“Oh, quit lecturing!” I banged the empty fruit drawer shut. “You think you’re so smart. The brains you have wouldn’t fill the hole in a doughnut. If you’re so wise about life, how come you’ve done nothing the past six months but sit on your—”
“Please!” My mother sighed, and lowered her voice. “Please. Don’t fight in my kitchen.”
“It’s all right,” Brian said soothingly. “She just has a hopeless crush on Neil Brown, and she’s taking it out on innocent bystanders.”
I had the leftover meatloaf in one hand. It would have been on his head in about two seconds, but by some miracle I restrained myself.
“You bastard.”
“Joslyn!” my mother snapped, shocked. She appealed to us both. “Why can’t you have some consideration for each other? Why must you always bicker? You’re rational, intelligent people—why do you have to behave like two-year-olds?”
We eyed each other darkly. I took the meatloaf to the counter, and got out bread and ketchup for a sandwich. Brian lit a cigarette. He said, as our mother drew a breath, “I know, I know—not in the kitchen, not in the living room—” He paused a moment before he left; I felt his eyes on the back of my head. He said suddenly, “What are you doing?”
“What,” I said coldly, “does it look like?”
“No. I mean what are you and Neil doing? It’s not as if he wants to go with you or anything—”
I turned so fast I knocked the ketchup over. “Brian—”
“Brian!” said our mother. Brian shrugged a shoulder.
“Just curious,” he said, and went to his bedroom. A moment later I heard his stereo. My mother put her hands on her head as if she were trying to hold it in place.
She muttered, “I’m going to move away from home.”
I settled down moodily in the living room with my sandwich. Brian needed a job. He needed a padded cell or a desert island, away from people and other breakable objects. A lump of meatloaf went down cold and tasteless in my throat. Neil did care for me. He smiled when he saw me; he laughed with me; he had come to pick us up in the mountains when he hardly knew Claudia or Barbara. He just needed to wake up, as I had, to realize I wasn’t the same girl he’d met barefoot with a peeling nose two years ago, just starting seventh grade. Then I realized that maybe he didn’t know how I felt because I hadn’t told him. Maybe all I had to do was tell him. I balanced the sandwich on my knee and thought about that. But it seemed wrong somehow; I couldn’t figure out why. Erica came then, while I was thinking and switched on the TV.
It said, “Why suffer? Take Parson’s Laxative, now in mint or strawberry—”
I got up and wandered out. There was no room in the world to be in love anymore.
On Wednesday, we began to paint. That was a hassle. Two old ladies stood gossiping in the yard across the street for half an hour while we parked and prayed for them to go inside. They kept giving us so many curious glances, as if they thought we were burglars, that finally we all got out of the pickup and walked down to the library. By the time we walked back, they had gone in, so we unloaded paint and brushes, thinner, newspapers, grubby clothes, and candles, and somehow got them all down the sidewalk and into the yard behind the pine trees while a police car ambled down the street. We got everything indoors finally, and changed clothes. We spread newspapers, lit candles, and contemplated the bare expanses of wall and ceiling.
I said, tired before we even started, “We need about thirty first-graders; they’d love this.”
“We need a stool,” Barbara said.
“We need air,” Neil said. He went to one of the windows. It had been boarded on the outside, but it slid open easily. He looked at it doubtfully. It had been well boarded. But the skylight wasn’t, and, straining upward he finally opened the stubborn latch. He pushed the glass as far as he could. “We shouldn’t breathe paint fumes too long; it mucks up your insides.”
“We won’t stay that long,” Barbara said. She pried open the nearest can. “Purple,”
“I’ve got yellow,” Claudia said. I reached for one.
“Black.”
“Black?” Barbara said.
Neil said apologetically, “That was my bicycle, I think, I just grabbed whatever we had.”
I got an inspiration suddenly, and all my tiredness left me. “That’s okay. We can use it.”
“We ought to get organized,” Claudia murmured. She could talk in front of Neil now, once she had surprised herself into getting started. But we were in no mood to organize.
