Rowing in Eden (27 page)

“Don't be ridiculous,” Brick said, and Martie, as if scandalized, “Really, Franny!”

Peg pulled out a chair at the table and sat. “Maybe we shouldn't tell Roz. If that's all Mike's up to, why ruin things between her and Turner? Things are lovely between them. He's written her and—”

“For Christsake!” Brick cried. “The guy's a fraud!”

Peg stared at Brick, almost as if she dared him to go on, but that did not stop Brick. “He deceived us, too, for that matter! He took advantage of our hospitality, and now we all look like idiots, and you can bet Mike's new gal won't waste time telling people how the Wahl girl's boyfriend came to town and—”

“You guys?” The four of them turned to the landing where Rosamund stood, white-faced, waiting. “What's going on?”

“Oh, honey.” Peg and Brick immediately made their way across the kitchen to the girl, oh, honey, honey, and Martie and Franny joined them, there, hugging Rosamund, who repeated, now with real anxiety, “What is it? What's going on?”

In the morning, when Franny went to Rosamund's bedroom to say, again, how sorry she was about things with Turner, Rosamund turned from her dressing table to hand Franny an envelope. “Look at the postmark,” she said.

Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“He was clever, but not that clever, huh?” Rosamund raised the back of her hand to her mouth as she smiled. Rueful, Franny thought, but not heartbroken. Somehow, while showing all the
signs of love, enjoying what appeared to be the best of it, she had managed to keep her essential self on dry land. Franny would have liked very much to know if this had been something Rosamund had decided to do, or if it all had just happened that way, the way that this difficult love had happened to Franny; but she doubted that Rosamund would know the answer, or even how to pass along such skills, if they existed.

“I promise I won't tell anyone what he did,” Franny said.

“What do I care if people know?” Rosamund smiled. “I'm not the one who had sex with him. I'm the one he respected.”

Franny felt glad for Rosamund that she was so good at making the world be what she wanted it to be, but the ease with which Rosamund could perform such adjustments did leave Franny feeling inept and lonesome. To make matters worse, this day was to be Susan Thomas's last in Pynch Lake until next summer.

Gloomily, she went outside. Descended the stairs to the dock and the rowboat. The boat had been pushed up on the shore since that business with Bob Prohaski and she felt a twinge—aversion, guilt—as she pushed the boat out into the water and climbed in and began to row toward the Thomas cottage.

They would go for a walk, the girls decided. Once they were around the bend that led farther out into the country, away from the lake and cottages, they began to sing. “Chances Are,” “Young and Foolish,” “I'll Never Smile Again.” They turned off Lakeside and onto a gravel road that ran between two farms. On a rise above a battered pigpen, they stopped to watch as two immense sows trotted across the muddy pen. The soft tents of the sows' ears flapped up and down. In the quiet, you could hear the sows' breathing, and the flapping of the ears, but then, seemingly from nowhere, like a dumped bucket of balls, a cluster of squealing piglets spilled across the ground behind the sows, racing to catch up with the mothers.

Though Franny knew her mother would not have liked it, she told Susan Thomas, “My mother's dad raised pigs. That red one's a Duroc. And the others are Hampshires. I think I might like to raise
pigs. I might like to be a farmer. Something simple like that. I think I might be happier that way.”

Susan Thomas nodded, but said, “I figure I'm probably as happy now as I'll ever be.”

“Susan! I couldn't go on living if I thought I'd never be happier than I am now!”

Susan Thomas scowled. “Franny, you're smart and pretty and this adorable guy likes you and—what more do you want, for Pete's sake?”

“Well”—she felt embarrassed—“to be sure of something, that's all.”

“Oh, that's all.” Susan Thomas shook her head, then continued on up the gravel road.

Flushed, worried that she had somehow diminished her love for Ryan Marvell by her confession, Franny wanted to shout after Susan Thomas that circumstances, not a failure of love, cramped her happiness. As she did not know how to say such things to another person, instead she made her way down into the steep ditch alongside the road and flicked at the transparent green pods of the touch-me-not growing there. Just as they had when she and her friends used them for play food in their games of “house,” the ripest pods of the touch-me-nots snapped open, ejecting yellow seeds and curling their insides outside, like the petals of lilies.

After a time, she could hear Susan Thomas coming back, the rustle of the fine gravel growing louder beneath Susan's shoes.

“I didn't mean I wouldn't
like
to be happier,” Susan said. “I just mean I don't think I will be. That's all.”

