Twilight Girl (2 page)

It was not a long drive to her destination. She parked inconspicuously, sneaked even more inconspicuously to a point of vantage.

Watching Miss Chamberlin's dog race the length of the redwood fence, Lon wondered if it were true. That business Mr. Beckwith had told her about Dalmatians. "Most other breeds can't stand them. Other dogs just have it in 'em to hate Dalmatians." Saying it as though owning a stinking pet shop made him an authority. "It's the color of their eyes," he had explained sagely. And had added in an awesome voice, as though speaking the Great Hidden Wisdom, "And the spots!"

It was, Lon decided, a crock of the well-known article, hating herself immediately for borrowing her father's army phrase.

"Here, boy!" she called.

The dog, falling all over his paws, hurling his black-flecked body in a convulsion of joy at being noticed, ran to the corner of the fence.

I’ll bet she's crazy about this dog. Maybe she hasn't got a friend in the world except this dog...

Forepaws on the inside wall of the board fence, the dog stretched his head upward for human contact. Lon patted the sleek, sun-warm head. Her other hand dangled the brown envelope against her knee.

It'll crack her up to lose this beautiful dog. She won't have anybody...

"Here, boy. Got something for you."

The Dalmatian ducked his head, twisting it then into position to gnaw cautiously at her hand.

"You're sure you like dogs?" Mr. Beckwith had asked before hiring her. "No use taking on somebody that don't like dogs."

"I love 'em," Lon had said.

"What kind you got?"

"Oh. Well, I don't actually have one."

"That's a fine kettle of fish." Peering at her suspiciously.

"No, y'see, my mother's president of the Garden Club and we have all these begonias and junk around the yard. That's the only reason."

"Begonias!" He had spat the word across the counter. But hired her anyway. And taught her enough about dogs so that now she shuddered, knowing what would come—the twitching of flesh and agonized whine, the stomach walls grinding red and merciless in the cutting green dust, the eyes pleading silently. . .

Lon muzzled the dog's face and roughed it back and forth. "Quit slobbering over me, stupid." His tail whipped the air. "Big overgrown pup!" The Dalmatian shifted paws, scrambling against the fence. "Think you're a lap dog, I'll bet. Hey, you lonesome, pooch? All by yourself all day long? How come other dogs don't like you?" Pushing his face and grinning at the fake growls. "You different? Is that why? That why the other dogs don't like you?"

She grasped his paws firmly in one hand, then shoved him away from the fence and turned before he could resume the game.

A minute later she was back in the Plymouth.

Circling the neighboring blocks, as she had done so often before in the hope of catching a glimpse of Miss Chamberlin, Lon pondered the problem of what to do with the brown, grease-stained envelope. Throw it out the window and some other dog might get it.

At the corner of San Leandro Drive and Los Altos, she stopped the car. Climbing out, looking up and down the deodar-lined street, she dropped her package into the corner mailbox. When she heard the envelope hit the metal floor with a hollow thud, she leaped back into the Plymouth and drove home.

* * *

Lon said no more than was necessary during dinner, having learned that the shrill nasal whine of her mother's voice would eventually wither from lack of response.

Mrs. Harris held a trembling fork in her hand, recounting the day's events. "I told the girls, not one more committee! I'm swamped now, I told them. Supervising the Sunday School is a full-time job and don't you think I'm not going to hold my ground."

"And stick to your guns," Lon's father placated. "They expect too much of you."

Long ago, Lon had concluded that Edwin Harris had been born for no ostensible purpose except to be agreeable. She had inherited her slim, angular body from him, but had been spared the myopic eyes that blinked at accounting sheets through thick horn-rimmed glasses by day and were the scourge of the Little League in the evenings. It was rare in the years since Eddie Junior had been born that she could bear to look at her father.

"When they find a good organizer, they work her to death," Mrs. Harris said. "I told them that right to their faces."

"Good for you," encouraged the man behind the glasses.

