True To Form (9 page)

“I never did this before,” I say.

“Did what? Spied?”

“I'm not spying!” I laugh, and Cherylanne looks a little hurt.

“I don't know what else you'd call it,” she says, sniffing, and I start to answer back and then think, oh, let her have it.

“When you stand outside a house that is not yours looking in, that's calling spying,” Cherylanne says.

“What I meant,” I say, “is that I never got to see a place again after I left it.” It seems so funny to me that my house is still there, looking just like it did when I lived there, only I don't live there anymore.

“Do you want to ask if you can look inside?” Cherylanne says. “They're real nice. They're
messy,
but they're real nice.”

I think about this, then shake my head no. I would like to see the rooms again, but they would be all different now, and I think that would bother me. This is the last place my mother lived, and I don't want to see it changed. But I do appreciate seeing the outside
again, the porch steps where I sat so many summer afternoons, the little strip of garden that runs along the front, the mailbox with its spot of rust that looks like a big comma.

Then, as I stare at the outside, the inside rooms start coming into my mind like waves that just cannot be stopped. I see my bedroom, the wall next to my bed where I used to make shadow puppets, the floor underneath the bed where I kept my Halloween candy and where I used to go to think things over, or to hide. Diane's room was always so neat and full of interesting things—tubes of red lipstick, pictures of Elvis, letters locked up in her jewelry box. We all lived there, our whole family, with my mother alive and all of our things in the same place. It feels so sad and marvelous to me.

I think of the bathroom where I shaved my legs for the first time, and the mirror I used to stare into, wishing for so many things. I think of the living room, the green chair in the corner where my mother sat at night to do her sewing. I see her biting off the end of the thread, the television screen reflected in her glasses. I see her bedroom, her lying under the covers with a library book propped up on her stomach, her brow furrowed with how much she was believing every word she read. She used to love reading. I see the kitchen, the way she folded towels at the table, and I see us all gathered there again for just a normal dinner, the flowered tablecloth, the round, cut-glass salt and pepper shakers, a stick of yellow butter on a saucer.

I remember the time I fell off a clothesline pole I was hanging from and knocked the breath out of myself, and I came running into the kitchen to find her, I was so scared. She pulled me onto her lap and put her hand on top of my head, and my breathing came back like a miracle. She was wearing the apron with ruffles around the edges and the heart-shaped pocket on it; I remember this now as though it just happened. Her hands smelled like lemons. I think, Every room in this house has a memory of my mother, she was
everywhere in it. Then I think of the living room sofa, where she lay dying those last couple of weeks, and the day she called me to her and took my hands in hers and started to say something, but then didn't; just pushed my hair back behind my ears and smiled this so beautiful smile,
I'm all right, I'm all right.
The sun against the side of her face. Her paleness.

I swallow hard, take in a deep breath. No, I don't want to see someone else's things where she used to be. If I were a priest, I would bless this house from outside, say those beautiful Latin words that seem so red and gold, and make the sign of the cross big in the air. Instead, I just tell Cherylanne, “Let's go.”

We start out down the street, and everything I see seems to talk to me, and every sentence starts with the same word: “Remember . . . ?” And inside I am answering with the most tender,
Yes, yes, yes.

One thing I know: Anything we have, we are only borrowing. Anything. Any time.

D
O YOU LIKE
T
EXAS OR
Missouri better?” Bubba asks. We are having dinner, and Belle has made her famous buttermilk fried chicken. Bubba has about nine hundred pieces on his plate.

“I don't know,” I say. “I've kind of gotten used to Missouri, finally.”

“Texas can kick Missouri's ass,” Bubba says, and Belle says, “Bubba!”

Cherylanne's father is out of town and Bubba is sitting in his chair. I guess this makes him think he's the man of the house and can do whatever he wants. But he still listens to Belle; one word from her and he is suddenly very interested in his plate.

“I thought Darren was coming to dinner,” Belle says, and Cherylanne's mouth turns into a tight, straight line. “He couldn't,” she says.

