Rowing in Eden

F
OR
H.P.

T
his project is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Special thanks to my editor, Robert Jones, for his guidance; to my agent, Lisa Bankoff, for her championing of the work; and to my family, for the blessing of their love and support.

               
It was partly the unusual geography of the
room that suggested to him the thing
that he was about to do.

G
EORGE
O
RWELL
,
1984

J
ULY.
A
QUEER, HAZY DAY.
O
VERHEAD, THE SUN MADE AN ODD
white bulge in the pale, pale sky.

Like ice, thought Franny. Ice melting into a glass of milk. Or maybe a knee—eerie thought—maybe a knee or an elbow that poked out from a pool of concrete.

Franny Wahl.

Staring out through the plate glass window that belonged to the showroom of the Pynch Marina (many shiny boats hunkering quietly at her back). Frances Jean, she was. Thirteen years old. Face set in a look both obstinate and dreamy.

Frances Jean Wahl thought about the summer sky, yes. Made up her strings of words to describe the sun in that sky, but other words ran in her head as well.

We don't do that, Franny.
Those were the words she meant to shut out by playing with words of her own.

We don't do that, Franny.

Outside the marina, Lakeside Drive ran bumper to bumper with irritable tourist traffic. This was Pynch Lake, a town of twenty thousand in the roughly rectangular state of Iowa. The noise from the traffic—coarse engine pops rising from a tangle of music and machinery on both the street and the lake—that noise poured through the marina's open door, and was overlaid by the sound of a radio playing in the back room.

“After late-breaking news, we'll return with Summer '65 Countdown,” the announcer said in a voice that was as much a honk as the
honks from the cars in the street, and, still, over all of this, Franny Wahl heard,
We don't do that, Franny.

At the four-way stop, a pretty girl in a black swimsuit stood up from behind the wheel of her convertible and began to yell. The object of her fury: a man in a station wagon who had hoped to back his boat trailer into the lake via the ramp at the end of the parking lot that served both the marina and the Top Hat Club. Somehow, this man had gotten his trailer hung up on the curb in front of the Top Hat and now he blocked traffic for the entire intersection.

More horns.

The driver of the station wagon—mouth working in his red, red face—climbed from his car.
Something-something
, the mellifluous newscaster said of the closure of the investigation into the misconduct of Senate employee Bobby Baker. As Franny's father often became agitated by such reports, the newscaster's words gave the girl the same sort of passing qualm she might have experienced had the marina's fluorescent lights flickered. Still, she did not actually listen to the report. She did not much care about news of the nation.

She did, however, pity the driver of the station wagon. A big man. A good six foot five, two hundred and fifty pounds. His shirt had come untucked in back as, vainly, he tried to lift the boat and its trailer over the curb and into the street.

Franny let her forehead tip against the cool glass of the showroom window. She closed her eyes. Because she felt sorry for the driver. And appalled by him. And even a little humiliated by his plight. Because he reminded her too much of her father. Still, the driver did not entirely distract her from the words:

We don't do that, Franny.

She could not seem to stop herself from holding the words up for inspection, pouring them back and forth like a string of beads, a handful of pebbles. She—tasted them. Something a little chemical? Like copper? Like a penny held on her tongue?

KNOCK. KNOCK.

The sound made her start. There, on the other side of the plate glass window, stood a family of tourists, laughing, looking in at
Franny as one member of their group—a boy of six or seven, hair in duck feathers from a swim at the beach—lowered his fist from the glass. He scowled at Franny. “Wake up!” he shouted, the words damped but still definite through the heavy glass. Then his laughing father and mother set their hands on the boy's skinny shoulders and they moved him along toward the busy intersection.

We don't do that, Franny.

The honking in the street subsided. The man in the station wagon had finally driven his trailer off the curb. Traffic began to move again and, from the marina sales counter, Franny could hear the laughter of her big sister Rosamund as Rosamund spoke to the marina clerk about buying life-jackets for the family speedboat.

