“That was fast.”
“Well, they were easy—just a seam and a hem. I got some gold cotton lining; it was really cheap, and I thought it would match the floor.” She paused. I tried to think of something to say, but my brain felt empty. She went on quickly, “I was able to do it this afternoon because my mother was out; otherwise she would have seen them.”
“Oh.”
There was another little silence. She drew a breath, moving a little toward me, and said pleadingly, “Joslyn—”
But I didn’t want to talk about it. I said quickly, “Are you and Neil going out?”
“Yes, to a movie.”
“On a school night?”
“Well, my mother said with all the babysitting I do, I need a night out away from the twins. Joslyn—”
“I wish my parents would give me a night away from studying.”
“Joslyn, I have to tell you. Joe’s coming home Saturday.”
I felt a funny prickling down my back. Sometimes, working on the room for him, I forgot who it was for; I forgot he even existed, and that he was coming to look at it out of his dark, hurt eyes. I swallowed. “I hope he likes it.”
“Oh, Joslyn, so do I,” she whispered. “Do you know what? I’m scared.” She broke off as a window slid up behind her. Neil, in Brian’s room, stuck his head out.
“Barbara? We’d better go. Joslyn, we’re taking the rocking chair over tonight; it really turned out well. Is there anything we can take for you?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
Barbara said reluctantly, “Well. Well, I’ll see you later.”
“Yeah.”
She left. A moment later I saw her in Brian’s room, her face lifted, smiling at something Brian said. Then Brian went out, and they turned to follow him. Neil’s hand slid up Barbara’s back to cup gently the curve of her head beneath her hair. His face turned toward her; in the bright light I saw his clean profile, the trimmed, pale hair, and the little, sweet smile he gave her. Then they went out, and he reached back to shut off the light. And sitting in the swing, hugging my knees, I cried, finally, like a little kid crying for something it couldn’t have.
I felt better afterward, sort of damp and clean inside. I waited for a while for the red to go out of my eyes and nose. Then I went in the house. It was quiet. Brian had gone somewhere, and my parents were in bed. Upstairs, Erica was reading. She glanced at me when I came in, and I knew from the way her eyes went right back to her book that I looked as if I had been crying.
She didn’t say anything while I got undressed. Then, as I threw back the covers and plopped down on the bed, she said tentatively, “You know what I was thinking?”
“What?”
“I was thinking we ought to rearrange the bedroom.”
I gave a short laugh. “We could, if we can find it.”
“I know it’s messy. But I was thinking if we moved the beds apart and put your things on one side of the room, and mine on the other, then I could have my side messy and you could keep yours clean. What do you think?”
I thought about it. “It might work. We could move the beds one on each side of the window.”
“And a dresser at the foot of each bed.”
“And the desks on each side of the closet.”
She nodded eagerly. “And you could have the top shelf of the closet, and me the bottom. Or—” she added hastily, “me the top and you the bottom; I don’t care.”
“Or we could divide the closet right down the middle, too, since that’s where the dividing line is anyway.”
“Yeah. Don’t you think that’s a good idea?”
“Sure.” I rolled over, pushed my pillow under my stomach, and rested my head on my hands. “What about the bedside table and the lamp? We both use them.”
“You can have them; you use them more than I do.”
“You’re using the lamp now.”
“Well, there must be another one around somewhere. I’ll look.”
“Okay.” She was quiet a moment. She reached up and switched off the light. Then in the darkness, she said, “You know what? Promise you won’t tell anyone. Promise?”
“I promise,” I said tolerantly.
“There’s this boy on the swim team I really, really like…He’s got brown hair and green eyes. His name is Jerome.”
“Jerome?”
“Yeah. Isn’t that a neat name? Do you know what? I think I’ll grow my hair long. How long did it take you to grow yours long?”
I thought back sleepily. “I was in seventh grade when I got it cut last.”
“Two years…He just moved here from Oregon. He’s in my classes. Once when we were horsing around before practice, he dunked me. But I think he likes Cher Adams better than me. That’s why I want to grow my hair long. He likes long hair.”
I grunted. “Good luck.”
“I can’t help it. I just like him.” That made me smile; I didn’t know why. She was silent again. Then she said, “Joslyn?”
“Mm.”
“What are you and Neil and Claudia and Barbara doing?”
I rolled over and stared at the darkness. We hadn’t just talked like this in a long time, and suddenly, for some reason, I couldn’t put her off with a lie or tell her to mind her own business. She was nearly as tall as I was, and she had fallen for a kid named Jerome who dunked her, and she knew about Neil and Barbara, but instead of teasing me about it, she was trying to be nice to me. So I said, “We’re trying to do something for Joe Takaota.”
“Joe—what happened to him? Nobody ever told me.”
I told her.
She said, awed, when I finished, “How terrible. That must’ve hurt. I wouldn’t do that for a million dollars. I’d take sleeping pills first—”
“Erica! Don’t even say that! Don’t even think it!”
“All right,” she said, surprised. “But why did he do it?”
“I don’t know. Just because things got rough, I guess, in his head. He couldn’t stand thinking about them any longer.”
