by Deb Caletti
“Oklahoma,” I said.
“Again?” Juliet said.
“Mrs. Phipps, the drama teacher, lacks imagination,” I said to Hayden.
“Well, it is Friday night,” Mom said.
Sometimes you’ve been lectured on a topic so often that all a person has to do is say a few words and all of their former lectures come pouring out of your brain like people from a crowded elevator. It’s a good time-saving trick for the person doing the lecturing. My mom, Annabeth Ellis, assistant manager of Quill Stationers, was under the impression that my life was lacking things—things like more friends, places to go, stuff to do, a passion, a boyfriend, maybe. I had held back from pointing out that these were precisely the things her own life was lacking—she had her job, sure, and her oldest friend, Allison Bond, and the women in Allison’s scrapbook club. She had her boyfriend, Dean Neuhaus, too. But when she came home from work, she’d flop on her bed, claiming exhaustion, and she complained often that she had nothing in common with the women in that club, who actually went on all the trips they were so decoratively remembering. And Dean—sure, he had a great job and a fancy car, but he was always pointing out how she could do things better. He had once taken out our own silverware tray from our own drawer and reorganized it so that only spoons were with spoons and knives with knives and he had cleaned it so that not a single bread crumb remained. Dean was more a promise of rejection than a boyfriend.
“Friday night. Why does everyone make such a big deal about Friday night,” I said.
“And New Year’s Eve, too,” Hayden pointed out. “Hate that.”
I smiled. “If you don’t have plans, you’re a loser.”
“If you don’t want to get drunk and wear those stupid hats,” he said.
“Those hats show disrespect for eons of evolution. We came out of the sea for that?”
He chuckled and stared back down at his lasagna because he knew, the same as me, that Mom’s level of irritation was rising. You could feel the silence being turned up as sure as if it were sound. I felt a surge of something. Happiness. It was that joy you feel when someone’s suddenly on your team when you were used to playing alone.
Mom’s lips were thin and tight. For some reason, she was being very motherly with me right then, probably because she wished she could do it with Juliet, but it was too late. She was never really much like that—even her lectures were more strong suggestions, darts thrown with best effort, with no expectation of actually hitting the bull’s eye. Honestly, how much could she actually care about my social life right at that minute? It felt a little like a mother performance. Displaying her authority to Hayden, the way teachers did on the first day of class to set the general tone.
“I used to love Friday night,” Juliet said.
“Scarlet, you have to make things happen for yourself. You can’t just wait around for the doorbell to ring,” Mom said, which, by the way, was exactly how she had met Dean Neuhaus. His Lexus had broken down on our street and his cell phone battery was used up, so he had asked to use our phone.
I rolled my eyes in Hayden’s direction, to let him know that public humiliation had no effect on me, and then used the favorite line of social losers: “I’ve got a ton of homework anyway,” I said.
“Well, it’s your decision,” my mother said with that uphill warning-rise in her voice. A person who says It’s your decision is informing you that your decision sucks, but I pretended not to know this. Instead, I smiled and changed the subject back to where it belonged. Someone needed to.
“When’s the baby due?”
“October tenth,” Juliet said.
“She’s four and a half months along.” My mother’s fork tinked against the plate in a way that seemed either angry or heartbroken. It was a long time to keep a secret. Juliet probably even had known last time we’d come to visit. I wondered what it would be like to keep that big a secret for so long. That could change you, maybe. The press of it day in and day out. Pretending everything was the same when we all sat in her hotel room and ate room-service meals. But Juliet looked just the same as she always did, except for maybe a small mound under her sundress if you looked closely. She was plucking off a crunchy corner of Hayden’s lasagna with her fork. I hated when she did that. You never wanted to sit by her at dinner because her fork would come visiting your plate uninvited.
“You thought of names?” I asked.
“Scarlet,” Mom said. Maybe she thought if we ignored this, it would go away. But I didn’t think that baby was going to stay inside Juliet forever.
