by Hadley Dyer
He had a way of making this sound like an accusation.
“—but also the world hasn’t messed you up yet. We can have a conversation about something that you thought you had a solid opinion about, and while we’re talking, you change your mind. You just, change your mind. Because you’re still becoming who you are. Or maybe, maybe age has nothing to do with it. Maybe who you are is someone who’s willing to change her mind. I still change my mind. I can’t stop changing my mind. Only, I can’t get over that woman I met three months ago at the lighthouse.”
“Well, this is the real me. This stupid, pissy person.”
“You’re not stupid. You can be pissy. I’d still want to stay up all night talking to you.”
He was turning away, but I drew him to me.
Have you ever tried to kiss someone midrant? In the movie version of my life, it’ll be romantic, how his hands went from flailing to resting on mine, how he leaned into me, but our mouths didn’t quite meet and his breath was like peach-flavored nail polish remover.
“Don’t be so heartless, George.”
He was still holding on to me.
“Let’s say you’re right,” I said. “Let’s say you’re not supposed to be a cop. But it got you here. To Rupert. To me. What if this is what you’re supposed to do?”
“I’m supposed to do . . . you?”
I shrugged. “Do I look like a poet?”
That was his cue. When he would remember that I’d said that before I kissed him at the lighthouse. When he would say again, As a matter of fact, you do, and light up the sky with fireworks.
He pushed me away. “I’m not just older, I’m in a position of authority. Do you get that? No, you don’t. You’ve probably never seen me like that.”
“I’m trying to say that, you and me, we might not be people who are . . . who are anything. I’m not an artist or an athlete or a tugboat captain. I don’t know if I’ll ever have something like that. Sometimes I wish I did, but I don’t see what was so terrible about you doing all those cool jobs and traveling to all those cool places other than not having someone to do it with.”
He stepped around me and picked up the flashlight, and this time I didn’t try to stop him.
“Where are you going?”
“The bar. I told the guys I’d play onstage tonight.”
“You can’t drive.”
“Bobby’s coming to pick me up. He asked about you.”
“That’s slightly terrifying.” I hadn’t forgotten the sight and sound of Bobby slamming his bandaged hand against the table at Long Fellows.
“He thought you might want to come along, whistle us another tune. I had to say you were sick. How could I tell him that I can’t get you past the door? Do you know how bad it must be if you don’t want to explain it to a guy like Bobby?”
“What happens out here is between us. No one has to know.” I could hear desperation in my voice and it pained me.
“George, we can’t.”
Right. Of course not. Don’t be silly, Frances. “Are you going to be afraid to be around me now?”
“I’m not afraid of you,” Francis said as he turned away again. “I’m afraid of myself.”
Twenty-One
I sat in the parking lot for a long time, listening to the bass line thrumming from the bar. I didn’t dare try to sneak in again. The bartender struck me as a guy who wouldn’t be fooled twice, and Francis wouldn’t hesitate to toss me out either. What was I even doing? Mooning around like a petulant little girl.
I fished my cigarettes and lighter out of my purse and left the car. A dusting of flurries, the first of the season, was coming down under the orange lights. I paced around as I smoked, then wandered around to the back of the bar, where a window was cranked open. It was the one directly behind the stage.
I sat on a flattened cardboard box beside the trash cans under the window, lit another cigarette, and listened to Francis singing alone.
Here so far away
The ocean is a finger lake
The highway is a well-worn path
That brings me back to you.
It had been a couple of hours since our fight on the ridge, and from the clear high notes and the assured way his fingers were moving over the strings, it sounded as though Francis had sobered up. At some point I started singing along, but I figured no one could hear me there, behind the stage, behind the speakers. No one could hear how our voices entwined, his a little coarse, mine a little sharp, a concrete wall with aluminum siding between us.
After the set, I sat a while longer in the silence. The snowflakes were fatter now, settling thickly on my jacket and my hair. I might have let myself disappear beneath them had “Sweet Home Alabama” not poured out the window.
He came around the building as I was brushing the ash and dirt off my jeans. He was frowning in the orange light when he grabbed me, and suddenly we were tangled up together, his back sliding down the brick wall, me sliding onto his lap, biting into each other under the canopy of my hair. And then we were in it. We were so, so in it.
The Cheese Stands Alone
Twenty-Two
January 1993
Snow fell steadily outside the classroom window, shin high already. We’d had a green Christmas, which my mother kept apologizing about as though it were somehow her fault, and then the new year came, thick and furious.
Miss Aker had invited the editor from the local paper to talk to our class, a balding middle-aged guy with a thick, tidy moustache that rested heavily on his upper lip like a page-boy haircut.
“How many of you want to be writers?” he asked.
A few hands went up, none of them mine. Shelley-with-an-E was waving hers confidently, as though she expected him to ask her to stand up and give an inspiring monologue about her true calling.
“Reporting is not for you,” he said.
Her hand dropped into her lap.
“It’s not about your story. It’s about the story. It’s about recording the truth, without shaping it into what you wish the facts could be. Clearly. Accurately. Precisely.”
