Juniors (4 page)

I HAVE A ST
RANGE RESPONSE WHEN
I FIRST WALK IN.
The place feels affectionate. Like it welcomes and wants me there. Maybe it's the flowers that someone left on the dining table, but it's other things too. The light, the view, the colors, even the bright material of the furniture. The walls are a soft yellow, like butter pecan ice cream; the air is crisp and quiet. It's air-conditioning, I realize, which we didn't have in the condo. At our Kailua place, I was always on the verge of a sneeze—the mildew, the mold, the humidity. Everything here is pure. It makes me feel like I've done something right.

“Nice,” I say, relenting. I run my hand over the back of the sofa just beyond the dining table. The kitchen, eating area, and living room are all one great room.

“Oh my God,” my mom says, taking it in. “Isn't this awesome?”

“Yeah,” I say. “It is.”

The furnishings are all unique. Nothing matches—there's a light green couch and bold, floral-printed love seats, and the dark wood dining table and the glass coffee table aren't from the same set. Still, everything goes together. This makes each thing seem valuable, like it's been collected over the years, or
mulled over and chosen just for this room. It feels like our San Francisco apartment. I eye the flat-screen and the stereo. Music! My mom is inspecting the appliances in the kitchen. This doesn't feel like a place where the leftovers are stored. It also doesn't feel like something out of a catalogue, though it's beautiful enough that it could be. It's a home.

“Look at all this fruit,” my mom says. I bring the groceries to the kitchen, where there's an array of fruit in a basket. I wash an apple and bite into it.

“Melanie's so thoughtful,” my mom says. “Isn't this amazing?”

“The fruit basket?”

“Everything.” She spreads one arm out like a model on a game show.

“Amazing,” I say.

“God, Lea.” Her face falls.

“What?” I take another bite. “Whenever I don't match your pep levels, you freak out. It's great! It's insane, okay? It surpasses. Oh ma haw, catchphrase.”

“I'll go unload some more,” she says.

She walks out like a disappointed puppy. What an actress. I'm quite the actress too, because as soon as she leaves, I practically run through our new place as if I'm on a timed shopping spree. I open every drawer and cupboard in the kitchen to find that we're fully equipped with matching pots and pans, coffeemaker, and utensils, all better versions of what we have. The kitchen has a bay window that overlooks some of the lawn and the driveway. I look down at my mom unloading a box, and my heart breaks for her a bit.

I rummage through the kitchen box she brought up, locating our magnets, one for each home we've lived in—a HarleyDavidson, an orange tabby cat, a banana, a Buddha, and from Kailua: Da Kine Plumbing and Heating. Now we'll need another. I put them on our new fridge. There. Home. I've marked my territory.

I open more kitchen drawers. There's even cleaning supplies and paper towels and napkins—it's like going to a vacation house, which is exactly what this is, I guess. I notice a bottle of red wine and another bouquet of flowers by the microwave, along with a note—
Everyone co
uld use some Flowers
! Welcome home. xoxo
Mels.
The bottle says Flowers Pinot Noir.

My mom comes back in, and I show her the bottle.

“Yum,” she says. “That's a good one.”

I read something else in her expression, something like weariness, like she's about to go to work. She puts a box marked
kitchen
on the counter, and I tell her about all the things already here.

“Should we bother unpacking our kitchen stuff?” I ask.

“I guess we could leave our things in the garage.” She follows my path, opening drawers, then looks around with her hands on her hips, surveying the place.

“Have you looked in the rooms yet?” she asks.

“Was just about to,” I say.

“Take a look. I'll leave some stuff in the garage and bring up the rest. There's probably towels and sheets here. I didn't think about that.”

“Maybe we'll get full wardrobes too,” I say, but she doesn't
register my joke. She never does—says I'm always getting stuck in Joke Town.

She takes the box she just brought up, and when she leaves, I open every closet I see around the main room before looking into each of the three bedrooms. The two bedrooms on the beach side share a bathroom, and each has a walk-in closet. The bedroom nearest the avenue is clearly the master because of its size, yet the smaller rooms have the best views of the ocean. I guess the arrangement is so the master bedroom doesn't overlook the main house, which would lessen its mastery.

