Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (8 page)

When Alice came back with the orange juice, Riley's quilt was tucked tighter around her neck.

"The warm feeling is not so bad," Riley said, her freckles stand ing out on her skin. "I'm having a lot of dreams."

"Nice ones?"

"Some. All kinds. I don't think I could divide out nice."

"Do you want me to stay with you?" If it were Alice, she would have wanted Riley to stay home with her or for her mom to be there making her tea, but Riley never took pleasure in being babied.

"No. I'm fine. I'll be back out by tomorrow."

"You think? No calling Dr. Bob?"

"No to Dr. Bob."

"How about toast?"

"No thanks."

"Bowl of Rice Krispies?"

"No."

"Tomato soup?"

"Alice, would you go away now?"

When Alice went back to check on her after babysitting the Cohen kids through lunchtime, Riley was not in her bed, which made her feel relieved. Riley was no doubt back in the lifeguard chair. Alice went to Paul's house the back way.

"Hello?"

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"Come on up," he called from his bedroom.

He was at his desk with his notes spread out and his laptop sleeping. She noticed a strand of his hair she'd left too long, but she didn't offer to fix it.

"Do you want to walk to the lighthouse?" she asked him.

He shook his head.

"Do you want to go get a salami sandwich?"

"That's tempting, but no. I have to finish this."

Sometimes she felt she was always offering people things they didn't want. "What page are you on?"

"Last night I was on page seven. Now I'm on page three."

"I think you are going in the wrong direction."

"I erased it because it was bad."

"No sandwich for you, then."

"Will you bring me one?"

She looked at him, insulted.

"Right. Never mind."

She looked out the window at the gray water and noticed a fig ure on the beach wrapped up in a blanket. Then she realized it was Riley's faded quilt and that the figure must be Riley.

She walked out of Paul's room and down to the beach. When she got close to her sister, she saw Riley curled up on the dune, face pointed to the water, but her eyes were closed and it gave Alice a scare at first. But Riley's eyes opened and she smiled.

"How are you feeling?" Alice asked.

"Good." She sat up, keeping her quilt tight around her.

Alice could tell by her eyes and her cheeks that she was still feverish. "Are you sure?"

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She looked around her. "These dreams I am having sure are nice."

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"So, Paul, how's California?" Judy asked eagerly.

Alice chopped tomatoes for her mother's customary Saturday- night salad and felt a bit sorry for Paul.

"I left."

"For good?"

"I think so," he said.

"Really?"

"I think so."

The price of tonight's dinner was parental inquisition, but in a way, Alice was kind of enjoying it. These were questions Alice wouldn't ask but whose answers she wanted to hear. Just as in high school she'd never ask a friend where he was applying to college, even if she was curious. Alice felt bad letting her mother do the dirty work.

"Riley said you were working on a farm."

Paul gave a bemused smile. "Many farms."

"Oh?"

"I was working on a project--it had to do with a state referendum--but it didn't end up getting on the ballot."

"I'm sorry to hear that. We really appreciate your idealism, you know?" her mother said with a smile that revealed orange lipstick on her teeth.

Alice winced.

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"Yeah, well."

"You're reminding me of your father," Ethan said. "In the good ways."

Paul's face remained closed. "I guess he also specialized in polit ical failures."

Alice saw the obvious emotion in her father's expression. Her father had felt true pathos for Robbie, and he'd loved Paul. Riley sometimes joked that she was the son her father never had, but really that was Paul. And Alice was reminded now of how stony Paul was to him.

Once, Paul had loved Ethan in return. He 'd attached himself to Ethan like a staticky sock, mirroring Ethan's gestures and opin ions. But some time later he pulled away. Alice couldn't pinpoint the time exactly. She'd ascribed it to adolescent cheek. She'd fig ured it was part of Paul's endless rebellion.

And it continued even now. She wondered why. She looked from one of them to the other.

