by Terry Reed
After Mary Parker’s experiment ended, my lips kept on going. They grew fuller and fuller until I finally had to go to Mary Parker and ask, “Is this like a quirk?”
But Mary Parker said not to worry, that very full lips could be a very good sign, that they could signify the lush, outward expression of a flowering, inner expressive self. I thought that made my lips sound nice.
But Mother didn’t think they were nice. First she accused me of pouting. Then she said I was trying my best to look like a “tart.” I had to ask her what a tart was, as I’d always thought it was either a rather attractive French pie, or a small turnover Clarine let you make from leftover pastry dough when you were little. Mother wouldn’t answer me though. I had to ask Mary Parker. I wasn’t too flattered when I heard the additional definition either.
I joked to Cabot that my lips seemed to be causing a “flap.” Of course I knew it wasn’t funny when I said it, but that’s the very reason Cabot was supposed to laugh. That’s the way we do it, the way it had always been done. But Cabot just said she’d give me an even fatter lip if I didn’t stop looking at them in the mirror. Matt, for once on my side, said I looked hot, except he said it a lot, a lot in front of Mother, and of course that wasn’t too constructive. But that’s just Matt.
Everyone had an opinion about my lips, because nothing can happen at home without everyone having an opinion about it. Except Dad. Actually, he sort of had one too. After I got caught for using my new lips to kiss Rey McDowell, he had a talk with me in the library. But all he said was “Boyce, it’s come to my attention that you’re a very pretty girl.” Then he said it’s best not to drink on dates. In the future of course. When it was legal.
Where I am is on a balcony on a kind of McMansion in Florida, where mostly what I do is sit in a deck chair at night and stare like a zombie at the full moon. It’s out there now surfing on a wave, hanging ten, falling all over itself doing the old razzle-dazzle soft-shoe hard sell that it’s supposed to be paradise here. Someone should put it out of its misery.
The McMansion is Mickey Knight’s, and of course her father’s, the brain surgeon. Mother got the idea to send me down here for the summer after she found out Mickey Knight was no longer my best friend; Mary Parker, the bus driver’s daughter was. She also found out about skipping class and going to the million movies downtown. For that I will be sent to boarding school in the fall.
Meanwhile I’m banished here to the McMansion with Mickey Knight and her father, who’s nicknamed “The General,” though nobody tells why. “The Admiral” would be more like it, since he spends all his time on a boat, killing fish. I have to go with him and Mickey tomorrow morning at five AM to kill some myself, and I’m so worried about all the carnage, I can’t sleep.
• • •
So since I’m up anyway, I’ve been thinking of doing some thinking. Not logical thinking, of course. I’ll think everything through illogically. Then I’ll be all set for later in life and the real world, when I’m not banished to a McMansion anymore.
At the top of the list is Dad, like what’s his story, and at the bottom, after Matt, is my lips. Frankly, I kind of liked the way Cabot said she’d give me an even fatter lip. I actually liked that. Of course I didn’t tell her so, but I think of it sometimes. I miss Cabot and Clarine especially, and little Lucy maybe even a little more, and even Matt quite a lot come to think of it, and of course Luke. He’s such a nice kid, and so eager and stuff, with his baseball mitt and his football and his big plans to go play the game, you couldn’t help but miss Luke. I’m not sure I miss Mother, though. And Dad, I’m putting him in limbo, since he could have come to my rescue but instead had a Scotch.
Cabot said I was really missing what was actually happening with our family because I was blinded from looking in mirrors. It’s kind of embarrassing to be told that. Even though I secretly liked the fat lip thing, I was sort of embarrassed about that other part of it. I mean, I was just looking. But maybe that’s bad, and that’s why I worked up this list for thinking tonight.
Dad did this strange thing in spring. He sold a blue Buick. I found out when Cabot came to my room and said in a tragic voice, “Dad lost a Buick.”
