Pretend We Are Lovely

by Noley Reid

  “For god’s sake.”

  Vivvy

  Holly. The girl who came to Dad’s, Enid called her Holly. Mom is gone, has been gone all day. Off to tennis, no doubt, which is not real tennis at all, just a satchel and short Kelly green skirt, the pink balls bouncing from the backs of her ankle socks and no racket.

  She always calls, “Tennis, tennis, I’m off to tennis,” and pulls the Datsun down the driveway every single day. All I can think is that if she were ever truly sorry about Shell, she would have stopped parking in the driveway a long time ago.

  We are in our tree.

  Because it has a view and Clint’s light is on.

  After breakfast, Mom was asking too many questions. So up we shimmied, Enid first swiping a square of baking chocolate off the counter and refusing to spit it out when Mom told her it was bitter. But, out of her sight, Enid keeps clearing her throat and scraping her finger across her tongue.

  “Do you know how disgusting that is?” I say.

  “I can’t help it,” she says, coughing up more thick brown mess, all juicy-wet.

  “How stupid are you?”

  “I thought it was chocolate,” she says. “Why would anyone make a thing so awful look like chocolate?” She still holds on to a corner of that square. She looks at it. I can see she is actually considering trying another taste.

  Finally, she drops the hunk, lets it fall to the needles below. Floey in the spotty shade of the big sycamore will not be bothered.

  We are both quiet. Enid watches our house and I look next door. His light’s out.

  “What I want to know,” says Enid, swinging sideways from her knees but refusing to let go with her right arm—she looks like a stiff flag, a pennant at a Hokies game. In goes a deep breath, in goes air and more air. Her belly filling big, bigger against her waistband. So much air. “I want to know how come it is they think we don’t understand exactly what’s going on here.”

  “You are so weird, Enid.” I pull her upside-down braid until she looks scared enough to fall.

  Enid

  The big Plymouth Fury pulls up. Daddy sits in the sunshine a second, then swings out the big door and hoists to his feet.

  We stay still because we’re not speaking to each other. We’re up so high he can’t see us and he’s got an armful of papers and his satchel but he reaches back into the car and comes out with a duffel bag and goes right in.

  “This means something,” says Vivvy, so maybe we are talking again.

  Yes, yes it does: today will be good.

  •

  Tomorrow will be the last day before school, so Vivvy and I dig out our leotards from dance classes last January to practice being magicians.

  “I bet yours won’t even fit,” she says. “Better try it on first.”

  “You’re just jealous,” I say. “You want my pretty turquoise one.”

  “Anything but a black leotard is for babies,” she says.

  “You are.”

  “Good one, dummy.”

  She steps out of her shorts, drags her blue T-shirt overhead. I start undressing. Gather up my ballet tights that are the color of Pepto-Bismol. I turn my back to her, step into the scratchy turquoise suit and pull it up slowly. Ma doesn’t believe in underwear beneath tights and when Vivvy turns away from the mirror on the back of our door to pick up her own seashell-pink tights, I see it: the start of sunshine hairs coming in between her legs in a V.

  Vivvy’s taller than when we went to Mrs. Cavallo’s every Tuesday and Thursday for lessons after school. Her leotard pulls up her bum, stretches in tent draping from the center of her cheeks up to each shoulder. Her sleeves are the same, though: still too long for her. I am bigger. Bigger than last winter. Bigger than the spring. I am bulging out everywhere, but the leotard is on; I’m in it.

  My undies bunch and I work hard at stuffing them and smoothing them up into the leg-hole puckers of my leotard. I can’t stand the girls who don’t notice their undies are lumping out. Vivvy unfolds a pink wrap skirt with a velvet tie, holds it out behind her and then pulls it this way, then that. She smooths it against her flat stomach and nothing hips and looks like all the older girls who line up along the practice barre outside the dance studio, stretching and waiting their turn.

  I sit on the edge of my bunk watching Vivvy. She’s practically grown, a college girl or something, the way she pulls her hair back into a ponytail then twists it up into a bun and pins it once, twice, again. Her neck is pretty. She flattens her palm on the bun and when it springs back secure, she takes a skinny black ribbon and ties it around in a little bow at the top.

