Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea (9781101559833) (11 page)

19

O
ne July day when Dottie and I were sitting in her room doing nothing, Dottie said, “You want to see something?” Before I could say yes or no, she pulled down her shorts and hauled down her blue cotton panties. She pointed to the chubby V between her legs. “Look,” she said. “Isn't that gross?”

“What?”

“Look closer.”

“I'm close enough.”

“Jesus, Florine,” Dottie said. “Look. Can't you see them things?”

When I squinted, I saw four or five little blond hairs rooted like unfurled ferns in her smooth pink skin.

“Wish I had some,” I said. I was hairless.

“I don't,” Dottie said. “I'm going to shave them off.”

“And I don't want to be flat forever,” I said. “I want boobs. You got boobs.” Dottie did have real boobs now. They wobbled on her chest like half-baked custard.

“I'd give you some if I could,” Dottie said. We looked at her doll shelf. “Look at them stupid dolls watching me like they expect something,” she said. “You want the rest of 'em for when you have kids?”

“Caroline and Patricia are enough. Give Evie the dolls,” I said.

Dottie snorted. “She's got enough friggin' dolls.”

“You might change your mind. Your kids might like the dolls, even if you don't.”

“I don't want kids,” Dottie said.

That alarmed me. I'd always pictured us growing up and living in these houses with our husbands and children. I decided to let the whole thing drop. “Want to go get a tan?” I said, just to change the subject.

“For a little while,” Dottie said.

We changed into our bathing suits, walked down to the shore, and spread our blankets on the pebbly sand. Now that we were both thirteen, the adults let us go down to the water by ourselves. The boys weren't around. They were too busy. Glen worked with Ray at the store, and Bud went out on the boat with Sam and Daddy. Bud had stayed pretty clear of me since the day we'd locked eyes while sitting in Petunia. A few days back, though, I had run into him as I was walking down the hill from Ray's store and he was walking up.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said.

“Been fishing?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Been to the store?”

“Yeah.”

“Bye,” he said and passed me.

But I caught him looking at me when I turned around to watch him walk away. He ducked his head, made a half-assed wave with his hand, and kept on moving.

Now, as Dottie tanned and I burned, words strange to me popped out of my mouth. I raised myself on my elbows and said to her, “I got to tell you something. I like Bud for a boyfriend.”

Dottie shaded her eyes from the glare of the sun and squinted up at me.

“That won't work,” she said. “That'd mean I have to like Glen.”

“It doesn't mean that.”

“It would follow.”

“I like Bud, anyway,” I said. “You don't have to like Glen.”

“Look,” Dottie said, “Bud's a good guy. Hell, Glen's a good guy. But they're like our brothers. Be odd if you two was to get together.”

“Well, let's see what happens,” I said.

What happened is that I did get odd. I wouldn't wave if I saw Bud onboard the
Carlie Flo
or the
Maddie Dee
. When the men came up from the boat, sometimes I went to say hello to Daddy and Sam. I couldn't look Bud in the face and I barely spoke. Bud wouldn't look at me, either.

After about two weeks of this foolishness, I decided I'd had enough.

One day, I said to Dottie, “I don't like Bud anymore. It's weird. You were right.”

Later that day, I ran into Bud as he was walking down the hill from Ray's store and I was walking up. My heart jumped and tried to run, but I forced it back into a sitting position and I said, “Hey” to Bud.

“Hey,” he said back.

It took a mountain of will on my part, but I didn't look back.

The rest of the summer ticked down to the anniversary of Carlie's disappearance. When the day came, it hit me like a stone to the heart. Daddy took me out on the boat with Sam and Bud for the two weeks before school. Out on the water, I was too busy to worry about whether or not Bud liked me or I liked Bud. I helped with the bait, I steered the boat, I plugged lobsters, and did what they asked me to do. Sometimes, I sat in a chair and stared at the water and the sky. None of us talked much. Their quiet company calmed me, and I liked being near Daddy without Stella around. While we worked, Grand took some of Carlie's old clothes and she and Ida made a beautiful quilt for me. I wrapped it around me at night and slept better than I had in a long time.

