by Неизвестный
He smiled and I knew for sure. He put his hand on mine and that scene from So Big came straight back to me…his hands…. Yup, that was a sex scene.
“May I?” he said, and grabbed a chair and pulled it in next to mine. He sat down.
“I…I never thought….”
“I’d see you again….” He finished my sentence for me. “Me, too.” He grinned. Same grin. The years just rolled away.
Dessert was about to be served, something thick and creamy and revolting.
“Lucy,” he said. “Escape with me to that balcony out there and we’ll catch up.”
A few people stared as the two of us got up and headed for the nearest exit, but we didn’t care. Out on the balcony we stood for a moment, not saying anything, just looking up at the moon and the stars and listening to the soft music — “elevator music,” my mother would say — coming from somewhere inside the hotel.
We sat on plastic Adirondack chairs, side by side.
“Okay,” said Skipper. “Let’s cut to the chase. You’re not married, are you?”
“Nope,” I said. I could be blunt, too. “You?”
“No. I’ve been waiting for you.”
I laughed and so did he. Some line to sling, in the moonlight, after all those years…
“Hey, Skip,” I ventured. “Why did you move away…and never come back?”
There was a long pause. He looked away, then back at me. I almost regretted asking the question.
“My dad got a new job.” Skipper paused, grinned, and went on. “But that’s not the real reason. I got left back.”
“Back…of what?”
“Back to first grade. I wasn’t promoted. I couldn’t read. I guess you didn’t know that….”
“But you can now,” I said, stupidly, and felt my face flush red. I hadn’t meant to be flip. It was just…shock, I guess.
“A little,” Skipper said. “I teach English. I’m a Ph.D. candidate. Still, I’m not smart like you. Tying shoes. Remembering all the kings and queens and presidents. Remembering to wear mittens when it’s cold.”
Mittens?
He put his feet up on the railing and heaved a long sigh that sounded very much like contentment. He was wearing argyle socks, the kind my grandmother used to knit on a big circular needle. One of his highly-polished shoes was untied. I pretended not to notice, but he saw me looking.
“Will you … tie it for me?”
“Sure.” I reached over to complete this solemn ritual : I tied his shoe. And then I felt his arms around me. I squirmed around to face him, and he said, “Stop.”
And then he kissed me. On the nose.
“There,” he said.
I sat back down, and he took my hand and held it, and we just stayed there, looking up at the stars, not needing to say anything, just like we used to.
“Hey, Lucy,” he finally said.
“Yeah, Skipper?”
“Do you think they still make orange Popsicles?”
# #
Sure, we talked some more, probably for a couple of hours, catching up, remembering, exchanging stories, laughing … it’s a bit of a blur. We swapped phone numbers, each of us with a pencil and a small notebook. “Still a Luddite,” he said. And when he grinned, the years just kept on rolling away….
The next day, I drove home, dropped off my friends, and headed to my mother’s house. I needed my dog. And, strangely, I couldn’t wait to tell my mother about Skipper. Was it a coincidence that we’d been talking about him just the other day? She probably won’t believe me. I know she’ll ask a lot of questions, she always does, but I have to tell her. In fact, I can’t wait.
I parked in her driveway and sat for a moment, clearing my mind, or trying to.
And there she was, at the door, smiling at me. And here comes Filomena, leaping across the lawn and into my arms. I rubbed my nose back and forth across her satiny ears, then ran up the steps to the porch and without taking a breath blurted out, “Guess who I met….”
“Who?”
“Wait,” I said, “let’s sit down.”
She gave me a cup of coffee, which I didn’t touch until much later, and sat down opposite me. “Tell,” she said. “All.”
I told her all about the conference. She listened, smiling, waiting. Filly snuggled peacefully in my arms. Then I got to the part about a guy named Lawrence and his speech about reading, and the kid who loved So Big.
“So Big!” She practically screamed and her feet came up off the floor for a moment. “So Big!” she repeated. “You’re joking.” Her eyes got all shiny, and she said, “We read it in high school. Everybody did, back then. I’ll never forget when she …whatever her name was…looks out over the fields and says, “Cabbages are beautiful.”
