Goldengrove

by Francine Prose

  The next morning, Dad said, “There’s something squirrelly about the guy. As if he had a secret acorn stash, and the thing he really gets off on is not telling the other squirrels where he’s got it hidden.”

  Margaret said, “You say that about every guy I go out with. Every guy I bring home, it’s like Romeo and Juliet.” In fact she’d only dated one guy, junior year, and it hadn’t lasted. A senior with a bolt through his ear who made everyone call him Turbo. “Maybe you think that any guy who would want to hang out with me must have something wrong with him.”

  “Quite the opposite,” said Dad.

  Mom said, “I know what your father means. The kid’s too good-looking. Little Adonis carries himself like a vessel of some precious oil he’ll drip on you if you’re lucky.”

  Margaret said, “How strange that someone who married Dad should hate someone for being handsome.”

  “We don’t hate him,” said Mom. “Hate is a little extreme, dear.”

  “That’s enough,” our father said. “The kid’s got a screw loose, is all.”

  It embarrassed us when our dad used lame, old-fashioned phrases like that. Something’s not somebody’s cup of tea. That’s how the cookie crumbles.

  “What screw loose?” Margaret asked.

  Dad said, “I don’t know, sweetheart. The one that holds it all together.”

  “Is your mouth a little weak? When you open it to speak, are you smart?”

  Margaret’s voice rose and lingered lightly on “smart.” She made it sound like fun, like flirtation, not like a list of qualities some guy is telling his girlfriend she lacks.

  Mom and Dad told Margaret she couldn’t smoke, but not that she couldn’t see Aaron. They always said it was a mistake to forbid kids to do something, unless you wanted to make it their heart’s desire. They often talked as if all four of us were involved in some group child-raising project, as if treating us like semi-adults would make us do what they wanted. But they gave Margaret such a hard time about Aaron—Little Adonis this, screw loose that—that it was easier to pretend that Margaret and I were going to the movies.

  Besides, Margaret liked conspiracies, codes, secret signals, her version of the tactics with which the brave Resistance couriers outfoxed the Nazis in her beloved French World War II films. We had a system worked out: Margaret and I would drive most of the way to town in Mom’s car and meet Aaron at a designated spot. We’d park Mom’s car behind a barn and get into Aaron’s van, and they’d drop me off at the mildewy-smelling, fake-retro Rialto.

  “Don’t change a hair for me, not if you care for me.” Our little rowboat caught a current and turned, then stopped turning.

  Sometimes I tried to see Aaron from our parents’ point of view. Squirrelly didn’t seem like the word for a sweet-tempered guy who, like my sister, seemed to throw off a golden light. Screw loose? Margaret was right. Our parents would have hated any boy she brought home.

  Aaron often had paint on his jeans and his hands, and once, when he showed up with a comet of blue across his forehead, I nearly reached over to wipe it off, but Margaret got there first. Aaron treated me like a person, unlike the boys in my school, to whom I was a window through which they kept looking for a hotter girl with bigger breasts.

  After the movie, Aaron would ask me to imitate the stars. My Julia Roberts, especially, cracked the two of them up. He called me “kid,” which he’d probably got from a film he’d watched with Margaret. They liked the same things—jazz, old movies, art—though I never knew if Aaron had before they’d started going out.

  “Stay little valentine, stay.”

  Lazily, the boat revolved, until Margaret’s blond hair was back-lit. When I looked into the sun, my sister blazed like a candle. Her eyes were shut tight, and I could tell that her mind was empty except for the music.

  The last wisps of that “Each day is Valentine’s Day” hung over the water, like the haze of heat and mosquitoes that would shimmer there when it was really July instead of this fake summer day.

  I said, “Are you seeing Aaron tonight?” I wondered what was playing at the Rialto. Margaret and I listened to Mom practice so long without a mistake that I almost relaxed.

  “I don’t know,” Margaret said. “We had a fight this morning on the phone.”

  “A serious fight? About what?”

  “Nothing. Nothing important. Aaron can be a little nuts.”

  “Nuts meaning . . .”

