by Deb Caletti
“Who?”
“Clive Weaver? Come on, it’s not like you haven’t lived across the street from him practically your whole life.”
“Maybe he was hot,” she said, and squirted her calves with the bottle.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked. I wanted to ask, Where’s Hayden? but I didn’t.
“Next door. Wacky Mrs. Martinelli couldn’t sign on to the Internet and she came over all frantic.”
I sat on the lawn near Juliet. Picked up a tennis ball that must have been Zeus’s and threw it against our fence where it bounced and landed in Mom’s oregano bush. One of the neighbors behind us was getting their house worked on. I heard the chink-chink-chink of a ladder rising, the bass hump of music, lyrics drifting. Some people call me the gangster of love, yeah. Some people walking round calling me Mau-rice… . “I like Mrs. Martinelli. I like her a lot, actually.”
Juliet turned her head on the lawn chair and looked at me, annoyed. It was the same look she’d been giving me throughout our whole childhood, the kind I’d gotten in the backseat of the car when she felt I had taken too much space for myself or when my elbow accidentally touched hers. “What, are you going to fight me about whether Mrs. Martinelli is a kook now too? What is your problem? You’ve argued with every word I’ve said since I got home. You never even said congratulations. Not really.”
I waited. I guess it was true. “Congratulations, Juliet,” I said. I let my sarcasm show. I wondered how often people meant it when they said that word; congratulations was probably one of the biggest mixed-feelings word in the English language.
She rolled her eyes in exasperation. It was weird to look at her body sprawled out like that. She didn’t seem to realize that she was different now, at least to me. I looked at that small mound. I remembered the pictures from the book; the tiny curled baby sea creature who now waited and grew inside of her while she swigged her Fresca, then set it on the glossy pages of the magazine she was reading. But it wasn’t just the tiny creature that made her different. Decisions could make you different too. A person could decide something that made them seem totally unknown and unknowable, even if you’d been with them nearly every day of your life.
“You shouldn’t drink that diet stuff. It’s bad for the baby,” I said.
“Thank you, doctor,” she said.
We sat there for a while. You could feel the fight there sitting between us. I hated conflict, but conflict with my sister was allowed. Conflict was part of our personal, forever playground. She would fight with me in a moment, but I never forgot that she’d fight for me too. “You know, I just don’t get the whole pregnancy thing,” I said. I picked at the polish on my toenails. I hoped Jitter couldn’t hear this. It was nothing personal. This was something between me and Juliet.
“What’s there to get? We had sex; there was an accident; we’re having a baby.”
“Jesus, Juliet.”
“Oh come, on, Scarlet. Don’t be such a prude.”
“I’m not being a prude. You’re just so flip about it. Accident.”
“Those things happen.”
“Not when you’re being careful.”
“I thought I was. Believe me, Hayden in bed can make you forget just about anything. It’s one of his finest qualities.”
“Jesus!” I wished I’d never said a word. God. “Never mind.”
“You brought it up.”
“You were on the pill,” I said.
“What are you implying? Are you accusing me of something? For God’s sake.”
“There are other options here.”
“Neither one of us wanted that, all right? Satisfied? It’s not like I trapped the guy, if that’s what you’re saying.”
“I’m saying it’s a little hard to understand. I’m saying you hugely disappointed Mom.”
“Oh, you’re kidding, right? What, I’m going to live my whole life for Mom?” She blew air out her nose, a huff that said what an idiot I was. She sounded like she was in middle school. “I’ve got to make my own decisions. Am I not allowed to grow up?”
Grow up. The words sounded childish. You don’t fight for your right to grow up if you already have. “You’ve wrecked everything you said you wanted.” I said.
I remembered when she got the job at the Grosvenor Hotel, how we’d popped open a bottle of cider, clinked our glasses; how Mom had grasped Juliet’s hands and told her the world was hers, how she needed to follow her dreams, even if we all knew how much Mom wanted her to go to college. I remembered, too, how Juliet had packed up and left her room nearly empty, tiny holes in the walls where her posters had hung. We’d tacked up all of the postcards she’d sent us to cover those holes—postcards of the Grosvenor Hotel at night which were in every desk drawer in every room there, next to the free pens and stationery that no one used.
