The Girls' Almanac

by Emily Franklin

  Lucy was the first to give in, to pluck a tomato half and eat it. The Early Girls had a slightly tough skin with a rich and sugary juice, and Lucy liked them best of all. After the drowning, she had forgotten to change the location of the tomato plants, though, and cutworms had invaded, despite the aluminum foil wrappers she’d put around the bases of the seedlings.

  Lucy enjoys thinking about Matt. Not what they might have been doing if he were alive, breathing in the dark lull of the raked dirt, but what they had done at an exact moment two years before. Maybe this was the day they’d gone to the fair on the town green and been caught in tacky caricature, balloon-talking love to each other from grotesque mouths. Each day could have been a day marked by an event, like when they’d first boarded a plane together, or had sex by the stacked wooden logs at the farm. She and Justin and Matt had stacked the wood themselves, brought it down from Vermont, where they’d bought it cheap, cheaper than you could get closer to Boston or down the Cape. Lucy learned how to pile the wood in a beehive shape, the tall cone of logs creating a hollow inside, where the air could continue to dry it for the next season.

  Some days, Lucy looked in her date book to see if she’d kept a record and could be sure if today was when they’d gone to Petrovia’s for soup before seeing a revival of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in the square, commenting on their movie-couple likenesses—didn’t all lovers go to black-and-white cinema revivals? Or maybe it was a Thursday, the day they’d replaced the light fixture in the kitchen, slipped the dead moths from the old one’s curves, and watched their flat bodies fall into the trash. Other days, Lucy’s date book revealed no details, and Lucy couldn’t remember where they’d been, what they’d discussed, and all day she would find herself edgy—what had she and Matt done on regular days, on days when they’d just been around and with each other?

  In the shower sometimes, Lucy will indulge herself and count her life since he’d been gone. How many haircuts has she had since Matt died? What has she done each national holiday since? What clothing does she own that Matt has never seen? Which books? What movies has she watched without him? With panic, it occurs to her, thinking about her hair, that someday, with enough haircuts and growth, there won’t be any hairs on her head that Matt has touched.

  When Ginny’s car stops by the copper beech tree, Lucy looks over and waves, suddenly excited to show her mother all the garden rows, to hold up the small placards she printed with herb names and then laminated. She’d gone to the coffee shop in town, taken more than her share of wooden stirrers, and superglued them to the cards. Heaped by the back door, they were ready to be staked, shoved past the topsoil down deep enough to avoid being relocated by the wind.

  “Come see the dress!” Ginny shouts and opens the car door. The breeze has picked up. Past the trees and house are ocean swells topped with whitecaps. From the car window, the plastic garment bag billows out, flag-waving and rustling until Ginny tucks it back in, holds it steady.

  “It’s beautiful, Mom, really.” Lucy nods to the dress. “I don’t want to touch it.” She shows her dirty hands.

  “I have to take it home and put it in my closet until Saturday—I don’t want Doctor Jim seeing it!” Ginny says.

  “When will you stop calling him Doctor Jim?” Lucy asks.

  “Oh, who knows? Maybe never.” Ginny smiles like a bride. She’d met Dr. Jim Thorensson first when she was still married to Lucy’s father, Mark, who had been admitted for observation after showing up with chest pain in the emergency room. He’d announced himself as Doctor Jim as if he were in pediatrics, but Ginny had been so grateful, so overwhelmed by his knowledge, that she hadn’t been bothered. As the papers passed from Mark’s lawyers to hers, Ginny had played mixed doubles at the club—usually losing cheerfully, until she was paired with Doctor Jim and they took each set from Aubrey Deltin and Trish Leonard. Since their introduction, even after he’d taken her to St. Bart’s and engaged her at the George V in Paris, she still thought of him as Doctor Jim.

  Ginny and Mark had eventually divorced, the silence stretching out between them like a sickening moment before a roller coaster reached its pinnacle and began its descent. That same silence was where Lucy felt solace after Matt died—she would retreat to her father’s book-filled flat in Huron Village and page through the Signet Classics he’d picked up at the used bookstore but never read. Or she and Mark would sit on his roof deck. The place was small but spare, with two red plastic chairs in the shape of giant palms. Sitting in one of the hands, Lucy would cry until clear mucus coated her mouth, her eyes swelled, her father intermittently sighing empathy or touching her hair. She would open her mouth sometimes to thank him but come out with only “Dad” before crying again.

