by Anne Valente
My dad was officially gone then, a quick departure to the apartment of the hygienist, whose name was Blanche. When my mom heard her name, she yelled, “What is this, A Streetcar Named Desire?” but that was all the anger I heard from her, and now my dad was supposed to return piecemeal, retrieve his things while Mom was at work, though I’d already seen his coat hangers and old flip-flops poking out of the trash cans at the end of our driveway.
I was fifteen, driver’s permit in hand, and though one of my parents was supposed to be in the passenger seat each time I took the Buick out, this didn’t seem like the time to ask either of them for permission. I called Blake instead, still watching Mom pat her tea pile out my bedroom window, and when he arrived on his bike a half-hour later, I grabbed my mother’s car keys.
“We’re going out,” I yelled from the driveway. Dad had recently repaved it, black and tar sticky in the afternoon heat.
“You kids have fun.”
I stood there a minute, but she didn’t move or ask where we were going. A light wind blew small bits of tea across the yard.
“We’ll be back later.”
“Is that Blake with you?”
“Hello, Mrs. Gibbons,” Blake called from the car, already in the passenger seat.
“How about Ms. Cornwall? My name’s the better one anyway.”
Blake looked at her out the window, but she just lay there, unmoving, her face completely blank.
“Tell your mom she needs to come over for a highball sometime.”
Blake looked at the pile. “What about iced tea instead?”
I opened the driver-side door and turned the keys in the ignition, pulling out of the driveway before my mom had the chance to respond. Once we were safely down the street, Blake switched out her Michael Bolton cassette tape for the Black Sabbath he carried in his pocket.
“What the fuck was that?” Blake asked. He shoved Michael Bolton into the glove compartment.
“What the fuck was what?”
“That giant pile of shit in your yard. Looks like your mom’s gone loony.”
I ignored Blake, reached over and turned the volume dial skyward.
“Where are we going?”
“Shakey’s?”
Blake always suggested Shakey’s, the ice cream stand that wasn’t two miles down the road. We could have easily biked there, like we’d done all freshman year, but now that I had Mom’s Buick, Blake thought driving was more adult. He also thought it would impress Callie Malone, a sophomore who scooped ice cream, though I was the one driving and Blake wouldn’t be sixteen until May.
After we pulled into the parking lot, and after Blake made me roll past the ordering station with our windows down, We Sold Our Soul for Rock n’ Roll blasting, Blake ordered a strawberry shake and that’s when I noticed Helen Toll sitting at one of the outdoor benches with some other girls from our class. She was a redhead, freckles splashed across the bridge of her small nose, and she’d been my lab partner in freshman biology. She always smelled like an orange grove, which was heavenly back in January when the snow seemed literally stacked against the classroom windows, but I’d never found the nerve to really talk to her outside of class, just looking over her shoulder during exams instead.
“Looks like your lady’s here.” Blake sucked on his straw.
“So’s yours.” I glanced back at Callie at the ordering station, in her bright yellow Shakey’s hat. She couldn’t have looked more bored.
“Make your move, man.” Blake sat down at one of the picnic tables, the condensation from his milkshake creating a darkened ring on the wood. “Girls like that seem all bookish, but she’s probably got a pair of handcuffs under her mattress.”
I looked over at Helen, thought of her spinning handcuffs in a red bikini. “She’s not like that.”
“How would you know?” Blake swirled the straw inside his cup, loosening clumps of ice cream. “I bet that girl sucks dick like nobody’s business.”
Heat rose beneath my skin, burned into my cheeks. “Why do you say shit like that?”
“Why not?” Blake smiled around his straw.
“Because it’s jackass, that’s why not.”
Blake sucked up the last of his milkshake and crushed the cup in his palm. “You need a good fuck, Gibbons. No more of this eyelash-batting bullshit. You’ve got to take the bull by the horns and just fucking do it.”
Since junior high, I’d only kissed two girls—Marcie Johnson in seventh grade, on the cheek because her breath smelled like potato chips, and Jenny Alfonso during a game of spin the bottle, the summer before freshman year. Her tongue tasted like red licorice. Blake’d had sex once, back in March, with a girl from St. Mary’s. He thought he knew.
I looked over at Helen again. She was laughing at something one of her friends said, her head back and her eyes rolled up, red hair floating against her striped tank top.
“I should get back. I need to finish my geometry homework before tomorrow.”
Blake gave me a look. He’d already let me know he disapproved of summer school, that I didn’t need to be taking classes when we could be out driving around, talking to girls, smoking pot in abandoned parking lots.
When we pulled up to the house, my dad’s car was in the driveway. It looked like it always did—a tan Honda with leather interior—except the headlights were smashed; the words I FUCK OTHER WOMEN were soaped into the back window, and VIOLENCE? was etched in large angry scrawl across the windshield. My mom was lying exactly where she’d been when I left, along the side of the house next to her pile of tea.
Blake hopped onto his bike, and I couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or coughing as he sped away. I walked over to the lawn chair and stared at my mother.
“What the hell is this?”
She didn’t answer, and I thought she might be sleeping beneath her sunglasses. But then she patted the other lawn chair, the empty one next to hers, and motioned for me to sit down. “I thought maybe your father’d be gone by the time you got back.”
