Flying in Place (9 page)

“Ginny? What—”

It must just have been a cloud over the sun, because in a moment she was solid again. “Show me how to do a triple somersault,” I said.

In real time,
back in the world, reality went rapidly from bad to worse. I was always tired from lack of sleep, always sore from the breathing. School faded into a monotone blur, alleviated only by flashes of terror whenever I encountered one of the Halloran children, and my grades plunged disastrously. My teachers questioned me, yelled at me, asked me if I were ill. My mother simply blamed Jane.

“Of course you can’t concentrate,” Mom told me after I’d nearly failed a vocabulary quiz. I’d expected her to scream at me; her sympathy hurt more than her anger would have, because it meant she’d stopped expecting anything from me. “You’ve just learned that someone you care about can’t be trusted to act the way she should. Something like that happened to me once, too…it nearly broke my heart.”

She trailed off, biting her lip. “When?” I said, my hurt replaced by fascination. “Who?” Ginny had always acted perfectly. Did that mean there was another tragedy in my mother’s past? Some man she’d loved before she met my father, maybe?

She shook herself out of her reverie as briskly as she’d shaken out the clean sheets that morning. “It was a very long time ago, Emma, and it doesn’t matter now. I only mentioned it because I wanted you to know that I understand how upset you are. It’s a terrible shock, but it’s also taught you how carefully you have to choose your friends. You’ll be all right. I’m just glad this has made you stop spending time with her.”

Whatever else the fiasco had done, it provided controversy in a town far too hungry for gossip. As my father had predicted, the scene on the Hallorans’ front porch soon mutated into a dozen different versions. In some retellings, Jane lured Tad out in the rowboat and tried to seduce him. In others, he tackled her in the woods, dragged her bound and gagged into the boat, a la Perils of Pauline, and raped her. Sometimes he and Billy—present in only some of these tales—both raped her.

New rumors sprang up overnight, like mushrooms. There were dark hints of beer and pot; there were versions in which Jane tried to drown Tad, ones in which Tad tried to drown Jane, and still others in which Jane and Tad struggled in the water, trying to drown each other, while Billy, stoned and drunk, sat in the boat and watched. The town buzzed with dire whispers of pre-teen sex rings, speculations that Jane was pregnant, reports that Tad had been caught masturbating on the beach, and mutterings that of course Jane was loose, since her mother not only approved of sex education but had helped develop the curriculum. Myrna’s offer to hold self-defense classes for all the girls in school—and any of their mothers who cared to attend—did little to quiet the gossips.

“That woman’s got too many boys,” a matronly shopkeeper told one of the town mailmen while I was buying a candy bar. “By the time she had a girl, she forgot what they’re for. Teaching them to fight! She wants one of them Olympic boxers, not a daughter.”

“Maybe she wants a mud wrestler,” the mailman said, handing her a stack of letters and magazines.

“She’s already
got
a mud wrestler,” the shopkeeper said darkly, and I put down the Milky Way bar I’d wanted. I wasn’t going to give this woman any money. Oblivious to my boycott, she went on, “What else do you think Janie was doing, down by the lake with those boys? Not ballroom dancing, that’s for sure!”

In the middle of all this, Jane and Billy steadfastly stuck to their account of what had happened, and the saner adults believed them. The Ewmets sent Tad to stay with his grandparents in California until the ruckus died down, but Mr. Ewmet, finding himself and his family under attack, couldn’t remain entirely silent. In his capacity as deacon, he delivered a sermon on the evils of licentious youth. One of the saner adults who’d been there said dryly, “Jane may not have been wearing much in the boat, but that sermon was more thinly veiled than she was.”

In response, the road repair crew that had been scheduled to fix a large pothole in front of the church never showed up, and Tom Halloran made no effort to disguise the reason. “There are plenty of other potholes in this town that need fixing,” he told a local reporter, who dutifully reprinted the statement in the weekly paper. “If Ewmet repairs the hole in his head, maybe I’ll get around to fixing the hole in the road. As it is, I think that pothole’s an outward and visible sign of inner unbelievable idiocy, don’t you?”

The reporter kept his opinions to himself, but a number of other people who should have stayed out of the fray took sides. My mother, predictably, was one of them. She replaced her usual unit on
Huck Finn
with one on
The Scarlet Letter
, taught largely from filmstrips that watered the text down for seventh graders. After the first few days, none of us bothered trying to read the book.

At the end of the unit we had to give oral reports. My mother gave us the list of topics she’d prepared the last time she taught the book, four years earlier. I picked the safely dull subject of the role of religion in Puritan life. Jane, never one to back away from a fight, chose to talk about “Hester Prynne’s Relationship to her Community.”

“Hester Prynne must have been mad because the people where she lived didn’t have any guts,” Jane told us, standing at the front of the class to deliver her report. She’d embroidered a scarlet A+ on her baseball cap; everyone but my mother had laughed when she put it on. It was already a safe bet that she wouldn’t be getting an A+ on this report. “Her friends wouldn’t talk to her anymore. They were prudes and cowards.” She glared at me the whole time she was talking.

“Guts!” my mother said at dinner that night, as I sat drowning in shame. “That Halloran girl used the word ‘guts’ in a report about Nathaniel Hawthorne. Can you imagine?”

“Guts is a perfectly fine word,” my father said mildly. He was home for dinner after performing a particularly grueling colectomy; he’d walked into the house whistling and hadn’t taken his eyes off me all evening. “It’s Anglo-Saxon, love, that’s all. Like shit and fuck.”

