Goldengrove (10 page)

“Chocolate.” Picking the flavor I wanted was easier when there was nothing I wanted.

“Excellent,” said Aaron.

I tried not to look at the filthy glass counter, like some bad abstract painting smeared with colored dabs. One drip of pistachio would send me racing out the door.

“ ’Scuse me?” said the girl.

“The lady said chocolate,” Aaron told her. “Double scoop.” Then to me, “Quick thinking, Nico.” He meant to sound approving. But he knew that my not caring wasn’t a good sign.

The girl smashed two brown globs into a cone, handed it to me, and turned back to Aaron.

“I think I’ll have the pistachio,” he said.

I stared at him as if he’d said, I think I’ll have the rat poison. We watched the girl dip the scoop in a blender jar of filthy water and approach the neon-green vat as if the sight of it wouldn’t make the planet topple off its axis. Aaron turned toward me, without seeing me. He had a funny twitch of a smile, and his eyes looked glassy. Then he bopped himself on the side of the head. “On second thought, make that butter pecan.”

The girl seemed not to have heard him and continued toward the lethal green. Then, as if she’d changed
her
mind, she spared us and swerved toward the beige.

“Thanks.” Aaron put four bills on the counter.

“That’s four-
fifty
,” said the girl. Everything was different.

“Cost adjustment,” she said, touching the inflamed nostril with the hand about to give Aaron change for a five. “Every Middle Eastern country we invade, the cost of oil skyrockets, which jacks up the price of your pecans and whatever carcinogenic shit they put in that pistachio. Plus every bomb we drop shortens the time until the next dirty-bomb attack. I figure the human race has got about another fifteen minutes, max. That’s why I like selling frozen dessert. Enjoy it before it melts—along with the polar ice caps. Ha ha.”

Her eyes were a pale, Siberian-husky blue, the pupils ringed with black as dark as the kohl around her eyelids. I thought she was someone I could be friends with, even though I realized her little speech had been entirely for Aaron’s benefit.

Aaron said, “You can say that again.” He smiled.

“But don’t.” He toasted her with his ice cream cone, and I did the same.

“Respect,” said Aaron, and the three of us fake-laughed. I loved it that the ice cream girl saw him hold the door for me on our way out.

“Can you eat ice cream and drive at the same time?” I asked. When the weather was nice, Margaret, Aaron, and I always finished our cones at the picnic table in front of the Dairy Divine. It was romantic, how they’d delayed the moment of saying good-bye.

“I could eat a lobster and drive if I had to,” he said. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

He headed up a narrow road I’d never been on before, though I’d thought I’d memorized every inch of the county. The road twisted up through the forest, then popped out into a clearing overlooking the mountains, their craggy silhouettes lined up in parallel rows and fading from green to purple to gray as they marched into the distance.

“I didn’t know you could get this high here,” I said.

Aaron said, “Well, actually, that’s why people come here.”

I prayed, Don’t let him pull out a joint. “Does this place have a name?”

“Miller’s Point,” he said.

“Who was Miller?” My father’s doomsday cult—wasn’t the leader named Miller? I wasn’t going to spoil our nice time by mentioning my dad. Anyway, Miller was practically the world’s most common name.

“I don’t know,” Aaron said. “Some lucky motherfucker. How would you like this view to be yours?”

“Maybe he didn’t own it,” I said. “Maybe he discovered it, or maybe he just liked to come here and look.” Maybe this was where he waited for an angel to rapture him and fifty thousand friends. Maybe this was where my dad’s maps and calculations would take us. Maybe I’d have to come here with Dad and pretend I’d never been here.

“Right,” said Aaron. “That’s how it works. All you have to do is hang out somewhere, and they name it after you.”

“Aaron and Nico Point.” I was horrified that I’d said our names together.

Aaron said, “They’re not going to call it that unless we both jump off.”

Neither of us spoke for a while after that.

Finally, Aaron said, “I haven’t been here since . . . I mean, it was always my favorite place, from when I was a kid. I used to imagine being a bird. Like every kid, I guess. But I’d always imagine flying out over my teacher’s houses and shitting on their roofs.”