“We haven’t talked about that yet,” Juliet said. You got the feeling they hadn’t talked about most things. “Hayden calls it Jitter, as in Jitterbug.”
I felt his embarrassment before I saw it, saw his neck flushing red. We didn’t know who he was or where he even came from, and this small bit of information seemed too suddenly personal. Maybe you should hear that someone is softhearted only after you at least know if they came from Saint Louis or Michigan. There’s an order to those things.
He braved our eyes, looked up. “It seemed wrong … you know. To keep calling it it.”
Juliet didn’t seem to notice his embarrassment. In fact, she didn’t seem to notice him much at all. When she looked at him, it was with the flat and uncommitted gaze one gives to boring television.
“Jitterbug … ,” my mother said slowly, as if this were taking a long time to reach the understanding part of her brain.
“It was just one of those things that comes into your head… .” Hayden said.
“I like it,” I said. “It’s very friendly.”
“Scarlet’s the generous one too,” Juliet said.
“Last time I heard, that was a good thing,” Hayden said.
Right then, one of the neighborhood dogs barked, Corky maybe or Ginger, and Zeus leaped to his feet and barked a loud and strong reply. He was doing his job, as far as I saw it. They communicated, and you communicated back, or you were rude. But Mom put her hand to her heart as if she’d just heard a cannon explode.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Jesus.”
If you judged by the mess we were all in then, it didn’t much look like He came when she called, either.
After dinner, Mom cut the pie and brought it into the backyard and she and Juliet had some hushed conversation that involved living arrangements and Juliet’s room versus the basement, while Hayden threw a tennis ball over and over for Zeus. There was the sort of tension that made you feel like someone had left the gas on in an enclosed room, even though we were outside.
My head felt too busy, as if it were an old room being moved into or out of—boxes about to be opened or shut, things being shifted around, movers bringing in new furniture there wasn’t a place for yet. I decided to surprise my mother and Juliet by not being such a loser introvert and by going over to Nicole’s after all. Her parents’ restraining orders sounded kind of peaceful. I left Mom a note, grabbed my backpack, and headed out.
As I walked down the drive, my eye caught on something over by the tire of Hayden’s truck—a sheet of paper folded and folded again until it was a fat chunk. When I leaned down to pick it up, I also saw the sticker on his back bumper: The only good clown is a dead clown. Ha. Another person with clown fear who was actually doing something about it.
Before I could open the paper to see what it was, I noticed old Clive Weaver across the street, on his hands and knees in his driveway. I liked Clive Weaver. I maybe even loved him. Even if he was always doing some loud, industrious thing like chainsawing tree branches or vacuuming his car at annoying hours on Saturday mornings, he made me feel happy when I saw him. He always gave a hearty wave and said hearty things to me like “Go give ’em hell today!” When he walked his dog, Corky, he let Corky lead, which sometimes meant that you’d find Clive Weaver in your hedges or up other people’s driveways. Right then, he was crouched next to his boxy white Jeep with no backseat, (which he’d bought when the postal service sold its old fleet), peerin
g underneath. He was wearing his usual attire—blue shorts, blue shirt, and knee socks, as close as you could get to the mail carrier outfit he’d worn for thirty-five years without actually being the mail carrier outfit he’d worn for forty-five years.
“Mr. Weaver?” I called.
“I had them a minute ago,” he said.
“Did you lose something?” I asked.
He looked over at me, startled.
“My keys. I had them right here,” he said. His white hair stood out in an alarmed fashion. It was usually combed straight across.
“There.” I pointed. “In your hand.”
He looked down, his mouth gaping at the surprise appearance of the keys. He was really worrying me lately. His old-guy vigor and capability seemed to be seeping from him daily, turning into something confused and feeble.
“That happens to me all the time,” I lied.
“Goddamn,” he muttered.
“See you, then,” I said.
“See you,” he said to his keys.
