“Max, why is your book purple?”
“I don’t know, because that’s what the publisher decided it should be,” he said, not looking up from the page.
“No, I mean, what are you reading that is best summed up by the color purple?”
He held the book up, displaying Virginia Woolf in profile under the title The Virginia Woolf Reader. “Everything she’s ever written.”
“Thought you’d do a little light reading by the swamp, huh?”
He shrugged. “It was on the bookshelf in the hallway on my way out. It was the first one I saw, so I grabbed it—probably because the purple makes it so noticeable. So I guess it was a good choice by the publisher.”
Knowing, probably, that this would not be Nina’s last interruption and not wanting to miss anything, he flipped from the page he had been reading to the back. As he read you could chart his progress by the back-and-forth of his eyes. He read like he did everything else—with full commitment to it. His entire body was involved. He looked away from the page for a moment, out of boredom, I assumed at first, as he studied the intersecting branches above us, but then his face just folded. At first he looked like he had a sneeze that wasn’t ready to be born, but I realized in horror that something on the page had made him cry. He made no attempt to hide it, or recover. I looked around for the others’ faces the way I would look for an emergency exit after smelling fire, on instinct. None of us had seen our fathers or brothers cry, so there was no way to know what any of them would make of this.
“Max, what is it, what’s wrong?” asked Nina.
“That’s the saddest thing I ever read. I can’t believe they published it.”
“What?”
“It’s her suicide note.”
“Nasty,” said Nina, but it was clear the idea appealed to her.
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read.”
“What does it say?” she asked, reaching for the book flirtatiously. Only she would try to make suicide coy.
He held it away without pulling his eyes from the page, which he had starting rereading. “I mean, it’s a suicide note, so of course it’s going to be sad. But the really unbearable part isn’t her description of how miserable she was.”
“Okay, so what is it?” Nina asked, the only one, apparently, willing to take part in this bizarre conversation.
He didn’t answer her at first, having gone back to reading, far more attuned to the letter itself than the conversation.
“Max?”
“What?” he looked up. “Oh, right.” He went back to the page, looking for the scrap that had made him cry. “It’s the part where she says, I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. She says it twice, and it’s such a short letter, and she was too good a writer to be inclined to repetition. She just . . . She must have really wanted to make sure her point got across, to have written it twice.”
“Or maybe she was crazy,” said Lindsey under her breath.
“You think, when someone like this dies, how sad it is that we’ll never have any more work from them, but until now I’ve never thought about the fact that she was a person.” He said this like the magnitude of what he was saying was self-evident. That whatever he was indicting himself for was obvious, and no small offense.
“Max,” said Lila, looking up from her own book for the first time since the conversation began. “How have you never read that before? Mrs. Chambers does a huge lesson on Woolf. And that was, what, two years ago for you now?”
And it was this, the suggestion that he should have known something long before he did—letting some beautiful, life-changing piece of prose almost slip through the cracks—not crying in front of a group of girls, at least one of whom he was half in love with, that embarrassed Max. That suddenly made him aware again of the physical space he occupied on the planet Earth, after Virginia took him somewhere else. And you could feel him calculate it, all the facts he would never know. All the pretty suicide notes and the rousing speeches given by generals to men going into battle, speeches that made it almost worth dying for. All the poems that you had to sit down at the final lines of, even after you had read them half a dozen times, and the affectations and insecurities of the poets who had written them. And you could see it change him, and make him smaller—the fact that you could spend your entire life in search of these things and never gather them all.
“Oh,” he said, his voice small. “I never took her. I petitioned to take physics and chemistry instead of an English class that year, since I already had a surplus of English credits.”
A silence fell upon our little group that even the gators and the snakes and the bullfrogs respected. The water lay still, with no splashes or rustling. I was about to cannonball into the pool just for the sound of it, when Nina spoke.
“In the fourth grade, Mrs. Bat taught us all about the Holocaust. And I mean, she spared none of the details. We heard about the gas chambers and the shooting-people-for-falling stuff, the families being separated. The whole nightmare. And because it was such intense stuff, she sent out letters to our parents a few weeks before, asking them to prep us. To give us some idea of what had happened. That, like, an entire race of people had been taken out and why and all that. So it wouldn’t be a complete shock. But of course Elaine had more important things to do. She swore she never got the letter, but whatever.”
Nina had been calling her mother by her first name since before we were old enough to grasp the subversiveness of the gesture.
“So, anyway, my mind is blown, right? Like I can’t even believe that this happened and I had never known. That I was, like, just then learning it. I felt like I had been lied to, you know? Like, how did something this terrible happen and we’re not, like, still talking about it all the time, like, CAN you believe this?”
Max had been in his head, still turning over the tragedy both of Woolf’s note and the fact that he had gone so long without reading it, when Nina started, but the more animated her telling became, the more of his attention he gave her. By now he was really looking at her, curious where this was going.