That killed me, when she said that. How do you lose a Buick? I knew what she was talking about, but I still made her tell me how you lose a Buick, like please spell that out for me, I’m deeply confused. Maybe it’s still at the mall? Did you check the airport? She said it meant he had to sell it because he needed money.
So that’s how you lose a Buick, I said. I have to admit, I was fairly sarcastic about it.
But Cabot still went around moaning that Dad lost a Buick. I told her she had too much imagination and all, that she better use it instead to sketch pictures of pictures of real people—that is, beautiful models from magazines—at which I already said she is very good.
Except the next time I found her sketching, she was doing ugly people, disjointed people, tormented people, with things like triangles for heads. She explained it by claiming she was “into reality,” though personally I thought the beautiful models more real. Anyway, the way she kept moaning how Dad “lost” a Buick, even if you didn’t believe her, it might still make you plan to think about that.
Then something else happened concerning one of the cars. Dad accidentally sort of burned up the Dream Machine. It happened when he finally drove it to work in downtown Cleveland. Before that, he’d tried it out on little hops up the road, but on any errand of consequence, he’d still always defer to one of the two remaining blue Buicks.
But one Friday, he must have decided to form some sort of permanent bond with his father’s old white Mercury, because he took off in it for work in downtown Cleveland. And he looked confident too, going down the driveway.
As he always did with a blue Buick, he parked in the Terminal Tower’s underground garage. But he must have been a little ambivalent about the whole bonding thing, because just as he was about to climb out of the Dream Machine, Dad fumbled his cigarette. Then he neglected to pick up the part that was lit.
When Dad returned to the garage at five-thirty that afternoon, he was greeted by an exhilarated garage attendant with a smudged face and a charred jumpsuit who described in detail his heroic rescue of the smoldering car. They towed it home and put it back in its slot in the four-car garage. We all tromped out to see it. It looked like an ash.
After dinner that night, Matt told a little circle of us that Dad had tried to “torch” the Dream Machine. Wide-eyed, we asked what he meant. “I mean arson,” he said, blowing it out long, as if exhaling fire. “Your Dad’s going nuts.”
Now he was our Dad. Classic Matt.
“Rrrrr-son,” Matt said again, extra long.
Cabot said, “Who are you? Satan?”
Luke said, “You’re scaring me, Matt.”
Lucy, highly offended, said, “Maybe you’re nuts.”
Me, I stayed out of it. I thought he might have a point.
Then Dad sold his concert grand Steinway piano. But Matt didn’t claim he was crazy and Cabot didn’t claim he did it for money. We all knew the real reason why. His friend Mr. Carter had died. I would have sold the Steinway too. Anybody would have.
Mr. Carter had been coming Saturdays in his old Ford to visit Dad since we were babies. He came to play the saxophone while Dad played the piano. I had fallen in love with him when I was two, the minute I first saw him. Every time he came to the house carrying his sax, I would run and jump on top of him. If he sat down, I would crawl onto his lap. If he stood up, I would cling to his leg. If he tried to go, I would drag behind him, attached to his hand, his coattail, whatever I lucked onto that day. When he played his sax, I sat next to my father on the piano bench, gazing up at his fabulous friend, my feet kicking in time over the edge of the bench, my hands alternately reaching for his shiny brass instrument and plunging deep into the folds of my dress.
“She’s developing an ear for music,” Dad told Mother proudly, his fingers dancing all t
he way down the keyboard.
But Mother knew better. She repeatedly made the trip to the end of the living room to lift me off the piano bench, or pry me off Mr. Carter. Finally she squeezed my arms and looked in my eyes and ordered me to no longer glue myself to our guest. From then on, I spent Saturdays piled in a heap at his feet. And now, fourteen years later, he had died.
So we knew it was in honor of Mr. Carter that Dad sold the Steinway. But it wasn’t just Saturdays that were quieter now. Dad was. He went to the library every night after work and had Scotch. But then he’d come out for dinner in a pretty good mood.
The moon has now hopped off that wave and is sitting on top of a palm tree down the beach like a smug white coconut.