“So what, that makes it okay?”
She lifted her sunglasses and peered over at me. “There are things you don’t understand, sweetheart.”
I hated the when you’re older card that teachers and other parents always pulled. Now my mom was pulling it too.
“There’s a lot of violence in this world,” she said, and it sounded so vague and weird that I thought maybe Blake was right, maybe she had gone crazy. But then she looked over at me, and I saw a defined sadness in her face. “Love isn’t much more than a fencing match, Kevin.” She reached over to her pile of tea, touched it again. “It’s just a matter of who stabs who first.”
I thought of Helen, of her and me lancing each other with swords, looked over at Dad’s car again. “And that’s your way of stabbing back? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Oh, honey. Maybe not. I hope it’s something you’ll never have to understand.”
Later she would explain it—the conversations she’d had with my dad throughout their marriage, how livid and selfrighteous he’d been about fairness, and treating people right, and how violence was at the root of all things, how people exerted their power over each other. He’d been an ethics major in college, when they met, long before he’d gone to dental school and met the hygienist he’d eventually fuck and leave my mother for. She told me later that his fierce justice had drawn her in, and that the gravity of it still held her unmoving when she thought of it just right.
All I knew was how stupid it sounded to me.
“I’m sure the neighbors are looking,” I said. “And not just at the car. At this goddamn tea.”
She lay back in her chair, flipped her sunglasses down.
“Let them look,” she said.
That’s when my father came storming from the house, clothes trailing on hangers behind him, a coffeemaker tucked under his right arm. He dropped the clothes and set the coffeemaker on the hood, and rubbed his palms across the windshield, looking up and down the str
eet all the while. And then he walked over and screamed at my mother in her lawn chair, while she sat placidly next to her tea, and I crept unnoticed into the house and closed the door on all the noise.
The tea pile dwindled over the course of the week, laid waste in mysterious ways, since my mother was a small woman and couldn’t have drunk that much by herself. She set out two pitchers of sun tea, plastic wrap stretched across the tops to deter flies and yellow jackets, but I never really saw her drink any of it, not from the window of my room anyway. By Thursday, the pile was gone. I thought that was it, that maybe she’d grown tired of sitting in her lawn chair after work, lying in the sun and keeping watch over the heap. But that Friday, while I was in the kitchen heating up a frozen waffle before class, I heard a dump truck roll up the street and looked out the front window in time to see another tea pile dropping into our yard, this time golden in color.
“Chamomile,” my mom said, when I called her at work. “It’s calming.”
I looked out the window, watched the dump truck thunder away.
“The neighbors are watching,” I said, even though no one was around.
“I’ll be home after five today.”
“Try not to destroy any of Dad’s property on your way home.” Besides the car, she’d obliterated Dad’s old matchbook collection over the weekend by lighting them all on fire in the backyard while I was at the library studying.
When I came home from class that afternoon, the phone was ringing. I expected my mother, calling with special instructions about the tea, maybe asking that I stand guard all afternoon so ants wouldn’t carry it away, leaf by small leaf. But when I picked up, it was Blake.
“Get your swim trunks on,” he said. “We’re going to the pool.”
According to Blake, he’d been biking past the Montgomery Park pool and had seen a group of girls through the chain-link fence there, a group that included Callie Malone and Helen Toll.
“But they’re not even friends.”
“Au contraire.” Blake’s voice sounded muffled, like he was eating a donut. “They’re both on the JV soccer team.”
I sat back on the living room couch. I hadn’t thought of Helen in days, had maybe even relinquished my crush, at least until September. I pictured the Montgomery pool, Helen lying back on a striped towel, the sun reflecting off the glossy skin of her bare abdomen and legs.
A half hour later, Blake was in the passenger seat of the Buick and I was driving the two of us to the pool, towels strewn across the backseat, sunglasses and flip-flops on, swim trunks catching in the breeze that flowed through the open car windows. Blake threw Mom’s Michael Bolton in the glove compartment again, this time for Van Halen. I thought of her arriving home soon and sitting outside with her absurd pile of chamomile, her feet propped up on the heap, my father nowhere in sight. I crushed the gas pedal down.
At the pool, Blake paid admission for both of us, since I’d driven and he was in a good mood. It took me less than ten seconds to find Helen—her red hair was a bright torch in the afternoon sun, and she was standing in the shallow end of the pool, her hands held lightly above the surface like she was getting used to the water. Blake stared at Callie across the pool, stretched out on her towel, looking weird without her Shakey’s hat.
“I’m going to go talk to her.” Blake looked at me, then back at Helen in the water, shrieking a little each time a ripple hit her bare belly. “Now’s your chance, man. Don’t fuck it up.”
I stood there for a second, watching Helen gradually immerse herself in the water until her red hair disappeared beneath the surface. I dropped my towel and t-shirt on a pool chair and sat down at the edge of the shallow end.
“Hey,” I said.
Helen didn’t look over, and something deflated inside my chest. It was like raising my hand in class and the teacher never seeing me, though the rest of the class had. I considered getting out, telling Blake I was going home. But just as I moved to push myself up from the edge, Helen said my name.
