Rowing in Eden (13 page)

Franny had heard this story before, too. She knew that Rosamund had heard it, as well, for Franny had been in Rosamund's company at least once when Peg told it. Still, Rosamund behaved as if the story were perennially fresh and important. She managed to look both grave and amused, the perfect combination.

“Oh.” Peg raised a finger to her lips as Martie's bedroom door opened: Sh.

“Hey, am I invited, too, guys?” Martie called, and stuck her head into Rosamund's room.

“Actually”—again, Peg winked into the mirror at Rosamund—“I'm just leaving, Martie.”

Mother and daughter turned sideways to pass each other in the doorway, then, with a yawn, Martie flopped down on the nearest twin bed. “Guess I drove her away, huh? Could you believe Dad at the club, though?”

“It wasn't that big of deal, Martie.” Rosamund waved a hand in the air. “Just—forget it.”

“Sure.” Martie raised herself on one elbow in order to peer around Franny to Rosamund. “We're supposed to be as pure as the Lennon Sisters, but Dad can be Mr. Toilet Mouth any old time.”

Rosamund licked a photo corner. Pressed it to the album page with the ham of her hand. “He was just—he shouldn't have had a second drink before we went to the club, is all.”

“Or a third, for that matter.” Martie slid off the bed and moved to Rosamund's side, where she reached out a finger to set a photo square on the page.

“Martie”—Rosamund warned—“this is
my
album.”

“Sorry, Your Highness! Hey”—Martie smiled at Franny—“you know what Dad'd really like about us being the Lennon Sisters? He could shut off the TV whenever he got bored!” She made the classic “pig face”—nose pulled high by a finger of the left hand; lower
eyelids dragged down by the fingers of the right—“Remember who you are, where you are, and what you are, but never mind if your father tells a waiter to fuck off!”

“Will you shut up, Martie?”

To Franny's surprise, Rosamund's eyes were pink with misery, and filling with tears.

“I would think after
your
behavior last night”—

Martie folded her arms across her chest, stood taller, straighter. “What about my behavior, Rosamund?”

Rosamund did not answer, but Franny said, “Come on, you guys. I'll tell you another knock-knock joke if you're good.”

“What
about
my behavior?”

“Well—you'd been drinking too hard.” Rosamund slowly closed the photo album. Sniffled. “And you
know
why Dad drinks too hard sometimes. So you shouldn't criticize him.”

Franny watched Martie's face to see if this change in the subject would satisfy her, and when Martie did not object, Franny added, “Because of that car accident, right?”

“Of course,” Rosamund said, and Martie burst in, “You know I think what Dad did was beautiful, Roz!”

“I hate that girl, though,” Franny said.

Martie and Rosamund looked at one another, then at Franny. “What girl?” Rosamund asked.

“The girl who
died
.”

“But, Franny,” Martie said, “she's dead.”

“I don't care. You can hate dead people. She messed things up for our whole family, and I hate her.”

“Well, all right,” Rosamund said. Her lips started to twitch with suppressed laughter, and then Martie laughed out loud, and Franny bolted from the room and down the stairs and out the front door, running until she was a ways down Lakeside Drive.

A cool blonde, that was how Franny imagined the dead girl. Carefree, laughing, wearing some strapless thing that pressed tight around her breasts and under her arms. If that girl had somehow miraculously been able to arrive at the Wahl house, Franny would
have barred the door against her without compunction. Pushed her away. Beat and scratched and kicked—

The sky over Lakeside Drive was a thin shell of glass, the inner curve of a lightbulb that now softened the asphalt road and baked the sandy shoulders and made the swamp exhale the vegetative breath of old men. In certain of the cottage yards she passed, grownups were at work: a man started charcoal in a grill, a couple spread a sail out to dry on a lawn. They were a distraction and plucked at her taut thoughts so that something like an off-key note rang through her, and she fixed her eyes on the patch of brown that was the Thomas cottage. The paint was the color of cattails and there was shade around the Thomas cottage—a homely shade made up of pine boughs that drooped like the wet swimsuits and towels on the Thomas clothesline—and it comforted her.