“So I started telling everybody about it. The bus driver. The cafeteria lady. Like, Oh, my God, listen to this fucked-up shit that actually happened. And every time I started I felt sure they were going to flip out about it, but all of them looked at me sympathetically, like, solemnly, and just said, ‘Yes, sweetheart, I know.’ And I figure that, while they know, they must not really know how bad it is, or they wouldn’t be so calm about it. So one day my mom comes home to me telling our Jewish mailman all about the Holocaust, not a single detail left out—I may have even embellished them to make sure he really got the extent of it. Can you imagine? He was really nice about it, but my mom really ripped me a new one even though it’s obviously her fault. I was forbidden to ever bring it up again to anyone. Ever. So, yeah, I was a little late in coming to the Holocaust, sure, but I’ve never forgotten it. And I never forgot the way I learned. In fact, I would say there are few historical events I’m as well studied in as the Holocaust.”
“Um, how have we never heard that story?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. Nina wasn’t fond of stories in which she was the butt of the joke. She liked to give the impression that she had been born knowing everything.
“I have,” Lila said, not looking up from her magazine.
“That’s wild,” said Max.
It was clear that he was as amused by the story as the rest of us were, but I don’t think he realized the magnitude of what she’d done for him. I’d never seen her make a fool of herself for anyone.
“Right?”
“I thought Anne Frank’s diary was a novel for a long time,” said Max. Quickly, almost involuntarily, like he had Tourette’s.
“Ha!” said Nina. “That’s almost worse than me. Her picture’s on the cover, you twat. Even I know that.”
<
br /> I waited for Max’s wounded, pensive look to return, but he only shoved Nina playfully—a gesture I had never seen his formality make space for—and they both started laughing.
“Can you imagine if it was a novel?” Max said. “And you were the girl whose photo they used for the cover?”
“You guys are so weird,” said Lila. “I’m bored. Let’s swim.”
She dove into the pool headfirst, and when she surfaced she started doing the practical little above-water breaststrokes old ladies do.
“I’ll race you,” Nina said to Max. And they sprang up from the ground as if the earth had kicked them out, and threw themselves into unforgivably sloppy cannonballs that disrupted the swimming lane Lila had created down the center of the pool.
“Don’t wake Marie!” Lila whispered hotly, nodding at where Marie was curled up in the fetal position on her towel, totally gone.
“Why not?” Nina asked merrily. “She’ll miss all the fun!”
But Lila had already turned away from her, her old lady strokes taking her farther away from Max and Nina.
I looked over to where Lindsey had been sitting next to me to see if she would be the next one in, but she was already up, circling the perimeter of the pool in her slouchy, stretched-out mom one-piece that looked faded enough to have actually belonged to her mother. She dipped a toe into the water but then jumped all the way in, quickly, before she could change her mind about it.
• • •
Before we could coo over exactly how short Sam Decker was selling himself, and insist that he was far nicer than us, that his kindnesses were everywhere, and that we were sure he had private reasons that clicked perfectly into place with his decision to treat Abby Madison to the symphony of unanswered rings that would drive even a crisis negotiator to madness, Bobby came wandering over in a Florida Cabaret T-shirt two sizes too big, making it look more like a dress than a T-shirt, a fire truck the red of a freshly picked mosquito bite in his hand.
“What up, maniac?” Nina asked.
“I’ve asked you not to call me that,” he said, placing the truck neatly on the bar table before him like he was preparing it for a presentation.
Nina was routinely meaner to Bobby than she was to the rest of us. She swore it was good for his character-in-progress, as she called it. She always said that if she had had siblings to be mean to she would have been nicer to everybody else, and we tried not to be offended that she didn’t count us as siblings. Someone had to see the worst side of you, she said. She reasoned that, by drawing it out of Bobby, he would be free to show his better self to everyone else.
“Did you catch Nancy what’s-her-face yet?”
Bobby had made the mistake of bringing his first-grade yearbook to the bar a few weeks ago and letting Nina hold it long enough to see a rogue heart drawn around a girl named Nancy. He had only let Nina touch it at all because she said she wanted to sign it. He seemed too smart to fall for this, but once we saw how few signatures he had gathered, we understood, and even Nina softened for a few minutes before growing more antagonistic in her resolve to prepare this boy for the world he would find on the other side of a childhood conducted under the unwatchful eye of Veronica Beecher.
“That would entail me chasing her,” said Bobby.
