Rowing in Eden (33 page)

“Eat your heart out,” Christy said. “He's meeting up with us at the Maid-Rite later.”

Joan Harvett stood and wiggled her hips, then exposed her own arm, burned, and scarred, too. “I beat Greg twice yesterday, and Greg can beat Ralph.”

“You guys are nuts.” Franny meant to hide her revulsion beneath an air of amusement, but maybe the girls could see the hiding. Maybe it left a bump or a hole in all she said or did in their company.

The people who paid attention to the football game now stood and yelled. Something good must have happened for the Pynch Lake side as the band played some sort of celebratory tootling and drumming,
bum, bum, bum.

Christy elbowed Franny, then pointed to Joan Harvett, who had begun to write in nail polish on the wool coat of a lady in front of her, “F-U—”

“Joan,” Franny whispered, “stop it!”

Though Joan ignored her, Roy Hobart leaned forward to hiss, “Shut your trap, Wahl. Everybody knows you're such a whore, if you didn't keep your legs crossed, your guts'd fall out.”

The words made the world in front of Franny go granular and jumpy, like a color TV screen looked at from too close. For a moment, her ears closed up, the way they did at high altitudes, and though she sensed Christy Strawberry now whispered something consoling in her direction, she also had seen the moment in which Christy and Joan Harvett glanced at each other, as if they wondered whether Roy Hobart's saying the words made them true.

Roy Hobart went back to talking to Lola Damon, making her laugh by analyzing the bodies of the women who passed on the cinder track below.

Joan Harvett completed her nail polish “FUCK” on the back of the woman's coat despite the fact that, at least twice, the woman had glanced over her shoulder and sniffed, apparently wondering at the smell.

Franny did not notice the boy from John Adams on the track below until Christy Strawberry shook her shoulder. “It's that guy,” Christy whispered. “Tom McCartney. He's waiting for you to invite him up.”

A handsome boy, with dark curly hair and olive skin. She smiled as he and his friends loped up the bleacher steps and took seats on the bench behind her and the other girls. She made an effort to talk, and the effort helped, but then he and his friends joined Roy Hobart in making spitballs and shooting them at people passing below, and she felt, no, this is impossible, and when they all got up at the end of the game to go to the Maid-Rite, she wanted only to go home.

Last year, she had found it exciting to walk with a noisy group of boys and girls to the Maid-Rite. Now it seemed childish. When they emerged from the darker neighborhood streets surrounding the stadium, and onto brightly lit Main, she whispered to Christy Strawberry, “Can't we walk on the other side of the street? I don't want anybody in the pool hall to see me, you know?”

“What's the big deal?” Christy said, her voice irritated, and so Franny stayed with the group, but turned her face toward the street as they passed the pool hall.

You could often see people through the pool hall windows, she knew: young men watching a game, or waiting to take a shot. A sinister and inviting world, dark and light, the fake river continuously running past the north woods in the Hamm's beer clock in the window.

“Franny!”

The entire group stopped and turned. Behind them, on the steps of the pool hall, stood Ryan Marvell.

He came toward her, smiling, at the same time casting glances at the other members of the group. “What're you doing here, honey?” he said.

“Just”—she pointed down the street—“going to the Maid-Rite.”

“Well, don't go there now! Let me get my jacket. I need to talk to you.” He watched her face. His eyes held her face. She knew he was proud of how he could hold her, and she did not want to look at Christy Strawberry or Tom McCartney or any of the rest of them to see if they saw it, too.

“You'll be here when I get back, right?” he said.

Roy Hobart mumbled, “Shit, are we going to stand here while she decides whether she's too good to come with us or not?”

Franny glanced at Tom McCartney as Ryan Marvell went back inside Viccio's. Tom McCartney looked away. “I'll catch up with you guys in a minute,” she said.

“Yeah?” Roy Hobart laughed. “Give him a quickie for me, too, why don't you?”

She watched the group move up the street. With little kicks, she bounced her toe off a parking meter in front of Viccio's—some nonsense meant to dispel that agitation she felt, though it was so ineffective that she barely was able to stop herself from taking off at a run as the old Mercedes trundled up Main, and Brick gave a honk and pulled to a stop beside her.

