“I don’t want to be sitting here in this burger joint any more than you do. But the bottom line, kiddo, is that you should be worrying about your own relationships and doing your best to survive your teens. No easy feat. And I’m terribly, terribly sorry for complicating things.” He reached for my hand; I pulled it back a little but then stopped. He held me by the fingertips.
“Look, I love you. Jane loves you. Tess and Rose and Cole love you. That’s what matters. That’s what I think. But I’ve already done too much talking. What do you think?”
I didn’t say anything for a long, long time.
Come, they told me, pa-rum-pa-pum-pum.
“I think I want to go home.”
HERE
Today is the thirty-fifth annual Bailey barbecue and fireworks display.
The main drag is packed with a few too many red, white and blue sequined outfits, in my humble opinion, but I can’t help appreciating the effort.
A favorite song of the L.A. bat mitzvah circuit, “Celebration,” is blaring from the DJ booth.
There’s a party goin’ on right he-ere
A celebration to last throughout the year.
I’m singing along. I’m moving to the music. I’m even feeling a little sheepish about my khaki shorts and black tank top. Would it have killed me to wear our national colors?
People have come out in droves and they’re celebrating, and it’s great, but when I stop and think about it, I can’t for the life of me understand why.
The way I see things, the people of Bailey have every reason to be angry. To feel cheated. To feel unpatriotic. To see themselves as standing alone holding the short end of the cosmic stick.
Setting aside the question of whether irresponsible human activity is to blame for the tornado, which I still argue it is, this tornado struck Bailey at the wrong political moment.
Too soon after Katrina.
Fortunately, Homes from the Heart stepped in to help. But when the people of Bailey asked for help from the government, all they got were a few FEMA trailers and a “Hey, sorry, guys, but the hurricane kind of wiped us out.”
So it would seem perfectly reasonable to me if these people didn’t feel like celebrating the USA. But they’re out here in red, white and blue and it dawns on me that patriotism is about much more than what your government gives you, or fails to give you, when you need it most. Patriotism is about what and who we are to each other.
And it’s about disgusting food.
Take the Bailey Bun, a dessert that appears only on the Fourth of July and has made the town semifamous. It’s some kind of bread stuffed with something creamy, dipped in strawberry preserves, deep-fried, then rolled in sugar, studded with raisins and put on a stick.
I don’t want to seem unpatriotic, so I eat one, and I find that indeed it is just as gross as it looks.
It’s a beautiful day.
Captain came in second in the hot-dog-eating contest. He was beat out by Early Joe, the town champion nine years running, who outweighs Captain by two hundred pounds.
I’m sitting in a booth with Teddy’s little sisters, Alice and Grace, helping them sell lemonade and homemade cookies to raise money to rebuild the medical clinic.
Grace wanders off in an effort to round up some more customers.
“Do you like my brother?” Alice asks. She’s the one in the denim sundress and red cowboy boots. Grace is the one in the baseball cap.
“Of course I do.”
I stopped by the trailer the other day with Teddy to thank Diane for the peach pie, and we all sat around drinking iced tea while Grace kicked a ball back and forth with a boy half her height and Alice braided my hair. “Your hair is just like Mama’s,” she’d said. “You should wear it in braids.”
“No, I mean do you like him like him?”
“You’re nosy.” I swat her on top of the head.
“You kno-ow,” she singsongs. “Teddy had a girlfriend.”
Now I’m paying attention.
“Grace really liked her, but I didn’t so much. She was okay. Nice enough. But she wasn’t as pretty as you.”
I love this kid. She’s the greatest person in the entire world.
“I don’t know why they broke up. Maybe it was because she’s a lesbian.”
“What! Do you even know what that means?”
“Of course I do. It means that she loves other women.”
“What makes you think that’s what happened between Teddy and …”
“Amber. I saw it on TV. That’s why this couple broke up on this show I watch on The N.”
“Well, you watch too much TV.”
“I read too.”
“Good.”
“And in this book I read there was a girl who broke up with her boyfriend because she was a lesbian.”
“Okay, Alice. Enough. Let’s sell some lemonade and get your mom’s clinic rebuilt.”
“Prude.”
“How old are you again?”
“Ten. I’ll be ten in September.”
“So you’re nine.”
“I’m basically ten.”
“Whatever you say.”
Grace comes back to the booth with Teddy in tow.
“Is Alice giving you a hard time? She has a habit of asking too many questions.”
Alice sticks her tongue out at him.
“Not at all. We were just having a nice little chat,” I say, and she sneaks me a grin.
“Good. Now, if you two don’t mind,” he says to his sisters, “I’m going to steal Harper away. I know the perfect spot for watching the fireworks.”
They protest. They want to come too, but he tells them they have to stay with their parents, and we walk off into the crowd.
The sun is going down and the heat is fading. At the edges, the sky is the color of a kitten’s tongue. People are finding each other and walking with their folded-up blankets to the field on Bill Parson’s farm.
“This way,” Teddy says, and he starts walking in the opposite direction.
I take a quick look around for Marisol, Frances and Captain.
