Tiger Lillie (3 page)

Mom told me that night as we did dishes, “Boy, was he something,” when they started dating. Like the suave, man-about-town type and everything.

As Dad spoke about their dinner out, the way he placed his hand on hers during the movie at The Grand, I could just picture the two of them together, swaggering arm in arm down Eastern Avenue on their way for drinks and dinner at Haussner’s. I believe it was the first time I’d ever really thought of them as carefree, young, and in love.

Lillie arrived home from school after his story. She put down her book bag and kissed our cheeks.

“Good day, babe?” Dad asked.

“Oh yeah. We started
Much Ado About Nothing.
And J got a copy of
The Bell Jar
out of the library. Dad, can you believe her use of language?”

My ears started burning. A good burn. I loved it when they talked about books! Lillie wasn’t the writer I was, really, but she always loved books. We all loved books.

Lillie had set up one of her craft tables at a small church bazaar, and she asked me to help her man it. I sat there selling all sorts of little trinkets, jewelry, and doll clothes. She paid me ten percent of the profits and put the rest into her school account to pay off her bill.

That night, I sat and read
The Bell Jar
as she answered phones for doctor’s offices who’d signed on with a business she started named Hello There! Answering Service. My sister was a whiz. And I sat beside her most nights, reading and drawing while she answered calls and studied.

She fixed us a cup of tea, and I saw the sadness in her eyes when she sat down across from me at the dining room table. I never knew how she kept so upbeat after Teddy disappeared. Dad felt his way through the room, sat down next to her, and took her hand as though he somehow knew she needed him just then. It was a cosmic experience for me. Dad and Lillie were always so close.

Mom called me into her bedroom, and we read our books, sipped the tea Lillie made, and listened to Beethoven. I felt at peace.

Lillie

Thirteen years, four months, and two days ago, Teddy disappeared. He said we’d meet at Friendly’s for ice cream after graduation, but he never showed up. And Teddy always showed up. Teddy always made good on his promises.

I’ll never forget the way Teddy stood up for me the summer we turned eight. As the only girl in the neighborhood, I endured more boy games—cowboys and Indians, marbles, baseball cards, and stickball—than any girl should. And mostly, I liked it. But there we were one day, playing army like we always seemed to do after we tired of riding bikes or roller skating.

Some boys from the next street over didn’t deem me combat worthy.

“Hey, they don’t allow girls to fight, so neither will we!”

“Yeah!” some of the others answered.

Teddy stood tall. By this time, he looked over all our heads and was easily the nicest-looking boy in school and just the nicest, period, and he was
my
best friend, not theirs, and well, they’d better watch it because that look glittered in his eyes. He always got to be Sarge. “She can’t help it if she’s a girl.”

“That don’t mean we have to allow her to play,” a boy named Nicolas said, an ugly sneer marring his face. “Girls don’t know how to fight, period.”

Teddy thought a moment. “Hey, they do too have girls on the battle-field.”

“Oh yeah? Where?” Nick asked.

I still stared at the grass, but I looked over to see Teddy thrust out his puny, little-boy chest. “The army nurse! They have army nurses.”

“Army nurses!” Scowl, mumble, kick the grass.

“Yep. And Lillie’s
our
army nurse.”

“No way. She has to be a German nurse.”

A German nurse! I wanted to cry. I wanted to run in and tell Mrs. Gillie.

“An American nurse.” Teddy took a step forward. “You got anything to say about that?”

I watched him defending me, standing up for me, being my boy hero, my boy wonder, and just then, at that moment, I loved him.

Nick backed down. Nobody stood up to Teddy for long. “Okay, I guess.”

The other guys agreed because, well, they knew which boy was the best, and besides, Mrs. Gillie baked the best cookies and scooped an extra half-cup of sugar into her Kool-Aid.

Later that afternoon, Mrs. Gillie invited me over for dinner. She fried up ham steaks, and I sliced the fat from the edge so they wouldn’t think me improper.

Mrs. Gillie smiled from her place there at the head of the kitchen table. “Why, hon, look at you, cutting the fat off. Aren’t you the proper girl?”