My liking of the whole package—the decorations, the layout, the possibility of a life here—soon turns into entitlement, like of course I should have all this. I deserve no less. For a moment, I even inwardly balk at the fact that the laundry room is all the way downstairs in the garage. I guess it's pretty easy to adapt to better surroundings.

I wheel my suitcase into the doorway of the small room that sits away from the driveway. I could have both rooms if I wanted. Or one could be my art room or yoga room or ballet studio or meditation room! I do none of these things, but suddenly want to. It's like getting something for free, for a limited time, and you feel a certain pressure to wring out every last drop. A ukulele room!

My mom walks into the room I've decided to take with another one of my suitcases.

“This one yours?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say, as if not really sure.

“Nice,” she says. “Everything is so lovely.”

“Did you see yours?” I ask.

She puts her arm around me. “I did. The bed is like a hotel bed.”

“Your favorite,” I say.

The room has the same dark wood floors as the rest of the house. There's a high bed with a puffy white comforter and big, full pillows. I throw myself onto it, and it does feel like a hotel bed. My mom explores, opening the doors to the armoire where a big television is stored.

“Awesome!” I say.

“Told you this would be fun.”

“I guess,” I say. It's still confusing, unreal, though I put my questions/complaints/reservations aside for now, remembering the bedroom I just came from. Green carpets, brown wood walls, low ceilings, heat.

This looks like a room that belongs to me. This one offers me something. Like the living room, nothing matches, yet everything seems to be getting along. I walk up to the window and look at the main house.

“We should probably go over, let Melanie know we're here,” my mom says.

“You can,” I say, not turning around. The house looks like a hotel.

“It would be nice if you came along. She hasn't seen you since you were a little kid.”

“It would be nice,” I say and glance quickly at my mom to show her I'm not moving.

I know that she wants me to do these things to learn manners
or something, but sometimes it feels like she just wants company, or that I'm a kind of shield for her. She doesn't have a husband, so I'm the one she brings along, and I'm the excuse she has when she wants to leave.

“Lea, they're doing a big thing here.”

“Yeah,” I say. “And I didn't ask them to.”

“Please have some gratitude,” she says.

“I will when I see them.” I hate when she makes me feel this way. I'm shy and embarrassed, and so I show her anger instead. I start unpacking my suitcase for something to do.

“Just come with me to say hello. I don't even know if anyone's here. You can meet Whitney.”

I don't answer. I refold my clothes like a maniac, as if this were the most important task in the world. I don't want to be shoved to their front door like a shy child forced to say “trick or treat.”

“Not now, okay?” I say. “We just got here.”

“I hope you're not going to have an attitude.”

I throw the clothes down on the bed. “I don't have an attitude! I'm just getting adjusted—trying to enjoy myself a little. Explore the surroundings, relax.”

She shakes her head, disappointed, giving me that wounded look. “I just thought some basic, decent manners wouldn't hurt.” She takes her exit. And scene.

Decent manners wouldn't hurt. But it does hurt. And it hurts me to think that she has to be nice, that they're doing a “big thing here” and we have to pay them back. How? What will we owe them, exactly? Their part will always look bigger: free house, parking, grounds, water. Flowers in a vase, Flowers in a
bottle, apples, oranges, bananas, oh my! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I just want to stay put. For a second, I had a feeling of excitement to be home, but by going to say thank you, she's reminded me that we're just houseguests. None of this is ours.

I OPEN
BOXES IN MY NEW ROO
M, LOOKING AT MY
things as if they're old friends. The built-in bookshelves are empty, and the first thing I do is arrange my books. I put the kid books I can't bear to get rid of into the closet—Ping, Eloise, Ferdinand, Beatrix Potters, Roald Dahls—and arrange the others on the shelf—Dickens, Austen, my young adults I get from the library whose titles I can never remember.
T
he Wonderful Awful
.
No Time Like Forever
. I line them up neatly, starting anew.