Turandot
was the opera playing inside the Thomas cottage. The windows were open and the music came through the screens. Franny and Susan Thomas had listened to
Turandot
several times, and, once, “Nessun Dorma” made Franny cry, but, just now, the music left her ashamed. A few nights ago, over dinner, she had mentioned that the Thomases often played opera music, and Brick laughed and said, “Ah, yes, academics and their fraus tend to be a pretentious bunch,” which was not what Franny had meant to say. Franny had meant to say how interesting it was that you did not need to know Italian to know that you listened to something beautiful. Yet she had laughed along with the rest of the family when Brick boomed a bit of fake opera in a fake language.

So what else was new? She set her knuckles to the Thomas door and knocked and Susan Thomas came, smiling, to let her in.

B
ECAUSE
G
INNY
W
ESTON HAD REMOVED THE VINYL CLOTH
from the breakfast table that morning, after Franny jumped from the landing into the kitchen, and took a seat at the table, she spied the familiar but usually hidden spot where, years ago, a dreamy, lovestruck Martie had written into the tabletop with a ballpoint pen:

You could feel the incised letters if you ran a finger across the wood. You could see the old oily black ink at the base of the tiny grooves.

“Look at this!” Brick had shouted when he saw Martie's declaration of love. “Our beautiful table defaced by just one more example of your asinine behavior!”

“But I love Roger!” Martie had said, which made Brick, and then Peg, even wilder, less rhetorical.

Roger Dale had calluses so thick from work on his family farm that he once entertained Franny and Martie by paring his palms with a steak knife. Right at this table. And hadn't Franny been sitting at this table—eating breakfast, just like now—when Peg screamed at Martie because Martie had come in from a date with Roger Dale bearing a hickey on her neck? “If ever I catch you in a
horizontal position with a boy, you won't leave this house again till you graduate from high school!” Peg had said.

“Don't answer that phone!” So Franny wanted to shout up the stairs to Ginny Weston or Rosamund—everyone else had left for the day. The caller would almost certainly be Susan Thomas on the line, confirming that Franny meant to crew for her.

“Telephone, Franny!” Ginny Weston called down the stairs.

Susan Thomas.

While Franny told Susan Thomas, no, she was sorry but she could not crew today, she stared at a brass pitcher of daisies that sat on a shelf above the telephone. The rime of corrosion—white, black, turquoise—that bit into the pitcher's rim increased her squeamish feelings about the conversation, and she found she lacked the strength to offer the excuses she had considered earlier (I have chores, I'm grounded, I have to practice for my piano lesson at three).

Susan Thomas sat quietly for a time, but then, voice scratchy with both irritation and hurt feelings, she said, “It's because my parents tag along to the races, right?”

“No!” Actually, Franny was touched by the way that the Thomases followed Susan's tacking from their speedboat. Really, Franny did not know what it was that made her need to stay home. “I'm sorry,” she murmured.

In a rush, Susan Thomas said, “My dad told me if you said no today, I can't ask you anymore. Since you're—unreliable. So, 'bye.”

“Unreliable.” The word buzzed in Franny's veins. Unreliable. He loves me, he loves me not. She reached out to pluck a daisy from the pitcher—for Bob Prohaski?—but the rough and leafy stem of the flower was entwined with other stems, and when she pulled, up came the whole bouquet, a putrid mess, the stems all gone to rot, and, quick, she hurried the pitcher out to the garage, set it on top of the freezer.

So. She started up the stairs. She would ask Rosamund,
Do you think I'm unreliable?
and Rosamund would say,
Of course not.

At the top of the stairs, a chiffon scarf covering today's pin curls,
Ginny Weston stood polishing the newel post.

“Ginny”—Franny stopped with a yelp—“that's my shirt you're using for a rag!”

Ginny Weston inspected the striped T-shirt, now splotched with the orange of O'Cedar polish. “Your mom give it to me before she left, hon. Said it was rags. Sorry.”

Franny found Rosamund in her bedroom, retroussé nose almost touching her dressing table mirror, mouth open in concentration as she applied mascara to her lashes. Franny took a seat on one of the twin beds. Smoothed her fingers back and forth on the corduroy bedspread. Darker in one direction, lighter in the other. Calming. Like fields of oats moving in the wind.

“Mom gave Ginny my T-shirt for a rag.”

Rosamund turned to offer a pout of sympathy and a grin. “Probably 'cause you're getting to be such a hot tomato. And I've wondered, lately, if Mom's going through the change.”