“I didn’t wreck; I reordered,” she said.
I stopped picking my polish and looked at her then. Reordered—the word Derek had just used not twenty minutes before, half hour tops, about why people blew things up. I listened to signs like that—a song heard twice when you turned the radio station, a line in a book read at just the right moment. Little clues given by the universe. The word was suddenly important. It seemed like maybe it was a sign that I should do some reordering of my own. They’d argued about Buddy Wilkes the night before. Buddy Wilkes was her unfinished business. Business I could finish up right then and there.
“I saw Buddy Wilkes at school today,” I said.
Juliet sat up then. “You saw Buddy? What was he doing at school?”
“Picking up Alicia Worthen. They looked pretty serious. Really serious.”
“Alicia Worthen? She hasn’t even graduated.”
“You’re so lucky you didn’t stay with him. He just sat in his car and shouted at her.” I was making up some of it as I went along. I guess reordering wasn’t always a precisely planned thing. “Hayden would never act like that.”
“What’d he say?”
“He didn’t exactly yell at her, more for her. Just, ‘Alicia, get over here.’ Something like that. Like she was his dog or something. No, Hayden wouldn’t even treat Zeus like that. You wouldn’t believe it. He’s such an ass.”
“Alicia Worthen. God.” Juliet didn’t look well. I felt the alarming sense of things all at once going wrong—that slipping feeling, the movement in an unintended direction. The way the ground starts to roll under the flat surface of your shoes just before you fall. Maybe the reordering had been a bad idea. Maybe I had opened a door when I’d tried to shut one. Maybe the truthful part of me knew I wanted to hurt her and had.
The smugness I had seen Juliet wear every day since she had arrived seemed to melt, as if she had gone from having everything to having nothing.
“I shouldn’t have drunk that Fresca,” she said. She got up and went inside and in a few moments I heard her retching, the toilet flush, the faucet running.
I sat there on the grass, ran my hands over the blades. I felt a little sick myself. I smelled a whiff of Varathane or some other soupy, gleaming chemical coming from over the back fence. I heard a small burst of man-talk, a shout. Whaddya say? More faraway man-talk. Music. I’m a joker, I’m a smoker, I’m a midnight toker… .
And then another sound, closer. Right there, from our own bathroom.
Juliet, crying.
Chapter Nine
This is what I call reciprocity,” Mom said, holding a pie dish on one palm.
“Lemon meringue?”
Mom nodded. It was Mrs. Martinelli’s specialty. “I perform the computer miracle called turn the machine off and back on and look what I get. Want some?”
“No thanks.” I gestured to the white bread I’d taken out of the cupboard for a snack, the jar of peanut butter.
“Tell me why it’s nice to have superior computer knowledge over someone, anyone.” Mom loved Mrs. Martinelli too. Sometimes Mrs. Martinelli would have lemonade with Mom at our umbrella table outside or coffee with her while sitting on
the living room couch. They would pat each other’s hands and tell stories. Mom always said that she respected the sequined sweatshirts. Sequins required a certain confidence, especially when worn while gardening.
“I guess you got her connected again.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have. Did you know they’re writing back and forth with some scammer? She said you knew all about it.” Mom didn’t wait for an answer. “Where’s Juliet?” she asked.
“She’s not feeling well.” I stuck my tongue out, mimed a throw-up face.
“Oh,” Mom said. “Poor thing. That’s too bad.”
“Why aren’t you at work?” I asked.
“I thought maybe I’d take the day off. Make sure Juliet was settled in.”
The words fell before I could catch them. “You didn’t even stay home with me when I had the flu and a hundred degree fever.”
“Scarlet,” she said as if it were the end of what she had to say even though it was the start. “I asked you over and over if you wanted me to stay. You said you were fine. You insisted. I took you at your word.”
I was going to tell her about Clive Weaver naked in the street, but I didn’t feel like it anymore. Some worm of jealousy and resentment was working around in my heart. I put my knife into the new jar of peanut butter. No matter what seemed to be going wrong in my life, there was something satisfying about that act. It was a mini-sense of triumph, a culinary groundbreaking ceremony, with me holding the special shovel.