  “Maybe I should keep it here.” Ginny gestures the bridal dress at Lucy’s house. “Just to make sure Doctor Jim doesn’t lay eyes on it.”

  Lucy imagines the gown swinging, bodiless, in her closet and says, “I hope you don’t call him that to his face.” Then she laughs. “Doctor Jim.”

  “Not too often,” Ginny says, and then, with her arms spread wide as if she were in a musical set in a garden, she says, “Doctor Jim the cardiologist—he’s all heart!”

  Lucy rolls her eyes. “Charming, Mother,” she says and fixes her mother’s scarf so it lies flat against her T-shirt, leaving soil crumbs on her mother’s chest. “Sorry—now it looks like you’ve eaten an Oreo.”

  “Unlikely.” Ginny sighs. She looks at Lucy’s bare feet and is about to offer to buy her new shoes, something appropriate for gardening, when she remembers the load in the trunk.

  “I brought you something,” Ginny says.

  They unload the flats, supporting underneath the flimsy plastic until the plants are near Lucy’s red clogs.

  Ginny holds up a shoe. “Oh, you already have an outdoor sandal. I was going to take you for a pair.”

  “Yeah, that’s okay, these work well,” Lucy says, slipping them on.

  Ginny, perched above the soil, tries to uncoil the seedlings. Lucy asks, “Are you nervous for the big day?”

  “A little, I guess,” Ginny says. “I suppose I never really saw myself marrying anyone other than your father. But this is a good thing for me. Don’t you think?”

  “I do,” Lucy says. Then, more dramatically, she says, “I do!”

  From her pocket, Ginny takes out the slip of paper that the nursery gave her with the plants.

  “I got you these,” she says. “They’re supposed to be very sweet. Tiny, but really delicious.”

  “Thanks, you didn’t have to.” Lucy scoops dirt out and into the holes puts a sprinkling of fertilizer before placing the first plant inside. Ginny, allowing her crouch to topple so the knees of her khakis are dusted with dirt, begins to undo the tomato seedlings from the flat boxes, holding each one a short time before passing it to her daughter.

  After the row is complete, the leafy stems watered, Ginny puts her arm around Lucy and says, “Do you know the name of these tomatoes?”

  Lucy shakes her head. She is overcome with emotion watching her mother sink in the dirt for her, with her.

  “Matt’s Wild Cherry,” Ginny says. “I thought—I don’t know what I thought, really. Just that it was a lovely name, and that you’d like them.”

  Lucy looks at her mother, the bride to be, and feels quiet tears start. Where will she be in August, when the peas are podded, the eggplants bosom-heavy, the rose potatoes and onions quiet underground?

  “Sweetheart.” Ginny rubs at Lucy’s hair, doesn’t try to calm it into order or slip it into an elastic holder.

  “I have a date tonight, Mom,” Lucy says, crying harder but looking out to the ocean. Ginny nods.

  Before the sky lets down its swelling, the wind picks up. Unhinged, the weather vane on the housetop tips up until it points skyward. Lucy takes her mother’s hand, thumbing impressions that stay mottled. She traces the hedgerows of Ginny’s raised veins the way she’d done as a kid. What is shadow one day, is water the ne
xt.

  Suburban Solstice, 1977

  Next door, Alex’s mom has a bag of pot in the kitchen junk drawer, but they don’t know that yet. With blond hair that swings hip length, Patti, his mom, is the first grown woman aside from her mother that Lucy will see naked, but she doesn’t know that, either. She is twelve years old at the solstice. By autumn, she will turn thirteen, just when the days are hemmed into mucky, unfire-flied evenings that start midafternoon.

  Fishing hooks, their prongs splayed like ventricles, loose twine, Halloween candy left too long, chocolate Marathon bar flakes, and M&M’s, their edges whitened, bits of dried grout, pencils, hair ribbons, and nails—all of these Alex and Lucy have taken out from the orange Formica-paneled drawer. Lined up, a deformed and ill-combined army, the stuff sits on the counter in a row until they tire of sorting through it and slide it all into the drawer, along with the unsifted items at the back. They take the quarters found at the drawer’s bottom and head outside.