The change?

“When a woman stops having her period.” Rosamund turned back to the mirror and began to groom the mascaraed lashes with a tiny comb. “It drives some of them crazy. Turner Haskin's dad has this mistress who's going through it, and lately she's been trying to seduce Turner!”

“His dad has a
mistress?”

Rosamund laughed at Franny's surprise. “Oh, Fran,” she said, “last night, I wish you could have seen it! A guy at the Top Hat sat in with the trio, and Annette, Mike's whatever you call her—
the singer
—she started flirting with the guy, so Mike and I pretended
we
were flirting. But wait—” She reached to her bedside table to raise the volume on the little radio there. A grown-up sort of song strained through the tiny speaker. Violins, a crooner.
You're out of reach-something-something—

“Pretty,” Franny said, albeit warily because suppose Rosamund said,
No, no, it's ghastly.

“It is, isn't it?” Rosamund smiled. “A boy who wanted me to date him—he used to play that whenever I came into a party.”

“And—did you ever go out with him?”

“No, but people got so they'd wait for me to show up—just to see if he'd still play the song.”

Franny traced her initials on the corduroy. “Listen, though, Roz,” she said, “what do you think I should do about Bob Prohaski?”

“Come on.” Rosamund hopped up from her chair and signalled for Franny to follow her into the hall. “Timmy's taking me to work in just a minute.” In front of the mirror at the top of the stairs, she stopped to tease her hair a bit higher. “So, why do you need to do anything about that Bob, anyway?” she asked.

The ringing bells of some TV game show indicated that Ginny Weston now had taken up ironing in Brick and Peg's room; still Franny answered in a low voice, “I don't—he's not that smart.”

Rosamund laughed. “At your age, they don't need to be smart! And maybe they never need to be smart as long as there's lots of money and lots of honey!”

Lots of money and lots of honey. Franny could not believe that Rosamund meant that. That was some jingle that she had picked up from her Miami pals, or, maybe, some old movie.
How to Marry a Millionaire
, maybe—one of those movies designed to make you think that all a woman wanted was to be coddled and cosseted, that the only passion a woman really felt was for fur coats and diamond rings.

“Anyway, you can always tell him you can't see him. Tell him your mother disapproves. Which isn't even a lie.”

True that her mother disapproved, Franny thought, but a lie that Franny would stop seeing him for that reason. If she loved him. If she loved him, she would never stop seeing him for any reason.

Rosamund shook her head at the mirror. “I know I don't actually look this good,” she said, and Franny, now idly considering herself in the nearby “fat mirror,” tugged Rosamund down the hall, toward the mirror closest to her own bedroom. “This one's best,” she said. “I mean, most accurate.”

“For bodies”—Roz nodded—“but it's got some kind of warp toward the top that stretches faces long.”

Franny moved closer to the mirror, up next to Rosamund. Compared to Rosamund, Franny looked half-baked, didn't she? Maybe when she started to wear makeup—but, no, her face would still be long, shadowy, droopy-eyed.

“But, Roz,” she said, “why doesn't Mom come out and say she disapproves of Bob?”

“She does!” Rosamund tilted her head onto Franny's shoulder. Smiled into the mirror. “Over and over again, hon!”

Franny smiled at Rosamund's reflection, then flushed and looked away—just as she would have had she come between a flirtatious glance and its target—when she understood that Rosamund's smile was only practice.

After Ginny Weston left for home that morning, Franny carried the library's Emily Dickinson book, along with her new notebook and a pen, to the screened porch. She closed the French doors separating the porch from the living room, then curled into one corner of the love seat.

In fear of her mother's ever again discovering a diary of her thoughts, Franny had written on the front of her new notebook,
Franny Wahl's Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson
, and, these days, instead of making personal entries, she copied into the notebook whatever Dickinson poem seemed closest to her own heart and mind. Today:

Unreliable.
Susan Thomas's father had called her that? Well, maybe someone had once called Emily Dickinson unreliable, too. Emily Dickinson did not much like to go out in public.

At the creak of the French doors' opening, Franny leapt from the love seat, crushing both journal and poetry book to her chest.

Brick. Looking abashed. “Sorry if I frightened you, dear,” he said. “I just came to pick up some papers.”

