Goldengrove (8 page)

Despite what Margaret had said, I knew that sex was more than knowing what flavor of ice cream you wanted, more than deciding how many dates you had to go on before you let a boy touch your breasts, more than no meaning no. I understood that sex could make anyone do anything, but I couldn’t figure out how the feeling I got from rubbing myself could make people ruin their whole lives.

One afternoon, as I walked down the poetry aisle on my way to the human sexuality section, a thick book caught my attention. It was an anthology of poems from around the world, and at the end was an alphabetical index of first lines.

On a hunch, I looked up “Margaret.”

I turned to the page, read a few lines, and then reread them, trying to understand and at the same time to convince myself that I must be mistaken. I no longer cared if someone walked into the store. I sank to the floor as I reread the poem.

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow’s springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

I didn’t get it right away or, truthfully, at all. Wanwood leafmeal sounded like some kind of garden fertilizer. I knew the poem was about grief and mourning and sorrow, about everything and everyone getting older and dying. For some reason, it infuriated me. I held the book open before me like a cross to ward off a vampire, like the surprise piece of evidence at my parents’ trial for . . . what? What sadist would name a baby after such a depressing poem? Maybe they’d actually caused her death by naming her Margaret. Nancy or Suzie or Heather might still be alive and well. I slammed the book shut as if it were the poem’s fault, though I knew that if I’d read the poem when Margaret was alive, it wouldn’t have meant anything beyond some dead guy’s weak attempt to sound gloomy and important.

The effort of wedging the heavy book back onto the shelf left me so exhausted I had to lie down on the floor. I opened my eyes to see my father leaning over me.

“Nico!” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I was taking a nap.” I glanced at the shelves, where the incriminating anthology had faded back into the rows of books. I almost said, “I found the poem. I know what you and Mom did.” But what would that have led to besides a conversation I didn’t want to have, looking up at my father from the bookstore floor?

I said, “I’m trying an experiment. A sort of osmosis thing. I’m seeing whether if I take a nap next to the poetry books, maybe a few lines will seep into my brain and make me understand poetry better.”

Dad said, “My little scientist. So does it work? Did anything stick?”

“Not a word,” I answered.

“Too bad,” my father said. Clearly, he didn’t believe me. But at least he didn’t ask why my experiment had left me in tears.

I
HAD TO BE CAREFUL WHAT
I
SAID, LEST ALL MY LIES COME TRUE
. My experiment in the poetry aisle had been an accidental success.
Something
lodged in my mind, so that for the rest of the day, that line, “
It is Margaret you mourn for
,” bashed around inside my brain like a bird trapped in a house. I knew it was insane to think that naming my sister after a morbid poem meant that she would die young. But the line stayed with me, and I wanted to get rid of it, the way you can pass along a tune that’s driving you crazy by singing it so that it leaves your head and enters someone else’s.

That evening, at dinner, I kept quiet as long as I could. Then I asked, “So are you going to change the name of the store now, or what?” It wasn’t what I’d said so much as the way I’d said it, the aggrieved, sullen
teenage
tone my parents hadn’t heard since my sister died. They sat up and listened as if they were hearing the voice of someone they used to know.

Dad was the first to realize that it was only my former self. “Why would
that
be?” he said.

“Goldengrove,” I said. “Isn’t that from the poem you named Margaret after?”

My parents looked puzzled. Could they have forgotten? Did they think Margaret was just a name they’d liked when they were hippies planting vegetables by the light of the full moon?

I said, “Would you like me to bring the book home and read it to you?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Dad said. “I remember it perfectly well.”

My mother said, “Margaret’s a beautiful name.”

“
Was
,” I said. “
Was
a beautiful name.”

“
Is
,” she said warningly.

“I still think Margaret’s a pretty name,” said my father. “As is Nico, for that matter.”

“Pretty?” I said. “Pretty?” I looked to Mom for support even as I felt my case collapse. How could I accuse them of harming my sister by naming her after a poem? Soon they’d insist on sending
me
for professional help. I wondered if Aaron’s mother had told him I’d said he should come visit me at the store.

I said, “Speaking of doctors,” though we hadn’t been. “Did you guys make that appointment for me to see the specialist in the city?”

“What appointment?” said Mom.

I said, “I can’t believe you forgot.”