  “Freaky,” Margaret said. “You’ve got to watch out for him sometimes.”

  “Freaky how? Watch out how?”

  Margaret had something she wanted to say, but she wasn’t going to say it.

  “A screw loose?” I said.

  “Right. A screw loose.” It was a relief to be off the subject of Aaron and onto the subject of Dad.

  “Anyway,” she said, “how serious can it be? Aaron and I are out of here in September. He’ll fall in love with the first girl who takes off her clothes in art class.”

  “Won’t you miss him?” I asked. “I already miss everyone. You, Mom, Dad. Aaron, I guess. And I’m not even gone yet.”

  I said, “Then shut up about it, okay?”

  “I’m sorry. You know I’ll miss you, Nico. You know I’m sad about leaving.”

  I had decided to forget about Margaret leaving and just enjoy the summer. Last summer, I’d been an intern at my old nursery school, and the summer before that, I’d gone to the town’s recreation program and a week of soccer camp. This summer, I planned to read, watch movies, go swimming with Margaret, maybe catch a fish or two that Dad could cook for dinner, and not waste one precious minute before she left me alone with our parents.

  With our eyes closed and the sun on our eyelids, I felt I could ask a question I could hardly let myself think, face to face.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Surprise me,” she said.

  “Are you and Aaron having sex?”

  She lit another cigarette. I was sorry I’d asked.

  “I thought I said, ‘Surprise me.’

  ” “Well, are you?”

  Margaret spun a smoky doughnut from between her parted lips. Finally she said, “Yes. But you knew that, Nico.”

  We’d certainly never discussed it. She and Aaron never even held hands when I was around. Sometimes I’d imagine them making out, until I’d begin to feel a strange sensation, like something inside me dissolving from the center out. Was that sex? I didn’t know. I liked it, and I didn’t. I knew it was sick and perverted. Not the feeling so much as the thinking about my sister and her boyfriend.

  For a moment I was distracted by the red branches inside my eyelids. The sun was trying to trick us into believing that the afternoon would last longer than it would. With the first hint of dusk, Margaret would want to go inside. Once she told me that twilight was when the spirits of the dead surfaced from the lake and made party plans for the night. She loved telling me ghost stories. I knew, that is, I usually knew, that she was trying to scare me. But what made it scary was that part of her believed it.

  “What’s it like?” I persisted.

  “What’s what like?”

  “Sex.”

  “God, Nico. I can’t believe you’re asking me this.”

  After a long time Margaret said, “You know how when we go out for ice cream, you never know which flavor you want?”

  After they picked me up at the theater, we ’d drive to the Dairy Divine. I always took forever deciding, until I’d finally give up, give in, and settle on something awful. I knew it was only ice cream. But the lumpy cherry vanilla and the gross butterscotch mocha raisin seemed like a frozen symbol of everything wrong with my life. Aaron and Margaret never got impatient or made me feel rushed or embarrassed. Margaret said there was something holy about indecision and regret. She told me the French expression—the spirit of the staircase—for the voice that catches up with you, minutes after the fact, to make fun of whatever you said and come up with the perfect answer you didn�
��t think of. We even had our own code phrase: SOS, we called it.

  Margaret always ordered pistachio, which tasted like dish detergent. She thought the color was funny. She liked the way the maraschino-cherry green dye stained her lips and tongue, and when she finished, she’d smile at us, leaving me and Aaron to marvel at how someone could look so beautiful with a green mouth and teeth. Sometimes the kid behind the counter would offer her a napkin as if he wanted to ask her to sign it.

  Aaron ordered coffee swirl, sometimes butter pecan. Margaret let him taste hers, and she’d have small bites of his. Something about the easy, intimate way they traded tastes was what first made me begin to think they’d had sex while I’d been at the movies.

  When had we switched from talking about sex to talking about ice cream? I said, “I know it drives Aaron crazy. Even though he’s nice about it, he really hates it, right?”

  Margaret shrugged. “Sex is the opposite of not being able to make up your mind. You don’t have a mind. You don’t have to think. You know exactly what you want.”

