Rowing in Eden (12 page)

Everyone at the table watched. Pretended not to watch. Charlotte and Peg sat straighter in their chairs and took delicate bites of their salads. The girls followed suit, and then Charlotte, who was the bankroller of her granddaughters' college educations, began to ask questions about what Martie and Rosamund would study in the fall. Franny, however, could not help noticing that a woman in a red sundress approached the piano. The woman leaned forward and said something in Brick's ear that made him nod and smile. Which, unfortunately, made Franny think of a cartoon from the hidden books at the piano teacher's house: A woman stands behind a smiling, seated male, her very large breasts covering the male's eyes as she asks, “Guess who?”

To Franny's relief, Brick did return to the table when their entrees arrived.

“Actually,” Charlotte said—she smiled up at Brick as he resumed his seat—“I don't like my beef rare, but Brick's daddy trained me to eat it this way. He was a tyrant on beef.”

Brick laughed. “But remember how he loved those greasy old pork ribs at Arnie's? Remember that, girls?”

Rosamund smiled. “And he'd always make sure Arnie brought the favor basket around for us.”

“‘
Get the big picture,'”
Martie sang out. “Remember how he'd tell us, ‘Girls,'”—she tucked her chin to her chest, made her voice deep and commanding—“‘make sure you get the big picture.'”

“The favor basket,” Charlotte said. “You girls loved the favor basket.”

Martie threw her hands down on the edge of the table. “Remember the black and white Scotties with the magnet bases?”

Remember the parrots at Drake's?

And the wishing well at Halford's?

The time Roz got sick on cherries jubilee?

Oh, yes, said Peg and Brick and Martie and Rosamund, and sometimes Charlotte, too. Now and again, one of them gave Franny a look,
Join in
, though, in fact, Franny had not even been alive in the days they discussed, or if she were, she had been too small to remember. This was a common enough pattern (sometimes it was “Remember how Kendrick at the stables used to flirt with your mother?” or “Remember how Daddy used to come in at night to say prayers and teach us ‘I Have a Little Shadow'?”). Really, she would not have minded the reminiscing so much had the others not acted as if she were a killjoy for refusing to pretend to have shared those same pleasures. However, it was a fact that the only time she remembered her father ever coming to her room to say good night was after he threw her notebook at her when she did not understand his way of explaining a math problem. Neither her father nor her mother had taught her how to sail or drive a motorboat or ride a bike, let alone a horse. Unlike the big girls, she had not owned a horse. In fact, the only times she had gone to the stables were when her mother picked up the big girls after their rides.

Which was not to say she did not have childhood memories.

She remembered her parents' parties at the Ash Street house (downstairs in winter, on the patio in summer). The tree house. Playing king and slave with the neighborhood girls. The thrill of “scooping the loop”—up Clay and down Main, past City Park, and on Lakeside to Clay again—when Rosamund first got her driver's license. Rosamund dressing Franny as a mascot for her junior high school's basketball games and taking her out to buy noisemakers and candy the time that Brick and Peg went to Minneapolis for New Year's Eve. Rosamund inviting her along to the drive-in for hamburgers with Artie and Darren—

“Hey, Zanios!” Martie cried, and, sure enough, Mike Zanios—dark blond curls still wet from the clubhouse shower, gym bag slung over one shoulder—now cut across the dining porch to the Wahl table.

“Don't get up!” he called.

Brick did rise, of course, to take Mike Zanios's hand, but the ladies stayed seated; the last time they had come to the club together, Charlotte Wahl had told Franny that she was now of an age when she should stay seated.

“How'd your game go, Zanios?” Brick asked.

With a bow toward Charlotte and Peg, Mike Zanios said, “Brick likes golf, but I only play because it makes me feel virtuous; like I just ate a helping of liver or cooked carrots.” He laughed then, and set his hands down on Rosamund's shoulders, who tipped her head back and smiled up at him.

“Rosamund,” Mike Zanios looked down at the girl and murmured, “you smell—delicious.”

An awkward moment, Franny thought. Rosamund colored, and then Peg tapped her nails on the table—Peg appeared surprisingly frosty—and she asked, “Well, Roz? Aren't you going to tell him you swiped some of your old mom's perfume?”

