by Ann Angel
Her mother stared at her for a second, then looked away. “That’s not what I’m saying, Lucy.” But the anger had been swept from her voice.
Tears had started to gather in Lucy’s eyes as the truth became obvious. “I don’t want somebody to notice me for the way I look! I want them to notice me. The deep-down me! I don’t want a boy who’s going to leave me as soon as somebody prettier comes along!”
The way Dad left you. The words hung in the air between them, but Lucy didn’t say them out loud. She didn’t need to. Her mother closed her eyes and let her head fall back onto the headrest while Lucy swiped her arm across her face, taking off what makeup remained.
“The world can be hard for a woman,” her mother whispered. “I only want to help you.” Which Lucy believed was the truth.
“Don’t worry,” Lucy said. “What happened to you is not going to happen to me.” She opened the car door and got out. As she walked across the lawn to the front door, she took off the uncomfortable shoes and let her bare feet dance through the tall grass.
On Saturday morning, Lucy woke up early. There was a shoot downtown at noon, her first paying job, but before that she had an appointment, and her mother had agreed to drive her.
The hairdresser swooned over Lucy’s long, pale hair. “You just want the ends trimmed, right?” she asked.
“Nope. I want you to cut it short—very short. The kind of hairdo that doesn’t even need to be combed.”
“Really?” The woman sighed and bit her lip. “I’m afraid you’ll regret it.”
“Not a chance,” Lucy assured her.
Soon, yellowy locks littered the floor. “I would have killed for hair like this at your age,” the hairdresser said sadly.
“Yeah, but I’d just as soon not be murdered for my hair,” Lucy told her.
When the woman finished up, Lucy put on her glasses and looked in the mirror. She ran her hand through the multilayered thicket. It felt good, and she decided it looked right—right for Lucy Furness. It was time for the change; she wasn’t in grade school anymore, but she didn’t intend to be a bimbo stereotype, either. Without the creamy, dreamy hair surrounding her head, it was clear she was nobody’s devilish angel. This was the hairdo of a young woman with a responsible job.
This haircut said, I’m more than you think you see. Look carefully. Blondes can be smart, and smart girls can have cheekbones.
Anita Riggio
I
I just wanted to see.
I only wanted to get to the very edge and look back at what I could leave, what I would leave. As if it mattered to anybody.
I remember beer cans. A pile of them in a clump of grass, glinting in the headlights.
And shards of silver slicing the river, cool and solid as swords.
Something skimmed my forearm. A carp? A trout?
Sleeping with the fishes.
Maeve always laughed when some doughnut-nosed movie tough guy made remarks about sleeping with the fishes.
Then, black water . . . the tug of current—come along, come along—and beautiful, blessed silence.
So this is what it’s like to die . . .
Until the thrashing—an arm under my chin. Drew’s voice close to my ear—“Jesus. Jesus”—and him pulling me onto the bank, both of us coughing, sputtering. Then I heard Drew sobbing, saying, “You are messed up, Roscoe! Man, you are messed up . . .”
I opened my eyes then, looked straight up into the crown of that huge swamp maple, beyond the silhouette of black branches and leaves, to the stars.
I’d almost done it.
Jesus. God. I’d almost done it.
II
“So, you and Drew put the kayaks in the water yet?”
“Nah.”
“How come?”
“I dunno.”
“You gonna get them in the water soon?”
“Maybe.”
Maeve and I were walking side by side down the lane toward the river. I didn’t get how she wasn’t afraid of me, of It, especially when everybody else—including me—seemed to be.
“Can I ask you something, Roscoe?” Maeve said.
“Probably not.”
“What were you thinking?”
“What was I thinking when?”
“That night at the river. Did you really want to die, or did you just not want to deal?”
“Christ . . .”
“I mean, come on, Roscoe. You couldn’t have thought that you could just check out being dead and then decide, no thanks, catch you later.”
“I didn’t think, OK? I just did it. Jesus, Maeve. Does everything that comes into your head have to come out your mouth?”
