Pretend We Are Lovely

by Noley Reid

  “Who are you writing?” I ask, standing pulled up onto the side of the bunk.

  She covers the page with her hand. “Get off.”

  I hang there on the side of our beds watching her, trying to see. But she just stares at me and won’t start up again until I’m out of sight.

  I crawl into my bed. Vivvy crumples another sheet above me.

  I lay down my head on the pillow. All I know is that our sheets are weeks overdue for a wash and they smell like dogs. I hold my breath.

  Tate

  Holly did not come to class today but is waiting outside my office door. Paper in hand. Eyes red and arms crossed.

  “I don’t know why this is hitting me so hard,” she says. “I used to be such a strong person.”

  “You’re still strong.”

  She unfolds her body and holds out the typed pages. “Anyway, here’s my paper.” She wipes underneath her eyes, gets up, and goes.

  I move to call to check on Francie, but know it will only make her angry.

  Vivvy

  Mom has shut herself into Shell’s room again, saying she’s working on our costumes. Dad worries Enid is getting too thin. He asks me if I’ve noticed and whether or not she is still eating.

  “She snitches,” I tell him. “She is always snitching.”

  “Does she go anywhere in particular when she’s done eating?”

  “No . . .”

  “Are you all right?” he asks and puts his big hand over the top of my head.

  “Sometimes outside, in the tree. Upstairs to bed . . .”

  “And you?”

  “Or to Mom’s room sometimes.”

  “Vivvy, how are you?”

  “I took one of Mom’s blouses. The dot one with red buttons. I took it before she came back home from Grandpa’s and I was going to put it back before then, too, but things were so weird; she wasn’t even getting dressed most days. I forgot. Then yesterday she was in there in her closet, sliding the hangers back and forth. They were scraping on the bar and I knew, I just knew what it was she wanted. And when she asked me, I lied.”

  He looks at me.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re good, then,” he says. “You’re just fine.” And he walks away.

  It was her favorite. I wore it to school. I was kissed behind the dumpsters and again by the bike trail woods in that blouse. When I came home her car was still gone. I walked up through the front door, up the steps, past her bedroom door, and right into our bathroom. I took the long, straight hair scissors from out of our sink drawer and snipped the dot blouse into inch-by-inch squares. Two handfuls in my pillowcase. And yesterday when she called out for it, I smiled.

  Enid

  It’s lunchtime and I went through the line and gave in my quarters, and it’s tacos in a paper boat, fries with nacho cheese squirted into a paper cup pleated in neat rows, a cool box of chocolate milk sweating on my tray, a big butterscotch cookie that’s always chewy.

  I don’t eat any of it.

  I’m striving to be a better person. I can smell the salt, the gooey melt of the cheese. The tiny grinds of meat in my taco shells, the tangy orange drips blotting the shells to their paper boat.

  I shut my mouth and decide not to open it again all day. I go outside and stand in the sun.

  Vivvy

  Dear Agatha,

  I am fine. How are you? I don’t love Clint after all. You were right. I don’t know how much a train ticket is. I’ll save my quarters, too.

  I miss you. Write back soon.

  Love,

  Vivvy

  I don’t send it. Not yet, anyhow. I slip it in the envelope and lay it in the paper box. It’s not what I want to say. But it’s not what I don’t want to say either.

  I can see Enid outside. In the bush, thinking I don’t know she stole my hiding spot. She is up on her side, her back to the house. Floey mills about, the new dog trailing her with high-kicking front legs like a Tennessee walker. I have a book report due, but I watch Enid instead.

  It is late afternoon so the sun is coming through the bush at a low angle behind her, no doubt why she has turned her back to the glare. Something in me feels tight. Enid sits up. Probably, too hot. She’ll sneak a popsicle or pudding to cool her down—Dad does the shopping now. Her T-shirt is sucked flat to her side and back. Then I see Clint. He’s beside her. Behind her. There he is and he is leaning up on his elbows. I pull closer to the window. She stands, comes toward the house, and then is out of sight. I listen for the door but before I hear it, Clint gets up. He yanks Basey out of a hole he’s dug beneath the crab apple.