“That’s so brilliant,” I said.

“I thought I would never be able to come up here again. I thought that if I came up here, I
would
want to throw myself off—”

“You don’t still think that, do you?”

“Not exactly.” As Aaron stared out the windshield, something in his face made me wonder if this was where he and Margaret had sex.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“No, why?” I said.

“You shivered.”

I held up my ice cream cone.

“Stupid me,” Aaron said.

Aaron and I worked on our ice cream, both watching a small, solitary cloud inch across the sky.

Aaron nodded at it.

“Check that baby out. What do you think it looks like?”

“A sheep?”

“I get where you could see a sheep. I was thinking Abraham Lincoln.”

“I can see that,” I lied.

Margaret would have seen something even odder and cooler than Lincoln. Or maybe she would have heard the cloud singing Otis Redding. And now she was gone, and here was Aaron with the dull little sister, and all she could see was a sheep. His ice cream hand clutched the steering wheel. Butter pecan trickled between his fingers.

I said, “I’m really sorry. I have no imagination.” I’d never said that aloud before. Why was I telling Aaron?

Aaron said, “That’s not true, Nico. That’s not true at all. I’m not saying everyone has an imagination. But
you
do. I always thought you were the funniest kid. And you can’t be funny without an imagination.”

“I never saw it that way.” Maybe I just liked to
think
I had no imagination. Because there were times I was proud of the twisty way my mind got from Point A to Point B. I just couldn’t see how a sheeplike cloud looked like Abraham Lincoln.

“Look again,” said Aaron. “Let your eyes go out of focus. Your mistake is zooming in too hard. That’s how you get the sheep thing. But if you just let everything blur a little, you’ll see the beard and the top hat.”

I squinted. “I see what you mean,” I lied again. “Sort of.”

“It takes a while. Try catching it from the corner of your eye instead of dead-on center. Because what you’ve really got to be careful about is looking in the wrong direction. Missing the main event.”

Listening to Aaron felt less like being part of a conversation than like chasing a runaway pet I was never going to catch.

“Like what, Aaron?” It felt strange to say his name.

He thought a second. “Like . . . I’ve always hated magicians. Because their whole thing is distracting you, making you look away from what they’re really doing. If you spend too much time watching magic tricks, you won’t be fit to live in the world. You’ll lose your survival instincts. You’ll be like a baby bird that falls out of its nest, and the humans adopt it, and the mother won’t take it back.”

I wondered if he was talking to me, or if this was how he used to talk to Margaret. How could anyone spend too much time watching magic tricks? It didn’t make sense, but still it seemed like the most interesting thing I’d ever heard. The cloud morphed into a Q-tip, but I didn’t say so.

I said, “Have you done any paintings?” I could ask to see them, and that would be another reason for us to get together.

He said, “I can’t imagine ever picking up a paintbrush again.”

“You should try.” I sounded as lame as Dad telling Mom to play the piano.

“I don’t want to,” Aaron said.

“Then don’t,” I said. “I mean—”

“And you know what? When people say, ‘You’ll get over this,’ I want to tell them to go fuck themselves. Sorry, Nico.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“Because what will I have then?” Aaron asked as if I might know. “The world without her in it? I keep wondering what she’d say about this or that. I can’t see or hear anything without wanting to tell her about it.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Me, too.”

He said, “You know what? I quit my job. I retired before it started.”

“What job?”

“I was supposed to teach art in the town rec program.”

“I used to
go
to that program.” It would have been fun if Aaron had been a counselor when I’d gone there.

“Everyone did,” said Aaron. “I didn’t feel like watching the little rugrats throw paint at each other. I didn’t feel like convincing myself it’s their way of being creative. I didn’t feel like anything.”

“Were your parents mad?” I said.

“Insane. But what’s saving my ass is that they’re too worried about me to get angry. They tiptoe around the house as if any loud noise might send me over the edge and—”

“And what?”