“We’ll catch up with them after,” he says. “C’mon.”
We climb into his pickup truck, and the engine starts with a groan.
“Where are we going?”
“A little faith. That’s all I ask.”
“You sound like Jesus radio.”
“This has nothing to do with Jesus. This is about fireworks.” He pauses. “And being alone with you.”
I turn to look at him, but he looks straight ahead. I don’t know why I’m looking at him. If he were to turn and look at me, I’m certain I’d look away. But I’m staring at his profile, his dark curls, his eyelashes, his high cheekbones, his chin with just the smallest trace of stubble on it.
He’s smiling.
“I … I …”
My heart is racing. Words are tumbling around in my head, in my throat, but I can’t grab hold of them and string them together.
There’s a battle going on here.
I want him. I do. I wouldn’t allow myself to believe that it could come to this with Teddy, that he would want me too, that he would want to be alone with me, and yet here we are.
But I’ve been through this before. I’ve been with the boy who one minute is your friend and then, when nobody else is around, and at moments you can never anticipate, is willing to be more.
I flash forward to tomorrow. I’ll be helping insulate the walls and Teddy will be doing whatever his assignment is and I’ll take a break and wander over to find him and he’ll look at me blankly, and there won’t be any sign, in any corner of the skeletal house, of anything having happened between us.
“I think we should go to Bill Parson’s farm with everyone else,” I say quietly.
He stops the truck.
“Really? Because if we go over on Stutter Road and climb the hill we can see the fireworks from the other side. We’ll be closer than the farm, and higher up, so it feels like they’re right i
n your face.”
He’s looking at me now. And now it’s me who’s looking straight ahead. It’s not quite black outside, it’s the deepest hue of blue, and in this light I feel lost.
“It’s totally safe. I swear. I’ve watched from this same spot for the past few years. But if you want to go back, let’s go.”
“I don’t know what I want.”
Sometimes, when you imagine places you’ve never been or things you’ve never done, you find that the real experience isn’t too far off from the one you invented in your head. Like New York. Before I ever went, I dreamed of it, and the concrete and height and glass and noise and smells of it all matched my imagination.
I pictured this summer in Tennessee for months before I came. What I imagined was heat. I imagined building strength in my biceps from operating power tools, and gaining space in my head. I pictured anonymity. I pictured no history, no present. Just work.
I didn’t picture this.
A town with stories and people and fading light at the end of each day that breaks my heart. A new set of friends. Another boy. Another relationship I don’t understand, with lines I can’t see.
“Harper, hey, I’m sorry I said that thing about wanting to be alone with you. Maybe that sounded creepy. I don’t know.” He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “I didn’t mean to make any assumptions. Really, I didn’t. Let’s just watch some fireworks. From wherever suits you best.”
I unbuckle my seat belt. I hear an explosion. At first I think it’s coming from inside me, but it’s not. It’s in the distance. The fireworks are starting.
I slide closer to Teddy. I turn to him.
I put my hands on his shoulders. I slide them onto his bony chest.
He takes my face in his hands. He reaches back for my hair.
We collide.
HOME
One Saturday night in January, Tess invited me to sleep over at Avi’s. Rose was still home from school.
One thing I’d learned about college from watching Rose go away was that you have vacations that never end. The other thing I learned was that when you go away to school, you get to start your own life, and whatever happens back at home is something that’s happening to other people.
Rose seemed unfazed by the divorce. She shrugged in her typical Rose way and tossed her long dark hair to the side and said something about it being the inevitable outcome of any relationship confined by the draconian societal construct known as marriage.
“It’s a prison,” she said. “Eventually, the smart ones figure out how to escape.”
We were sitting on the beach drinking lattes, still in our pajamas. Avi and his girlfriend, Lynn, who lived together now, had an early tennis game. It was sunny and clear and hot, too hot for a January morning. But in this new world, heat in January is a way of life.
I looked out at the ocean and the sand; I turned around and looked at Avi’s condo complex and the hundreds like it up and down the coast as far as my eyes could see. I imagined it all gone, underwater, swallowed up by the rising oceans.
There was nowhere, no place, nothing, that felt safe anymore.
“Anyway, they’ll be fine. It’s probably better this way. They’ll move on, find new lovers, have new experiences. Live their lives.”
Rose seemed to have aged ten years in the five months since I’d seen her.
In high school she’d been a romantic. She pined over this gorgeous boy with dark hair, olive skin and a necklace made of white seashells who surfed and played the drums. I used to watch her get ready to go out to parties where his band, Sex Wax, would perform. Fruity-smelling skin lotions. Carefully applied eye shadow in earthy tones. Outfits assembled to appear as if they’d been thrown together.
The only thing she wanted was to be his girlfriend. For him to love her. She was never able to look at anybody else.
Then she went to college. She dated somebody her freshman year, but ever since then she’d been having only casual relationships and lots and lots of sex. She liked to talk about the liberating world of sexual encounters unadorned by any effort to define them.
I still couldn’t bring myself to tell either of them that I’d been having sex with Gabriel off and on since October, encounters unadorned by any effort to define them, and that it was anything but liberating.
