Pretend We Are Lovely

by Noley Reid

  All this I balance on the sick tray. I check the living room but she isn’t there, and now I make it up the stairs without spilling. Even though Floey starts out following but pushes through my legs to be first up. Then she sits at the top step, yawping her mouth and giving one big wagging yawn as if she’s about to get it all.

  I knock and push in the door.

  “Good Lord, Enid,” she says, unfolding herself on the bed. “What have you done?”

  “Made you breakfast,” I tell her but I can’t look right at her.

  “Baby,” she says, “what’s wrong with you? Don’t you know me at all?”

  Tate

  “Please take her somewhere. Knock some sense into that girl, Tate.” This is Francie’s call to me Tuesday morning, early. “She absolutely refuses to go to the camp. She has got to get out of this house. And it’s prepaid. A commitment’s a commitment.”

  There are times I still think it could be about me, the phone ringing. That she has suddenly remembered what I am to her and she to me.

  “What can I do?”

  “At the very least get her out of my sight.”

  “You don’t mean that,” I say.

  “I know it’s wrong. I get sick when I look at her. I just get sick.”

  “Francie.”

  “I’ll think I’ve got leftover meatloaf and can heat it up the next night,” she says. “Then I open the fridge: it’s gone! Licked clean, with the foil back over the rim of the loaf pan. Like she thinks I’ll believe I wrapped up an empty container.”

  “I cannot talk to you about this, Francie,” I say. “It won’t go well for either of us.”

  She says something, whispers it, but I am not meant to hear and I do not.

  “I’m coming to get her,” I say.

  •

  “Come on, chickadee!” I call up to her.

  Enid is in her tree. She pretends not to hear me.

  I touch the trunk of the tree. “You sad, baby bird?” I ask her but she is silent, lips pursed into a beak. I reach for her, both arms up to catch her like when we are at the pool and she won’t jump off the diving board unless I am treading water in the deep end, waiting for her beneath it.

  She falls, tumbles into me with squatting bird legs and tucked wings, like a little bird shot down.

  •

  “There’s something wrong with me.”

  These are the first words Enid says on the ride to my place. She clutches one hand in the other. It’s like hiccups or a sneeze or even choking when she cries. A messy, runny-nosed, heaving-ribs cry. I don’t know what to do for her, so I sing and whistle and make any kind of noise to distract her from what it feels like not to measure up.

  Enid

  Daddy gives me his blue nightgown top with the white placket and cuffs. It’s long on me. It falls off the shoulders. I like to walk around in it, and feel the sleeves way over my knuckles.

  We can’t have Floey here at Daddy’s. No pets allowed. Once he snuck her in, wapsed up in a sheet like she was big, heavy laundry. But she wriggled and woofed and then there was her tail and a neighbor saw and we smiled but had to turn right back around and take her home.

  So I’m in his blue nightgown and thinking of Floey and wondering does she know where I am.

  Vivvy

  Enid is back home just for the day. We are in the kitchen, the three of us. And Floey, who takes in a deep breath and sighs it out with a moan, stretching all four paws.

  “That dog’s getting fat,” says Mom.

  Enid picks up the colored map puzzle she knows by shape not country. Fitting in the pieces, she presses each one into the wooden backing and against the edges of the other pieces.

  “She just lies around all day,” says Mom.

  “She goes under Enid’s covers,” I say. “She claws at the sheet then turns in a circle like five times before curling up in a ball.”

  “Good Lord,” says Mom, turning from the chopping board and her bell pepper. She turns back and starts chopping again.

  Enid dumps the puzzle pieces out onto the kitchen table. “Come on, Floey,” she says. Enid pulls up the dog by her collar and heads outside.

  “I wonder if she’s pregnant,” says Mom. “Floey, that is.”

  “She’s just fat,” I say.

  I go outside too but I don’t look up to see if she is there. Instead I walk beneath where her feet are probably dangling down.

