Rowing in Eden (35 page)

“Come on, hurry up,” the mother called to the child as she advanced down the hall. Then they were gone and the man in the rain slicker left, too, and Franny stepped up to the telephone, which looked full of promise.

Suppose—on a whim—Ryan Marvell decided to try to telephone her at the library. Right this minute.

Just in case—so no one else could use the telephone—she picked up the receiver and discreetly depressed the cradle. A woman in a Chanel-style suit descended to the base of the alcove's chained-off stairs and unhooked the chain and passed by Franny, who said into the telephone, “That would be nice. Sure. If your mom says it's okay.” But when a second woman stopped in the alcove, Franny had to drop her dime into the coin box and dial her father's office.

Closed.

She tried home, next. Busy.

“May I use the phone if you're not getting through?” the waiting woman asked. “I'll only be a minute.”

Franny wandered down the hall to Children's. Eyed the beat-up display rack of early readers that stood just inside the door: the story of the fellow who woke up to find his head turned into a parsnip. A Ricka, Dicka, and Flicka book. A story of Babar the Elephant.
Make Way for Ducklings.
All of them, books she had loved. So maybe the young mother in the hall had not been so terrible of a mother. She had brought her child to the library, after all.

“May we help you?” Miss Ivy called from the checkout desk—quite loud, apparently because no one else was in the unit at the time.

“I'm just waiting for the telephone,” Franny said. She walked the length of Children's, to the Story Room—the prettiest room in
all the library, a circle of windows and window seats. When you were small, you could sit on the window seats while Miss Ivy read stories, or you could work on the simple wood puzzles at the central table, fit the piece of blue sky to the scallops formed by Bo Peep's pink bonnet, lay the sheep-shaped pieces into their appropriate spots at the base of Peep's hoop skirt.

“Oh, Lord,” Peg said as she drove Franny out of the library parking lot, “Martie called just before you did, all in a tizzy. It seems her latest, this Milton, left for Washington, D.C., and he didn't want Martie to come along.”

“Oh, no.”

“I tried to get her to calm down. She makes a fool of herself. That's why they leave.” Peg scarcely stopped at the four-way half a block up the street. “I could see nobody was coming,” she murmured. “‘Don't throw yourself at them, Martie.' How many times have I told her that? A girl can't throw herself at a boy and hold his interest.”

Franny sighed. “That's so sad.”

“But you agree, don't you?” Peg said sternly.

Franny watched two nuns climb out of a beige sedan in front of the rectangular brick building that was their home. The yards and yards of their habits caught in the breeze and lifted and luffed, black sails against the gray sky.

“That it's sad?” Franny said. “Yeah, I agree.”

T
HE TRAVEL PLANS ARRANGED FOR
M
ARTIE AND
R
OSAMUND
Wahl's trips home for Thanksgiving included Rosamund's flying into Des Moines on Wednesday afternoon, and Brick's picking her up at the airport. Peg had arranged for Martie to receive a ride from Iowa City with the nephew of her hairdresser, who was to drop Martie at the house at around eight on Wednesday evening.

“You would have thought I'd sold her to the Indians!” Peg said, then added with a whine, “‘I suppose you guys are driving to Des Moines to get Roz!' As if she couldn't see the difference between an unnecessary eight-hour trip and a necessary three-hour trip.”

“Sometimes, you just have to plug your ears when she talks,” Brick said.

This was at breakfast, Wednesday morning. Her parents would know about Martie's pregnancy by the time they went to bed, and yet there was nothing for Franny to do but act as normal as possible. Eat her toast. Explain that Mrs. Harvett would bring her home from Y-Teens. Go wait for the bus.

In English class, however, Franny jiggled her foot so hard that her shoe flew off and hit the shoulder of a girl several rows up; and, at lunch, when one of the more popular of the ninth-grade boys entertained his friends by sending love notes to a girl from Special Education, Franny found herself yelling at the boy and his friends where they sat, smirking, on the cafeteria stage.

“Ooo, Franny.” The boys raised their knuckles to their mouths and leaned back, pretending to be afraid of her. “Ooo, don't hurt us, Franny.”

All day long, she watched the clock. “IBM” read the small black letters on the face. The father of a boy Rosamund had dated during her freshman year of college had been employed by IBM. Would she have to remember that forever and ever? Every time she looked at an IBM clock? The father of a boy she never even met?

At the ringing of the release bell, she wandered out into the hall to her locker. Lola Damon stood in the foyer, using the trophy case as a mirror while applying her lipstick. Joan Harvett joined Lola Damon there. She looked down the hall toward Franny and waved
come on.

“Lola and Chris want to get some nylons before Y-Teens,” she explained as Franny drew near, “so we got to hustle.”

Moisture in the air, moisture in the gutters from a recent rain. She had never lived through a winter in love with Ryan Marvell, but the smell stirred a nostalgia in her that was linked to him. Because her whole life was now linked to him? Was that what it was?

