glass of Hawaiian Punch. I slapped my rolled towel on the kitchen table. “Have you heard the news?” she asked me, not noticing that I was angry. “Jackie Kennedy is going to marry some old rich Greek guy. She’s hidden away on his yacht in the Mediterranean.” Carol made a face and drained the glass of sweet red punch as if washing a bitter taste from her mouth. “Isn’t that disgusting? What would President Kennedy have said?” Carol had taken down her autographed color picture of JFK, but I knew she still had it, carefully stored in her sock and underwear drawer, along with the proof Kennedy half-dollars my mother had bought us when she worked at the Treasury. I understood why this news had made her forget about picking me up at Mrs. Henry’s.
“I bet he’s spinning in his grave,” I said, imagining just that, JFK tossing and turning in his coffin under his flickering gas eternal flame, imagining his bride in another man’s arms.
“Her new husband isn’t even an American,” she said.
Carol said all the other girls in the chorus were outraged, too. And when we watched Cronkite after dinner, it was clear the whole world was waiting for the first glimpse of Jackie transmuted—like gold into lead, Cinderella into the Wicked Stepmother—into Mrs. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. No one was thinking about poor Wally Schirra and his head cold circling the earth in Apollo 7 or about Paul asleep after a dinner of baby food and fruitcake in the Maltezos’ dark backyard. No one, that is, except me.
That night I dreamed we were both in our bathing suits floating in the deep night of space. Paul was ahead of me, and I was trying to rescue him as I had in Mrs. Henry’s pool. Though I could almost touch his warm, bare skin, he kept bobbing away.
13
On Friday, the eighth day in space for Apollo 7 and Paul and the day of Lynn’s slumber party, Dawn Kartorski and I were carrying an archery target from the gym out to the far side of the field for PE. Halfway there, Dawn dropped her end. This was understandable. The targets were woven straw, about five feet across, heavy and awkward to carry. Unfortunately Pammy Derby was right behind me with a fistful of quivers, the spiked metal stands that, stuck in the ground, held the arrows for each shooter. When I stopped short, Pammy kept going and drove a quiver into the soft flesh behind my knee just below the hem of my navy blue gym suit. “Hey,” I said, “watch it.” It didn’t really hurt. I pulled the quiver out. It left one moon-shaped crescent in my leg, like the marks my nails had left in Paul Maltezo’s side but deeper. Blood oozed out.
Pammy took one look, dropped the quivers, and fainted. Dawn, who didn’t realize what was happening, turned around and saw Pammy lying on the ground surrounded by metal quivers, her gym suit somehow unsnapped in the front to reveal a corner
of white, lacy bra. For no reason I could see, Dawn screamed. That brought Miss Jepson, the PE teacher, running. “Give her air,” she said, though the four of us were alone on the field. She crouched down and patted Pammy’s face briskly. When Pammy sat woozily upright, Miss Jepson instructed Dawn to leave the target where she’d dropped it and help Pammy to the nurse’s office. “Take it slow,” she called to them as they started across the field, one leaning on the other.
“Miss J.,” I said tentatively. Miss Jepson was tall and blond, with thin, ropy muscles in her legs and arms. She was the girl’s dean as well as the PE teacher and the one who got to paddle the occasional girl sent to the office for that punishment usually reserved for boys. She knew I was a klutz, one of those girls who only passed PE because they always dressed out and showered. I tried to stay out of her way.
“What?” Miss Jepson snapped, swiveling to face me and seeing my leg for the first time. Blood was trickling slowly down the back of my leg, turning my sock a nice bright red.
“Holy moly,” Miss J. said. “How did you get shot? We haven’t even strung the bows yet.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I got stabbed by a quiver.” I pointed to the sharpened metal stands lying scattered in the grass.
Miss Jepson shook her head, as if it were beyond her comprehension how a simple assignment to set up equipment could have turned into such wholesale slaughter. “Well, you’d better get to the nurse, too.” I nodded and limped off the field.