“Fran”—he leaned across the seat of the car to speak to her through the open window—“what're you doing here?”

Though she did not look back at the pool hall entrance, she could hear the door open behind her, steps coming her way.

“Dad, thank goodness you're here,” she said, very loud, and quickly climbed inside the car. She wanted to look back at Ryan Marvell, to send him a message, but did not dare. “I was going to call you and Mom. Some kids and I were walking to the Maid-Rite, but they were acting like such jerks, I couldn't stand to be with them anymore.”

Brick nodded. “I know all about that,” he said. “Say, are you coming down with something? You sound sick as a dog.”

In the morning—hot, thick-headed—she lay in bed and tried to will her body to fight off whatever ailed her. A cough shook itself loose from her chest with surprising strength as she forced herself out of bed; but imagine the problems that would arise if she stayed in bed, and then Ryan Marvell called and wanted her to meet him.

After breakfast—her mother down in the basement, Brick sleeping—she wrote on the blackboard “Gone for a walk.” She headed for Karlins' Grocery. Maybe it was crazy to think he might call her, there, on a Saturday morning, but she hung about the store for a bit and, then, since she was already halfway to Mother Goose, she continued on down the road—just in case he might have been called in for a little part-time work.

She was quite close to the miniature golf course when she realized that Karen Johanson and a stout man who was surely Mr. Johanson were at work on the course, preparing for the winter closure. Two small children toddled about while the adults dismantled The Old Woman Who Lived in the Shoe.

Franny had just turned to head back home when Karen Johanson called out, very friendly, “Hi, Franny!”

A trick, but Franny missed it, and turned to smile.

Karen Johanson did not smile. In her Screaming Purple People Eater sweatshirt, with her hair in disarray from the wind, she looked slightly maniacal. “That's Franny Wahl,” she said to her husband, then turned back to Franny with a shake of her head. “I suspected you all along.
Michelle.
You could've gotten my husband killed.”

Franny shook her head. “It was a mistake, and I fixed it as soon as I could.”

“You're the girl?” Ted Johanson wiped his hands down the sides of his work pants as if he meant to come greet her, but his wife gave him a sharp look and he stayed put.

“Ryan's not around, is he?” Franny asked.

The man shook his head. “You're a troublemaker,” his wife said. “I could smell you coming.”

Franny turned again and started back the way she had come. “Bye-bye!” called the little Johansons, but their mother shushed them.

At home, Peg demanded, “Where have you been?”

“Walking.”

Peg began to empty the dishwasher at a furious pace. “Some boy called for you. Are you sure you weren't meeting some boy?”

Some boy. It made her hopeful. “Was his name Tom McCartney?”

“He didn't give his name, but that cough of yours is awful. You should take some of my turpinhydrate.”

In her mother and father's bathroom, upstairs, Franny found the bottle of turpinhydrate that her mother kept on hand for her bouts of bronchitis. She drank a swig of the stuff. Nasty. It reminded her of last summer and the bourbon she had sneaked to Artie and Darren.

Back in bed again, she continued to cough into her pillow for a time, but then she began to feel better, rosy rather than hot. She listened to music on her clock radio. The clock radio's face
did
look like a face. In the upper-right quadrant of the circle, an open square showed the date, and that was an open eye while the other side was an eye shut in a wink.

She slept most of the afternoon, then picked at a little dinner in front of the television while Peg worked in the basement. Brick was not at home, but Franny did not ask about that.

Later in the evening, Peg came out into the den, holding up a half-full bottle of cough syrup that she had just found in the downstairs bath. “So you didn't find this earlier?” she asked.

Franny hesitated, then answered, “No, I didn't.”

“Well, here. It'll help that cough a lot.” Peg gave the bottle to the girl. “Take two teaspoons. Keep it with you.”

Like a good girl, Franny went out to the kitchen with the syrup and took the two teaspoons Then she went upstairs to hide the bottle of cough syrup she had found earlier. She placed it with the bottle of aspirin taken from her grandmother's house and a packet of razor
blades from her father's side of the medicine cabinet. If need be—if Ryan Marvell did not come back to her—she could numb herself with the cough syrup, then take the aspirin and slit her wrists. No, her forearms.