“His mouth has bangs,” Lisa whispered to Bill, and I barked a loud laugh before I could help myself.
Shrunk down in my seat, I pretended to take notes, starting with a clear, accurate, and precise sentence: I would rather be anywhere but here.
I was on my feet as soon as the bell rang. I had to get up the highway to a parking lot behind an abandoned building to meet Francis before his shift started at six thirty. This was our only chance to get together before Saturday, when Rupert would be around. It wasn’t like we could call each other if we wanted to talk, not if we didn’t want to be found out.
There were weeks when all I could expect was a hand resting briefly on my back or a slight rub of his hip against mine as he moved past me in the farmhouse kitchen. One afternoon when we were standing over Rupert—who had managed to get himself down on his knees to show us how to clean Shaggy’s ears—I felt Francis’s finger barely grazing the inside of my wrist. I don’t want to get overly poetic here, but give me an inch of Francis’s skin brushing against mine over a chesterfield jackhammering by some East Riverview boy any day.
Francis and I hadn’t had sex yet, didn’t have a place to do it or enough time to make it special. He knew I wasn’t a virgin, but seemed to think it needed to be a more tender event than I was hoping for. That afternoon I planned to set him straight.
“George?” Miss Aker was sitting on the edge of her desk wearing a pale denim jumper, argyle knee socks, and a look of kindly concern.
“Sorry about the laughing,” I said. “I just remembered this joke I heard.”
“What was it?”
“Actually, it wasn’t that funny.”
“I see. Well, George, I was wondering what you thought of our guest speaker. I saw you taking notes.”
“I liked what he said about telling the truth.”
I wasn’t sucking up. The truth was starting to sound real good to me: n
o subtext, no double-talk, no trying to impress people, just the facts. Lying had stopped being fun a long time ago, once it became something I had to do constantly.
Miss Aker smiled, a very pretty smile apart from her two perfectly yellow canine teeth. “A better fit for you than poetry, I expect. Although your exam essay—that wonderful idea that being sentimental can be brave—was very nicely articulated. I hope you’re doing as well in all your courses.”
“I am, thanks.”
Sort of. My first-term grades had been solid, thanks to all those hours with my textbooks open at the lighthouse and all those nights when it was Lisa and Nat’s turn to hang out with Bill. Mum cried when I sent off my applications to Noel, Aurora, and two other city universities; I had a real shot of being the first person in her family to get a degree. Even Dad looked a little misty. But lately I’d been spending more time on the logistics of being with Francis than I had studying.
On the other side of the window, the snow fluttering around him like he was inside a giant snow globe, Bill held up a plastic lawn chair.
“George, is everything alright?”
I snapped my focus back to Miss Aker. “Yeah—absolutely.”
“You’re distracted lately.”
“Um, just family stuff.”
She nodded. “I’m sure we’ll see your father back at the regatta next year.”
I quickly got my things from my locker and jogged toward the school entrance, stopping at the distinctive sound of valley hooliganism on the other side of the auditorium door. Inside, Lisa was sitting onstage, cross-legged, staring at a script in her lap, while twenty, thirty Elevens were practically swinging from the rafters.
Lisa used to say that a theater production was all about the director’s vision for a play, but when had she ever had an original thought? She got her style from magazines, her music from the radio charts, and she parroted back whatever our teachers said. It didn’t seem like she had a blueprint for this circus play, or anyone trying to help.
Now that we’d been apart for so long, and now that I had Francis to remind me every day that high school wasn’t forever, it was easier to feel bad for her. But what could I do? She’d chosen her stage manager. Christina was sitting on the edge of the stage, kicking someone on the floor below her, and gave me a smug look when she spotted me in the doorway.
“I WANT TO PLAY OUTSIDE!”
I closed the door and gave Bill a two-knuckle punch for startling me. He’d brought the plastic lawn chair inside and was shaking it at me. It was strapped to a pair of children’s skis. “I’ll let you take the first ride,” he said.
“Where did you get that?”
“They made it in shop class this morning when the power was out. There’s loads more.”
I resisted the urge to check my watch, but could feel it ticking on my wrist. “I gotta get out to the farm.”
“Aw, come on. You said the old guy doesn’t care when you show up, but you’re always bailing on me to go to work.”
“Not always.”
Just when I got an unexpected chance to see Francis.
“Nat’ll go sledding with you.”
“Where is she?”
“I dunno. Lisa’s in there.”
“She throws up when she runs in deep snow. Besides, I’ll never get her out of rehearsal, and she’s always in rehearsal, and please can we go play? Please, please, please . . .”
I felt the watch tick again. “Okay, Billy. For a minute.”
All manner of sleds were shooting down the steep hill beyond the school fields. The makeshift magic carpets—mostly cardboard wrapped in a garbage bags—were getting the best distance, judging from the number of kids wrapped around trees at the bottom.
Bill launched me in the chair with a big push. I made it about three-quarters of the way down before wiping out, sending someone else arse-over-teakettle with me. He raised his head out of the snow: Joshua Spring.
“Geez, sorry,” I said, crawling over to him. “Are you hurt?”
“It’s cool.”