Most days I would gladly have stabbed myself to get out of PE—that year I had achieved the lowest score a living human could make on the President’s Physical Fitness test—but this time I was afraid I’d miss Lynn’s slumber party if I was really hurt. When I opened the door to the office lobby, I saw Pammy stretched out on the couch with both the nurse and the principal’s secretary tending to her. I guess she’d fainted again just trying to tell them what happened. “Excuse me,” I said.
The secretary turned around, her mouth pursed in a frown. “Can’t you see we’re busy …” she began. Then she saw the blood soaking into the carpet.
“I was in archery class and …” I started.
“Oh, my God,” the secretary said. “She’s been shot!”
“Shot?” the nurse repeated, shifting her attention to me.
The principal, dark, balding Mr. Trumbell, who looked uncannily like the late Gus Grissom, popped out of his office. “Someone’s been shot?”
“In archery class,” the secretary said.
“By another student?” the principal asked, fully concerned now.
“By me,” Pammy cried out from the couch, “by me,” and burst into tears.
“It wasn’t an arrow,” I tried to explain, “and it wasn’t her fault. It was a quiver. I was stabbed by a quiver.” They all stood for a second, just staring at me. Then the nurse acted.
“Call her mother.” She glanced at the girl sobbing on the couch. “Call both their mothers.”
MY MOTHER ARRIVED, fully dressed, even wearing lipstick. Accidents had a way of getting her attention. She took me to see Dr. Blue. He was semiretired and only worked mornings, but luckily I’d been stabbed in first period. Mrs. Maltezo was there, so she cleaned the cut and my leg. “Tetanus booster and a gauze bandage,” she said to me. “Too clean and small a puncture to stitch. Not too bad, but you are going to have yourself a cute little scar.” Mrs. Maltezo smiled at my mother, who was sitting on a chair in the corner of the examining room, her head tilted back, her eyes closed, as if the sight of my blood had made her queasy. Actually, she was asleep. Dr. Blue stuck his handsome silver head in the examining room just long enough to agree with Mrs. Maltezo’s diagnosis.
“You’ve got to watch out for Cupid and his arrows, young lady,” he said and left laughing at his own joke.
After Mrs. Maltezo taped the bandage over the hole and wrapped a few rounds of gauze around my leg just to make sure the dressing stayed in place, I asked her, as both nurse and hostess, if I could still go to Lynn’s slumber party. I figured she would say yes, and I wanted to stop my mother or Carol from getting any ideas about my not being well enough. Mrs. Maltezo smiled at my mother again. “It’s all right with me,” she said, “if it’s all right with you, Mary.”
My mother’s eyes snapped open at the sound of her name. She sat up, running a hand over her hair, as if Mrs. Maltezo’s blond perfect perm reminded her of how flat and gray hers was.
“Mrs. Maltezo says it’s okay for me to come to Lynn’s slumber party tonight, if it’s okay with you, Mom,” I said.
My mother snapped open her purse, looking for something, her cigarettes or maybe her car keys. “If she won’t be a bother …” she said.
Mrs. Maltezo shook her head. “Jesse’s never a bother.” She turned her smile on me. “I’ll check your dressing tonight before you girls go to sleep.”
As if anyone ever slept at a slumber party.
WHEN MRS. BOGGS dropped Marly and Carol and me off at the Maltezos’ it was still light, the red and purple of the sunset glinting off the silver back of the Airstream in the yard. My war wound made me a celebrity, and I got to tell my story, complete with imitations of both Miss J. and the principal, over and over, as each group of girls arrived. None of us went outside to talk to Paul or the other boys on the walkie-talkie. Though I’d been wanting to do that all day, ignoring Paul somehow felt better. Let him swing alone through the darkness of space, I thought as we spread out the pizza dough from the Chef Boyardee mixes, dribbled them with the bright red canned sauce and grainy canned cheese. As Carol, who’d been supervising, was about to stick the first one in the oven, Mrs. Maltezo said, “Wait.” She’d bought pepperoni, to make it more like real Italian pizza. We watched as she added the slices, dealing them out like a deck of round cards.