  I hear her come in. She does not stop in the kitchen. She is quick up the stairs and I feel caught. I pull out my letter. Take it from its envelope. Read through it again. I take up my pen and try to start writing.

  “Hi,” she says, going straight to her bunk.

  Still out back, Floey barks so the other dog yaps and growls. Basey must have gone in because he doesn’t answer.

  “Where were you?” I ask.

  “Outside.”

  I redot my i’s on the page. “Duh. What were you doing outside?”

  She pulls off her shirt—her back to me again—and takes a clean one out of her drawer. “Nothing. Thinking,” she says.

  I start over on a fresh sheet.

  Dear Agatha,

  My sister is a liar. I miss you. I’ll save lots of quarters.

  I slip this page and a square of Mom’s shirt into the envelope I already wrote. I lick the back and smooth it flat, press a Boynton sticker over the seal. I take it down to the mailbox and leave it there for the mailman.

  18

  Vivvy

  “Just hold on,” she says and puts a hand up to make me wait. “Here.” She pulls the cap off a tube of Maybelline lipstick, finds a brown Cover Girl compact, the mirror dusty with powder.

  “Watch in the mirror,” she says, so I hold the compact out in front while Holly runs the color, a pink called Taffy, around my mouth.

  Today is a teacher planning day at our school so Dad brought us to campus for student conferences. He asked me to watch Enid. He likes us with him nowadays.

  So I was on the bench in the hall outside his office, trying to hear him tell a boy who came up the stairs like a sleepwalker that there was just no way he could pass the class after a test as boneheaded as his was. Then down sat Holly to go in next. Enid was here too and when Holly started coming down the hall to us, Enid grabbed her stomach and said real loud, “I’m gonna be sick.” She looked at me. Come on said her face. But Holly is pretty and the first thing she did when she sat down was take the elastic off her braid. She put her fingers into it, untwisting the sections, fluffing out her long hair, kinked and the color of cayenne powder.

  I couldn’t look away.

  So here I am and it’s wrong. Enid is at the end of the hall, coughing, throwing a fit that she thinks is subtle. Finally she heads down the stairwell, which Dad wouldn’t like.

  “You’re a real looker, Vivvy,” Holly says.

  Beneath the hazy residue of powder on Holly’s mirror, my cheeks are bright pink. “I don’t know,” I tell her.

  “What are you, thirteen?” she says.

  “Yeah.” No one ever guesses close to my age. “Almost.”

  Her face is round, her chin full. Her stomach pooches out a little when she leans forward to pick at frayed threads across the left knee of her blue jeans.

  I pull my legs up Indian style on the bench so that we nudge knees.

  The door opens; the boy comes out of Dad’s office. Holly stands. From here, Dad is only hands on top of his desk. One flicks a blue felt pen. The other slides papers in and out of stacks, in and out, then back out and in. Holly picks up her purse and book bag. She reaches behind her head and pulls hand after hand to get all of her hair in front of one shoulder. She goes in. The door shuts and my hand is laid out across the wooden bench, across her seat, and the seat is warm.

  Francie


  The first time I left him was in 1969 and I had made lamb stew. He loved it: forked the cubes of browned meat, devoured three bowls full, sought out extra potatoes fishing his fork into the Crock-Pot, sucked at the ladling spoon, sopped the last of the roux with another crumbling scratch biscuit.

  We sat moony-eyed.

  I became optimistic in these moments of making another person so content; I began to believe love was possible.

  “I have to tell you something,” he said as he washed the dishes.

  I rocked behind him, felt my hip bones against his soft backside.

  “I hate stew.”

  My body went on swaying. I was sure this was the start of a joke.

  “I didn’t know how to tell you,” he said.

  I felt him twist to turn to me, to make this right face-to-face, but I kept my grip and he went on with the sponge and squirted more lemon Joy into the murky water.

  “It’s so . . . dry-tasting, so brown. I have never liked it—I never ate my mother’s. You’re mad now.”

