“Hey, we’re playing baseball. You want to pitch?” I called out to Kid. He came over and took the ball from me. “I’m good at this game,” he said, and he was. He gave a few arcing tosses which Kristen sent thumping against the wall of the house and Oscar and I swung at and missed, swung at and missed. Then we offered him the bat. He couldn’t seem to get a grip on it. It kept bouncing out of his hands to the ground.
“Wait a second,” he told us, and he gave a hitching run over to the stone wall where he had left his baby sister, coming back with a long stick that had fallen from the maple tree. “Can I use this instead?” he asked, and when he crouched over the pizza box we were using for a plate and Oscar pitched him the ball, saying, “Let’s see you try and hit this one,” he snapped his arm around the way a cat bats at its reflection in the water, and the ball sailed off the side of the house and came tumbling back over our heads.
We watched it land across the street.
“He who hits it, gets it,” Oscar said, angry that Kid had connected with the ball. He made a gesture with his thumb. “And that’s you, Limpy.”
Kristen had come home from school with me to spend the night, so it must have been a Friday afternoon. Cars and trucks and SUVs were barreling by on their way home from work, but Kid acted as though he didn’t see them at all. He dropped the stick and walked into the street and then across it, and he collected the tennis ball from Enid Embry’s thornbushes, holding it up so that it glowed like a yellow apple in the sunlight. Then he stepped off the curb and walked straight into the path of a minivan.
I screwed my eyes shut and listened for the shriek of tires, for the smack of his body as it rolled up the hood. But when I looked again he was standing safely in my own front yard. He gave the ball to me and tucked his hand in his pocket. The minivan was at the other end of the street, waiting its turn at the stop sign, as peaceful as a cow chewing grass.
“Holy crap,” I heard Kristen say, “I thought you were dead for sure.”
And then—
Then it happens. Once again I turn my head, or I try to reach out for them, and they dissolve in a ripple of sparks.
I cannot see them.
I do not know where they’ve gone.
When my vision clears again (it would be impossible for me to say how much time has passed: minutes? years?), I see myself cleaning out the refrigerator in our kitchen. This was one of my chores, back when I was a girl. I had to clean the refrigerator, and keep my bedroom tidy, and empty the small bathroom trash cans into the big kitchen trash can. I had to borrow sugar or milk or flour from Enid Embry or Sara Cadwallader, our neighbors, and return their Tupperware to them when we were finished. And then there were the chores that Kristen Lanzetta and I invented for ourselves, a different one nearly every day, chores we carried out with an almost religious fussiness. We had to touch our elbows whenever someone said our name. We had to wear our matching yellow socks, the ones with the ducks on them, inside-out to school. We could not step on cracks, including the cracks that separated the panels of the sidewalk. We could not walk in the shade one day, or on the grass the next, or in the sunlight the next.
I was waiting for Kristen to knock on the door while I sorted through the refrigerator. It was Sunday morning, a week or so after the ice had melted from the puddles. Kristen was going to spend the day with me. Her mom and dad had promised to drop her off on their way to the movies.
Our refrigerator had a lazy motor, so that the food decayed much more quickly than it should have. I had to poke through it once a week (and every day during the summer) looking for signs of mold and rot. I checked fruits and vegetables for circles of gray fuzz. I opened milk bottles and containers of soup, sniffing for the sweet, sickly smell of spoilage. I was worried that Kristen would get there before I was finished. I had a secret I wanted to tell her—only her, my best friend—and I could feel it pushing like an enormous bubble against the back of my throat. My dad was at the stove, layering cheese and tuna and spinach into a casserole, and when I asked him if I had to clean the whole refrigerator right then, if I couldn’t wait to do half of it tomorrow, he said that when he was my age he had to walk five miles through the ice and snow to clean his refrigerator, and afterward he spent the whole day chopping logs and digging holes and throwing the logs he had chopped into the holes he had dug.