“What are you doing for him?”
I thought of the little room in the middle of a small, tired, empty house, in the middle of a great mass of towns and cities. I wondered then if the things in it that we had found so beautiful: the plants and banners, pillows and wind chimes and paintings, were really what the part of him still trying to stay alive was looking for. I knew then what Barbara had meant when she said she was scared. She was afraid of Joe, afraid the person she was expecting wouldn’t be the same person who would walk into that room on Saturday. I swallowed. The back of my mouth was dry.
“I don’t know.”
Claudia was waiting for me beside my locker the next morning. I saw her from a distance, but I kept coming because I had to face her some time, and she would have been hurt worse than I was if I’d turned away. Her face was colorless except for her nose.
I said, “Hi,” and she said miserably, “Joslyn, I’m sorry about yesterday. I felt awful. So did Barbara. But you—but there’s just nothing—”
“I know.” I dropped my books on the floor and whirled the dial on the lock. “Did she find some nice material?”
“Yes. White with little burgundy-colored flowers all over it. You’re still mad.”
“I’m not mad.” And suddenly, when I said that, it was true. I sat down on the pile of books on the floor and said tiredly, “I’m not mad. There’s nothing—there’s nothing to be angry about. It’s just—I’m just—” I didn’t know what I was just. “I’m going to go be a hermit.”
“You could be a nun,” she whispered, “like Guinevere.”
“A nun.” The bell rang and I got off my books.
She didn’t move; she looked at me anxiously so I said, “It will be all right.”
I meant it, so she believed me.
I didn’t talk to Barbara for a few days. I wasn’t angry; I just didn’t feel like talking. I wanted to avoid Neil, too, but I would rather have died than have him guess the way I had fel
t about him, so I tried to treat him normally, like a friend. But, hanging the crates for me in Joe’s room one evening, he glanced at me and said softly, “You’re so quiet.”
I didn’t know what to say. I shrugged a shoulder, which was a little hard to do while holding a crate steady on a wall. “I’m just tired. Studying too hard, I guess.”
He went back to his pounding. He had to pound gently, and it was slow work. He had put one beside the closet, and he was hanging the other near Barbara’s galaxy. She had put the rocking chair beneath it, and a small brick and board shelf full of science fiction paperbacks beside it. When Neil hung the crate, I was going to put Claudia’s oil lamp in it so Joe would have reading light. On the other side of the room, Barbara had put the pillows she made, plump and bright, with another little shelf between them holding candles, plants, a wooden flute.
Looking around at the room, I said surprisedly, “It is beautiful.”
Neil gave a nail a final tap and smiled. “I didn’t know it would turn out so well. I really didn’t.”
“What will—What will Joe think of it? He’s not—I mean, I never knew him. I never really knew who we were making this place for. And now that he’s coming, I don’t know if it’s right for him. Even Barbara. I don’t think even she knows.”
He centered the last nail and give it a meditative whack. He said simply, “I don’t know what Joe will think. I was doing it for Barbara.”
“Then you don’t know if it’s right, either.”
“No. We can hope it is.”
“You knew Joe—”
He shook his head. “Nobody did.”
I was silent again. I had thought in the beginning that we all knew what we were doing, but now it seemed none of us knew. Neil finished driving the nail in and gave the crate a tug to see if it would hold. I was getting over being in love with him, but it was slow work, and some place in me still felt sad when I was with him. He said, “Okay,” and I put the oil lamp in it, centering it. We stood back to look at it.
“It looks nice,” I said glumly. He glanced at me. Unexpectedly, he put a hand on my shoulder, shaking me a little.
“Don’t be so worried. The important thing is that he has people to do something like this for him. He’s lucky.”
I wanted to shout at him that I wasn’t sad about Joe but about me, and it was all his fault even if he was too stupid to realize it. Then, looking at him, for a split second I wondered if he really did know everything that had happened and was simply trying to handle it, as we all were, as best he could. I looked away from him. His hand tightened a little, then dropped, and he stretched to get the kinks from hammering out of him. He picked up the leftover nails and the lantern.
He said suddenly as we went out, “And Barbara’s lucky, too, that she has you to help her do this.”
I didn’t answer. But part of my brain kept chewing on what he had said even after he drove me home, even after I went to bed.
The next afternoon, Claudia had a doctor’s appointment to discuss her operation, so she didn’t meet me to walk home together. I got my books absently, trying to see her in my mind’s eye, wondering if she would come out ravishingly beautiful. I decided probably not, with her pale eyebrows and round, pink face, but she would look better, and that would make her happy. Slamming my locker shut and turning, I came face to face with Barbara. She said softly, “Will you walk home with me?”
I nodded. I found my voice, as we walked outside. “Where’s Neil?”
“He’s at a Student Council meeting. Joslyn, he got some fish to go with the sea horse. They’re orange and pink, like candy.” She was silent a little. It was a hot Friday afternoon, so hot I could smell the leaves baking in the sun. I could feel the sun burning my nose under my tan. Barbara said, “Joslyn—” and stopped. I knew what she wanted to say; I didn’t know yet what I would say when she did.
