Local Girls (9 page)

“So is Eddie a really good kisser?” I asked Jill later that day, when the purple dusk was sifting between the poplar trees and the temperature was still past ninety.

“Compared to what?” Jill said.

We were out in her parents' backyard, sitting in a wading pool we had dragged out of the garage and filled with cold water from the hose. With Jill's belly so big, we filled up the whole pool, and had to take turns stretching out our legs.

“Okay, tell me this.” I was smoking a Salem I'd stolen from Margot, and I held the cigarette between my thumb and forefinger, the way Margot always did when she wanted to make a point. “What do you think about when he kisses you?”

“Are you doing a survey?” Jill had gained nearly fifty pounds, but the weird thing was, she was just as beautiful as ever, so pale in the dusky light that she almost glowed. “All right. The truth? When he kisses me my mind goes completely blank.”

We both laughed then, hard enough so that streams of water began to slosh over the sides of the pool.

“Maybe that's why I married him. Maybe I didn't want to think.”

We mulled that over as fireflies appeared on the lawn.

“I wish I was ten years old,” Jill said.

“Me too,” I agreed. But that was a lie. I couldn't wait till September when I'd be a senior and my entire world would change.

Jill wrinkled her beautiful nose. “The whole neighborhood smells like tomato sauce.”

“We're doing lasagna. There's a wedding at the Knights of Columbus Hall tonight.”

We heard Eddie pull into the driveway. He had a Camaro that drove Jill's mother crazy, and to be honest it did sound more like a jet than a Chevrolet. Eddie worked down at the Food Star with my brother and I couldn't bring myself to tell Jill that employees of the deli department spent their lunch hour smoking pot in the parking lot. She thought Eddie was working so hard, slicing bologna or whatever it was they did in the deli, and who was I to destroy that dream? I was fairly certain that given time, she'd be disappointed enough in Eddie without my reports.

“Two beautiful girls, that's what I need,” Eddie said.

He was a liar, but he was a good one. He'd brought home a six-pack of beer, which he dumped into the wading pool; then he sat down on the grass and eased off his boots. I could understand Jill's mother's complaint about the aroma of his socks, which he quickly pulled off so he could stick his feet in the pool.

“Your brother's quite the pisser,” Eddie said to me as he got himself a beer.

My brother lately seemed to concentrate all his attention on alcohol and illegal drugs.

“He managed to get an entire delivery of beer into the trunk of his car and he was brought up to be a good sharer.”

It was my mother's car actually, an ancient monster which was always in need of resuscitation.

“Thank you, Jason.” Eddie raised his beer can to the sky.

“Gretel was just asking me about the way you kissed,” Jill said.

She was that way sometimes, embarrassing you to death.

“Jill!” I was pretty much mortified, but I had cultivated a snooty look to ease myself out of embarrassing moments such as this.

Eddie liked this information; he thought quite highly of himself.

“Oh, yeah?” he said.

I realized that he was sitting too close to me, and now he leaned closer still.

“Want to find out?” he said.

Jill let out a snort.

“I mean it,” Eddie said, although whether he was addressing me or Jill I couldn't tell. Before I could figure it out, Eddie had started to kiss me. It was getting even darker by then, and from the corner of my eye I could see Jill's hair, which looked silvery against the sky. Eddie kissed me and went on kissing me until I couldn't breathe, and then he backed away and laughed. I must have had a stupid expression on my face, because Eddie took one look and said, “I guess I'm even better than I thought I was.”

Jill was patting my leg. “Gretel?” Her voice was concerned, but I was the one who wasn't listening now. I got out of that pool fast, threw my T-shirt and shorts on over my wet bathing suit, and went to the gate. I didn't bother to retrieve my shoes, although the concrete was still burning-hot, even now, in the dark. I was late for the Dorrios' wedding, and my mother and Margot had already loaded up Margot's car and driven to the Knights of Columbus Hall. As I ran there, I thought that human beings really didn't have a chance. I kept feeling Eddie's kiss, as if it were happening over and over as I ran across lawns and headed for the turnpike. I understood why Jill looked so dumbstruck and glazed; how could she not be puzzled that a kiss had taken her so far? No wonder people did such stupid things for love. No wonder they wound up ruining their lives, or at least setting them on a strange and unknown course.

