What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay (11 page)

And if Noah says one single thing about Jesse, or about those drawings, I’ll kill him.

9

So naturally I called Lily as soon as I got home. “What is
wrong
with boys? That was a rhetorical question,” I added, because I could hear her breathing in. “They practically barked at each other and pawed the ground. If there’d been a fire hydrant, Noah would have peed on it.”

“I never realized you were such a cosmic hottie.”

“Very funny.”

She made a sort of snorting noise. “Just watch out. If Noah actually decides he likes you, it’ll be like having a giant St. Bernard trying to bring you flowers.”

“All Noah’s interested in is actually getting his hand up my shirt. Which if I was going to do, it would not be with Noah.”

I heard Lily snort again.

“Oh God, does that make me sound awful? I haven’t had any
practice
at this.”

“Mom says experimentation is healthy, we just have to set good boundaries,” Lily said. She managed to quit laughing.

“Is that code for nothing below the waist?”

“I think so.”

“Does anybody tell boys things like that, or do they just tell us?”

“Well, they make them carry that egg around. I think that’s supposed to give them the idea about consequences.”

Jesse had put his egg in his bookbag, where it broke and glued all his notes on
Othello
together. I said, “I don’t think consequences occur to boys. And Mom got on me because she thinks Jesse’s too old for me. But he hasn’t gotten romantic—he was just pissed at Noah. I think.”

“How do
you
feel about
Jesse
?” Lily said. “That’s the question.”

“He makes me a little nervous when he gets intense.”

“That may not be a bad thing.”

“But I really like him.”

“Okay.”

“So what would
you
do?” I asked her.

“I read somewhere that what you do in high school has absolutely no impact on your future success and happiness,” she said. “I’m banking on that. Unless of course you run off and get married. That would impact it.”

Like my mom did. I said, “Maybe that’s what Mom’s worried about. That the little acorn hasn’t fallen far from the tree.”

“Could be. So maybe you don’t have to
do
anything about Jesse, Ange. Just lighten up and see what happens.”

“I suppose.”

“And if Noah keeps on, you can put a dead fish in his locker.”

Now that would be a great idea, if I was only a guy. “Okay,” I told Lily. “I’ll file that one away.”

“You’ll thank me later.”

“I’m thanking you now,” I said, and hung up laughing. Lily always makes me feel better.

But apparently she hadn’t been talking to my subconscious. It took me a long time to get to sleep because I kept thinking about things, particularly Jesse. Then I had the creepiest dream I’ve ever had. I was dancing with this cute Asian girl and we were in some kind of bar.

It’s strange how in dreams nothing ever strikes you as strange at the time. It seemed perfectly normal to be dancing with a girl in a bar, and everybody else was either a soldier or a little Asian girl in a tight dress. I don’t mean young girls, just little compared to the American men. The one I was dancing with came up to my chest. And I was a guy, too. I don’t know how I knew, but I didn’t have to think about it. The music stopped and we sat down and I bought us each a drink. Hers was just cold tea in a shot glass. And I knew she would go upstairs with me if I gave her ten dollars, and I did. Here’s where it gets so strange I don’t want to go any further, but I can’t get it out of my head. I’ve never had sex with anybody, and in my dream I had sex with this girl, only I was the guy. It was beyond weird. And I would have said it was probably nothing like the real thing, since I don’t have any experience with that except for descriptions in books, except that as soon as I woke up I knew where the dream came from.

The clock said 4:00 a.m. I’d been smoking a cigarette, lying in bed beside this naked girl and smoking a cigarette like they do in old movies. I actually thought I still had the thing in my hand when I opened my eyes. I jumped out of bed and wrapped the sheet around me because I thought the naked girl was still there, too. And then reality sort of settled down around me, like I was coming up out of water, or the air was coming down. I wasn’t naked—I had on my frog pajamas and a camisole, and I wasn’t a guy, either. I sat back down on the bed with my heart pounding and I didn’t go back to sleep for the rest of the night. I’d rather have even the dream about the jungle than be part of somebody else’s sex life again.