Belle looks at her, but Cherylanne won't look back.

“Well, maybe another night,” Belle says.

Cherylanne tosses her hair back. “We'll see.” She is even prettier than she used to be, but I have to say I don't exactly understand what I used to find so interesting about her. All she will talk about is Darren. When I said I was thinking about college, she said the only degree a woman needed was an MRS. Then she showed me how she has started a hope chest, with some pillowcases she
embroidered with hearts at the edges made out of little Xs. When I tried to tell her about the airplane trip, how it was so exciting to see the patterns in the land like giants had played in a sandbox, and how the stewardesses were so pretty and so nice, she stopped me in the middle without even knowing I was in the middle.

The phone rings, and Bubba practically knocks his chair over to run and answer it. Then, “Hey, Katie!” he yells. “It's for you!”

I feel like it's kind of rude that someone else's phone rings and it's for you, but then Belle says, “Go right ahead, honey, it's probably your dad.”

“It's a girl,” Bubba says, and he's kind of right; it's Ginger. “I just wanted to see how you're doing,” she says.

“I'm fine,” I say, and I think of how she's there and I'm here, and how different my life is from how it used to be here. I tell her a little about what we've been doing, and she tells me what she's been doing, then my father gets on and I tell him, and then there is a long silence. Finally he says, “All right, then, we'll see you at the airport the day after tomorrow. You behave,” he adds.

I go back to the table and look at the familiar faces around it and I realize something: I don't live here anymore at all. Every part of me has gone from here. It's not a sad feeling, or a bad one. It's like a page turned in a notebook you will always keep, but now you are on the new page. I think something in me knew that I had to see this place again to understand that, and that is why when Fab Freddy said where, I said here.

W
E ARE LYING IN
C
HERYLANNE'S
bed just about to go to sleep, when all of a sudden I hear her burst into tears. At first I just lie still, not knowing what to do. Then I reach out my hand to turn on the bedside lamp.

“Don't!” she says, and I turn it off.

I lie back, wait for a moment, and then say softly, “What's wrong?”

“Only
everything!”

“Darren?” I ask, and she says, “Yes.”

“Well, what about him?” This afternoon when we were out walking she made him sound like the best boyfriend in the world. She said when I met him I would understand completely why she is through looking. “He is soooo cute,” she said, her eyes half closed with the intensity of her emotion. “He is thoughtful and courageous and a tremendous genius. We're getting married as soon as senior year ends.”

“Wow,” I said, and she turned suddenly and said, “Oh Katie, if only you could meet someone like him, too.”

I smiled.

“Don't worry. There's still time for you to find someone.”

“I know that,” I said. “There's a lot of time. For one thing, I really do want to go to college first.”

She sighed. “That again. Why in the world are you so fixed on going to more school? Isn't twelve years enough?”

“I just want to go.”

“But what
for?”
She pulled some leaves off a bush we walked past, then scattered them behind her as we walked. “I'm going to scatter rose petals at my wedding. Pink and ivory.”

I was almost ready to tell her that I want to go to college to study poetry, but it's too important to me to risk telling anyone. So I told her I want to study anthropology.

She stopped walking. “
Anthropology!
What's that? Just the name of it puts me in a bad mood.”

“It's the study of people,” I said.

“What about people?”

“Just . . . them,” I said. The truth is, I don't know that much about anthropology. I just saw Margaret Mead once in a film in science class, and she seemed so wonderful. Smart and brave and so taken up with all she was doing, that distance thing in her eyes, where she was seeing something so much bigger than what was in front of her. I liked the notion of learning about how, in other parts of the world, nothing is like it is for you. Wake up in the morning, and Whoa! Different food, different shelter, different transportation, different smell to the air. Different landscape, different weather, even different light in the sky. Religions that have nothing to do with what you've been taught, jobs that are nothing you have ever seen or heard of. Women with baskets on their head, women wearing wooden shoes, women walking with goats down narrow cobblestone streets. Oxen here, penguins there. Tigers padding silently through the jungle, beneath parrots with feathers so bright and beautiful, and monkeys shrieking and hanging by one arm while they use the other one to dig in their armpit. Really, if you ever think about all that is going on in the world at any given moment, it's enough to make you stand still in wonder. And you have to think, What all happened that I am here in this place and not in another?