At Drew's Department Store, several women already waited at the stocking counter, and when Christy Strawberry and Lola Damon joined the line, Joan Harvett asked if Franny would do her a favor and come with her to Spragues' Drugs to buy her a pack of cigarettes.

Franny was more than willing to leave the store and walk outside, to get away from Lola Damon. Sometimes, she wondered if Lola Damon might have had something to do with the beating.

“But, listen,” she said as she and Joan Harvett entered the old drugstore—she gave a laugh and lowered her voice as if she were about to say something risqué—“I want
you
to do
me
a favor, too, Joan.”

“Me?” Joan Harvett's smile was forced. “What?”

As she did not like to say, for a moment, Franny busied herself with rooting a dime from her purse. “Here!” She smiled and offered the coin to the girl. “I want you to make a call. All you have to do is say, ‘Is Ryan there?' and if he's not, you just say, ‘Would you, please, tell him Franny called?' and if he is, then you give the phone to me.”

Joan Harvett looked toward the drugstore's front door.
Because she wanted the other girls as witnesses? Support? “But if I'm just doing that,” she said, “why don't you call, Franny? If he's there, you'll talk to him, right? You don't want me to talk to him.”

Franny grinned. As if this all were—fun. “Come on, Joanie. Humor me.” She pulled playfully on Joan Harvett's arm. “It'll take you all of two seconds.”

A very old telephone booth made of dark wood, with a wooden seat, the Spragues' telephone booth sat in one corner of the store, tucked behind carousels of postcards and sunglasses. “I'm handing the phone right to you,” Joan whispered as she dialed the number. “Don't you dare move.”

From where she stood, Franny could hear the faint ringing of the Marvell telephone. It filled her heart with joy and fear. She squeezed her hands into fists she raised to her face, and then Joan Harvett was saying, “Is Ryan there, please?” She smiled at Franny. “Okay, well, would you, please, tell him Franny called?”

Joan Harvett laughed as she hung up. “So?” Franny asked, now very stiff, as if her interest in Ryan Marvell instantly had cooled to vain curiosity.

“It was his dad! He was
so
sweet, Franny. ‘I'll tell Ryan you called, honey!' Did you ever meet him?”

Franny shook her head, no, and stared at the telephone booth's molasses-dark finish, its white stars of reflection. Mr. Marvell probably had no idea that a person named Franny even existed. And Mr. Marvell had liked Joan, the girl who had called, not Franny. Furthermore, while the lady at the counter rang up the cigarettes—one pack of Winstons, one of Marlboros—it occurred to Franny that it might have been Ryan Marvell who took the call. Joan Harvett would not have known. Ryan Marvell could have pretended not to be himself just as easily as Joan Harvett pretended to be Franny.

The SFF girls who served as leaders for the Y-Teens group acted as if they were gratified to see Franny enter the Y-Teens room. “We've missed you!” they said. “Are you feeling better?”

From the way they studied her face, she suspected that they, too, knew about the beating.

“We're making Thanksgiving decorations for Good Shepherd,” the taller and prettier of the two leaders said, and pointed toward the back of the meeting room where a number of girls sat at fold-out tables, adding pipe cleaner handles to nut cups. Two girls Franny knew from honors sprawled on the floor, drawing turkeys on sheets of oak tag.

“Brownnosers,” murmured Joan Harvett.

“Thunder-thighs,” said Lola Damon and pointed at an exposed section of leg belonging to the heavier of the two girls. Renee Bowen. Franny liked Renee Bowen. At the beginning of seventh grade, Renee had used to invite Franny to join her and her friends for lunch. Those girls had not, however, been the friends that Franny had wanted back then; and now they considered her wild.

Wild.

Even the hoody girls at her school—the ones with lilac eye shadow and hair teased into transparent mantillas, the girls with hickeys all over their necks—Franny could hardly believe anymore that they acted with the sort of reckless joy she once assumed went with true wildness. Maybe, like her, they were dragged about by terrible bonds they could not understand or even see.

She took a seat at one of the fold-out tables and began to work. Inane. And was this what life ended with? Being wheeled into some disinfected dining hall so you could get a nut cup made by the Y-Teens?

The last time she had been at the Y, she had not actually attended the meeting. She and Ryan Marvell had parked along Lime Creek and skipped stones while, supposedly, she walked with the other Y-teens, collecting money for UNICEF. That day, before Peg arrived to drive her home, as an act of contrition—Franny had seen the photos of babies whose heads balanced precariously above stick bodies—Franny stuck her entire October allowance in the collection box at the Y's front desk. That was just before Joan Harvett had returned with her UNICEF group, and said a haughty, “Are
you really coming to the meeting next week, Franny, 'cause we're getting tired of lying for you,” and Franny had snapped, “I never asked you to lie for me. Tell the truth: You
don't
know where I am.”

Today, she hardly cared enough to be touchy with the girls. After the meeting closed, she volunteered to be the one who sat on the front steps and watched for Mrs. Harvett's arrival while Joan and Lola and Christy went to smoke between the Y and the neighboring boarding house.

