by Anita Shreve
Sometimes, sitting on the back stoop, pretending to study his French, he would see her across the grass and gravel and wonder about what it would be like to be in a car with her at a drive-in. He couldn't keep from thinking about it: the idea was in the air and in his blood. But the thoughts made him uncomfortable, nearly in the same way that thinking about his parents doing it did. And sometimes he felt guilty, as if he were supposed to have taken better care of her somehow—though that, he knew, was crazy. She was beyond his care, or anyone's, for that matter.
And sitting on the stoop, he would sometimes hear raised voices in the Close kitchen, a mother and a daughter scratching at each other like cats: words thrown whining and bickering through the screens. The fighting had come on gradually during that summer and the school year following that awkward day on the baseball diamond, Eden beginning it (seemingly demanding it), taunting her mother with her outrageous dress and behavior, until Edith Close, a novice at this combat, began to learn from her daughter, raising her voice to a new shrillness—born, he imagined, out of bewilderment. You cannot, he thought, remain indifferent to a stinging bee.
In the beginning, he and his parents had been mildly alarmed by the raised voices next door. His own parents rarely yelled at: each other or at him. But then, as the weeks and months passed and the bickering voices seemed to find no truce, he began to grow accustomed to the nightly battles—like the rattling of a scheduled train—as though these, too, were part of an evolving landscape.
And sometimes the screen door would slam, and Eden, her eyes inflamed, roughly pushing her hair off her face, would spot him on the stoop. She might put a fist on a cocked hip and narrow her eyes at him. Or she might, with dizzying speed, change her stance and her expression entirely, sashaying across the yard to meet him, a smile skimming her lips as she clutched a pack of Old Golds or Winstons. She would smoke after these battles, in full view of her mother, prolonging, by this gesture, their animosity. (He couldn't conceive of smoking in front of his parents; indeed, he was thinking of giving it up altogether.) She would reach the steps where he was sitting, lean against the rail and shake a cigarette from the pack, deliberately offering him one. She kept her matches in the cellophane. Sometimes, maddeningly, she would ruffle his hair, and he would toss his head sharply to shake her off.
"Enjoyin' the entertainment tonight?" she would say.
When Jim was home, there was no fighting. It was not so much that Jim kept order in his household; it was that in his presence, Edith would not criticize their adopted daughter, nor rise to the bait if Eden dangled it, by wearing a too tight sweater, or by missing supper entirely, or by coming home at eleven o'clock, an hour after her nominal curfew.
"Sweetie," Jim would say, coming out onto the steps on these late nights, intercepting Eden before she entered the house.
"Daddy," Eden would say, though out of earshot she referred to her parents as Jim and Edith, and Andrew had never heard Eden address Edith as "Mother" or "Mom" at all.
"Sweetie, your mother is upset. You should have told us where you were going. We waited supper for you."
And Eden, brilliantly contrite, would tilt her head ever so slightly and murmur, "Sorry, Daddy," in a voice Andy seldom heard, the voice, he thought, of a regular fourteen-year-old girl.
Jim, instantly mollified, poised to be charmed by what he imagined to be his daughter's sweetness, would kiss the top of her blond curls.
"Sickening," his own mother would say of Jim's inability to discipline his daughter, as she witnessed the scene from their kitchen window.
ONE AFTERNOON that last spring, he remembers, he was changing the oil in the car for his father when he heard a sudden and particularly loud spate of bickering, followed almost immediately by the sound of splintering glass. It was Sunday, and Jim had been away for days. There'd been no buildup of voices, no warning of a coming storm. Until the fighting, Andy hadn't even known Eden was home.
The caliber of the bickering was different than he'd heard before, and while normally he would simply register the sound and then go back to what he was doing, this time he slid out from underneath the car and sat up. His father, working that afternoon on the plumbing under the sink, came to the back door.
"What the...," said his father.