“Yes, you have to do the whole thing,” he said. He squeezed the back of my neck. “If Kristen gets here before you’re finished, I’m sure she’ll wait for you.”
The air in the refrigerator was only medium-cool, contained in a single, solid block that I could barely even feel on my skin, and I looked through the food shelf by shelf, listening all the while for Kristen’s car to purr to a stop in our driveway. The secret I wanted to tell her was this: I had a dream last night that Oscar Martin asked me if he could be my boyfriend, and I told him yes, and he kissed me on the lips. These were the exact words I was going to use.
I held a container of peaches to the window, watching the sun strike the syrup. I thought I saw Kid for a moment—he was standing by the pond in my backyard, just behind the line of elm trees, steadying his sister against his chest with his palm— but when I looked again he wasn’t there. I put the peaches back on the shelf.
“This is all I found,” I said to my dad, and I showed him a plate of sliced cheeses that had hardened to a pale crust at the edges. “Do you want me to throw them away?”
He took the plate from me and peeled the cling wrap off. When he caught the odor, he gave a grimace of such honest disgust that I couldn’t keep from laughing. “Good Lord!” he said, and he replaced the cling wrap. “Here, throw the whole plate away. I can’t imagine we’ll want to use it again after this.” He looked at the refrigerator and shook his head. “Ever. What’s wrong with that thing, anyway?”
“I heard that,” my mom said. She was coming down the winding wooden staircase that joined our kitchen to the rooms above, which always reminded me of the corkscrew my dad kept by the wine rack—I thought of it as an elaborate toy, with arms that could rise and fall in jumping jacks, but it was never as much fun to play with as I hoped it would be.
“What happened this time?” my mom asked, and my dad said, “We had a cheese fiasco.”
She took the plate from me. “You know I’m ready to replace that thing just as soon as you are, Christopher. All you have to do is say the word.”
He sprinkled some bread crumbs onto the casserole and shrugged his shoulders. “Let’s give it a few more weeks to get its act together.”
“You’re the boss,” she said. She turned to the refrigerator. “You hear that? You’ve been granted a stay of execution. I suggest you make the most of it.” She scraped the cheese into the trash can and shut the lid.
A car turned off the street, and I heard its engine powering down though not switching off in our driveway. The sound shifted unmistakably, the way that water pouring from a faucet will change its pitch as it grows warmer or colder. A few seconds later there was a knock on the front door.
“See, finished in the nick of time,” my dad said to me, but I was barely listening. I ran for the living room, past the staircase and the television and the decorative glass table, through the front room and into the foyer. I could feel the words popping open inside me: I had a dream last night that Oscar Martin asked me if he could be my boyfriend, and I said yes, and he kissed me on the lips. You can’t tell anyone else, okay? It’s just between you and me. Promise you won’t tell anyone, okay, Kristen? I had a dream last night that . . .
But when I opened the door—and I can already see the moment shrinking away, consuming itself as I watch—Kristen was waiting there for me with Robin Unwer and Andrea Onopa. Each of them was wearing a clear plastic bracelet made of identical diamond-shaped beads. Kristen held hers out for me to see.
“We got them at the grocery store last night,” she said. “Aren’t they beautiful? Robin and Andrea spent the night with me, and I told them they could come over today.
It’s more fun this way, don’t you think? With all four of us instead of just the two? You don’t mind, do you, Celia? Do you?”
Another episode: Kid and I were playing on the wooden deck behind my house, jumping to the ground from the long, rickety incline of the staircase. Each time we landed we would climb one step higher and leap again, first him and then me. So far we had made it to the eighth stair. “Eight’s my record,” I told him. “Any higher and I chicken out,” and he looked at me, and looked at the staircase, and then looked at me again, and said, “I bet we can do nine if we try it together.”
I was doubtful. “If you think so . . .”