“And . . . I don’t know.
Their
fantasy. Whatever that is.”

Aaron’s dad was some kind of contractor-builder. I didn’t know what his mom did besides raise five kids. I thought about her coming into Goldengrove for a book that advised her to think of Aaron as a kitten who wouldn’t come out from under the couch. Poor Aaron. His parents should have been grateful to have a son like that.

“What’s their problem?” I said.

The Q-tip cloud had vanished. I’d studied the water cycle. Rain into cloud into rain into earth. The thought of it comforted me. I wished I could have told Aaron where the cloud had gone without getting lost in the maze of an explanation.

“My failure to
snap back
. They can’t figure out why I can’t
snap back
. So tell me, Nico. What am I supposed to snap back
from
and snap back
to
?”

“I don’t know.” Every time he’d said
snap back
, his lips twisted like rubber bands. He was imitating or mocking someone. Now I felt sorry for his parents. I wished he hadn’t mentioned them, because now all I could think of was Dad pacing the bookstore and imagining the worst.

“I should probably drive you back,” Aaron said.

“That’s what I was thinking.”

As we switchbacked down the road toward town, Aaron said, “Do you ever think about reincarnation?”

“All the time. Why do you ask?”

Aaron said, “Remember how your sister liked Laurel and Hardy so much? Well, I found this Web site all about these two brothers from New Jersey. Lots of people think the brothers are Laurel and Hardy reincarnated.”

“And?”

“And . . . the brothers were always big Laurel and Hardy fans even when they were in preschool, and they sort of look like them, and they made this video about them, and—”

I said, “There’s a movie where Hardy gets reincarnated as a horse.”

He said, “I watched it with Margaret.”

We passed a van like Aaron’s, stuffed with kids. The driver beeped hello.

“Who was that?” I said.

“I don’t know,” said Aaron. “Some random soccer-mom communication. You know what I wish I could do? Watch a movie, an old one like I used to watch with your sister. Maybe we could do that. I’d thought I’d never be able to go the Dairy Divine or drive up to Miller’s Point. And we did it together, Nico, and it wasn’t so terrible. Was it?”

We drove by the woodstove store, then the Quikmart.

“No,” I said. “It was fine. It was . . . nice.”

Nice,
mocked the staircase spirit.

He said, “You could come over, and we could hang out at my house and watch an old movie on DVD.”

“We could?” It was one thing to go with Aaron on a spontaneous ice cream run. But making plans, watching movies . . . how would that work? Don’t worry, Mom and Dad. I’m going to Aaron’s to watch the kind of films I used to watch with Margaret. If they were reasonable, they’d understand that Aaron and I were just friends trying to help each other get through this. But my parents wouldn’t see it that way. They’d always distrusted Aaron. Now they’d probably think he was some kind of necrophiliac child molester. If I wanted to spend time with him, I would have to keep it secret.

“Sure,” I said. “We could.”

“When?”

“Sunday,” I said. “The bookstore’s closed.”

“Excellent. I’ll call you.”

I said, “I’m not sure my parents will go for it.”

“I’m sure they won’t,” said Aaron.

As we neared Goldengrove, Aaron repeated, “I’ll call you, okay?”

I said, “You’d probably better hang up if my mom or dad answer the phone.”

Aaron grinned. “I’m good at that. I’ve had plenty of practice.”

Eight

I
TOLD MYSELF IT WAS NOTHING
I
HADN’T DONE BEFORE. I’D
lied to my parents every time I’d pretended to go to the movies with Margaret. But Margaret had always worked out the intrigues and the complicated arrangements.

To watch a film with Aaron would take, including travel time, three hours, more or less. My parents would worry if I said I was going to spend that long riding around on my bike. Three hours at the library? My dad spent half his day there, and it was closed on Sundays. Three hours at the movies? Even my parents knew the Rialto didn’t have matinees.