“Yup. Most of the time. Oh, look!” Maeve stood perfectly still, one arm outstretched, the other hand shielding the delight in her eyes. “The pair of cardinals. They could be oracles, you know.”
I picked a long blade of reedy grass, glancing in the direction Maeve pointed. “Oracles, huh?”
“Yup. Frank and Til, my grandparents. Got to be.” She laughed. “That male is one cocky little guy.”
“Uh-huh.” I walked away before she spun out on all that spiritual energy crap.
Maeve caught up, snatching a crab apple from a low-hanging branch. “You know you choose this, Roscoe,” she said.
“Choose what?”
“You choose to stay closed off.”
“Who’d you hear that from—an oracle?”
“We only ever get two choices: deal or don’t. There’s help for depression. Therapy and meds. Or herbs. Acupuncture, even—”
“Give it a rest, OK?” I grabbed Maeve’s crab apple and pitched it at the heads of some cattails. “Don’t you get on my case now, too. I’m fine. All right? Everything is just peachy.”
Maeve didn’t flinch. “You ever figure what this is costing you, Roscoe?”
I kicked a pebble; I had to kick something. If Drew had tried to ask this stuff, I might have kicked him. “Uh, I dunno. Maybe a buck fifty?”
She gave me the raised eyebrow while she decided whether or not to advance the troops. “Nice. Boy, you just keep that up.”
We continued side by side down the path.
“Hey.” Maeve flicked my arm. “I have an idea. How about we play bingo?”
“You have sincerely been hanging out at that church too much.”
“Not that kind of bingo.” She shoved a mass of dark curls away from her face. “I read it in a magazine. This would be ‘Bingo for the Soul.’ ”
“And you have been reading those sappy selfhelp ‘Soup’ books again, too, I can tell.”
Maeve downshifted to tank mode. “We make two bingo boards—one for you, one for me—and fill in the little squares with stuff that annoys us. Like in the cafeteria, for example, when you set down your tray and the entire table shuts up.”
I stopped. “You making fun of me now?”
“Absolutely.” Maeve bumped me with her hip. “C’mon. It’s a coping strategy. Let’s see . . . what else annoys Peter Roscoe?”
I started walking again.
Maeve bulldozed ahead, oblivious. “We could include a square for that Dina girl in chorus, who’s always asking you, ‘So, how are you, Peter?’ ”
“Man, she is so annoying . . .”
“Yeah. See? And—”
“Minelli, who asks me right in front of everybody, do I need more time for my take-home exam.”
“Right!”
Our two shadows stretched out over the bumpy gravel path. Maeve was nearly skipping over mine.
“There should be a square for my mom, who sighs every time she looks at me,” I said.
“OK. A square for your mother. Good.” Maeve stopped, feet rooted, hands planted on her hips. “So, the first one to get bingo gets a prize.”
“What’s the prize?”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to work on that.”
Her chin went up. She sniffed the air, turned, and found a fat cluster of honeysuckle. She put her face to it
. “Mmm. Just smell this, Roscoe.”
“I can smell it from here.”
Maeve pulled a slim gold trumpet of a bloom from the vine. “You can actually taste the honey, you know.” She held it out to me.
“No thanks. I’m trying to quit.”
“Ah, Roscoe,” she said. “You just don’t know what you’re missing.”
“Sure I do. You’re keeping a running tally.”
And I stood there with my hands in my pockets, watching Maeve take a hit off a honeysuckle blossom.
III
It rained so much in July and August that even the weather guys were complaining. I didn’t care, though. I was spending serious hours in the basement watching Turner Classic Movies.
I like old movies. Nothing really hideous ever happens on-screen. You can depend on that. I saw To Kill a Mockingbird twice in one day. You’ve got to appreciate a dad like Atticus Finch. Not that I’m a big expert. Not that I ever had any kind of dad at all.