Reclining here every night on my deck chair on my bedroom balcony like this, I’m kind of hoping I look like I’ve rather had a breakdown. I have a summer lap blanket tucked over my legs and the white curtain from my room billows out from the door, fluttering loose like an unhinged sail. My hair, now way past my shoulders, flies in the wind. I’m hoping if anyone passes by on the beach and sees me, they’ll think I’ve been sent here to recuperate, to breathe the salt air from a deck chair and stare at the open sea as if I’ve just come out of a coma. I’m hoping they think, Too tragic, too young.
I got caught for kissing Reynolds McDowell after the spring dance at the Shaker Heights Country Club. Rey is Matt’s friend who lives up the street. I’ve known him since he came to my crib and gave me a ball peen hammer to play with. Now he’s tall and cool and has blue eyes that widen when he talks, but especially when you talk. I think his expanding eyes kind of give him away, like he’s not so cool as you think, which personally I think is extra cool. I know I love him now, but I still say it was Mother’s fault I had to keep kissing him to find out for sure. Mother had always said when the man you thought you loved first kissed you, you’d feel this very definitive electric shock. Sort of a zap. And that’s how you’d know.
The dance was outside because of spring and there were heated tents and live music and old chaperones who sat in the dead white men’s portrait room in the clubhouse drinking themselves under the table. Outside was for junior members and their friends and one friend of Rey’s was a southern boy named Calhoun who wore a seersucker jacket with battered jeans and made mint juleps in the parking lot off the back of his rusty blue pickup truck. So Rey brought a couple of Calhoun’s special drinks. Then we slipped away from the pickup, and took off our shoes for the grass.
When Rey kissed me on the golf course everything was slightly out of focus and distant and pretty, the lights strung along the inside of the white canvas tents and the music and the feel of his mouth on my cheek.
That was the problem, only on the cheek. Rey has a reputation for being what’s sometimes called a lady-killer, but that’s all he tried to lady-kill me. So I kept touching my face, trying to decide if I’d felt the supposed very definitive electric shock, and therefore was truly in love.
After we took our shoes and went back to the tent and the whole rest of the dance too, I kept trying to decide if I’d felt the very definitive electric shock, or what. I realized Rey would have to kiss me again or I would never be sure.
We were quite late coming home. Rey drove me, and then parked his father’s Oldsmobile five hundred feet from the entrance to our driveway, behind the azalea bushes. But he still didn’t lady-kill me. Instead he killed the lights, slowly and mysteriously put a finger to his lips, and opened his door. “What is it?” I whispered. “Why are we stopped way over here?”
“Why else. Your mother.”
Oh. Then this was actually a very good idea. This way, Mother, who waited on the front stair landing every dance for me to come home, couldn’t possibly hear the car. I could just slip in the back door and up the back stairs and go to sleep, and if when I woke in the morning I found Mother still on the landing, I could just say very sleepily and very innocently, “Gee, Mom, why are you hanging out there?”
It would have worked. It was my own fault that it didn’t. Just as Rey was about to climb out of the car, I got extremely curious again about the very definitive electric shock. Rey apparently had no plans to kiss me again, so instead I leaned over and kissed him, just like he had done to me, on the cheek. Then I drew back, trying to decide if I had been zapped.
Rey had an odd reaction. After I kissed him, he sat with his head slumped, staring at the steering wheel. I thought I’d hurt him or something. I asked if he was okay and he shook his head no, then slumped it again. Finally he came to life and groped for the door handle, but then his hand sort of slid down. The hand went into the air and landed on the steering wheel, then it slid off. Then it came up and was on my face, and his mouth was on my mouth, and didn’t slide off. And it was kind of eternal almost, except in the most exquisite middle of it, Rey leapt about ten feet out of the car. “Honey, I’m taking you home.”
He’d called me Honey. I felt a very definitive electric shock.
At the back door, Rey forgot all about Mother and any more good ideas. I was halfway in the door, but he pulled me back out. Then I was up against the house, and his mouth tasted of sugar and bourbon and mint, from Calhoun’s juleps. I somehow remembered what Rey forgot and I pulled myself away and ran in the door.