But the shouting had stopped by then, and his father turned away from the door. Andy was about to go back under the car, when Edith Close came out of the house, her coat on, her purse over her arm, her mouth set in a thin line. Without acknowledging Andy, she turned down the drive, made a right on the road and walked to the tree where the county bus regularly stopped.
Andy sat on the gravel. His hands were smeared with grease. He stood up and walked to the other house, hesitating below the steps, out of sight of Edith at the bus stop. He wiped the palms of his hands on his jeans. He listened, heard nothing and then climbed the steps. It was April, he remembers; he had on two old flannel shirts of his father's. Edith, in her haste, hadn't closed the door. He put his face to the screen, put his hand up to shade his eyes.
Eden was sitting on a chair by the table. She was wearing a long nightgown and a bathrobe. Her hair was disheveled, uncombed, as if she'd just woken up. She was crying. He didn't think he had ever seen her cry before. She brought her hand up and touched the corner of her mouth. He remembers thinking how small she looked in the chair. He remembers wanting to go in and sit beside her. He wanted to knock, but he didn't.
BY MAY of his senior year, the spring before the shooting, Eden seemed to have settled, in a fairly deliberate way, and in a manner that surprised everyone, on Sean. Andy was never to know what it was exactly that drew Eden to his old friend, if, indeed, she could actually be said to have been drawn at all. For he sometimes wondered, then and later, if it wasn't in keeping with the perverse, self-destructive course she'd been on for almost a year to choose a boy known for his volatile temper and, more to the point and perhaps for Andy's benefit, to strike so close to home.
Andy was sitting on a bench in the locker room when T.J. told him. It was after a baseball game, and Andy, with a towel around his waist, was trying to untangle his underpants, when T.J. said, his back to Andy, "You know about Sean."
"Sean?"
T.J. opened his locker and hunted for a sock.
"And Eden," he said.
"Sean and Eden?" Andy didn't get it yet. Had they had a fight? Got caught smoking on school premises?
"They're like a thing," T.J. said. He looked quickly at Andy and then away. He began to whistle between his teeth.
"You mean they're going out?" asked Andy. He said the words going out distinctly, as if they could not possibly apply to the present situation.
T.J. scratched his chest. "Yeah. Like that."
Andy shook his head. There had to be some mistake. "That's impossible," he said. "Are you sure? I'd know if it were true."
"Oh yeah?" said T.J. "And how is that?"
"I'd have seen them together at the house or something."
"No you wouldn't. Her father won't let her bring any boy home. So they hang out in Sean's car...." T.J. stopped, not wanting to lay out the graphic details to his friend.
"But Sean never really liked Eden," protested Andy. "Of the three of us—"
T.J. snapped around. "You know, Andy-boy, half the time, I swear to God, you're livin' in a dream world, you know that? You don't see what's goin' on right under your nose."
"I don't know what you're talking about," said Andy, stung by T.J.'s sudden attack.
"I'm talking about Eden," said T.J. with exasperation.
"What about Eden?"
"Anybody with two eyes could see that it's always been you she liked best, and you're either blind or you're more of an asshole than I thought you were."
"You must be crazy," said Andy defensively. "She's only fourteen. She was one of the guys. She was like a sister...." He stopped, aware that he was contradicting himself.
"Oh really?" said T.J., buttoning his top button and picking up his gy
m bag. "Well, that's history now, isn't it."
T.J. slung his gym bag over his shoulder and headed for the door. He didn't wait for Andy, and he didn't say goodbye.
Andy sat on the bench, his underpants balled in his fist. He was trying to imagine Sean and Eden in a car together, she laughing, Sean reaching over to finger the collar of her blouse, but something inside him wouldn't let the image coalesce. He threw the underpants into the bottom of the locker. He slammed the door shut with his feet.
"Fuck it," he said, and pulled his pants on.