Clive Weaver went to his mailbox next and opened it with a tiny key on his key ring. I hoped something was in there. He loved it when he got mail. You could tell. Even if it was some Domino’s Pizza ad or one of the endless notepads or calendars or letters from Yvonne Yolanda, Your Friend in the Real Estate Business, he seemed pleased. He’d walk off looking at the envelope with a smile and a bounce in his step, as if he were walking on promises. Most of all, I think, he loved to hate getting his electrical bill. He’d shake his fist at the envelope. “Roscoe Oil!” he’d say. “Those bastards!” But today, nothing. I heard the sad metal door shut against the sad metal box.
I held the clump of paper in my hand and unfolded it as I stood there on the grass. It was a letter. Black ink and small block letters. Hayden’s handwriting. I had no proof of it, but I knew it inside, down deep and clear as day, the way you know all of the most truthful things. It said:
A little evidence of God …
Stars.
Raspberries.
Sand dollars.
The need to make music and art.
Sight. Insight.
Tree rings.
Evolution, yes.
Genius, invention, and the brain itself.
Repetition of design, and on the flip side, variety of design.
The sea.
Color.
Language.
Babies.
And most of all … you, my beautiful Juliet.
For a moment, I could barely breathe. I held the note in my hand as Mr. Weaver shuffled inside; as Fiona Saint George shuffled outside, wearing all black and grasping a box of chalk; as the Martinellis’ dog, Ginger, squatted by the juniper bush; and as Ally Pete-Robbins’s banner blew in the breeze, reminding anyone who might forget such a thing that it was spring.
Some place opened in me that I didn’t know could open. I felt a rip, a thing being torn, and underneath, something laid bare that I’d never felt before, some sort of longing. The words on the page were as beautiful as any I had ever seen. They were an offering, a gift held out in careful, cupped hands. They were the shining silver tips of a wave at sea, in contrast to the deep, gray watery depths of those other words in my head. My baby, Juliet had said. My.
Chapter Four
In the morning, the smell of burned toast climbed the stairs, drifted into my room, and woke me up. Someone was burning toast in the kitchen, and usually Saturday mornings just smelled like the same old dusty-vent smell of the furnace going on or last night’s baked-chicken odor that couldn’t bear to leave us. No one cooked breakfast anymore—Mom would eat a bowl of Total (I once caught Dean Neuhaus grabbing a pinch of her side as if it were excess flab even though Mom had a thin, careful body), and I would have a bowl of Life, but the days of week-end breakfasts of French toast or scrambled eggs appeared to be over, disappearing right around Juliet’s senior year, when Mom basically decided her cooking days were done. After Juliet left, the two of us ate like bachelors, quick dinners sometimes downed while standing at the counter, take-out eaten with plastic forks out of white Styrofoam containers. So the burning-toast smell made me feel happy. I actually hurried out of bed with the kind of childhood excitement brought about by simple things like Otter Pops and a new lunch box and hot chocolate with marshmallows.
I pulled my hair up and made sure I didn’t look entirely stupid and was pleased when I saw that what I had imagined was true—Hayden stood at the kitchen sink in his jeans and a soft green T-shirt that looked a million years old. He was rumpled in a way that made you think of sex and sheets and Sunday morning and the bed he’d just risen out of next to my sister. His face was scrubbly and unshaven, and he held a piece of toast in one hand, scraping the black off with the edge of a knife. There was something about that scraping sound and the black dust falling into the kitchen sink, though, that made me feel bad for him again. Black toast was plain old good intentions gone awry.
“Toast fiasco,” he said when he saw me. A bowl on the counter was filled with the wet, wobbly yellow of cracked eggs. Zeus sat at Hayden’s feet, hoping for the jackpot of dropped food.
“Need some help?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Maybe start the bacon?”
“We have bacon?” I said. I didn’t remember bacon since Mom still felt motherly.
“I went to the store this morning,” Hayden said.