Mom left the kitchen. I could see her through the door, standing in front of the stereo. She pulled her hair back in a ponytail and then let it go as she pretended to contemplate what to put on. She looked young like that. It was always strange when you saw your parent as a person, not a mother or father. I guessed that happened more when you had a single parent. They couldn’t hide in that thing called marriage. Mom stared down at Neil Diamond’s face on the cover of Neil Diamond’s Greatest Hits, the one where his eyes are brooding but kind, and then on came the deep thrum of the guitar, and his voice. Melinda was mine, ’til the time that I found her … holding Jim. Loving him …
“Mom, God,” I called from the other room.
“What?”
“I’m so sick of that I could scream.”
She put her hands on her hips. “I’m not exactly forcing you to stand there and listen, am I?”
“Play ‘Sweet Caroline.’” Juliet had reappeared. She looked pale, even after her day in the sun. She’d tied a sarong around her hips, sleeked her hair back in a long blond braid. “Remember how we all used to sing that loudly in the car? Sweet Car-o-line, bum, bum, bum …” She sang with that voice that could make you think about beautiful things—water droplets and tulips pushing up through frost. “Summer time,” Juliet said. “Scarlet with her teeth perpetually blue from Otter Pops.”
“I loved that,” Mom said. “Everywhere we went, we played this. You, me, Scarlet, and Scarlet’s monkey.”
“Jibbs,” Juliet said.
“God, he was so dirty, and you’d never let him out of your clutches, Scar,” Mom said. “I had to sew his head back on twice.”
“Remember when she used to get the words mixed up to ‘Jimmy Cracked Corn’?”
“‘Jimmy crapped corn, and I don’t care,’” they sang. How could I forget? I’d only heard the story a million times.
Juliet and Mom laughed, but I didn’t feel like playing. I took a bite of my sandwich. Something was irritating me. And irritating me even more when Mom put her hands on the sides of Juliet’s cheeks and looked into her eyes. “You okay, baby?”
Juliet groaned.
“I know.”
The doorbell rang then. “If it’s Mrs. Martinelli again, I’ve reached my end of computer knowledge,” Mom said.
Juliet went to the door, opened it. “Silly, you don’t have to ring the doorbell,” she said. I heard the happy tick-tick-tick of Zeus’s toenails arriving on the wood floor, and Hayden’s voice in the hall.
“We are now officially employed!” he said. He appeared in the kitchen. His sunburn from a few days before was turning brown. His hair was sweet-rumpled, and Zeus pushed past him and came toward the counter, his nose up in the air, sniffing for something that might be/maybe/is it? peanut butter.
“You got a job?” Mom asked.
“I’m calling myself a dock manager,” he said. “But I’m really just hired to fix stuff there at the marina, work on Will Quail’s boat. I was afraid to commit to anything more permanent since we haven’t decided”—he knew to be careful, paused to choose the right words—“things.”
For a moment, Juliet said nothing and Hayden said nothing which meant they were saying a lot. The moment passed. You could feel a decision being made, hers, an instant mental pro-and-con list. She looped her arms around his waist then, and you could also feel something melt, fast as butter in a hot pan. Hayden put his hand around her bare back and sniffed her hair. He was someone who fell easily into forgiveness.
“Old man Quail used to teach Driver’s Ed,” she said.
“He’s deaf as a stone,” Hayden said.
“He’s always been deaf as a stone,” Mom said. “Too many rock concerts during the Age of Aquarius.”
Juliet released Hayden, turned to place herself against him, standing with her back against his chest. “He used to go, ‘Turn that radio off!’ when it wasn’t even on.” She grabbed Hayden’s arms, wrapped them tightly in front of her. She hadn’t been this affectionate with him since they’d gotten here. The whole aloof business was gone. Thank Alicia Worthen for that, I thought. It was the law of diminishing options.
I felt the wave rise—the wave of vague pissed-off—a pissed-off without a name. An edge of anger that might really have been disgust. All of this easy forgiveness wherever you turned. I shoved my feet into my sandals. I suddenly just wanted to get out of there, away from all of them.