I needed a friend to lie for Aaron and me the way I’d lied for him and Margaret. But I’d blown away all my friends after my sister died. Anyway, I couldn’t trust them with a piece of gossip this hot. I imagined confiding in Violet or Samantha. Then I tried to calculate how long they could hold out before they told someone. I couldn’t blame them. There wasn’t a teenager on earth who could resist the glamour of being the first to hear that a girl she knew was hooking up with her dead sister’s boyfriend. Which I wasn’t
,
but even so, I knew how it might look.

I considered everyone I knew. Then I thought of Elaine. She was old enough, cool enough, she could keep a secret. She’d always refused to tell us the name of Tycho’s dad. I’d invent a boyfriend my parents didn’t like, and I’d ask Elaine to pretend that I was at her house when I was seeing Aaron—that is, the mythical boyfriend. I could ask her a favor because I was doing her one, filling in at the store till she found a sitter for Tycho. It never occurred to me that I was encouraging her to lie to her employer, probably because I couldn’t imagine Dad as anyone’s boss.

One afternoon, the phone at the store rang. It was Elaine, she’d forgotten a novel that she was halfway through. Tycho was home with a cold, she couldn’t leave. Could I bring over her copy of
The Man Who Loved Children
?

Dad was in his office. He looked up from a book when I knocked. “Just listen to this passage. Got a minute, Nico?”

“Sure,” I said. “But I need to go out. Elaine wants me to bring her a book. Can you take over the counter for a while? She’s stuck home with Tycho.”

“Fine. But listen.” He read, “ ‘In one South Indian village, pilgrims come to feed the dead by throwing food into the ocean. Bearded holy men work the beach, selling packets wrapped in banana leaves, a recipe the sadhus divine the dead want to eat.’ ”

“I wonder what’s in the packets,” I said.

“Comfort food for the dead,” Dad said. “Basmati rice? Vegetable curry?”

“Macaroni and cheese,” I said. It had never occurred to me that the dead might get hungry. Was there some food Margaret wanted? Pistachio ice cream, maybe.

“I wish I could use it in my book,” my father said. “But it’s not, strictly speaking, about the end of the world. I wish I was smarter. I wish I could synthesize this and Hindu eschatology and—”

I said, “You’re really smart, Dad. I’m sure you can use it somewhere. But I need to go out. Remember?”

“What’s Elaine reading?” my father said.

“
The Man Who Loved Children
,” I read off the cover.

“I’ve never read it,” Dad said.

“Me, neither,” I said. “But if Elaine wants it that badly, it’s got to be pretty good.”

“Take your time,” my father said. “I could use a break from writing.”

I ran all the way to Elaine’s. I found her in the kitchen, wearing shorts and a Jim Morrison T-shirt, her bare feet splayed across the top of her yellow Formica table. She was smoking a cigarette, drinking iced coffee, leafing through a travel magazine. She stubbed out the cigarette, as if I that would mean I hadn’t seen it. On the CD player, a blues singer was growling about a rabbit and a hunter and a gun.

“How’s Tycho?” I asked.

“He’ll live. But you know how he is. Every head cold is a metaphysical nightmare. Why should he have to suffer? Not that he asks, exactly. But I know what he’s thinking. Why can’t he just watch TV and drink juice and not chant stuff like ‘Hot now!’ and ‘Cold now!’?”

“Maybe so you don’t have to take his temperature.”

“He hates it,” said Elaine. “So I don’t. He’d bite through the thermometer. But what about
you
? Are
you
okay?”

I said, “I don’t know why everybody’s always asking me that.”

“Are
you?”

“Cramps.” I made a face. I actually had my period, so I wasn’t lying, not yet.

She shut the magazine.

“I bet you didn’t know that Zimbabwe is the new Las Vegas.”

I said, “Maybe Las Vegas is the new Zimbabwe.”

Elaine said, “If kids wrote these magazines, they’d be a lot more interesting.”

“Thanks, I guess.” I handed her the book I’d brought from the store.

“Thank
you
.” She sighed. “I’ll never find my place. Reading it is so painful I keep having these narcoleptic attacks, nodding off in mid-sentence. Because the father in the book is exactly like the son that my father and my ex-husband would have had if
they’d
gotten married and had a baby and the baby grew up and became a father. You should read it. But not now.”