“I do.” And so I followed behind him, counting off the steps. We lined up at the very edge of the ninth stair, leaning out over the drop. My legs went weak on me, soft and quivery. I felt like they would slide out from under me like a pair of soupy eggs. “I don’t know about this,” I said. “Are you sure we—”
“On the count of three,” Kid interrupted, “One, two”—and just before we jumped, he took my hand—“three.”
As we fell through the air everything seemed to vanish for a moment—the trees, the house, even my own body—but then, abruptly, it all came back. I had let go of Kid’s hand, but I could still see him beside me. The stairs were rising up to meet us as they dropped away toward the ground. I felt the wind prickling against my scalp like a cloud of gnats. We landed hard.
I brushed the grass off my knees and stood up. “We did it!” I yelled. “We broke the record!”
Kid opened his mouth to answer, but a jet plane was passing overhead with a high thunder that grew louder and louder, and I couldn’t tell what he was saying. He kept talking as though he didn’t notice the plane at all. After the noise fell away, I asked him, “What was that? I didn’t hear you.”
“I said I’m hungry.” He gave me a strange look and shook his head. “You need to get your ears checked.”
“Come on, then, if you’re hungry,” I told him, and he followed me with his halting walk into the kitchen.
I decided that we should fix sandwiches. “I’ll get the peanut butter and jelly ready, and you can make the toast,” I said. “Okay?” and I laid the bread out on the counter. The jelly was inside the door of the refrigerator, but the peanut butter was tucked deep in the top shelf of the cabinet, and I had to stand on a chair I pulled over from the kitchen table to fish it out. I worked the jar open with both hands and then towed the chair back to the table. When I finished I saw that Kid was browning the bread inside the oven. I laughed. “Why didn’t you just use the toaster?” I said.
“The toaster?”
“Of course the toaster. Here.” But when I showed it to him, depressing the lever with its flattened-out rasping noise, he diverted his eyes.
“I—I don’t know how to use that kind,” he said, and he slipped an oven mitt onto his hand and collected the toast off the rack.
We were eating our sandwiches when I realized something. “Hey, where’s your sister? I think this is the first time I’ve seen you without her.”
He stared into the middle distance for five seconds, ten seconds, twenty, and then dropped the bread crust onto his paper towel, a look of shock washing over his face. His skin was turning the same translucent white as candle wax. “My sister!” he said, and he pushed his chair from the table and turned his head from me and—
And another: It was Oscar Martin’s birthday, and there were ten or twelve of us huddled around the coffee table in his living room, watching as he opened his presents. A Nerf football. A bicycle helmet. An X-wing Fighter video game. I had given him a SuperSoaker water rifle, the kind with the extra storage tank which he had told me he wanted the summer before, rattling on about it whenever our parents took us to the swimming pool: “Man, I wish I had one of those! Nobody could stop me! I’d be invincible! G-doosh!” But one of his aunts, it turned out, had given him one for Christmas, and so, apparently, had one of his uncles, and when he opened it he rolled his eyes and showed it to his mom. “Well, that makes three,” he said, and then: “Oh, yeah. Thanks, Celia.”
After he had opened his presents, during those few shuffling minutes when we were still waiting to see what would happen next, I watched Kristen Lanzetta and Robin Unwer and Andrea Onopa touch their fingertips together in a pyramid and say, “Wonder Twin powers, activate!” They were the only other girls at the party. I recognized the slogan from a superhero cartoon, and even though I hated superheroes, I asked, “Can I be a Wonder Twin, too?”
“Sorry,” said Andrea, and she rattled the beads on her wrist. “You have to have one of the Wonder Twin bracelets.”
Kristen nodded. “Those are the rules. We can make you our pet monkey, though. Do you want to be our pet monkey?”
I shook my head and looked away. Oscar was tossing his Nerf football into the air and trying to catch it as it fell, but it kept tapping the light fixture and angling off to the side, bobbling around in a heap of wrapping paper and bows and Dixie cups stained with fruit punch. Kid was sitting with his back to the television and paging through one of Oscar’s comic books while his sister slept beside him in her baby carriage. A cartoon was playing, filling the space around his body with a toneless white light. Finally Oscar’s mother said, “Oscar, why don’t you kids play one of the games we talked about?” and Oscar dropped his football and said, “Oh yeah. I forgot what came next,” and announced, “Okay, guys, now we play Stoneface.”