“Already? It’s only”—I checked the microwave clock—“nine thirty.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I had the scariest dream.” He held out the still-sort-of-black toast out to me. “Pre-breakfast snack?” he said. I shook my head, so he bit the corner off himself.
“What was the dream?”
“Don’t laugh,” he said, crunching.
I made a very solemn face. “Promise.”
“I was in the ocean. The waves were really high. You know, over my head?” One of his cheeks was a round ball of toast. “All I had was this little dumb-ass toy to hold on to—a rooster. Those inflatable things you wear around your waist when you’re a kid. I actually had one in real life.”
“A rooster? Not exactly a water animal.”
“I know. Ask my mother. Maybe a whale or something, right? It was probably on sale. Anyway, forget my twisted childhood for a second, okay? I was gulping water and flailing around and then suddenly there was this shark.”
“A shark.”
He swallowed. Took another bite. Hayden was a vigorous eater. “But he was this …” He hesitated. “Very light white-red color.”
“You mean pink,” I said.
Silence. “Well. Yeah.”
“A pink shark.” I laughed. I stopped. “I said I wouldn’t laugh.”
“I believe you promised,” he said. I found the bacon in the fridge, opened the package. I laid out the flat slabs in a pan.
“A pink shark, though,” I said. “You can’t exactly blame me.”
“It was a horrible pink. Okay, shit.” He sighed. He ran his fingers through the loose curls of his hair. “I give up. I knew it would sound stupid. Nightmares sound so pathetic in the morning. ‘And then I was in the jaws of a giant hawk who turned into a can opener.’” Hayden held our own can opener, which he was aiming to use on the lid of a can of peaches.
“Supposedly they’re your subconscious talking.”
“My subconscious speaks in a foreign language,” he said.
I tried to think what a pink shark might mean, but came up with nothing. I didn’t always believe much in the subconscious anyway. I knew pretty well what was going on inside my head, I thought, just maybe I didn’t always want to know. You can shield your eyes from an accident and still know the accident is there. Zeus was sitting right in front of the utensil drawer. I nudged him and he scooted to the side. “Sorry, boy.”
Hayden pointed at me with the can of peaches. “Hey. You’re a person who apologizes to dogs.”
“I probably apologize to everything.”
“I’m positive that t
he world is made up of those who apologize to dogs and those who don’t.”
“I apologize to this azalea in the front yard every time I run over it backing out of the driveway.”
He laughed. “Hmm. A plant apologizer. This might blow my theory all to hell. Spatula?” I pointed, and he took one out of the drawer.
“Can you imagine if you one day apologized to Zeus and he said, ‘Hey man, no problem’?” I said. The idea pleased me, dogs talking.
“I wonder what his voice would sound like,” Hayden said. The bacon was beginning to sizzle nicely and the orange juice sat ready in our old pitcher and new toast had been pushed down into the toaster. Hayden cut a hunk of butter and plopped it into a second pan for eggs. The kitchen was humming with a nice busy importance.
“Wouldn’t it be great, though, if you could have an actual conversation with him?”
Hayden and I looked over at Zeus. Sometimes you were sure dogs had some secret, superior intelligence, and other times, like right then, you knew they were only their simple, goofy selves. Zeus looked back at us, a bit blank but hopeful, wondering if something was going to happen that involved him.
“I’m not sure we’d want that,” Hayden said. He gave Zeus a long look. “Nah. He’d start doing all the things you hate in people. Bitching, complaining …”
“Get me off of this leash! Who do you think I am?” I said.
“This food tastes like shit,” Hayden said.
We were laughing when Mom came downstairs. Her brown hair was wet from a shower and she was already dressed in capris and a T-shirt. She gave me a look that said she didn’t approve of me liking Hayden when she hadn’t figured out yet whether she liked him or not herself. Mom was what you’d call fiercely protective. I know this was supposed to be a good thing and I appreciated some of its positive qualities, but it didn’t always feel like a good thing. It was hard to do “big things” in the world when she was on the other side of the street, wringing her hands.