  What could Margaret possibly mean? She was getting like Mom. I thought, I’ll never eat ice cream again.

  I said, “We forgot the sunblock.”

  Margaret said, “You look good with a tan.”

  “Mom will have a fit,” I said. “Skin cancer, remember?” “Mom will have a fit for a change.” Margaret leaned over the boat. “Can you see the bottom? Look, Nico. Look at that.”

  I looked until we almost tipped. A dark shape flitted by.

  “See what that was?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “You didn’t,” she said. “But so what. Did you know there’s a lake in Macedonia where the fish are seventy million years old? Maybe if we saw all the way down, we’d see fish that have been here that long.”

  “Each fish lives seventy million years?” Ever since we were little, she’d made up scientific facts. She told me that if everyone in the world wore their watches upside down, time would run backward. She said that turkeys were so stupid they drowned in the rain, and that you could sharpen your hearing by walking around with your eyes shut. The problem was, some of it was true. Maybe there were fish that old living in a lake like ours. Maybe that was why I was drawn to science. I liked the idea of an authority I could go to for a ruling on the stories my sister told.

  Margaret sighed. “The species, Nico. Not each individual trout.”

  “Joke,” I said.

  A shadow darkened the water. Last summer, algae had begun to grow—Dad pointed out the obvious irony—on the surface of Mirror Lake. By last August, it was an eco-threat, and now the town was watching to see if the bloom would return. In a few weeks, they were having a town meeting about the pond scum. The phytoplankton. It was a word I liked knowing.

  “Not if the phytoplankton chokes off their air supply,” I said.

  “Listen to you.” Margaret exhaled through her nose.

  This turn in the conversation was making me feel gloomy. I would never be poetic and beautiful like Margaret. I would never find a boy to call me his funny valentine.

  I told myself to keep quiet. I said, “You shouldn’t smoke.”

  “Why not? One cigarette’s not going to kill me. God, you do sound like Mom.”

  “That’s three,” I said. “Three cigarettes in an hour.”

  Margaret gave me a long, unreadable look. Was it anger? Affection? The sun in her eyes? She stood. The boat rocked slightly.

  “Smoke this.” She smiled and gave me a funny salute she’d copied from Ginger Rogers. Then she dove into the water.

  I watched her swim toward the landing. I thought of the seventy-million-year-old fish looking up toward the light and seeing the sleek graceful dolphin streaming just above it. I would have to row home by myself. Exercise was good for me if I wanted to look like Margaret. I needed to rest a while first. Sunspots ticked the back of my eyelids.

  I sat up and looked for Margaret. Usually, she lay on the dock, sunning herself and waiting to help me tie up the boat. Maybe she’d gotten a phone call. Something made me shiver, as if I’d floated over a cold spot.

  I rowed in as fast as I could and, panting, dragged the boat onto the bank. Our mother was still practicing that spooky Chopin waltz. I couldn’t find Margaret anywhere. Still a little breathless, I kept on calling her name.

  I had to walk around in front of our mother and wave both arms until she noticed and stopped playing.

  I said, “Have you seen Margaret?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I can’t find her,” I said.

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” she said. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

  “I can’t find her anywhere.” The jagged edge in my voice tore away the cobwebby trance she’d been in.

  Mom stood up from the piano bench. She said, “Where is she, Nico? Go find her.”

  Two

  NONE OF US KNEW. NO ONE KNEW. THAT WAS WHAT EVERYONE kept saying. First we didn’t know what had happened, then we didn’t know how it happened, and then we still couldn’t understand why, why Margaret, why our family, though it wasn’t like us to say, “Why us?” What did it mean to be like us? What did us mean without Margaret?

  They searched for Margaret, they dragged the lake. Parked beside the water, the police car kept flashing its beacon. It wasn’t night, it wasn’t dark, they weren’t speeding to a crime scene. Maybe the spinning light was meant to reassure us. Help was on the way.