"Do you know if Riley's joining us for dinner?" Judy asked.

Alice ran up to her room to check on her and found Riley in bed, doing something on her laptop computer. Riley often kept odd hours and made herself scarce when her parents were there. Alice understood Riley hadn't told Judy she was feeling ill. "Do you want to eat with us?" Alice asked.

"No," Riley said.

"How are you feeling?"

"Fine," Riley said without looking up.

Returning to the kitchen table, Alice looked around, seeing it though Paul's eyes. Her vision changed when he was around, and

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she couldn't say if it warped or if it improved or, for that matter, whether accuracy was necessarily an improvement.

Nobody had a regular seat at this table. It was round and made of a warm-colored wood, so scratched and ringed that the damage had become the surface itself. The chairs were reproduction Wind sors from a sale at Macy's a decade or so ago. Alice remembered the shopping trip, running up and down the aisles of the huge store on 34th Street, delighting in all the little room setups with their prop TVs and fake plants. She sat on a couch in one, lay on a bed in another, trying on a different life for each. It was funny how all the different rooms existed in one gigantic room, how you didn't need walls to divide space. She couldn't remember her family shopping for furniture any other time.

The window over the sink was big but showed only phragmite stalks and changing slivers of Paul's house. The cabinets and coun ters were a scratchy white Formica that warped in places, showing the swollen, pulpy wood fiber underneath. Alice knew how much her mother wanted sleek cabinets and stainless-steel appliances like their friends had. But her father always said, "Judy, it's the beach," as though that were the reason and no other.

How staunchly people rationalized the things they had, even (especially) if they didn't choose them. Her father went to rhetori cal lengths to support the philosophy of a simple house at the beach and to assail the grossness of extravagance. But Alice wondered if he would change sides if he had a million dollars.

Paul espoused the same philosophy, and he presumably did have a million dollars. But Paul had his principles, whereas her father had his feelings. Pride was what they had in common.

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Their house was built in the seventies with little generosity in material or design. The flimsiest wood, the most vomitous lino leum, the cheapest fixtures. The doorknobs felt light and wobbly in your hand. Even the aluminum windows peered out oafishly and with a look of apology. Alice often wondered aloud if the builder made it ugly on purpose, but Riley wouldn't hear a word against it. And though Alice judged her home strictly, it was the place she loved most, and she wished for it when she wasn't there.

There were three small bedrooms upstairs and one truly tiny bedroom downstairs. This had been a darkroom, a painting studio, and a recording studio, and briefly housed a loom for weaving. All this was in accordance with her father's changing hobbies and delusions, the delusions requiring more radical renovation and expensive equipment than the hobbies. By now the room had ves tiges of all of these, plus a plastic crate of free weights. By now it was a storage room and an archive.

Alice suspected that if it was her mother's father who'd died in the spring of 1981 and left them a hundred thousand dollars, then the little room would have been a guest room or a den or, best of all, a writing studio for her private use. Alice's father did not make much money in his job as a private-school teacher and a coach, but his father, Alice's grandfather, had been a successful lawyer. And though Grandpa Joseph had been a notorious gambler at the horse track, he had provided the windfall that bought them this house and, moreover, bought them entry into this world of plenty where they did not otherwise belong.

The single great luxury of the house was the trumpet vine that

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grew around the arbor and fence, an extravagance of orange flowers and attendant hummingbirds. It was a mystery to all of them. Their potted tomato plants yellowed, the vinca rotted, and the basil plant withered. Their cultivation failed, but their accident prospered.

Sometimes the vines got to be so much that you could feel the fence straining under them. So Alice and her father took to the vines with giant clippers, laying violent siege to their one glory. But the flowers always came back more and more, like disap pointed children or thwarted desires.

