by Paula McLain
“What are you doing in the dark?” Leon asked, but didn’t turn on the light.
“I think I’m waiting for a phone call.”
“You think?” Leon chuckled. “Must be your sister.”
Leon had been Raymond’s roommate and best friend for five years and knew every part of Raymond’s story that was worth talking about—late at night, in bars over black and tans or bourbon, in their own living room, passing a homemade glass water pipe between them. He knew Suzette’s highs and lows, mostly because Raymond was the barometer, and because Raymond simply took off every few months, dropping everything to go and straighten or bail her out. A few times he’d brought her back to stay with them. Leon knew about the boyfriends, the bankruptcy, the Dexedrine that kept her thin and brutally optimistic, like a clench of thrumming wires. He knew about the baby she’d sent to live with her and Raymond’s mother, Berna, years before, and knew most of all that no matter what she did, Raymond protected her, looked the other way, turned the other cheek.
“The girl’s trouble,” Leon had said more than once, and it didn’t need saying. She was trouble. Troubled. Was in trouble every time Raymond turned around. But what was he supposed to do? Just walk away? After all of the mistakes, the ridiculous choices, the self-destructiveness, it wasn’t easy to go on caring about Suzette, but sometimes love wasn’t easy, Raymond told himself. He told himself he had no choice. Being born into the same family meant they belonged to each other. No matter how messy things got or how it looked to other people, this was an indestructible fact.
After Leon went to bed, Raymond waited for another half hour or so, but the phone stayed dead. His first instinct was to get in the car and go find her, but where in Oxnard was she? And would she still be there when he arrived, some six hours later? Another part of him wanted to rip the phone out of the wall. It was one of those heavy-as-a-dumbbell phones, and pitching it into anything—the wall, maybe the refrigerator—would feel satisfying. It would jangle on impact. It would leave a dent.
He found himself thinking of the play telephones he and Suzette had made as kids with paper cups and kite string or yarn. They never worked, those phones. Maybe they’d never gotten far enough away from each other, or drew the string tight enough, but he’d never heard what he was supposed to, the vibration of her voice traveling to arrive, incredibly, in the cup. He’d heard her, yes, but the way he always had—because her voice carried, because he was listening hard. No matter how clear his instructions, she’d hold the cup right up to her mouth, like a mega-phone, so that not a single word came through ungarbled. And no matter how many times the game failed, come a rainy day, a dull day, they tried again, dragging out new cups and string.
In a way, Raymond thought grimly, they were always playing the telephone game. When they were kids, Raymond’s bedroom and Suzette’s were next to each other. The house was old, with sloped walls and creaking floorboards that functioned as a kind of clairvoyance. He always knew where she was in her room, what she was doing. He knew the instant she woke up in the morning and the instant she dropped off to sleep as well. Suzette was born when Raymond was six, so it was sort of his job to look after her, but it was also more than his job. He always knew what she was thinking or believed he did.
And now, as he sat guessing in the dark, trying to pinpoint her in space and time, to will her to call him back, he thought he might as well have been using weightless string and Styrofoam. She would call again or she wouldn’t. She would be okay or not. Ray, I don’t know what to do, he heard again, a cracked bell sounding in his head, but the phone in his kitchen was mute and useless. He went to bed insisting to himself that she’d call in the morning, and when she didn’t, he grabbed a map, put coffee in a thermos, and went to find her.
DIAMOND GIRL
In the car on the way home from O’Hare, Fawn mostly talked to Raymond, filling him in on details from home. Her mom was fine. Her dad was working a lot. Her little brother Guy had had pneumonia in the spring, but he was better now, and was even playing soccer again. Raymond listened and nodded, occasionally asking about one thing or another. I looked out the window, my mind ticking, trying to think of the perfect thing to say—witty, worldly, memorable—that would show Fawn how fundamentally great I was. But my tongue was dead in my mouth. My brain felt leaky and unreliable.
When we reached the house, we sat on the couch in front of TV trays and ate burgers we’d picked up from A&W, Fawn slathering her onion rings with French’s mustard. (Mustard!) After dinner, we watched the Movie of the Week, which was about a mischievous but brilliant chimpanzee that helped his detective owner solve a murder mystery. He knew sign language, and when he found various clues, he would shriek and sign wildly to the detective, who was apparently an idiot. I thought this was a totally unbelievable story, but Fawn laughed and seemed into it, so I was too.