  All the time the divers were working, my parents didn’t let me go outside. We sat on the porch, listening to the men shout from boat to shore and watching a trick of the light that made the red beacon seem to revolve on the white porch ceiling. My parents each held one of my hands with a steady pressure: half comfort, half restraint. They were afraid I’d see something that might scar me for life. But I was already scarred for life, and I couldn’t look at the lake. I couldn’t imagine letting my skin touch its filthy water. I’d been planning to go to the town’s algae-problem meeting and show off what I’d learned on the Internet. Let the phytoplankton bloom. Let the fish strangle and die.

  We watched the beacon until my father said the light was driving him nuts and went to ask the cops to turn it off. Even after the light blinked out, a red shadow stained the ceiling. Some time later my father came in, and we took one look at him and knew that they had found her.

  Still, every breath I took was a prayer. Let my sister be alive. I would devote my life to saving the lake if it didn’t kill her.

  I kept hoping it was all a mistake, that she’d gone into town to meet Aaron. But I knew that hadn’t happened. Mom had suggested we phone him. Just like that, she’d said, “We should probably call Aaron.” What had all that play-acting been about, those sisterly trips to the movies? That my parents had known all along made me furious, for a second. A second was all we could afford. We had to be good to each other.

  “I’ll call him,” I’d said. I didn’t want him hearing that Margaret was lost from someone who thought he had a screw loose.

  “Wait a minute,” Aaron’s mother said when I’d asked if he was there. She’d shouted his name, as if across a distance. It took him a while to come to the phone.

  I said, “Have you seen Margaret?”

  “No, I haven’t. What’s up?”

  “You haven’t seen her anywhere?”

  He heard the pleading in my voice.

  He said, “Should I come over?”

  The truth was, I would have liked him to. But I said, “Better not.”

  Almost as soon as they found her, the doorbell started ringing. The neighbors who brought over food had the grim, determined expressions of people seeing loved ones off on a journey. There were platters of sandwiches, casseroles of mac and cheese, bowls of tempting salads and fruit, but we weren’t tempted. Dad cooked, it helped him, just as it helped my parents to focus on me, just as it helped me that I had them. They were careful of me, they protected me. I never once heard the word autopsy, though I
was pretty sure it happened.

  My mother and father expanded into larger versions of themselves. The decisions they made, the small things they did, made me glad that they were my parents. They never even considered the corny funeral limo. My father would drive us in his Jeep, just the three of us without some stranger in black eyeballing us in the mirror. The only bad move they almost made was: Dad wanted to play a tape of Margaret singing “Amazing Grace.” It was part of her application portfolio for a college that seemed to want students who could smoke beloved hymns into smoldering torch songs.

  Mom said, “Are you out of your mind? They’ll have to wheel us out on gurneys.” I was relieved when my dad backed down. I couldn’t have stood hearing my sister sing about how she was lost, but now she was found.

  I was surprised when my mother told me I didn’t have to go. She said, “Nico, it’s up to you to decide whether or not you want to say good-bye to your sister that way.” I was still bursting into tears when anyone said the word sister. And when someone said your sister, I wanted that person dead. I didn’t want to go, but what would I do? Stay home? Go to the movies and wait for someone to pick me up?

  The day of the funeral was windy and cold. I imagined Margaret stage-managing the scene for maximum tragic drama. I wondered if the newly dead were allowed to control the weather as a consolation for never again feeling it on their faces.

  All day, my parents and I clung together. We’d been hugging more than we had in our whole lives until then. Not hugging so much as leaning. We were so physically tired. I kept wanting to tell Margaret how goofy Mom and Dad were acting, until I’d remember why.

  My clearest memory of the day is of my father’s scratchy jacket. I burrowed into it so hard that the wool left welts on my face. The graveside ceremony was conducted by the minister from the Unitarian Church, to which my parents went a few times and then quit because Mom liked to sleep in on Sundays. I kept my eyes shut the whole time and blocked out the service by chanting nonsense inside my head. I tried to imagine a beautiful place. Margaret had taught me to do that when I went to the dentist. But nothing worked, there was nowhere to go. Not the lake, not the rowboat, not Times Square, not Paris.