by Diane Munier
I touch his neck, his face. His skin is smooth, damp, his hair, short, short bristles, smooth under my hand.
His forehead touches my own. His hands sit at my waist.
“I love you,” I whisper.
Overhead the floor creaks and we hear the muffled voice of Stanley. Rat-a-tat-tat.
Easy’s arms come around me and he crushes me against him and I hold him the same way, front to front, his heart smashed under my ear smashed over his heart. I love…I love…I love.
“I love you,” I say louder, but it’s soft, soft in this hard room with my father’s voice overhead.
“Georgia,” he says, but it’s breath and whisper. “Georgia.”
I lift my face and his lips find me, kiss their way over my face until my lips are against his.
We are sinking down, I don’t know anything but him and moving and the floor, and him on his back and me over. “Easy.”
Kiss and breathe and touch and love.
His uniform will get dirty. I don’t see his hat. I don’t care.
“You can’t get hurt,” I’m saying and I’m crying. I’ve disintegrated into that hot river of fear running under everything. I didn’t even know it was there.
“I won’t,” he says. “I’ll come back to you, Georgia. I’ll come back.”
“I’ll wait Easy. It’s not like he said. He doesn’t know me. There will never be anyone else. Never.”
He pulls me to him, his hand on the back of my head and he kisses me long and his tongue, I’m shocked when it enters my mouth. I didn’t…I mean…I…floating.
“Georgia?” he’s saying, soft so soft.
I am limp on top of him. He cradles my head against him with one hand. The other moves over my back, under my shirt. This is how people do it. This is how it happens. It hits like a storm and it lifts you up so high. This is how love rips you open. This is what they’re all afraid of.
Well not me.
Darnay Road 57
All I can think about is kissing Easy. I want to do it again. And again.
I think of Abigail. All those years we talked about when and where and with whom we would share our first kisses.
And now that it’s happening, I feel differently. I want to keep it to myself long enough to let it sink in. He had said he would kiss me every day, and we’d missed two days, nearly three, and now, now I’ve lost count.
And it’s private. I’ve been in so much trouble I can’t afford to share it. I don’t want it thought about or talked about, or worse…judged. It’s mine and it’s his and that’s all.
Our love shields me from Stanley’s cruel words. It shields me, but it can’t take those words away, those words not said to me…but near me like knives thrown around the outline of my body in a carnival show.
In the cellar, I want to keep going. Easy’s hand rubs over the back of my bra and I say, “You can touch it,” but I’m so stupid cause he is already touching it, but he pulls his hand away and brings it from under my shirt and he smooths it over and over and he says we can’t keep going.
I want to. But Easy tells me no.
He tells me it won’t be this way.
I say, “What way?”
“In this basement,” he says. “This bomb shelter with your old man running his mouth overhead. Not like this.”
I wasn’t going to do it. Not everything. I couldn’t do that, well no I just got kissed. Then he said, not like this and he pushes me up and I get on my feet quick and he gets up and we dust off and he tucks his shirt all around and grabs his hat off the floor and polishes the brim with his sleeve.
He’s hurt my feelings.
We get out of the cellar and sit on the back porch and he kisses my hand and asks me what is wrong.
“Nothing,” I say, my hand tingling.
“We have to do everything right so we can keep seeing each other.”
He touches my chin and I look at him. I want to.
“All right,” I say. I put my head on his shoulder then and his arm goes around me and that is more than I can imagine for good, for wonderful.
It’s almost immediate that we hear Stanley’s car doors slam and Stanley’s car starts up in front of the house. Easy is supposed to be long gone and we stand and now I’m dusting off my backside again.
“You need to go back in the house,” Easy says. He’s going back to Disbro’s.
I don’t want him to, but he says, “We have to show Vi we can keep the rules. She said fifteen minutes and it’s over that now.”
I can tell he’s been in the army because I don’t think he worried about rules so much before.
