by Ron Koertge
“He knew Bob from church.”
“I heard your folks are seeing the sights.”
“You can say that again.” She chews as she shrugs. “Every week another postcard: the Grand Canyon, Pikes Peak, Mount Rushmore. Every week the same message: ‘Glad you’re not here!’” She leans over her plate of food. “I saw this thing on TV where they said about ninety percent of lottery winners are miserable.”
“You don’t look miserable.”
“I’m not the lottery winner unless their motor home goes off a cliff. All they do is make the house payments; the rest is up to me. Nice, huh? You’d think I’d been some drug-addicted shoplifting nympho. Instead I got a job when I was sixteen and came home by midnight on weekends.” She takes a serious bite of eggplant. “Who cares? I’m out of here the day after graduation, which of course they won’t be in town for because there’s a saguaro in Arizona they haven’t taken a picture of.” She holds out her plate. “Now, will you get me some more of everything or at least turn your back while I waddle into the kitchen?”
“Stop being hard on yourself, okay?” I rehearsed it so many times in my head that it comes out pretty smooth.
Wanda blushes just a little. “Sorry. You’re right.”
Just then Megan steps out onto the patio, points with a celery stick, and says, “I wish somebody would shut that dog up.”
I tell her, “Give me a minute and I will.”
In the kitchen Astin is busy loading up his plate. I step through the big sliding door that leads from the patio.
“How’s it going with Wanda?” he asks.
“Fine.”
“Do you believe the tits on her?”
“Shut up. She seems nice. She’s easy to talk to.”
“Teddy!”
We both glance toward the pool.
“Teddy!” says Megan. “When you come back, bring me a Perrier.”
Astin says, “Tell her to get it herself, you don’t work here.”
“I’m going that way. It’s fine.”
I deliver Megan’s French mountain spring water and Wanda’s second helping, then head for the deep part of the yard. I pass a gardener’s shack with its mower, gas cans, and clippers and find a big Irish setter, who is glad to stop barking and chat.
When I get back to the others a few minutes later, Megan asks, “How did you do that? My mom is always calling the cops.”
“He’s just bored. The kid got tired of him, so now if he gets to go out, it’s with the mom, and all she does is go to her boyfriend’s house, leave him locked in the car, and then cry. He’s a bird dog. He wants to fetch. If I were him, I’d bark too.”
“How do you know all that?” Megan asks.
“My mom, I guess. Stuff I read. Like . . . did you know dogs and wolves are the same for thirty days? Then the wolves start turning into real wolves and the dogs just stop there so they can be dogs. Otherwise they can’t be around humans.”
Megan sits up. “So a dog who keeps maturing turns into a wolf?”
“No way,” says Astin, “does a Chihuahua turn into a wolf on day thirty-one.”
“I just know what my mom said, and we can’t ask her.”
“Well,” Megan says, “I’m going to swim before I eat.”
She unzips her silver cover-up and steps out of it. Astin puts down his plate and takes off his jeans. Underneath is a turquoise Speedo. The polo shirt goes, he shoves Megan, and they dive into the pool together.
“You know just a second ago when she dropped her robe?” asks Wanda. “She practiced it.”
“Are you kidding?”
“I was there. She’s got this like wall of mirrors in her bedroom, and she stood in front of it and got the move down just the way she wanted it. She is really entertaining.”
“You guys have been friends a long time?”
She nods. “Since grade school.”
“I’ve only known Astin since the Rafters. But he’s a good guy. He’s been really . . . Well, he’s just a good guy.”
“He cheats on Megan and steals from that garage he works for.”
“Seriously?”
She nods. “Just chump change mostly. Quarts of oil, filters, crap like that.”
I can feel my stomach tighten up like it used to. “Well, he doesn’t steal from me.”
“I’m just saying.”
We eat and don’t talk for a while. I make myself chew really slowly. In Santa Mira my stomach was always upset.
