Pretend We Are Lovely

by Noley Reid

  I’m looking for where to sit. I need to sit. I’m not allowed back there but too far up front and they’ll see me as still a baby even though I’m in fifth grade now. But too far back and they will see me.

  The bus takes a big turn. I start to fall on someone I don’t recognize. She looks up at me, like to see if she needs to move over. She doesn’t move but the seat opposite is empty so I sit here. Smack-dab in the middle of nowhere.

  “E-N-I-D, E-N-I-D I-S F-A-T!” chant two boys in the back.

  One second the bus is full of chatter, laughter, and the whoosh and rhunge of stopping and starting the engine. The next, there is nothing but the Mickey Mouse song set to new words sung out loud and clear by the bus boys.

  “Give it a rest, Rob.” It’s Vivvy.

  I peek around the seat to see Vivvy flicking one of the bus boys’ hands away from her chest.

  “Give it a rest,” she says again.

  They keep on singing.

  Vivvy laughs like a twittery bird. The song is over.

  We pull up to Margaret Beeks Elementary and I’m off the bus fast as can be. I walk the big kids’ hall now, fifth and sixth.

  “Enie!” calls Vivvy from so far behind me. “Enid, your lunch!”

  My hand still holds my side, the other keeps my backpack in place on my shoulder. I forgot my lunch. And it’s so far behind me now, way too far to even look or go back. I keep on going down the hall.

  Tate

  Francie wanted to be a chef. She wore the white shirt with all the buttons. Even at home. Even in her apartment, without even a kitchen—well, maybe two burners and a toaster oven. I have seen one picture.

  The shirt was pristine. If any meal got made, its production was immaculate. Literally. The shirt’s pressing and starch, both original. She pinned her hair over her ears back then, too, but different. Austerely.

  Once in the middle of the night, or maybe early morning, she twisted inside my arms, the skin of her bare breasts tugging against mine, her forehead tucked beneath my chin.

  “You don’t know this about me,” she said. “I’m not to be trusted.”

  I was in and out of sleep. We were engaged then, not yet married. I woke myself up.

  “I can’t be trusted,” she said again.

  “Baby,” I said, like it was anything of comfort.

  “On the pastry unit. There was so much butter left. I was pickup one night. I and another girl, but she had a boyfriend who waited in the lot and I told her the most wicked thing that night. I said that I’d seen him flirting with some of the women working cheese when they went out front to smoke. So she left me alone. It never would have happened in day class, you know. They’re more serious, more committed.”

  I think maybe I laughed here and she stopped a moment, deciding whether to go on.

  “Well,” she said, “plus I’m better in the day. Stronger.”

  I ran my palm up underneath her breasts. Felt the entire width of her rib cage in the span of my hand.

  “Nighttime comes around me and I don’t quite own myself,” she whispered. “I couldn’t stop. And all our profiteroles were in the school café’s walk-in freezer. You don’t know me, Tate Sobel.”

  She could be dramatic. I did know that already so I kissed her cheek.

  I did not understand what she was saying. That she was telling me everything.

  “I was alone with the pastries and sticks of butter,” said Francie. “And then they were gone.”

  Vivvy

  I am being kissed. Behind the cafeteria, where the extra teachers—subs and coaches and volunteer library mothers—park their cars. His chin is pointy and poking my jawbone. His lips mush against me. He smells of pizza sauce.

  It is not Clint.

  I’m not sure how I got here. It was lunch and I was sitting with my friend Sarah. Someone tossed a folded-up bit of green paper onto my lunch tray and I thought it was just trash and wouldn’t have even touched it but then the boys said it was a love letter and hooted at me. So I uncrimped it, pressed it smooth against the table, and Sarah and I shielded it from them and we read: Meet me at the dumpsters.

  No name. No time. They oohed and aahed not even knowing one word of it, so Sarah and I cleared our trays and went outside to jump rope.

  “You have to go,” she told me. “Don’t you want to know who sent it?”

  I shrugged. I’ve never seen Clint’s handwriting. I looked for him, studied all the boys outside to spot his friends and they were alone. I went.

  •

  “Turn your head.”