At bedtime, Fawn had her turn at the bathroom first and when she came out she wore an actual nightgown made of a pale blue eyelet. There was a white satin bow affixed to the center of the neckline and just above it, she wore a tear-shaped amber pendant on a silver chain so fine it could have been spun out of confectioner’s sugar. I hadn’t noticed the pendant before, but I had noticed Fawn’s hair, which was gleaming as she brushed it now with long, even strokes. In the car, I had been mesmerized by the way the sun transformed the somewhat ordinary brown into a dazzling, minky ribbon. A thick strand lay across the back of Fawn’s seat, and I felt it pulling magnetically on my hand, which was lying, for the moment, tame in my lap. If I moved slowly, the way pickpockets did, I could reach up without anyone seeing, stroke just once, and then know exactly how soft it was, how fine. But I resisted. Wasn’t it weird to want to touch someone else’s hair? And what if I was caught? What would Fawn think of me then?
What Fawn did or didn’t think of me was to become my principal obsession that summer, so much so that it would fully eclipse and cancel out its reverse: what I thought of her. It never occurred to me to ask myself if I liked Fawn. The real question, the only question, was did she like me? If not, how could I make her like me? If yes, then how much? And when? And why?
In the days after Fawn’s arrival, nothing and everything happened. Raymond took a personal day from work and drove us up the Great River Road all the way to Dubuque, where we went up a steep hill in a rickety funicular that delivered a spectacular view of the Mississippi. At the top, a college-age boy took our twenty-five cents. Long rust-brown hair fell fetchingly into his eyes, and he sported a dimple in his right cheek deep enough to swallow a blueberry.
“They sure do grow them cute out here,” Fawn said to me as we walked away, and I puffed up, feeling pride though we were in Iowa, not Illinois. Out here was a broad enough swath, I thought, and regardless, Fawn thought we had something to offer her. Maybe we actually did.
It was on the way home from Dubuque that I first learned Fawn could sing. Raymond had Gordon Lightfoot on the eight-track; he was a sucker for “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and knew it word for word. When “Spanish Moss” came around, Fawn began to hum and then to sing properly, her throat loosing notes so low and so mournful I thought I might cry on the spot. When she’d finished, Raymond clapped his right hand lightly against the steering wheel. Generally I was too shy to sing in front of other people, but Fawn’s voice swept me up and carried me along with it. And as soon as I opened my mouth, I knew it was going to be okay. She wouldn’t make fun of me and neither would Raymond, because I sounded great. Together, Fawn and I sounded better than great. For the rest of the ride home we listened to the Jesus Christ Superstar sound track, pulling into the drive just as “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” was hitting its stride. Instead of turning the truck off, Raymond sat patiently and let us belt out “I never thought I’d come to this, what’s it all about?” to the darkened cab. He seemed to get a kick out of watching us sing, out of seeing us having a good time. It was the best day Raymond and I had had together, no contest, and I wondered if he knew too that
it was all Fawn’s doing.
The next day Raymond went back to work, and Fawn and I were left in the house to figure each other out. Raymond was part of a contracted crew that mostly did roadwork for the state of Illinois. He wrangled school bus–colored earthmovers and backhoes, trenchers and dozers, ripping up concrete or laying asphalt on Interstate 80. Sometimes he simply raked down the median on a big John Deere bar-cutter mower.
“He really works outside all day?” Fawn asked me incredulously. We were painting our toenails for the second time that morning, our feet perched on the side of the coffee table, cotton balls between our splayed toes.
“I think he likes being outside,” I said, daubing at my nearly invisible pinky nail with the wet brush and flubbing it. “He says he wouldn’t want to have to be at a desk wearing a suit and tie.”