“Tacos for dinner?” Mom said. “Can you eat that, you think?” She peered worriedly at Juliet.
Juliet nodded. “Oh yeah. Let us help.” She lifted up one of Hayden’s arms, pretended to bite it.
“I hold the record for cheese grating,” he said.
I choked back the bite of my sandwich. “I’m actually heading out,” I said. I heard the edge in my own voice, the letting-them-know but not-letting them-know anger. It pushed up against me inside, made my face flush.
“Oh?” Mom said.
“Dinner plans with friends.”
She didn’t even ask her usual twenty follow-up questions. Who would be there, what time I’d be back, if a parent would be present. She’d either given up on my doing anything different from babysitting or hanging out with Nicole and Jasmine, or she was too preoccupied to really care. “The car needs gas,” she said. “Take my card and get some.”
Anger and irritation were fighting for first place inside of me, and I made some attempt at a rare dramatic gesture. I swiped her keys off the counter and stormed toward the doorway, realizing too late that shit, shit, shit, one foot was suddenly bare and landing on the linoleum floor. My shoe, that traitor, had abandoned me, and it now sat alone over by the counter. I had to do the one-shoe limp back to retrieve it. It would be so much better if humiliation was private.
I heard a little hnn sound from Juliet, a laugh trying not to be a laugh. Forget that shit. I got out of there. I left my half-eaten sandwich, left my backpack full of homework. Left cloudy motivations and strange workings of the heart. Left small humiliations and big disappointments.
Neil Diamond was still crooning. Good times never seemed so good … If I never heard that goddamned Neil Diamond again it would be too soon.
The tick of Mom’s gas gauge was as far into the red as it would go, so dangerously low that it was Dean-Neuhaus-would-never-do-this low. My psychology books would call this passive-aggressive behavior, subtly striking back at someone who seems more powerful, only my mother was getting it wrong, because she was the only one who was sure to be punished. I pulled into Abare’
s, which we all still called Eugene’s, since that’s what the gas station had been for a hundred years before the old guy died. It was sold after he was gone and a mini-mart was put in, and the only thing that stayed the same was that they still hired guys from our high school to pump gas for elderly ladies like Cora Lee from the Theosophical Society and Mrs. Dubbs, who worked in the deli at Johnny’s Market. Buddy worked at Eugene’s, too, but I didn’t see either him or his car. I pulled into the lane marked SELF-SERVE, chugged gas into Mom’s tank as the wavy lines of fuel fumes made a psychedelic escape.
“Hey,” a voice called. I assumed not to me. Maybe someone was shouting to the chunky motorcyclist in his chunky leather jacket.
“You.”
I looked up. It was Jason Dale, a guy who had graduated a few years ago, one of Buddy’s friends. He obviously didn’t know my name, but I knew things about him. He’d been a hard-core partier. He’d gone out with Renny Williams’s sister, Wendy, and some people said she’d gotten an abortion. Juliet thought he was an idiot. She thought all Buddy’s friends were idiots.
“Aren’t you Juliet Ellis’s sister?”
“Yeah,” I said. If I had business cards, that’s pretty much what they’d read.
“Is it true she’s back in town? Someone said they saw her.”
I played a mental chess match, with Hayden on my team. I calculated how long that news would take to reach Buddy. I hung up the gas pump. “Nope. Someone saw wrong.”
“Shopping downtown?” He still sounded hopeful.
“She’s in Mexico,” I said.
“Oh cool.” He rubbed his angled cheeks with his palms as if feeling for a nonexistent beard.
“Yeah.” I was ready to expand on my story. I had her singing for some cruise line, docked in Aruba and heading out to sea where she would be unreachable for months, but the details didn’t prove necessary. Jason Dale walked back to the mini-mart without a good-bye; his jeans droopy in the back like Clive Weaver’s bare skin. The motorcyclist gunned his engine and arced out of the lot.
I got back in Mom’s Honda Accord. I moved the seat and changed the radio station because I knew she didn’t like that. I turned the radio up loud enough to feel it thrum inside my body. I needed music that loud sometimes, loud enough to feel like a heartbeat.