  That’s all this boy says now. We are standing and I do turn it just a little for him, which makes me think of being at the dentist when he wants a better angle to get at some new cavity way at the back.

  He is just my height, which means short. I know who he is, though we’ve never been in the same class. He is in Mrs. Rider’s sixth grade and so there’s music together and lunch, of course. Evan Greeley. A popular boy. Best friends with Travis and Andy.

  “What do you think of Travis?” he asks me, stuffing his hands where they’ve been this whole time—deeper in the pockets of his tan corduroys.

  “Travis?” I say, not understanding.

  “He says you’re kind of cute.”

  “I don’t know. I guess he’s kind of cute, too.”

  “Want me to tell him?”

  “Okay.”

  “Bye.” And he’s gone. Back around the corner of the building.

  Sarah comes to find me. “Evan Greeley?” she says. “We don’t even know him.”

  “I guess that doesn’t matter.”

  “What did he want? You’re all red.”

  “I am?”

  “Did you do it?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “Whatever—did you?”

  “My neck’s sore.”

  She grabs my hands and pulls us both down to sit on the curb. “What was it like?” She leans so far forward my cheeks go hot.

  “Sort of gross.”

  “Oh,” she says, and sits back, looking off to the mom cars.

  We go back to the jump ropes and take both from the younger girls. Enid is here and I give her a little smile anyhow. “Come on,” I say to her. “Jump.”

  Sarah and I swing the ropes double Dutch as slow as we can and Enid jumps facing me, then turns to face Sarah, then back again. She is silent and I like knowing she is not going to talk because she is a little bit afraid I’ll remember who she is and throw down the ropes. Sarah watches the boys off to the side on the monkey bars and underneath the basketball net. She watches Travis in particular. And beautiful Dawn, who goes with Andy, watches me. I feel taller. I know things.

  Enid

  I watch Mindy, the biggest girl at school, walk to one of the lunch tables. I watch the way she walks—like a girl in an animal suit. She eats out in the open, for all of us to see.

  When my class first came out from lunch, Vivvy was jumping rope with the older girls. I’m not supposed to talk to her but she’ll let me sit on the blacktop Indian style and pretend I’m nobody. I want to sit near her now, promise myself not to even look at her. But she’s gone. The girls are still jumping rope but she’s missing. I sit down on the corner of the blacktop and retie my shoelaces, tug up my ankle socks, tug them again wanting to be sure no little bump will pop up beneath the tongue and the top of my foot.

  Francie

  Sheldon’s grass is the stillest spot of earth. I don’t have to think. I don’t have to move or eat or refrain from eating. I don’t have to drive by the doughnut shop and not look at that girl and imagine what it’s like to press a glazed doughnut against one’s lips and then kiss my husband.

  Daddy calls from the porch: “Francine. Francine!” Soon he’ll go upstairs to look down on me from the back bedroom’s window. He’s always done so. “Francine!”

  Vivvy

  We are sleeping in the basement tonight to watch Grease being shown for the special late-night movie. Sandy got her pe
rm eons ago and we are still up messing around with the bottles down here. Dad is snoring in Mom’s bed and she still has not come home so it doesn’t matter.

  Enid likes the smell of Dry Sack sherry—“like soy sauce,” she says. She likes it for the saltiness. She holds the lip of the bottle to her snout and breathes deep. “Yummy,” she says.

  I take Kahlúa and we sip straight from the bottles.

  “Oh,” she says, making that face. “Oh, no! Awful!” She is about to spit, or try to spit.

  “No, don’t do it,” I say and put my hand over her mouth. She shuts her lips and squeezes tight to keep it down, to prove she is as big as me. I take another swig, thick as syrup, prickly at my throat like the shocks I get from scuffing around carpet in socks.

  There is bourbon here for Mom’s whiskey cake. And ouzo, which only Dad likes.

  “Now,” she says, heaving a big sigh. “Now I’m a wreck.” That’s Enid pretending she is Mom, down to the hip bone, only Enid doesn’t have hip bones. Enid falls asleep mashing her face to the flat cushion of the couch.

  Tate

  “Your hair smells nice.”

  “It does?”