Where Max was all eager youth and Sam Decker was the epitome of physical manhood in its prime, Bobby was a boy who had been born with the knowing cynicism of a ninety-year-old. One look at him and you knew he knew and understood things about the world that no one his age had any business knowing. Where Max had questions and wonder, Bobby had answers he wasn’t ready to share, afraid, you could sense, to burden you with them. Where to Max the crosses had been an unthinkable blow, too sad to accept or live among, if you had told Bobby about them, he would have only nodded grimly, an acknowledgment that these things happen. Max’s unpopularity had probably never occurred to him. He had been raised by two loving parents to have a healthy self-regard. He became friends with us for the company. Bobby knew exactly how many signatures were in that yearbook, and exactly what that number meant. Every time I spent more than a few minutes with him I was newly grateful for Nina and Lindsey, even if they sometimes drove me to madness. I reinterpreted Nina’s bossiness as a willingness to take care of things no one else had bothered to, and Lindsey’s refusal to talk about things like what the hell she was doing with someone like Carine’s boyfriend and what could possibly be in it for her as an optimistic worldview.
“That’s not what she said,” said Nina.
“She lives two counties away and her parents don’t drink, so she’s never been here.”
“Okay, Romeo. Believe it or not, there are other places you can talk to someone.”
He turned the idea over with his eyes and then decided not to worry about it.
“Do you want to see my new truck?” he asked Lindsey, nodding at the fire engine, giving her permission to pick it up. Like most people, Bobby liked her the best. Nina was the one you looked at while you were talking, but Lindsey was the one you entrusted things to.
“Not bad,” she said, picking it up to study it. “It’s a hook and ladder. My favorite.”
“You would have a favorite truck,” Nina said.
“You know what my favorite thing to do with my brothers’ Hot Wheels when we were kids was?” she said, ignoring Nina.
“What?” Bobby asked, looking, for once, like a kid.
“Make these crazy pileup collisions. Just, like, miles of cars backed up on each other.”
“That’s awesome,” said Bobby matter-of-factly. “I have some other cars over there. Should I go get them?”
“Totally,” she said.
“Wow, he must really like you,” said Decker, who was clearly amused and charmed by Bobby, though he had become shy as soon as he got to the table.
“What do you mean?”
“A man never leaves his car with a woman. At least not his newest, best one.”
“Whatever,” said Nina, rolling her eyes. “Can we at least agree that it should be criminal to bring a boy like that to a bar like this? I mean, most kids are assholes anyway, so it doesn’t matter, but you can feel the ick of this place infiltrating his pasty little pores.”
“No way,” said Decker. “My parents used to throw these wild parties when I was a kid. All the time. On school nights sometimes. I remember going to sleep to the sound of them, and just not being able to wait until I was old enough to go to parties like that. Most kids are afraid to become their parents, but I never was. I couldn’t wait to be like them. They had these friends that they, they loved them, you know. And that’s what growing up meant. Getting to hang out with your friends all the time way past when you were allowed to when you were a kid.”
“That sounds okay,” I said. “But didn’t they have shit to do? Like, work and stuff?”
I couldn’t picture the adults in our neighborhood having time for that kind of merriment. The lawn chairs were more group therapy than lavish party, and always ended in time to get five or six hours of sleep before early-morning shifts.
“Nah. My dad was a fisherman. When he was gone, he was gone; when he was there, he was there. My mom was the secretary to the principal where I went to school. She was the one you checked in with when you were sent to the principal’s office. And she always made you feel better about it. No matter what you did, or allegedly did, she had a smile for you. She made it seem like she was on your side. I think the other kids always liked me for it. So it always made sense, her staying up late when she shouldn’t be. She was one of us, just trying to get away with it, no matter what it was, and because she was an adult she sometimes did. She’s still at it. You should see that woman make her way through a bottle of wine.”
We could picture her perfectly. Before the reign of Abby Madison, he took her to all the award shows. She had a haircut that promised her clothes were
n’t from Chico’s, or wherever else women her age were supposed to shop.
“So, man, you’ve had a charmed life all the way through, huh?” said Lindsey.
He tilted his head to consider this, like it had never occurred to him. “I have no complaints.”
His face went from disinterested acceptance to that happy smile you give a puppy and kitten napping together. We all looked to the point where his face was turned and saw Bobby making his way toward our table with his giant cabaret shirt pulled up so he could carry at least a dozen mini-trucks over to us at once.
“He’s back,” said Decker. “Hey, my man, what you got there?”
Even if Bobby hadn’t been born with the seasoned wisdom of someone who had done all this before, the tone Decker used was way off, suited to someone years younger than Bobby.
“Who’s this?” Bobby asked Lindsey, unimpressed.
“This is our friend Sam,” she said.
“He doesn’t know what a Hot Wheel is?”
“He’s special,” Nina said conspiratorially, taking a rare break from antagonizing Bobby to align herself with him against an even more savory target.
“Hey, man,” Decker said, totally game, his hands parted momentarily from his beer in surrender. “It’s okay, you don’t have to share. I know how it is with cars and girls, man. Each of us to our own.”
We looked over at Roni to see what she thought of the movie star riffing with her kid—now treating him like he was five years older than he was—but she was fixing her lipstick in the metal of the beer taps.
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