Shaken and Stirred

by Joan Opyr

  “Green Thumb Gardening,” he said. “Gene has worked out the bugs, so we’re moving the release date to early January. I need a couple of quick paragraphs for the small trades. A file by Friday—would that be too soon? Oh and how are you doing? Did everything . . . um . . . you know, come out okay?”

  Abby turned the water off and settled into the tub with a loud splash.

  “Clark is worried that they might have removed the wrong parts. And he wants me to do some work.”

  “Clark’s an ass.”

  “Clark’s a generous ass. Enjoy the luxury of your surrounds, courtesy of Clark’s deep-pocket salaries.” I went into the bathroom and leaned against the sink. Abby’s head floated on a sea of bubbles. “Next is Louise. She took Belvedere to the vet, but it’s nothing to worry about. She thought he looked stiff. The vet prescribed a different anti-inflammatory. Rimadyl. Possible side effects include ulcers and death. She doesn’t want to give it to him without your permission. Call her back.”

  “Why didn’t she leave a message on my voice mail?”

  “She did. And she left one at the hospital. And she sent one by carrier pigeon. You know how she is.”

  “I know.”

  “The next call is from . . .” I stopped as a voice stepped out of time and into the hotel bathroom. Poppy, this is Susan.

  Abby looked at me. “Take it in the other room,” she said. “And shut the bathroom door.”

  I reached the end of the message and punched in the code for repeat.

  “Poppy, this is Susan,” she said. “Your mother gave me your phone number. I understand you’re going to be in town, and I’d like to get together, if you can fit it in. I realize you have a lot on your plate. Maybe we could have dinner? My number is . . . well, my number is the same as it’s always been. I’m sure you remember it. I’m staying at my father’s house. He’d like to see you, too. He says it’s been a long time. Please call. I want to see you.”

  Please call. I want to see you.

  I didn’t know which was more disturbing, the assumption that after nearly twenty years I’d still remember the phone number at her father’s house, or the fact that I did remember it. I knew it as well as I knew my own.

  Two months after my accident with the BB gun, Susan Sava moved into the house next door. It was Saturday, October 13. I wrote it in my diary. Her father, Mike, worked at Bloom’s Chevrolet with my grandfather. He was a salesman. Hunter had told me that he had a daughter about my age. He said I’d like her, and so for weeks I’d been looking forward to moving day. When the U-Haul arrived, I got my motorcycle out and rode it in slow circles around our front yard, pretending not to watch the people and furniture going in. I’d been riding for about half an hour when Susan stepped out onto her front porch and waved at me. I waved back. Two seconds later, I ran smack into a hickory nut tree. Thus marked the beginning of the clumsy pratfalls that plagued me whenever I was around her.

  Not that I was graceful at the best of times. My depth perception was still slightly off, and I sometimes miscalculated when climbing stairs or reaching for a drink. To add to my general awkwardness, I was self-conscious about my eye. People had a tendency to stare, then catch themselves and look away.

  Susan stared that first day as she helped me to my feet. I looked away, embarrassed.

  “No, don’t,” she said, cupping her hand under my chin and forcing me to make eye contact. “That’s interesting—the pupil’s just dilated. I thought at first that your eyes were two different colors.”

  “A lot of people make that mistake.”

  Her own eyes were dark blue, deep set against the rich tan of her skin.

  “So, is it permanent, then?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m Susan,” she said, holding out a hand for me to shake. “I understand they call you Poppy, but that’s not your real name, is it?”

  “It’s a nickname. From Popeye. My grandfather—Hunter—he’s a joker. My real name is Mary Frances. People used to call me Frankie. Take your pick. I don’t care.”

  She laughed. “I don’t even have a middle name, and here you are spoiled for choice.”

  “You’re welcome to one of mine.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I believe I’ll have Frances. Those were my favorite books when I was a child. Have you read them?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry.”