It took us a week, off and on, to do the painting, and finished, it was amazing. I painted big black and yellow sunflowers on an orange background until we ran out of yellow, and then I finished a section of wall in a patchwork of black and white squares. Claudia painted flowers with red stems and leaves since I had used all the green, too: and Barbara painted a rainbow on a black background, and copied a picture of a galaxy in gold out of an astronomy book. Neil stuck with straight painting for a while, doing the ceiling; and then he got inspired, too, and painted sea horses, goldfish, swordtails, angelfish in a gaudy orange and red sea all over the closet walls. We did all the odd leftover places in splotches of color, and the floor we painted brown—we had all kinds of brown—with big gold flowers from a can Neil had produced out of nowhere. It was beautiful. Standing in the middle of the floor, you didn’t know where to look first.
By the time we were finished, we were exhausted, our hair was turning odd colors, and we had lost track of the lies we had told to explain our constant absences, I had told my parents I was doing a science project at Barbara’s house, which worked fine until Barbara’s mother called one day wanting to know if Barbara was at our house. So we told them Claudia was working on the project, too, and we had been at her house. But even a science project didn’t explain the paint in our hair, so Barbara invented an art project, which turned out to be a mistake since everyone wanted to see it. Brian, I could tell, didn’t believe any of it.
“I haven’t seen Neil for days,” he kept saying. “What are you up to? And why does he want my fish tank?”
Neil had bought a sea horse. He set the tank up in Barbara’s house, to the joy of the twins, who gave him all their old seashells to put at the bottom of it, and crowded around him while he set up the filter.
“You can keep it here until Joe comes,” he told Barbara when they were out of earshot, “then transfer it up to the house for him.” His face broke into a slow smile as she watched the sea horse. It was charming, with a delicate, long-nosed face, a long curly tail, and a fat tummy that made Claudia ask hopefully, “Is he pregnant?”
“I love it,” Barbara whispered, as it stared back at her from under its funny arched eyebrows, and bounced up and down in the water. “Oh, I love it. I hope it doesn’t die.”
Neil shook his head. “Shouldn’t. It’s healthy.”
Mrs. Takaota, coming home then with her arms full of groceries, her face weary after a hard day with her fifth-graders, broke into a laugh when she saw it, and Barbara glanced at me triumphantly. It was a good thing to look at.
Then we began to collect things for the house on our own. That meant we didn’t have to spend hours in the evenings at the house, which was a relief; we could bring whatever we found whenever we had a chance. It also meant I didn’t have Neil picking me up in the evenings, or meeting me at the corner to walk to the house with me. He came over in the afternoons; he talked with me, but it seemed he would always wind up in Brian’s room listening to records. It made me feel funny inside, like kicking something, but he never seemed to notice. And then one morning on Saturday he came over and asked for me. I was in my room making giant banners out of burlap and felt and colored tinfoil, which I had to do while Erica was away swimming. I had pushed all her junk under her bed and the banners lay flat on the floor. One was a landscape with felt trees and flowers and a yellow foil sun, and the other had a spaceship flying among silver stars on a blue black background. No matter how I cut the spacesh
ip, it still looked strange, sometimes like a hot dog, and sometimes, when I tried to make it saucer shaped, like a jelly doughnut. It was giving me fits.
Then Mother called, “Joslyn! Neil wants you.”
I was so surprised I almost didn’t answer her. I went downstairs, licking paste off my thumb, and found him in the living room. I said, “Hello,” and he said, as he had said a hundred times before in my head, “Are you busy? Can you come with me for a while?”
I nodded.
We drove to his house, which was a couple of miles away, and he took me into the garage, after introducing me to his collie, which put its paws on my stomach and licked my chin.
He said, flicking back his hair, “I got something that I wasn’t sure Barbara would want. She seems to want everything to be so special. So I thought I’d ask you.”
“What is it?” I asked curiously. He pointed.
“That.”
