by Deb Caletti
“Scarlet, please. I’ve seen your body before. Since I was three, for God’s sake. I’m your sister.”
Precisely. “Uh-uh.”
“I’m tired. I’m pregnant, remember? I need to sit. I’ll shut my eyes.”
“Fine.”
We closed ourselves in the little dressing room with the slatted wood door. Juliet sat down on the triangular corner seat. I hung the fat bunch of dresses on the hook, slipped off my shoes. I could see the sock clad feet of the person next to me under one side of the wall.
“So tell me about this Jared,” Juliet said. She leaned against the tight corner of the dressing room, eyes shut. She looked sort of sweet then. I remembered how much I loved her. She didn’t look capable of ripping Hayden’s heart to shreds.
“Jared,” I said. I stepped into the first dress, wiggled the zipper up behind me. The bust of the dress gaped out and I pushed my palms against the material to flatten it out. “Jared is … No boobs,” I said.
She popped open her eyes. “Yeah, no. That won’t work. What do they think? If you had a chest that big you’d fall over every time you stood up.”
I plumped out the material to its fullest full to make her laugh. “Triple Venti Double-Tall implants,” I said.
“Move on,” she said. Eyes shut again. “Jared.”
“Really nice, you know. Wants to be a …” I wriggled free from that dress, put on the next one. It was black, with white decorative piping. I was a human Hostess Cupcake. “A chef.”
“A chef?” She popped her eyes open.
“A pastry chef.”
“Oh.” She seemed to ponder this as she pondered the dress, realized they both left something to be desired.
“No comment even necessary,” I said.
“You should try something sexier. You could pull it off. You don’t have to be virtuous every minute.”
“Right, what, low-cut black lace? I’m sorry, I’m not you.”
“Look at you. You turned gorgeous. I go away for a year and, well, look at you. Jesus.”
I did—gave a good long look in the dressing room mirror. I looked back at me, unimpressed. I looked through the hangers, deciding what to try next.
“Tell me about Hayden,” I said.
“What’s to tell?”
“You make it sound like he’s so simple. Like it’s all right there to see.”
“It is. He’s sweet. A good person. Etcetera, etcetera. You can see it. Anyone can see it.”
“Does he like the mountains? Did he ever go to camp? What is he afraid of?”
“I don’t know, Scarlet.” She was getting pissed at me.
“I’m just saying, there’s a lot to a person.”
The little room shuddered as the door next to me closed. A mom with two small children by the sound of it. There was a lot of shuffling and bumping, and then, “Sit here with Sarah, okay, Benjamin? Make sure she doesn’t fall.”
I unzipped a satiny brown dress and tried to lift it over my hips but it wouldn’t go. Plan B, try again. I raised my arms and scootched it down. There was a small voice: “I like what’s in your purse, Mommy.”
And then: “Benjamin! Don’t play with that. Put that back!” And then, a thump and a wail.
“Brown satin,” I said.
Juliet looked. “I really like that. That’s great on you.”
It was hard to see anything since the mirror was so close up, but from what I could tell, I looked like me, only shinier. The kid was still wailing next to us and Juliet squinched up her face as if the sound pained her. I did the same. “Can’t you do what I ask you for one minute?” the woman next door said. The second kid started to yell-whine. “Mom! Give it baaaaack! I want it baaaaack!”
“We’ll put this one in the maybe pile,” I said.
“What did you say? I couldn’t hear you,” Juliet said too loudly. I hated when she did things like that. Juliet wasn’t one to just be nice and go along.
“Juliet!” I whispered.
“Well, for God’s sake,” she snapped back.
“Fine, here. Take it. Just don’t take everything out,” the woman said. The sock-clad feet in the dressing room on my other side put their shoes on and got the heck out of there. Smart.
Getting out of the dress was harder even than getting it on. I was sure it had shrunk a size somewhere between lifting it up over my stomach and up to my shoulders, where it appeared to be jammed. “Ow,” I said.