  “The Frances books. They’re by Russell Hoban, about a little badger. I’ll loan them to you, if you like.” She took another shameless look at my eye. “How did it happen, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Mishap with a BB gun. I can still see, so it wasn’t a big deal.”

  “Must’ve hurt, though.”

  “It didn’t tickle.”

  She laughed. “Okay, tough girl. I was just going inside for a Coke. Why don’t you come with me? You can tell me all about it.”

  “There’s not much to tell.”

  “You’ll have to make something up then. Every scar deserves a good story.”

  I think I fell in love with her that day. I fell in love on October 13, 1979, and I never quite fell out again. Not even when her mother began selling Avon.

  Chapter Seven

  My English term paper wasn’t due for another two weeks, but I wanted to get it done before Susan came home for Spring Break. She was due back at any time. I reached out to adjust the blinds. Several red cars had driven by, and each time, my heart leapt up for just a moment before I realized it wasn’t Susan’s Honda. The third time this happened, I gave myself a good shake. Really, I was as bad as a dog panting at traffic.

  Nana looked over my shoulder. “What’s this essay about?”

  “Oedipus Rex,” I said irritably. It was the second time she’d asked, and I had to fight the urge to type “Oedipus was a motherfucker” for the next time she looked. Another hour had passed, and Hunter still hadn’t come home. My grandmother was chain-smoking, and my mother wore a tight-lipped expression. If I hadn’t wanted to sit by the dining room window and keep an eye out for Susan, I’d have taken the typewriter into my bedroom.

  Our dining room was actually an extension of the living room. Only imagination and the edge of the carpet divided the space between them. To emphasize what little separation there was, my grandmother had planted an enormous wing chair in the middle of the living room floor with its back to the dining room table. There was only three feet of space between them, but the chair forced us to act as if there were a door. If you didn’t slow down when crossing from one room to the other, you risked barking your shins or gouging your ribs.

  Both rooms were crowded with furniture. A three-keyboard Wurlitzer organ took up one entire wall, and a sofa, chairs, a stereo cabinet, and a console television filled the rest of the space. It was impossible to walk in a straight line from one side of the room to the other. In order to fit the dining room table into the space available, one side of it had to be shoved against the back wall. Otherwise, the front door wouldn’t open.

  The noise in the dining room was too much. It was like trying to work in a bus station. My mother had given up reading and was watching The Andy Griffith Show. Nana sat down in the wing chair and tried to get our dog, Maurice, to bark along to the tune of Andy’s whistling. My mother turned the volume up on the television to drown out the dog. He barked louder.

  I closed my eyes and tried to think of something clever to say about Oedipus. Nothing came to mind. I checked the window again.

  “Stop messing with those blinds,” Nana said. “Can’t you see the dust you’re raising?”

  Dust motes caught the light as they billowed over the table. I ran my finger along one of the flat metal blades and then rubbed my fingers together. “How old are these blinds, anyway? Have they ever been dusted?”

  My grandmother shook her head in disgust. “When was the last time you did any housework? You ought to be ashamed of yourself, letting me and your mama do it all.”

  “I mow the grass.”

  “Once a
week.”

  “All right,” I said. “How often do you clean the house?”

  Nana turned to my mother. “You raised a terrible smart-mouth, Barbara.”

  “Don’t I know it,” she said. Maurice continued to bark.

  “Would you please put the dog out? I can’t concentrate with all that racket.”

  “I just let him in. Here, Barbara—Poppy says turn the television down. She can’t concentrate on her school work.”

  My mother sighed heavily and lowered the volume. I wished I’d asked Susan for an exact time. She’d just said Saturday evening when I’d talked to her, and at the time, that had seemed good enough. Now, I was anxious to get out of the house. Twice, I caught myself typing Opie instead of Oedipus.

  I felt something shove against my legs and looked down to find Maurice trying to squeeze between me and the stack of Reader’s Digest condensed books that propped up the back corner of the table. The Olivetti wobbled precariously, dropping a letter. I advanced the roller and rubbed at it with my typing eraser, scratching a hole in the paper.

