“When’s the last time Mom and Dad ever played Clue?” Charlie tosses down his cards. “Mr. Green,” he says sourly. “In the ballroom with the rope. Bore-ring.” He slides to his hands and the balls of his feet and starts pumping himself through a round of pushups.
“I have the ballroom.” I wag the card in his face. “So I win, I win. You guessed wrong.”
“Big deal. It’s not like you get a prize.”
“You shouldn’t exercise so soon after dinner.”
“I have to get in shape for later,” Charlie huffs. “But thanks for one more tip about what I’m not allowed to do, Miss Rules.”
“I swear I’ll tell Ted exactly where you are if you leave tonight. He’ll tell Mom.”
“So tell,” Charlie puffs.
“He’ll make you come back.”
“He’s the one who wants to go back with me tomorrow and get those kids. It’s not true what you said, that building the fort’s just for us. It’s our protection against the other side. You never know when they’re planning to strike, like the commies.”
“That’s so mature, Charlie. I feel so much safer, knowing you’re defending me from commies.”
“Look, bug-eyes, why don’t you shut up and butt out?” He sits on his knees, panting.
“Shut up, Charlie. Why don’t you learn how to act older than a three-year-old?” I climb to my feet and head for the door.
“Well, I’m not cleaning up this stupid game, since it was your idea to play,” he says. He kicks away the game board with his heels, sending it skidding into the side of my foot.
“Ouch!” I yell. “What’s your problem?” As I walk past him to the door, my upper leg brushes hard against his shoulder, enough to knock him off balance.
“Cut it—out!” He reaches up with both hands to shove me into the doorframe and I stub my toe.
I’m just about to shove him back when I hear the sound of the front door. I leap out the den to safety and run to greet Mom.
“Chicken chicken chicken!” I hear him yell from the den.
“Lane, were you worrying?” Mom looks stern and checks her wristwatch. “Because I told you by eight and it’s not eight yet.”
“I wasn’t worrying. I never worry until it’s later than what you say.”
“I don’t know if that’s exactly the answer I was looking for.” She nips up my chin with her index finger. “Goofy girl. You’re going to give yourself an ulcer. I really am thinking about Dr. Forrest again.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“Dad stayed at the Officer’s Club and I can’t give you an exact time when he’ll be home, so don’t ask, but you can do some more useless worrying about him if you’d like. Or you can help me by getting out the silverware and linen for the party. Where’s Charlie?”
“Den.”
Mom nods and clanks her car keys into the china bowl on the hall table, where she always keeps them. She places her purse carefully beside the bowl and drifts into the living room.
“Here we are in November and it’s still light out,” she remarks, staring out the window at nothing in particular. “We never get that horrible winter-dark here. Isn’t that nice?”
“I guess.”
“So pretty and colorful. Always sunshine.” She half-closes her eyes and smiles, and I recognize in her smile the same expression Charlie makes before he does something wild.
“No snow, no ice.” I say, thinking about the accident. My words must make Mom think about it, too. She steps back from me like I just sneezed with my mouth open; like I did something wrong to her.
“Lane, do me a favor?” she says.
I nod. Mom smiles and the moment’s okay again. “If you do the table, I’m just going to have a shower and change.”
“Sure.”
“That’d be great.” Mom smoothes my hair back behind my ears and then wanders away from me, thinking of other things. She sheds her sandals and carries them with her as she walks along the edge of the living room carpet and up the stairs.
Our corner cupboard holds all the glasses and plates and tablecloths, as well as a scratched wooden chest filled with splotched silver forks and knives and odd-sized spoons. I open the chest and scoop up fistfuls of silverware, plunking them down in a line on one end of the dining room table. No matter how much Marita polishes it, the silver is always tarnished olivey-gold. I don’t like eating with real silver, anyway. It makes my food taste cold.
I pick up one of the larger spoons, rub it with the hem of my dress and peer into the upside-down pinched face shining back at me. My face looks pointed and mean, like a witch, but I definitely don’t have bug-eyes. “Jerk,” I mutter, setting the spoon down.