She said it three times. Cabbages are beautiful? What was she talking about?
“It won the Pulitzer,” she said, calming down. “But…is there something you’re not telling me?”
“Mom. It was Skipper.”
“Who?”
“Skipper. Remember, the other day…”
She put both hands over her mouth and sort of …nickered. My sensible mother was acting like a dodo.
“He’s a teacher. Getting his Ph.D. He only lives about twenty miles away from here. We’re meeting next week, and….”
“Was it really Skipper … that same Skipper?”
I nodded. “It was. Is.” I looked deep into my mother’s eyes, waiting to see what she’d say next, hoping it wouldn’t be about cabbages. But she just smiled at me.
“Sometimes,” I said, burying my face in Filomena’s fur for a moment, then smiling back at my mother. “Sometimes a girl gets it right the first time.”
# #
That was the high point. Then, of course, there was the reality.
Skipper — I call him Lawrence now, at his request — had a tougher time than he’d thought extracting himself from his girlfriend, Alice.
There are other problems, too. He’s allergic to dogs and won’t take medicine for it. He’s got a ton of debt. His apartment is a dump. And, Ph. D. or no Ph. D., he’s still no good at balancing his checkbook. But these are all little things.
And I guess I’m not perfect, either. I nag. I bitch and complain when he doesn’t call or when he shows up late because his crappy old car broke down again.
Love isn’t easy.
But is this love? Or is it just a fantasy — the cute idea that two six-year-olds can start all over again twenty years later … without even an orange Popsicle to share?
Plus, there’s my mother. She couldn’t wait to meet Skipper again, so I managed a supper at my place. Mom, Skipper-Lawrence, me, and, for ballast, my friend Fran and her new beau.
“What will we talk about?” My mother asked.
“Cabbages?” I suggested, trying to make her laugh.
That night went well. Others, of course, didn’t. We fought, Skipper and I. It’s not as easy, pushing thirty, as it was being six. First off, he is a Republican. Okay, so we don’t talk politics. He drinks a bit too much. Okay, so I bite my tongue.
He snores.
He spends hours preparing, agonizing, over his dissertation. Writing still doesn’t come easy to him. Sometimes I help him.
We argue. We have silences. We talk about a vacation, but it hasn’t happened, which isn’t surprising, since the biggest thing we have in common is that we both hate to travel. My mother adores him, which just makes me mad. Can’t she see what a jerk he can be sometimes?
So, a week ago, I decided to take a break. De-Skipper my life for a while. Try a little solitude.
It worked for a couple of days. I took long walks with Filomena, read a couple of good novels, went out with the girls to a movie. Worked on lesson plans.
Then the phone rang. It was Lawrence himself. “Can I come over?” he asked.
“May I?” I corrected him, which he hates.
“So can I … may I?”
“Why?” I asked. Dumb question.
“My shoe’s untied.” Pause. No comment. “Seriously, it’s time, Lucy. Unless you want to wait another twenty years.”
I guess I don’t. “Okay.” I said. “Come on over.”
Wipe that grin off your face, I said to the mirror. You’re hooked. Admit it.
Reader, it may take a while. But Skipper and I are going to get it right. The way we did when we were only six.
The Only Girl in the World by C.B. Pratt
C.B. Pratt lives in Mickeyland, Florida, keeping a nearly sleepless watch on the borders of the Empire, often infiltrating in the guise of simple tourist. After a career in various mad enterprises, a return to writing fiction is like coming safely into port at last. Hero for Hire, the first title in the Eno the Thracian series, will be available as an e-book in June 2013.
Often when I find myself with a writing challenge, I take a phrase or an idea and analyze it word by word. In this case, the word that stood out for me was “see.” What is “sight?” Is it just the use of our eyes? Or does “sight” mean anything if there isn’t a mind and an imagination to understand what is seen? Does the mind invent it’s own answers to interpret what is seen and what happens when so much of what we want to know is unseen? In this story, I have a man who is attempting, not without frustration, to understand why he sees a face he cannot remember ever seeing with his physical eyes. Does he “see” her again? What does “again” mean if you aren’t sure there was ever a first time? The title “The Only Girl In The World” comes from the 1916 song by Ayer and Grey, not from Rhianna’s recent hit.