  There are boxwoods all around the stone path to the back of his house. I like to pull off the leaves and let the cupped form of them cling to the tips of my fingers. Whenever Enid follows me out exploring, that is what I do. We walk the backyards that face into ours. We touch the tree trunks and she picks up speckled leaves from the grass. If there’s an overturned potted plant, she turns it right side up.

  I go to camp today for two weeks. Horse camp in Harrisonburg and Enid is supposed to come, too, but I know why she won’t. In April we went for a weekend trial and she cried on the drive home. Mom came to get us and Enid didn’t speak for days. She didn’t eat either and that’s saying something. First we stopped for tacos. Then at a Waffle House. When Enid didn’t want anything there, Ma tried to drag us into a Howard Johnson’s for grilled cheeses at the counter. Enid wouldn’t even get out of the car. Just sat there holding her sides, sniffling little gobs of snot all over her face, and refusing everything.

  She went straight to bed. She stared at the wall, holding herself tightly. “They said I was too big. In my class, my horse sat down when I got on and they said I was too big to ride.”

  I pressed my face to hers, a sort of kiss. “You are,” I said and kept her face there in front of mine even when she pulled hard to get free.

  Francie

  Before Vivvy and I leave for Harrisonburg, I find myself in his room. There’s a desk in here now. My mother’s old sewing table and spools of thread, too. I have tried to make plans, make these ridiculous costumes.

  I still smell him.

  There is a way a boy smells different from the baked sugar of Enid’s and even Vivvy’s hands and faces. A boy is slightly sour; a boy is like wet sand, like warm rocks.

  •

  When I was a girl in North Carolina, I used to lie in the field beyond our house in Boone and wish on stars. My daddy called out to me sometimes, and sometimes I pretended not to be there on my back in the long grasses, feeling tufts of clover flowers tucking up into the soft backs of my knees. This was when I was younger—maybe ten, even twelve. Those summers, those springs and falls too, I lay amid the weeds with the crickets and hoppy June bugs, forcing myself to keep still though all I wanted was to scratch.

  Mother left because she couldn’t make up her mind. That’s what Daddy told us, and I never for a minute failed to see that his explanation didn’t make sense, given that she never came back.

  Tate

  I arrive to collect Enid, again, off her mother’s stoop just in time to load Vivvy’s camp duffel into Francie’s car. I hug Vivvy but feel her body twist away. She will be thirteen soon and practices hating everyone and everything.

  Enid and I don’t talk in the car. We go pick up a flimsy pizza box that sags and slides open under the weight of large extra cheese, pepperoni, and ground beef. We considered double extra cheese. Seriously considered it, but I let Francie’s voice tell me to act as an example. To make up for the extra stringy pulls of cheese we are scraping off the box lid while driving this pie home, I’ll insist on silverware and napkins, and Enid’s Coke drunk from a Muppets glass instead of the can.

  “Can we have leftovers for breakfast, Daddy?”

  She thinks two meals ahead at least. But we finish the entire thing tonight on the sofa, watching The Dukes of Hazzard, eating straight from the box, holding over paper towels, slugging back swigs of Coke and Bud straight from the cans.

  Vivvy

  “In the car, Vivvy,” says Mom. “Now.”

  I somersault off the high branch to make her head explode. The mulch jams up into my sandal
s and I shake out each shoe, then drop them back onto the ground. Mom pulls a bra strap back onto her shoulder, shaking her head. I don’t look behind me, through the pines, but I want to touch everything here. Every bush and every little stone at the edge of her garden. I drag my fingers through the forsythia and take a pinch of leaves with me.

  “Vivian,” says Mom, “quit being so destructive.”

  I open up my hand and let the leaves fall. She gets in the car and waits with her eyes shut like it’s the end of the world. I walk slower. One foot in front of the other, delicately crushing each one of her border portulaca plants.

  5

  Enid

  Today Daddy and I hit the doughnut shop. The one with the street window that looks in on the squirty dough shooting into rings on a conveyor belt and then flipping into dark, goldy oil. I get chocolate-frosted with peanuts on top. He asks for one filled with Boston cream.

  The girl at the counter smiles at me. “You can heat yours up over there,” she says.

