Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (3 page)

She was shaking the cereal box around to see if there was enough left for another bowl. "Yes. Do you want to borrow them?"

"Can you do it?" he asked.

She put the box down. She uncrossed her ankles. She chewed the inside of her cheek. "Can I cut your hair, you mean?"

"Yeah."

She used to cut his hair sometimes, and Riley's, too. She 'd cut other kids' hair once in a while. She 'd removed wads of gum and nettles as a favor. Not because she was particularly good at it but because her Uncle Peyton had once given her a barber set with the good scissors. And otherwise you had to go off-island.

Could she cut his hair? If not, why couldn't she?

"Nothing fancy," he said.

"Give him a bouffant," Riley suggested.

"I guess I could do it."

He stood, looking at her expectantly.

"Right now?" she asked. Now was not as good a time as later, when he would forget about it.

"Yes. Is that okay?"

Somewhat mechanically, she followed him up the stairs. They had just one bathroom, and she and Riley were locked in a

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long-term standoff about whose turn it was to clean it. Paul sat on the edge of the tub, just the way he used to do.

Riley stood in the doorway, a look of amusement on her face.

The scissors were there in the cabinet, still rust-free in the origi nal plastic case. She wished they weren't both watching her. It felt embarrassing to tend to one's scissors so well.

"Okay. So . . ." she began. "Just, uh . . ."

"Cut it off." He pulled his T-shirt over his head, which didn't help put her at ease. She had to force herself into the orbit of his head. His face now related to her chest as hers usually did to his. He looked up at her, and she felt as though she were made of nostrils.

"Not all of it . . . ?" She couldn't stand to make him bald.

"The dreads, mainly. You can do it however you want."

"I think you'll find wildlife in there," Riley commented.

Alice nodded. That wasn't the thing she worried about. You couldn't grow up with Riley and be prissy.

It was funny the things the three of them talked about. Often it was the concrete things they hung upon. Concrete or metaphysi cal, and very little in between. That was another leftover, a child's prerogative, in a way. They talked about fish and they talked about God. But it was all the stuff in the middle that came to preoccupy you as you grew older.

The previous night, the rain had pelted against the tar shingles and they'd talked for hours on their sandy living-room floor. They talked about the big storms, the houses that washed away, the old promenade that once lined the ocean beach and now lay deep under the waves. They'd talked about the sameness of their island in spite of the fact that it was always changing shape. Alice had felt

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relieved that her parents weren't around so it was just the three of them, the way it used to be. It allowed them the freedom to let the conversation meander and stall. It allowed them to leave out large categories of discussion, such as what they'd been doing for the last three years.

Alice held up her scissors and snapped at the air a few times. She touched her hand to the top of his head for a start. It was warm and made her think of duck-duck-goose. She felt the stubble of his chin against her forearm. She had the feeling of crying creeping up her throat. How she had missed him. Sometimes you couldn't face the sadness of being forgotten until you felt the comfort of being remembered again.

"Well, here goes," she said a little faintly. She grasped a clump of his brown hair and cut. Sharp scissors against hair made a won derful sound: a soft, multitudinous zing. She remembered that she had always liked it.

Underneath the grime, Paul's hair was as fine as it had been when he was little, in spite of how he'd mistreated it. Each piece she cut at the base of the clump curled sweetly and lay down on his head. It was more docile, less complicated than the other parts of him.

"What do you think?" she asked, adverting to Riley.

Riley was standing still for longer than usual. She looked at the mess of tangles and clumps on the linoleum floor. "He has to clean up." She said it amicably, seeming to indicate approval.

Riley went back downstairs, and they heard the screen door slam and settle.

Alice held a clump at the nape of his neck and made him shiver. Delicately, she cut pieces around his ear, admiring the pale silky

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fuzz that sprouted along the edge. It wasn't just now. These things had always meant something to her.

"You are being very still," she complimented him.