“Men look great in suits. Middle-aged men, anyway.” Fawn looked at my handiwork and grimaced. “I’d better save you from yourself,” she said. Taking up the polish remover and a Q-tip, she held my foot in her lap and went around the nails with a light but precise stroke, all of my swerving outside the lines disappearing. “Raymond’s pretty good-looking, don’t you think?” Fawn mused. “He could probably be a model or something. One of those guys in the Sears catalog wearing a flannel shirt and holding a shovel. Lumberjack guy.”
I nodded, laughing. Raymond was handsome, I had to agree, but I had never tried to imagine him doing anything other than what he did, being anyone other than my uncle Raymond—though who that was exactly remained pretty murky territory.
“Do you ever look at the underwear sections in those catalogs? Men’s underwear is so stupid. There’s that little flipty-do crotch thing that they’re supposed to put their peckers through. Whose bright idea was that?”
“Raymond could be an underwear model,” I suggested.
“Perfect,” Fawn said, blowing on my now-finished toes. “We could go raid his dresser and find an outfit for him.”
I hesitated. It wasn’t even noon on our first day alone, and already Fawn was suggesting a level of trespass that hadn’t occurred to me in the seven months I’d lived with Raymond. “Do you think that’s a good idea?” I said quickly. “I’m sure he wouldn’t want us going in his room.”
“Chicken.” Fawn huffed and pushed her bangs out of her eyes. “Well, we have to do something. I’m bored out of my brain.” She slumped on the couch, letting her eyes rove critically around the room, from the cracked veneer of the coffee table to the filmy, burbling aquarium. Finally she settled on me. “I know what. We’ll give you a makeover.”
“Me?”
“Who else, stupid?”
The good news was I had potential; the bad news was I would have to apply myself. Did I know what that meant? Fawn wanted to know.
“I have to go on a diet?”
“That’s a start. But there’s more to it.” We stood at the mouth of my closet, Fawn flipping through the hangers, rejecting each item with a “No. No. Nope.” And then, “Have you been living under a rock or something?”
It took Fawn about two seconds to declare my closet a disaster area. I would have to borrow her clothes until we could do a proper shopping. That was all there was to it.
“You do have a great figure, though,” she said. “I’d kill for your boobs.”
“Thanks.” I brightened. Assets were assets, and it was the only way I felt myself to have any advantage (if you could even call it that) over Fawn who, though she was nearly a year older, was too slender to have breasts.
“Your eyes are nice too, a very pretty brown,” Fawn said, stepping closer. “But you’ve got so much hair, they get lost.”
“I could push it back,” I suggested, securing handfuls behind an imaginary headband.
“Too Alice in Wonderland. You don’t want to look younger. You want to look…mysterious,” she said, trying the word on, then repeating it.
What Fawn decided on was a radical cut similar to Mia Farrow’s in Rosemary’s Baby. I tentatively agreed. I understood that Fawn had decided to make me a project—like a new recipe in a test kitchen—and was flattered, of course. But would I turn out? What if Fawn thought she was making a chocolate soufflé and I was more like one of those cake mixes that come with the Easy-Bake Oven?
“Do you have any money?” Fawn asked.
“No. Raymond gives me five dollars allowance every two weeks, but I’m not very good at saving.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t mind giving us a loan,” she said, and walked down the hall to his room. I followed and stood at the door, watching, as Fawn went over to Raymond’s dresser and rifled through a pile of bills sitting on top. She came back out with a ten and some singles.
“It’s no big deal,” she said, reading the unvoiced disapproval on my face. “I do it all the time at home and no one cares. My parents don’t even notice. I say it’s their loss for leaving money lying around. They should be more careful.” She smiled a Cheshire Cat smile and told me to grab my purse.
To catch the bus downtown, we waited in front of Keaton Intermediate, where I had finished eighth grade the spring before. Across the street sat an empty lot filled with waist-high couch grass, end to end, broken only by the occasional tire rut and by charred-bare rounds where brave kids or those who didn’t care if they were busted by Moline’s finest, had built pit fires.
“What’s out there?” Fawn asked.
“Not much. Kids get drunk there and make out.”
“There’s one in every town. Back home we go to a place we call The Cellar. It’s just this room in the basement of an old warehouse, but people have dragged furniture down there. Mattresses and old sofas. So it’s pretty cozy.”
I tried to imagine “cozy” from these details and came up short.