  Through the sunken living room, with its plush beige carpet, they pause by the Plexiglas coffee table. The see-through, curved chairs are hardly there in the sunlight, more ghostly than furniture should be. Lucy thinks about saying this out loud to Alex, who has stopped to press the backs of his sneakers down so they become flip-flops.

  “No blisters this way,” he explains.

  Alex’s hair is as white-blond as his mother’s, and it wisps down into his eyes until he tips his head upright, the fringe nearly long enough to tuck behind his ears. Lucy balances in a half-lean against the indoor hammock. Suspended from metal eye hooks on the ceiling, the double hammock is white, a woven mass of silky waxed rope with knots and loops so intricate the whole thing is a widow’s web. Lucy is always drawn to it but rarely hoists herself inside. The hammock swings above the step down into the living room, and Alex will climb in and read comics next to Patti, who sometimes lies in it, legs in a widened V for balance while her hair dangles down through the string diamonds that have stretched to parallelograms. Patti’s hair would touch the floor beneath the hammock, and she’d drag on a More 100, the soft green pack resting on the rise and sag of her chest. Lucy’s parents furnished their house with Early American antiques, Shaker-influenced tables, quilted bedspreads, the blond wood cradle she’d slept in as a baby. Alex’s place has an indoor hammock which seems grossly out of place, more evidence of Alex’s house being the creepy fun house part of an amusement fair that Lucy both longs for and fears.

  Outside, the tarmac’s heat is so intense that, if Lucy stands in one place too long, her drugstore sandals begin to adhere to the paving. She jingles the found change in her pocket as they walk the length of the drive and scratches under her arm where the halter cuts into soft, untanned flesh. Alex is already kid-caramel brown, almost fourteen and losing his childhood hips. When they are adults, when she sees him for the only time past adolescence at some graduate school party in town, he will have put the weight back on again, belly and waist will have become one. Here, where the road winds down from his house to hers, they are long-legged, their coltish selves anticipating only mint-chocolate-chip ice cream from the Brigham’s in town. It has not occurred to Lucy that she will miss him later, that she will miss anyone.

  “I might get peppermint instead,” Lucy says when they’ve turned onto School Street and the town center, spelled “Centre” on all the signs, is in view.

  “No, you won’t.” Alex grins.

  He stretches his palm out, and she hands him the money. Alex’s hands are doughy, his cuticles ripped, nails squared and uneven from biting. Lucy’s mother, Ginny, swats her daughter’s hands if Lucy puts her fingernails in her mouth to chew, or if Ginny is across the room and can’t reach for her, she’ll raise one eyebrow and curl her lips until Lucy’s hands are back, lap-resting where they belong. At the end of the drive, in the maple shade, Alex holds Lucy’s shoulder back from the traffic. Above, the larks careen from a soon-to-be-landscaped rhododendron, and she wonders if Alex has ever thought to kiss her.

  Years before, when their parents still socialized, Alex’s father would drive her, just for the thrill, unhelmeted on his motorcycle on the black tongue of driveway that separated Alex’s house from Lucy’s. She would like to say that she remembers the kind of bike it was, or how she felt up high, but she doesn’t. The cigar reek on his father’s suede jacket stays with her, the prickle of hairs on her arms from the exhaust heat, and how with each sway and turn she was sure she would reel off, fall and skid on the gravel, leaving her parents and brothers lemonade-sipping in the sprinkler spray on their front lawn, without her.

  In town, Alex orders Lucy’s ice cream, and it never occurs to her to mind. Kelly Hanson, the mean girl in Lucy’s grade, slings by on her banana-seated bicycle while they eat their cones. Kelly’s ponytails and handle streamers sweep back in the breeze, and even the way she pedals—body up, legs straight—seems cruel. Lucy’s shoulders curl forward, her torso slumping. Kelly ignores her, and Lucy isn’t sure whether it’s relief she feels or like she missed out.

  Alex watches Lucy watch Kelly and says, “I heard her dad’s an alcoholic,” as if that will explain everything.

  The sun glints off the car roof in front of them, and Lucy makes her hand into a visor to watch Kelly ride away with one of the free lollipops dispensed at the dry cleaner sticking out of her mouth like a thin cigarette.

  “I wish my bike had streamers like that,” she says and licks the last of the green ice cream from where it runs onto her wrist.