So I salute and it probably looks so stupid, but that’s what I do and he salutes back, way better, as he walks away, backwards so we can keep looking at each other.
I have to say, “Look out,” because he almost walks into the flowerpot that has sat there without a flower for a couple of years.
He makes it to the gate, still turned around and he smiles and he says, “Aw come ‘ere,” and he holds out his arms.
I go to him and I leap up and my ankles are crossed behind him and he spins me slowly, so slowly. We are getting very amazing at hugging.
After a minute he sets me down and I look up at him.
“When will you be back?” I am asking that, and I get this flash that I’ll ask him that a thousand times before he’s with me for good.
“Soon as I can,” he says and he kisses my nose and of course I want more, lifting my lips even, though I don’t know it until he laughs, looking right at my kisser and I feel so stupid but before I can take it away he kisses me fast there.
“You’re so cute,” he says.
I hope he’s telling me the truth.
So we wave about three times and I go in the house. I feel floaty and goofy and happy and sad too. It’s just a somersault inside. There’s the kitchen, and Stanley’s words are still hanging around, but they are smoke now, falling apart, getting absorbed by every other bit of life in here.
Aunt May is gone too. It’s just me and Granma now. “Saints alive,” she says to me entering the kitchen. She holds her hand out and I go to her and she hugs me. “Pay your father no mind,” she says.
“I don’t,” I say, but there are reasons, well a reason, and that is Easy. “But it’s not okay,” I let her know.
“No it is not.” She lets out a breath, a short one. “I must lie down.”
I pull back and look at her.
“We will talk about all of it, but not now,” she says so tiredly. She breathes again, kind of wheezy. “You can lie with me and we’ll talk in there.”
I follow her into her bedroom, the old walnut furniture that she shared all her life with Grampa still shiny and unscratched.
I have spent many nights here, but not too many as in my tender years I worked on my cases and held so much vigil at my window the sill is marked up from the flashlight and the spirals on my many notebooks.
“First off, Granma, did you go to the doctor for the asthma?”
She sits on her side of the bed, gripping the edge of the mattress. “Yes. May took me.”
“What do you do for it?”
“I have this,” she opens the nightstand and shows me a funny thing that is as long as her finger and looks like a fat plunger. She also has capsules and she inserts one of these into the plunger thing and puts her mouth over the open end of it and plunges the medicine into her mouth.
She lays the plunger on the nightstand and sits on the side of the bed for a minute coughing a couple of times and breathing more labored than usual.
“What does that do?” I ask finally.
“Helps my lungs,” she says. She lies back then, on the three pillows she keeps there. She rarely lays flat.
I notice she has her shoes on. On the white chenille bedspread that is usually a no-no.
I stop to untie them, slip one off then the other. I get the foot pillow. It’s an old throw pillow, that radiant green she used to love and now she�
�s stuck with. I put the pillow under her feet then walk around to the other side of the bed and kick off my shoes and lie down, also on top of the spread cause you never mess the bed up just to take a nap.
“Are you better now?”
“Yes,” she says.
I look at her quickly and her eyes are closed. “I was on the porch with Easy cause he was worried about Stanley being here.”
“For heaven sakes,” she says softly, but she keeps her eyes closed.
The asthma I knew nothing about seems to have taken its toll on her.
She is very quickly sound asleep. I have the phone number for Disbro’s. If girls could call boys I might call Easy and tell him I love him. I’m telling him now…in my mind thanks to Susy Smith’s book ESP for the Millions and thanks to Aunt May who doesn’t know I borrowed the book via Abigail May and read it thoroughly. Anyway, I’m working on reaching Easy, telepathically.
But my mother comes in, like an errant channel when a plane goes over, cutting into what I’m trying to watch. I think of my mother, my beautiful mother. My dad was never big enough. That’s what he said. First time, I don’t blame her for running away. I don’t even blame her for leaving me behind…with my Granma. And in Easy’s path.
