The Evening Star (16 page)

“Okay, can I just dry my hair?” Melanie asked, thinking he meant to go to breakfast, or maybe it would be lunch by the time they actually left.

“Bruce, did you kiss bumpers on purpose?” she asked then. He was sort of pacing around, he really seemed wired; she thought she’d just go on and ask. She wanted to know, and if it
had
been an accident, they could still go out and eat.

Bruce turned his grin on—he had a great grin. It made you realize how sweet he really was.

“I didn’t know if you’d noticed,” he said.

“So did you?” Melanie asked again—she felt nervous all of a sudden.

“Yeah,” Bruce said, coming toward her.

Next thing they were hugging, then kissing; a little later it was like he had never been gone. Melanie couldn’t believe that her dream of bliss, her nicest hope, was coming true; but her body believed it—just for a moment she wondered what the baby inside her was thinking about it all. After the love-making Bruce fell asleep and she had a nice time, just lying beside him, feeling lucky. Maybe they were back in love; maybe they’d even get married and raise the baby like normal people. Melanie felt that she
was
a normal person, mainly—at least she felt herself to be more normal than Teddy and Jane, although she loved Teddy and Jane and had to admit that they did a good job being parents. Also, she was more normal than Koko, who spent far too much time playing computer games on his computer. Of course some of that could be because she wouldn’t let him move in and be her lover.

Bruce took a while waking up. Melanie didn’t care, although she was actually getting a little hungry. She could have absorbed some Mexican food, but she didn’t wake him. He had been really wired, and she had unwired him, which
was good. The thought of the Ferrari was a little troubling, though. The fact that he was driving it sort of implied that he still had some connection to Beverly, but Melanie decided not to worry about that too much—yesterday she had had no hope but today there definitely was hope.

When Bruce woke up it took him about twenty more minutes to get the yawns out of his system. He lay on her bed and yawned, watching Melanie brush her hair.

“So are we going to get out of here?” he asked, realizing she hadn’t the faintest idea what he meant when he’d asked the question the first time. It was going to be interesting to see how she reacted when she got the point.

“Sure, are you up for Mexican food?” Melanie asked. “I could go for a bean burrito.”

“I knew you didn’t get it,” Bruce said. “What I meant was do you want to get
out
of here. I don’t just mean eat—I mean
leave.
Go live in another town—L.A. or somewhere.”

“L.A.?” Melanie asked. “You want to go live in L.A.?”

“Well, we could,” Bruce said, waiting to see if the idea was really going to hook her, or what.

“In the Ferrari?” Melanie asked—she still felt a little uncertain on that point. If they headed out to L.A. in Beverly’s Ferrari she was pretty sure they’d wouldn’t make it. Beverly’s folks would have the cops on them in a minute.

“Naw, I just borrowed the Ferrari,” Bruce said. “Beverly’s out of town. I guess we’d have to go in my Mustang and maybe tow your car. Once we’re out there we’re going to need two cars, in case we both get jobs. It’s a big town.”

“It’s a big town,” Melanie echoed. Actually she was sort of stunned by the prospect of moving to it. More than that, she would be moving with Bruce—it sounded as if he intended for them to live together, once they got there. The thing that was amazing was how quickly life could change. Only last night she had sat in her car and cried, convinced that she would never even get to kiss Bruce again, never even get to touch him, maybe. It had been a bleak prospect—also, she was pregnant, which made that prospect even more bleak. Now, just a few hours later, they had not only kissed again
and made love again but he had asked her to run away with him to Los Angeles.

“My dad lives near L.A.,” she said, remembering that fact and wondering if it would make their living together awkward or something. Her dad was not exactly prudish, but her stepmother, Magda, definitely wasn’t any too fond of her, and there was no telling what either her dad or Magda would think of Bruce—he sometimes didn’t make too good an impression on adults.

She saw Bruce watching her a little anxiously; she hadn’t really answered his question, maybe he was thinking she didn’t really want to go. But that wasn’t what she was thinking at all. It was just such a shock to realize that Bruce wanted her to go with him and wanted her to
live
with him that her thoughts sort of spun around for a few seconds; it was such a shock that she actually felt a little dizzy, but it was a happy, amazed dizzy, and when she came out of it a little she didn’t waste any time on doubts or questions.