At the Wahl house, earlier that morning, there had been talk of the life-jackets. “You kids and your guests think you're indestructible.” So Franny's mother had said to Rosamund, and the sharpness in Peg Wahl's voice had let Franny know that the conversation involved more than life-jackets. Though no one had pointed out the change, that summer Franny saw that the river of parties and guests that had formerly carried her father and mother atop its dashing blue now had tossed the pair aside. And who did the lively current carry these days? Franny's big sisters, Rosamund and Martie, home from their universities until September.

As she talked to Rosamund, Peg Wahl had been at work on that evening's dinner. With her substantial, sun-tanned arms sunk to the elbows in chicken parts and barbecue sauce, and her hair not yet combed for the day, Peg looked very much the farmwife she might have become had she not met law student Brick some twenty years before. Franny knew, however, that her mother could still bring up a shine on her once much praised looks (even now, her high cheekbones, chocolate eyes, and white-toothed smile attracted comparisons to blond and bubbly Doris Day).

Peg kept her voice low as she spoke to Rosamund; a few of her daughters' houseguests still lingered in the dining room, helping themselves to scrambled eggs and sausages from the breakfront.
“It's your dad and me that'll get sued if one of your guests drowns!”

Your dad and
I
, Franny thought, then blushed inwardly—a tingle swept across her scalp—at her mother's error, her own mental correction of the error, and the fact that, really, she was doing little more than eavesdropping. The Wahl house had begun its life as a lodge for hunters more interested in pheasants than privacy, and Franny sat, unobserved, on a set of stairs that allowed descent into either the living room or the big kitchen.

Franny's rule since June: Whenever possible, jump the four steps from the landing in order to show that you, at least, are not growing old and stodgy. You, at least, are young and alive, and the moment she saw an opening in the conversation between mother and sister—
slam!
—she jumped from the landing into the kitchen.

“Franny! How many times have I told you not to do that?” Peg said, but Rosamund laughed and drew close to Franny and linked arms with the girl.

Odd to be bigger than Rosamund now. Curious for the youngest to stand taller than the oldest by several inches. To be the same height as the nineteen-year-old Martie.

“Come to the marina with me, Fran,” Rosamund said. “We'll take the boat!” She made a show of licking her lips. “And, after, we can go across the street to the Dairy Queen!”

An old green and white dinghy had been in the family for as long as Franny could remember, and had fallen to Franny the summer before, but when Rosamund said “the boat,” Franny knew that Rosamund meant “the big boat.” The big boat was a grand, gleaming thing, all burgundy leather and mahogany, a full-size automobile engine growling in its middle. When Rosamund drove the big boat, she looked even smaller than usual. Roosting on the very rim of the back of the driver's seat, she leaned forward and
down
to the steering wheel like a jockey to his reins.
A gentleman's den on the lam.
That was what Franny shouted that morning when she and Rosamund reached the middle of the lake, and Rosamund pushed the boat's throttle as far as it would go. Rosamund had laughed at what Franny said. Which was nice. Nice to have your big sister think
that you were funny. Even if she only pretended to think you were funny, that was something. That was making an effort to be your friend.

But then the sisters had docked at the marina and started up the twanging boards to the sales area. The trouble spot—Franny anticipated it—was the gas pumps, where the knot of dockhands stood smoking their cigarettes. More than likely, Franny knew, one of the hands would make a remark as the girls passed.

But there was another possibility. A heart-swelling, breeze-on-your-skin possibility: that from that menacing cluster of sun-browned limbs and white T-shirts and blue jeans a miraculous boy might step forward, and look into Franny's eyes, and say something so right that it would be precisely as if Sir Walter Raleigh draped his cloak across a puddle for the passage of the queen. Then Franny could let down her golden tresses that the prince might climb to her arms, and love would fill all the nasty hollows in her head, and she would be who she always had been meant to be: the beloved, in love.

Passing by the dockhands. Okay. Passing. No moment of romance, but no embarrassment, either. Rosamund—not Franny, Franny was too nervous—Rosamund nodded coolly when one of the hands said hello. Safe, Franny thought, but then a sucking noise started up behind the girls, something so foul that she glanced back. Just to frown, that was all, but as soon as she and Rosamund moved out of earshot of the hands, Rosamund said,
We don't do that, Franny.

Not that Rosamund sounded truly angry. Not the way that Franny's parents, or even Martie, sounded when they disapproved of Franny. Still, Franny had felt ashamed.