She didn't think he 'd heard her at first, even though she was inches from his ear. "I'm trying," he finally said.

She came around to the front last, bold now in her barber per sona. She held his chin to steady her cutting hand against his cheek, perhaps not strictly by necessity. She looked at his cheek, his jaw, and felt the reassurance of being near him.

She remembered when she'd first learned to knit from her Grandma Ruth after fifth grade. She'd spent a whole winter knitting Paul a hat. She'd wanted to keep some connection to him through the cold months when she didn't see him, when the distance between them and the awkwardness between their parents made him almost like a stranger. The next winter Alice had knitted him a scarf in green, gray, and blue to remind him of the ocean. She remembered sending it to him in his first year at boarding school. Her yarn was her proxy to touch him, to keep him warm, to make him remember her.

Alice fell into a meditative mood, lulled by the sound of her scissors. She evened, trimmed, shaped, and smoothed. She felt a fullness in her heart and in her throat. She felt his head loosening on his neck, giving in to her hands, trusting her.

How long since she had felt this particular feeling in her muscles? She'd forgotten what it was like.

In spite of everything, she felt such pathos for him. She always had. Even though he was older than she. Even though he was mean to her, and dismissed her and even forgot her, she still ached for

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him. Maybe it was because his father died. Maybe because Lia didn't mother him in the regular way. Alice remembered her own mother telling her how at a few crisis moments when he was small, Paul had turned to her instead of Lia. "I was touched when Paul let me take care of him," Judy said, "but it made me sad, too. A well- mothered kid doesn't have needs that fast, that big."

"She's had a tough life," her father used to say about Lia, even while acknowledging that she was a pain in the ass.

Lia grew up in Italy, orphaned by the age of fifteen. She called Paul Paulo, but only she was allowed. If Riley or Alice did, Paul would punch them. Apparently, his mother meant to name him after a heroic uncle, a spy supposedly, who died in World War II, but his father, Robbie, meant to name him after Paul McCartney. Alice did not know what it said on his birth certificate. She thought it was odd the way Paul acted as though he did not speak Italian even though they knew perfectly well he did.

Alice also knew that Paul's father's parents, his grandparents, did not like Lia. They blamed her for everything that happened with Robbie. And though Alice felt that Lia deserved a lot of blame in the world, it was possible she didn't deserve that particular blame.

Paul was their only grandchild and supposed heir to the gigantic piles of money, which Lia was spending as fast as she could. She knew these things only from her mother and father, never from Paul. Paul's grandmother had once called Alice's mom in the hope that she would intervene on their behalf. Riley remembered it. "You should be calling Lia," Judy had advised, but the grand mother refused. Only the lawyers called Lia.

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Paul stayed away from his grandparents. He did not get along with his mother but he would be loyal to her. It was the main way, as far as Alice could tell, that he managed to love her.

Lia spent most of her time in Italy since Paul left for college. When she was in the United States, she found endless faults with it--the food, the pace, the language, the music. Alice always imag ined a happier Lia in Italy, but Paul once told her that Lia com plained when she was there, too.

Alice did not remember Robbie, Paul's father, because he died when she was only a few months old. Riley did remember him-- bits and pieces of him, like his beard and his rubbery sandals and his fingers knowing how to tie all kinds of knots.

It terrified Alice to talk about Paul's father, because she knew things she shouldn't have known. She knew things Paul had not told her, things he probably didn't know. Alice hated that and faulted her mother for having ever told her. Her mother was too keen on information, too quick to believe in the neutrality of facts just because they were true. "It's the journalist in me," her mother claimed, managing to praise herself even in apology.

Paul almost never talked about his father, and when he did, he acted as though he remembered him perfectly. But Alice noticed that he didn't talk about the small things.

Alice suspected Paul couldn't really picture him, just like she couldn't picture Paul when he was away. Maybe that was the case with people you wanted more than was good for you.