Every south-facing second-floor window, including the two in Alice's bedroom, looked directly at Paul's family's grand three- story shingle. She thought of Tolstoy when she considered its generic, platonic beauty, compared to the unique homeliness of her house. The outside of his house was part of her landscape, but the inside she hardly knew at all. The windows stayed dark at night, so you couldn't even see in. It was more an idea to her than a place. For every thousand hours Paul had spent at her house, she 'd spent one at his. Paul's empty house looked at the ocean, and they at it.

You would have thought Paul's house had been built after theirs--islanders were always grabbing up one another's views. But in fact, his house had been standing since the nineteen- twenties, though it had to be picked up and moved shortly after the hurricane of 1938. The builder of their meek house had actually chosen to lean it into the shadow of a great and substantial one. It seemed to Alice further proof of the builder's poor self-esteem.

"So, Paul." Judy reinvigorated her line of questioning over Ethan's grilled pork chops, as dense and hard as roofing tile. "What are you planning to do in the fall?"

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Paul did not throw his plate to the floor or suggest that Judy leave him alone. He was always more patient with Judy than her daughters could manage to be.

"I have to finish up an old incomplete from Cal-Berkeley this summer, and then I'll hopefully be starting a graduate degree in philosophy and political science."

Judy nodded with obvious approbation. She always had high hopes for Paul.

"Where are you planning to go?" Ethan asked in his care ful way.

Alice looked back and forth as though taking in a tennis match. It was more like Canadian doubles, though, and she found herself rooting for the lone man.

"I have a provisional acceptance from NYU. One of my profes sors at Cal joined the faculty there, and he 's looking on my appli cation kindly," he said. "So I guess that's where I'm headed."

Alice opened her mouth to speak, but her mother got there first.

"Well, that is wonderful!" Judy nearly shouted. "You and Alice will be there together. You can see each other all the time." She turned on Alice with a look of pride. "Only Alice will have a pretty rough schedule. You know how the first year of law school is."

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"You are going to law school?" Paul pulled her out of the house and down the boardwalk as soon as they had done a respectable job of eating her father's pork chops.

She blinked at him, unable to say anything. The directness and

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urgency of the question was startling, the subject matter far out side their usual bounds.

"Why didn't you tell me that?" he demanded.

Why didn't she tell him that? Why didn't he ask? Since when was she supposed to tell him anything about the life she led or, God forbid, ask him any questions about his? She wished she could say one of these things aloud.

"Paul," she said in protest. What was he doing?

"Law school?" he said again.

"Yes. What's wrong with that?"

He shook his head as though too many things were wrong with that to even say. He was leading her to the beach, but then he turned around and led her toward the village instead. This was not a conversation to be had on hallowed ground.

"You think you are going to be a lawyer?"

"You say that like I'm going to be a bank robber."

"I'd rather you be a bank robber." His jaw muscles clenched and his eyebrows came down to his nose. Here was that intensity that scared most people off.

"Anyway, lots of people go to law school and don't become lawyers."

"What a pile of shit. Did you really just say that?"

She turned and walked away from him. He couldn't treat her that way anymore.

He pulled at her hand to make her stay with him. "Alice. Hang on. Please? I'm sorry."

Her chest ached. She wished she could help herself. Why did he

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care so much? Why was her life suddenly his to arrange? And if he cared so much, why had he left her for so long?

"A lot of people go to law school, you know. It's a pretty normal thing to do."

"But not you."

"Why not me?"

"Because!"

His disapproval stung in her eyes. She chomped down on her cheek so she wouldn't cry. Worst was the memory of how she imagined she'd impress him when he learned. She always wanted him to think she was smart. How stupid she felt now.

"You're not exactly normal."

"Thanks."

"You're not. Anyway, normal is the problem. Why would you waste yourself like that?"

"Waste myself?" She kept her face incredulous. "Do you know how hard it is to get into a good law school? You have no idea how hard I worked."

"You're right. I don't." He still held on to her hand in a concilia tory way but a little too tightly. They walked past the post office and the village hall. He was still thinking she might turn around and go.