20

N
othing much happened for the rest of the summer. I grew a few pubic hairs and that cheered me up a little bit. Stella and Daddy stayed locked together in his house, I still lived with Grand, and then it was time to head for junior high for the eighth grade. This meant we had to travel by bus to Long Reach. The comfort of small numbers vanished when we entered a school that contained three grades with about two hundred students per grade. Corridors and hallways had to be navigated by twists and turns to find our classrooms. They called us fish, at first, and they said we smelled, because we were from The Point. Dottie laughed at them, Glen didn't notice, Bud thought they were assholes, and I tried to become invisible. It didn't work.

I was tall for thirteen, and skinny, with hair that curled any way it wanted to go, no matter what I did. I was shy as a shit poke, but Carlie's absence was what made me stand out. When we first went to junior high, the Long Reach kids whispered about it just loud enough so that I heard it, clear.
“Ran off with some guy. Dad's a drunk. I heard she got around. Murdered,
maybe
?
”
Although it didn't make any sense, it made me mad that Carlie wasn't there to stick up for me. Talking to Daddy about it was out of the question. I went, as always, to Grand.

“Best to ignore it, Florine,” she said. “Don't give 'em the satisfaction of letting it bother you. Soon they'll forget all about it and find something else to talk about.” Why Grand thought that I could ignore it was beyond me. Grand hadn't had to go to junior high school. I kept my head down and my ears closed as best I could.

Grand was slowing down some, and forgetting things. One day, when I got home from school, she was sitting on the sofa watching a show on television. Her apron was on and flour spotted her face. She was knitting away on something.

A bowl of flour sat on the bread block in the kitchen. “That flour going to make itself into dough?” I called to her.

“What did you say?”

I walked into the living room. She peered up at me over glasses that glinted with the changing scenes on the television.

“You want me to finish the bread?” I asked.

She puckered her brow. “For heaven's sake, I'm losing my mind,” she said to herself more than me. She set her knitting down and shuffled past me into the kitchen.

“I can do it, Grand,” I offered, but she wouldn't let me do it alone. I noticed her swollen knuckles, and how the skin around her jaws formed jowls that wobbled as she worked. She had turned seventy-nine years old in late March. What might other people think if I brought them home to meet her? Most of the girls probably had young, pretty mothers, much as I had had once. How would Grand measure up to them? It shamed me to think that way, so I took it out on the bread dough.

Grand was right about them forgetting about me, sure enough. People did begin talking about something else besides me and my missing mother. They zeroed in on poor Glen.

Ray and Germaine, his parents, didn't live together, we all knew that. She lived in Long Reach with a roommate, Sarah. That's the way it was, and we all tended to business with Glen in our midst. But evidently it was important for everyone in junior high to know that Glen Clemmons's mother was a lesbo, which was short for lesbian. Around the end of September, the rumors started.

“She ain't,” Glen said to me on the bus going home to The Point one night soon after word got out. Big fat tears rolled down his full-moon face. I noticed that a few pimples had set up housekeeping near his chin.

“So if she is. So if she ain't. Don't let them get to you,” I said, sounding like an echo of Grand. Easy to say, I knew. Harder to do, for sure.

“I'm gonna kill anyone says it,” he said. I left that one alone. That was up to him.

Dottie joined Grand and me for supper that night for some tuna noodle casserole, one of Dottie's favorites. After we set the table, we sat up in my room. We could hear Grand in the kitchen humming over the TV news blaring in the living room.

“She's getting a little hard of hearing,” I said to Dottie.

“She's getting on,” Dottie said. “I wished one of my grandmothers was still alive.”

Dottie's grandparents, both sides, had passed before she'd been born. This life was tough on the old people. Grand was the last of her generation to live on The Point.

“You suppose Grand knows what a lesbo is?” I asked Dottie.

“I'm not sure I know what it is,” Dottie said. “I been trying to figure out what goes where, or who does what.”

“You girls come down,” Grand called.

On the way down the stairs, I said to Dottie, “I'm going to ask her. Get her going.”

