Cricket embarrassed herself by eating some of everything. Then she helped finish off the collards, coleslaw, cheese grits, sweet potato polenta, and mashed potatoes. She drank a sixpack of Genny Cream Ales all by herself, and her share of four gallons of margarita mix spiked with an equal amount of tequila. She ate pecan pie, peach pie, sweet potato pie, key lime ice box pie, chocolate peanut butter pie, and bread pudding. Then they found a whole bag of assorted cartons of linguine-with-Cajun-whatever that had got left in the bottom of the delivery box somehow. Luckily, Jee and Reg returned in time to clean that up, along with the red beans and rice and the rice pudding that nobody else had fancied.
Cricket felt pleasantly full. She postponed another margarita and walked out along the breakwater.
Out here, the city lights were like a distant mass of stars. Far to the south, the plants in Hammond, Indiana glowed orange against the night sky. Due east she could see nothing but smooth gray-black water, and the sky punctuated with an endless string of landing lights approaching O’Hare Airport. She stood listening to the wavelets lap against the breakwater, marveling at the edge of civilization, right here at her feet.
Amanda appeared at her elbow.
Cricket waved at the dark water. “The works of man stop,” she explained.
Amanda didn’t say anything. Cricket glanced up and saw that her roommate was staring out at the water as if it were covered with fascinating things. There were in fact three white gulls floating motionlessly about thirty yards away. Beyond that, nothing. Cricket understood Amanda’s stare. The nothingness called to Cricket, too.
“Beth’s being a brick about this party,” she volunteered. “Yeah, I hate it. I know it has to happen. I just wish it was over.”
Amanda said nothing. There was no judgment in her silence.
“The thing is, I’m not ideal grandma material. I found that out after Alban died. Twelve years of family picnics and holidays, and all they talk about is food and soccer and pregnancy weight and scouting and menus for their bar mitzvahs, and a million kid things. I did my kid things already. I can only do so much of that. After Lucien’s kids went off to college, I got out of a lot of it. I could pick and choose holidays, spread myself out between my kids and step-kids. And then with Irving I had grown-up step-kids. I guess it was inevitable. I kinda lost touch with everybody.”
She glared out at the water, her eyes stinging with resentful tears, feeling trapped by the choices she’d made, and the choices she’d passed up, too. What the heck? Why didn’t a woman get more than two lose-lose choices? And why was she thinking like that now, when she’d had all the men and all the kids and all the life that most people ever got, and more?
Feeling softer, she said, “I guess I chose to look forward to new experiences and new faces. I refused to attach myself at the hip to one family. It’s been a long life, a terrific life. And I can’t wait to finish it up, so I can start this next one.”
“Finish it up with this party?”
Cricket sighed with resignation. “Ugh.”
Amanda was quiet a moment longer. Then she said, “And after that?”
“What? Oh.” Cricket remembered Amanda’s proposal that they do something fun. “The carrot.”
“What?” Amanda actually looked at her. Pinkish-orange light from Lake Shore Drive gleamed along the curve of her cheek, and backlit her shoulder-length aura of fluffy, post-basketball-messy blonde hair.
Cricket smiled. “Oh, yeah. The reward.”
“The yard lamp at the end of the tunnel.” Amanda nodded. “What would you like?”
Cricket looked back over her shoulder at their teammates. Beth was packing their trash back into the delivery box with obsessive neatness, as if there would be a quiz later. Pog was mixing more drinks. Reg fussed over Jee, lovingly brushing sand off her feet and legs, then rubbing her hair with a towel. Cricket turned back to look out at the wild, empty darkness.
“I’d like to go camping,” she said.
“Okay. When we get home, we’ll look stuff up. Make some plans.”
The next few days were a misery to Cricket. The dreaded Celebration of Life loomed.