I like the comforter that's on the bed already, so I keep mine in its bag and put it in the pile of things to take downstairs, which is becoming huge. I don't need my old pillows, hangers, linens, towels. Everything here is better.

“Lea?” my mom calls from the living room. She's playing music. After I discovered Sonos and the home-filling speaker system, we can't stop playing music.

“Yeah!” I yell.

She walks to my doorway and whispers, “Whitney's here.” She looks giddy, like some celebrity is right behind her, but she's trying to play it cool.

“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”

“I went over to see if Melanie was home, and Whitney was there. She wanted to say hi.”

“Okay,” I say, shooing her away, knowing she's covering for whatever she's done—probably told Whitney I was dying to say hello and that I have no friends. My mom moves away to make room for Whitney, giving me a supportive look like I'm about to sing a song or jump hurdles or something.

“Hey,” Whitney says, from the doorway. She's barefoot, and her hair is wet, which tells me something about her—most girls don't like to get their hair wet. They just cook poolside like rotisserie chickens, taking intermittent dips up to their chins if they need to cool off. Her legs are muscled and long, even though she's not very tall.

“Hi,” I say.

Her two front teeth are notably big, but in this weird way that makes you want your front teeth to be notably big too. She has a dark mole perched on top of her right cheekbone that I keep focusing on, so with that and the teeth, it takes me a while to register her entire face, but when I do, I see cruelty. It's not that she's scowling or smirking or anything. She just has that teen-movie-girl face, the popular one who gets one-upped at the end by the less pretty girl with the big, big heart. Maybe that's not fair, though. Maybe she's not cruel at all—maybe she's just pretty. Her eyes are large and a bit slanted, with thick lashes.

“My mom told me you were here,” she says.

Yes, she clearly wanted to drop in and say hi. I want to tell her it's okay to go.

“I'm going to finish up out there,” my mom says. “Can I get you guys a snack?”

Oh God. A snack. I imagine saying to Whitney, “Can I offer you some fruit your mom brought?” and serving it to her on one of her plates.

“No,” I say.

“I'm good, thank you,” Whitney says.

“Okay, I'll let you girls chat.”

Whitney smiles at my mom, I don't, and then we're by ourselves. What are we supposed to chat about? She walks in, then takes slow steps around the room. I wonder if I should resume my task or follow her around like a realtor. She wears just a large T-shirt that has wet spots where her breasts are.

“Getting settled?” she asks, looking at the mess on the floor, my boxes and clothes.

“Yeah,” I say. “Unpacking some things.” Obviously.

She walks toward the window that faces the sea and her house.

“I've never been in here,” she says. I look at the backs of her thin and strong legs.

“Really?” That seems weird to me. I'm someone who leaves no drawer unopened. I can't imagine not going into a house I owned.

“I mean, when it was finished, I peeked in,” she says, “but I never looked at the bedrooms.”

I guess not. Why would she? It would be like checking out the maid's quarters or the handyman's tool shed.

She looks at my books, and I remain quiet, as if someone's looking at my art right in front of me. I wish I had some of my
pictures up—ones of my friends or of my mom and me in LA, dressed up for a premiere. She hops over a pile of my hats, then peeks into the bathroom. I hold myself back from saying anything, not because it would be something rude, but because it would be something nice. Apologetic, careful, false. Or it would just be plain lame, like “how's school?”

“You should come swim or lay out sometime,” she says. She walks back to the window and sits down on the built-in bench with the beachy, blue cushion. “I have magazines. I'm done with them. So and so did this. So and so wore that. Those kind.”

I laugh, needlessly, then stand up because I can't just stay crouched down by my boxes, but when I stand, I have nowhere to go. I feel my stupid clothes, my ratty nondesigner jeans, my sweatshirt with the stain that runs along the zipper like a sewage canal. I suck in my stomach and hold my hands together, cross my arms, then uncross them and say, “We were in the same ethics group, right?” as if I don't know.

“Oh yeah,” she says.

She has no problem with the silence. She stays still. I walk over to the bed and sit down.