It still might have worked. But I had one bare foot safely on the back stairs, my slingback shoes slung over my finger, when I suddenly became very curious. Mother wasn’t crazy enough to still be on the landing at this hour, was she? She would have given up and gone to bed, wouldn’t she? She would have decided to deal with me in the morning, right?
I opened the front hall door a crack, slipped in to adjust to the darkness, and squinted up at the landing. And she wasn’t there. I got a little bolder. I tiptoed to the bottom of the stairs, looked up at the landing, and she still wasn’t there. And that satisfied my curiosity: my mother wasn’t crazy. So what I did, I took the path of least resistance. Rather than go to all the trouble of turning around and going with the back stairs and the original plan, I slung my finger with the shoes over my shoulder and simply cruised right up the front stairs. And there on the landing from the shadows near the curtains, here came my mother, pouncing on me like a panther.
I’m not going into it further. It’s too scary. But I got severely shaken by the shoulders, rocked, sort of back and forth like a rocking horse getting a good workout from a kid who didn’t like it anymore. It wasn’t painful or anything, but each time I rocked forth, it was closer to Mother’s face, and she started sniffing. I tried to rock back when I realized, but it was too late. She had already sniffed out the kisses laced with bourbon and mint. Then there was that chat with Dad in the library, and, later that very week, the badly timed call from the headmistress at school. And almost the next thing I knew, I was here at the McMansion.
I’m getting quite carried away with this breakdown idea. Maybe if I can manage one, I won’t have to go to boarding school in the fall. But the truth is, I’m wondering if I already had a sort of breakdown of sorts. I guess I know when it happened. It was after Mr. Carter died. I awoke in the middle of the night and remembered. And it didn’t feel right to just go back to sleep. I had once loved him, after all. Even though I was two and he was over fifty, I had. And now he had died, and it seemed something should be done, some special honor should be paid, but I didn’t know what. So I got out of bed and went downstairs in the dark.
I roamed around for a while, through the dining room and the living room. I sat down at the piano, since Dad hadn’t sold it yet. I pretended to play the keys. But the imaginary music I made from memories of him there didn’t seem to hold any answers, so I started roaming around again. I guess I couldn’t find what I was looking for in the house, so then I pulled a sweater from a peg in the back hall and I drifted outside.
I flicked on the outdoor lights and walked down to the reflection pool with the naked Little-Boy Statue, and looked back up at the house. All the windows were dark and the house looked excep
tionally spooky and large. Then, for no real reason, I headed for the garage and when I got there I rolled up all four of its doors.
There were two Buicks left, plus the Dream Machine, now completely restored and repainted, from the time Dad had torched it.
I finished opening garage doors and started walking back and forth in front of all the cars, as if I were a teacher or something, a teacher on the verge of giving a meaningful lecture on the final day of school. But I wasn’t talking at the moment, because I was thinking up what I was planning to say. Then I paused, just like some teachers, for dramatic effect. But I started walking again when I couldn’t think what was meaningful to say. I could almost hear the cars, like kids, collectively sigh. I figured it must be pretty tough to be a car parked in a garage, and then to get hit with a bad teacher on top of it all.
I continued pacing back and forth in front of all the cars. I was remembering a poem Mary Parker had assigned back during the experiment. It was about a flower in a “crannied wall” and the poet, he goes and plucks the flower, and holds it and looks at it there in his hand. Then the poet says, “Flower, but if I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.” Mary Parker had urged me to commit that poem to memory, as she said it held a simple but all-important principle, a principle that could be applied to anything in the world. She said that’s what a true principle did, because it was universal.
So now I was thinking, What about things such as Dream Machines and blue Buicks? Could the universal principle be applied to a family car?
I began walking faster, thinking, it’s a universal principle. If I could understand what you are, root and all and all in all, I would know what God and man is. I kept going back and forth, walking faster and faster in front of the cars in the garage.