by Laurie Fox
I leapt to my feet and batted away her hands. “I’m still waiting, Mummy. But he’s forgotten all about me. Eleven years ago he promised to return for me. It’s been eleven fucking years! I mean, what could have possibly come up that was so important, so completely demanding of his time every minute of every day?”
For eleven years, I told myself, some battle or siege, fire or flood, must have displaced Peter’s memory of me. For I was his greatest love—not counting Mummy and Grandmother Jane and Great-Nana Wendy. At the very least, I was third runner-up.
Mother flung her arms around my neck like a lover. I picked up her sweat, its dizzying top note of rose oil. “Sweetie, Peter’s affections for you were real. Are real. But so is his bloody narcissism. Really, I thought we’d been through this countless times. At least forty, eighty times.”
“No, that was you and your mother, Mummy.”
“Not true,” she said with a heavy heart. “I don’t have a mother. I was sprung from the loins of creativity itself!”
“That’s baloney and you know it. Anyway, stop trying to make things right. They’re not hunky or dory. Not even close.”
“All right, love. Let’s workshop this issue.” I raised an ironic eyebrow and she pulled on my bangs. “Have you picked up the von Franz yet? You know, the textbook I borrowed from the library?”
“You mean stole?”
“Well, it’s a seminal work and we can’t afford seminal works. Not since Dummy, I mean Daddy, stopped paying alimony.”
“You mean, not since you dropped off the best-seller list.” I stuck out my tongue.
“You brat. I’ll have you know that The Problem of the Puer Aeternus is Marie-Louise von Franz’s masterpiece. It explains why Daddy and Peter and your dead grandfather are all so—screwed up.”
I stared at her blankly.
“Perhaps you haven’t ventured beyond the book’s cover?”
“Oh Mummy, that stings.”
“Well, the photograph on the jacket—of the Bronze Statue of Youth—is clearly arousing. I know that looking at him does me a world of good—”
“Mother, the point?”
“The point is spelled out by the book’s subtitle: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood. In other words, Peter is a big baby. The poor dear can’t evolve.”
“Oh, that’s deep, that’s really helpful.” I tore free of her arms.
“Sweetie, Peter’s no different from those surfers who monopolize the beach in Santa Cruz—charismatic, yet startlingly empty inside. You can never possess him. He belongs to nature.”
“I don’t wish to possess anybody. I just hate being forgotten. How dare he.” I kicked at a rock and watched it break into bits. “Look!” I twirled around. “I’m stunted too, just like Peter. Except I’m stuck in hell, not paradise.”
“Now aren’t we being a touch melodramatic?”
“I have a degree in melodrama, Mummy. Don’t you remember? Perhaps you’ve forgotten me too.”
“Oh, poor nobby no-mates! You slay me.” Then she pretend-fainted, throwing herself down on the dusty trail—she always could outperform me. Yet Margaret was the only known Darling who hadn’t succumbed to madness: her medley of lovers, pre- and post-Dudley, had made certain she got attention around the clock. Of all the Darling women, Mummy alone had the confidence of the Truly Loved—or Madly Worshiped.
“Sweetheart,” she said, “do keep your heart open, won’t you?”
I lay down on the trail next to her, caring nothing about the dirt in my hair, on my clothes, up my nose. We must have looked like two women felled by a deer hunter.
“My heart is closed for the summer, Mummy. I just don’t believe they’re out there, those boys who allegedly grow up. Despite my limited experience, it’s clear to me that men are eternal babes in the wood....”
. . . outstretched on the earth’s floor, I sensed the planet spinning ever-so-slightly, inching along in its trip around the sun. I must have dozed off. But there was something strange about my sleep: a raven-haired boy loomed over me. At least his shadow did. When I cried out, he had the nerve to plunk down next to me, setting his muscular limbs alongside my scrawny ones. Oddly enough, I was thirteen again, not yet fully developed.
Squinting up at the sun, my eyes took in a world of unparalleled beauty: the sky was a most serene periwinkle, dotted with fluffy cotton clouds that appeared to spell out my name. (Perhaps my own narcissism had gotten the best of me.) And yet it was snowing too! Crystals the size of snow cones fell on the ground to my right. I shivered, then was warmed by a current of temperate air. Encircled by desert and jungle, forest and lagoon, I had to laugh: this place was as familiar as the ring on my finger. I had forgotten so much!