“Your father and your ex-husband couldn’t have had a baby.”

Elaine looked disappointed. “Metaphorically, Nico. The funny thing is, I never noticed they were alike until I read the book. Self-dramatizing sons of bitches, both of them. Men, I mean. Your dad excepted.”

“Dad included. In his way.”

Elaine said, “Your father’s less of a motor mouth. And a million times nicer. More present and accounted for, if you know what I mean.”

“Present?” I said. “Accounted for? Dad?”

Elaine said, “Maybe it’s just a father thing. Christina Stead got
that
right. Hey, you want some iced coffee? Aren’t you dying of heat in that? Those synthetic vintage shirts, you might as well be walking around in a plastic trash bag. Wasn’t that Margaret’s shirt? Sorry.”

“That’s okay.” I fought the urge to say that Margaret told me I could have it. I could lie, but not about that.

“It looks great on you,” said Elaine. “But gosh, you’re losing weight. Isn’t your father feeding you? Nico, how are you? Really.”

I said, “I’m okay. Not great.”

“Great would be bizarre,” she said. “No one’s expecting great. Getting out of bed is the new great. Which you seem to be doing.”

“That’s about all,” I said.

Elaine said, “I hear you’re conducting ESP experiments in the poetry aisle. I thought that was inspired—”

I said, “Can I turn down the music?” I needed a walk across the room to process the fact that my father had told Elaine something so personal and shaming. Adults entertained each other with stories about their kids. The younger you were, the less privacy you had. Well, fine. I could lie about Aaron.

“Did I ask if you want some coffee?” Elaine said. “My short-term memory’s shot.”

“You asked,” I told her. “I said yes.” I didn’t like coffee. Margaret used to love it. The heart-disease books warned against caffeine. Uncaffeinated, my heart was ricocheting off my rib cage. Fear made me want coffee, the way being near a cliff can make you want to jump.

“Coffee would be excellent,” I said.
Excellent
was Aaron’s word. “Excellent,” I repeated.

As Elaine and I chatted—the weather, her ongoing babysitter search, customers at the bookstore—I stirred three teaspoons of sugar into my thickening coffee and, sip by sip, let the caffeine and carbs get ready to do the talking for me.

“I need to ask you a favor,” I said.

“I owe you one,” Elaine said.

I said, “I’ve started hanging out with this guy.”

“Oh, please, not yet,” she said. “Who is he?”

“No one you know.” Was that a lie, too? Did Elaine know Aaron? “Just a guy.”

“What’s he like?”

I waited a beat. I’d rehearsed this. “This really nice kid, in my class. Smart, considerate. You’d like him, Elaine. But my parents can’t handle my going out with anyone right now. They go crazy about every little thing. I don’t blame them. But no one would be good enough, and they’re giving me a hard time.”

“Have your mom and dad met him?”

I nodded. “It wasn’t pretty.”

“Why didn’t they like him? Tell me the truth.”

How shortsighted of me, not to have expected this, not to have invented a list of the imaginary boyfriend’s alleged flaws to go with his real virtues.

“My dad says he has a screw loose.”

“Which screw?” asked Elaine.

“The one that makes everything boring.”

Elaine said, “This is starting to worry me.”

“Please, Elaine. You
know
me. You’ve known me since I was born.”

“Your parents aren’t stupid,” she said.

I said, “They’d have a problem if I was going out with God.”

“Let’s hope you’re not,” said Elaine.

“Anyhow, I don’t think your dad believes in God. Any more.”

I said, “Come on, Elaine. Please.”

“Remind me how old you are,” she said.

“Thirteen. Almost fourteen.”

Elaine said, “Still growing. All that sugar can’t be good for you, honey.”

“I don’t drink coffee that often,” I said. “Only on special occasions.”

Elaine said, “What do you do?”

I looked at her.

“What do you and this boy
do
?”