One afternoon, my mother set her green plastic laundry basket on the shag rug, perched at the edge of the futon, and watched Brando in On the Waterfront doing “I-coulda-been-a-contender.” When they cut to a commercial, she sighed and started folding a load of my T-shirts. “Marlon Brando was so handsome when he was young . . . time changes everything, Peter,” she said. “For bad and for good.”
“Nice, Ma. Thanks.”
She made a move to brush my cheek with the back of her hand, thought better of it, then hefted the laundry basket. She tried to sound casual when she suggested that I go out for a run or a walk or ice cream or air.
“You’re going to get moldy down here, Peter,” she said.
I shrugged.
She sighed again and went on upstairs.
I wanted to tell her I was sorry for making her worry. I wanted to tell her I was sorry for acting like a jerk. Instead, I fished around between the cushions and found my bingo card.
Mom sighing. Square B-4. I made an X.
Drew came over one day during This Property Is Condemned. He planted himself and his basketball in front of the tube just as the mother showed up to haul Natalie Wood back to the boarding house.
“So, you plan on swimming this year, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Roscoe. You’re gonna quit the team?”
“You’re in the way, Drew.”
“What is up with you, man?”
“Nothing much.”
“Roscoe, what are you doing?”
“Watching Natalie Wood. And you’re still in the way.”
Drew stood over me for a moment more. “This is bullshit . . .” he muttered, then took a seat on the futon.
He sprawled there, palming the basketball hard, one hand to the other. The slapping noise was annoying, rude even, and I wanted to holler at him, Hey, have a little respect, would ya? Natalie Wood died, and now her little sister’s got nothing left of her but one old dress and some stupid beads!
I didn’t holler, though. I just fingered my bingo card.
“What is wrong with you?” (All variations.) N-2.
Gestures of impatience, intolerance. O-5.
Whoo-boy. Two Xs. A bonus day.
When the final credits rolled, Drew stood up. “I’ll see ya around, Roscoe,” he said.
“Yeah. Later.”
Drew didn’t stop by after that.
Maeve came every afternoon after her babysitting job. She arrived at four twenty-five; you could set a watch by her. I clocked every sound from my barrel chair: the slam of her car door, the murmur of female voices in the kitchen, the scrape of a chair across the linoleum floor above my head, the click of the basement doorknob, the weariness in my mother’s voice, “Peter, Maeve is here to see you.” Then, the thunder of Maeve coming down the stairs, busting into my bunker.
“Hey” was all she’d say before she threw herself onto the futon. Sometimes I could hear Maeve swallowing unsaid words. Sometimes I could feel words rising up into my chest, but they never did make it out of my mouth.
All summer long, while Natalie Wood and Gregory Peck flickered on the dim screen in the basement, while I listened to footfalls on the floor above, the water trickling in the pipes, the washing machine chugging, the dryer whirring, and the voice in my head whispering, You’re worthless, Roscoe, Maeve just sat beside me, twirling a strand of her hair and letting me be.
But one day early in August, Maeve stopped coming.
I didn’t call her. Didn’t see the point.
I figured even she had had enough.
IV
I overheard the news in the hallway, on the first day of school, from Dina and her stupid friend.
“So, you heard about Maeve?”
“What about her?”
“She has some kind of weird bone cancer.”
“Omigod. Cancer?”
“That’s what I heard.”
“My grandmother died of cancer. Is Maeve’s—like—fatal?”
“I don’t know, but she wasn’t in homeroom, and somebody said she’s been in some big hospital in the city for two weeks.”
“Wait. Remind me again. Who is Maeve?”
“She’s the one with the really wild, curly black hair. She sang second soprano in chorus last year. She’s supposed to be manager of the boys’ swim team?”
“That sort of dumpy girl with the big mouth and the bigger laugh?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, I know who she is. That’s too bad about the cancer . . .”
“Yeah. And it looks like the boys’ swim team might need a new manager . . .”
“You are evil, Dina. You really are.”
I bolted for the bathroom, slammed into a stall, and puked.