No I don’t blame my mother at all. I think she had a lover. I think she followed him. I think she followed love. Across the ocean. Bigger love than Stanley Green was ever going to give. She waited on him first and it wasn’t there and she left me, like an offering, left me to fill his emptiness.
But he couldn’t love me either.
Darnay Road 58
Granma sleeps. I go in the kitchen and put the dishes in hot soapy water and wash them quickly, barely aware of what I’m doing. How can I be here, washing stupid dishes when Easy is so near? In a couple of weeks I’ll give anything to get so much as a glimpse of him and now he’s near and I’m washing cups?
Is it over? Has she lifted my punishment? It’s enough I can’t go to school, right?
I hear the double knock and the front door opens and I know it’s Abigail May. I dry my hands and we meet in the hallway.
She is in her gym suit with a letterless letter jacket over that. She’s in the process of earning her letter for cheering but that will take the rest of the year. She quit growing two years ago. Five-foot-two, eyes not blue. That’s what Granma sings to her with a slight modification on the lyrics. Then, “Has anybody seen my girl?” She means Abigail. Abigail always laughs and gives her a hug.
But right now her eyes are troubled. She wears her feelings like red lipstick Aunt May always says.
“Can I be here?” she whispers.
“Yeah,” I say, motioning she should follow me upstairs. We go up and enter my room and I close the door.
“I’ve got so much to tell you. But first…you first,” she says gripping my arms.
“Easy was here. I love him,” I say. I can’t believe I tell her like that.
“You do? Well…that’s pretty much like usual isn’t it?” she says with a big grin, passing me by and taking off her jacket.
“It’s real though. He’s my boyfriend now. My real boyfriend.”
“It’s the big news at school. You being suspended too. That story is growing--the janitor catching you two doing it. In the church.”
I pick up a china statue I got with my watch years ago. It’s Cinderella and she’s holding the sides of her dress like she’s going to curtsy. If I throw it I’ll lose it and maybe wake Granma. I put it back on the shelf.
“I hate school. I don’t want to go back there.”
“You have to go back,” she says.
“I wish I could run away to Canada with Easy,” I say hotly.
Her big eyes get even bigger. “You do?”
“I would,” I say. “Who is saying this? What have you heard?”
“It’s just talk. At the lunch table. I told them to shut-up.”
“Who? Who says it?” I demand.
“I don’t know,” she drops onto my bed.
“I’m not going back there. I’ll go to public.”
She flops onto her back. “You can’t do that. You have to go to Bloody Heart.”
“No I don’t. I hate it there.”
She gets on her elbows. “I went with Cap.”
All thoughts of Bloody Heart fly out the closed window.
“When?”
“Saturday. Sunday. Tonight.”
“Wh…How?” I have that feeling like years before when she flew past me on Cap’s bike, her arms raised.
“I tell Aunt May I’m doing regular stuff and I meet Cap.”
She stares at me, not backing down, kind of proud. Here I haven’t sneaked out to meet Easy and she’s been going ahead and meeting Cap. I’m kind of mad and…jealous? I’m jealous.
“You can’t be doing that,” I say, but it’s the other choice—if I’m not going to be honest I can always turn into her mother.
She blows that off, “Too late.”
“What…what do you do?”
She falls back and spread her arms wide. “Whatever we want. He’s so….”
“He’s wild,” I say. Just going by looks.
She’s up and all over my room, flitting about in this kind of swirling dance, “He is. I love him so much.”
“Love him?” I’m appalled. I’m the one in love. And my love is real, not some…joke.
She’s giggling and…shining. “Yeah.” She’s playing with my Cinderella. “Yeah. Peace and love, right? Free love?”
“Free love?” Oh come on. We’ve talked and talked about it. We say shocking things all right, like we plan to do it someday when we’re in college…if we go. But not with just everyone. Just with thee one. Well for me, just with Easy. But leave it to Abigail to take it all seriously and start…whoring around.