“Well, studying anthremology is the dumbest idea I ever heard
of,” Cherylanne said. “If you don't mind my saying so. I mean, going to school to learn about people, when you
are
one!”

“But there are many different types,” I said. “You know, like different cultures. Have you ever heard of Margaret Mead?”

Cherylanne frowned. “What was she in?”

“In?”

“What movies?”

“She's not an actress. She's an anthropologist. Like a woman scientist.”

“Well, there you go, right there is trouble,” Cherylanne said. “Any woman scientist is going to be one ugly and bitter woman.”

I sighed, turned my head away from her to look at the playground we were walking past. A bunch of kids laughing, having fun. I thought of the night Cynthia and I went to the school playground and rode the merry-go-round under the stars. I asked her that night to tell me honestly if she thought I could ever be famous, and she said, Yes, her face serious and true. Then she asked me if I thought she could be, and I said, Yes, too.

“If you start messing around with science, it's a cinch you're going to have a very hard time catching a husband,” Cherylanne said. “One thing men do not enjoy is a woman with too many brains. Their feminine allure is sucked right out of them, and they often have bad breath. They have no idea at all how to dress, especially shoes. If you are a scientist, you will be a spinster and you will die unfulfilled, if you know what I mean. You don't want that. Believe me, it is not too soon to start living your life in such a way as to guarantee finding a good husband. Darren came to me accidentally that's true, but also, I was ready.”

She kept talking, but I stopped listening. I was thinking about what my life might be like if I were a spinster. I would like to have a husband, but if I don't, maybe it wouldn't be so bad. You could live in your own house with whatever furniture and dishes and things that you picked out. You could do whatever you wanted,
with no one saying, Now
what
time are you coming home? I imagined myself living somewhere alone. There I was, in a room with cheerful yellow walls, sunshine streaming in through the windows. There was my cat, a handsome gray tabby, curled up on my lap as I worked at my rolltop desk. I used thick, cream-colored paper and a black fountain pen with a gold tip. An idea for a poem appeared like an exotic creature peeking out from behind the bushes, and I wrote it down, then sat quietly before it, sipping tea and smiling.

I needed to nearly cover my mouth from the excitement of the thought. It seems like sometimes you know some things about your life in the future even though you're only a kid, and this is one thing I know: If I could be a poet, I would not mind living alone. I just don't think so.

But now here is Cherylanne lying in the bed sobbing away, saying she doesn't know what to do, she can all of a sudden feel Darren getting cool toward her, he is just not as interested as he used to be, and this after she has gone ahead and done it, but don't tell anyone.

“Done what?” I ask.

“It!”
She raises her head to look at me. Her lashes are all wet and spiky with tears.

I gasp. “You did
that?”

She nods.

“Did it hurt?”

“A little.”

“But did you like it anyway?”

She nods again, half smiles, then lies back and starts crying again.

I start to say something, but can't. I think of preachers I've seen standing up high behind their pulpits, waving around their Bibles and yelling,
“Fornication,”
the flesh of their fat chins shaking. That's now how I feel about what Cherylanne has done. I don't think she's committed a big sin and hurt God. I just feel sorry for
her that she doesn't have any better ideas. She reminds me of those horses tied up to a metal spoke, their heads down as they go around and around and around.

Cherylanne sits up and rubs angrily at her eyes, wiping away the tears. “I don't care what anybody says about what we did, we're practically officially engaged!” I try to think of Cherylanne and Darren going all the way, but all that comes into my head is a picture of Belle standing in the kitchen, holding a dishtowel down at her side and saying, Oh, Cherylanne.