  “Let’s look at home,” Alex says and arcs his cone wrapper into the trash barrel.

  They head for his house, splitting a Dr Pepper on the way back. Each turn, before sipping, they make sure the other has sucked clean the saliva from where it gathers on the soda can edge. Up by Meadowbrook, where the pines thicken, Lucy’s mother drives by and tells Lucy it’s time for her annual physical. Lucy has to leave Alex there, kicking up the dust on the roadside, while she goes to be weighed and measured.

  Next year, she will switch to a female doctor at a hospital-based practice with magazines and pamphlets in the waiting room. Ginny has reassured Lucy that “it is time” to see a woman and that Lucy will feel more comfortable; Lucy suspects already that this has more to do with Ginny’s comfort than her own. That her pediatrician is male hadn’t registered with Lucy until her mother pointed it out. Lucy watches the physician make a note on her chart and wonders what information is contained in its papers, what they would reveal: not so much if she is of normal stature and well-seeming appearance but rather if he—this knowledgeable person—could somehow predict where she might fall on the happiness chart, the curve of life satisfaction.

  Today, Lucy is oversized and dangling from the pediatric vinyl-covered exam table. Stacked and closed up in glass canisters are sterile swabs, hypodermic needles in varying sizes, and tongue depressors. On the doctor’s desk is a white plastic pelvis, the bones splayed like butterfly wings.

  Afterward, Lucy and her mother sit parked in her car outside the doctor’s office. A downed oak limb, a storm remain, blocks part of the sidewalk. They had lost power several days before, and had listened together in the candle-lighted room, she and her brother young enough somehow not to mind her father reading aloud. Her mother had changed into pajamas early—her nightgown billowed out and made her appear both larger and softer than she really was—and she’d let Lucy lean back onto her chest, her daughter’s hands on hers. Lucy had felt the rise of her mother’s veins, how they swelled in the heat. The rain had come, soaking the ground and driving the earthworms out onto the bluestone walkway, and they’d found them, withering, in the morning sunlight the day after.

  “Well, you’re growing, that’s for sure,” her mother says, clipping her hair back so it’s fixed to her neck.

  “I guess.”

  “You know, you could always ask me something. A question, I mean. If you have one,” she says and is about to touch Lucy’s face when she stops. In front of the car, a bag from the Shoe
Barn swinging like a purse from his shoulder, Alex pretends to direct traffic. Ginny laughs, and Lucy feels the blush rise to her cheeks. Alex motions for Lucy to join him on the sidewalk.

  “Do you want to go?” Ginny asks.

  Lucy nods, despite feeling guilty about skipping out on their mother-daughter trip to the salon. A couple of times a year, her mother went to have her hair straightened and took Lucy along for a manicure. Lucy spent ages choosing from the wine reds and chestnut hues of nail polish, only to scrape it off at bedtime that night. Lucy went with her mother because Ginny wanted her to, because Lucy felt it was what girls did with their mothers—watch in silence as, under the cones of the dryers, mothers fell out of listening range and into the distance.

  “Look over there.” Alex points to a long cabinet in his pantry in which there might be bike streamers.

  Lucy shakes her head and holds up leftover plywood planks from two summers before, when the carpenter Lou, who had only three fingers on his right hand and four on his left, had come to expand the deck and left scraps.

  Alex drinks chocolate milk from a recess-small carton, and when he’s done he puts it on the floor, stamps on it once, hard, and it pops. Spits of milk, the sappy, dark stuff from the bottom of the carton that never fully mixes in, are all over the floor. Lucy snags the sponge and wipes up what she can see, but Alex takes the sponge from her and slicks her legs with it, scrubs at a spatter on her ankle.

  Back at the junk drawer, Alex takes the whole thing off its hinges and puts it down on the terra-cotta-tiled floor, where they can reexamine the contents. Lucy tries on Halloween waxed lips and is wearing them still when Alex pulls out metallic pink bike streamers in their plastic packaging. Lucy wonders why Alex would have pink ones, or if the color dictated their placement in the drawer, unused. He hands them to Lucy, and she fingers the shiny threads. He rifles through the drawer, plucking out Dum Dum lollipops with uncurled wrappers, an army knife neither can open, and then a tinfoil-covered bag.