“That” was a rocking chair. It was bumpy, sort of mangy, as if someone had tried to take the paint off and gotten bored. One of the arms was broken, and there was a crack in the seat. Neil put his hand on its good arm. He said, his brows crooking a little worriedly, “I know it’s in bad shape. But I’m going to sand it down and refinish it. See how light the wood is under the paint? It’s good, solid wood; I think it’s oak. And I can fix the arm. Will she like it?”
I nodded, touching it. “Are you kidding? She’ll love it. Where’d you get it?”
“Oh, some old ladies were having a garage sale down the street, and I saw it. I remembered that she wanted one. It looked so ugly I wasn’t sure she’d want it in Joe’s room, but I took a chance.”
“How much was it?”
“Oh—” He touched the broken arm, trying to maneuver it back in place but it fell. “Not much. Really not much, considering the wood. And I have a job.” He squatted down and ran his hand along the crack in the seat. “I can fill that, I think. Which would she like better on it, do you think: paint or stain?”
“I don’t know.” Then something struck me. “Anyway, it’s for Joe. We keep talking about Barbara. What do you think he would like better?”
“Oh.” He stared at the chair with a funny expression on his face. “I think just stain, so the grain will show…” He raised his eyes and looked at me then, and his eyes had a question in them, half-wry, half-doubtful, like the expression on his face. But something stopped the question, and he rose quickly. I felt his hand, warm and unexpected, on my arm.
“There’s something else. It’s in the backyard.”
I would have followed him anywhere.
The other thing was a plant with green and pink leaves. It was sitting in a big coffee can; Neil said, “My mother grew about ten of these from leaves of a big plant she has; she said I could have it. I’m going to paint the coffee can. It’s a coleus.”
I touched a leaf. It was green on the edges, and had a smaller splotchy pink leaf shape inside. “How does it do that?” I wondered. “It’s pretty. Did you tell your mother why?”
“No. I just—I said—” I looked up at him, surprised. For some reason he was blushing. He poked at the dirt under the coleus, his face lowered, and cleared his throat. “She didn’t ask much. She has so many of these things. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to show you. So you think they’ll be all right?”
I nodded fervently. “Fine.” He didn’t say much after that; he drove me home in near silence. But he was okay when he let me off; he touched my arm again briefly, smiling. “Thanks, Joslyn. See you.”
I went back upstairs, bemused. I felt as if I had gotten into a roller coaster that had gone over a gentle bump and stopped. I found Brian sitting cross-legged on my bed, gazing at my banners.
I said, “What do you want?”
He said, “Your spaceship is weird.”
“I know.” I surveyed him coldly from the doorway. “What do you want?”
He untangled himself and pointed with a bare toe. “The roof should be flatter, and you should cut a rim around the bottom.”
“Huh?”
He reached for the scissors. “I’ll show you.” He started cutting, his tongue between his teeth. Finished, he dropped it back on the burlap: a neat, white flying saucer. I blinked.
“That’s it. That’s what I was trying to do—”
“Elementary. Now the question is: why?”
I looked at him. He looked at me, his chin cocked challengingly, but there was none of his usual, annoying, superciliousness in his eyes. I realized a lot, then: that he was bored, dying of curiosity, hurt because he felt left out of something Neil and I were involved in. Most of all, I remembered that Joe had been his friend.
So I said, “Joe Takaota is coming home.”
He went still for a moment, his eyes holding mine, unblinking. Than he said softly, “When? What are you doing?”
I had to tell him. He said nothing when I finished; then he reached in his jeans pocket. I said, “Not in my room,” and his hand came out again, even though he looked as if he hadn’t heard me.
When he didn’t say anything, I said nervously, “What do you think?”
He glanced at my banners, and suddenly, they looked childish to me, awkward and silly, like things you’d find in a first grade classroom. A funny lump came into my throat. Then he said soberly, “That’s really a nice thing to do.”
It was so unexpected I almost fell off my clogs. He cleared his throat and got off my bed. He ran his hands through his hair, and reached out to pick at a blob of paint on the window sill. He looked out the window a moment, then at me.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think—I thought you’d think it was stupid or something.”