Wine glasses are next. I stand them in rows like soldiers. The hand-embroidered napkins and placemats are last to come out. We have too many, since we can buy them for cheap downtown, and all my aunts and uncles in the States got them for Christmas last year because they’re really expensive up there. They are so beautiful, though—birds and flowers and fruits stitched in silk on linen, each one unique as a snowflake. I begin to fold them one by one into flat fan shapes the way Marita does.
“What day is it?” Charlie has been watching me from the door. I jump.
“Why do you always scare me like that? Friday.”
“Everything scares you, Lame. Don’t they always go out on Friday and have parties on Saturday?” He walks slowly around the room, bumping his hand along the carved backs of the dining room chairs.
“Except they went out last night so the party’s tonight.”
“Where’d they go last night?” Charlie stops in front of his reflection in the mirror over the sideboard and knobs up the muscles of his arms. “Like I need jungle fruit to look like this, ha.”
“I don’t know. Other parties? How would I know?”
“Is this going to be a loud one like last week, where we can’t sleep even with our doors shut?”
“I hope not, and I hope not too many people come.”
“Too many people always come.”
“You know, we never used to have these parties until we came here.”
“Gee, Lane. We never used to do lots of things until we came here. You’re such a genius to notice. Hey, you know what I hate?” He has stopped in front of Mom’s painting, a picture of a bowl of peaches that she did last year when she was taking this art class at the Rec Center.
“What?”
“That painting. I hate how Mom never finished that last peach.” I walk over to where he’s standing and look, too, although I know what he’s talking about. All the peaches are nestled in a blue bowl by a window. The unfinished peach is in the back, like a smooth bald baby head among all the brushed oil colors. “I hate that this painting’s, y’know, hanging up on our wall, when it’s not finished yet, just because Dad decided it was finished.”
“Well, it was Mom who didn’t finish it,” I say.
“But it was Dad who hung it up,” Charlie answers. His nose is practically touching the painting. “It’s like a ghost peach,” he decides, turning away from it, his hands on his hips, like he just figured out a math equation on the blackboard.
“Alexa just pulled in,” I say.
Through the dining room window, I watch her two-seater sports car screech to a stop in the carport. Linda sits in the passenger seat. A red-and-white-striped catering truck from Diferente follows behind.
“I’m going to finish my F15 model.” Charlie jumps for the door. “It’s almost done. Come in and look when you’re done with all that.” He hightails it before he has to say hello to Alexa.
13
“YOO HOO!” ALEXA CALLS from the hallway. Her perfume enters the room before she does. It smells sweet, like Hawaiian Punch. “The food followed me here,” she calls out to no one in particular. “And I brought Linda to help out. Where’s Marita? ¿Estás aquí, Marita?” Alexa sees me and flows into the dining room, trailed by Linda, who’s wearing a crisp beige uniform and is holding another crisp
beige uniform in a see-through dry cleaning bag.
Marita won’t be happy; the uniform is for her to wear tonight. Mom and Dad never ask Marita to wear a uniform. When we first came here, they both were strict about telling Charlie and me to be polite to everyone’s housekeepers; to say “please” and “thank you” to Marita and not to use words like “maid” or “our girl.” But Alexa handles housekeepers differently and tries to overrule Mom’s opinions, always supervising Marita, making her do extra stuff and wear the beige uniform.
“I guess she’s in her room. And Mom’s showering and getting ready.”
“We’re in a crisis,” bubbles Alexa, “because I can’t find any Bug-Be-Gone candles. I hit all the PX’s on all the bases and of course there’s nothing, which again proves my theory that the PX is run by true military intelligence—ha!” She gives a meaty laugh and then begins pointing and jabbering at Linda in her flat dubbed Spanish that’s too fast for me to understand. Linda nods, then slips away.
I close the corner cupboard and brush my hands together. “I’ve set up the table for the buffet. Dad’s still at the change of command party. Do you want something to drink?”
“No, sweetie, I’ll have Linda make me a drink—she knows how I like them—strong!” Alexa touches both her hands to her left ear and secures the backing of one of her snail-sized gold earrings. “Now tell me. Where’s your mother?”