  “I know,” I say. “I always heat it up.”

  “Throw a dozen surprises in a box for us to take home, would you please? For the girls,” he says low to her, like I shouldn’t hear him, “and some friends. For later.”

  “Later, huh?” she says, smiling.

  It’s just us and it’s just going to be us, and I want to tell him it’s okay by me, because sometimes people don’t understand and we both know what’s a lot of doughnuts and what’s way too many doughnuts.

  They’re all in the case between us, perfectly ordered in rows of each kind on its own huge yellow tray, labeled: CAKE, SOUR CREAM, CHOCOLATE-FILLED, BLUEBERRY, GLAZED, and so on. She reaches for a crinkle-paper and selects our doughnuts, taking her time considering the trays and picking the biggest, best ones from each.

  “She’s in my class, is all,” says Daddy to me.

  “Okay.”

  I put my doughnut in the sugar-crusted microwave, turn the timer dial, and flip the toggle switch. It comes alive in a great buzz of light and melts the chocolate right down the sides of my doughnut. The peanuts go sliding, too. I think of all the things I could melt into sticky goo if we had our own microwave oven. Seven seconds, six seconds, five seconds. I spin around and see Daddy talking to her at the counter. His right hand’s on the counter between them, he holds the pink box under his left arm. The bell dings and I get my doughnut back out and take it to the window stools where we always sit.

  He comes over and sits how he always does. Because his legs are so tall he leans his back against the counter and sticks his legs out into the shop. “What do you want to do today?” he says, picking a flake of glaze off his shirt and popping it onto his tongue.

  I shrug my shoulders.

  “It’s hot for outdoors.” We rode our bikes here, because we can. But we’re like swamp creatures covered in slime. Even his shirt is wet across his back. He takes a big bite and licks at the middle goop of his doughnut, pops the last bite in his mouth.

  “Could we paint something? Could we paint the kitchen?” I’ve always wanted a red kitchen and in the last few days his kitchen almost seems like mine.

  “You think you might like to head up to see those horses?”

  He turns sideways to look at me, then looks away again. He laughs so I look, too. He’s facing her—that girl behind the counter—and that’s what he’s been doing all this time. She’s watching him so that she doesn’t even notice me looking at her. She has red hair and I’ve always wanted red hair, teeth Ma would call braces-straight, tight jeans, and an inch or two, or three, to pinch. She’s curvy, which is what Ma calls ladies with breasts, and has a long pretty braid that sweeps over her shoulder—thick like rope on a boat. Pretty, too, and she’s watching Daddy.

  “You ready yet?” he says again, crossing his legs and spinning to face me, like he’s trying to hurry me along.

  “What’s her name?” I ask.

  “Who?” He sucks yellow filling from his thumb but looks at the counter. She stands up, turns her back to fiddle with something on the coffee machine. “Holly Lyman.”

  “I don’t like her,” I say.

  “Clear your mess.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no’? Clear your trash. I didn’t raise you to be lazy and rude.”

  “I’m not lazy!” I say. I cross my arms and step away from my milk carton and napkins.

  “Take your trash now, Enid, or I will make you.” Daddy goes to the door and dumps his trash there. He stands waiting for me.

  I pick up mine and walk to the far THANK YOU trash can. My back is to him. I stand there as long as I can and then I throw away my milk carton and walk back across to the door. “I want to go home,” I tell him.

  He can be smiley again so fast. “And paint the kitchen?”

  “Home home.”

  Vivvy

  Mom is too skinny, if I am. Her hip bones jut out of her jeans just above the front pockets. She never eats in front of us. Carrots, okay, and when she chops iceberg lettuce for our sandwiches or tuna fish salad, she snitches leaves and stuffs them in her mouth as if she’s Enid with a butter wrapper. She draws a smiley face on the pad of paper next to her food scale where she records the calories: 42 + 17 + 6 = 65.

  •

  Here at camp, there is a girl from Missouri who says everyone there is big into floating, which she claims is the Ozarkian name for sitting around in an inner tube. She says the one here in Harrisonburg, the New River, is lame compared to their Salt Fork. She has to be reminded we will not leave shore until her life vest is on and buckled. She rolls her eyes.