“Kevin!” When I turned around, she was smiling at me. “I didn’t know you came here much.” She said it like she came to the Montgomery pool every summer, like she knew I wasn’t a regular. I mumbled something about my geometry class, that I needed the break. She splashed the water with her left hand.
“Why don’t you come on in?” She squinted up at me. “It’s a little cold, but you get used to it real fast.”
I looked across the pool at Blake. He was sitting on Callie’s towel now, leaning in like he might put his arm around her.
Since it was still mid-June, the water was shockingly cold, but Helen splashed me and laughed until I ducked my head underwater, and then it wasn’t so bad at all. The sun warmed the back of my neck, and I relaxed into the water so I didn’t have to think about how I was finally talking to her.
We floated along the edge of the pool together, and every once in a while she’d grab the side and kick her legs out, or slide her head under the water. She told me about her summer, that she was taking a PSAT course, that she’d gotten a job at the bakery on Northanger Street by the school, to make some money between soccer practices. I listened to her and tried not to think about her body just below the surface, a cascade of golden skin only inches away.
Helen was telling me her fall class schedule, excited that we had English during the same period, when the lifeguard blew his whistle and announced adult swim. I looked at Helen awkwardly, not knowing if we were old enough to stay in the pool.
“I could use a soda.” She smiled. “You want to come sit with me?”
We grabbed our towels and moved to the concession stand. Helen stood in line while I found a table near the edge of the pool’s chain-link perimeter, away from screaming children and tired parents. I looked over toward Callie’s towel again and noticed it was gone. Panic gurgled in my belly, that maybe Blake had left me there. And that’s when I realized it—that he’d taken her somewhere. Maybe the woods out back, maybe a deserted shower in the locker room. Wherever they’d gone, they wouldn’t be back any time soon.
Helen walked up with a large soda in a Styrofoam cup.
“Sprite,” she said. “You want a sip?”
“It’s actually kind of hot out here.” I pushed back my chair. “You want to go sit in my car? I can turn on the air.”
Helen squinted down at me and said nothing.
“I guess,” she finally said.
In the Buick, I turned down the Van Halen and we sat silently while Helen sipped her soda. Her swimsuit was still wet, staining the seat cover with dark damp. Blake would be angry when I took him home later, but I didn’t care. Helen told me she was taking trigonometry in the fall, and that she might join the dance team, since it wouldn’t interfere with soccer. She was talking about the same things she had in the pool, but her voice was different, like our conversation couldn’t sustain itself in the new air of the car. Her hair was still wet, and as she spoke, a bead of pool water slid down her neck toward her swimsuit, crossing peach skin puckered with cold.
She was still talking when I asked if I could kiss her. She stopped and looked over at me.
I stared down at my hands. I could hear her breathing, the rise and fall of her exposed, perfect chest. And before she could say anything more, before she could maybe say no, I leaned across the front seat and kissed her hard across the mouth.
She kissed me back. I was sure of it.
With my mouth against hers, I thought of Blake, laying Callie down across some leafy forest floor, or pressing her against a mildewed shower wall. I pulled Helen toward me, one hand behind her neck. With the other, I fumbled my way up her towel and past her exposed belly until I found her breast. Beneath my hand was a grapefruit. Tangerine. A lemon, at best.
I fumbled harder, my tongue in her mouth, until she pushed me away, her soda spilling across the Buick floor. She stared down at the Styrofoam cup, the straw and lid scattered over the floor mat, and pulled her bikini top up so her breast was no longer exposed.
I wiped my mouth and leaned back in the driver seat, not knowing what to say to her. We sat there for a moment, and then she pushed open the passenger door and walked away. I didn’t follow her, or even watch to see if she returned to the pool, or if she just went home. All I could hear was the muted sound of Van Halen and the slow fizz of Helen’s spilled soda, pooling now in the corner of the floor.
I thought about Blake. He’d find a way home. I shifted the car into drive and pulled out of the parking lot.
I knew my mother would just be getting home, and I didn’t want to see her. So I drove around, up and down Northanger Street, past the high school, and then to the playground of my elementary school, where I sat on a swing, waiting for the light of the sky to tilt away from me, toward dark.
When I finally pulled into the driveway, sometime after sunset, my mom was sitting outside next to her new pile of tea, like I figured she would be. She was lying back in the lawn chair and staring up at the new summer sky, twilight marbled in pink and orange across the horizon beyond the trees. She didn’t even have to pat the lawn chair next to her.
“Mom,” I said, sitting down beside her. I didn’t know where to go from there.
“What is it, sweetheart.”
“Mom, I think I did something wrong.”
She didn’t look over at me. “Oh, it’s all right, Kevin. I haven’t been easy on you either, these days.”
“No. I mean, I think I hurt someone.”
She didn’t respond right away, and I thought maybe she was angry, until she said, “Fencing match?”
“I think I stabbed first.”
She didn’t say anything back, but she reached over and patted my hand. It was the first time I could remember her touching me since I’d started high school. Her hand felt like an afghan.
We sat there awhile longer, neither of us speaking.