Beth, Amanda, and a wildly reluctant Cricket sneaked down to the Loriston Home at eleven o’clock one night and excavated piles of photo albums from Cricket’s storage space. Some thoughtful soul, no doubt anticipating her death, had put those boxes in the stack nearest the door. They must have been thinking about the convenience of her executors as far back as the day she moved in. She pointed out the right boxes and then slunk back to the van to sulk. Ugh ugh ugh.
Back at the Lair, Beth made her go through all the boxes and choose pictures for the bulletin boards that would stand in the party room.
Cricket felt a distant fondness as she remembered the endless procession of bris, birthday party, bar mitzvah, graduation, wedding, funeral. Many lives, most of them over before her own. She felt like Rip Van Winkle—no, he slept through his century, didn’t he? Then somebody who never died, who kept on having life after life after life, but no vacation in between.
Vacation between lives. Huh. Maybe those pink carnation guys had something there.
She should have had a plan.
Because now she knew that death was not for her, and hell was a hoax, and she had a gloomy feeling heaven was boring, and she didn’t have the patience at her age to start trying to believe in an alternative afterlife.
That wandering train of thought, and many others, got her by while she browsed the photo albums and handed Beth the ones to set aside and told her how to label them.
Amanda stood by, mostly silent, always present, to give her a tiny smile now and then.
AMANDA
Beth took a handful of seventy-five-year-old baby pictures from Cricket and started putting double-stick tape on the back. “I bet this brings back a lot of memories,” she said absently.
“That’s why I hate these things,” Cricket said.
I saw Beth send her a look of pure horror. “Hate?” she said, looking at the baby picture in her hand.
Cricket gave a disgusted grunt. “Everybody thinks old people have nothing to do all day long except think about memories.”
Beth looked at the table, covered with piles of photographs of Cricket’s life. I thought she would burst into tears. Good, I thought, you’re finally getting it. I let her swell and turn red for a moment, while Cricket tossed over the pictures and sorted them with ruthless, emotionless efficiency.
Then I said, “Not everybody wants to wallow in the past.” Ouch. That came out harsh. But I was sick of Beth ramming this party down Cricket’s throat.
“Like you, I suppose,” Beth said, shooting me a hurt look, and I recalled once again why I stayed out of things when the estrogen level started to rise around here. She looked at Cricket, her face full of remorse. “I thought these would be good memories. If she saw them, Cricket could, well, revisit the past and love it and then say goodbye to it. So she can start her new life with us.”
“Oh, honey,” Cricket said. She reached across the kitchen table and patted Beth on the hand. “Those pictures? That’s Aubrey, my first baby. He was really sick all the time, croup, and then a cough that wouldn’t stop. We talked about going away to the mountains to help his lungs, but by then I had his brother in the cradle and another brother on the way. Alban hadn’t started to make money yet. We were just another young, broke family. Aubrey was dead before he was twenty. Killed in Korea.”
Beth looked stricken. “I’m sorry.”
“Eh,” Cricket made a philosophical sound. “What’s that guy say? ‘Men die, horses die,’ something or other.” She handed Beth another baby picture. “You didn’t kill him.”
I didn’t believe that was how Cricket had taken it, back when it happened. But she genuinely seemed to feel that way now. How had she segued from grieving Gold Star Mother to Men die, horses die, even the gods themselves will someday die?
“I don’t think about the past,” Cricket said, soft
ly but flatly.
I wanted to cut Cricket free of her past, too, but at least I had noticed that she lived in the moment. I thought of her crouching like a child under the marijuana plants, watching me as if every nerve in her body was focused on the here and now.
Cricket sent me a look full of wise patience.
Suddenly I saw myself playing invisible child here in the Lair, watching the drama without taking part, being useful without drawing attention to myself, while the others did adulty, humany stuff.
Beth said, “I’m sorry you hate it so much. I really think this will turn out for the best. It’s a very final way of getting closure. You want these people to say goodbye to you. Once they think you’re on that cruise, they’ll stop seeing you around every corner—I take it you don’t want to have to move to another city?—because, admit it, you’re not that good at hiding yourself.”
Cricket grumbled, “I guess not.”
