I like it best when we go to Uncle Tim’s for parties; his house always feels the most comfortable and warm. Mom and Dad have been trying to talk him into moving into one of the smaller flats on the south side of town for years, but his answer is always the same: “It’s just too much trouble to move. I’ll wait until after Barry graduates.” Everything in the house is just as it was when Aunt Marie was alive—the family photos still hanging on the wall, the living room windows draped with cornflower-blue curtains she sewed herself, and the outside trim still the same sage green she painted to match her garden. I see pieces of her in all corners every time I come over, and I think it’s the real reason Uncle Tim wants to stay, but I keep this to myself.
The group today is small—Aunt Helen and her family are at my cousin John’s soccer tournament, three hours away in Kalamazoo, but she dropped off a card before they left. That’s fine by me, because they always give me money whether they’re at the party or not, usually twenty or sometimes even thirty dollars. I’m not sure what I’m getting from everyone else. I saw Betsi bring in another bag from the trunk, and even though she had her jacket thrown over it, I could tell it was my presents. I asked Mom and Dad for a telephone for my room, one of those see-through plastic ones that come in colors like hot pink and light up when they ring. Mom didn’t seem too excited about that idea. Betsi has been jumpy and secretive about her present for me, taunting me with “I have something for you” and “I know something you don’t know.” I keep wandering by the pile on Uncle Tim’s dining room table and see a box markedTO PRESLEY, FROM BARRY , and wonder if it’s something Barry actually picked out himself.
All of the coats are taken up to Barry’s room and piled on the bed. In my coat pocket, I carry one of the lipsticks I got from Jill, Starlight Express, a sheer pink with a touch of glitter. Mom doesn’t say anything when she sees it on my lips, probably because it’s my birthday, but Grandma Dunn asks, “What’s that on your mouth?” She and Grandpa won’t head back down to Florida until after the first of the year, with the other snowbirds.
“It’s lip gloss, Grandma,” Betsi says. “Here, why don’t you let me fix you up a plate of food?” She steers Grandma Dunn into the living room. I throw Betsi a “thanks” as she passes by. I’m listening to Uncle Tim’s small radio that sits on the kitchen windowsill. I cut up pieces of garlic bread fresh from the oven, placing them in a basket lined with cloth napkins to keep them warm. Barry sneaks up behind me, reaching over my shoulder for a carrot stick on the vegetable tray, his chest brushing against my back.
“How was your sleepover?” he asks.
“Fine. It wasn’t really a sleepover,” I try to explain.
“Oh. I thought your friends spent the night.”
“Well, they did.”
“So how is thatnot a sleepover?” Barry asks, laughing and this time reaching for a cauliflower stalk.
“Well, it is sort of, but not like a kid’s sleepover—”
“Wait,” he says, grabbing my shoulder suddenly. “Do you hear that?” He leans over the bread basket and turns up the volume on the radio. I recognize Elton John’s voice but can’t remember the title.
“This issuch a great song,” he says, closing his eyes and nodding in time with the music. I don’t know what to say, so I start to ask Barry what the name of the song is, but he motions for me to be quiet. He shuffles around the kitchen, singing along with the music. “‘Until you’ve seen this trash can dream come true…You stand at the edge while people run you through…’”
His voice is clear and rich. I didn’t even know Barry could sing. He drops the cauliflower on the counter, grabbing my hands and trying to twirl me across the room. “‘And I thank the Lord there’s people out there like you…I thank the Lord there’s people out there like you.’” I giggle with embarrassment as I let him spin me around and find Betsi watching us from the doorway, smiling just like the Mona Lisa that Elton John and Barry are singing about at the top of their lungs, as though their lives depended on it.
Mom hands me a paper bag with handles and tells me to pack up my gifts while she loads Uncle Tim’s dishwasher. Really, it should be Uncle Tim doing the straightening, but he’s asleep on one couch and Barry has wandered off. Dad snoozes on the other couch while Peter plays with Barry’s game system, the sound effects turned down low. The grandparents are playing cards in the dining room. I transfer my pile into the bag: a baby-blue cardigan mailed from Grandma Biddie; a bright red hat and scarf from Grandma and Grandpa Dunn; a Cavaliers sweatshirt from Uncle Tim; and a new book bag from Peter, who made sure to point out that Mom chose it. Even though Mom and Dad ended up getting me the hot-pink phone I wanted—with a warning of “No calls until your homework is done.”—I think it’s Barry’s and Betsi’s gifts I like best.