“You can swim, Teddy,” Wanda tells me. “I’m fine here on the beach with the Greenpeace people pouring water on me.”
Astin said she’s just fishing for compliments, but I think she sounds really down on herself. “I thought you weren’t going to do that anymore.”
“Sorry.”
“Anyway, I don’t know how to swim.”
That makes her look up. “Really?”
“My parents didn’t see the point.”
“Well, I know how, but whenever I get in the water, there are always unkind references to a certain Melville novel.”
“Wanda!”
“That’s the last time. I promise.”
We watch Megan and Astin play in the pool. They dunk each other and laugh.
Wanda says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if a celebrity spokesperson stepped out of the bushes and tried to sell us something.”
“Run that by me again?”
“They’re just so perfect, it seems like they ought to be selling something.” Then she waves that sentence away. “Don’t pay any attention to me. I watch too much television.”
Astin hammers a beach ball out of the pool, so I go and get it for him. When I come back and sit down, Wanda says, “Megan can be vain and a pain in the ass sometimes. But she’s a good friend, too. I hate being by myself, and I’m afraid of the dark. If I get freaked out, I call her and she comes over. If I need a couple hundred dollars for a few days, she goes right to the bank.”
“I just loaned Astin some money.”
Wanda puts down the sparerib she’s been working on. “Well, kiss that good-bye. He’s into Megan for eight or nine hundred. She can afford it, but it’s still crummy.”
She whispers the last part because the two of them are at this end of the pool. Then she says real loud, “Did Astin tell you I was going to New York in June?”
“Uh-huh. I have to go somewhere when I graduate. At eighteen, foster care is over.”
She takes a big gulp of Coke. “Well, I want to go, but the whole thing scares the crap out of me. It’s all the way across the country, I don’t know anybody, and an apartment about the size of my butt costs two thousand a month.”
“But you’ve got a job.”
“Yeah. A guy I work for at the playhouse hooked me up. But I’m already lonely.” She shifts a little and fans herself with one hand. “I started as an usher two years ago and worked my way backstage. I love set design. It’s just playing house on a grand scale. I like figuring out how the sofa in act one can be the canoe in act two. And then I get to build it! What about you?”
“Well, I thought I’d just be stacking fifty-pound bags of Alpo and ringing up goldfish for the rest of my life. Now I don’t know.”
Just then, Megan and Astin start kissing like there’s no tomorrow.
Wanda sits up. “That’s my cue to show you around. This house is really something.”
I follow Wanda into the kitchen, where she points. “On your left you’ll find the Sub-Zero refrigerator that keeps the takeout food fresh.”
“Does anybody ever cook?” I ask.
“I don’t think so. Melanie brings in a chef every now and then if she’s having lots of people over. Otherwise, somebody from Organic Express drops stuff off.”
She leads me out of the kitchen and down a short hall lined with Audubon prints, then into a room full of books. The desk probably had to be lowered in with a crane since it’s way too big for the door.
“Stay behind the velvet rope, sweetheart.”
/> I know she’s just playing docent, but what if she actually liked me? What then?
She points to the desk. “Where Megan’s father sat and talked to his bimbo girlfriends.”
“So you knew him.”
“Oh, yeah. A total sleaze. Put the make on me when I was fourteen. You know how people have stuff and you wish you had it, and then you see what it does to them and you think, ‘No, thanks’?”
“You mean money?”
“More like how good-looking he was. Totally gorgeous. But he’s just like a prince in one of those stories where some crone comes into the queen’s bedroom with a curse up her sleeve. When he grows up, women throw themselves at him, he can’t say no, and he can never be happy. He still calls Megan’s mom and cries.”
I walk to the nearest wall and check out the books. They’re real, but they’re also stiff. The spines crack when I try to open them.
“Where’d the money come from?” I ask.
“She brought some with her, and he made the rest in real estate.”
I run one hand across the amazingly shiny desk. “So,” I say, “it’s a study, but nobody actually studies in here.”