The boy and I giggled conspiratorially.
“Why it’s my biggest fan!” I teased, and reached over to tickle him on the belly.
“No it isn’t,” he said, pulling away. “I’m my own biggest fan. See?” He waved his hands overhead, creating a luscious breeze; it carried the hint of mint and lemon.
“What a grand fan you make,” I said.
The boy brayed, then bounded up and began dancing a free-form jig, one that today would appear more punk than folkloric. “I’m grand, I’m so grand,” he sang, so many times I was persuaded to pull an ugly face. Before I could comment on the boy’s revolting love affair with himself, he stuck a banana in my mouth—one freshly plucked off the tree to our left. He fed it to me slowly, and it was delicious.
“Thriz izz so grood,” I said.
“Sorry, can’t understand you. You really shouldn’t speak with food in your mouth.”
“Oh yeah?” I countered after a final swallow.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blimey, I’m a Beatle!”
“Hardly.” I scowled.
The youth scrambled up the banana tree and swung athletically from its lowest branch. I bolted up from the ground, and was about to tickle the boy’s bare feet when he recoiled. “Naff off,” he said.
“Wherever did you pick up such language?” I scolded.
“From your mum, who else?” With his lips he blew a raspberry—how sophomoric—and then began crooning “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” until I planted a palm over his lips.
“And just who exactly is this person—the she who loves you?” I taunted. The love of his life was standing right in front of his nose, yet the boy was bloody oblivious.
“The she who loves me?” he repeated, voice muffled. “Couldn’t tell you.” He shrugged. Then he bit into the flesh of my palm.
“Ow!” I cried, withdrawing my hand.
“But you can tell me something,” he said.
“Yes?” I said, anticipating another bite or perhaps some vain request. Against my better judgment I drew closer.
“You could tell me that blinding good story again—the one about the Beatles coming to America? Plee-eze,” he pleaded, kneeling for emphasis.
“Oh, all right,” I groaned.
We sat on a log cushioned with daisies—a very odd log. And though I assured the boy that all mothers read to their children in an intimate fashion, he refused to lay his head on my lap. Of course, I hated him for that.
“Once upon a time,” I began, with all the energy I could marshal in the face of romantic disappointment, “there were four talented lads from Liverpool who could make music like the gods. They flew to America on Pan Am and on February 7th, 1964, they landed at John Fitzgerald Kennedy International Airport, where a gaggle of screaming mimis awaited them on the tarmac.”
“Stop.” The boy extended his hand like a crossing guard.
“What, you’re bored already?”
“No, it’s a corker of a story. It’s just, I need to remind you about tickling me. And putting your hand on my mouth.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t.”
“What?” I asked.
“I said, don’t ever touch me again. I am not to be touched.”
I WENT to s
wat his hand, but there was no boy sitting beside me or hovering overhead, only the midday sun in a cerulean sky, warming my cheeks and highlighting my shock. I brushed the sleep from my eyes—I’d been sleeping?—and turned my chin to face Mother. She was arranged fetchingly on the ground, skirt fanned out as if she were Scarlett O’Hara. “You were saying, dear?” she prodded.
“What, Mummy?” I rummaged through my thoughts. “Oh, right. I was saying that I’ve decided to find true happiness in being alone. I no longer expect to be pleasantly surprised by men. And I can’t carry a torch for a man who doesn’t exist. It isn’t fair!”
“Wherever do you get these ideas?” she said, sitting upright.
“From you, Mummy. From you.”
Her cheeks were smudged with soil now and her topknot was in a tumult. To tell the truth, she looked sexy.
I remained draped on the path, vowing never to rise again. Of course, I made vows like this the way other daughters promise to brush their teeth and go to bed early. Crossing my arms defensively, I closed my eyes to the world and tried to imagine nothing, something I wasn’t good at.