The rules were simple: two of us would stand eye to eye with blank expressions on our faces, and we would try to keep from laughing. The first to crack a smile was the loser. I was going to ask Kristen to be my partner, but before I got the chance she had paired up with Robin Unwer, and Oscar Martin had paired up with David Kuperman, and Andrea Onopa had paired up with William Miller. Kid and I were the only two players left, and though he said he didn’t want to play, he wanted to keep reading his comic book—“Just staring at someone like that . . . I don’t know, I just don’t like it”—I convinced him to join me anyway.
I had played Stoneface before and I knew that the trick was to look directly at one of his eyes—at, not into—which would dull the expression on his face; otherwise his personality would come teasing and flickering out of him like a flame from under a carpet and I would laugh almost immediately. Also, if I tried to keep a watch on both his eyes, or, even worse, on his whole face, I would start to feel my own eyes looking back at me, my own cheeks stretching helplessly into a smile, and I would not be able to stop myself. Within half a minute I found myself laughing anyway, but for the first few seconds I was staring at Kid, I could see a reflection of the room in his right eye, or patches of the room at least—the table, the walls, and the window, but not the VCR or the television; the bookshelves and the carpet, but not the stereo or the artificial houseplant.
When the final round of the game was finished, Oscar gave a box of chocolate-covered cherries to the winner. “Here’s your prize, David, so eat it.” Then he clapped his hands and said, “All right, our next game is going to be Scavenger Hunt. Everybody needs to pick a teammate, and then I’ll hand out the instructions.”
I tugged at the sleeve of Kristen’s purple jacket. “Do you want to try this one together?” I asked.
“Well, I promised Robin I would do everything with her today. But maybe Andrea will be your partner.”
“But Robin was with you last time! It’s not fair,” I said. “How come you never—”
But she interrupted me: “We can’t be partners all the time, you know, Celia,” and she shook her head and took Robin’s hand and said to her, “See, it’s just like I told you. Every single minute of the day.”
I felt a stinging in my eyes, a pulsing heat, and I blinked a few times.
I—
I cannot remember where I was or what I did, how I felt or what I said.
Sometimes I close my eyes, and they all come back to me, my friends and family, not as the people they were in this particular moment or a
nother, when they shared in my life, but in a bundle of their own quirks and habits and eccentricities, as closely connected as a cluster of blackberries. All I have to do is think of them by name.
My mom, for instance—who played the clarinet, and who would press the bell against my stomach when she came to tuck me in at night, blowing a warm buzz of air through the pipe that made me giggle and twist and squirm. She wore blue jeans and a sweater around the house—or, in the summer, blue jeans and a T-shirt—but occasionally, when we went out to eat, she would wear a wonderful sheer crinkly skirt that made a swishing sound when she walked that I liked to pretend was the ocean, rolling in and away, in and away. She kept a small, square vegetable garden filled with carrots and tomatoes and lettuce. She sang along to the music on the radio, and she always seemed to know all the words. Whenever she heard me talking with my friends about Oscar Martin or William Miller or John Pelevin, she would tell us that we were all boy crazy.
Kristen Lanzetta—who had long black hair that had never been cut, never once, in all her life, and which she pinned together in the back with a brown and yellow butterfly clip that was shaped like an actual butterfly. I had been friends with her ever since I was a baby, and we knew all the same stories and liked all the same people and invented hiding games, clapping and rhyming games, pony-riding games. She had a collection of plastic rings from the gum machine at the grocery store, and so did I, and we liked to trade them with each other on rainy days: her ruby ring for my diamond, my sapphire for her emerald. She had a cat, Simon, who hated both of us.
The Truth About Celia Page 10