"Verna had the gall to tell me I'll have more time with the kids out of school. Came right out and asked me if Lon didn't help around the house. Of course, what could I tell her?" Shaky hands left the table to pat the machine-frizzled hair. And the bright dark eyes turned accusingly toward Lon.

Lon counted frozen peas. And her father poured oil on the troubled waters. "Lon's not like Evie and Judith.' We're all different, Mother."

"She carried all the rocks." This was an unexpected defense from the potato-stuffed mouth of Eddie Junior. "She brang the rocks for the rock garden."

Lon threw him a wry thank-you with her eyes, sweeping in that moment the thin, simian face, wizened, somehow, far beyond its eight years. Mention of her sisters and the sight of Eddie's face stirred the buried recollections, the unburied resentments. Evie and Judith, married now, but in those days primping and giggling and bossing her around the house, with no Eddie in view. And Dad tousling her hair, teasing, "Counted on you to play with Brooklyn, y'little monkey!" Never really complaining because she was a girl. Joking about it that way. Playful, controlled punches in the arm, full-swinging pats on the back when she stole third or scooped a playground grounder. And proud of her, with the pride nurturing, growing inside her.

And all this was B.E.—Before Eddie, the family afterthought who squealed, bleated, kicked and raged his protest vainly, ignored in his protests by Dad, who now had a son to be buddy to. For above all that was sacred, Eddie Harris Senior believed fervently in his mission as Father, the Pal. So that After Eddie, there came to Lon the life-vital need to be more a boy, more a pitcher, more, more—until the gentle swelling under the smudged T-shirt proclaimed the odds insurmountable, the competition too heartlessly stacked against her. So that now Dad had Eddie, and L.A., not Brooklyn, had the Dodgers. And Lon had the Island, discovered in reverie between her twelfth and thirteenth years—the undetermined pin-point in the Pacific to be peopled with a painstakingly selected population. Excluding the Harrises, one and all. Except Lon.

"People are noticing the way she runs around, Dad." Her mother's flute-pitched lecture on the state of the belt-line of Lorraine Harris's jeans was usually channeled through a neutral source. "You'd think if she has to dress hike a hooligan, she could at least recognize where God put her waistline!"

The voice-sound blended with the whine in Lon's head.
Shut up! Just shut up and let me go.

"It could be worse." Dad apologizing for her again.

"She could be painting her face like a barn and staying out late with boys. Am I right, Lonnie?"

Lon nodded yes to the milk glass. And when it was over once more, she washed and dried the dishes mechanically, then closed the door of her room behind her.

* * *

The room, like the rest of the new gingerbread-tract house, was furnished in an abortive maple—rag-rug— pepper-grinder—lampbase attempt to resurrect old New England in new Los Angeles suburbia. But the Polynesian masks Lon had whittled from fallen dried palm fronds were her own. The draped fishnet and cork floats were hers. And the papers she took reverently from the bottom desk drawer belonged to a world that none other traveled, except by invitation of the fertile mind. Carefully she chose them, the residents of this unsurveyed microcosm of her fantasy.

She passed quickly over the world map, the South Pacific circled in red crayon and marked:
In This General Area.
Nor was there need, this evening, to review the
List of Supplies
(fish-hooks, canned milk, thread, pencils, paper)—some day to be alphabetically arranged, but scrawled now in green ink. And no time for the
Sacred Rites of
{name of Island to be selected when we arrive). No interest now in the Secret Incantations, lists, charts, schedules, village layouts, codes, rules, menus, constitution, cultural and recreational plans—or the notebook devoted to
Ideas on How to Get There,
including:

A. Boat (Check costs)

B. Where to Sail From

C. Knowledge of Sailing (Find someone who knows about it)

* * *

With none of these details was Lon Harris concerned on this evening of the last day of school in June. From the imposing sheaf of papers she pulled the list of proposed inhabitants. For reasons she had never considered, accepting the fact as casually as she chose a gray sweatshirt over an eyelet embroidered blouse, none of the names recorded was male. Under the heading
LON HARRIS, HIGH PRIESTESS
was another name she had added to the roll call early in the second Junior-year semester. With a surge of something inside her that had wavered before friendly Dalmatian eyes, she picked up a ballpoint pen and traced a question mark after
SECOND HIGH PRIESTESS.
Then grimly, her revenge tempered by the solemn responsibility of her ritual, she drew a line through the name of Netta Chamberlin. And in that moment, the sound in her head that was not a sound abruptly stopped.

