“Uh, I’m going to go take care of Fel,” Mila says in this almost insulted way. Her tone says it should be obvious where her priorities lie now. “She’s wrecked. I’m getting everyone out of my face and being there for her.”
Gray, I think.
She hates her sister and she loves her sister. She always wanted to beat Felicia, but she never wanted to see her hurt. I remember how before our first performance, Mila warned me that I was going to see a different person up there on the stage. There’s gray there too, in the way a person can be one thing in public, but that can also not be who they really are.
Through the phone, I hear a door shut and then soft crying. “Got to go, talk to you later,” Mila says, and hangs up.
I walk back over to the table, where Scott is working on carving the champagne cork with a Swiss Army knife he keeps on his key chain. He holds it out to me.
“I made you a little microphone.”
I take the cork. It’s pretty good. I talk into it. “That was my friend Mila from the show. She made it to final three.”
Scott says, “What about the guy who kissed you?”
I realize if Felicia was the one eliminated, Ford went through. He must be out of his mind with happiness. “Yeah, him too.”
“I’m glad you got out of all this bullshit, Tiny.”
I put my feet up on the table and look at Scott. “Why didn’t you leave for college when you were supposed to?” I ask.
Scott tries to act like the question doesn’t bother him by messing around with the knife. Then he laughs. “I didn’t know who I wanted to be.” He’s playing it off like a joke, but I don’t think it is.
“Like on the inside?”
“In life.”
“But isn’t that the point of college? I don’t think you have to go there knowing everything.”
Scott stretches his arms up in the air. “I’m hungry. You wanna go inside?”
I humor him because I guess that’s the courtesy you can give to your friends: more humor and more patience. And that’s why friendships can last so much longer than romances. Everything’s less urgent. We pick up our glasses and go into the kitchen.
We take Dixie cups (Dixie . . . the South) and fill them up with snacks from the pantry. This feels familiar too; we used to do this after school.
“You want some yogurt raisins?” Scott asks, searching on the top shelf that I can’t see without a step stool.
“Yeah, definitely.”
We take the cups and sit on the floor and look through my mom’s cabinets. In one of the cabinets under the island, she’s storing a box of all the former tassels that have held back our dining room curtains. She changes them out with her mood.
Scott pulls out a lilac one with pom-poms hanging from it. “These go up when she’s feeling old. She thinks they’re fun and flirty and girlish.” His voice is a little draggy from the champagne, but he’s right. He knows these things about us. He takes the tassel and starts wiggling it back and forth on the floor. “You guys totally need a cat. Here, kitty, kitty. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” I laugh.
I take one of the aqua tassels with beads out of the box. It matches his poncho. I scoot back to tie the cord so he’s got a low ponytail with a gigantic tassel hanging out of the bottom. “This one looks like it was made for you.”
Scott turns and kisses me.
Our mouths are together for one second before I understand what’s happening. The smell of his skin takes me back in time again. I pull back. I say, “I’m not doing this. The whole reason you’re over is that we’re actually going to be friends.”
Scott tries to kiss me again. I get up from the floor.
“We’re not just going to fall back into old patterns!” I yell. “That isn’t the point of tonight.”
I expect Scott to laugh to diffuse the tension, but instead his face is so angry that it’s like I’m seeing a new him. “‘The point of college,’ ‘the point of tonight.’” He kicks the cabinet door, which is unexpected. “Does every goddamn thing have to have a point? Does everything have to be explained to death? Can’t a person just exist? Can’t things just be different and we don’t have to talk them into the ground?”
I’m taken aback. “Well, things are different. We’re trying to be friends.”
“I don’t need to label everything, Magnolia! I can just be different than I was before! You can too.”
“Huh? How do you know I’m not different? We’ve just spent months barely talking.”
Scott pops up from the ground to stare me wildly in the eyes. “You think about everything too much—that’s why I couldn’t be around you over the summer. It was always pressure, you being with me. It was like make sense of this, make sense of that. Why can’t you ever just let whatever’s going to happen, happen, without thinking it to shreds? Why can’t you just go with the flow, huh? Why can’t you, why can’t you, why can’t you?”
The way he’s asking me this is full of so much desperation, I’m too stunned to begin an answer.
The doorbell rings.
“Who is that?” Scott asks, almost accusingly, as if I’ve planted someone to get myself out of this exact moment.
“I don’t know,” I say. I live in a gated community, so no one ever really just stops by.
We stand in silence for a second.
“I’m going to go get that.” I leave the kitchen, feeling Scott watching me. I feel dizzy from that interaction, like it physically took me by the shoulders and shook me. I’m not the one who’s not ready to be friends. It’s Scott. Sadness starts to overpower the dizziness—the sadness is about giving up the idea that we could pull off this new kind of relationship. But it’s also clear to me that that’s what I have to do.
In the foyer, I stand on my tiptoes so I can see out the beveled diamonds of glass my mom recently had installed in the front doors.
Ford is standing on my doorstep. He looks up, and our eyes meet. He’s squinting from the lantern hanging above his head.