  My belly aches. The sides of my face twitch. I want to wear my ballet slippers but Vivvy laughs at me. I do even though the elastics cut into the tops of my feet. And then she wears hers anyway.

  We walk through the pines into Clint’s yard.

  “You are the assistant,” she says.

  “You too,” I point out.

  “You’re the assistant’s assistant.”

  Vivvy pushes in the front door and we go up the stairs to the playroom, where he’s got a desk draped in yellow and red bath towels.

  Clint arranges cups of water and little bottles of powder and bright colored liquids in neat rows. I smile because he’s setting all their labels in one direction, nice and straight. He stands back to check on them and then adjusts one that’s a hair off. I saw it too; glaring, Ma would say. I reach for Vivvy’s hand. She shakes me off.

  “What took you so long?” he says to her.

  “I’m not late,” she tells him, like I’m not even here.

  He holds up his hands, checking one last time. Now he looks up. “That’s what you’re wearing?”

  “Enid wanted to; it was her idea.” My sister is a liar.

  “Well here’s the thing. I’ll do the tricks and you just hand me stuff,” he says, then looks over to me. “The both of you.”

  “We know,” she says.

  “You can count, right?” he says to me, poking a finger into my arm.

  “What do you think, I wear diapers?” I check for a bruise.

  “Wear diapers,” he repeats, folding in half like he’s laughing but not really. “Good one. Now count up all these playing cards.” He must have three or four decks on the red half of the desk. “It’s crucial—crucial!—that they’re all there.”

  “Okay,” I say, happy for a job but looking up to see if he gives Vivvy something better to do.

  Clint walks off to the bathroom and turns around to make sure I’m counting and Vivvy follows after him. The door shuts. I count. I lose track thinking about Floey, who followed us over, and Basey out in the yard. She barks and then he howls. Then it’s quiet until a few minutes more when she barks and he howls. I start over. I make piles of ten once it’s clear that’s about all my head can hold before I lose concentration and start thinking about what they’re doing in the bathroom. I’ve got my tens in perfect rows upward and sideways and just have a few more to go when out comes Clint.

  “You aren’t even done yet?”

  Vivvy comes out. Her cheeks are pink.

  “Come on,” he says, “we’ve got tricks to do.”

  Clint practices his card tricks on us and they don’t come out right. He accuses me of miscounting the decks and then moves on to the cups of water. He slips a tablet into one of the cups, then drops red food dye into the water. One glass turns the water red, the other turns it purple. “Magic!” he says and waves his arm like he’s selling a car. Vivvy practices fanning one hand through the air and wiggling her hips for the imaginary crowd. Like Ma, sometimes. I stand on the other side of the desk and shift my weight side to side but don’t guess it looks like Vivvy’s wiggle-waggles.

  He has a few more tricks. One of the card tricks does come out right but that’s with Vivvy choosing her card and when he asks was hers the nine of clubs she says, “How did you know?”

  Vivvy and I go down the steps and out the back door, through the pines and up into our tr
ee. She still has on her wrap skirt and I’m worrying about it getting sappy or snagged because maybe soon she’ll hand-me-down it and I can try wrapping it around me, like an apron is all.

  “That wasn’t your card, was it?”

  “Shut up,” she says.

  “Knew it.” I stuff a bit of undies back inside my leotard. I rub around on our branch just to let the bark grip hold of my seat and thighs, to show Ma and make my needing new ballet clothes about something other than her rolling her eyes and saying Jesus, Enid.

  “You wanna play dress-up?” I ask.

  “No.” She sits on our branch, lets go, then just slips to hang from her knees.

  “We could play wild bears,” I say. We’re already in the tree.

  She doesn’t answer. I look back over to the window into Clint’s playroom. The sun’s too bright to see inside but I stare at it anyway, picturing him swishing his arm back and forth again, though the tricks were all duds.

  “What were you doing in the bathroom?” I say. “Before.”