AFTER THAT DAY, without appearing to do so, he looked for signs of them together. And he concluded that T.J. had been right: he was blind, for how could he have failed to miss the way Sean was always dressed first after a game and out to his car, or the way Sean sidled past him with a greeting but had not really had a conversation with him for weeks? Or the way Sean and Eden sat on the steps behind the gym and smoked during third period, their shoulders touching? And as the days passed, there were more overt signs: Eden missing the afternoon school bus day after day, arriving late for dinner, saying she'd walked home from school, though Andy knew Sean was dropping her off a quarter mile short of the house. And once Andy came around a corner into an empty corridor by the music room at school and saw Sean pressing Eden into the brick wall with his body. They were kissing, and Andy was caught. He couldn't turn around, couldn't retreat. He tried to saunter past them, tried to appear intensely absorbed in the cover of his math book. Eden pulled away just as Andy passed.
"Andy-boy," said Sean, breathless.
"Sean," said Andy, moving past them.
"Hi, Andy," drawled Eden.
He heard giggling behind him.
HE NOW AVOIDED Eden as best he could, stopping short at the screen door if he saw her emerge from her house and cajoling T.J. to pick him up and drop him off for the couple of weeks left before school ended. Sean brought Eden to the graduation party, but Andy had his own date and aggressively pretended to be having a better time than he actually was. After he took his date home, he and T.J. drove for hours In T.J.'s car and got so drunk they had to park by the side of a deserted road before they both passed out. When he got home, well after six in the morning, expecting the wrath of his father to greet him at the door, his father took one look at Andy, shook his head sadly and went upstairs to bed.
ONLY ONCE, in the weeks before the shooting, was he alone with Eden for any length of time. It was a Monday afternoon, he remembers, his day off from the Texaco station. That summer he was working long hours, and his parents let him do what he wanted on his day off, an indulgence that pleased him since it seemed to suggest that he was a man now—a workingman with days off and privileges. He had slept late that morning, and when he came down to the kitchen, his mother was already dressed, already halfway into her day. It was the summer he was reading No Exit and The Stranger to get ready to go to college in Massachusetts, and he had a book with him at the table. Out in the backyard there was an aluminum reclining chair on which his mother sometimes dozed in the afternoons with Family Circle on her lap; and so after breakfast he went outside and lay back on it, shielding his eyes from the sun with the paperback held over his face. It was after twelve, and the sun that day, he remembers, was ferocious. Almost immediately, he unbuttoned his shirt, fanning himself with the cloth.
He was asleep when he felt a large insect crawling over his stomach. He sat up with a jolt, flailing at his chest, trying to brush it off. And then he heard her laugh—a laugh that sounded unpleasant and grating through the fog of his sleep and the pounding of his heart. He fell back against the chair. Her face was over his, too close to his own, blocking out the sun as the book had done.
"Lazybones, get out of bed. The sun is up, the witch is dead."
"What?"
"Andy, it's almost one o'clock."
"You should talk."
"Want to go for a swim?"
She was wearing a pair of tight white shorts and a blue sleeveless blouse. Her arms were tanned, and when she moved away from his face, he noticed that her chest, where he could see it, was tanned too. His eyes strayed to her breasts and away again. He hoped she hadn't seen. It was a powerful reflex he was trying to cure himself of—the way, when looking at a girl, his eyes went immediately to the breasts rather than to the face. Instinctively, he began buttoning his own shirt.
"No," he said. "I'm reading."
She laughed. "Right," she said. She picked up his book, which had slipped onto the grass, and squinted at the title: The Myth of Sisyphus.
"Jesus Christ, Andy. You're turning into such a fink, you know that? Anyway, you haven't been swimming in weeks. I happen to know that for a fact. It's summer, in case you haven't noticed."
She sat on the edge of the chair. "I'm not leaving until you say yes. I'm bored sick, and I want company."
"Where's Sean?" he asked, the name catching in his throat. They had never spoken of Sean.
"Oh, him," she said too casually. "How should I know?"
"You should get a job," he said, "if you're so bored."
"I'm only fourteen," she whined. "And anyway, what's it to you?"
"I worked when I was fourteen," he said, instantly regretting it.
"Well, la-di-da. You sound like an asshole sometimes, Andy, you know that?"