He shook the snow out of his hair, and without thinking, I brushed it off his cheeks. They flushed pink. Not a guy who could hide his feelings, Joshua. Some people weren’t built for secrets.
“Do you . . .” He glanced around—for Christina, no doubt. “Want to try that again? I mean going down. Down the hill.” He flushed redder.
“Sorry, I can’t,” I said. “I’ve got to—”
“Okay. Yeah, whatever.”
“No, I would, but I have to be somewhere.” A bead of blood had appeared on his lower lip. I pointed to my own lip. “I think you bit yourself.”
He put his hand to his mouth, then looked down at the red blotch on his mitten. “Great.”
“Here, let me . . .” I took a tissue from my pocket and reached over, but he blocked me with his monster-sized mitt.
Enough. I waved to Bill and power-walked to my car. I couldn’t phone Francis, had no way of letting him know I would be late. Our dates often went sideways, usually because he got caught up at work. I was used to that, unfortunately. When I was a kid, how many times had my dad sat down to dinner only to be called back out again? It got so that I’d get stressed out if the phone rang on special days, like when I had a soccer game or a school concert. He missed my sixth birthday because of a house fire, and my ninth because someone was murdered. I guess you’re not supposed to complain about that.
Now Dad spent most of his time snoozing, reading, and watching TV, Mum waiting on him hand and foot. So to speak. He rarely bothered to patrol me anymore. With my two jobs and good grades and all the Saturday nights I’d spent with Rupert, he had little reason to doubt that I was playing Yahtzee when I was actually slipping away to meet Francis, who didn’t always show. So, there was a lot of sitting in cold cars, fretting about whether he’d come and gone and how long I should hang around to be certain.
It was well after four and getting dark when I arrived at the parking lot, and there was no sign of Francis. If he’d made it, he must have given up. Stupid, slow-moving plow.
I drove on to the lighthouse and sat in the dark car. It was tempting to go to the farm, make up some reason to check in on Rupert, and see if Francis had gone home, but I was trying not to do too much of that, and maybe he’d gone somewhere else before his shift.
I let myself into the lighthouse. In the wintertime I was only there half days on Saturdays, spent most of my time cleaning already clean things and doing homework, so that the air would have hardly thawed before I turned down the heat and locked myself out again. It was especially chilly within the glass walls surrounding the lantern, where I could see the farmhouse lights beckoning from the ridge. I went down a level to the service room and flipped the switch, remembering again Francis’s mischievous look when he’d put his hand on the wrong one. Then I wound my way down the metal stairs to the keeper’s quarters and waited.
My truest, most visceral memory, the one I can still feel on my skin today, is the moment the lighthouse door opened. A half hour had passed. I’d already turned the lantern off and was zipping up when Francis appeared with a gust of cold air. As we stumbled back into the lighthouse, Francis wrestling off my coat, his mouth warming mine, I understood why people said it was like a part of them was missing when someone they loved went away. Everything felt right again, like all of the pieces of the world had snapped back into place with a resounding click.
We had sex, for the first time, in the lighthouse, is what I’m saying. Sweaty, clamoring, splinters from the wooden floors, drinking each other in the moonlight sex. I do apologize to all members of the lighthouse heritage society for what we did on the hardwood and possibly to the hardwood. Afterward, we lay under a rough wool blanket that I remembered was in the closet after the fact, our skin quickly cooling, the grandfather clock ticking down the last few minutes before Francis had to leave. I drew a sentence on his arm—
There is nowhere else I would rather be.
“This might be the
happiest I have ever been,” he said. “And I did some serious drugs in Peru.”
“Me too. Happy, and relieved.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“I was just scared you’d have more hair than I’m used to.”
He kissed my forehead and mumbled something into my hair. It might have been: “I was scared you’d have less.”
Twenty-Three
I never thought I’d be that girl going down on someone in a car on the edge of an empty parking lot. I certainly never thought that I’d be the one to turn the keys off in the ignition, reach over, and unbuckle that someone’s belt. (And absolutely never when he was in uniform, because that would be gross, except those two times after work when he happened to still be in uniform.) Nat and Lisa always made it sound like this was something you did for a guy because he whinged you into it. But I liked it, and I liked what Francis was doing to me, things high school boys couldn’t learn from watching porn. “I need to spend quality time with my friend,” I’d say. “Feel free to listen to the radio.” If you locked me in a room without food and water for long enough, I might have admitted that I wished there was a girl I could talk to about it.
I started having this irrational fear that people could read my mind and everyone knew what filthy thoughts I was having. What if a cross-section of my brain was exposed at an angle that I couldn’t catch in a mirror, and I was the only one who didn’t know my fantasies were playing like a movie reel for the world to see? One day, some little kid who hadn’t yet finished Concealing Knowledge of the Inner Thoughts of George Warren 101 would blurt out, Mummy, that girl is wondering if she has a weird vagina.
If you want my body and you think I’m sexy
Come on, sugar, let me know
My mother was sitting at the kitchen table with her beloved seed catalog, singing along with Rod Stewart on the radio in her choir voice, which was about as horrifying as you’d expect. “There’s my good girl,” she said when I came in.