  “Leave me alone.” Vivvy drops from the tree, lands right on her pointy-pink ballerina tippy-toes. She doesn’t leave though, just squats in the dirt like she’s lost something.

  Vivvy

  “How about pizza tonight?” says Dad at the foot of the pine.

  Enid hoots and hollers.

  He puts his hand on my head where I kneel, picking through the mulch, looking for pink quartz pebbles. So far just one. I slip it in my shorts pocket and I don’t know why but I think Enid is watching me too closely, so I face the neighbor’s shed that stands next to our carport.

  “Real crust or pita pizza?” says Enid.

  He cocks his head. “Do you mean to tell me you don’t sit up at night dreaming of my delectable creations? My delicious, crispy, yummy, perfectly good pita pizzas? Is that what you’re saying, you Looney Tune?”

  “I sit up nights for Tater Tots,” says Enid.

  “You sit up nights for a whole lot more than Tater Tots,” I call up into the tree.

  •

  “Sugarbell,” he says to me.

  Enid is getting cleaned up upstairs and Dad is weird. He will look at me but if I look back at him he starts fussing with the pizza box. He lifts the lid and shuts it, lifts it and shuts it, letting out puffs of steam.

  “Did your ma say anything to you?”

  He looks like Clint asking can he touch this, can he touch that. Scared of me. Scared I might say yes.

  “About where she headed.”

  “Tennis,” I say. I take a fork and knife from the drawer for me—Dad and Enid will use their hands. I walk away to the table.

  “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” he says. He picks up the box and their extra cheese has the bottom of it so greased and heavy that he can get it to the table in one piece only by burning his palms to support the underneath. “Everything is fine, you know. We will have a fine time.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Nothing to it.”

  “Quit being weird,” I tell him.

  “Right-o, Captain.”

  “You better not be eating my extra cheese!” hollers Enid, running down the stairs. She is in regular clothes now, too, but when she sits down next to me her shorts ride up. Red grooves the leotard elastics made circle her thighs.

  “Don’t knee-sit,” I tell her because someone should.

  Tate

  I rinse the dishes and load them into the dishwasher, wipe down the table, and leave Floey in charge of the floor. I open the fridge to see what there is for tomorrow’s breakfast and supper if she’s not back by then. Surely she will be.

  I go out to the trash can and bury the pizza box beneath layers of unopened newspapers. Upstairs, I wash up at the mirror where Francie used to stand and ask me, “Do I look different?” What she wanted me to say always was, Yes, very different, but I only ever said, “In what way?” I wash my face, hang the cloth on the bar next to hers. I hold it to my nose and smell the sour dankness of her cleanser. Unpleasant but warmly familiar.

  Without Francie in the bed to preoccupy my brain, I realize the mattress is all wrong. Or I’m all wrong in this bed anymore. I smell her pillow, pass my leg across her side of the bed.

  The lights are out and I’m halfway asleep.

  The door pushes in.

  A little hand to mine.

  “Daddy,” Enid says, and I tug her up into the bed, open the covers for her to crawl in.

  Enid

  Today is the day, but we don’t do the magic show. We don’t sell the tickets Vivvy and I markered on the back of Ma’s basting tape. Today is the last day of our summer and we are sulking instead.

  I put Floey in her fairy wings and she and I begin running bush to tree.

  Vivvy’s inside, upstairs, listening to Grease, the slow ones where Danny and Sandy sing alone into the night. She said, “Go play, Enid,” when I asked her again about the bathroom at Clint’s. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said and just shook her head like I’m dumb on purpose.

  I lie on my back in the grass, look up into the white sycamore, and when Floey comes over to sniff my face and stick her wet nose in my ear, I tug her down on me. She smells good. Like skin and fur and forsythia blooms.

  Francie

  I am here. I’m in the grass. I don’t speak to him. But I lie here just the same.

  I’m back in my old yard in Boone. The back corner where the grass should be a different green, a sort of patch over the hole. But no, it’s the same and I worry the next time I come, I won’t know the exact perimeter; I won’t know where Sheldon is at all.