“That reminds me, is there anyone coming to this event who is old enough to remember how you looked when you were seventeen or twenty or twenty-five?”
“Irving’s sister is still alive, but she’s gaga, and we didn’t meet until I was sixty. So what?”
“Because this face”—Beth reached forward and cupped Cricket’s face in a surprisingly tender gesture—“is probably the face you wore then.”
Cricket was startled. “But don’t we all? I mean, aren’t you kids wearing the faces you had when you were young?”
“Goodness, no,” Beth scoffed. “This is the face I wanted to have when I was fifteen. Jee, I know, has described her former self as a ‘squidgy-nosed, scarred-up little brown kid.’ She’s not much older than that now. Reg has idealized his appearance. Pog I can’t speak for.” Pog was downstairs paying the Ann Sathers delivery boy.
They both looked at me but didn’t say anything.
“This is me,” I said. I was damned if I’d let Beth rummage around in my past.
Cricket glanced at me and caught me reddening. “I think you’re beautiful,” she said softly, looking at me with her heart in her eyes.
That made me smile. She didn’t look away. She must be wondering about me. I wondered what.
“I just thought of something,” Beth said. “If you get a moment when you decide you don’t want to deal with people, maybe you could change how you look. Right there. At the party.”
I broke my stare into Cricket’s eyes to say, “You just said that. If there’s any really old people at that party, they’ll recognize her.”
“No, really gumby her looks,” Beth said. To Cricket she said, “Put on someone else’s face, the way you did that night here in the kitchen. You can walk around and eavesdrop if you want, or just sit in a corner and drink champagne, and nobody will notice you.”
I glanced at Cricket. “You sure you want to do that? You may hear something you don’t want to.”
Cricket snorted. “You don’t know these things. Nobody talks about the deceased. It’s just another party with free booze.”
But I could tell she was thinking about it. I wondered if Beth was right. Would Cricket see her family with new eyes if she were wearing, well, new eyes?
She reached over and patted my hand. “I’ll be okay, cookie. It’s just another thing to get through. Life’s full of ’em.”
“What about you, Amanda? Do you think about the past?” Beth could never let anything alone. We were still training her.
“Nope,” I said with finality.
I flipped rapidly through a pile of black-and-white snapshots from the forties, I would guess, because everyone wore a thick layer of dark lipstick and Cricket herself had filled out a bit. She still looked like a kid playing dress-up with the big girls. One image grabbed me by the heart, and I paused.
Here was Cricket, must be in her mid-twenties, with a squad of pretty girls all about the same age. They wore those housedresses—what did my mom call them? Shirtwaists. Snappy. They looked polished and dangerous in their dark lipstick and lacquered hair styles. Of them all, only Cricket seemed innocent, childlike, and fully alive.
That’s us, I thought, bunch of man-eaters, and Cricket, not thinking about how she looks but about how she feels. And clearly she feels great.
I stood up and took the photo over to my fridge and stuck a magnet over it, feeling incredibly weird.
The day before the big party, Cricket and I took another bike ride. I didn’t know about her, but I needed to clear my head. She was silent, as usual during these outings. We rode east to the lake and down Lincoln Park, battling a strong, warm, southerly wind the whole way. Gulls did the same over our heads, looking like white boomerangs tossed against a bruised sky. A summer storm was brewing. Big high thunderheads shouldered in from the west. When that lot hits the lake, I thought, we’re gonna get wet.
We parked the bikes and sat in companionable silence on the breakwater north of Fullerton, watching the storm clouds roll closer and the warm air toss the waves around.
“You did so good, stonewalling Beth,” Cricket finally said. “I’m gonna use that technique when Sharon starts in on me.”
I smiled. “The harder they push, the less you say. Drives ’em crazy. Eventually they leave you alone.”
“Of course you were lying,” she added. “You do think about the past.”
I flinched and looked at her with surprise and dismay.
“It’s like a cloud hanging over you.” She didn’t sound critical or probing. Just sympathetic. Like someone saying, My, that’s a heavy bike.