What charm is there about a face to make it linger forever in the memory? Charles could have drawn hers, if he had any vestige of artistic ability. He tried once or twice but the result resembled nothing human, let alone charming. A lift of an eyebrow, bolder than the wisps of fashion, a half-smile just calling forth the three-cornered dimple east-southeast of a full lip touched with red made a delightful memory even if he could not recall where he’d seen her.
From the top of a tram maybe, hurrying home from work through the fog-trimmed London evening. Or in a corridor-train jammed with theatergoers. Perhaps she’d been leaving a party while he’d been going in. Charles liked to think it was the last for that way there was at least some hope of seeing her again. If they knew some of the same people, perhaps, one day, they’d pass each other at someone’s home and he could stop, put out his hand and say, “I’m Charles Brightson and I’d quite like to marry you.”
He’d never say it like that, of course, straight out. She’d think him mad and maybe he was, a bit. All he knew was her face. It stayed with him always. He had only to close his eyes and there she was, smiling, putting up her hand to smooth springing thick dark hair. He only hoped she really existed and wasn’t just some image he’d glimpsed in childhood or in a dream. A pity to love devotedly an image from an advertisement for milk or Pear’s Soap.
She didn’t have a name nor a habitation. She smiled at him when he woke up last day of term and was still there when he found his bunk at flying school. He never spoke about her, even when the other lads joked about sisters and sweethearts. There was little difference between Winchester and flight training, maybe because most of them weren’t any older than he was. Even the training officers were all young men; the oldest at 25 was known as the Gaffer. The jokes went on, funnier than ever, even when the first of them fell from the sky during a low-altitude turn. Reynolds had been his name.
To turn out fifteen hundred pilots, the service trained eighteen hundred men. Some washed out for health reasons; pilots who gets nosebleeds at a thousand feet or whose ears turn white when the temperature drops aren’t much good. Most, though, just died. A shredded linen wing or an engine failure and a lack of experience made a deadly combination. Still, there were friends to be made and enjoyment to be had. The girls living near the airfield were a giddy lot, full of fun, though none had a dimple in just the right spot. The other chaps took to calling him Vicar since he didn’t drink, much, and no girl was the right girl.
Charles even read a little poetry from time to time, from the small green books issued to them as a matter of policy. “I did but see her passing by …” made him throw the volume of ‘Better British Poets’ against the wall. Poetry was all well and good but it left out the ridiculous pain of it all. Mad to close your eyes and see a girl who you didn’t know, could never meet, and probably wouldn’t like much if you did. Bonkers, really, to stand like a stickin-the-mud when dozens of pretty girls were waiting for partners. Doolally to go out for a smoke and see her face in the plumes when you could be plotting how to evade the chaperones.
He had to concentrate extra hard when flying to see the enemy’s troop movements, or lack thereof, to take note of new trenches and fortifications if any, because that blasted girl was always drifting across his vision like a searchlight. The anti-aircraft guns puffing up Archie at him he avoided almost lazily the way wily trout avoided hooks in the brook back home. He flew eighteen recon missions, hardly ever glimpsing another plane. There were rumors of a commendation in the wind. He wrote regularly to his father and his younger brothers, hot for their turn to sign up. But even then, he had to blink her face away from the page.
Her face was the last thing he saw, there in the flames as the engine caught fire when he didn’t evade Archie with his usual skill. The stick didn’t respond as it should and Charles cursed it. The fire, rejoicing at the excess of oxygen, devoured the fuselage and blew back onto Charles, burning him, blinding him.
# #
“You’re back early,” Ward Sister Parker said as Julia Kendall walked into the hospital entry. “Catch me giving up home leave to come back to this place.”
“Couldn’t stay away,” Julia declared. “I missed the stewed prunes desperately.”