I was completely out of breath when I got to the Knights of Columbus Hall. The parking lot was full and the moon was climbing past the asphalt-shingled roof. The heat seemed to be rising, and in the back room, where my mother and Margot had set up a makeshift kitchen, the temperature must have been well over a hundred.

“Finally,” my mother said when she saw me, shoeless, in damp clothes. “I was worried.”

“I forgot the time.” I grabbed an apron. Margot had had the Two Widows logo printed on the blue cloth.

“It's wild out there,” Margot said, coming in from the function room with an empty tray. She'd been serving hors d'oeuvres, but she looked as though she'd been doing battle. “They're drinking whiskey sours like they were water.”

I could tell from Margot's breath that she'd had one herself. I helped her load up another tray of hors d'oeuvres—little hot dogs wrapped in phylo dough and mini knishes—while my mother got the main course ready. If I wasn't mistaken, Margot seemed a little flushed, and when I followed her into the wedding party I saw the reason why. There was a man who was searching the room, and when he saw Margot he waved.

“Hey, baby,” he called.

Margot turned to me and for an instant I saw the hope in her eyes. I saw that she'd be willing to try again; she'd do anything for love, the real sort, the sort that would last.

“Wish me luck,” she whispered.

I was standing beside the bar, which specialized in whiskey sours and rum punch, and I could see her all the way across the room. I couldn't help but wonder what this man's history was; if he'd been married, or if he was married still. For all we knew, he could be Dorrio himself, today's bridegroom. Not that it mattered. There he was, on the other side of the room. There she was, headed straight for him. And there I stood, barefoot, in the Knights of Columbus Hall, during the hottest summer of our lives.

True Confession

In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from the blue. One minute she was a seventeen-year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars.

She'd been daydreaming, staring through the plate-glass window, her arms on the countertop, not even noticing that someone had arrived to pick up his order. When she thought about it later though, she'd felt him there, a heat wave beside her. She couldn't have kept herself from falling in love with him; she never had a chance. Before she realized he was next to her, he had placed his hand over hers on the countertop, then looped his fingers through hers. Gretel looked up at him, so startled she might as well have been shot.

“I just wanted to wake you up,” he said.

Which is exactly what he did. One look at him and her heart was racing. One look, and whatever her life had been before was all over.

His name was Sonny Garnet and she had heard about him in the way people hear about a skirmish in a far-off country, someplace war-torn and dangerous. He'd been picked up for questioning by the police half a dozen times, he'd been tried and let go, stolen cars had been involved, or was it drugs, or was it a cop who had been paid off? None of it was true, he told Gretel now. It was idle gossip, jealous speculation. He was only twenty-two, but he seemed unbelievably adult. He had a wallet filled with cash and a brand-new Camaro; he had a way of taking your hand which made it clear he'd have to be the one to let go.

He paid for the meatball sub he had ordered, but Gretel knew he was waiting for her in the vestibule, and she was trembling when she picked up her pizza; she was holding the box too tightly, surely the cheese would slide off the top, but she didn't care. She'd had the funniest feeling when she looked at him the first time, and it happened again when he opened the door for her. She was somehow blinded, as if Sonny Garnet were made not out of plodding flesh and blood like other men, but of clear true light. Was he exceptional-looking? She never could tell. He had dark hair and pale blue eyes with features so wary and sharp they gave the impression that he never needed sleep. He was tall, and had to bend to be on eye level with most people, but he did this so gracefully any girl he spoke to had the sense that she was the only person in the world, and that talking to her was more important than breathing, than seeing, than life itself.