“Maybe not,” Dottie said.

During supper, I said, “You know what a lesbo is, Grand?”

“A what?” Grand said. “A lesbo? Can't say I do.”

“People at school say that Glen's mother is a lesbo.”

“No she's not. She's a Whitman, from Georgetown. I knew her mother. Wonderful woman.”

Dottie looked down at her plate as if the food there was the most important meal ever put together. Her eyebrows were wiggling, which meant she wasn't far from laughing.

“No, Grand,” I said. “People are saying that Glen's mother likes girls.”

Grand helped herself to a tablespoon of casserole. “What's wrong with Germaine liking girls?” She gave me a look loaded with questions. Probably I should have stopped there, but Grand said, again, “What's wrong with that?”

Dottie picked peas out of the tuna casserole and pushed them to one side.

“Nothing,” I said. “It's just that I thought girls were supposed to like boys, not girls.”

Grand shook her empty tablespoon at me. “I want you to listen to me,” she said, “and you Dorothea, too. Life's too short to worry about what other people think. And I got a question for you both. Is whatever Germaine likes hurting you?”

“No,” I said. “I was just wondering . . .”

“What about you, Dorothea? She hurting you?”

“I don't care,” she said. “Don't matter to me.”

“That's good, because I say it's none of your business. I say that it's nobody's business. Jesus don't care who likes what or who does what, long as they believe in him and listen to what he has to say far as loving each other, no matter what, no matter who. That's what I think.” Grand finished her supper and got up to clear the table, even though Dottie and I were still eating. “Jesus loves everyone,” she muttered as she cleaned up the kitchen. “All of us.”

After supper, Dottie said, “She got some wound up.”

“She did,” I said. “Wish I'd never brought it up.”

That night, in the half place between sleep and awake, I saw Jesus walking down a deserted Mulgully Beach. I ran so that I could walk along with him, and we headed for the rock where Carlie and I had gone on to that day together. Carlie sat on that rock, facing away from Jesus and me, her back pale against a black swimsuit I'd never seen her wear. She was looking out over the ocean at her precious horizon.

I stopped, but Jesus kept going. “Carlie?” I said. She didn't turn around. She didn't let on that she heard me. When I turned to tell Jesus to make her listen he faded away, and when I turned back, Carlie was gone, too. I opened my eyes and stared up at the ceiling. The television downstairs was still on, loud.

I went downstairs and sat beside Grand as she knitted.

“Bad dream,” I said.

“Everyone has 'em, Florine,” Grand said. “Everyone has 'em.”

“I love you, Grand,” I said.

“That's good,” she said. “We're stuck with one another, looks like. That helps.”

At the bus stop the next day, I said to Glen, “You should be glad you have a mother. Doesn't matter what she does. You should just be glad you have your mother.”

But Glen let them get to him, and he wouldn't go to Long Beach to stay with Germaine. Germaine was made of stout stuff, though, and she wouldn't let him ignore her. One night, as we walked from the bus stop to Ray's store, Germaine was waiting outside. I wondered, sometimes, how she and Ray had produced such a big son. Germaine was tiny, with a pixie-cut to her pale blond hair. Ray wasn't tall. But Parker was big, and maybe Ray had passed that on to Glen.

Seeing Germaine standing in front of the store, her eyes desperate with the need for Glen's understanding, made me jealous. How many days had I wanted to see Carlie waiting for me when I got off the school bus? And here was girl-loving Germaine, Jesus's child no matter what, wanting her baby in the worst way. Glen said, “Shit.”

“She's your mother,” I said. “And she's here. That's something.”

“She's right,” Bud said, behind me. “Florine's right.” When Dottie, Bud, and I passed by Germaine, we said hello, and went on home. If Glen hadn't stopped to talk with her, I would have clouted him one. But he did.

21

B
ud introduced me to his new girlfriend one Saturday in October.

I was hanging out clothes in the fall sunshine in the side yard, sheets slapping back against me like wet sails, when I heard footsteps crunch up the gravel road. I peered around the sheets and saw Bud holding hands with a girl, walking up toward Ray's. The girl stopped and smiled at me. “Hi,” she said. “You're Florine, right?”