“Oh.” She raised her hand to her neck and laughed at her heart-thumping panic. “I'm—okay.”

“Well, good. That's good.” He ran his hand over the top of his crew cut. Back and forth. “I forgot your mom wasn't going to be here this noon. I thought I'd have lunch with her.”

Franny nodded. Maybe he was feeling worried over something, and needed Peg to tell him it was all right. Sometimes Peg could do that for him, Franny knew—they all laughed about it, and called it “fluffing up Brick.”

But suppose Franny made him lunch. Suppose it cheered him, and he said, “This is real tasty, honey. You're growing up to be a fine young lady.” It was not impossible. Susan Thomas's parents said such things to Susan, and, just a few days ago, at the China Castle, Franny and Christy Strawberry and Joan Harvett had seen an entire family whose contented members bent so close over their little table that their heads almost touched.
Check out the cornballs
, Franny had whispered to Joan Harvett and Christy Strawberry, though her longing to leap into that cozy circle actually made her dizzy. Her thoughts skipped—little blanks—as if she were a scratched record, and to save herself, she began to sing a very loud rendition of
“Cuando caliente el sol,”
which forced not just that charmed family to look up, but other patrons as well. Christy and Joan had found this hysterically funny, but Franny had known her behavior was hideous. Even then, she knew.

“Dad?” She stepped out into the kitchen where Brick now shook aspirin from the bottle they kept by the sink. “If you haven't eaten, I can make you lunch.”

“Oh?” he said. He would have preferred to stop at Mike's Top Hat on his way back to the office. She could see that as soon as she spoke. Eat a steak sandwich. Have a drink. Still, he nodded. He meant to be nice. “I guess that'd be okay.”

Supposedly, when Rosamund and Martie had been small, Brick always came home to the house on Ash Street for lunch. Maybe if he had come home when Franny were growing up, she would have known him better. This beefy man with fine red hairs on the backs of his big fingers, now lifting to his mouth a spoonful of soup: What did a person say to him?

“So, how's your soup, Dad?”

He gave her a winking grimace. “Awful salty!” he said, but in a voice so enthusiastic, so peppy, she wondered if she had heard him right.

“I made it like they said on the can.”

He smiled and nodded. “Awful salty!” He pushed back his chair from the table, and picked up his sandwich from his plate. “Think I'll be okay, though, once I scrape some of the glurp off this sandwich!” As if he were some comic sneak, Brick raised his shoulders and tiptoed to the bread board and, there, snatched up a knife and scraped off the mustard and mayonnaise Franny had put on the bread.

“Ta-da!” He smiled at her, and winked, as if they now had triumphed over the small disaster that was her making of the lunch. But then something made him frown. Something outside. “Ahem.” He jerked his head toward the window that opened on the sideyard. Took a long, whistling in-breath. “Looks like somebody's on his way up to the house from the road.”

Bob Prohaski. And not alone. She could hear the sound of two boys laughing as they made their way around the garage to the front door. Brick widened his eyes—very wide, an awkward-looking stretch that actually made it possible to see the bulge of the cornea—but did that mean she should go outside or not? She took a bite of her own sandwich. Chewed.

“Aren't you going to go say hello, Fran?”

Without answering, she stood and carried her plate to the sink. She could tell he watched as she walked to the back hall, and this made her movement awkward, stilted.

“Franny!” Bob Prohaski grasped her hand and pulled her down the front steps to the mulberry tree, beneath which sat a smiling, berry-eating boy whom Franny did not recognize: Legs akimbo on the lawn. Big, bare belly. Blond baby face.

“Roy Hobart,” said the boy, and waved a purple palm.

“He went to Holy Family,” Bob Prohaski said. “He's starting at St. Joe's in the fall.”

Roy Hobart shook his head. “Bob and I were having a blast at Shelly McDonald's but there wasn't a thing would do for Bob but we come see you!” Roy Hobart gave the house an admiring look. “I heard this can be a rocking place.”

Bob Prohaski grinned and grabbed Franny to his chest. He smelled of sweat and dust from having hitchhiked to the house. A person was not supposed to like those smells, and the fact that Franny did made her wonder if perhaps there were something wrong with her. Maybe she was too much of a sensualist. Sensuous? Sensual? One of them was okay, and one was not, and Franny suspected she was the wrong one.