  My hands touch the grass that has become him. Sheldon had a rabbit die of frost once because we didn’t know any better and thought two wool thermals draped over the outdoor hutch should be enough in winter. He walked in the house that morning cradling a bloody-nosed thing in his arms; frozen stiff as it was, I first thought he’d covered one of Vivvy’s baby dolls in dryer lint. Tate wanted to bury it for him but Sheldon refused and walked around the house, dressed, and ate his allotted lunch, all with the animal thawing out and going damp, the fur sticking to his skin’s moist heat in the crook of his elbow.

  I screamed at him. I hollered: “Get that thing out of the house!” I even threw something at Sheldon when he appeared at the table for supper still holding it.

  I lie on my side here, I lie on my belly. The grass is full of heat. Daddy doesn’t mow as often as he should so it’s long enough to swallow my ankles and wrists, even come up to my ears. How can I shepherd Sheldon through the world when I’m not even certain where he is? He’s invisible. He’s gone. He was a fussy, obstinate, compulsive boy. And now he’s just gone and I can’t even walk around with him in the crook of my arm, drag his body to the table for supper, dangle his legs over my lap while I read the paper.

  I cannot pretend at all.

  He gave up his rabbit at bedtime. Tate said, “I’ll make you a double-scoop ice cream cone,” and then snuck it to him upstairs. That was as deep as Sheldon’s love ever went. Tate held Sheldon and told him, “Bunny knows you loved him.” Sheldon was tired, his left arm must have been numb through the elbow. He slipped into sleep and finally let go.

  Tate

  I knock on Vivvy’s door and hear her stop the record by dragging the needle up. “Sweet?” I say.

  She does not answer. Instead she comes to the door, opens it into her body, and stands there keeping me out.

  “Whatcha doing?”

  “Nothing,” she says, then points her chin back over her shoulder toward the record player.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  She nods.

  “Do you know why that girl came to see me, came to the apartment?”

  “Holly?”

  I nod.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugs.

  “She’ll be in one of my classes this fall. You see? She had a question about a paper she’ll have to write.”

  Viv
vy looks up at me. Her eyes squint and her forehead creases.

  “There’s so much about being a grown-up. There’s just so much.”

  “Okay,” she says and that is that.

  “You ready for school tomorrow?”

  “She bought us stuff.”

  “Good. That’s good,” I say. “Have you been missing your friends?”

  “Sure. I don’t know. Not really,” she says, then, “Her name is Holly, right?”

  “Did your mom tell you that?”

  “Enid.”

  “Right. Of course.”

  10

  Enid

  By the time the bus picks us up at the corner of Preston and Eakin, there’s only one more stop. Just one to get through and then we’re on our way. Clint and Vivvy sit on the wisteria vine that’s there.

  “Who do you have this year?” Clint asks her. “I got Ramsey.”

  “Nelson,” says Vivvy.

  I have Mrs. Moss.

  “Ha-ha,” says Clint to Vivvy.

  “I know. Everyone cool got Miss Ramsey.” Vivvy cinches her backpack’s strap. She has it on her left shoulder and Clint has his on his right. She releases the buckle and makes the strap go loose and long again.

  I loosen my strap, too.

  When we see the yellow edge of the bus swing around its turn, Clint does a weirdo voice, saying, “And away we go!”

  “Who says that?” asks Vivvy.

  “My dad. It’s from some old-time show.”

  The rest of the bus grows in the distance. I move a step closer to the vine. Vivvy and Clint haven’t budged and they don’t. Not yet. Not until Mrs. Healey pulls up to us. All the side windows are dewy on the inside because the school got some new buses with AC and we got lucky. The brakes whoosh, the door folds in. Already I see the blurry bus boys moving around in back.

  Clint gets on first. Vivvy hops up next. Now I tug myself up the big steps. I follow their backpacks down the aisle. Mrs. Healey shuts the door and doesn’t wait for us to sit but Clint goes all the way back now and so does Vivvy. I hear their names over and over again in happy greetings. They sit on opposite sides of the aisle in the second-to-last seats.