My chest tightens again, but along with fear, I’m not going to deny that there’s relief and happiness clamping down on it too. A few weeks ago I believed there was nothing Ford could say that would change what he did. But it looks like I’m ready to be a little more open-minded because now I open the door.
Ford is wearing his old white shirt with his old jeans. But a new jacket.
“I never really got to thank you for saving me with the Superstar,” he says.
It’s like I can feel every molecule of air on my forehead, on my cheeks. Jenny hasn’t been seriously adhering to Buddhist beliefs, but she has been talking about looking at anger and transforming it. From what I understand, this doesn’t mean you have to ignore it. It just means that you learn how to turn your anger into something less destructive, something new.
“Don’t worry about it. How’d you get in the gate?”
“Some kids came out the pedestrian side. I walked my bike through.” I lean forward and see Ford’s motorcycle parked against the curb.
There’s an awkward pause then, and I watch Ford as he glances around my porch and takes in where I live. He gets this look that communicates everything about how this scenario is so far from what he had. It’s kind of the face you’d make if you were going to give one of those low, sinking whistles at being shocked by a price.
That look tells me exactly how much he wanted his life to change. And why he pretended to be someone else in the hopes that it could happen. And how it’s possible that he was just trying to play a different part and got caught up in it to the point where it wasn’t as much lying as it was wishing.
Ford goes from looking at the chandelier hanging in the foyer behind me to looking into my eyes. I stare at his face, and I find out that I am easily able to see the gray.
He says, “Look, I need to be with you.” My chest feels like it cou
ld crack at that admission. “I need you, okay.”
“Well, here’s the thing,” I say. “I love you.”
His whole face changes like he’s been lit from within. “Well, here’s my thing—I love you.” We break into what I can only describe as dumb smiles at each other. “Will you come with me?”
“Like, right now?”
Ford thumbs in the direction over his shoulder. “I have to get to Calumet. I want to show it to you. The only problem is that I just missed my flight, and two of us aren’t going to work on my bike.”
Out of the corner of my eye I see Scott appear in the dining room threshold, waiting to see what I’m going to do. I’m sure he’s heard the end of our conversation. I disagree with what he said at Del Taco, that we’re just ending up as nothing. I don’t think you ever get over people you loved. It’s just one day you get the strength not to go back there because you finally know what’s bad for you.
Before, Scott told me that I think too much, but now I don’t even have to put a second of thought into what I want to do.
I say to Ford, “I have a car.”
Ford
49
It’s after sunset the next day when we take the worn-out steel bridge over the Saint Francis River. The familiar rhythm of the bridge’s warped roadway feels like an old friend waving me home.
“Take it all in.” I motion like royalty at the not very exciting landscape out the windshield. “As far as the eye can see, this is all my domain.”
“It’s breathtaking,” Magnolia says in an exaggerated way that might be her attempting to pull off a Southern accent. “My, my, my.”
“Is it? I guess I was too distracted by your beauty to notice.” I reach over and awkwardly stroke her cheek with the back of my hand, doing my impression of a creep who does things like that. “You see, before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. My eyes were blinded by the light.”
“I’ve already had enough.” She laughs, grabbing my hand, intertwining her fingers in mine. “How do you even know Twilight?”
“A lot of the girls who sent me fan letters kept mentioning it. They said I was like Edward, except with normal skin.”
“Whatever, you know you read it.”
I’ll admit, the Arkansas Delta isn’t the most exciting landscape on earth, but to me it has a sort of muddy charm. Maybe it’s just because I grew up here. I may not legally own a single acre of land, but this is all still mine: my turf, my hood, the land of my fathers. All that stuff. It’s weird how much confidence can come out of something as simple as knowing your surroundings.
Magnolia’s watched the delta pass by her window for hours. The slow-moving brown rivers. The endless fields, harvested and bare now. The one-stoplight towns. The mobile homes that sit out in front of, and replace, the rotting wood farmhouses from better days. She watches them all go by like an astronaut getting her first look at the surface of the moon.
“Right here, past Dead Man’s Curve, people race their cars sometimes. One night Will Portis flipped his Chevy over in that ditch. Thought he was going to drown before we could get him out.”
Magnolia tips her head against the window and stares into me. “We have ditches at home too, you know. I want to see some real South.”
I give her the sternest look I can pull, and I put on my heaviest drawl. “Listen, li’l darlin’, you’re just lucky I brought you to these parts at all after I had to come save you from that surfer boy, from havin’ to listen to his stories about getting spiritual with them dolphins.”
She keeps her face serious too. “I think it’s just that there’s nothing I love more than long, flowing blond hair.”
“All right, that’s it. Get out.” I reach over and tip her toward the door. “Just open that door and jump. I’ll be nice and slow the car down. Remember to roll when you hit the pavement, and you’ll be fine.”