And I did
not
go over to church and ask Felix about that one. In fact, I was so freaked out that I started wishing I hadn’t asked him to Thanksgiving dinner. But I did, and I figured I had until Thursday to forget about sharing his body while he had sex with a bar girl. Dreams always fade out so fast you can hardly remember them the next day, anyway.

Not this one, apparently. As soon as we picked Felix up on Thanksgiving, the whole dream came back into my head in Technicolor. I couldn’t even look at him at first.

He didn’t seem to notice anything, thank God. “Hi,” he said as he climbed into Ben’s car. “Nice of you and your folks to invite me. Appreciate it,” he added looking over at Ben.

“Glad to have you,” Ben said, and Grandma Alice said so, too.

“So you work at Angie’s church?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Felix said. He wasn’t wearing the ratty bathrobe, I noticed. He had on a suit that was a bit threadbare but respectable, and white socks with his sandals. His hair was combed and slicked back, and he’d just shaved. I could tell because there were little nicks on his chin. He said, “I take care of the garden and polish up the angels.”

Grandma Alice smiled. “It’s important to pay attention to the angels,” she said. “Then they pay attention to us.”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s the way I feel about it.”

Wuffie’s house is a big old stone one in the East End. It used to be all orange groves out there except for the house, and there’s still a grove that Wuffie and Grandpa Joe own. The oranges are always just coming ripe this time of year, and so are the pomegranates on the tree by their front door.

Wuffie came bustling out as soon as we got there, with a big white chef’s apron on and a spoon in her hand. Grandpa Joe was right behind her. He has a white mustache and looks a little bit like Albert Einstein if Einstein combed his hair. He shook hands with Ben and gave him a wink, which I saw. He shook hands with Felix, too, and then everybody rushed around for a while, taking coats and fixing drinks and putting out bowls of nuts, while Mom and Ben looked like bad actors in an amateur play trying to look normal.

The whole house smelled like turkey cooking, and Wuffie’s spaniels were hanging around in the kitchen looking hopeful. Those dogs are so dumb they’ll eat buttered cardboard, which Ben and Grandpa Joe proved last Thanksgiving.

Mom and Wuffie went back to the kitchen and I overheard Mom saying, “Mother, this is
my
decision!” and Wuffie saying, “But darling, you are always so
hasty
. Ben is a prize.”

“I’m not trying to knock ducks over at the fair.”

Wuffie made a “Hmmph!” noise.

Mom said, “Define prize.”

“He loves you. He respects you.”

“He doesn’t.” Mom rattled around in a drawer. “Where the hell is the whisk? And since he doesn’t, why hang around waiting for the inevitable?”

“You’re leaving him before he leaves you?” Wuffie sounded really annoyed. “Sylvia—”

“He thinks my feelings don’t matter. So I can see what’s coming. So, fine.”

“I doubt that,” Wuffie said, and I did too. I know why she’s mad but I can’t see why she thinks it means he doesn’t love her.

Then Grandma Alice came in to help and they had to quit arguing.

Ben was talking to Grandpa Joe, and I realized they were expecting me to talk to Felix since I’d invited him. He was looking at a big silver bowl full of pomegranates on the buffet.

“You ever eat one of these?” he asked me, poking them with a finger.

“Yeah. They take forever. You have to peel them and pick the seeds out. It’s the seeds you eat.”

“I know,” he said. “We used to have a tree in the backyard when I was a kid. The seeds look like little rubies and the juice stains your fingers.”

“Grandpa Joe fed me some seeds and told me the Persephone story when I was about four. Scared me to death,” I said. “I thought I was going to have to go live in the Underworld.”

“She ate six seeds, right? And so she had to stay six months in the Underworld after Hades kidnapped her. That idea’s even older than the Greeks,” Felix told me. “In a lot of cultures, if you eat somewhere you tie yourself to it. And it to you.”