“You go out there?” Fawn asked, gesturing toward the lot with her chin.
“Not much,” I said. In truth, I’d crossed it only once, thinking it a shortcut home, and instantly regretted it. It had looked perfectly tame, even scenic from the road. But once I was out there, I couldn’t go ten feet without seeing the smashed brown stars of exploded Michelob bottles. Crushed White Castle boxes flecked the weeds and mud holes, as well as wadded wrappers of every kind—gum, candy, condom. I even saw a balled-up pair of white panties lying a few feet off the path. If you’d have told me then that by the end of the summer I’d be utterly unfazed by this sort of landscape, that I’d know what to do with a joint, a condom, ruined panties, I’d have said you were crazy. At my middle school in Bakersfield there’d been drinking, drugs, sex, but the action came nowhere near me. I was and had always been young for my age, stunted. At fifteen I’d had a kiss, yes, but a disastrous one, delivered badly by sweet and puny Patrick Fettle, a neighbor boy in Bakersfield who might as well have been my brother.
When I was growing up, Patrick and Myron Fettle had been my only real friends, particularly during the summer months when other friends were far off and September was farther still. The Fettles’ house sat within a mile of a reservoir, which was banked by levees made of pebbly gray dirt. Myron loved to hunt bullfrogs there, the BBs from his Daisy rifle raining down on the green water, skittering then sinking fast. Patrick didn’t like to shoot; instead, he and I poked holes in the mud with pointy sticks and collected polliwogs in metal coffee cans stripped of their labeling. We collected lots of things in those coffee cans: algae-slicked ferns and pussy willows, white quartz stones with rough edges, and bait worms and kissing bugs. Kissing bug was Berna’s term for a box elder bug, even though they didn’t kiss anything. They bit and bit hard whatever they landed on, the grayish skin around a knee, the lightly furred lobe of an ear. The bugs were red-edged, eyeless, with legs like filaments and antennae like black thread. They were everywhere in the summer months, which was why, I suppose, we collected them. It was either that or collect their stings, from which would rise itchy pink anthills of skin.
Then, when I turned eleven (Patrick was my age, in my grade at Truxton Middle School, and Myro
n was two years older), something irrevocable happened. I began to grow breasts. Suddenly, I no longer resembled a girl. I was one. Myron shunned me overnight and altogether, forgetting me as one does a mangled toy. Patrick, always more sensitive, was slower to give in to the obvious: boys and girls were retreating from each other everywhere, on playgrounds and ball fields, in neighborhoods in towns all over the map and even out in the sticks, where no one was looking. Patrick and I could have stayed friends in secret, I suppose, but we didn’t.
One summer afternoon, I put on a T-shirt that was two sizes too big and went looking for Patrick. It was a hot, dry day. By the time I finally found him in the vineyard that bordered the main road, there was a yellow film on my legs and arms, and collars of dust around each of my sockless ankles. Patrick was down on his knees in one of the furrows, digging in the loamy dirt with his hands. He didn’t look up as I approached, but I braved ahead anyway, shaking my T-shirt out and blousing it around my waist.
When I came nearer, I saw there was a dead partridge on the ground next to his left knee. It was an adult male, about the size of a small peahen, with a bluish ruff.
“He’s beautiful,” I said. “Where’d you find him?”
Patrick grunted something I couldn’t decipher and went on digging methodically, the mound of dirt to one side growing slowly. The soil on top was darker and damper, and looked cool to the touch.
I sat down near the dirt pile and watched him dig. It was nearing dinnertime, maybe five o’clock, and the light was changing. The grape leaves around us glowed, backlit, and I saw, under a heavy swag of vine, a spider’s egg, netted and white and so fragile-looking it seemed to be crocheted out of air.
When he’d cleared a two-foot-square hole, Patrick reached over for the bird, lifting it gently with one hand under the plump body and one under the head so the neck wouldn’t bow. I was amazed by the delicacy in his touch. Once he’d placed the partridge in the hole, he covered the body with grape leaves before he scooped the earth back into place, tamping and pushing with the flats of his palms. When he’d finished, the plot was level with the furrow; only his handprints showed that anything had happened there at all.