“I’ll go, Bruce,” she said. “I love you.”

“I just sort of knew you’d be up for it,” Bruce said, yawning in relief.

14

When Melanie called, breathless, and told Teddy that she and Bruce were moving to Los Angeles, Teddy was in the midst of refereeing a dispute between Jane and Bump and couldn’t give this dramatic news the sort of awed attention he knew Melanie would like to have it receive.

“That’s a surprise I can’t deal with right now,” he admitted to his sister.

“Why not, what’s happening?” Melanie asked. Teddy was trying to sound calm, but in his voice she heard reminders of a time when he had not been calm.

“Jane wants to spank Bump and I’m arguing for clemency,” Teddy said. “I have to hang up or there won’t be clemency—she’ll spank him. I’ll call you back later.”

Jane had just come in from work at the 7-Eleven and was not in a serene mood. An asshole had hassled her about change just before her shift ended, and then had had the gall to follow her for almost a whole block, trying to get her to go out with him. The man had looked like a Cajun, though he claimed he was from Florida.

“You have the most beautiful long legs I’ve ever seen,” he
said, as he was following her. “I know how to do the dirty dancing.” He was combing his hair as he walked.

“I know how to squirt you in the eye with my Mace, too,” Jane said, taking her Mace out of her purse. He made so bold as to touch her elbow, so she pointed it at him, a threat that immediately cooled his ardor.

“Don’t Mace me, goodbye,” he said, departing. “I just fell in love with your beautiful long legs.”

Jane did have beautiful long legs and was a little bit vain about them, but her legs pretty much got taken for granted by Teddy; it annoyed her that a Cajun who couldn’t even count his change paid more attention to them than her husband. Then she got home and started to make tea, only to find a sopping-wet Sanskrit grammar in the sink. For the past few months she and Teddy had been working on Sanskrit together. Bump’s main flaw was that he craved attention—indeed, he craved it so much that he would attempt to destroy anything that distracted either of his parents’ attention from him for long. Although he liked his own books, and usually kept five or six of them in his bunk bed with him so he could look through the stories whenever he wanted to, he didn’t like his parents’ books, any one of which was likely to distract his parents’ attention for long periods of time.

Lately, though, his main rival had been the Sanskrit grammar. His parents spent long hours poring over it or talking about it; when they were devoting themselves to the book he would have to have a fit or scream to get their attention at all. First, he tried merely hiding the book—he hid it under a shoebox in his mother’s closet, but she soon found it. Then he managed to tuck it under the washing machine, but again the book was found. Bump was ingenious at wiggling into places a parent couldn’t go, pushing the book ahead of him to hide it as far away as possible, but there weren’t that many good hiding places in the apartment, and his parents always found the book. They seemed to find it amusing that he was jealous of the book and wanted to hide it—also they seemed to enjoy letting him know that they were Bigs and he was a Little, which meant that they could always find anything he tried to hide.

Bump didn’t find this amusing at all, but he thought he had solved the problem of the book one day when his father was napping. It was raining hard and the window was open, so he pushed the book over the windowsill and watched it fall into the rain. When his parents discovered the mushy book lying in a puddle below their window they shook their heads at Bump and looked sort of pleased. The fact that he had so cleverly disposed of his rival, the book, seemed to convince them all over again that he was a child with a quite high intelligence.

Bump was glad he had pushed the book out the window. He assumed that he had disposed of it forever and became very annoyed when his father came home, a few days later, with a book that seemed to be exactly like the one he had pushed out the window. He immediately tried to stab the book with a pencil, but his mother just took the pencil away from him and put the book on a high shelf where he couldn’t reach it.