“Coming through!” called a sweet, high-pitched voice, interrupting my little stab at serenity. Dust streamed from a pair of navy-blue Converse sneakers that were attached to the longest legs I’d ever laid eyes on. The legs were planted like a bean stalk a few inches from my waist. “I said, hello down there. Guys?”
I looked up to meet the haunted eyes of a young man with a bird’s nest of ice-blonde curls. A so-called grown-up. He appeared to be carrying some sort of portable reel-to-reel, and his ears were encased in geeky, oversized headphones. Yet another male tuned in to a fantasy world. But, then again, he was gaunt like me!
“Hey, are you guys okay?” he asked.
Mother sprang up from the ground. “Clearly, we are not guys. But, yes, we’re quite well. In fact, we are tip-top! And you, are you tip-top?”
“What?” he said, shading his eyes. I stretched my Patti Smith tee-shirt down over my stomach, and slowly got to my feet. “What?” he repeated.
“Well, if you’d remove the bloody headgear and look in my direction, you could hear the bloody question, couldn’t you?” Mother said.
The young man shook off the headphones in an aw-shucks sort of way; he set his Nagra tape deck on the ground.
Mother moistened her lips, repositioned her braid, and patted down her gathered skirt. Little puffs of dust issued from its folds. “I said, isn’t it a smashing day? We’ve decided it’s perfect.”
“That’s cool. A committee of two decides that today, July 20th, is the best day the Earth has ever witnessed. And two Brits.”
“We’re Americans!” I blurted out, not quite clear on Mummy’s status.
“Hi, I’m Freeman,” he said casually, and pointed to himself as he said it. He then bent down to examine the spot where I’d recently been horizontal. “Okay, okay, okay. I just don’t get it,” he said. “What’s so special about the ground?”
“My daughter is what’s so special.” Mother rested a dainty hand on each of his broad shoulders.
“Mummy, don’t. We were just looking at things in the dirt. Bugs.”
“I agree with your mother,” the young man said, rising to his full height. All three of us blushed in unison.
“It’s the bugs,” I repeated to no one in particular. It was then that I realized my cheeks must be streaked with dirt, my hair a jumble.
“Listen,” he said. “Would you mind if I recorded you saying ‘It’s the bugs’? I like the sound of it.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I demurred.
“It’d make me really happy,” he said with a dopey grin.
“Well, your happiness takes precedence,” Mummy broke in. “Say it, darling!”
Over the course of ten minutes, I managed to say “It’s the bugs” twenty times into Freeman’s microphone—and this before I knew how far “the bugs” would take me. We were playing a game, were we not? Mother had assured me that all meetings with men were games—that I must participate fully if I wanted to go home a winner.
I HAVE to admit, Freeman’s passion for documenting every sound along the path that day really turned me on. I was knocked out by a man who had every inch of the imagination of Peter, but who lived on terra firma. Who was tethered to this plane. Of course I missed the obvious: Freeman was tethered by a cord to his tape deck, a connection that rerouted his attention from me to a world of crackles and squeaks and discordant bleeps.
Mummy has always insisted that my encounter with Freeman was kismet. In fact, she stepped aside that day and let the two of us improvise, retrieving The Female Eunuch from her backpack and parking her petite derriere in the shade of a eucalyptus.
Picking up on Mother’s cue, Freeman pointed down the trail. “Did you know,” he asked, “there’s something completely awesome down by the beach?”
“Really?” I said, amused. “Because I’ve had my fair share of awe.”
It was then that I risked looking into his angular face and, I swear, saw my own. His was a Scandinavian version of my Anglo/Russian-Jewish countenance—paler, blonder, unfreckled. Sweet and uncomplicated. If you don’t count the monomaniacal eyes and the cunning smile.
Mother waved us off with a melodic ta-ta, her motives as transparent as her blouse. With unchecked glee, Freeman led me in the direction of a little-known beach. As we made our way over the coastal cliffs, negotiating the ice plant and the occasional poppy, I couldn’t stop smiling. Freeman declared his allegiance to Monty Python and even performed their complete catalogue of silly walks. Goofy is good, I told myself, and thanked God for this reprieve from my usual black thoughts. As we chatted, we brushed against each other like old friends, inches away from holding hands. All the while, Freeman took refuge in talking about music composition, explaining why certain sounds are too subtle to record faithfully. I let him carry on for minutes about things I couldn’t fathom; concepts like feedback loop, flanging, and stochastic resonance hardly resonated with me, but I relished hearing about a cult as mysterious as my own sect of aerodynamic girls.