It was difficult to measure what effect the syrup had on her cough, but it did put everything off a little to one side: Ryan Marvell, the fever. The next evening—Sunday evening—when Tom McCartney called her, she lay on her parents' bed and stared into the receiver, which made her feel a little like a dog listening to a call from its missing master. A weary RCA Victor dog.

“Excuse my cough,” she said to Tom McCartney. She
would
like him. Probably lots of boys who were thirteen spit spitballs. Ryan Marvell probably had. Ryan had probably not been as mature as Tom McCartney when he was thirteen.

She had to get back to thirteen.

In and out she drifted from the conversation, but the boy had a number of friends around him, and, now and then, they would get on the line and say, “Hi, Franny!” and that would rouse her a bit.

On Monday, she sipped at the turpinhydrate in the bathroom stalls between classes. Her English teacher asked if Franny weren't too ill to be in school, and Franny made a little humming noise—the cough syrup made her feel like humming—and she said, “Oh, I think it's just allergies, Miss Rozen.”

At lunch, the light wood of the stage at the end of the cafeteria flickered with static, tiny dots of green and pink. Joan Harvett and Christy Strawberry teased Franny about how jealous Tom McCartney had been when she did not go with them to the Maid-Rite, and Franny laughed as if she were elated by the news, and then she told them how crazy it had been when her father drove up and she had to leave with him while Ryan Marvell watched from the pool hall steps. She did not tell them that to lose the pain of losing Ryan Marvell would be to lose him even more completely, and she had no intention of doing that. She did not tell them that, before first period, she had gone to their cheerleading coach, Miss Bright, and quit the squad. Miss Bright—a muscular little woman with a
skunk's streak of white in her black hair—had asked, “Now why would you want to do that?” The bones in Franny's face had vibrated as she said, “I'm not feeling well,” and bent to leave the pompons in their dry-cleaner's bag by the door.

After school that day, she walked to St. Mark's. The chapel was dark but someone had cranked open one of the stained-glass windows and that jeweled wing against the autumn sky made the bright world beyond tilt and gasp, become a magical glimpse caught in a magical mirror. That was Ryan Marvell, too. Life was him. God is love. Or life is. She knelt and bowed her head. Ryan Marvell had filled her brain. She had not had a chance.

In the dark church, her cough brought stars and bits of glitter to her eyes. She stared at the saints in the stained-glass windows. She, too, was surrounded by a hot corona, her body light, almost transparent. Soon, now that the cold was coming, ice would begin to build up inside the base of the stained glass windows—old metal things, poorly sealed. When the sun shone on the windows in winter, the ice became a lens for the window's colors. Blue ice. Pink. The irregular gold of melted butter.

She closed her eyes. She prayed. The same prayer, over and over again, and the truth was, what she believed in was love. Love. Love. Only love could save her, make her whole, lave her wounds. What was the passion of Jesus to her? She prayed for the love of Ryan Marvell. She prayed for help. Who was God but someone to whom she could address the insufficiencies of her life? The comfort of God was only that he might answer her prayers.

Her ribs ached from coughing. The light from the Perpetual Candle flickered, and she squinted at it with one eye. Something told her that a person's taking medicine in church—particularly medicine that made you feel so much better—might be sacrilegious, and so she waited until she reached the alcove before she took another sip of the turpinhydrate.

It seemed too good to be true that Susan Thomas and her mother sat in their Corvair outside the entrance to St. Mark's, and so Franny did not immediately walk up to the car, but waited, grinning,
on the St. Mark's steps, hoping the long-haired girl on the passenger side, who was surely Susan, would turn her face Franny's way, eliminate all uncertainty.

It was Mrs. Thomas, however, who showed herself first, her bowl of gray hair rising into view as she climbed from the Corvair.

“Mrs. Thomas!” Franny called.

“Franny! We just tried to call you!” Mrs. Thomas exclaimed, and then Susan Thomas was unfolding herself from the car and giving Franny a hug. It seemed Mrs. Thomas had taken Susan out of school early that day so she and Susan could see a litter just born to a Pynch Lake breeder's prize weimaraner; and, as a favor to their minister in Des Moines, Mrs. Thomas was now delivering literature to the sister church in Pynch Lake.