“Nico, sweetheart, there’s nothing wrong with you,” said my father.

I said, “The sooner the better, okay? The heart specialist?”

“Will do.” My mother gave me a trembly version of Margaret’s Ginger Rogers salute.

And though it was still early, I went to my room and got into bed.

Seven

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I
WOKE UP DRENCHED WITH SWEAT FROM A
night of troubling dreams. In one, a blotchy purple stain seeped in from the edges of my field of vision. I’d never had a nightmare like that, of gathering darkness and blindness. I was afraid to open my eyes. I opened one. I could see. Then I remembered the line from the poem.

I whispered, “Help me. I need your help. Tell me what to do.”

Margaret and I used to play with a ouija board we’d found in the attic. The first few times were thrilling. The gliding, the spelling out, my gathering amazement as the letters turned into words. I’d wanted to believe that Margaret and I were taking dictation from the beyond.

The last time we did it, we’d asked the spirit what its name was.

“M-o-t-h-r-a,” it spelled out.

I said, “Isn’t that the monster in that horror film you like?”

“Hush, you’ll scare it away,” Margaret said.

The spirit spelled out “N-i-c-o.” I caught my breath.

It spelled, “G-e-t y-o-u-r s-i-s-t-e-r s-o-m-e c-a-k-e.”

I said, “You’re doing it, right?”

“Think what you like,” Margaret said.

It was easy for us to play like that, then. Whom did we think we were contacting? We’d never
met
anyone who had died.

But now, though I longed for a message, I would never have touched the board. And whom would I have played with? Instead, as I lay in bed, feeling the sun filter through the curtains, I prayed to become a human ouija-board puck. Let my sister move me.

After a while, I felt . . . something. The urge to get out of bed, a faint pressure on one elbow. I let it push me, I didn’t resist as it steered me to my closet. My hand rose, and I plucked Margaret’s Hawaiian shirt from the swaying clothing. I reentered my body to find it wearing my sister’s shirt and feeling ever so slightly braver.

“Thank you,” I said to the empty room. Or to Margaret, if she was there. In the shirt, I could face the bookstore and not succumb to the temptation of obsessively rereading the poem about death and my sister.

I slipped out of the house. I didn’t want my mother to see me in Margaret’s shirt.

My father was waiting in our usual booth at the Nibble Corner. When he spotted me, he looked vaguely irritated or anxious, as if I were bringing him bad news about a broken household appliance. Maybe Margaret’s shirt stirred some recollection that failed to compute. Or maybe that was the default expression his face assumed that summer, before he knew someone was watching. He didn’t seem to notice what I was wearing, or to connect the shirt with my sister. Evidently, Margaret’s fashion sense hadn’t come from Dad.

We ate our sandwiches. I went to the bookstore. I felt fine, or almost fine. The silkiness of the shirt on my skin could have been Margaret touching my arm. The palm trees swayed, hula girls danced, Margaret’s ghost exerted its pressure, and all of it lulled me and kept me from seeing the hurricane heading my way. Still, I must have sensed some disturbance in the air. Because when my father left for the library, I didn’t want him to go.

I said, “Have fun, Dad,” in someone else’s reedy voice. I felt a grinding in my chest. I needed to see a doctor! The first appointment my mom had been able to make was not for another few weeks.

To calm myself, I opened my favorite book, a volume on Sienese painting so large that I had to spread it across the counter. Each picture reeled me in, first with the bait of its story line, then with the lure of the secret beneath it. Turning the pages transported me from a candy-colored city to a hillside on which two shepherds and their dog huddled by a fire, gazing up at an angel powered by a rocket exploding from its robe. I paused at a levitating monk, rising into the air, then went on to the garden paradise crowded with joyous, reunited souls. All around were flowering plants in glorious full bloom, trees loaded with enough lemons for eternal lemonade. How glad the embracing angels were to have ended up there.

Painting by painting, I worked my way through the miraculous rescues, the saints snatching infants from the jaws of wild beasts and restoring the pink of life to the ashen-faced dead. One artist seemed to specialize in saints resurrecting drowned children. A baby had fallen into a fountain. A boy had slipped into a river. Both paintings showed the children immersed, their faces blue as water, and then in subsequent panels the boy and the baby stood, dressed in red, their tiny hands clasped in gratitude to the saint who had fished them out. I wondered if the painter had seen something like that, or if he had lost, or almost lost, a child to death by drowning.