As we stepped out at last onto a deserted, pebble-tossed beach, Freeman made a preposterous claim: “If you listen real hard, you can hear the world turning on its axis.”
I could only respond with a wise-guy grin, for I had experienced this axis-turning only an hour before and didn’t recall any particular sound. Nevertheless, I cupped my hand to my ear and said “aah.” I was making an effort.
“What?” Freeman asked, excited. “You actually hear something?”
I nodded bravely.
“So tell me what you hear. Describe it!”
“Sorry.”
“What?”
“I don’t have the words,” I confessed.
“Because you can’t hear it. Right?”
Once more I nodded, mildly ashamed.
“You can’t hear it because it takes training. Years of training.” He stooped down and fingered a pink stone, then cast it in the direction of the water. It missed the tide by a wide margin. “You have to learn to screen out the ambient sound, the foreground noise,” he said.
“Oh, I see,” I said neutrally, then tugged on his jeans jacket. “Excuse me, but isn’t that a little arrogant? I mean, doesn’t it somehow suit your purpose that you can hear something I can’t?”
“And what purpose would that be?” he challenged.
“To make me feel inferior, of course.”
Freeman shrugged. “I just wanted to share something beautiful. It was a present.”
By now, we had reached the point where the stony beach meets the green-gray water. Freeman turned his back to me, perhaps in disgust, or maybe he was listening to other sounds I couldn’t hear; he had marched into the ocean with his Converse sneakers on. Slipping off my high-top tennis shoes and crew socks, I darted into the water and sloshed my way over to him. From behind, I grabbed at his waist. I have no idea what possessed me to do this; a waist is a very private
province. Freeman recoiled at my cold hands, then turned to face me.
“Thanks for my present,” I said. “I will use it wisely.” Then I delivered a kick to my own right shin for sounding like a princess.
With bemused powder-blue eyes, Freeman now looked through me, no doubt preoccupied with the sound of crashing waves, the dulcet hiss of foam. When I tapped him on the nose to bring him back, he blinked; then he took my wet hand in his and solemnly led me back to the beach. Hardly on solid ground, we bent our knees in unison and sat on the damp sand salted with pebbles. I didn’t care if my jeans were soaked to the calves or that my butt would flaunt two round wet spots; it was worth it to be close to this young man with the big ideas.
“Good,” was all that Freeman said before he held a palm to my cheek and kissed my sea-moist skin. “Good,” he repeated before he left a soft, dry kiss on my chapped lips. Then he took my strawberry-blonde hair in his hands and played with it—for minutes. I was so excited by this strange contact that I wanted to bite him and thank him. And when he coiled my hair into loose Princess Leia buns (Star Wars had opened in May and was still the rage), I did the latter—I thanked him for everything. My gratitude seemed out of proportion; we had known each other for barely two hours. But I was aroused by a boy who was capable of growing whiskers and turning gray at the temples.
Freeman held a stray lock of my hair up to the sky, which was rapidly clouding over. Exposing my chilled right ear, he blew warm air on it and whispered “Thank you” in return.
“I haven’t done a thing,” I said.
“You listened,” he said. “And you believed. In fact, you have the look of a believer.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” I chuckled.
He let go of my hair and we kissed gingerly, brushing off any grains of sand that interfered with our purpose.
* *
FREEMAN was as charming with Mummy as he was with me. But while she found him the ideal suitor, I found him painfully sunny. He was endlessly upbeat, possessed of a happy-go-lucky nature that appeared to be the antithesis of my own. It’s no secret that, by my mid-twenties, the gloom that had set in during my late teens now pervaded all my days, sunny or not. Besides, I didn’t trust blondes. They looked blithe even when harboring the worst moods. And Freeman’s bad moods would never hold an Elavil to mine. Nevertheless, I was intrigued.