Embarrassed, I said, “Well, actually, I like the fat. I just thought maybe it was the right thing to do.”

“Eat however you like here, hon. Think of this as your second home. I mean, you and Teddy here have been best friends since kindergarten. Eat the fat if you like!”

Ham grease had spattered her glasses.

Teddy reached out and touched my hand. “Yeah, that’s right, Lillie.”

After dinner we viewed a rerun of
Match Game
and laughed like crazy people. I remember thinking if they started making that show again, and I went on and got to the five-thousand-dollar round, I’d pick Richard Dawson as my partner. Yep, I would. Mrs. Gillie swore he was a mind reader.

Tacy

What a concert that was! The junior-high youth leaders, Jim and Amy, took us down to the Baltimore Blast game, and it was Youth Night. Lots of other church groups went, and they put Saint Stephen’s name right up on the scoreboard during one of the breaks. We all cheered. Mr. Jim cheered loudest. He had one of those Baptist voices that rang out in our little Episcopal sanctuary and livened things up.

The local Christian radio station that sponsored the event was giving away free T-shirts so I went down to claim one. I waited in line, chatting with some of the gang when we made it to the table, and the guy giving away the T-shirts, a gorgeous guy, smiled at me. I’m telling you, that smile just went right down into my stomach. He was looking in my eyes and everything.

“Hi, I’m Rawlins,” he said.

“Tacy Bauer’s my name.” And then I giggled, which was so immature, but I couldn’t help myself. He was the kind of guy that did that sort of thing to me. Way too old, I knew, but I was just trying to get a free T-shirt. I can’t believe it, but I ended up giving him my phone number. I couldn’t believe he asked for it. I never did that kind of thing before, as I was only fourteen at the time. Mom always said I looked older than my age. He seemed so nice, like he hung onto every word I said from then on out. Every inane word. I never remembered being so tongue-tied.

He called me the next day and asked me out. His full name was Rawlins McGovern, and I found out he was seven years older than me. Mom and Dad would have had a fit had they known I was talking to a college boy. But I decided they didn’t have to know. Besides, he said he went to church and everything, so in the long run they really wouldn’t have minded. I didn’t want to worry them if I didn’t have to. He was interning in the radio station’s advertising department, but he planned on assuming a good position at his dad’s advertising business someday. That sounded so exciting to me, especially since I wanted to work at a magazine.

Barb and I went to the mall the next day and I bought a pair of lime-green Capri pants like Grace Kelly would have worn. My mother always did like Grace Kelly.

Lillie

I appreciate the physical body of human beings. Hence my fascination with skeletons and the like, I suppose. But it’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it? The way the muscles flow like mountain ranges, each bump and sway making utter sense, each mound anchored to a certain point on a bone creating a system of levers and pulleys. What magnificence of planning. And due to this love, this appreciation, I’ve come to respect Jesus in a way that may be unusual to some. See, He inhabited a body. A body just like mine, minus the female parts and the extra fifty pounds, and He chose to sacrifice it.

If the Incarnation doesn’t wow you, nothing will.

Imagine, that cat-o’-nine-tails ripped into those gorgeous mounds of muscle, those perfectly formed, scarlet wads of tissue. Imagine the pain, the very real agony born of very real nerve endings tucked into a neurological network, synapses firing away, firing, firing, blasting sensation of such horrific proportion not many of us can begin to understand.

Imagine the blood spattering like popping oil, wads of flesh flying through the air. I try to picture it, at times, just to appreciate His sacrifice, just to try and not forget and throw around His love and pain like it doesn’t really matter in the day-to-day. And I imagine the feeling of a deep scab being ripped away, only that scab covers my entire body and the ripping takes hours.

And even then, am I going far enough? Probably not. Nails into wrists and feet? Dear God. How did You not come down from that cross? How did You stay? What kind of wonderful love is this?