I didn’t understand. There was Sarah Denton. There was me. Who was I to Gabriel? Were we still friends? Who was I to anyone? What had happened to all the relationships in my life that mattered?
“Tell me, Harper,” Rose said. “How’s Art these days?”
I looked quickly at Tess. I couldn’t help it. It was our tacit agreement never to talk about Dad. I wasn’t sure why I’d allowed this in the first place, but it had become a part of our new relationship.
Tess stood up and said, “I’m going in for more coffee. Anyone?”
We shook our heads.
“He’s okay, I guess,” I said to Rose. “He’s goofier around Cole. Always trying to come up with some crazy activity for the two of them to do together when it’s Cole’s time at the house. Trying to be the cool dad. Other than that he’s just seeing patients, cooking barely edible meals and pestering me about my homework.”
“And his love life?”
I buried my hands in the sand until they disappeared.
“I don’t know. I don’t really ask. If I had to guess I’d say nonexistent.”
“You sure about that?”
“No, I just said I don’t know. That I don’t ask. Anyway, I don’t see when he’d have the time.”
“Oh, there’s always time.”
I suddenly found her college-girl wisdom intolerable and infuriating. But at the same time, I envied the distance from which she was able to view everything.
I wanted to go away. I wanted my own fresh start. My own new world where the things from home seemed smaller, like they do from an airplane window.
It would be a year and a half until I could go away to college.
But there was the summer, I thought. I’d find somewhere to go in the summer.
HERE
When I get back to my room after being in Teddy’s truck, Marisol is propped up in bed reading a magazine.
“So, how were the fireworks?” she asks.
“You saw them, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I saw them. But the question is, did you?”
I smile. “Sort of.”
The truth is, when I realized we were missing them I muttered something about that in between kisses, and then Teddy whispered, “Come here.”
He turned his body so that he was leaning against the driver’s-side door, and he stretched his leg out along the bench of the truck, and he pulled me to him so that I was leaning with my back against his chest. He covered my eyes.
“Just listen to them,” he said softly in my ear. “We’re not missing them at all. Fireworks have a sound that gets lost when you watch them. Just listen to the percussion. The radical rhythms. Pop-pop-poppity-pop-pop-pop. It’s music.”
And then he took my hair and moved it off my neck and began kissing me there and I listened to the faraway explosions.
“C’mon, Harper, don’t make me sound like your mother, don’t make me say something like ‘Where have you been, young lady?’” Marisol says.
For a minute I freeze up inside, but then I take a breath and it melts away. Not even the mention of mothers can ruin the allover body buzz I have right now from being with Teddy.
I sit down on my bed and kick off my flip-flops.
“Okay, okay. I was with Teddy.”
She jumps up. “Don’t. Say. Another. Word. Not one more.”
She slowly opens our door and peers outside.
“I’m pretty sure the coast is clear,” I say.
Linus just finished making the rounds. I caught him at the end and said, “Sorry I’m late getting back.”
“Do you have a good excuse?”
When I stammered, he smiled and said, “I can see that you do.
Happy Fourth of July.” Then he headed toward his room.
We sneak into the hallway and tiptoe down a few doors to Frances’s. Marisol taps three times.
“Yeah?” comes a quiet, almost squeaky voice.
“It’s us.”
The door opens and there’s Captain.
“Whew. Frances is in the bathroom and I didn’t know what to do.”
“I totally bought you as a girl,” says Marisol. “I’ll double-check with Frances later, but by the sounds of things, you seem to have no balls.”
He lets us inside. Frances’s roommate, Liz, is gone. She’s best friends with the Chicago Sisters and doesn’t seem to mind crashing in their room from time to time so that Frances and Captain can have some privacy.
Frances comes out of the bathroom wearing a T-shirt of Captain’s.
“What’s the word?”
“Ask Harper,” Marisol says.
I’m not so sure I’m up for this. I know they’re just being friends, and friends want details, but I don’t want to look like a total fool for sounding all romantic about my night with Teddy when tomorrow he’ll ignore me and they’ll all be around to watch it happen.
“What’s the word, Harper?” asks Frances.
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit,” says Captain. “And I can prove it. Exhibit A: You were nowhere to be seen during the fireworks. Exhibit B: You have this look of happiness on your normally surly face. Exhibit C: You’re here in Frances’s room after lights-out, standing in the way of me getting laid. That adds up to something. So sit down and spill.”
I do. I sit down and I tell them all about my magical night of listening to the fireworks with Teddy. And then I say that tomorrow it’ll all be over.
“What makes you say that?” asks Marisol.
“I know certain truths about life.”
“Whatever that means,” says Captain. “Listen, I’ve seen the way he looks at you. I’m a guy, and I know certain truths too, and I know Teddy’s into you. Don’t forget about the pie. Guys don’t bring pies to girls they aren’t into. In fact, guys don’t bring pies to girls, like, ever. That’s kind of a sissified thing to do, but I’ll let it slide ’cause I think Teddy’s cool. Now, can you two get out of here so I can be alone with my hot girlfriend?”
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