  “Mmm.” I bury my nose in Holly’s neck.

  •

  Before I ever saw Francie, I heard her voice. She was in a different room. A party at Jaquess and she had come up to Pennsylvania to visit a girlfriend who’d run off from home. So Francie was just this sound, this sweet glass of champagne with bubbles coming to the top to break open in giggles and a smile. I turned the corner, tripped on someone’s shoes—I remember that distinctly, that there was a pair of loafers there in the doorway. So when I looked up finally and saw her, I about died.

  She was this beauty—not in the classical sense, I guess. Deep brown hair, nearly black. Like coffee beans. It went to the middle of her back, held tight against her temples with a thin band of ribbon or something. A black dress when such things were strange, were a little dangerous. Low, flat sandals with straps that wound up her ankles to buckle, like she used to wear. Slick red toenails. Red lipstick to match, and nothing more or less to her face.

  “You don’t go here, do you?”

  “I’m at Hollins,” she said. “For art. Art history.”

  “That’s all girls, isn’t it?”

  “Why do you think I’m here?”

  Francie

  I first heard his voice from another room. Booming. Hollering. “This is important, dammit,” he said. “This is fucking meaning.”

  I stood in the doorway of the bedroom where I’d been sitting all night talking my friend through the best decision of her life, leaving Boone just because she was pregnant—though, at the time, I was trying to bring her back. When I heard him, I went to the doorway and waited there. He was standing, as if already delivering lectures. And that was attractive to me, I know, seeing somebody who didn’t have to think at all, somebody who simply was. He wore a corduroy jacket, no suede elbow patches but there was a hole in the cording of the right elbow and I recall picturing myself on a sofa whipstitching on a single minky patch.

  He made his way to me. The room picked up again. Pouring drinks, fussing about the music, saying good night. He was such a big guy that kids standing between us had to take several steps out of his path before he could get through to me.

  I spoke first.

  11

  Tate

  Enid tiptoes into the bedroom too early today. Barely any light slips beneath the curtains and the air is still cool. Francie has been gone eight days.

  “Daddy,” says Enid, rubbing at her eyes and flapping the sheet around my middle.

  I must have carried her back to her own bed in the night. Or she made her own way, I don’t know.

  “Daddy,” she says again, tugging the buttons of my nightshirt. “The dog is falling apart.”

  We go look, her taking my hand to lead me. Her bed is a lump of twisted sheet and light blanket. Enid pulls up on the covers and there lies Floey, panting and pushing out the first pink, gelatinous puppy.

  “I had a feeling,” I say.

  Vivvy peeks out over the edge of her upper bunk, bleary. “So Mom was right.”

  “Ma knew?” says Enid.

  “Nobody told you?” I say. “We didn’t know for sure but—”

  “You knew?” Enid says to me.

  “I thought she would have said something.”

  Enid drops the covers again and looks at me.

  Vivvy jumps down and uncovers Floey all the way to the head. Her eyes are dilated black and she looks particularly beast-like. There is something very undomesticated, something downright savage yet trance-quiet, about this dog in labor. I pick up the first one, rub it around in Enid’s sheet to work it free of the membrane holding its tiny legs to its belly. This thing is all head. Slit-shut eyes and a snuffing nose. Floey licks at it now and it rasps a few squawks. Enid turns around, her face in contortion.

  “Totally normal,” I say.

  She sniffles and turns back to watch the dog.

  Vivvy stands beside me. She gives a little shake of the head.

  The dog makes quick work of the next but it is only sac and thin veins, not a puppy. I lean into the bunk to take it but Floey wants it more and snatches it up in her mouth and swallows. She lowers her head again. She pants. We have to wait for whatever will come next. I go down for coffee. Enid stays right there soaking it all in, rubbing Floey’s head and belly. Vivvy comes down for milk and OJ.

  When I go back maybe an hour later, Enid still sits with Floey and the only pup suckles while Floey licks it clean.