Margaret
had
been born too late. She’d meant too late for the jazz standards, the screwball comedies, the satin gowns. But she’d been off by the centuries. Too late for the lifeguard saint.

Suddenly jealous of the families of the rescued children, I turned to the painting I loved most and saved for last,
Saint Nicholas of Tolentino Saving a Shipwreck.
Shining through the furry black sky, a celestial searchlight had picked out a boat with notched walls and towers, as if a fortified town had slipped offshore and floated onto the ocean. A storm had ripped the sails from the ship and swept them into the sky, where they whirled and snapped like laundry blown off a clothesline. From the edge of the painting, the saint flew down to save the drenched passengers and sailors huddled, praying, on deck.

Staring at the picture, I found what I’d wanted when I’d gazed into Margaret’s snow globe. I left my body and entered the painting. I felt the sting of salt on my face, I heard the wind moan and the sailors’ shouts, I saw the saint approaching. I focused on the heavenly laser piercing the spiraling wind, and as I cowered along with the shivering crew, waiting for Saint Nicholas to steady the boat and gather me in his arms, I imagined—no, I heard—the tolling of the ship’s bell.

In fact, it was the doorbell. Someone had walked in.

Even when I heard a voice saying, almost fearfully, “Nico?” I raised one arm to ward off the lash of salt spray. I wasn’t ready to leave the roiling sea for the airless tomb of the bookstore.

Someone stood in front of me. A mouth, a familiar face. It took me so long to identify it that when I finally did, my own face lit up, and I blushed. We both acted as if I’d been joking, making believe I didn’t recognize Aaron. We laughed, but it wasn’t real laughter. It was the noise two chimpanzees might make to express something too deep for everyday monkey language.

“Aaron! Aaron! Hi! Hello!” I was practically yelling.

“Hey, kid,” Aaron said. “How are you?”

“Okay, I guess.” Water bubbled out of my eyes. That’s how okay I was. Fighting tears gave me something to focus on, a timeout in which to process the fact that Aaron was actually here. My standing behind the counter would have made it awkward for him to hug me or touch me. He was trying not to look at me—out of politeness, I guessed. The sight of him made me feel a stab of longing for Margaret, from which I was distracted by the startling realization that all this time, all these days and weeks, I’d been waiting for him to walk in.

“You’re still here,” he said. “My mom told me—”

Where else would I be? Was Aaron nervous? About seeing
me
? About seeing Margaret’s sister.

“Don’t cry,” said Aaron. “Please don’t cry. Forget I said that. Go ahead.”

It was such a huge relief, not having to pretend. Weeping felt like sneezing or like falling asleep. Aaron watched me, not annoyed or impatient but, it seemed to me, grateful, as if I were doing what he would have done if he’d been a girl. Snot roped out my nose. I wiped it with the back of my hand. I wasn’t embarrassed. I didn’t care that he was a boy. An older guy. A relative stranger. At that moment, he was the person who knew me best in the world.

I scrubbed at my eyes and willed the tears to stop. Meanwhile, I shut the art book and slid it under the counter. What if Aaron thought I’d been looking at art just to impress him? But I hadn’t known he’d come in. I’d been looking at a sinking ship, at sailors in danger of drowning. I didn’t want it to upset Aaron. That a boat might remind him of Margaret made me so glad to see him that I started crying again.

By now Aaron was looking at me in a way that I mistook for curiosity about when—if ever—I might calm down. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Margaret’s shirt. He kept wanting to look at my face, but his eyes kept tracking down to the palm trees, then back and forth, nose hula girls, forehead coconuts, trying to put it together. Since he couldn’t focus on me, I could stare at him without having to worry about him staring back. Aaron still had that golden glow, burnished by exhaustion and sadness. He looked wasted, but more attractive: a haunted, insomniac soul. I thought of Aaron’s mother, and I wondered if a stranger seeing our family would think we’d aged drastically, too.

Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed the change if I hadn’t known his face so well, if I hadn’t watched so closely as Aaron and my sister traded tastes of the pistachio that dyed their mouths a matching green. Anyone else might just have seen a handsome boy, innocent and self-admiring. Maybe a little troubled. Screw loose? I didn’t think so.