Was that what he did in Vietnam? Eat there and tie himself to it? Well, of course you’d have to eat. But eating was a metaphor. Mom’s big on metaphor, so I know all about that. Sex, death, and food are all linked up together. I could feel my face burning again as soon as I had that thought. My coloring makes it hard to see me blush (one of life’s little compensations), but Felix could tell from my expression that something was wrong.

“Uh, you have any more weird dreams?” he asked.

I snapped my head around. “Why do you ask?”

“Which one was it?” he said.

I kept my eyes on the pomegranates. “Um. In a bar. Um.”

He laughed suddenly. I don’t think I’d ever heard him laugh before that. He sat down on the sofa and closed his eyes, grinning a huge grin. “I guess it was educational,” he said, with his eyes closed.

“Will you shut up?” I hissed. I sat down next to him so I could whisper. “I did
not
want to know that stuff.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly want you to know it,” he whispered back. At least he was being quiet.

“What kind of behavior is that for a saint, anyway?”

“Saints are human.”

“All the girl saints were martyred for refusing to marry pagans. They didn’t do stuff like that.”

“I’m not a girl saint.”

“You’re not any kind of saint. I don’t know why I even said that. Get your dreams out of my head!”

“Angie!” Wuffie called from the kitchen. “Would you and, uh, Felix, set the table for me? Use the good china.”

Felix hopped up from the sofa. “Great! Let’s go be useful.”

I’ve spent my whole life hanging around Wuffie’s house, so I know where everything is. I showed Felix the good dishes in the cabinet and I got out the silver. Wuffie already had the good tablecloth on, so we laid out seven places—Wuffie and Grandpa Joe at each end, and the rest of us two to one side, three to the other. If I could manage it I was going to get Grandma Alice and Felix on one side with me, so Mom would have to sit next to Ben.

Grandpa Joe carried the turkey in and everybody else brought the other stuff. Mom dodged my secret plan and sat down on the far end of the side with three places just as I sat down on the other end and beckoned Felix into the middle seat. So Ben sat across from Mom, but at least she had to look at him.

“Joseph, would you say grace, please?” Wuffie said.

Grandpa Joe grinned. “We are lucky dogs,” he said, to which Ben and Mom and I all answered, “Arf!” Wuffie hates that one, but she forgot to tell him not to do it.

Grandma Alice giggled. Grandpa Joe started carving the turkey. It looked like things might be going to go all right, especially when Ben started talking to Grandpa Joe about the Middle East. They don’t see eye-to-eye and can make the subject last all night when they get going. In our house, religion and politics are not forbidden topics—they’re the usual sources of conversation. Ben says our family motto is, “Choose your side and your subject.”

“I don’t care whose side you’re on or what the history is,” Grandma Alice was saying, getting into it too. “There is no such thing as a ‘holy’ war. War is not holy.”

Then Mom jumped in, sort of accidentally landing on Ben’s side.

“Do they come to blows?” Felix whispered to me. “Should I watch for flying china?”

“No, they’re having fun,” I said back. There was no need to whisper. My family is very loud.

They kept it going all the way through pumpkin pie, just like they always do, and on into the kitchen with the dishes. I was having the best time. My family is very opinionated, but they’re well read, and we aren’t above cheating either. I learned a long time ago that when Ben says that “studies show” something-or-other, you have to ask him if it’s a real study or one he just made up because he’s convinced studies
would
show that if someone actually did one. He’ll tell you if he’s made it up, but not unless you ask.

Everyone was bumbling around in the kitchen, scraping plates and waving their arms and generally having a good time, while Cookie and Cupcake, the spaniels, wandered around underfoot waiting for someone to drop something. Grandpa Joe dismembered the turkey carcass and dumped it in the trash, and Wuffie packed the rest of the meat into Tupperware. Mom was washing the good china. Ben sidled up next to her and started loading the dishwasher with the other stuff, and she didn’t even glare at him. Grandma Alice and Felix and I got the rest of the things off the table. We’d just folded up the tablecloth when there was one of those sounds that anybody who has a dog knows. We all turned around to look at Cookie, gagging and hacking up blood and gristle on the kitchen floor.