I sigh, wondering how Alexa can stand in front of me and give me all the evidence that she’s listening, but then never have any memory of what I’ve said to show for it.
“I’m here, Al. Did you remember candles? The table looks nice, Lane.” Mom breezes into the room, smiling in her best hostess style. Her hair’s wet and she’s dressed in a pair of Dad’s old loafers paired with his oversized faded chinos and an oxford shirt unbuttoned to the grainy freckles of her chest. Her belt is pulled into the last hole and the pants’ fabric bunches in lumpish pleats. All Dad’s castoffs. In a way, she can make me see the way Dad might have looked when he was young, before he bulged out.
“No candles anywhere on any base! We have to go on another mission downtown!” Alexa loves a crisis.
“The catering truck is here,” I say. “Marita probably needs help organizing.”
Mom looks from Alexa to me and then decides. “Okay, we’ll go downtown, and Lane, you supervise the food. Just make them put it all in the kitchen for now and then Marita—is Linda here?” Alexa nods. Mom continues, “And Marita and Linda will change the foil plates to china plates and make the food look pretty, which is all that really needs to be done.” She turns to Alexa. “You know, if we can’t find candles we won’t be able to use the back porch.”
“What about your tiki lamps?” asks Alexa.
“We had some, yes, but I don’t know where I put them.” Mom crinkles her eyebrows together and up, like she’s mystified, although she and I both know that last month in a fit of boredom or evil Charlie dropped each tiki lamp off our roof one by one, watching them smash on the pavement below. Dad and Mom grounded him for three days. Mom tries to suppress tales of Charlie’s tantrums whenever she can.
After Alexa and Mom speed off in Alexa’s car in search of candles, I go out to the kitchen. Linda and Marita are unpacking the boxes of food the caterers have hauled in from the Diferente truck through the back door of the kitchen. Marita has changed into the beige uniform and her long black hair is rolled into a hairnet, in the same style as Linda.
“Can I help?” I ask. “Mom said if you needed help to ask me.”
“We’re fine.” Linda makes the okay sign with her hand and Marita laughs and makes the sign, too. “Okie-doke!” she says through her nose, I guess imitating an American voice. They both look at each other and laugh. I feel stupid without really knowing why.
The counter is chock-full of food—plates of teriyaki chicken and steamed vegetables and rice and marinated steak, plus platters of bite-sized food held together by frilly-capped toothpicks.
Marita slides the food onto china dishes while Linda cuts the stems off a pile of fresh flowers and arranges the blossoms around the plates. They chatter together, their words only understood by me in crumbs and edges.
“Well, I’m going to go, then,” I say. I feel way out of place. I make the okay sign, which starts them laughing again.
“Almost time for bed,” Marita calls out to me as I’m leaving. “Put that dress in the washroom for me to clean the mud off it later.”
“Yep. Buenas noches.”
“Good night,” they chorus.
Charlie’s room smells like airplane glue and his finished F15 model sits proudly on the landing strip of his desk, but he’s nowhere in sight. Next to the plane is a folded piece of paper. I open it and read:
Lane,
I have already gone on a commando mission to the other side to get that dumb kid Jason Mikulluh. I’m going to counter attack which will be a big surprise which he’s not expecting. I’m writing so you don’t get all worryed like a crybaby about where I am, but if you tell Mom or Dad or Marita, I will be REALLY pist off. If I need back up, I will come back for you and Ted by 21:00.
Over and out
C. G. Beck
14
I CRINKLE THE LETTER into one hand and run out of his room, out the front door, and onto the front lawn. The sky is smudged deep blue with the beginning of night and the heavy air is warm as breath.
“Charlie, can you hear me? If you’re out there, tell me. Mom’s going to be mad—the rule is no going out after supper. Can you hear me?” The darkness erases my words into a bleat. I hear crickets and smell bug spray, but I don’t see Charlie anywhere. “Don’t you do anything stupid, Charlie,” I call. “You just better not do that to me.”
