Heart-Shaped Box (Claire Montrose Series) (3 page)

Charlie flipped through pages with photographs of club members, the choir, the band, the orchestra. Claire recognized herself in one of the group photos, her curls all but obscuring her eyes.

Before the alphabetized photos began was a single page set in plain type and headlined “Academic Honors.” Claire reached out to turn the page, but Charlie had already found her name. “Look at this! National Merit Scholar. Oregon Scholar. Presidential Scholar Nominee. Your family must have been so proud!” Claire gave her a look and Charlie remembered whose family she was talking about. The older woman’s face grew serious. “With your scores, why did you never go to college?”

“
We didn’t have any money.” Claire kept her answer short, knowing that was only part of it. Part of the reason was that she had been scared.

“
But all the good schools are what I believe is called ‘need-blind.’ You should have qualified for many scholarships.”

Claire shrugged. “No one told me that at the time. At Minor, we had one guidance counselor, but I’m not sure what he was there for. It wasn’t much of a secret that he believed girls should grow up to be wives and mothers.”

Wanting to change the subject, Claire took the annual from Charlie and began to turn the rest of the pages, rows and rows of faces. She pointed at a thin boy with straight dark hair parted on the side. With his long, narrow pointed nose he looked something like a drawing of Pinnochio come to life, made the “real boy” he had always wanted to be. “Now this is the funniest story of all. Who would have thought that Dick Crane would turn out to be somebody important?”

“
Why is that name so familiar?” Charlie wrinkled her forehead.

“
He goes by Richard now.”

“
Richard Crane - he is that computer millionaire?”

Claire nodded. Dick - or Richard - had invented the Simplex high-speed modem. Now anyone who spent time on the Internet wanted to do it via a Simplex, which was lightning fast and allowed its owner to use a phone without getting an additional line. Who could have foreseen that a member of Minor High’s Bi-Phy-Chem Club - which now sounded like a support group for drug addicts with sexual identity issues - would someday be well on his way to being one of the richest men in America?

“
He sat in front of me in calculus, but I don’t remember talking to him more than once or twice. He was kind of your typical smart, quiet kid. He worked on the yearbook and was a founding member of the Knights of the Log Table math club. Everyone knew he was a genius, but at Minor High that wasn’t anything to be proud of.”

“
I wonder how the people will treat him now?”

“
I kind of hope he comes, just to see,” Claire said, turning the page. “Oh look, there’s Tyler Kraushaar.”

“
Tyler Curlyhair? It fits, doesn’t it?” Charlie tapped on Tyler’s hat-defying blond Afro.

“
I didn’t realize that was German. When we were six, I told him there wasn’t any Santa Claus. When he was little, he had this terrible stutter, and he couldn’t even get any words out, he was so shocked. So instead he ran away, crying. His mom called me up on the phone after we both got home from school, screaming that I was a liar to have told her son that.”

“
He must not have liked you.”

“
Are you kidding? He always had a huge crush on me. He even asked me out on my first boy-girl date.” Claire smiled at the memory, the awkwardness faded by the intervening years. “I don’t know why I said yes. Ever since third grade he had been trying to prove that he liked me by pushing me down on the playground or stealing my lunch. Once when we were playing dodge ball he beaned me so hard that he gave me a bloody nose and I had to go home.”

Charlie gave her a sympathetic smile. “What was your date like?”
“Well, we were both fifteen, which meant he couldn’t drive. He had his mother pick me up and then we went over to his house and listened to records in the den. Every few minutes his mom came in with another tray of snacks. I still remember the look on her face, like she thought she was going to catch us having sex. The next week Tyler told everyone at school I was his girlfriend, and I had to go around taking it back.”

“
Was he angry?”