  “No,” I said and stood with him awhile more until he finished scrubbing everything but the ceramic pot, which he left to soak.

  I did not plan to go. In bed he kissed my eyelids and pressed his cheek to my heart, saying how slowly it beat, that I should run marathons.

  I don’t think I spoke.

  “Dream sweetly,” he told me later and I had every intention.

  There was a storm that night, terrible snow so unusual for October in Jaquess. I left him. Only for three days but I left.

  Then I called him.

  “I didn’t know where you were,” Tate said. He was crying. He coughed through loose phlegm.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m coming back as soon as the roads clear.”

  “I didn’t know where you were.”

  “I’m coming, love.”

  “How could I sleep not knowing that?”

  “I’m coming now.” It would have been wise to wait out the weather but as soon as we hung up, I took my bag and got back in the car and drove the six hours north all through bad storm. When I arrived, my knuckles were split across in red grooves for how tightly I’d gripped the steering wheel. I should not have driven; he should not have let me.

  Tate was on the stoop of our building; the top of his head glistened, for now the snow was starting to melt, the air warming into morning. He opened my car door, smiled and kissed me when I stood. Reaching up into the wet flakes in his hair, I kissed his face where his mouth was lost in beard. We went up the stairs, inside our door, and we held to each other. His arms were soft, they were warm.

  I hear him now downstairs talking with the girls but cannot make out their words.

  Enid

  I’m not a copycat, but I take Vivvy’s box of pink notepaper to my bunk.

  Dear Sheldon, I write because I call him Shelly but it doesn’t sound serious enough. I go on:

  You shouldn’t have sat there. If you wanted brownies, you should of gone for them yourself.

  Love,

  Enid

  P.S. I’m not mad.

  P.P.S. Maybe a little.

  P.P.P.S. I still love you.

  •

  Vivvy and I set the table around her, Vivvy singing and sliding on the linoleum in her sock feet. This morning it’s scrambleds and french toast. Daddy sets kisses in Ma’s hair each time he brings a plate to the table, squeezes Vivvy’s shoulder, and pats my back. And Ma, Ma is eating.

  After we clear plates, I’m out in the yard. I’m up the tree. I’m hanging. By my knees. Two hands. One hand. Other hand.

  Sometimes when we used to hang like this and Ma saw us, she put her finger over her lips like a secret to me and snuck up behind Vivvy. She reached way up then and swatted her on the bum and Vivvy always nearly lost her grip and fell. She didn’t, though. But almost.

  “Hey!”

  I snap my neck and scrape my palm twisting to see.

  It’s Clint. “Come here, want to?”

  I pull myself upright on the branch. I sit there a second. “What do you want?” I say.

  “Come here and find out.”

  “No way.”

  “Fine.” Clint shoves his hands deep down in his front pockets, makes tight round fists within them. “I have something,” he says. “You want it?”

  “What is it?”

  He looks up at me. Blond and freckled. His dark eyes squint up into the light breaking the treetop. “Just come here, Enid. God. It’s for you.”

  I start down the tree. I don’t worry he’ll figure out how to climb it. He doesn’t try anymore. My pants cuff snags a low branch and before I can reach down to unhook it, Clint’s hand is there and now he’s holding on to my ankle, kind of guiding me down safe.

  “Hold out your hand,” he says. “And close your eyes.”

  He sets something light and slick in the middle of my palm. It’s warm from being in his pocket.

  “Okay, open.”

  It’s beautiful. Deep goldy yellow, clear, shaped and sized like a dinosaur’s tear. Shiny and warm yellow with two tiny bubbles at one end, so I laugh because it makes me think of pee in the cup for Dr. Smythe.

  “Do you know what it is?” he asks.

  “Glass?”

  “Amber. Look at the inside.”

  I hold it up to the sun and it shines its circle of light onto my wrist, then my arm, then Clint’s cheek as I turn it above us.

  “Look closer,” he says, pulling my hand down toward my face.

  I do. And there within this thing is the most magnificent blue fly I’ve ever seen. The eyes are soft with black fur.