I think back to the peer-counselor-led session, the things we had done, and more important for me, the things we've never done and always wanted to do. I remember noticing she wasn't too far ahead of me and thinking she must be lying.

“That was a weird exercise,” I say. “Walking across the room.”

She looks like she's remembering something that happened ages ago. “Yeah. I kind of liked it. Made you think.”

“Totally,” I say.

“Did you see Laura Fujimoto?” She laughs. “Oh my God,
she got, like, all the way across. I always thought she was some goody-goody.”

I laugh, or make a sound that approximates laughter.

“But who knows why she walked,” Whitney says. “Hopefully 'cause she did bad shit and not because bad shit happened to her. Like what if she took her steps 'cause she was molested or something? And by the way, how the fuck is walking across the gym supposed to help her with that—or with any of our problems?”

“Yeah,” I say again, ineptly. Where is my funny self? Where does it go when I'm intimidated? I fold shirts that I've already folded.

“Why'd you walk?” she asks.

“I don't know,” I say. “I don't really remember.”

She looks at me like I'm hiding something scandalous. Black-soled shoes in the gym. That's why I walked. Thug life.

“What about you?” I ask.

“I don't really remember,” she says, and now she looks like she's the one hiding something scandalous.

Water drips from her hair onto my hardwood floor. Her hardwood floor. This is all hers. While it's easy to adapt to better things, it's probably hard to come back down.

“So do you like it?” she asks, and looks up at the ceiling.

I look around, as if considering. “Yeah, it works. My mom's going to be shooting more in town now, so . . .” I usually find that when I mention my mom, the attention turns immediately to her and sheds a more attractive light on me as well, but Whitney doesn't seem to care.

“Yeah, my mom's all amped on your mom's show.” She gets
up and walks by me. Her hair smells like expensive perfume. She picks up the few things on my shelves—an old pencil box, a glass vase I made—then puts them down again. She's in charge, and I feel like I'm losing an invisible race. Even my posture is pathetic. It's like I've become suddenly infected with clumsiness and I'm afraid to move and spill my dignity.

“You going out tonight?” she asks.

“Not sure yet,” I lie.

“You're friends with Danny, right?” Her smile is coy.

“Yeah,” I say.

“He's kind of a dreamboat,” she says.

I laugh, and a little spit darts out. I think she cringes.

She taps her nails against my ukulele on the shelf, and now she looks bored, like she's enduring a class in school. I wonder if she feels forced to stay and hang out with me. I don't know what to say to her and hate that I'm nervously trying to think of something.

I'm about to say something about the cottage, how it's nice, how everything's so great, so much better than our last place, thereby firmly establishing my rank notches below her, like I'm some kind of lady-in-waiting, but then a clear little bubble of snot comes out of Whitney's nostril, and I stop and stare at it. It's perfectly developed, a round and jolly little thing. She stands there, ignorant, and I can't help myself.

“Oh my God.” I laugh.

“What?” she says, and I tell her to look in the mirror. She walks to the chest of drawers and looks into the large rectangular mirror that hangs above it.

“Whoa,” she says. She tilts her head to the right, then left.
She doesn't sniffle or wipe it away. I watch her looking at herself.

“You may have set a record,” I say.

“Now that is g money right there.” She turns slowly and strikes a funny pose with her hands on her hips, her face in profile, proud like a conqueror. Then she breaks the pose and looks around, maybe for something to wipe her nose with. She ends up using her T-shirt. “Well, that was awesome. A nice welcoming. I'm such a spaz,” she says, in a way that's the opposite of spazziness. Her way of speaking is languid, like her words have been out in the sun for too long.

We talk a little more, small talk, miniature talk, but it's comfortable now. It's because of the snot. If that hadn't happened I would have been nervous and resentful, and she would have forgotten me or treated me like some kind of ghetto foster child.

“I'm heading back out before the sun goes down,” she says.

“Just going to finish unpacking,” I say. I refrain from saying thank you—
Thank you for
the house.

Before she leaves, she returns with some paper towels and cleans up the water she dripped on the floor.