“I don’t think it’s stupid. Why should I?”
“I don’t know. You usually think everything I do is stupid.”
He looked startled at that, and was silent again. Then he moved away from the window to the door. He reached out as he went by to give my hair a kind of little light pull like he used to in the years when we had been friends.
I said, “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Wild horses,” he murmured. “Thanks. He’s been in the back of my mind. I hope he’s all right.”
“So do I,” I said softly. He didn’t ask if he could help, and that was what stayed in the back of my mind for a long time.
The next evening I took my wind chimes and banners to the house, and Neil hung them from the ceiling for me. Watching him stretched between the floor and the ceiling, his face preoccupied, the copper and painted glass tinkling delicately as he hung them, I felt my mouth suddenly crowded with words. A candle gleamed in my hand; another was lit at his feet. The room was silent but for his breathing; it was so silent I could almost hear the words I wanted to say to him in the air between us before I said them.
I said, “Neil—” and stopped. The sound of my own voice scared me. He looked down at me absently, his lips parted a little, the candlelight flushing over his face. Then he winced and dropped the chime. It was the copper one so, jangling to his feet, it didn’t break.
“Must’ve hit a beam; the tack won’t go in. I threw my thumb out of joint. Let’s try it over a foot.”
I bent to pick up the chime. I could feel my own face burning in the light. For some strange reason I thought of Hester Prynne, then, and knew she would never have been such a coward. But I said, even before Neil could ask me what it was I had wanted to tell him, “Oh, nothing.”
The next day, Monday, I hated.
It began with Barbara finding me in the morning, gripping my arm and saying as we went to our first class, “Joslyn, do you know what? I went to the pet store yesterday to get more food for the sea horse, since the twins spilled the old food all over the rug, and do you know what? Those things cost eight dollars! Neil said—he said only—I only paid him two dollars for it!”
I was startled. “Maybe he bought it somewhere else. Maybe he—” I remembered the rocking chair, then,
that he had also paid a few dollars for. I said puzzledly, “Well, maybe he really wants to do something for Joe.”
“Yes, but Joslyn, how will I pay him back?”
“He doesn’t expect you to.”
“Yes, but, Joslyn—”
I mulled it over through the bland day. Then, when we were standing in front of the school waiting for Claudia at the end of the day and talking about a Spanish test I’d just flunked, Barbara, who was still frowning, stopped midsentence. I saw Neil beyond her, unlocking his bike from the rack.
Barbara said, “Just a minute,” and went over to him. I watched them absently. Neil straightened when Barbara came, and she talked with her hands a lot, the way she always did when she was upset, her long black hair blowing away from her face so I could see it. Neil stood listening, his hands tucked in his back pockets. He didn’t say anything for awhile; he just listened, the wind picking at his hair. Then, finally, he said something. I saw Barbara’s face under her dark color go scarlet.
She looked down at her feet. Then she lifted her head and looked up at him and smiled. The wind blew a strand of hair across her smile. He reached out silently, and very gently moved his hand down the curve of her cheek, down her neck, catching the strand of hair in his fingers and loosing it again to the wind.
I went home, then, alone. I went upstairs and sat cross-legged on my bed, not moving, feeling as though an ice cube were stuck, cold and hard, in my chest. I didn’t think very much; I just waited for the ice cube to melt. The wind set the half-rolled blind tick-ticking against the window; an airplane droned sleepily, persistently in the sky. Somewhere outside people were talking; somebody was mowing a lawn. They were all soft, lazy sounds I had heard all my life; I never realized before how pointless they could sound. I swallowed after a while, but the ice in my chest didn’t move.
Erica came in. I hardly noticed her until halfway through doing what she called making her bed, she looked at me and asked suspiciously, “Are you sick?”
“No.”
“You sound sick,” she said cheerfully. “Adrian Carne stayed home from school for six days with mono. Her mother said she’d been swimming too much, but Liz Cramer says you get mono from kissing. Maybe you’ve been kissing too much.”
The Night Gift Page 6