  Her name is Agatha and her bunk is over mine. “I’m just here because my grandparents live in Lynchburg,” she tells me. “I have to come for summers.”

  “My sister refused,” I tell her.

  “How old is she?”

  “Ten.”

  “My brother’s almost that,” says Agatha.

  I don’t tell her about Sheldon.

  In the morning we are back in the stables. I’m assigned Danwick and Agatha is next door with the palomino. I don’t like palominos but she says they are the prettiest so she doesn’t seem to mind or complain when the horse balks at a jump, and he always does. I curry-comb Danwick, who is a white-and-brown paint. The dried mud clouds up into the air and through the window bars that connect this stall and the next. I comb in deeper, faster circles. Danwick’s hide tics around my hands. Agatha does not cough so I keep going until he shifts his weight enough that I’m pushed and held against the wall. I don’t know if I can’t breathe because of his size or because of his strength.

  My eyes sting and shut. But I can’t breathe so finally I cough and squeak and push on Danwick’s flank. He allows two inches and I breathe again and move out in front of him. I wipe my eyes on my sleeves, catch my breath and heartbeat.

  I peek in the palomino’s stall. Agatha is bent over at the horse’s left front shoulder, with his leg curled and coming through her knees. She cups the hoof in her left hand and holds the tool in her right, and is gingerly picking at the packed dirt in his hoof.

  “I can’t stand doing this!” she says.

  “Why?”

  “You have to be so careful around the frogs,” she says, pointing the tip of the pick at the center of the hoof even though I was there, too, when the counselors went over grooming. “I’m afraid I’ll jab one with the pick and my horse’ll bleed to death. It can happen; I saw my aunt’s horse go crazy and get shot after having its frog picked.”

  “Was there blood?” I ask.

  “The sawdust clumped like cat litter there was so much,” she says.

  I lead Danwick more to the middle of his stall, place the saddle pad and saddle. I buckle the girth, wait until he lets out his bloated belly of air, and I cinch it up even tighter. And from the grooming box, I take the hoof pick and slip it in my pocket for no good reason.

  I touch my horse’s muzzle and know he would never hurt me. That is the kind of horses t
hey have here. I bridle him, click my tongue twice, and lead him out into the sunshine and air.

  Francie

  With Vivvy at sleepaway horse camp and Enid at Camp Indulgence, I dress for tennis. Breakfast can wait. I walk deep into the yard, all the way to the back property line. To walk along Sheldon’s low stone wall there. Deep, to where the grass is left alone and vines bully the weeds. I imagine I’m at the little plot at the back of my daddy’s yard.

  All this house and yard and wall is mine.

  I watch the sun break through the stand of poplars and pine beyond the low stone wall and the netting of kudzu.

  It’s funny we buried Sheldon back home in Boone. Not we, really. Me.

  Tate kept saying, “Forgive yourself,” like something he’d read in a book.

  Vivvy

  “Leave me alone,” I tell her, Agatha, the girl from Missouri who wants something.

  “We could catch frogs down at the lake. Think we could catch a turtle?”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “Beth says there’s a snake she saw and it’s as long as a fireman’s hose.”

  “Triple stupid.”

  I am sitting on my bunk, propped against my pillow, which I’ve folded in half to be able to write a letter. All I have down so far is Dear and I don’t even know who I’m writing. She is next to me, though I did not move over to make her any room. And I don’t know why. It isn’t that she is nasty or smells; all the girls like her.

  “We could see if Beth’s right,” says Agatha, picking up one of my braids and twisting it in the air. “Come on, Viv.”

  I take it back from her.

  “She can’t be right!”

  “I’m writing my sister,” I tell her and start drawing in the name with pretty squiggles and curls and buttons. Dear Enid, it goes. And then stops.

  Some girls ask Agatha to go with them to the lake; Aggie, they call her. No, she says, she has things to do. She hoists herself up into her own bunk and I feel a little bit queasy every time the springs shift over my head.