Yet, now, Rosamund chatted gaily with the marina salesclerk—as if whatever irritation Franny had caused on the dock were forgotten. Rosamund laughed and whooped a charming, “Oh, no!”

The clerk—dark, oily bangs flopped down in his eyes, a little Band-Aid on his chin—was not much older than Franny herself.
Still, Rosamund stood only five feet tall, and the advantage of the clerk's size clearly gave him a thrill. He blushed and towered. He tossed his pencil high in the air, caught it behind his back.

Not a special boy, Franny thought, so maybe it was greedy to want him to find her as attractive as he found Rosamund.

“I didn't really mean life-
jackets
.” Rosamund closed her big brown eyes. Raised her chin. Solemnly moved it back and forth, as if she viewed some vast future visible only to herself—soon, soon, she would tell the clerk his fortune—then, quick, she opened the eyes once more and laughed. “I meant
belts
.”

What Rosamund wore over her shorts that day: a sweater forgotten by one of the summer's male houseguests. Very big. Brown. V-necked. It seemed to Franny particularly wonderful on Rosamund, and see how Rosamund adjusted the black sunglasses that perched in her fair fluff of hair. That was wonderful, too, and watch the way in which, without ever taking her eyes from the sales boy, she fished a tube of lipstick from her shoulder bag and, using just one hand, removed its cap, and wound up the stick, which was a color called Pure Pearl.

Rosamund had let Franny try the Pure Pearl once. On Franny—why?—the fashionable frosty white mutated into something therapeutic, a salve, but on Rosamund it had the same effect as the big sweater, the frazzled straw bag slung over her shoulder, the none too clean but extravagantly purple brush that Rosamund used to “tease” her hair to cotton-candy heights. The same effect as the box of grapefruit sent home to the family from a stand near Rosamund's dormitory at the University of Miami. The same effect as that bit of Eastern accent she had picked up from New York friends at school, and the effect was: perfectly right.

“People won't put on the jackets,” Rosamund told the clerk. “We have gobs, and nobody will wear them 'cause they make you look fat!” She puffed out her cheeks and drew up her shoulders to show the boy the effect of the bulky life-jackets. In response, he laughed and flopped his arms up and down.

He can't control himself, Franny thought, and felt some sympathy
for the boy, and despised him a little, too. Poor thing. Looking silly, meaning to look cool. She understood that.

“So, okay,” he said. “Let me check in back.”

We don't do that, Franny.

We. Don't. Do. That.

To apply the Pure Pearl, Rosamund inserted the entire lipstick between her lips, then rubbed the stick back and forth. This extravagant method soon wore all of her lipsticks to an hourglass shape that broke in half; still, Rosamund had read in a magazine column that someone famous—Brigitte Bardot?—applied her lipstick in this way, and Rosamund put great stock in the advice of such columns. Knox gelatin made a girl's nails “drop-dead glamorous.” A capful of baby oil in the bath left you “silky smooth.” Just the day before, Rosamund had said to Franny, “Here's something great I read in that dating column. You're out in a car with a boy, and he gets fresh, okay? So you just press your finger to his chin and you say—very sweet, no need to be nasty—‘Shall I drive us home now, or will you?'”

Franny had been thrilled that Rosamund shared such wisdom with her, and so she did not point out that it belonged to a predictable world, not the surprising one in which, say, just the Saturday before, standing in her friend Christy Strawberry's dark garage, Franny had found herself perfectly willing to let a fifteen-year-old by the name of Bob Prohaski press his tongue into her mouth.

Really.

Also, Franny did not really want Rosamund to know that she and Franny did not live in precisely the same world. Maybe if Franny did not acknowledge the menacing oyster-colored clouds above her own head, she could edge into that kingdom where Rosamund held her face tilted up to always sunny skies.

“You like turquoise?” the marina clerk called from the back room. “They're either turquoise or orange.”

“Oh, turquoise, please,” Rosamund said.

The honking in front of the marina picked up again. A crowd of
pedestrians (two women with strollers, a group of teenagers, little kids being shepherded by adults) had worked up the nerve to cross the intersection of the four-way.