I had no idea what to say. “I was a good child,” I blurted.
“Well, pleased to meet you.” Cricket put out her hand and we shook. “I was a bad child.” She grinned. All she needed was a missing tooth. “That’s why my aunt and uncle married me off young. Keep me out of trouble.”
“You were good for a long time after that,” I reminded her.
“Yeah, babies will do that to you. I kind of got my bad-kid yayas out, watching the boys grow up.” She seemed to be searching the dark, tossing waves. “Maybe that’s what I’ll do now. Get back to my bad kid self. Hit everything on my bucket list.”
I wanted to ask her about her bucket list, about being a bad kid. Instead I looked up at the thunderheads rolling ever closer. She said she saw my past like a cloud over my head. No. She saw me thinking about my past. How could she see that, when I didn’t see it myself?
“I spent—” I broke off, counting in my head. “Nine and a half years? That’s how long I worked in the Regional Office. After I realized where I was, I mean. I worked for that company for a while. It just—slowly turned into—”
“Into hell. A really boring, mind-numbing, safe hell.”
I scowled at the waves. “You know, when Beth does this, we try to shut her up.”
“Does what? Try to open you up with her can opener? Difference with me is, I don’t have plans for you.” Cricket lay back on the limestone breakwater. “Don’t change the subject. Running away for nearly ten years is the same as thinking about the thing you’re running away from.”
“How do you figure?”
Her voice came faintly. “C’mon.” Overhead, thunder rolled. She didn’t move.
I pretended I wasn’t thinking about what she’d said. Maybe I could change the subject. “We’re gonna get wet.”
“So?”
I smiled in spite of my annoyance. It wasn’t like we could catch a cold. Jee would run shrieking for fear of wetting her nice clothes. Beth would forget we were immune to illness and cluck over us. Pog was so non-athletic, she wouldn’t be out here in the first place.
Cricket lolled on the breakwater while reflections of thunderclouds raced across her eyeballs.
She was right, of course. The only place in the world I had ever imagined going, besides my desk at the Regional Office, was back to the condo where my parents had sickened and died.
So I stayed at my desk, avoiding thinking about my parents’ condo. Which was the same thing as thinking about it
. Because, if I had been able to think about anything else, I’d have walked out of there and never come back.
The morning’s weird feelings were still with me, apparently. How could I see now how locked-in I’d been, when I hadn’t seen it then? Why did I feel sorry for my old locked-in self now, when I’d been happy to feel nothing for so long? I always knew I could leave the Regional Office.
Everybody there knows they can leave.
They just don’t.
Because they don’t have a Cricket or a Beth wedging a prybar under the lid and letting out the boiling lava.
Beth was working hard to change Cricket. Didn’t seem to be happening.
Cricket was changing me just by breathing.
Okay, she was trying a little bit.
Maybe a lot.
I realized once again that Cricket was ninety-eight. She had been around the block many times, compared with my thirty-five years, the first twenty-five spent in the shadow of the Army, the rest in a state of numbness in the Regional Office, trying to forget my Army family. While I’d been hiding, Cricket had been living. She knew stuff.
She knew what she was doing to me. She was as bad as Beth. Worse, because she was better at it.
That’s because, I thought, she cares. I guessed that Beth cared. But Beth was so conventional, half her interventions failed on impact. Cricket saw deep into me. She cared.
And she did too have a plan. Didn’t she?
Was I making all this up because I felt weird?
I decided to pretend I didn’t know it was happening. Wasn’t like I could stop it. I didn’t even know what it meant, or what I felt, or why I felt it.
Bad-child Cricket made me feel safe. And a little ticklish, in a good way. The first fat, warm raindrops splashed down on us, and I felt Cricket’s hand steal into mine. I pretended I didn’t know it was happening.
CRICKET
After dinner Amanda spearheaded the planning of a camping trip. They decided it should happen after the party and after the tournament was over. Everyone could relax then.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 73