Franny squinted up at the girl, who made a kind of sepia tower against the sun. “But maybe if you don't think you will be, you won't have a chance to be,” she said.

“And if you keep thinking you will be—in the future—maybe you won't be happy with what you've got now!”

Franny clawed her way up out of the ditch, grabbing at weeds, laughing at her trouble with the unsteady footing. On the way back to the house, she showed a new poem—a short thing—to Susan Thomas.

Susan Thomas nodded and smiled. “Did you show it to Ryan?”

“Oh, no.” Quickly, Franny stuffed the thing in her pocket, and she changed the subject to Bell Academy, and Susan's poetry class there—for how could she have explained to Susan that it would be utterly impossible to ask Ryan Marvell to think about what she thought about their love?

That afternoon, Franny and Susan Thomas made the most optimistic of plans for getting together at Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter. They walked about the house with their arms over each other's shoulders, sad, but exhilarated, too: proud of their friendship.

When the Thomases finally drove off to Des Moines, Franny ran down Lakeside Drive after their car. She waved wildly and cried, “Adieu! Adieu!” as if she mocked those movie scenes in which a person ran alongside the train that carried away the beloved, but this was only to conceal the fact that she felt precisely the way she imagined the people in the movies felt—that is, the way the characters felt, not the actors.

T
HE
S
ATURDAY BEFORE
L
ABOR
D
AY, A CREW CAME FROM
Moore's Marina to take out the dock and pull the hoist for the inboard onto the bank. The rowboat could spend the winter on the bank, upside down, but not the inboard. While the crew worked, Franny and Rosamund drove the inboard over to Moore's ramp where Brick waited with a car and a boat trailer. The three of them then drove the inboard into Moore's big, echoey warehouse for the winter, and Brick and Rosamund acted as if this were a jolly end-of-summer ritual. Franny went along, but secretly wondered if her father ever had paid his bill at Pynch Marina, and if he now ran up a bill at Moore's.

The day after Labor Day, Roosevelt Junior High opened, and Franny found she felt some of the old excitement of school starting again. She carried a new three-ring binder and a vinyl pouch holding four as yet unsharpened pencils and one pen. She wore a clean, white oxford cloth shirt with a button-down collar.
I'm Rip Van Winkle
, she thought as she hurried down the familiar halls and into the familiar morning light of her homeroom, #112;
that is, I'm me, but a me who's been through an experience nobody else knows about.

At lunchtime, across the crowded cafeteria, she caught a glimpse of Bob Prohaski. Fear made gooseflesh rise on her arms at the same time that her heart sank with remorse. Bob Prohaski now wore eyeglasses with stern black frames that did not seem quite wide enough for his broad face. It occurred to Franny that he must
have needed glasses for a long time as his lenses had the same greasy-looking thickness as the lenses of his big brother's glasses. But, then, maybe they were his brother's glasses?

He was trying to use his brother's glasses to help himself see?

Or: He wore his big brother's glasses, which he did not need, in order to resemble his brother?

There sat Christy Strawberry and Joan Harvett—with Lola Damon—the three already finishing their lunches at a table near the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. As she made her way to the girls, Franny held her face turned slightly to one side, in part because she felt shy in their company lately; in part because she did not know how to respond to Joan Harvett's imitation of Lola Damon: that black hair, the chalk-white lipstick, the twin ribbons of black liner that seemed to weight her eyelids.

“We were just talking about Greg,” Lola Damon whispered as Franny took a seat. “Joan's having trouble with him.”

It seemed Greg Hopper—now the boyfriend of Joan, and
not
Christy; Christy now preferred a Ralph True from Holy Family—it seemed Greg Hopper was now threatening to break up with Joan. And why? Because he had made out with another girl over Labor Day, and when he reported the incident to Joan, Joan had failed to cry. The picnic girl, however,
had
cried when Greg Hopper told her that he liked Joan best—all of which made the boy wonder if maybe he should like the picnic girl.

“Everyone knows I can't cry!” Joan wailed. “Right, Franny?”

Franny nodded. She tried to appear sympathetic. Really, it depressed her that she did not feel sympathetic toward Joan, or even especially friendly toward her. And look at Lola Damon. Lola seemed intensely interested in Joan's problem. Lola leaned forward in her chair to say, almost sternly, “Start carrying an open safety pin and stab yourself with it whenever he expects you to cry. Or bite your tongue! It's
not
that hard.”