Tacy

My first date with Rawlins McGovern felt like something from a fairy tale. Unfortunately, I’d never read the actual Brothers Grimm or I might have had a heads-up on the future. I felt guilty because Mom and Dad told me I had to wait until I was sixteen to date, but that was two whole years away. I told Rawlins I was sixteen. He really was the nicest guy. Twenty-one years old. A real man, not like the weird boys in my class who were still laughing during the human anatomy unit in science class. I got ready at Barb’s house and he picked me up there. Barb said she’d cover for me if the folks called. I hated to do that to them, but, well, I knew it would all work out fine. Rawlins actually had a car phone. In a blue Miata! His dad partly owned McGovern, Hyde, and Wiley, a really big-time advertising agency downtown. Downtown Baltimore, not Bel Air. In the Signet office tower. And there he was, working at a little radio station to learn the ropes from the bottom up. How cool was that? I couldn’t believe he wanted to date me. He told me he’d never seen a more beautiful girl.

He actually had a dress delivered to Barb’s house for me. I swear, I looked at least twenty-one in it. It was white with spaghetti straps and a neck scarf. When we drove away from Barb’s house, he said, “You have beautiful shoulders, Anastasia.” He called me by my full name, wasn’t that romantic? “I sent the dress just so I could see them.”

Oh man! He was so amazing! Two days before, I worried myself about the school’s immature gossip, and suddenly I was dating a mature guy.

But he didn’t even reach out to touch my shoulders. I thought he might after going to all that trouble, but he didn’t. He just looked at them and flicked his eyes up to look in mine. I can’t even explain what it did to me. But that’s the way it felt with Rawlins. He was so powerful and wonderful. When he dropped me off, he didn’t kiss me or even hold my hand, but he ran a finger down the back of my hand, between the two middle bones, really slowly, and his eyes never left mine and he told me again how beautiful he thought I was. I was so happy.

Lillie

Cristoff tosses the newspaper onto my desk and I glance up from my planner, watching as he bales his explosive red hair into a ponytail. “If you’d get a cell phone, Lady Nibs, I could have told you about this sooner. We made
The Sunpaper
, Lillie, right on the first page of the Maryland section! Right next to that heroin murder in Patterson Park.”

I sip my first taste of consciousness-inducing Coke and push my orange glasses up on my nose. Just couldn’t contemplate contacts today. Besides, I love my orange glasses. I love orange. It embodies everything bold and upbeat. I have an orange bedroom, an orange bathroom, and at least ten orange articles of clothing. Today I’m wearing at least four of them, with orange loafers and big orange plastic Wilma Flintstone beads circling my neck.

I’m a nightmare. A size sixteen orange nightmare. I am under no delusion that I’d be allowed as the army nurse in these clothes, German or otherwise!

I tap the paper on my desk. “You sound surprised, honey.” We’ve exploited ourselves this way at least four times a year for the past three years.

Straightening his khaki pants, he perches on the corner of my desk, just an old door on two of my Uncle Jimmy’s sawhorses, actually, painted, well, orange. “Oh, honey-girl, I’m just tickled. You know me! And look”—he points to the fourth line down—“there’s the plug for our business. Full name
and
the basic location. Free advertising! And we can sure use that. I thought for sure this would catch on more quickly than it has.”

“Give it time. We just need that one big account. Or something highexposure. Like a movie star or something.” Like
that
will ever happen in staid and stodgy, provincial Baltimore. Talk about an unorange city. “Until then, we’ll just have to tighten our belts and hang on until the line of credit runs out. You got any aspirin? My head is killing me.”

“Yeah, I’ll get you some in a minute. Just one of those crazy tech companies out in California would give us enough business for a year straight! They do a lot of crazy retreats and meetings and stuff, don’t they? How do we get the word out?”

Cristoff is not only my best friend, he’s my business partner. We’ve known each other since seventh grade when, as the new kid, freshly transplanted from Virginia, effeminate and skinny enough to be the offspring of a dogwood tree and a clothesline, nobody else wanted anything to do with him. Well, Teddy and I reached out. Some trio we made once we hit high school. The loud-mouthed, bookish yet athletic girl who paused during every gym class and every lacrosse practice to puff on her inhaler, and Teddy, the love of my life, childhood sweetheart, smarter than both of us put together, taller than both of us put together, and possessing more self-reliance, passion, and daring of spirit than anyone I’ve ever known. God, You remember how I miss him, don’t You? “So what you got going today, honey?”