Winter was coming. Cars now drove with their headlights on. The headlights glimmered on the moist streets, and behind them, the cars appeared sly as cats preparing to pounce.

One car—a dark sedan—pulled up to the curb and made Franny's heart lurch, but the female driver immediately hurried into the boardinghouse.

A radio tower's distant light plucked, red, at the teal sky. She stood to look in through the glass doors to the lobby. Five twenty-three said the clock over the reception desk. Two and a half hours until Martie would arrive home. Rosamund might already be at the house. Franny was excited to see her but also wished that the whole evening could somehow be put off, indefinitely delayed.

Yes.

A group of girls played table tennis at the back of the lobby, and, just then, the game's blond paddles and taut green net struck Franny as particularly therapeutic, a game to restore normalcy.

If Franny had gone inside, and asked to join the girls' game, they might have exchanged frowns at her intrusion, but they would not have turned her away. If she were patient, and flattering, and disapproved of the girl who had been in love with Ryan Marvell, in time they would probably let her be their friend.

She could be patient, and maybe even flattering, but she could not imagine that she would ever disapprove of herself for loving Ryan Marvell. As far as she was concerned, she never had a choice in the matter. Loving Ryan Marvell was very much like being born into the family she had been born into, a mixture of good luck and bad.

So she sat down again on the cold staircase. She played a little game she often played when alone and waiting for her parents to pick her up. She became, for a while, that old lady coming down the street with her little shopping cart rattling behind her. Her back had a terrible hump, oh, her old chest ached, her tongue flapped around in her toothless mouth like a fat seal.

She entered a spring-footed boy—maybe nine or ten years old—who ran a bike up to the front of the boarding house, and she felt his hands vibrate on the handlebars, and his scalp tingle as his sweat began to cool in the early evening air.

The dinner made in honor of Rosamund's return was ham and navy bean soup with garlic bread, salad, and date bars. Franny was hardly able to eat, she was so nervous about the impending arrival of Martie, but the kitchen looked cozy—Peg had lit a candle in the center of the breakfast table—and the other three went back for seconds, and Brick toasted everyone with the wine that he had opened.

It seemed clear to Franny that Rosamund remained as ignorant of Martie's condition as Peg and Brick.

“Daddy,” Rosamund said after the table was cleared, “can we get you to play a few songs for us?”

Brick rubbed his arms and pretended to shiver. “I don't know. It's mighty cold in the living room since your mother decided we ought to live like pioneers.”

Peg laughed. “I think we pioneers can brave the cold, but let me start the dishwasher first.”

“We'll be right with you, then, girls,” Brick said, and, with a bow, he held back the blanket that hung in the kitchen doorway so they might pass through the dining room and proceed to the living room.

Rosamund scampered to the shantung couch. Took a seat. Drew her legs beneath her. “How can you stand it in here?” she whispered when Franny drew near. “I have goose bumps!”

“My virtues produce an inner glow,” Franny said, then pulled out a blanket she kept hidden behind the couch and tossed it Rosamund's way.

“You're sweet.” Rosamund wrapped the thing about herself. “I could never live in Iowa again!”

“Never?”

“I'll visit, of course, but there's nobody here except family I want to see. Mike's called me a couple of times at school, but”—She shrugged to show lack of interest.

“Mike Zanios,” Franny said. She was surprised, somehow, although she recently had realized that, despite last summer's fury, Brick himself had resumed going to the Top Hat Club for lunch.

“Oh, and Timmy, too. He's called and written.”

Franny hoped Rosamund would say more, or ask about Ryan Marvell, but Rosamund stuck out a hand from the blanket's folds and picked up the
Vogue
lying on the coffee table and began to flip through its pages.

“So”—Franny glanced toward the kitchen door, watching for the arrival of her parents—“have you talked to Martie lately?”

Rosamund shivered beneath the blanket. “Should I have? She called me when you were in the hospital. She wanted us to form a vigilante group to hunt down whoever hurt you—and, incidentally, from the way Mom cried about you on the telephone, I half-expected you to have an eyeball hanging out of its socket, or something.”

Franny raised a finger to an irregular groove on her cheek that still felt tender to the touch. “I'll have a couple scars.”

Rosamund rapped the magazine against Franny's leg and smiled. “They'll make you look distinguished and give you a good story to tell your grandchildren!” she said, then raised a finger to her lips as Peg and Brick—him, with the tray of shot glasses and bottle of scotch—entered the room.

“This ought to improve the temperature in here,” Brick said, and Peg laughed at the sight of Rosamund, bundled up on the couch:

“You can't go around in a sleeveless dress here, honey!”

“I'll probably be rusty.” Brick slid back the bench and sat down at the piano. “With your mother's new economies in force, I hardly come in to play.”

“Mood Indigo” was Rosamund's request, and Peg asked for “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and then the front door flew open and Martie called, “Halloooooo! I'm home!”