Dully, Rosamund said, “It's Mom's perfume.”

“Ah.” Mike Zanios apparently recognized that his compliment had gone sour, and he winked at Peg, and said a lively, “No wonder you smell so nice!” and, then, Brick asked if he had ever told Mike the story of how the man on the Miami airplane mistook Rosamund for a twelve-year-old—

“Excuse me.” Franny stood and started toward the rest rooms. She had not gotten far when Martie called from behind her, “Wait!” and so she waited, staring at the ceiling tiles pocked from an era when games of darts were allowed near the bar.

“Was it that idiotic story about the man on the plane that drove you away?” Martie whispered. “I mean, are we supposed to believe a grown man mistook a platinum blonde in a push-up bra and eyeliner for a twelve-year-old?”

Franny blurted a laugh, though she could not tell if Martie meant to imply that Rosamund had invented the airplane story, or that the man on the airplane had, indeed, said those things to Rosamund but not meant them. If she could have thought how to do it, Franny would have asked Martie to clarify the matter. She
also would have asked what had happened between Martie and Darren Rutiger the night before. Also, did Martie know: Were she and Franny the Cinderellas? Or were they the evil stepsisters? Were they bound to find handsome princes, in the end? Or would they be forced to dance on burning coals, and have their eyes pecked out by a flock of crows?

While Franny went into the toilet stall, Martie whispered outside the door, “Anybody with half a brain can see why Dad trotted out that story, right? I mean, Zanios is drooling over Roz, so Dad's trying to tell himself that Roz
is
twelve. Maybe he's even trying to tell Zanios that Roz is twelve.”

This made a certain amount of sense to Franny but it also depressed her. She hurried to wash her hands and leave the bathroom, and was somewhat cheered, upon returning to the table, to find Mike Zanios gone and the others now standing beside their chairs. Soon, they would be home and Franny could go to her room, and be by herself, and read poetry and write in the journal she had bought when she last went shopping with Christy Strawberry.

The waiter/wrestler stood leaning up against the bar as the family moved toward the door. He nodded. Maybe he did not mean to look ironic—maybe that was just his face. Franny glanced away from the ironic look. Her father, however, stopped right next to the boy, and the words he said to the boy made Charlotte Wahl gasp “Harold!” and the bartender, Jimmy—a slender mustachioed man who had always been friendly to Brick—step out from behind the bar.

“That's enough, Mr. Wahl,” Jimmy said.

“You damn betcha that's enough!” Brick's upper lip quivered in agitation. “You get rid of this pipsqueak or forget about my business!”

His voice low, the bartender said, “I wouldn't threaten to take my business from a place I owed nine hundred dollars. Sir.”

“Jimmy!” The little manager bustled toward them, all the while nodding apologetically to Charlotte. “Folks, please—”

Peg put her hand on Brick's arm—“Honey”—but he shook her off, and banged open the door on his way outside.

Charlotte Wahl was not an easily ruffled woman. On that day, however, as her daughter-in-law and granddaughters walked her to her car—Brick already sat scowling behind the wheel of the Wildcat—Charlotte declared, “Well, that's one more place I'll never be able to show my face again because of Harold.”

“Oh, men!” Peg—looking wan—did her best to smile at her daughters as if they all had just shared a bit of fun.

Charlotte climbed into her Chrysler. Shut the door. Turned on the motor. “Are we dismissed, then?” Peg muttered.

No. With a hum, the Chrysler's electric window descended into its velvet slot. “I'm sending him a check,” Charlotte said to Peg. “See he uses it to pay off that bar tab. I don't ever want to hear about that again.”

“Hey, you guys: Knock, knock.”

In the front seat, neither Peg nor Brick gave any sign of hearing Franny—neither had said a word since the country club—and in the back, Martie and Rosamund looked Franny's way with some irritation.

“Come on! Somebody ask ‘Who's there?'”

“Who's there?” said Rosamund.

“Honolulu!”

“Honolulu who?”

“Now listen carefully, okay? Just—say ‘Honolulu who?' again.”

Rosamund sighed. “Honolulu who?”

Franny grinned as, carefully and slowly, she enunciated, “
Hon! Oh, it's Lulu, who you've been waiting for! I can see her coming up the sidewalk!
Hon-o-lu-lu. You get it?”