  “Do you like it?” he asks.

  “It’s mine?”

  He nods, then takes my hand and we walk to the forsythia. He pulls back the leggy whips of bush and I am to go in first. There in the gully made by Vivvy, then Floey, then me, Clint and I sit and we kiss.

  Francie

  He slips a hand inside my nightgown, moves up the side of my waist. Where I’ve begun to swell. I feel his big toe in the arch of my left foot, nuzzling there. He kisses my shoulder, my neck. He works his way to my cheek, my lips. I shut my eyes, though it is dark enough here.

  “Stop,” I say. My hand, too, it’s pushing him back, his chest, the center of his heart. He leans back. I can see his eyes well enough to know what he would say if he were saying anything.

  I pull him close. I love you, my head is saying.

  Forehead to forehead. My hands holding his cheeks, the bristling of his beard. His hand is still, holding me through the rumpling of flannel low on my side.

  Tate’s fingers inch down my thigh. “Soft,” he says, and I push him down and turn away.

  19

  Francie

  I come home bearing proper groceries to an empty house today. Floey peers into the first bags I set down just inside the porch door. When I come back with more, the new dog has tipped over one of the sacks and is dragging the plastic-covered loop of kielbasa across the porch floor. I pry that from him and manage to get the rest of the groceries on into the kitchen now. Celery, milk, a loaf of bread, peanut butter, the kielbasa (the plastic punctured and gnawed but mostly intact), green peppers, onion, Kleenex, toilet paper, and Minute Maid freezer cans. Floey lies down out of the way. The new dog gets in my way back and forth between the counter and the fridge, ever hopeful.

  Saved for last, there is one more thing. A little reward for keeping on track: a bag of Chips Ahoy, which I will parcel out in the most reasoned, most minimal amounts. But not yet.

  I go upstairs. I fiddle with the girls’ toothbrushes, shaking them off at the sink and placing them in their holder. Their Crest spit is revolting: a pair of frothy aqua slicks, one on each side of the bowl. I look away, crumple Vivvy’s nighttime paper cup and drop it into the trash on my way out. I consider tidying up their room but can’t face it so I turn, instead, to ours. I yank our sheets down onto the floor and kick them toward the laundry basket. There is a bill on my desk. I pull out the
chair but continue standing to write the check. I take down an envelope and write Martin Greer, DDS, then cap the pen. I leave the checkbook register facedown, open, to remember to record the amount.

  I need a larger project to turn off my head. I get the cleaning bucket and cloths and head back to the girls’ bathroom to scrub off the toothpaste spit. I need gloves and go down to the kitchen for them.

  A moment later, I have a cookie on the scale. Twenty-five grams is way too much. I snap it in half and place the slightly smaller piece back on the scale. Twelve grams of butter and sugar and flour. Too much. I snap it again, repeat and repeat. With an eighth of the cookie on the scale, a sixteenth. Into smaller and smaller crumbs, I break the cookie. It is still so very much.

  I’ll just have a lick of the crumb on my finger. It’s crisp but instantly yields nearly to dough when my tongue wets it. I smash all that remains of this cookie and I lick my thumb and press it into the sharp grit of crumbs. Before I’m done, my thumb feels twice the size—swollen for how I have sucked and gnawed at it.

  Only one. I walk away.

  Vivvy

  There is a dead bear in Dawn’s basement.

  The first time I ride home on Dawn’s bus, as soon as we walk down her basement steps, she shows me the bear. “Touch it,” she says, her hand petting its back.

  It is real: big, brown, has its head on and all its feet with toes and sharp, curved claws. The head is flat across the top and wide, really wide. What I touch are the eyes, which are yellowed, cold, hard, and glossy.

  “The teeth are sharp, see?” She puts her hand flat inside, palm down on that awful tongue that is raised up in an arch like a yawn: pink and stiff, with little white bumps along the edges for tasting once, I suppose.

  “Feel them,” she insists, grabbing for my hand, but I take it back from her.

  “I’m not afraid,” I tell her, but it is the tongue. I don’t want to touch the tongue.