  Francie

  When I was young, Mother left me a note. She preferred writing down her thoughts and left them around the house for me to find. This isn’t for you, she’d tape to a tin of cookies and date it March 7, 1952. She always dated them, in place of her name or a single arrow-stricken heart. Hanging along with the coral hand towel in the hall bath: Do be careful when wiping your hands that you leave this as nicely folded (in thirds) and straightly draped as when you found it. October 22, 1951. And laid on top of the row of Mary Janes and tennies and sandals on the floor of my closet was, Please learn the beauty of right angles. July 2, 1952.

  Vivvy

  I find a box in Mom’s sewing closet where there are old shoe boxes—some empty, some not—labeled for what they used to hold: White Slingback, Navy Crossover Pump, Dress Black Sandal, Patent Leather Open-Toe. Enid and I used to beg her to pull these down off the shelf and let us hobble around in them. And sometimes, when the mood was just right, she would hand us each a box and let us play.

  Then I take another one down, the sandals, only it’s not empty. The box is heavier than shoes and is solid and unwieldy. There is so much weight to it, I almost lose my grip.

  I open the box, tuck the lid beneath my chin. There are photographs. On top of rocks. His gravel rocks. A blue Margaret Beeks T-shirt from first grade.

  “She hides things,” says Dad real quiet from the doorway. He comes in to stand right beside me. “She has always hidden things.”

  He puts his hand in the box, down into the rocks. He spreads his fingers and it’s more than I can do to support the push of his hand diving in beneath the stones.

  “Dad,” I say, “Dad,” because he is not taking back his hand and I know I’ll drop the box. “Daddy.”

  “Go on to Enid,” he says, taking the box in his arms.

  I stay. There is nothing we can do, not even if we all loved him.

  12

  Tate

  I decided to make flank steak for dinner, so I am in the kitchen to turn it in the marinade. The underside is brown with soy and honey. Nibs of garlic have wedged themselves in the scorings. I have scrubbed the russets, snapped the beans.

  I hear the girls at the foot of the stairs, down in the basement with plastic horses, Barbies, and paper dolls playing on the wooden steps. First it is just the sound of stories coming to life in low voices, of the slight embarrassment that accompanies make-
believe when you are ten and twelve.

  I seek out the meat fork. Drawer after neat drawer. Francie began moving everything years ago; she continues to reorganize regularly. Dinners have gone cold while I try to find silverware.

  Downstairs, the big dolls tell the littler dolls to clean their rooms or eat their limas or how much one hates the other for being gone all week long on a trip. There is nothing subtle about my girls. No mysteries here.

  Enid’s voice separates out of the neighing of their horses, the clip-clop of hooves when they seesaw the stiff-legged horses back and forth to simulate a slow canter. “Ma said he was lucky,” she says, “because he was so sick.”

  Vivvy’s horse hooves keep moving.

  And for a split second, I don’t know it’s Shell they’re talking about. The splittest of seconds.

  “But it hurts.”

  “That’s what grown-ups say when they don’t know what else to say.”

  “It hurts, Vivvy.”

  “There has to be blood for it to hurt.”

  “I’m the one that held him,” says Enid. “Nobody but me.”

  “What is wrong with you?” Vivvy’s mouth pinches each word. “It’s like you’re retarded. Like you go around the house making everything up. You didn’t hold him or even touch him. Dad had him and there was red blood in the blanket. He made Mom crazy and you just stood there eating all those brownies.”

  They both fall quiet for a moment, the horses’ hooves, too.

  “Pinch me so it goes away,” says Enid now, and I can almost see her hand on Vivvy’s forearm, her eyes big, asking please. “Pinch me so you can stop hating me.”

  Vivvy screams, all her air coming out at once, and there is a soft thud of her sister tumbling from being knocked over. Vivvy storms up the steps. She comes through and when she sees me in the hall she blows out her cheeks. “I hate you!” she says and runs upstairs.

  “I know,” I say, but she is gone.

  Enid

  It’s late but I can’t get back to sleep. Daddy presliced the leftovers so I’ll just go down and snitch a few. A few wiggly strips. And I’ll dip my fingertip in the juice and suck at it but then I’ll come back up so there’ll still be enough for him and me later and we can butter our bread and lay down the slices and then squash the meat inside, letting the white bread turn plum with so much of the juices.