“To each their own. Will you be on tonight?”
“Probably. I go even now to see Herself.”
“I’ll pray for you.”
Not usually did lofty Sisters speak to V.A.D. helps, who were tolerated as well-meaning but clumsy socialites. Kendall was different, the Sisters all said, though in what that difference lay was usually answered with a shrug. The Head Nurse summed it up in one word. “Competent.” Then, after a frowning pause, “Not sentimental.”
Julia unpacked swiftly, laying her civilian clothes away in one of the two drawers allotted to her from a six-drawer chest. She wedged open the window; Wainwright was allergic to fresh air and always kept it tight shut so that the room contained a tangible fug after three days. Rivers always went along with the prevailing mood, agreeing in the same breath that fresh air was desirable but that the room was cozier with it closed.
Julia paused to look out over the green countryside beyond the ambulance-marred drive. There were no rolling hills here but the sight still gave her a pang of homesickness. Not for the tiny Portsmouth flat where she’d spent a shortened leave but for Mounts Hill House, the lost paradise. Her sister, wrapped up in her boisterous boys and dreams of how wonderful life would be when her husband finished his naval service, had no time or inclination to reminiscence about days gone by. Maybe she was wise to fixate on the future but there had to be something between this aching loss and a complete willful forgetfulness. Nell didn’t seem to remember even one of the things that Julia couldn’t forget, not the apple trees, not the servants, trees and people each with their own personalities, not even the tragedy that ended it all.
# #
“We have several new boys,” Ward Sister McHugh announced. “Two broken tibias; they’ve already been christened ‘the twins’ though they’re nothing alike really. An appendix case, a fellow with a bad go of gastritis — you’ll have to keep a basin ready for him — and the usual kittle-cattle.”
Julia noticed the corner of the room, where the white curtains had been drawn to create a private pocket in the midst of the chattering, chaffing group of soldier-patients. Sister McHugh nodded toward it gravely. “He’s very bad, poor lad. A pilot.”
&nb
sp; “Another of them,” she said flatly. The airfield at Parkhurst gave them many patients, almost all ‘very bad’.
“Aye. Burnt, blinded, and Mr. Martin says there’s nothing further surgery can do for him. Liver’s all but gone, and the rest of him no better. Under morphia but very polite when he comes out of it.” Her strong red fingers felt automatically for the watch pinned to her thin bosom. “Due for another hypo in an hour.”
“Very well.”
Nurse Wenderly, who had charge of the ward in the Sister’s absence, hadn’t been qualified for very long. Nurses are supposed to be all starch and steel but Wenderly hadn’t quite achieved this ideal as yet. Julia watched her wipe the tears away from her plump cheeks as she emerged from the white-curtained corner an hour later. The patients, those who were alert, noticed them as well.
At the desk, Julia asked in a lowered tone, “Are you all right?”
“Don’t tell Sister but it goes right to my ‘eart to see him like that. You can tell he must of been terribly good-looking, even if he is a bit gingery. And his voice is ever so nice. Oh, this war’s an ‘orrible thing.”
“The world’s full of horrible things but we shouldn’t show that we feel them, not in front of the men.”
She saw Wenderly’s wounded look and knew she sounded like the pattern of all priggish nurses back to Nightingale. The Sister was quite cold to her for the rest of the afternoon, consciously reminding her that she was nothing but a penny-a-pack V.A.D. But when it was time to check on Lieutenant Brightson, Wenderly had been called away so Julia resolutely walked behind the white curtains.
He lay on his back, the upper half of his face wrapped in bandages slightly stained at the edges. A faint odor of decay reached her and she hesitated, despising herself a good deal. She went forward to count his pulse. His right hand was cut as though with many shards of glass but not burnt. He jerked when she touched him. “Who’s that?”
His voice was half-choked but the accent was pure Oxford. “I’m just the V.A.D. You’re not supposed to be awake yet.”
“Breaking the rules, am I?” He spoke lightly but she felt the tension of pain in the trembling of his hand.