CHAPTER 2

Luigi's Drive-In jumped with cars. The cars jumped with kids and the kids' radios jumped with the beat of Fabian's mixed metaphor:

I'm your tiger, you're my mate!

Hurry up, buttercup, and don't be late!

Lon turned off the ignition and waited in the old Plymouth, wondering why she had come here alone, where no one came alone. Not knowing what she waited for on the outer edge of the parked cars. Still, a lonely voice inside was telling her she had pulled into Luigi's because this was one of the restless evenings when the Island was not big enough to hold her, and where else was there to go? So she had come where the music jumped and the cars bulged with kids delirious with the prospect of three undisciplined months spreading out before them.

Jumping, too—with menus for the heap with blinking headlights, and a tray of Luigi-Burgers and malts for the gang in the dago-ed Ford—was a curved and compact doll, all five feet of her crammed into the Air Force blue slacks and vivid red bolero that identified a Luigi car-hop. Her face was buried somewhere beneath layers of pinkish pancake. Yet Lon was certain that under the thick make-up, the girl's complexion would be genuinely pink and white. Mascara-weighted lashes fluttered provocatively over lavender-blue eyes that, like the rest of her, were round. For her face was round, the breasts that strained against the scarlet monkey jacket were round, and her hips in the tight gabardine slacks were just wonderfully round. Too, she had a round button nose. Her mouth, when she was not smiling to reveal even white teeth, formed a perfect 0. And under the round gray-blue cap, her face was a pretty pink moon.

But the hair,
Lon thought. The hair out of some technicolor nightmare, untamed by the required hairnet and falling midway between the girl's chin and shoulders, assaulting the eyes with a shade that hovered between lavender and violet.

And it was, "Hey, you, Vi'let!" that the boys howled from the parked cars. "You with the purple mop!" "Wha' hop-pen' ta the ketchup fer my fries?" Roaring like the tiger looking for its mate: "Is it purple all over, Vi'let?" "Prove it, honey. I only want the facts, man!"

The girl replied with winks, responded with smiles. And the boys who asked for proof were rewarded with sidelong glances. She gloried in her upstage role and Lon thought,
she's not beautiful. Not actually beautiful. But she acts as if she is and so nobody can be sure she isn't.

Not actually beautiful, but seeing the girl through the girl's round eyes, Lon shivered a little, felt her tongue turn to balls of wool as Vi finally got around to the old tan crate in the back row.

"Hi. Sorry it took so long." She shoved an oversized menu at Lon.

"It's okay. No hurry." Lon pretended to study the glossy card.

"They sure give me a hard time about my hair," the girl complained proudly. Wrinkling the little round nose, pleased with the hard time. Her voice was coarse and she spoke with a practiced attempt at sexy intonation. Lon felt an unaccountable swell of disappointment.

"I notice."

"At first Luigi said to let it grow out natcherl or blow. The crust! I said he could take his lousy job an' shove it One night, on'y one night I worked with it like this and he's beggin' me to leave it alone. Guys come around jest to see me an' don't he know it!"

The girl studied Lon while speaking, looking Lon over carefully. Faded red of the cotton T-shirt, mostly.
Sizing me up as a weirdo,
Lon told herself. And said aloud, "It's very pretty."

"I bleach it first an' then I put on this stuff I mix myself. Jest food coloring, that's all it is. Red an' blue. Holy Jeez help me I ever get caught in the rain, huh?" She laughed, catching Lon's eyes with the lavender-blue discs and holding them uncomfortably long. "It goes with my name. My name's really Vi'let. You dig?" She was quiet then, waiting for her order, staring in a strange, knowing sort of way.