I turn back to the house and spy Marita in the window, bent over the sink. The catering truck’s gone. Twin beams of car headlights flash in the distance and I watch as Dad’s jeep pulls into view, flooding the street with a pool of electric yellow.
“Is that you, Lanie?” he asks when he shuts the engine. “What are you doing; decided to bring your worries out for an airing?”
“Not really.”
“Then what really?” Dad’s voice is loudly cheerful. His arms are weighted down with two brown paper bags and he slams the door of the jeep with his boot.
“Nothing I guess. I was just going in.” I follow him into the house, into the den where he deposits the bags on the bar. He pulls out all the bottles from the bags and sets each bottle neatly on the glass bar shelf with the others. Rows and rows and rows of bottles, all sizes and shapes.
“That ought to get this crew through tonight, anyway,” he says, surveying the shelf, satisfied.
“How was the change of command party?” I ask.
“So-so. Got more fun later. The thing was …” He strides out of the den, so that I have to tag along behind.
“Was what?” I trail him upstairs and into his and Mom’s bedroom, where he starts to depin his buttons and tags and medals from his dress blue uniform, carefully dropping each item into Mom’s open jewelry box.
“That we were all sad to see Major Gregory leave for Fort Ord, and we’re not so excited about Jacobs taking over Alpha Company, so while the ceremony and party were nice, it marks the beginning of a not-so-fun time for Alpha. And some of the younger guys were …” He shakes off his dress jacket and disappears into the walk-in closet.
“Were what?” No response. I pick up one of Dad’s pins—it’s actually just a name tag—Lt. Col. Beck. Everywhere I go here, I am glued to that name. It’s stuck to my house, my ID, my passport, all my forms for school. Lt. Col. Beck’s dependent; that’s how the army catalogs Charlie and Mom and me. I drop the tag back in Mom’s jewelry box.
“Were what?” I ask louder. Dad pokes his head out of the closet.
“What were what?” he asks. “Where’s Mom?”
“She and Alexa went to buy candles. Downtown.”
“Lane, you’re going to have to scram now
while I get ready, okay?”
“I’m going to bed.” After Charlie comes back. Please come back Charlie.
“Good idea.” His head disappears again.
The downstairs seems extra spacious, and I realize the coffee table and the end tables are missing from the living room. Party-proofing, Alex calls it, when you hide your furniture from rowdy guests who might scuff or break or burn their cigarettes on it. I didn’t notice it missing before; and now I wonder where the furniture got stored. I tour through the rooms, opening doors, aimlessly looking for it.
I find everything piled and stacked perfectly into the impossibly small space of our coat closet. Mom must have done it herself; her mind knows exactly how to wrap around problems of squares and spaces and angles. I imagine all those math-teacher rules boxed-up and gathering dust in a corner of her mind. She liked teaching, but after the accident she decided that facing a classroom of ninth graders each day was too much to handle. “Too much to think about,” she told me. Her teacher’s clothes and books are neatly packed away with all our winter stuff in storage chests at my grandparents’ house.
It would be nice to see my winter things again. I miss my navy blue wool coat with red piping, although I bet it’s too small for me now and moths have likely eaten holes in it. I miss my ice skates, too, although I was always too chicken to do more than shuffle around the edge of the pond in them; and I’d like to see my Swiss hat with the attached braids again.
I used to wear that hat even in the summer, pretending with my dolls that I was Heidi sitting on the Alps, drinking my milk out of a soup bowl, and eating big hunks of cheese until Emily and her friends’ teasing—they’d yodel, “yoo-hoo-loo-oo—ser”—made me have to hide my milk and cheese parties in my room.
“If I don’t see a winter for the next twenty years, it will be too soon,” Mom had said when the last box was packed, her words sealing shut my hopes of ever going back to Rhode Island. I’d never gotten attached to any one place. Before Rhode Island we’d lived in Tennessee, before that Georgia, before that Washington, before that Virginia, where Charlie was born and back as far as I can remember, though I was born in South Carolina. But, still, I hope I see winter sometime in the next twenty years.
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