“You get out! I’ll show myself around,” she says, and tips me back. We end up in a fierce battle of arms and elbows, which she wins by leaning over the armrest and suddenly kissing me. I try to keep an eye on the yellow line as she pulls my face toward hers. It’s hard to drive straight with her lips and the smell of her hair, but luckily, the road’s all ours.
Except for a couple of power naps, we’ve pretty much driven fifteen hundred miles straight through. To sum up those fifteen hundred miles, you’ve basically got: city, mountain, desert, desert, desert, desert, Great Plains, Great Plains (getting less Great and more Boring at this point). Things turn green again, and you’re in Arkansas.
Back in Arizona, we passed cool rock formations that looked like old castles, but Magnolia doesn’t have any love for the desert.
“Maybe it’s because I grew up in one,” she said.
I argued that Southern California isn’t really a desert, that there are lots of trees and green things. But she said modern people did that, and all the palm trees and sprinklers are just Los Angeles pretending to be something it’s not. I told her that sounded just like something she’d say.
If it were up to me, I would’ve stopped to check out every single point of interest on the road. I want to see all the petrified forests, the meteor craters, the Grand Canyon, the average-size canyons, ancient Indian ruins, and especially Billy the Kid’s grave. But this last performance ahead of me tomorrow (and Magnolia’s complete lack of patience) has kept us on a tight schedule.
So instead of grand canyons and dead underage outlaws, we’ve settled for cheeseburgers in Flagstaff and tacos in Albuquerque. In New Mexico I finally called the production office and told them not to worry. I’d be there. We haven’t bothered with a hotel because we’re only stopping for power naps. In the car last night, parked underneath a faded neon cowboy on the sign of the long-abandoned Six-Shooter Motel, the temperature dropped until our breath covered the windows with white frost.
Curled up in the backseat, we held each other for warmth like a couple of stranded Antarctic explorers. And inside the icy car, surrounded by nothing but desert night and empty highway for a hundred miles, it felt like we couldn’t have been more alone. Finally, truly alone. We woke up stiff and half-frozen.
We’ve taken turns DJing with Magnolia’s MP3 player. A sample of this past afternoon’s playlist:
1. Alicia Keys—“Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart” (Magnolia’s pick)
2. Bob Dylan—“Blood on the Tracks” (mine)
Magnolia took exception to my insisting the entire Dylan album be listened to all the way through, so she paid me back with:
3. Britney Spears—“Till the World Ends”
When I asked if it was some kind of punishment, Magnolia launched into a long lecture on the artistic value of pop music. She said, “Some things that just sound simple really have complex things going on underneath.”
I said, “I hope that goes for me too.”
4. Spoon—“The Underdog” (my choice)
A sing-along because Maggie also knew this one.
5. Fleetwood Mac—“Gypsy” (hers)
Magnolia got sad talking about the sadness of Stevie Nicks’s voice. I told her that Fleetwood Mac was always what I’d pictured in my head when I imagined the beaches of California. Like somehow that sound translated perfectly into the place. She said, “Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about.”
6. Led Zeppelin—“When the Levee Breaks” (all me)
Guess we got into a kind of seventies groove here.
7. Haim—“The Wire” (all her)
8. Iggy Pop—“The Passenger” (mine, but Magnolia loves the song too)
9. Prince—“I Would Die 4 U” (Magnolia’s)
Come on now—everyone likes Prince.
10. The Rolling Stones—“Exile on Main St.” (back to me)
Once again Magnolia was skeptical when I told her Exile is an
album you have to listen to in its entirety, straight through. But this time, I won. Look, I don’t make the rules.
So we crossed the country to our own soundtrack. Sometimes neither of us could shut up, and we talked over each other about how she wants to write and how I want to make music, and the future in general.
“God, I hope we’ll know each other years from now,” she said while driving.
I looked at her. “It’ll be our own faults if we don’t.”
Sometimes we just sat quietly, staring out the windshield or nodding along to the music. Sometimes Magnolia would wake up from a nap and start bouncing her shoulders in her seat to whatever song was playing, and suddenly we’d have crazy energy and roll down the windows and sing along really loud to our audience of bored cows and lonely windmills.
But when I start getting really close to home, recognizing town names and roads I know, I realize that before this drive, I saw my hometown as a separate piece of the world, tossed off by itself. Now I spot the rusting silver water tower of Calumet, and my mind slides it into its proper place, right in the middle of the big old American puzzle.
Then there are flashing blue lights in my rearview mirror.
50
Magnolia looks over her shoulder, surprised. Only people who don’t get pulled over very often look that way.
“Were you speeding?” she wonders.
I keep a wary eye on the cruiser behind us. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh God, but we’re so close,” she says, pointing at the town visible a few miles ahead.
“Maybe they just want to give me a hero’s welcome,” I say, not believing this at all, but not wanting to scare Magnolia.
I pull off onto the shoulder, watching in the mirrors as the cop does the same. He steps out and adjusts his clothes in the reflection of his cruiser window. He tugs at his uniform, trying to make it stretch over his big belly. That’s when I realize who he is.
Everybody Knows Your Name Page 23