“That’s quite a haircut,” Aaron said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Thanks for mentioning it. It was my mom’s idea.”

“So I guess she took you to the butchers at the mall?”

How much had Margaret told him? He must have known all about us.

“You look completely different,” he said.

“I
am
completely different.” I wondered if I should come down from the platform behind the counter. I stayed where I was.

“I know,” he said.

“But different better.”

“That would be strange,” I said.

“Different
really
better.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I don’t know why that would be. I feel different worse. A lot worse.”

“Don’t you think I understand that?” Aaron sounded almost angry. It was a little unnerving, how quickly he got annoyed. Grief was rough on everyone’s nerves. Everyone was edgy.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I mean, I know you know.” I’d forgotten what we were talking about. Better not to talk, better not to call attention to a girl with a bad haircut wearing her dead sister’s shirt. But the longer the silence lasted, the greater the danger that Aaron would leave. Or that my father would come back. If I couldn’t say, “How are you?” what were my chances of saying, “Please stay. I need you to stay”?

Finally Aaron said, “I looked for you at that meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“The meeting about the pond scum.”

“Oh,
that
meeting. I forgot.”

“I can understand why,” Aaron said.

“You can?”

“My God, Nico.” He finally looked at me, at my face.

“So what’s up with the phytoplankton?” I asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Phytoplankton,” I repeated.

“Also known as pond scum.”

“Excellent.” Aaron grinned and stuck up his thumb.

I watched him as closely as I dared. Was he making fun of me? “I’m not being sarcastic,” he said.

“It’s great that you know stuff like that.”

“So what did they decide?”

“Decide? Since when has this town ever decided anything? They did what they always do. Talk and argue, dis
cuss
, blah blah, talk and argue some more, freak each other out. That’s what they like best, they like to feel really scared. They’ve been shaking in their boots ever since 9/11, up here in the middle of nowhere, way off the terrorist radar. Right?”

“Right,” I said. For a second, I wondered, Was Aaron high? I didn’t think so. He just had the unstoppered sound of someone who hadn’t talked in a while.

“But the thing is,” he was saying, “if they’re terrified, at least they’re feeling
something
. Although that’s not what they
think
they like. They think they like feeling
nothing
, which is why they live up here where nothing ever happens, where what gives them screaming nightmares is the fucking pond scum. And of course, your sister dying. That really blew them away.”

I heard the breath catch in my throat, the only sound I could make. Aaron understood. He said, “Graduation was hell. Half the town felt they had to come up to me and say how sorry they were about Margaret, and I had to thank them. I knew they meant well, and all the time I wanted to kill them. I wish you’d been there, Nico.”

“We didn’t go,” I said. “We didn’t want to.”

“I understand that,” Aaron said.

“And I respect your family’s decision. I just meant for support. For me.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You would have hated it,” Aaron said. “Everything she couldn’t stand, one thing after another. There was no one I could look at. No one to roll my eyes at. Teachers and kids she didn’t even
like
were pretending they were her best friends. They were all competing. Who knew her better, longer, telling their personal reminiscences that probably never even happened.”

I said, “Maybe that’s nice. I don’t know. I’m glad I wasn’t there. So what
is
the story?”

“The story on . . . ?”

“On the phytoplankton.”

“Oh, right. If things keep going like they did last summer, which they will, thanks to El Fucking Niño or global warming or whatever—”

“They definitely will,” I said. How I longed for that other life in which I worried about climate change. And how great that Aaron thought about it, too. I’d never realized that we had anything but Margaret in common. Margaret knew we were headed for ecological disaster, but she liked to pretend I’d invented it to be a Debbie Downer.

Aaron said, “By August we’re going to be sitting on a major sinkhole. Skin rashes, eye infections, liver damage. Sulphury, rotten-egg swamp gas. It’ll be like the black lagoon the creature crawls out of. At least I’m getting out of here.”

“I’m not,” I couldn’t help saying.

“I know,” said Aaron. “Sorry.”

“That’s all right. I don’t want to leave.” Only when I said it did I know it was true. Margaret and I had dreamed of going to Boston, or New York, or even Paris someday. I’d assumed we’d go together. Now she’d found a permanent home, and if I wanted to be near her, I was stuck here forever.