“Stewart!”

My father laughed. “Now, Pam, those are eminently expressive words. The only thing wrong with them is that they’re not Latinate. Tennyson had guts as surely as you or I do. Coleridge may not have produced much shit, since opiate addiction causes notorious constipation, but all those fellows fucked whenever they could get it—”

“Stewart! Watch your language in front of your daughter!”

“Oh, my dear, I’m sure she’s heard worse from her darling little compatriots. And why should I watch my language, when you do it so vigilantly for me?”

My mother spooned more peas and carrots onto my plate, even though I hadn’t touched what was already there. “You’re starting to sound like Tom Halloran.”

“Yes, he’s certainly a vigilante, although he probably couldn’t pronounce it.” My father whistled a fragment from the William Tell Overture and said, “So tell us, Emma, how is your friend coping with her newfound fame?”

“She’s not my friend anymore,” I said, my arms aching with bruises under my long-sleeved shirt, and shovelled peas and carrots into my mouth so he wouldn’t ask me any more questions. I knew Jane thought I sided with my parents, but I couldn’t apologize, because to tell her why I’d acted like such a prude I’d have to tell her about the breathing.

“You’re growing up, Emma,” my mother said approvingly. “You’ve finally realized that she’s not good enough for you. You’ll be much happier in school when you make nicer friends.”

I swallowed the peas and carrots, which tasted like gravel. Nicer friends? Like who? Fine, Mom. I’ll spend all my free time with Ginny.
That
should make you happy.

The phone rang, and my father grimaced. “That had better not be the hospital. I can’t digest pork in an ICU. Pamela, love—”

She’d already gone into the kitchen to get it. “Hello? Yes, of course this is Pamela.” Her voice was suddenly cold and scornful, the way it had been when she was talking about Jane’s report.

My father raised an eyebrow. “Pam?”

“It’s for me,” Mom said tightly, and carried the phone into the pantry at the far end of the kitchen. “No,” I heard her say, vehemently, and then she closed the pantry door.

My father shrugged at me. “There goes your mother, shutting herself up with the canned corn again. Is math going any better, Emma?”

“No,” I said, straining to hear what Mom was saying through the closed door,

“What are you working on?”

There was a hiss from the pantry, something that sounded like, “Myrna, you’re not to call here.” My father frowned.

“Mixed variables,” I said.

“What?” He looked at me blankly and then said, “Oh, well, those aren’t too hard.”

Sure they aren’t, for a famous doctor. “Absolutely not,” my mother said. Her voice faded for a few seconds before rising sharply. “I don’t want you in this house, do you understand that?”

“Maybe you should go upstairs and mix up some variables,” my father said, still frowning. He’d started tapping on the tabletop with his fingers, a nervous, drumming tattoo.

“I told you,” said my mother, “you’re not welcome here! Don’t call again!”

I wanted to cry, and even my father scowled. “Dad, why does she have to talk to Myrna that way? It’s rude, isn’t it? Mom’s the one who’s so big on manners.”

“What?” He looked at me blankly again, and then his features softened into something like relief. “Well, Emma, your mother has to act as she thinks best. Don’t worry about it. They’re both adults, and it’s not your responsibility. You should be worrying about your grades instead. Do you want me to help you with the math?”

I shook my head and got up to go to my room. On my way up the stairs I heard my mother say, “This is intolerable. Intolerable! Stewart, can’t we get an unlisted number?”

He laughed: a short, sharp sound devoid of humor, “I don’t think that will do much good, Pam. You seem to keep forgetting that she knows where we live.”

“Did you have to solve
equations with mixed variables?” I asked Ginny that evening, as we did slow circles above the lake.

She grimaced. “We’d just gotten to that in math, and then I had to go into the hospital, so I never learned. I always thought they sounded like mixed vegetables. Peas and carrots. I hated peas and carrots.”

“We had peas and carrots tonight.”

“Ugh. Have you ever been to Disneyland?”

“What?” Her logic frequently mystified me. “Of course not. I’ve never been anywhere except Aunt Diane’s house in Ohio.”

Ginny did a graceful loop-de-loop, mirrored by her reflection on the water, and said wistfully, “Dad was going to take us to Disneyland when I got out of the hospital. He’d promised. I’d always wanted to go.”

“He doesn’t make promises like that to me,” I said. Why did she always have to make me jealous? “But he loved you, so I guess that’s the difference.”

“I guess so.” Ginny shivered. “He loves you, too, doesn’t he?”

Did he? He’d taught me to swim; he’d made the balloon animals for me, and he helped me win the pumpkin contest every year. But I didn’t know what those things meant anymore. He liked me to swim because he wanted me to exercise, so maybe when he made the balloons he’d really been making fun of my stubby legs. Maybe he carved the pumpkins so carefully just because he couldn’t stand to watch contests he didn’t win.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t—I can’t figure it out. Maybe he did once. I don’t know. Anyway, he loved you more. He’s never talked about taking me to Disneyland, that’s for sure.”

“He must love you,” Ginny said insistently. “He must, Emma.”

“Why?” She was making me nervous. “It’s not a law, is it? Mom doesn’t. Anyway, what do you care?”

“He has to love you! Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“Huh?” For a moment I thought I heard breathing in the distance, but then I realized it was only the wind in the trees. What was she talking about? “No, that’s not why I’m here! I showed you why I’m here. The first time I saw you. When I pointed. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes,” said Ginny, her voice shaking. “Of course I remember. Doesn’t that mean he loves you?”