Rosamund groaned, but Franny laughed and, meaning to fill the car with the sound of merriment, she added, “No, it's extra good because I used the ‘who.'
And
the person who answers
isn't
Lulu, see? It's somebody else, so you get the answer once removed, and I don't know if I've ever heard anybody do that before.”

Rosamund smiled a little, then pointed out the window. “There's your favorite cottage.”

Franny felt grateful to Rosamund for remembering the favorite cottage, a tiny place shingled in chocolate brown and sitting in a hollow below the road. Enormous basswoods surrounded the cottage, and the green moss on the roof was simultaneously sharp and soothing. Something else, however, had made the place magical to Franny:

One night, long before they had moved out to this side of the lake, the family had driven by the spot and Franny had seen a group of anonymous, enchanted kids through a window that let into the cottage's pitched upstairs. A golden window. The children conducted a parade with batons and paper hats, and Franny had thought,
I want to be one of them.

Though, of course, she could not be one of those children if she lived in the cottage now. Now, she would have to be something else. Someone's beloved, maybe? A wife?

Back at the house, all three daughters filed upstairs, as if they had agreed to leave the first floor to Brick and Peg. Franny followed Rosamund into her room, and sat on the edge of one of the twin beds while Rosamund stood at her dressing table, and—with an occasional sigh—shifted into different patterns the photos she meant for the pages of her new album.

Rosamund
—Franny wanted to ask Rosamund something. In her head, she kept forming the name
Rosamund
, preparing to ask her question, which was: Had Peg ever said to Rosamund, “Don't look too nice because then Dad will spend all dinner looking at you?” Sometimes, Peg said this to Franny and Franny wondered how to respond. Of course Brick had never spent a meal looking at Franny. He hardly spoke to her, if he could help it.

At any rate, Franny felt relieved that she had not asked Rosamund the question because here came Peg, smiling rather timidly, knocking on Rosamund's door frame.

“So what are you girls up to?” she asked.

“Nothing much,” Rosamund said with a glance toward Franny.

Would they talk about the scene at the country club, Franny wondered? Would they like her to leave?

Peg stepped to Rosamund's side. “That's a handsome young man, isn't it?” She pointed to the album on the dresser, and Franny stood so she might look, too.

“James.” Rosamund shook her head. “He's the one who got my friend Pam in trouble.” Rosamund pointed at another picture, this one of a tanned girl in bra and underwear—perfect figure, perfect underwear—who stuck out her tongue at the photographer.

“So”—Peg glanced over at Franny, hesitated, then asked—“what happened?”

Rosamund smiled the nonchalant smile she used for stories with a bit of shock to them. “Pam was lucky. Her rich daddy came to school and flew her down to Mexico and that was that.”

Franny tipped her head to one side—an attitude she hoped might suggest that she did not quite understand the story. In fact, she had heard it before, and knew that Rosamund meant the girl had had an abortion. Which, Rosamund said, was no big deal except in the United States, where it was illegal, so girls tried to do it to themselves with hangers and things, and ended up dead.

It startled Franny that Rosamund could speak of such things to their mother—the closest Peg had ever come to speaking of anything sexual to Franny was to tell her that if a boy ever tried to touch her, she should lift her knee between his legs as hard as she could. Still, from certain remarks that Peg had made over the summer, Franny gathered that Rosamund had told not just Franny, but Peg, too, that she was friends with a Miami heroin addict and a rich boy who stole cars for kicks. That she knew people from New York who sometimes went to Greenwich Village and smoked marijuana while they listened to jazz, and that her friend David, as Rosamund put it, liked boys better than girls.

Peg picked up the photograph of Pam. “After you were born”—she raised her eyes to meet Rosamund's eyes in the dressing table mirror—“people told me I couldn't get pregnant while nursing. Well, at first, I thought I just hadn't got my period back, but, pretty soon, uh-oh, I started getting sick in the mornings.”

Rosamund gave her head a sympathetic shake. “Poor Mom.”

“I tried everything!” Peg continued. “Bethie and I drove across every railroad track we could find. I took hot and cold baths and drank a whole cup of gin”—Peg made a face of revulsion, then laughed—“your dad and I rode horseback for hours—”