“Nothing. We go out for ice cream—”

“Where?”

“The Dairy Divine.”

“He drives?” Elaine said. “How can he be in your class?”

“We take our bikes. We get ice cream. It’s nothing. My parents are paranoid. Can I say I was here with you?”

“I don’t like lying to your parents.”

“Listen.” I paused to steady myself.

“This is the first thing—the
only
thing—I’ve wanted to do since . . .” Elaine knew since when.

I was playing the Margaret card. I had saved it until now. It was the only thing that could make good-mom, good-person Elaine keep something like this from my parents.

Elaine stared at the ceiling. “How could that water spot be growing when it hasn’t rained for weeks?” She looked at me and shrugged. “Young love. What was
that
like? Dear Lord, I can hardly remember.”

“It’s not
love
.” I glared at her. “God, Elaine. We hang out.”

“That goes with the territory. The first time it’s never love. People say
first love
. Such and such a guy was my first love. But usually, they mean second love. The first time they don’t know it, or they won’t admit it. If you know what I mean.”

I didn’t. I wasn’t in love with Aaron. I didn’t even have a crush on him. That would have been too strange. We were friends, we were friends, we were friends, was all. I couldn’t begin to explain it. But let Elaine think it was love if it made her do what I wanted.

She said, “Everyone wants to bet on young love, to put their money on first love, as if love’s going up against death in some cosmic
High Noon
shoot-out. No one wants to think that love and death are working the same side of the street.”

“What?” I hated how adults got cryptic when you most needed them to be clear.

“Never mind,” she said. “Just two things, okay? First: Don’t make any decisions for a year. I mean
any
decisions.”

I said, “I’ve been hearing that from everyone who comes into the store.”

“Well, excuse
me
for being one giant cliché. But they don’t mean what
I
mean.”

“Which is . . . ?”

“Don’t make me get overly personal, Nico. Decisions about . . . your body.”

I said, “Oh, right. Sex. I should have known. I swear we’re not doing anything like that.” I almost wanted to admit the boy was Aaron so she would know how wrong she was. Or maybe I wanted to hear what she knew about Aaron, what lies my father had told. But I couldn’t risk it.

Elaine said, “I assume your mom had the Big Talk with you, right?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Actually, yeah.”

When I told my mom I’d gotten my period, she’d started crying. Then she said, “Come on. I’ll drive you to the drugstore.” On the way, she said, “Nico, you’re a smart girl. And you have an older sister. I’m not going to embarrass us both. The most important thing is to be safe and make sure you’re old enough. There’s a box of condoms in the upstairs medicine chest. As for the rest . . . I don’t want you to get your heart broken, honey, but I know that’s wanting the impossible.”

Then she’d told me about a short story she’d read in which a character says that the nature of sex is that the man is the guest and the woman the hostess. “The guest wants all sorts of things, he wants to make an impression, to enjoy himself, and so forth. And the hostess . . .”

Mom waited for me to ask what the hostess wants, but I didn’t. For some reason it seemed more repulsive than something clinical and disgusting. I preferred the part about the condoms in the bathroom.

“The hostess,” my mother said, “wants to be thanked.”

“Was it a man or a woman character who said that?” I asked.

“A woman,” said my mother. “And a woman wrote it.”

At the drugstore we’d bought a lifetime supply of stick-on pads and junior tampons. The kid at the checkout counter snickered at the mother-daughter menstruation survivalists.

Elaine said, “I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when Daisy gave you the sex talk. I’ll bet your mother was very modern and progressive.”

“I guess,” I said, though neither of those words described our conversation, precisely.

“Maybe I’m less modern. But then again I’m a single mom. Living proof of . . . something. At the very least, you’ll have a connection you might not want to have with that person. You can meet him twenty years from now, and no matter what else happened, he’ll still be the first guy you had sex with. I don’t want to be graphic, but you will have had that person
inside
you.”

“Elaine,” I said. “Please. That is so totally gross.”

“Sorry,” said Elaine. “But I don’t think I can emphasize this point strongly enough.”