“Megan sometimes. Two years ago she published this essay called ‘My Body Is a Treasure I Want to Squander.’ It’s already in a couple of anthologies. I know she wrote that here because she told me.”
She links her arm through mine and tugs. I try and act like this happens to me all the time.
Just then, we hear a dog bark. “I thought you took care of that,” says Wanda.
“It’s not him — that’s a spaniel.”
“So you know all this about animals, just from working in that pet shop of your parents?”
“Mostly. But let’s not forget the noble institution of Scouting.”
“Seriously?”
“God no. My scoutmaster gave me the creeps.”
Wanda grins. “Was he just a total mo?”
“That would’ve been okay with my dad as long as Mr. Mathis brought all his gay friends in the store to buy teacup terriers.”
“He actually said that?”
“Maybe not exactly, but according to him, every black guy’s a crack addict, every gay guy’s got a little fluffy dog, and every Chinese kid can do calculus in his sleep. The whole reason I was a scout in the first place was because he made me. I was supposed to forge all these relationships, right?”
“Let me guess,” says Wanda. “So that every time somebody wanted a parrot, he’d think of you?”
That makes us both laugh. “The whole thing was truly stupid. If all that bogus networking wasn’t bad enough, there were badges for everything: Rabbit Raising, Pulp and Paper. There was even something called the American Heritage badge.”
Wanda slouches against the wall. If I put one hand next to her and leaned in, I’d be flirting.
“What’s an American Heritage badge look like?” she asks.
“Like the Statue of Liberty is holding a ham.”
Wanda takes me by the arm again and we set out. She says, “You’re kind of cute, you know that?”
I doubt it, but I know for sure I smell good. I took two showers.
Megan’s mother’s bedroom is huge: his-and-her bathrooms, a spa in one corner, a mini-gym in the other. And a bed that only needs chalk lines to double as a soccer field.
“Watch this,” Wanda says, reaching for a remote. One remote among many.
At the push of a button, the blinds open onto another patio: koi pond, one teak chaise, ferns and calla lilies, a statue of a Buddha.
“Holy cow.”
She nods. “Yeah, I know. You kind of have to wonder what old Siddhartha would think about ending up in a place like this.”
This time she takes my hand. I let her, but I’m not kidding myself. She’s just a nice person who is probably this way with a lot of people. This is still maybe the best day of my life.
In Megan’s room there’s a plasma TV and all those mirrors that Wanda mentioned before. On one of them, right at eye-level, where she can see it from her StairMaster, is a note in Magic Marker: GET THAT BIG ASS OF YOURS UP THOSE STEPS.
Wanda tells me, “Nice, huh?”
“Not so much, actually.”
We’re on our way back outdoors when she stops me in the door of the music room. There’s the biggest piano I’ve ever seen.
“Does anybody play that thing?” I ask.
“Megan took lessons when she was little.”
“My father would say, ‘All that money just so some spoiled brat can play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.’”
Wanda leans against the doorjamb and crosses her arms. “My dad was a carpenter. And he had this bumper sticker inside his toolbox that said, EVERY TIME I HEAR THE WORD CULTURE, I REACH FOR MY PISTOL. Not that he actually had a pistol.”
“Do you miss your parents?” I blurt.
“I’m too pissed off to miss them.”
“I can’t hear their voices anymore, you know? I don’t remember what my own parents sounded like.”
She puts one hand behind my head, sort of on my neck. I stand very still.
“I don’t know where that came from,” I tell her. “I’m sorry.”
Then she leans in and kisses me on the forehead. “Orphans in the storm,” she says.
By the pool, Megan and Astin are still making out except now they’re wrapped around each other on one chaise.
“Seriously,” says Wanda, looking for a place to put her wedge of cheesecake, “can you two do that somewhere else?”
Megan gets to her feet and tugs at her bikini. Astin gropes for a towel. Then he chases her toward the house.
“Oh, Ted!”
When I turn, Megan is standing in the doorway.