“Are you okay?”
I managed to get one arm free, hoisted the dress over my head so that it was basically stuck on my face. “God! How do they expect you to get these things off?”
Juliet laughed. Damn it, she was peeking. “Don’t look!” I said. The dress was hanging on my head like a turban, with one of my arms in the air out the neck hole, when the wailing stopped next door and a face peered under the door.
“Hi la-dy,” the little kid said.
“God!” I said.
“Hi-ii,” the kid said again.
“Go back on your side, honey,” Juliet’s voice was a hostile, too-loud message to the mother next door.
“Sarah! Come here! Quit that! The lady needs privacy!”
“Can I have gum?” Benjamin said.
I finally managed to free the dress, and I stood there, clutching the brown satin to my mostly naked self as the little girl retreated and appeared again, and as I watched Juliet’s face change in a moment from pissed to horrified. She put her fingertips up to her face, as if their touch kept the thoughts in her head.
“Juliet?”
She looked ill. I got scared. What did I know about any of this, this pregnancy? Was this some medical emergency? I tried to remember about anything I might have read in What to Expect When You’re Expecting. What if something happened to her right here? What if there was some sort of pregnancy disaster right here in Vibe!?
“Oh—” It was more a sound than a word. Pain. I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there clutching that strangulating dress and looking down at her.
“Tell me,” I said. “What? Are you hurting? Is something going wrong?”
“I just …”
“What?”
“I didn’t think about this,” she said.
“Juliet, what?” Okay. This was okay. It was an emotional crisis not a physical one.
“This.”
She pointed down to the floor, where a pair of little kid legs now stuck into our dressing room. One of the small pink tennis shoes had the laces undone. The bottom of the other shoe was scribbled on with some sort of ink pen. There was a pink-and-purple swirly Band-Aid on one plump knee, hanging on by only a single sticky end.
“That kid?”
Juliet gave a small nod. A tear rolled down her nose. I felt something big then. Something too large to have a name. The weight of mistakes and the lifting heart of compassion. Human beings colliding with the most complicated parts of themselves and the weird bravery of that. I held my sister against that brown satin dress. Held her head as the tears darkened the fabric. I felt all the choices that come out wrong in spite of our small hidden hopes. But I felt something else then too, something for the small someone inside Juliet whom I couldn’t seem to make entirely real. A someone who was growing and becoming in spite of our confusion, a someone whom I felt right then that I maybe just might love.
*
I listened to Hayden’s truck back out of the driveway. He and Juliet were going out to the Lighthouse, with its candles on every table and tri-fold menus. Hayden had rubbed his hands together happily at the thought of a baked potato wrapped in foil, and Juliet smelled like perfume. Buddy Wilkes’s allure—his slim hips and lank hair, the six-pack too often dangling from his long fingers, the poison of his coyote thinness and dark need—it had been kept away from my sister’s new life. He was just an outsider. For that day anyway.
Candlelight and dinner, facing each other across a table—this was a setting for love, or else it was supposed to be. Hayden’s hand was on
the small of Juliet’s back when they left, and she leaned into him as they went out the front door and down the walk. I would lean into that hand, I would. It would be easy. I would rest against that chest and it would be the rightest feeling in the world because he was a man who understood kindness. You could rest where there were good intentions. If you really cared for someone, though, really cared, you wanted what they wanted for themselves, right? You wanted that for them more than anything else, even if it made your heart clutch up. Even if you wished the hand was there on the small of your own back.
When they left, I read the new note on the bedside table.
Dearest Juliet—
Beautiful places: The tip of the Baja peninsula, Lover’s Beach, a slim stretch of white sand below an arch of rock. The Northern California coastline, wild rock shorelines, tumultuous waves, trees bent and twisted by insistent wind. The Cinque Terre—rugged, ragged Italian hill towns spilling out toward the sea, oranges and reds and old stone and clotheslines of white sheets set against blue azure waters. Ile Saint-Louis, cobbled streets and winding alleys and immense old doors and secret courtyard gardens.