“I couldn't leave you here,” Sonny Garnet said to Gretel as she hugged the pizza box tighter, so close it nearly burned her skin.

“Why not?” Gretel was a practical girl, and liked to know the score. She was careful too, or so she thought.

“Because I knew I'd regret it,” Sonny said.

Gretel looked at him and blinked. She wondered if she had grown extremely stupid. Why was it that she trusted what he was saying? How was it possible for her to believe every word?

Sonny was so smooth he could have a person walking toward his parked car before she knew where she was headed. He could open the door and help her inside before she realized she'd made a decision. As soon as he got behind the wheel, Gretel should have known what she was letting herself in for, but maybe a broken heart seemed a simple price to pay, the way all costs that must be settled in the future appear, until they suddenly come due.

When he let her off in her driveway, Gretel's cousin Margot was just arriving. Margot stood on the front stoop and watched Gretel slowly unfold herself from the Camaro, carrying the pizza carelessly, as though it were the last thing on her mind.

“There goes trouble,” Margot said as Sonny Garnet drove away.

Gretel could almost believe that the ice coating the sidewalk was melting beneath her feet. She would have spoken, but words were impossible; the only thing that would form in her mouth was a sigh.

“Well, baby, you have got yourself a problem,” Margot said to Franny when she came into the kitchen. Margot plopped down the dozen cookbooks she'd brought over, then took off her gloves and scarf and draped them over a kitchen chair. “Get ready for the shit to hit.”

In Frances's opinion Margot always overreacted, but when she went into the living room and saw the pizza deposited on an easy chair and her daughter staring into the mirror above the couch as though she'd been hypnotized, Frances thought there might, indeed, be cause for concern. She touched Gretel's forehead for fever and was delighted to find she was burning-hot. That, at least, was a predicament that could be solved.

“Take two aspirin and go to bed,” Frances said.

“Okay.” Gretel was as docile as a lamb, and already too far gone to reach.

“She has a fever,” Frances told Margot when she went back to the kitchen. “FYI.”

The two cousins got together every Thursday night to trash their ex-husbands and look for new recipes for their catering business. Margot had opened
The Hallelujah Hawaiian Cookbook
to pineapple-chicken bits, but now she closed the book.

“A fever? Wake up, Franny. She's in love.”

“Concentrate on your Hawaiian chicken.” Frances had had enough awful things happen to her recently; another serious complication would be overkill from above. “You'll get more accomplished if-you stick to business.”

But Margot was never one to ignore a problem, and the next day she was waiting on the stoop at exactly three o'clock, never mind that the temperature was eighteen degrees Fahrenheit and she had to wear earmuffs and two pairs of gloves. Although it was freezing, cold enough to turn the tip of a person's nose blue, Margot was out there long enough to have smoked two Salems by the time Gretel finally arrived home from school in Sonny's car.

Margot couldn't see a thing, since the windows of the Camaro were all fogged up, but as soon as Gretel opened the car door and stumbled out, Margot could tell it would soon be too late for intervention. The look on Gretel's face was so dreamy and warm it took the chill right out of the air. She looped her arm through Margot's and together they watched Sonny Garnet's Camaro speed away. The car was a deep red color, like rubies or blood, and if you narrowed your eyes it seemed as though a bright red thread were sewing up the asphalt and the ice.

“Thirty-five minutes late getting home,” Margot said.

“Sue me,” Gretel told her.

“Haven't you seen enough bad luck?” Margot sighed. “Didn't you learn anything from your mother and me?”

Gretel kissed Margot on the cheek, then headed for the front door. “Get off my case. This is my life.”

Margot's and Frances's divorces weren't even in the same universe as what was happening to Gretel. All those men who had dumped Margot, or had disappointed her—the most recent one having turned out to be a lot more married than he had first implied—were not the same species as Sonny Garnet. Sonny could blow all of them away; he could turn them to dust with a snap of his fingers, then pick up the pieces and put them back together again.