Christy turned from sneaking a look across the cafeteria at Greg Hopper. “I've got it, Joan,” she whispered. “You run to the john and we follow. You put soap in your eyes, like they do for
movies, you know? Then you and I go up to Greg's table and I say, like I'm real mad, ‘You creep, Greg, you made Joan cry,' and you're all red-eyed and everything.”

While Christy spoke to Joan, Franny sensed that Lola Damon had turned her gaze Franny's way. She pretended not to notice until Lola said, her voice clearly taunting, “So, Wahl, you think that's a good idea?”

“Worth a try,” Franny said. The words sounded odd, crumpled, and she repeated them—“Worth a try”—as she stood up from the table. “But I've got to go get my lunch. Before the bell.” She looked toward the cafeteria line, the ladies in their white uniforms and hairnets. “Is there anything worth eating today?”

It was a great comfort to arrive home after that first day of classes. Once she was off the bus, and inside the house, she wanted nothing more than to turn on
P.M. Matinee.
However, no sooner had she lain on the floor in front of the television than Martie thundered into the den.

“Some girls called for you earlier! They said they were going to beat you up!”

“Sh!” Franny looked toward the kitchen where her mother was folding laundry at the breakfast table. “Jeez, Martie.”

“I already told her.” Martie lowered her voice to add, “She was, like, ‘Oh, well, just some pranksters,' but I think we should call the police if it happens again. Tap the phone.”

Franny tried to concentrate on the TV movie—Jimmy Stewart as a young clerk. She tried not to think about someone punching her in the face, kicking her ribs, but Martie set a penny-loafered foot upon Franny's arm, and she leaned down to ask, “You're not still seeing that Ryan Marvell, are you?”

Franny hesitated, then whispered, “You're not still seeing that Darren Rutiger, are you?”

Such narrowed eyes! Such tight lips! “What are you talking about, Frances?”

“At the carnival, I saw you guys. In the Wildcat.”

Martie glanced toward the kitchen. “Did you tell anyone?”

“No.”

“Good.” As if they were spies passing messages, Martie, too, stared at the television as she whispered, “He's off at basic training now. And he was just using me, trying to get at Roz. So, are you happy, Miss Busybody?”

Franny looked back at the television. “Some days more than others,” she replied. “Now, may I watch this show in peace, please?”

Unfortunately, once Martie left the room, Franny found she could no longer concentrate on the story; and so she turned off the set and went into the kitchen to see if Peg would mention the telephone call.

“Here.” Peg tossed the end of a warm bed sheet to the girl and they began the familiar dance of folding: drawing apart, together. Apart. Together. Peg took the sheet for its last fold, then placed it in a box marked M
ARTIE
W
AHL
that already contained a set of pink towels for Martie's dormitory room. Her voice low, she said, “So Martie told you about that call? You girls. Honest to God.”

“Mom, I don't even know who these people are!”

Peg gave a skeptical snap to a pillowcase, then nodded at the basket of socks and things that remained to be folded. “You got something in the mail, by the way. A brochure from the Bell Academy for Girls. Do you know anything about that?”

Franny nodded as she began to lay white socks out on the table for matching. “That's where Susan Thomas goes.”

“Well, I know that, but don't you start thinking we can afford to send you to some snooty school, because we can't.”

She nodded. She was not thinking about Bell Academy. She was thinking about Saturday. On Saturday, Peg and Brick would drive, first, Rosamund to the Des Moines airport, then, Martie to Iowa City. Which meant that Franny would have the entire day to spend with Ryan Marvell. The problem: She still had not figured out in what way she could phrase the question, “How much of the day would you like to spend with me?” so that Ryan Marvell's answer did not expose possible deficiencies in his feelings for her.

A waste of effort, she realized when he called her at Karlins' Grocery on Friday afternoon. There
was
no perfectly safe way to ask the question, and when they made their plans for Saturday, she said nothing at all about the fact that her parents would be out of town.

She did, however, mention the threatening phone calls. There had been another just the night before.

“You don't know who it could be, do you?” she asked, and Ryan Marvell said, “Franny, I don't know girls who go around beating up other girls.”

Offended, it seemed, so she did not pursue the subject.

On Saturday, by the time Rosamund and Martie had all of their things packed inside the Wildcat—suitcases and hair dryers and boxes—the only place for Franny to sit for the drive to town was Martie's lap, in the backseat.

“Delightful,” Martie said and asked Franny to lift herself up, now and then, so that Martie could pull her skirt straight.