V
Maeve’s mom dispatched the trick-or-treaters, then held out a full-size Hershey’s bar to me. “Live it up, Peter,” she said. “Maeve is in the family room.”
“Bingo,” Maeve said.
“No way. Let me see.”
She pointed to the glass on the table and made a “gimme” gesture. I handed her the banana pineapple juice; she handed over her bingo board. “I do not lie.” Maeve sipped her juice through the curly pink plastic straw I’d brought her. “The eyelashes did it. See?”
I scanned the card. G-4. Losing your eyelashes.
I glanced up at Maeve, still sipping. She batted her naked eyelids.
“OK,” I said. “You win.”
“Ha.”
Maeve settled back on the half dozen Indian-print pillows behind her. The raspberry paisleys and turquoise curlicues looked too cheery against her shiny bald head. Three small beauty marks on her scalp made a tiny clover just above where her hairline had been. Patches of blue pooled in the hollows of her cheeks and on either side of her forehead.
If this had been a movie, there would have been violins—or a damn oboe, at least.
But this was no old movie.
Maeve unwrapped my Hershey’s bar and broke off a piece. “So what’s my prize, Roscoe?”
I looked at the bingo board in my hands. I shook my head. “I dunno.”
“How about glitter nail polish?”
“Sure.”
“Or a Snickers bar.”
“Sure.”
“Or a rhinestone butterfly hair clip.”
“Sure.”
She waited.
I glanced at her. If Maeve had had an eyebrow, she would have raised it.
“Ah shit, Maeve . . . I can’t do this.”
“Can’t do what?”
“This. Play stupid bingo. Be with you. Sit here, while you—you—” I couldn’t look at her.
“Jeez, Roscoe,” she said quietly. “You’ve really got it rough.”
“What?”
“Are you kidding me? Poor you?” She bolted upright. “Dammit! I sat with you all last summer while you were deciding whether or not to value the very thing I could be losing.”
“You are not losing.”
“I could be losing, Roscoe
! I’m scared that I’m losing. I’m scared and I’m pissed off and I hate this and I hate that you refuse to see it. Would you just open your eyes? Look at me!”
“I am looking at you, Maeve.”
“No! I mean, see me.”
“I do see you. And I think—I think you’re beautiful.”
“Right.” Maeve collapsed back on her pillows. She closed her eyes. After a long moment, she opened them and turned her head toward me. “So, just your luck, huh, Roscoe? To love a bald girl?”
I moved over to the hassock, lifted Maeve’s bunny-slippered feet, and held them in my lap. “Yeah . . . just my luck to love a bald girl.”
Maeve blinked. She fingered a strand of fringe on the prayer shawl some lady in church had made for her. “Yeah . . .” she said.
I tossed the cardboard then, and sent it sailing across the room like a Frisbee. “Time to make a new bingo board.”
VI
Maeve died seven weeks later, more spirit than body.
I sat in the back of the funeral parlor for the duration of the wake: two to five and seven to ten. I stared at that closed casket and tried to fathom where all the life had gone that had been in the body now sealed in that shiny wood box.
Seems the entire high school processed up that aisle. People came who never even really knew Maeve. Dina bawled the whole time she was in the viewing line, and was sobbing so hard by the time she got to the front that some other girl had to sit her down and rub her back.
Drew showed. After he shook hands with Maeve’s family, he came and sat with me for a while.
“Hey, Roscoe.”
“Hey.”
“This is tough, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry, man. I mean, I know you two were tight.”
I looked at him.
“I’m really sorry, man.”
And Drew sat with me while I cried.
VII
I paddle slowly past the big swamp maple and listen to my oars dipping in and out of the river. A fat carp skims the surface, flipping his tail. When I spot a pair of cardinals, I pull up and listen to the cocky little male sing his cocky little song.
Later, when I walk up the lane from the river, I stop and press my face into a tangle of honeysuckle.
A feisty little honeybee lights on a nearby blossom. I nip off a flower, taste the sweetness.
And I think, Bingo, Maeve. This one’s for you.