“Ted, rinse all those plates, will you? And stack them. Maria will do the rest in the morning.”
Wanda says, “Don’t pay any attention to her.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. She can order me around — we’re friends. But you’re a guest.”
“Really, it’s no big deal.”
“Well, don’t do it now. If I put on a CD, will you dance with me?”
Oh, man. “I’m not very good.”
“Who is?” She gets to her feet. “You want a little drink? Her mom’s got some two-thousand-year-old brandy.”
“Okay, I guess.”
While Wanda is inside, I rehearse the box step I taught myself by reading a book. I’m hoping she wants to slow dance because that’s all I know how to do.
Sure enough, something lazy and bluesy comes from the outdoor speakers. Wanda walks toward me with a glass in each hand and her arms spread wide, like I’m home at last. I know it doesn’t mean much, but it’s a good feeling anyway.
I take my drink, pretend to sip it, and watch her take a mouthful and lick her lips.
“Doo-wop,” she says linking her hands behind my neck. Mine settle at her waist. Wanda’s forehead touches mine, like we’re aliens saying hello. She sings under her breath, something about the still of the night.
Luckily I can see my feet and they’re still moving. Mostly, though, she just sways. She’s totally relaxed. I can smell the liquor on her breath, heavy and rich. I try and remember this in case it never happens again.
When the song ends, she yawns. “Do you think sleep really will knit up the ragged sleeve of care?”
“Probably. Are you sleepy?”
She puts one hand to my cheek. “Just a little.”
I lead her toward the chaises. “Go ahead. Take a little nap.”
“Will you sleep too?”
“Absolutely.”
“If I snore, poke me.”
“All right.”
She reaches across the three or four inches that separate us. “Hold my hand, Teddy.”
A hummingbird fools around in the bougainvillea. On the other side of the wall, a car or two goes by. Wanda’s breath evens out. Her mouth opens a little.
I remember what Astin sa
id: “It’s just a day at the pool with a couple of girls.”
How cool is that?
I watch her sleep for a while, then wander into the house to use the bathroom. To get there I have to pass the study. There’s that big, shiny desk. I remember the one I ruined at the party in grade school. I swear to God, if there’d been one girl there half as nice as Wanda, that would’ve never happened.
A little later, when Wanda wakes up, I’m right beside her with my eyes closed. She stirs, and I look over.
“Did I snore?” she asks.
“The earth trembled.”
“Shut up!” She runs both hands through her curly hair. “Are those two still inside?”
“As far as I know.”
“That just makes me tired. You want a ride home?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“It’s not a problem. I just live about six blocks from the Rafters, over on Elm.”
Outside, we walk down the driveway and head for an old Toyota pickup.
“Megan wants me to park on the street so oil doesn’t drip on her precious driveway. She says she hates her mother, but she’s just like her. She told me once she wanted to burn this house down and live in the rubble. Then we went uptown and I watched her spend eleven hundred dollars on clothes.”
I get in and grope for the seat belt. The truck is messy, but orange peels on the floor make it smell tropical.
“Those books in your way?” she asks.
I look down. “I kind of stepped on one.”
“Let me have ’em.” And without looking, she sticks one arm out the window and tosses them into the truck bed.
Wanda negotiates the wide streets, yawning a little and squinting into the sun.
“I’m not sure that brandy was a good idea,” she says. “I’ve got a killer headache and a lot of work to do.”
A few minutes later she pulls up in front of the Rafters’.
“If you ever want to do something,” she says, “I’m good to go. It’s not a date or anything. It’s just, you know, an outing. A movie or a hamburger at Blue’s.”
“Are you serious?”
“No, I’m a total sadist. This number belongs to Charles Manson.” She rips a piece of paper out of the nearest notebook, writes on it, and hands it to me. “Of course I’m serious. Now you be serious and call me.”
I don’t want to go in yet, so I sit on the porch. I like everything that happened today: Megan’s house, the pool, the lunch, dancing with Wanda, watching her sleep — everything.