  “This table has got to go,” I said, wadding up the page in disgust. “It’s only got three legs, and it’s too damn big for this room. It’s not as if the leg Maurice chewed off is going to grow back.”

  “That table was expensive,” Nana said, rubbing the mangled arm of the wing chair, which had also been remodeled by Maurice. “I paid three hundred dollars for it.”

  “It was expensive in 1972. Now it has three legs.” I closed the book on Oedipus Rex and unplugged the typewriter. “I can’t wait to go to college and get out of this mad house. It’s like living in the Haney Place.”

  “The what?”

  “The house on Green Acres where Oliver and Lisa live. You can’t plug the microwave in without unplugging the toaster. If you touch the stove hood while touching anything on the stove, you’ll knock yourself into next week.”

  “This house wasn’t wired for that microwave. Your grandfather bought it so you could play with it, baking potatoes and blowing up hot dogs.”

  “This is the twentieth century. You don’t have to heat the oven for an hour-and-a-half to bake a potato. You ought to try it. No heat, no foil, no mess.”

  “Mess,” Nana said. “Talk about mess. You’ll miss us when you’re gone. You won’t have anyone to pick up after you all day long.”

  “I don’t know how you’re planning to pay for it,” my mother cut in.

  “Pay for what?”

  “College. I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “Financial aid will pay for it.”

  “Will that cover everything?”

  “I was planning to get a part-time job, and I’m going to work this summer.”

  “As a soda jerk at the flea market, which is only open on Saturday. You need to find a regular job during the week.”

  “I will.”

  “Have you filled out any applications?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “The record store at North Hills Mall and Taco Bell, okay?”

  My mother gave me her watch-that-snotty-voice look. “I guess we’ll have to work something out with the car, or I suppose you could take the bus.”

  “I could use Nana’s car.”

  Nana shook her head. “Oh, no, you couldn’t. Your driving scares me to death.”

  “You wouldn’t be riding with me.”

  My mother piped up with mock cheerfulness. “Maybe your dad will give you a new car for graduation. He might win one. Lucky Eddie.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  Maurice nuzzled my leg. He was a big, black standard poodle. I cut his hair short every six weeks with a pair of electric clippers. Not a poodle cut, just a simple kennel cut. I thought he looked stupid clipped like someone’s hedge, with bald patches here and there and big poufs over his hips and ankles. I kicked off one of my tennis shoes and rubbed his fur with my foot. It felt scratchy against my bare skin. Given my choice of dogs, I would have picked something other than a poodle, something less nervous and over-bred. Maurice was afraid of his own shadow. I stopped rubbing and slipped my shoe back on, prompting him to shove against me with his nose. I reached down and scratched between his ears.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  Maurice jumped up, cracking his head on the bottom of the table. I got up to look for his leash, resigning myself to being dragged all over hell’s half-acre. It was then that I saw Susan’s car drive past the dining room window. My heart pounded rapidly against the walls of my chest.

  “Where are you going?” my grandmother asked.

  “Knock it off,” I said to Maurice, who was hopping up and down by the front door. “I’ll walk you later.” To my grandmother, I added, “I’m going next door. I just saw Susan drive by.”

  She said nothing, though the look she gave me was eloquent enough. Susan was to blame for my wanting to go to UNC, and Nana didn’t approve. That look said that it was just a matter of time before I joined the ne’er-do-well hippies of Chapel Hill. I opened the front door.

  “I won’t be long.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “Just don’t forget about AA. Your grandfather wants us to go with him tonight.”

  “He wants an audience,” my mother corrected.

  “The meeting’s at seven-thirty. I’ll be back in plenty of time.” I paused to check my hair in the mirror next to the front door. It was still too short. I’d cut it two weeks before with Maurice’s dog clippers, hoping I’d look like Annie Lennox. Instead, I looked like an AWOL marine. I gave it a quick brush now with my fingers, making the hairs stand up like the bristles on a scrub brush.