None, though, is as beautiful as the land of your body—the curve of hip, breasts, ass, mouth. Skin white and smooth as eggshells. Softness, woman, a country to disappear in forever.
I put on some music and sat at my desk. Zeus lay underneath, and I kept him close by petting him with my foot. Hayden asked me to keep my eye on him so he didn’t have a revenge pee on the carpet. He didn’t always take well to being left behind.
I folded paper cranes out of roof-washing advertisements and credit card applications and real estate flyers. I sifted through Mom’s postcards and chose one from Madrid with a bullfighter on the front. The weather is superb here, I wrote. We saw the Vazquez collection at the Prado and thought of you… . I took another sheet of stationery, yellow with a wildflower border, and wrote, Mail carriers are AWESOME! on its empty center. I folded it three times and tucked it into the yellow wildflower-bordered envelope.
Being needed was a handy trick. It could fill you up so full you never even noticed all the places that were empty.
I heard them come home, and for a long time, the house was silent. Hayden in bed could make you forget just about anything… .
But then I heard the door handle turn, slowly, with effortful quiet, and then I heard the creak of stairs, the shushing of Zeus, who thought he was waking for a night adventure.
My heart was beating fast, and I was weirdly excited, the way you are on your birthday morning, or when you’re taking something new you’ve bought out of a shopping bag, or when you are about to see someone you really like. Really like. I didn’t stop to think, or maybe that was just another lie. Maybe I decided not to stop and think. I tossed on my shorts and my sweatshirt. I made the same quiet path down the stairs.
“What are you doing here?” I whispered.
“Scarlet.”
“Can’t sleep?”
“Nah. You? What are you doing up?”
“I’m the worst sleeper in the world,” I lied. “Happens all the time. Sometimes I just need to get up and out. Sometimes I go for a walk. I walk and look at all the quiet houses.”
“Yeah? Same here. I like to drive, though. Once I crossed the state line. The night I met Juliet.”
“I thought you would have slept like a baby after your night out tonight. Romance, dinner, tra-la-la.”
“We had a great dinner, thank you, Scarlet. It really was great. Your sister just puts a lot on my mind. She can’t help herself.”
I left that alone. The joy I had felt when I heard him head outside started to slip a little, and I didn’t want it to slip. It felt so good. I had a sudden idea.
“Let’s go for a drive now,” I said.
“I don’t think so, Scarlet. I don’t think that’s such a great idea.”
“Come on, why not? A spin around Deception Loop. It’ll help us both.”
“No car keys,” he said. And then he seemed to reconsider. He felt up inside the bumper of his truck, near the tire. He held up a small metal box. “Car keys.”
I smiled.
“I have a feeling your mother would not like this,” he said.
“We’re not doing anything wrong. It’ll be our secret.”
I liked this idea, us having a secret. No one would need to know, just like no one needed to know any private feelings I might have. They would be a secret between me and myself, kept from doing anyone harm by staying locked away. They would be mine and mine alone. A person, a girl, could have all kinds of thoughts and none of them mattered, none of them could betray or embarrass or complicate as long as she kept hold of them, made them her own business and no one else’s, kept them tucked in a box of metal, same as those car keys, which Hayden now slipped out and dangled on one finger.
“Windows down … ,” he warned. “Night air blowing in.”
“No other way,” I said.
We got in and he started the engine. It sounded so loud there on that late, dark street. I closed the door so softly that I had to open it again at the stop sign to shut it hard.
“You’ve got to warn me when you’re going to do that,” Hayden said. “I was just about to push the gas pedal. Maybe you’d better buckle in. I’d hate to lose you.”
The sound of that pleased me. “I’m buckled. See?”
“All right, then.”
“Music?”
“Just night music.”
“Better,” I agreed.