“
That was the sad thing. He wasn’t.” Claire rifled through the pages until she found the photo she wanted. “This was my first real boyfriend. Jim Prentiss.” She pointed to a boy with wavy light brown hair who was intently potting a plant in a greenhouse. He wore a puka shell necklace, flared jeans so tight you could see the space between his thighs, a belt with a buckle in the shape of a leaf of pot, and what looked like a hand-crocheted shirt. Her memory supplied the color for his eyes: the green of cat’s eye marbles. “We worked together at Pietro’s Pizza. I was head cashier and he was head cook. Sixteen years old and proud I was making twenty cents more than minimum wage. We used to stay in the restaurant after we finished closing it up.”
Charlie raised an eyebrow but said nothing, having guessed what two teenagers would do in a building late at night with no adults present. Jean had never talked to Claire about birth control, but Claire had only to look in the mirror or at her sister to know the consequences of unprotected sex. The same week Jim kissed her in the cooler Claire had gone to Planned Parenthood for the pill. She remembered the way Jim used to touch her, his clear experience tempered with a genuine affection. Afterward, they would pass a cigarette back and forth. Claire had felt sophisticated, conversing naked with a boy. When he decided he wanted to see someone else, Jim told Claire straightforwardly and then held her while she cried. It wasn’t in Jim to lie, or to be with one girl for more than a few months. Whenever he had free time, he practiced guitar with his older brother in their garage. They had played for a few school assemblies, sweaty and happy, their hair hanging in their eyes, while the girls screamed out their names.

“
I heard he got some girl pregnant right before we graduated, and their parents made them get married just before she had the baby. I can’t imagine he stayed married long, though.” She realized what was unusual about the picture of Jim in a greenhouse. He had basically been a hood, as the bad kids were called back then. Claire flipped back through the pages. No one had taken pictures of the hoods, of the nerds, of the shy people. Or maybe they did, but their pictures certainly didn’t make it into the annual.

Claire was about to close the yearbook when her gaze lit on the photo of Logan West. He had a shock of bright red hair, pale skin, and square-framed glasses that had not yet moved from geekiness to Elvis Costello cool. “There’s another kid I’ve known since kindergarten. His family lived down the block. The last time I saw him was about a week after we graduated. He was wild, shouting that the walls were listening to his thoughts, that people’s mouths were turning into volcanoes. He was wearing a kind of helmet he’d made out of tin foil. Everyone thought it was because he smoked a lot of pot, but later that summer he ended up in Dammasch, the old state mental hospital, diagnosed with schizophrenia.” Claire had visited him a couple of times. Now she felt guilty that she had let him slip through her life.

Instead of answering, Claire turned back to the photos of the prom. “Looking at all these people, I feel like I have double vision. It’s been so long since I’ve thought about them I can almost see them as if they were strangers. At the same time, I remember the weight some of them carried, the weight of popularity. It was like the rest of us were insubstantial.”

RD4MOR

Chapter Three

With a snap, Susie shook out a silver plastic cape and draped it over Claire’s shoulders. Already Claire was beginning to have second thoughts. Her gaze met her sister’s in the mirror. Their eyes were the same - the same almond shape, and the same shade of blue, like the flame on a gas stove. They had the same high cheekbones, the same narrow straight noses. Even their hands were the same - long with squared-off fingertips - only Susie’s were stained yellow with nicotine.

Susie lifted one of Claire’s strawberry blond curls and then let it spring back into place. “You won’t look stupid,” she said, answering an objection Claire hadn’t raised. Yet. “This is going to be very subtle. Take a look at your hair real close. You already have blond, brown and auburn highlights. I’m just going to accent them a little. And I’ll guarantee it will take five years off your face and make your eyes look bluer.”

“
But will it freshen my breath and get rid of my ring-around-the-collar?” Claire asked.

Instead of answering, Susie tugged a close-fitting rubber cap over Claire’s head and tied the ends of the white elastic bands under her chin. The cap was pockmarked with dozens of holes. Picking up a tool that looked like a crochet hook, Susie began to pull small sections of hair through the cap.

A thought occurred to Claire. “You don’t use this stuff on dead people, do you?” Susie had started working at Moyter’s Funeral Home a few months earlier. At her previous job at Curl Up and Dye, she had grown tired of all the clients who seemed to want a therapist instead of a hairdresser. As Susie had pointed out, dead people usually weren’t interested in telling her about their ungrateful kids or philandering husbands.

“
Relax.” Her sister patted Claire’s shoulder. “I keep all that stuff separate.”