  “We need to leave at seven o’clock,” Nana reminded me, frowning at my hair. “Why don’t you put on a baseball cap and hide that monkey mess on your head?”

  “Leave her hair alone,” said my mother. “It’ll grow.”

  “Not in time for the meeting.”

  My mother snorted with derision. “I don’t know why you think you’ll be going to a meeting. He left three hours ago. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that he’s not coming home tonight.”

  My grandmother said nothing. Maurice, seeing that he wasn’t going for a walk, crawled back under the table and gazed at me reproachfully. I turned my back on all of them and slipped out the front door.

  Before long, I was spending several afternoons a week at Susan’s house, and a good portion of every weekend. She made friends easily. I was in awe of her. She’d moved two months into her senior year of high school, and it didn’t seem to matter. It was as if everyone had known her for years. I’d met Abby by that time, but we weren’t yet friends. I was still eating lunch in the school cafeteria by myself.

  I was devastated when Susan left for college. Her response to my grief was to encourage me to be more outgoing. I’d played sports in Michigan, and Susan pushed me to try out for the junior varsity teams in high school. I made volleyball and basketball, and, my sophomore year, softball.

  “Join the French Club, too,” she said. “It’ll look good on your college applications.”

  Susan came home for holidays and breaks, and while I looked forward to her visits, I grew less dependent on her as time went by. I developed my own group of friends, Abby, and Kim DiMarco, and a couple of guys who hung around the fringes. Abby’s mother, like mine, was single. She was a widow. The apartment they lived in was less than a mile away from my house. We also shared a coincidental connection in that Pearl Johnson, the woman who took care of Miss Agnes, was Abby’s aunt. Abby and Susan knew and liked one another. She looked forward to Susan being home almost as much as I did. We rode around in Susan’s car, went to the mall or the movies, and ate dinner at the Char-grill Drive-in.

  My relationship with Susan gradually changed, and while I wouldn’t have described us as equals—as a college student, she seemed too far above me for that—by the time she was a sophomore and I was a high school senior, I no longer felt like her protégée. Susan was
the first person to talk to me about going to college, first guiding and then pushing me through the application process. No one in my family had gone beyond high school, and the assumption had always been that I’d graduate and look for a job. They seemed puzzled when I told them I was applying.

  There was a world of difference between the Savas and the

  Bartholomews and Koslowskis. The first time I ever ate butter was at Susan’s house. It was spread all over a crusty baguette, and the difference between that sweet, salty flavor and the margarine at my house was a revelation to rival St. Paul’s on the road to Damascus. When I suggested that we start buying butter, too, my mother said that as long as she could get eight sticks of margarine for eightyeight cents, that’s what we’d be eating.

  As I rang Susan’s doorbell, I took note of the two new hammered copper planters on the front porch. Dark green leaves were pushing up through the soil, probably tulips. Mike had been to the Netherlands to scout out new varieties. When he came back, he gave my grandmother a small wooden windmill with the word groetjes, greetings, carved on its base.

  Susan answered on the third ring, wearing only a red terry cloth bathrobe.

  “Groetjes,” I said.

  She laughed. “Groetjes yourself. Come on in.”

  Susan had fantastic legs, long and tan beneath the knee-length robe. I was looking at them as I followed her inside. Consequently, I tripped over the edge of the doorframe.

  “Walk much?”

  “You know how I am. I trip on air.”

  “It’ll get you every time,” she agreed, reaching out to hug me. “It’s good to see you.”

  It had taken me a long time to get used to Susan’s physical expressiveness—she hugged me, she kissed me, she ruffled my hair. With the exception of my grandfather, who was prone to beersoaked displays of affection, my family didn’t hug. I could count the number of times my mother had embraced me on one hand. I was both thrilled and terrified when Susan touched me, uncertain of how to respond.