The windows were down and he drove just a little too fast on the long road around the island. As he drove, you felt all of life there, stretched out and sleepy in the black night—the still cars and dark houses, the glow of porch lights and the tiny red beams of sailboats bobbing in the waters of the sound. Gardens resting, hawks not, rabbits huddling together for safety. People dreaming, toes touching other toes under quilts, fretful tossing, all of what might be waiting when morning came. The slow, permanent rhythms of the tides, of trees doing midnight growing, of humans forever tangling and untangling their own stories. I breathed it all in through the open windows, felt its grandness, and beside me, felt Hayden’s presence there too, him with his one elbow out the open window, his T-shirt sleeve flapping in the cool air.
I watched his profile. The tick-tock tick-tock of the turn signal sounded both tired and important at that late hour. It reminded me of arrivals and departures, the sound of coming home when you were a child and it was past your bedtime, and you’d been asleep in the backseat of the car.
The tires crunched gravel, and he pulled over at the small curve where there was a scenic view labeled with a sign. We sat there for a while, listening to crickets through the open windows. The night smelled like blackberry leaves and the ocean’s nearness, something sweet and deep and full. His presence seemed so large there beside me. I felt it in every part of me. It was bigger than the sound stretched before us, a sea of creamy blue-black tinged with silver moonlit waves.
“Hear that hawk?” he said.
“Yeah.”
My voice seemed to surprise him. He looked over at me. He seemed startled. Maybe he’d forgotten who was in the car with him.
“We’d better get back,” he said.
He reversed out of the lot, set us on the road again. We didn’t amble and stray this time, just made a straight shot there. We were nearing home when he spoke. “She’s scared about getting close. She says she’s scared; that’s why.”
“She’s scared about getting close,” I said. Right. She had seemed really scared of getting close when she was wrapped up with Buddy Wilkes on our living room couch. Getting pregnant on purpose sure seemed like being scared of getting close. Uh-huh.
“You know, after …”
He didn’t finish. I wanted to say, after what? What big crisis had she had that we didn’t know about? But I felt irritated at the direction things were going in. We were almost home. The ride was almost over, and maybe I’d never have another lik
e it again. I picked up his pack of cigarettes on the seat. I shook one out.
“You could teach me to smoke,” I said.
“You don’t want to smoke, Scarlet.”
“I do. You could teach me.” I put one between my lips. It tasted brown and sweet, sweeter than the gray, ashy smell it made when lit. I let it hang there. “How’s this? Like in the movies.” I pretended to smoke, blew out the imaginary air. I was feeling a little reckless. The wind and the night and the late hour and watching Hayden’s profile, it all made me feel like I could toss things away, everything, all. Like I would want that, and it would be good.
“Give me that,” he said. He snatched it from my lips, and I could feel his hand brush against my mouth. His fingers, brushing against my skin.
“My smoking days are over already? And I wanted it so much.”
“You don’t want that, Scarlet.”
“I don’t?”
“It’s not who you are.”
We pulled up to our driveway then. He cut the engine, and there in front of our still house, the night seemed quieter than quiet.
“We don’t know that.”
“We do know that. And it’s a good thing. It’s a great thing,” he said. “Come on, let’s get some sleep.”
We went inside again. There was the shushing of Zeus, the creaking steps, the turning door handles, in reverse. He stopped at their door. I wanted something bad. I could feel the rumble of that want filling every bit of me. If you had asked me right then what I wanted, though, I might not even have been able to say exactly what it was.
“Good night,” he whispered finally.
“Good night,” I whispered back.
Chapter Fifteen
Hey, Miss A plus.” I closed my locker and turned around.
“Kevin,” I said. I had a moment of fear-panic, looked at his hands. I saw with relief that they did not hold some round cartoon bomb with a sparkling, lit fuse, nor a Wile E. Coyote crate labeled Dynamite! Actually, he was smiling. I had to think a minute. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen Kevin Frink smile. He smirked, yes, but that only involved one corner of the mouth, not both.