"All right, all right," he said, capitulating. "Where?"
"The pond," she said. "The pool is totally revolting. I swear to God there's half an inch of scum on the water."
"All right," he said again, grudgingly. "I'll get my suit. You go get yours."
"I'm wearing mine," she said.
He checked his eyes just in time, but his visual memory was flawless. That couldn't be true, he thought, but he couldn't very well challenge her.
"Listen, I'll tell you what," he said. "Compromise. OK? I'll walk you down to the pond, and you can swim. I'll keep you company, but I don't think I want to swim myself." Actually what he didn't want was to go through the hassle of looking for his suit and the even greater hassle of explaining to his mother where he was going and with whom.
She shrugged and stood up. "Suit yourself," she said.
"That's good," he said, appreciative of the pun.
She looked blankly up at him.
THEY WALKED through the cornfields, the sun baking their heads, their feet following a path so familiar he was sure he could have found his way blindfolded. Almost at once, away from the shade of any trees or houses, he wished he'd bothered to get his suit. He'd be dying for a swim by the time they got there. Well, what the hell, he'd go in with his clothes on. They'd dry in the sun on the way home anyway.
She walked in front of him, and it was impossible not to notice the way she moved—her narrow hips twitching from side to side in her white shorts. Her hair was in a ponytail, and it, too, swayed back and forth. He thought, fleetingly, of what was said about her. Of what was said about her and Sean. Phrases came into his mind, and he worked to push them away.
He hadn't been to the pond in weeks, not since before school let out, and he was surprised by the lush growth there: tall scarlet lilies and Queen Anne's lace and old grape vines. There were trees here at least. He sat on the grass under the shade of one, and to his surprise, she sat down beside him.
"I thought you wanted to go swimming," he said, looking at her.
"So?" She stretched her legs out on the grass and crossed them. She kicked off her sneakers. He looked at her legs. They were tanned, golden, all the way to her shorts. She had lost the bruises of the year before. Now all he saw was the long, smooth shape of her legs and the red polish on her toes. He tore his gaze away.
There was a sparkle on the water. He had learned to swim in this pond when he was a boy, no more than five. His father had taught him, patiently, over many days. Though Andy sometimes suspected his father had subtly planted the notion that there were leeches in the pond—thus hastening the process. He'd been so terrified of touching bottom that he'd learned to float the first day. I
t wasn't true, though, about the leeches. The pond was crystal clear, even if the color of the water was brassy from the minerals in the soil. He was thinking that any minute he'd just make a run and a flying leap, and the cool water would close in over him.
"Oooh," she said. "Ants." She twisted her body to flick something off her thigh and in doing so brushed his bare arm with her own. The touch was electric, galvanizing, and instinctively he pulled away from her.
"What's this for?" he asked suddenly.
"What's what for?" she said noncommittally.
"This," he said, gesturing to include the space that surrounded them.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You don't?"
Maybe he was wrong, he thought. Maybe she did just want a swim. But if so, why was she sitting so close to him? The sun glinted painfully off the water.
"Andy," she said. There was a question in her voice.
"Let's hit the water," he said quickly. He bent forward, as if to get up.
"Andy, do you ever wonder what it would be like?"
There was a ringing in his ears. "What what would be like?"
"You know."
"No, I don't," he said irritably. "You said you wanted to swim."
He knew that all he had to do was stand up and begin heading for the water, and that would be that, but instead he waited for what she would say next. He wanted to hear what she would say next. Despite himself. Because of himself.
"I think about it," she said in an oddly quiet voice.
"Think about what?" he said, trying for a tone of exasperation.
"Us."
The word fell like a leaf to the grass and lay there in front of them—him with his body still poised to stand; her with her legs crossed in front of her. There was a sparkle on the water, so bright it hurt his eyes like a headache. Around them insects buzzed and whined in the heat. The pond always seemed smaller in the summer, he thought, hemmed in by the vegetation. Looking at it, he couldn't imagine playing a hockey game on it.