Alice let her scissors clatter into the sink. She stood still, her hands on his head, one over his ear, the other at the back. She let

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out her breath as his head sank slowly into her body, coming to rest just below her breasts.

She held him there, her head bowed to his. She felt the bones of his cheek and chin against her shirt, the bits of stubble catching in the weave of the cotton, his breath pooling in the wrinkles.

He was with her; he was here. She was scared to even breathe.

The screen door rattled in the kitchen. He lifted his head. She stepped back. And just like that, he wasn't with her anymore.

The air that had enclosed them re-formed around them as sepa rate bodies. He looked at her for a moment but said nothing. She retrieved her scissors and with shaking hands put them back into their plastic case.

He stood and regarded himself in the mirror. "Nice job," he said to her. And she realized he had completed the transformation back into the Paul she knew. They had done it together. From strange, foreign Paul, he 'd returned to the beloved, exacting Paul of old.

But there was a moment in between, a moment flung free in the midst of the transition, when he had made contact. That was the moment she would dwell on.

u

For the first time in months, his head lay comfortably in his pillow and his scalp did not itch. But even so, Paul couldn't sleep, and this too he attributed to his haircut.

He pictured, or rather felt, Alice 's toe kicking into the side of his foot. He could feel the pressure of her palm on his head and her

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fingers on his chin. When she bent over him, he smelled a new Alice smell, perhaps cleaner than the old Alice smell but still related and deeply stirring.

That was the thing that overtook him, when he'd pressed his head against her body. Why had he done that? What had it meant? It wasn't the kind of thing you did to any old girl. You couldn't take it back. You could try to discount it. You could pretend it hadn't happened. But it was there between them. Thankfully, though (he was thankful, wasn't he?), the rest of the day had seemed to consti tute an implicit agreement to a mutual amnesia.

His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children. Maybe he shouldn't have come back here. But what else did he have?

The trick was to have what he had without destroying it, if that was possible. Could you even do that? Every desire fulfilled was thus defeated. Could you interrupt the cycle? Could you make the world hold still?

There was nothing new in loving Alice. He had always loved her, even when he was mean to her. He remembered it, and he had been told so. He'd loved her before she even realized it. Wasn't that the easiest way to love a person? She was fat and wordless and comforting to him when she was a baby. He 'd carried her around from place to place. His mother's psychiatrist had said that Alice was his transitional object.

He knew at the age of four when his father died that he wasn't going to be getting any brothers or sisters in the traditional way, and Riley had understood that, too.

"It's okay," Riley had told him, "you can share Alice."

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Riley was his equal, his rival, his flip side, and his best friend. In some ways, he found it hard to distinguish himself from her. They were the same age, and for years they'd been the same size. They'd worn the same pants. He felt disloyal for having kept growing after she had stopped.

Alice wasn't his friend, though he knew she 'd always wanted to be. She was something else, neither more nor less but not the same.

When he thought of Alice, especially when he was lying in this bed, he thought often of the summer when he and Riley were thir teen. Old friends and cohorts were turning vain and stupid every where they looked, losing interest in the things that had once mattered to them. Kids like Megan Cooley and Alex Peterson started up spin-the-bottle and truth-or-dare parties in the back room of the village library. Riley hated it, and Paul was afraid of it. What they'd witnessed from their parents made them only more determined to stay on the safe side of adolescence. Alice, at ten, copied her indignation from them.

As a band of children, they had laid a magical world over the topology of this skinny place, spread it from ocean to bay. It had places and creatures both evil and good, and part of the enchant ment was their power to change sides whenever a good game required it. Both he and Riley realized this world was fragile. It would sink unmarked into the sea if they let it. It required believ ing in, and fewer and fewer people did.

In outward disgust and inward fear, he and Riley had estab lished a mostly wordless covenant. Bodies were being snatched left and right, but they had each other to remind them what was true. If they kept each other honest, they decided, it would not happen to