Then the old, annoying pattern started repeating itself. Every day his father or mother or both spent too much time looking into the book, ignoring him completely at such times unless he threw a tantrum or hurt himself in some way. He tried to stab the book with pencils and knives and once even made a small cut in it with a kitchen knife he had snatched, but none of these attempts really worked. Once, trying to climb up the bookshelves in order to get the book, he fell and split his lip; this got him some sympathy but didn’t mean that the book was gone. Bump watched it on its high shelf and intended to attack it again if he got the opportunity, but no opportunity had come until that afternoon, when his father, who was making a phone call, momentarily relaxed his attention and left the book on a chair. Bump grabbed it and took it to the bathroom, and threw it in the big people’s toilet. His father discovered it there only a few minutes later, but a good deal of damage had been done. The book was almost as mushy as the one Bump had pushed out the window. His father merely looked at him in a funny way, twisted his mouth a bit, and shook his head. His father didn’t grab him or shake him or anything; his father never did such things,
even when Bump ignored his potty and peed wherever he happened to be.

“This isn’t going to keep us from learning Sanskrit, you know,” his father said, carrying the dripping book to the sink.

Bump didn’t know why they liked the book so much—it didn’t have pictures in it, as his own books did—but he knew that they wouldn’t like it
as
much, now that it was wet through and through. He ignored his father’s remark and sat at the foot of his bunk bed, studying his book with a tiger in it—the tiger book was one of his own favorites. He felt happy, now that his parents’ bad book had been disposed of again, and when his mother came home he ran to meet her and got picked up and kissed. Bump loved the way his mother smelled and was happy for a while, cuddling and smelling her.

But when his mother saw the wet book in the sink, the atmosphere immediately changed.

Bump saw her face grow angry—he immediately ran and burrowed into the closet amid his mother’s shoes. It was the safest place in the apartment, but this time it wasn’t safe enough. His mother just kicked away the shoes and pulled him out. Bump began a silent resistance; he kicked at her as hard as he could, but kept a smile on his face. His mother was not very gentle, though. She held him and shook him; she was very angry and didn’t smell nice anymore.

“Don’t you dare ever hurt one of my books again, Jonathan!” she said. “It wasn’t your book and you mustn’t get it wet.”

His father came and tried to take him away from his mother. Bump stretched out his hands to his father but his mother refused to let his father have him. Then the phone rang and his father turned to answer it. Bump really wanted to get away from his angry mother. He wiggled as hard as he could in an effort to demand that his mother release him so he could run to his safe father, but his mother imprisoned him in her lap and ignored his kicks and wiggles. Bump could hear her breathing like a beast—when she became angry enough to use his other name, Jonathan, she often
breathed hot breath on him like a beast—like some of the big dogs they met on the sidewalk during his walks. Sometimes when she held him as she was holding him now, and breathing hot breath, he wondered if his mother was really a tiger. She didn’t have stripes and a tail, but Bump thought she might be some sort of tiger anyway because of the way her teeth looked and her eyes looked and her breath came when she was angry. Perhaps the tiger in his book was only one kind of tiger and his mother another kind. He felt himself to be a match for his father but he knew he wasn’t a match for his mother, and he thought it was probably because she was really a tiger. “You little fucker, that’s two Sanskrit grammars you’ve ruined!” she said—she often spoke in such tones to him when she became angry enough to use his other name.

“Yes, but it’s just a book, after all,” Teddy said, hanging up the receiver so quickly that he dropped it and had to fumble a bit before he got it back on the hook.

“Please don’t spank him,” he added.

Jane had been holding Bump on her lap, watching him struggle and wiggle, while he eyed her with a kind of maddening calm that replicated Teddy’s own maddening calm in every way. When Teddy asked her please not to give Bump the spanking he deserved, she immediately flipped the child over like a pancake and whopped him twice on his behind with her open hand. Then she sat him on the floor and watched him flee. In seconds he was back in the closet amid her shoes, hiding.

“I wish you hadn’t done that, but you did it,” Teddy said.

“Yeah, I did it, and it’s over,” Jane said, still very angry. In a detached part of her brain she was wondering what sort of place the Cajun would have taken her to if she had gone with him. Would he have paused at a dance hall for a little dirty dancing? Or would he have just made straight for some crummy apartment?

“Maybe it’s over and maybe it isn’t,” Teddy said, a little angry himself. “Maybe twenty years from now he’ll murder us both because of what you just did.”