Despite the tugging sensation of having bits of her hair pulled through the cap, Claire closed her eyes and tried to follow her sister’s instruction to relax. It was impossible to clear her mind. She just hoped she was doing the right thing by letting Susie talk her into getting highlights.

When she had first returned the card to the Minor High reunion committee, Claire had decided that she was comfortable enough with herself to go as herself. She wasn’t going to get caught up in trying to make herself over, the way she heard some people did before attending their reunions. No facelift. No breast implants. No Jenny Craig. No caps on her teeth.

But then an idea began to nag at her the way her mother never had - would it hurt to try to look her best ? In the last two months, Claire had worked her way up to eighty-pound pec flys and now benchpressed one hundred and twenty five pounds. She was determined to draw attention away from her knobby knees and to her shapely shoulders. She loved junk food too much to diet for more than two hours, but now she was restricting herself to potato chips and crackers that said “less fat” on the label.

What to wear was the one problem Claire still hadn’t solved. The reunion offered a million different forms of humiliation for people who were on the verge of forty - and who also happened to be stuck in the throes of remembering their youth. Things kicked off Friday night with a Western-themed social. Claire figured she could get by with a denim skirt, a T-shirt and a bandanna tied around her neck. But what was she supposed to wear to the next day’s pool party? Or the dress-up dance Saturday night? Or Sunday’s barbecue and salmon bake?” Fourth of July in Minor meant the weather would likely be ninety-plus degrees. No hiding less than perfect thighs under pants, or concealing “chicken wing” upper arms with long sleeves.

At Meier and Frank, Claire had bought a swimsuit that, according to its hangtag, could correct six different figure flaws. It promised to nip in her waist, give her cleavage, elongate her torso and legs, minimize her butt and flatten her abdomen. The only problem was that it took twenty minutes to wrestle herself into it. And once she took it off, the red marks it left behind lasted for hours.

On the same shopping trip she had come close to buying an evening dress that was cut in such a way that no underwear could be worn under it. She’d finally borrowed a dress from her old friend, Lori. Lori had insisted Claire try on the high-heeled pumps that matched the dress. At the sight of Claire’s awkward, mincing stride, her friend had doubled over with laughter. “You look like a transvestite!” she had managed to gasp out. “You’ll have to wear flats, like you always do.” Since Claire had planned to do so anyway, she didn’t bother pointing out that her strange gait had been mostly due to the fact that Lori’s shoes were two sizes too small for Claire’s own size ten feet.

Something cold seeped onto her scalp. Claire opened her eyes. Susie was dipping a paintbrush into one of three pots of liquid color. Then she picked up another of the pulled-through sections of hair and began to paint it. “I’ll put more of the blond next to your face. It should make you look younger.”

“
Susie, at a reunion, everybody knows exactly how old you are.”

“
I know that,” Susie gave Claire’s shoulder a shove that was a little less than playful. “But you don’t have to look it, do you?”

Could Susie be jealous? The only thing she had ever graduated from was beauty school. Their mother, Jean, had left high school at sixteen when Claire’s imminent arrival had made itself known. Both of Jean’s parents had grown up on farms, quitting school by tenth grade because their help was needed in the fields. Before that, the family history was a little hazy, but Claire wouldn’t have been surprised to learn she was the first Montrose to graduate from high school.

Susie picked up a box of tin foil and began to tear off inch-wide strips. When she had a couple of dozen, she started to wrap some of the sections of hair in twists of foil. “This will intensify the color a little bit. That way you’ll have two levels of three shades, for a total of six variations of color - in addition to the color of your own natural hair.” She caught Claire’s gaze in the mirror again. “Don’t worry. You’ll look great, and no one will have any idea that it didn’t grow that way. Plus, you won’t have to worry about roots.” She picked up the last piece of tin foil, twisted it into place, and looked at her watch. “Okay, this is going to have to set for forty-five minutes, and then I’ll rinse it out. I’ve got to run down to the store and get some pull-ups for Eric. I’ve tried everything to potty train him, but it’s not working. I even got him this special potty chair that plays a song when you pee in it.”