Brick and Peg and Rosamund chatted away in the front seat. Peg and Brick were looking forward to seeing friends in Iowa City. One of the friends had a new house and Peg and Brick would go there after Martie was settled in her dorm.

The car passed Mother Goose Miniature Golf. Ryan Marvell had quit the job once school started. Still: she had sat on that very piece of split-rail fence and talked to him.

“Now, Fran.” Peg smiled and craned around in her seat. “We may not get back before late. The Harvetts are bringing you home after dinner, right? If I call at nine or ten, you'll be home?”

Franny nodded, right, but her mother's smile made the lie more painful than usual, and when her father stopped the car in front of the children's entrance of the public library, she did not point out that she had not used the children's library for over two years. She kissed each family member goodbye and told her sisters to write, and then stood, waving, until the Wildcat pulled into the street.

The children's entrance to the library featured a clumsy
wooden foyer, a shanty that had been tacked onto the stately building to provide a place in which children might remove and put on their snow clothes in winter, and Franny stopped and took a fond sniff of the foyer's odor of battered wood and rubber matting. The benches were wonderfully low, as was the water fountain just inside the building proper.

Did Miss Ivy remember Franny? A big woman in a tube of mauve lace and a French twist as dun and matte as a discarded chrysalis, Miss Ivy looked up from the checkout desk and smiled as Franny passed through Children's to the hall that led to Adults.

A maiden lady, Miss Ivy. Someone to pity.

Between Children's and Adults sat an alcove that held a wall of coat hooks and the pay telephone upon which Ryan Marvell would call Franny at noon.

Of course, he might not call. He might have stopped loving her since they last saw each other. Such things happened with heartbreaking regularity, she knew.

In Adults, the clock in the reading room showed the same time as the clock over the checkout desk and also the clock over the door leading to the Francis Wahl Nature Walk: eleven-o-three.

She pushed open the door. A pretty day, the air thin and bright. She stopped before the memorial plaque that stood at the entry to the nature walk. “Beloved husband.” Hard to imagine her grandmother speaking of gruff Francis in those terms. But, then, she supposed “beloved husband” was the language of public memorials, useful where private sentiments would feel wrong.

The plants that grew around several of the big trees were hostas—one of her grandmother's favorite plants—and her grandmother had installed markers that identified which variety was which, and Franny stopped, now, to straighten a marker that had fallen over.

The grounds were not extensive but there were many short trails and as she continued on, she spotted, up ahead, a stooped figure in a green dress moving very slowly through what seemed to be
a group of gooseberry bushes. Someone elderly? Who had lost something?

In an effort not to startle the woman, Franny called hello as she drew near, and the figure straightened and turned and it was her grandmother, wearing—along with the green dress—canvas garden gloves that rose all the way up to her elbows, and bright red rubber boots.

By way of greeting, Charlotte Wahl raised into the air a filthy pop bottle, several scraps of paper, and what appeared to be a small child's sweater, gone stiff with rain and sun. “The maintenance men don't always keep things as nice here as they should, so I came by to do a little straightening.”

“I'm taking a break from homework.” Franny pointed a thumb back at the library. She never knew exactly how much to say to her grandmother. It might be that her grandmother knew every detail of the trip to Des Moines and Iowa City, and would be offended if Franny assumed she did not know; or it might be that she knew nothing at all, and would be offended at that; or she might be offended if you presumed she wanted to know something.

Charlotte dropped the trash in her hands into a paper grocery bag she had already filled almost to the top. She was meeting her friend, Gen, at the country club for lunch, she said. Would Franny like to join them? Then they could bring her back to finish her homework?

Oh, thanks, but she was going to Joan's later, and needed to keep working now.

She had promised herself that she would wait until eleven forty-five before she went to stand in the neighborhood of the pay telephone. She made it until eleven-forty. The hall, thank goodness, stood empty. Framed autographs and letters from famous people—Walt Whitman, Herbert Hoover, Helen Keller—lined the walls, and Franny, reading one, then another, hoped they seemed to give her a reason to be in the hall.

A very large young woman in white majorette boots and a
hairdo as big as a tumbleweed ambled past. Had she looked at Franny oddly? It seemed so. It also seemed to Franny that the young woman was not the library type, but the type who might make anonymous telephone calls and pull a girl into a rest room and pummel her bloody. She had hardly finished thinking this, however, when the young woman came back down the hall, pushing a library cart of books.