I stepped out from behind the sheet, wearing my old jeans and a holey white T-shirt that Grand kept begging me to get rid of. But it had been Carlie's shirt, and I'd reduce it to rags before I tossed it out.

Both the girl and Bud looked down when I stepped out.

“Hi,” I said.

Bud, still looking down, said, “This is Susan.”

Susan's hair was long, a soft, straight brown like a mink's coat. Her eyes were the same color as her hair. She was small enough to fit into a teacup. I'd seen her in school surrounded by friends.

Grand came out with a basket of clothes and set it down next to me.

“Hi, Bud,” she said. Bud looked up at her and smiled.

“Hi, Mrs. Gilham,” he said.

“Mrs. Gilham?” she said, and then she giggled like a girl.

“Grand,” Bud muttered.

“Who's the young lady with you?” Grand said.

“This is Susan Murray, from school,” Bud said. “Susan, this is Grand.”

“Nice to meet you,” Susan said.

“You sew on them patches?” Grand asked her. Susan's jeans were covered with colorful squares.

“I did,” Susan said. “Each of them means something to me. This one”—she pointed to a flannel patch on her thigh—“comes from one of Bud's old shirts.” She bumped against Bud, who bumped her back and blushed. He looked as if he'd been hit upside the head with a honey-coated two-by-four.

“Well, aren't you clever,” Grand said to Susan.

By this time, I'd figured out why Bud and Susan had looked down when I'd stepped out from behind the sheets. Carlie's shirt was thin, it was wet from the sheets, and flat as I was, my nipples still stuck out in the cold. I covered my breasts with my arms.

“Well, we're going to Ray's,” Bud said.

“Nice to meet you,” Susan said. They walked on, my old friend and his new girl.

“She's nice, and some cute,” Grand said. “Good for Buddy.”

“I got a headache,” I said, and went up to my room, tore off the T-shirt and swamped myself in a thick gray sweatshirt that read B
UBBA'S
S
TEAK
H
OUSE
.

Stella came over later in the day to see Grand and to talk about Susan. She usually didn't come alone, and I wasn't pleased to see her. She said hello to me, then sat down with Grand to have a cup of tea.

“Sweet girl,” she said to Grand. “Looks good with Buddy, too.”

“It's Bud,” I said from my place on a stool near Grand's kitchen cupboards. I had cleaned them out and was putting new contact paper on the shelves.

“Point of fact, it's James Walter,” Stella said.

“He's Bud to me,” I said. I smoothed a sheet of contact paper down on the top shelf so hard my hand got hot from the friction.

“Lee says she's the prettiest girl he's seen in these parts since . . . ,” Stella said.

I stepped down off the stool and I said, “Since what?”

“Carlie,” Stella said.

“She doesn't come close to Carlie,” I said.

“Now,” Grand said. “It's apples and oranges. This girl right here is just as pretty as her mother, and as pretty as Susan.”

“I'm not pretty,” I shouted, and I stormed upstairs to my room, where I headed right for the mirror to stare down a pale girl with muddy green eyes. My cheekbones were so sharp you could slice cheese on them, my mouth turned down, and my chin was like Daddy's chin, strong. If I saw me, I wondered, would I think I was pretty? I shook my hair out of the rubber band that had been holding it back. It twisted and squirmed away from my head. Except for some red highlights that reminded me that I was Carlie's daughter, I hated it.

Someone clumped up the stairs and then Dottie stared at me from the doorway.

“They let me in,” she said.

“They'll let anyone in,” I grumbled.

“Strange car over at your dad's house.”

“Who?”

“I don't know. Some woman looks like she works in an office. Your father came out of the house to meet her. They shook hands, then went back in.”

That confused me. How could a strange woman get past Stella's eagle eye and why would she let Daddy be alone with her?

“I'm going to see who it is,” I said. “But don't let Stella know I'm doing it. You go down the stairs, make a lot of noise, say hello or something, and I'll go out the side door, through the garden, and cross the road.”