I said, “We’ll have to move the fish tank to the house tonight,, then.”
She nodded. “And make sure everything’s ready. I don’t—I’m not sure how I’ll tell him about it. But I’ll think of something.”
I considered that blankly. “That might be hard. That might be harder than anything any of us have done.”
“It’s all right; I’ll think of something.” I heard her take a breath to say something, but she didn’t. I heard the sound again, a moment later. Then she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, facing me, so that I had to stop, too. She said, “Joslyn, I miss you.”
I looked back at her silently. I didn’t know what I wanted to answer. Then one of my shoulders spoke before I could, giving a little shrug, saying, Oh well. Her face was puckered in little worried lines; it was as familiar to me as my own face. It made me smile suddenly, because I knew it so well. I said, “Oh well.”
“I’m sorry—”
“It’s all right.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
She gave a deep, relieved sigh. We fell into step again. “I’m so glad. There are so many things I want to tell you, but I couldn’t; and who else can I tell them to, if not you and Claudia? I felt awful, when I couldn’t talk to you.”
“Well, I couldn’t talk to you either—the only person I had to talk to was Brian, and all he ever says is ‘Did you make an A on your algebra test?’”
“Did you?”
“Of course not, but at least I’m not flunking any more. What pattern did you get for your prom dress?”
“It’s really simple, just floor-length, sleeveless, with a-a sort of plunging neckline. Joslyn, I couldn’t believe it when he asked me. He just—One moment he was just somebody I didn’t know very well, who was really nice, and the next minute he just—the next minute I loved him. He just looked at me—”
I nodded. If Claudia had been there, she would have said something about Romeo and Juliet. Barbara was trying to gesture excitedly with her arms full of books; her face was really happy. Everything she had had to hold back came spilling out of her then; and in the hot, lazy afternoon, I felt too peaceful to be jealous. When we reached her house, Mrs. Takaota said, “Joslyn, I haven’t seen you for ages!” and the twins dragged me to the fish tank to see the new fish, which flashed in the salty water, gaudy as Lifesavers.
I had supper with Barbara. Neil dropped by in the middle, and Mrs. Takaota fixed a plate for him, too, in spite of all his protests. He grinned at me.
“You’re supposed to be home studying.”
I put my hands over my mouth. “Oh, I forgot. How did you know?”
“Brian told me. He came into the doughnut shop one night and said he had a job and you were going to make straight A’s this semester.”
I made a face. “Not after the way I got started. I really forgot. I’d better go home.”
“It’s Friday,” Mrs. Takaota said. “Finish your dinner.”
“I can’t. I promised my mother I’d study if she promised she wouldn’t ground me. Brian’s probably been waiting for me. All he cares about is money.”
Neil shook his head. “He misses going to school.”
“He what?”
“But he’s afraid to come back, afraid of being behind everyone else in his class. He’s got a lot of brains. He really likes teaching you.”
I eyed him incredulously. Mrs. Takaota said, “Finish your dinner,” and Neil said, “I’ll drop you off at your house. Finish your dinner.”
So I did. I got home to find my mother washing dishes. She looked at me coldly. I sighed and said pleadingly, “I forgot! I was at Barbara’s and I didn’t remember until right in the middle of dinner. Besides, it’s Friday—”
She dropped a plate into the dish drainer. “It’s a school day. You are supposed to come straight home and study.”
“I know. I know. I just forgot. Besides, if I study on a Friday, how am I supposed to remember everything until Monday? Besides, I don’t have much homework.”
“That’s not the point. You need to learn to discipline yourself. We made a bargain: y
ou were to go out only after your homework was done. You didn’t keep your part.”
I drew a breath. I was on shaky ground. “I have been. I’ve been working hard, you know that. I just forgot once—just once. I’m not perfect. I can’t be disciplined overnight. I am trying; I have been doing a lot better.”
“So far, yes. But if you can’t remember to come home to study, how will you learn anything? You’ve been scatterbrained all year; you need something to help you remember—”
“Mother—” I said desperately, before she committed herself to saying anything rash.
“I’m not going to go through another of my children dropping out of school.”
“Mom, you promised you wouldn’t ground me!”
“And you promised something to me, too. From now on—”
Whatever it was she was going to say, Brian interrupted with a sudden, melodramatic, “Halt!” We both turned. He was standing half-naked in the doorway, sweaty and greasy from working on a car. Having caught our attention, he went on more gently to my mother, “‘The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed: it blesseth him that gives and him that takes…’”
He ran through it to the end, stopping only once for a cue. I was fascinated. So was our mother. She listened without moving, letting the hot water run behind her. When he finished, he gave us a little bow and said, “Defense rests. Is there any beer in the house?”
My mother gave him a glass of cold water dazedly.
I said, “How many years does it take the sun to go once around the center of the galaxy?”
He gulped water. “Two hundred-million years.”
“How do you say, ‘I am tired,’ in Spanish?”
“Soy cansada.”
“Who invented the McCormick reaper?”
He wiggled a brow at me. “P. J. Sullivan.”
My mother cleared her throat. “When are you going back to school?”
The Night Gift Page 9