While we were busy in the kitchen, Lynn took pictures of us with her father’s old Polaroid Land camera. This was no simple white plastic Swinger, but a huge contraption with bellows and a bulb flash that was almost too heavy for Lynn to lift. The pictures, when they came out, were small and square. Lynn gave each shot exactly one minute to develop, then peeled back the sticky cover sheet, and there we were in black and white. Flour on our noses and hands deep in the dough. Dancing around with the little cans of cheese. The pictures curled into tight cylinders almost immediately, and you couldn’t touch them or they would stick to your fingers. After she had shot the whole roll, Lynn rubbed each picture with some special milky solution that came in its own applicator the size of one of my mother’s red lipsticks. “That keeps them from fading,” she said. “In the morning, everyone can take one home.”
We ate the pizzas, which were great—soft and greasy and terrifically salty. Carol picked all the pepperoni off hers and gave them to me. “Too hot,” she said. The sausage slices made my mouth burn, but I ate them, washing them down with about a gallon of Coke.
“Man,” Lynn said. “I bet we’re going to have nightmares.”
“Not if we stay up all night,” I said.
After that, we changed into our PJs and watched Theater X, the late-night movie show the high school kids all watched. Some astronauts landed on a moon of Jupiter and discovered alien life in the form of a bunch of lonely young women in high heels. It was called Fire Maidens of Outer Space. The dance numbers were especially good.
When the movie was over at midnight, Carol announced she was going to Lynn’s bedroom to sleep. “If anyone,” she looked right at me, “wakes me up, I will personally kill them.” Janie, the baby of the group, and three other girls decided they would try to sleep on the shag carpet in the family room. They headed off, trailing blankets and pillows.
After they were gone, Lynn said to the five of us left, “Hey, wanna see another movie?”
“How?” I said. After Theater X, the station had played the national anthem while the flag bravely waved and jets boomed through the sky. By midnight, all three Orlando channels were nothing but test patterns.
“Come on,” Lyn
n said, waving for us to follow. We went down in the basement. The Maltezos’ house was on a high bluff a block from the Indian River and had the only basement in Cocoa, maybe in the whole county. Her father, she said, had to bring in a crew from Georgia because no one in town knew how to dig one. “They said we’d hit water and have a swimming pool instead.”
The basement was a little musty-smelling but seemed dry enough. There was a pool table and a bar and all sorts of those bar things grown-ups found funny, like Texas-size jiggers and a clock that said NO DRINKING BEFORE FIVE when all the numbers on the face were fives. The floor was made of linoleum squares that looked like playing cards. In the middle of the room, the King of Spades winked at the Queen of Hearts. Deep wooden storage closets were built into the wall along one end of the room. Lynn disappeared into one and came out with first a film projector and then a screen, which she set up in front of the bar. We sat on the linoleum floor, looked up at the show. There was no sound except for the projector’s rattle. First we watched an old black-and-white Porky Pig cartoon of animals skating around noiselessly at the South Pole and defeating a hunter. Then a home movie in color of what I thought was Lynn as a baby playing on the beach with a much younger Mrs. Maltezo, who waved wildly for the camera.
“You were kind of a fat baby,” Marly said, as we watched Mr. Maltezo’s shadow move back and forth across the beach blanket where the baby lay, its mouth stretched wide in a silent wail.
“That’s not me’ Lynn answered, sounding disgusted. “I wasn’t even born yet. That’s Paulie.”
I looked more closely. Paul was fat. And he looked deeply unhappy. Would our children, if we had children, look like that? In the movie, a disembodied hand waved a starfish in front of the baby. Paul only cried harder. I felt a sudden surge of maternal tenderness. I wanted to pick him up, make him stop crying, rock him to sleep and into a happier future. The basement seemed stuffy. I wanted to be outside. I wanted to talk to Paul on the walkie-talkie. Besides, linoleum playing cards made a hard theater seat. My quiver wound ached. I stretched my legs, started to stand up. The other girls shifted restlessly, too.
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