“Why don't you walk downstairs and go out the front door?”

“Where's the fun in that?” I asked. Sometimes, Dottie could be a few sandwiches shy of a picnic. Any chance to pull one over on Stella was not to be missed.

Dottie clumped downstairs and started talking loud to Stella and Grand while I tiptoed out the door into the side yard, ducked under the sheets, and went across the road and down Daddy's driveway.

The car parked there was a new one; a town car, no doubt. I passed it and walked into the house. Daddy and the woman sat at the kitchen table. She was writing in a notebook and a tape recorder sat in the middle of the table. Daddy looked at me like I'd caught him doing something wrong. The woman looked at me and said, “Hi.”

“Florine, this is Elisabeth Moss. She's a reporter. She come to talk to me about Carlie being gone.”

As I thought about backing up and leaving, Elisabeth Moss got up and came toward me with her hand outstretched. “Hi,” she said, and her voice was as warm as a heated, buttered muffin. “I work for the Long Reach paper, Florine. Your dad has just been telling me about you.”

“Florine don't have to be here,” Daddy said.

That set me off. “Why don't you want me here?” I asked him.

“I didn't want you to have to talk about something that might make you feel bad.”

“How could I feel any worse?”

Daddy shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said. “She's stubborn,” he said to Elisabeth.

“I've got one of those,” Elisabeth said. “Thirteen going on twenty.”

“Well, sit down,” Daddy said, and I slipped into a chair between them.

Elisabeth said, “I know that there was a story about your mother disappearing when it happened, but I thought I'd do an update. It was a little over a year ago, right?”

“One year, two months,” Daddy said.

Elisabeth nodded. I liked her face. It wasn't fussy. She looked me in the eye.

“Let me catch you up, Florine. Parker Clemmons told me that the police haven't had much to go on. So, I thought that if I wrote something about it, it might shake something loose. I called your dad here, and he agreed to talk to me. This will go into the paper, probably in a couple of weeks. I want to talk to some other folks, make it a feature.”

“Will my picture be in the paper?” I asked, thinking about the whispers in school.

“Only if you want it to be,” Elisabeth said.

“I was thinking of using the picture in Carlie's wallet—the one of the three of us,” Daddy said. “I was going to ask you first, of course.”

“So, if you don't mind, I'm going to ask you a few questions,” Elisabeth said. “Do you mind if I tape you?”

I shrugged. “Okay I guess.”

“All right then, I'll start with this question, Florine,” Elisabeth said. In the gentlest voice possible she said, “What did you think, at first, when Carlie didn't come back?”

“A lot of things,” I said. “I thought maybe she'd decided to take a trip. Then I thought she ran off. Then I thought worse things.”

Elisabeth nodded, and said, “How has your life changed, Florine, without her here?”

To my surprise and embarrassment, sudden tears ran down my cheeks. Daddy fished a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to me. As I caught his eye, I saw the fear in his face and I knew he was thinking about the part Stella had played. I could give him up now. I could tell this reporter about the slut who had marched in and kidnapped my father. I wiped my eyes and blew my nose.

“If it hurts too much, you don't have to answer,” Elisabeth said. “But I think readers might like to know how it feels to lose someone and not know what happened to them. They would be sympathetic to you, I'm sure, Florine.”

“It isn't that,” I said. “It's just that it's none of their business.”

“How do you mean?” Elisabeth asked.

“They might read the paper and feel bad, but then they go do what they do. We got to live this.” I looked at Daddy. He was looking down at his big, scarred, salt-dried hands, folded on the table. The knuckles were white.

“It's changed everything,” I said.

The article on Carlie came out in early November. A photographer took a picture of Daddy and me standing by the harbor, and they used the picture of the three of us. For two weeks in school, I was once again the center of attention, only this time it was pity instead of rumor that made me stand out. I didn't want people feeling sorry for me.

The police got tips from people who swore they'd seen Carlie as far away as San Francisco. Daddy got a marriage proposal in the mail, which fried Stella's ass. But nothing panned out. When Thanksgiving came, the crowd turned to turkey and I gave thanks when it quieted down.