”You didn’t let him, did you?” I say.
She goes back to my bed and falls there laughing like a crazy loon. Her little butt is sticking up kind of quivering. I walk quickly to the bed and smack her a good one right on it.
She rolls over, her face flushed. “Ow, bitch.”
We call girls bitches all the time, but just when we talk to each other. We’re trying it out—that word and it’s our favorite. But she never calls me one.
“You deserve it,” I say. “Telling on me about the church. You big stupid fruit.”
Her mouth is open and she moves her feet fast and gets herself sitting upright on my pillows and wrecking my bedspread. “I had to tell because I didn’t know what happened to you. I got worried, freak.”
“You weren’t worried. You wanted to look important cause that’s all you care about anymore—your reputation,” I say squeaking out ‘your reputation’ like I’m mimicking her—which I am.
“At least I have one,” she says lifting her chin.
“Shish-boom-bah!” I sneer.
“They were going to call the police,” she says more loudly, “and you know what that means. Easy would be in so much trouble and then it gets into the paper and dumb-ass Stanley gets the paper!”
She’s right. That’s how Stanley keeps up. She’s right. He’d have that much more on Easy. He’d make that call to Fort Ord. She’s right. It could have been that same cop that pulled us over. It could have gone so much worse.
I plop on the bed, my head in my hands.
“He was so horrible,” I moan, meaning Stanley.
I tell her what happened then. What Stanley said.
She turns on her knees, making the bed bob and wave like we’re on the high seas, and she punches my pillow a few times. “He’s such an old fart bitch jerk.”
That makes me laugh. Then she laughs. She half tackles me laughing and pulls me down on the bed with her. She loves to do this, get on me and kiss my ear and be gross. She thinks it’s funny and it always is and I hate it.
I try to get her off of me and she’s laughing and so am I, and we end up on the floor and she’s doing her barnacle thing and you can’t get her off,
but I’m trying and I’m yelling at her.
I hear Granma somewhere in there. We cut it out then and she leaps onto her feet and says, “Granma,” all sing-songy, running to her and hugging her. She’s just doing it to get her way. She probably shouldn’t be up here without permission since I’ve been jailed.
“For heaven sakes you two are worse than a passel of boys,” Granma says, but she’s just pretending to be ticked off. She’s patting Abigail’s back.
“Tell Crazy,” I say flapping my hand toward Abigail.
“Granma I’m so, so hungry,” Abigail says.
“Well it’s not going to be fancy but you’re welcomed to stay,” Granma says.
Abigail gets all giddy and jumpy. No wonder she loves cheering. Granma leaves and doesn’t say a thing about Abigail being up here and all I can think is maybe this means Easy can come over tonight too.
“So what are you and Cap doing?” I say.
Abigail smiles this tight smile and flops back onto my bed and my teddy bear goes over the side. “Well the first time…Saturday, I was at the five and dime getting some make-up and I saw him out on the sidewalk.” She looks at me, “Well I knew you were grounded. Aunt May said I couldn’t disturb you. So I went with Jessica…well not with her, but we ended up walking uptown together.”
I don’t know what kind of face I’m making, leaning against my radiator with my arms folded.
“Well she was ahead of me so she waited and I caught up,” she defends herself. “Anyway….”
“You were just hoping he’d come by,” I said.
She laughs and gets all spastic and squeals. “Shut-up and let me tell it. I looked out the window while I was paying at the store and he was out there on the corner, leaning on the stoplight post smoking a cigarette. He looked so cute!” She has to roll around some.
“You’re fixing my bed,” I say.
She ignores it and sits up clutching my pillow. “So I put my make-up in my purse and go out there. I got some Sugar Babies so I wave at him over there and he nods…so cute. And my heart….”
She is so dramatic I could strangle her, but I can’t move I’m so interested.
“So I hit the button and all the cars have to stop and I walk across toward him….”