I opened Barry’s first, a book he disguised by wrapping it in a larger box. “I didn’t want you to be able to tell what it was just by walking by,” he said, winking.
“Tender Is the Night,” I said, announcing the title to the room and hoping the “ohs!” from the adults will buy me some time to figure out why he chose this particular one.
“Gatsbyis a great story, but I thought you should check something out by Fitzgerald that wasn’t assigned reading,” Barry explained. “He really nails the complications of love. I read somewhere that he once saidGatsby was a tour de force but that this book was a real confession of faith.”
The “ohs” fell silent upon Barry’s impromptu dissertation. My mother spoke first. “Barry…I had no idea you were such a…voraciousreader.”
“Here,” Betsi said to me, disregarding the bemused looks everyone was giving Barry. “Open mine next.” Her present was in a dark purple gift bag with lavender tissue peeking out. I reached in and pulled out a box covered in red, orange, and green jewels, with little mirrors sewn into gold fabric. When I lifted the lid, there was the smallest tinkling of music. The inside of the box was lined with the same fabric around a mirror.
“Do you know what song it is?” Betsi asked. I held the box up to my ear like a seashell, but I still couldn’t tell. She started to sing softly: “‘Only fools…rush…in…But I…can’t help…falling in love with you.’”
“It sounds so different than the version you play,” I told her.
“I know. I wanted to try and find a way to make you see what I love, but in a different way. I wanted to give you something that was a little part of me. You can keep anything in there, bracelets, earrings, barrettes, notes, secrets. It’s yours.”
Now, packing up, I place the box in the paper bag last, holding it in my hands with the lid open and staring at my reflection. The mirror is so small, I can see only my mouth. Most of the glitter has faded from my lips. I push myself up, heading for Barry’s room to retrieve my new lipstick from my coat pocket.
Dusk is falling, and the leftover light coming in through the windows of the upstairs hallway creates long, willowy shadows of a lamp, a vase, me. I wonder if I should turn on a light, but I can still make out the door to Barry’s room at the end of the hall, a ray coming through the crack at the bottom to guide me. When I turn the handle, the door sticks. I give it a good rattle, but it won’t budge. “Hello?” I say, knocking lightly. “It’s Presley. Can you open the door? I need my coat.”
I hear a shifting on the other side, just slightly, like a hiccup. It’s there and then it’s gone. I lean my ear toward the door, trying to hold my breath, and then I hear it again, first a creaking and then a murmur, as if someone is turning in their sleep. Then I hear Betsi’s voice say, “Coming!” and it seems like forever before the door opens. Her hair is sticking up in the back, and her eyes are squinting even though the light has been on in the room. The coats are piled on the bed but smashed down in the center. “I fell asleep,” Betsi explains, shrugging.
“Up here? Why didn’t you just go into another room without coats on the bed?” I ask her, heading over to the heap and pulling on the sleeve of my jacket, which is at the bottom. When I lift it up, someth
ing crumpled up and black falls onto the bed. I pick it up, unraveling it in my hand, and see it’s a bra. “Is this yours?” I ask, holding it like a dead mouse.
“Oh, yeah. I must have slipped it off while I was sleeping. I do that sometimes—take off my clothes in my sleep. It’s the craziest thing,” Betsi says, laughing a little and grabbing the bra from my hands.
“Yeah. Crazy,” I say, reaching into the pocket of my coat for my gloss.
Betsi takes off her shirt right in front of me to put her bra back on. She’s standing near Barry’s closet door, and before she refastens it, I can’t help but notice her breasts, how perfectly round they are, how rosy the centers seem against her smooth skin, which is the color of fresh whipped cream. Betsi catches my eye in the mirror on the door and I look away, trying to find something else to concentrate on—the sports trophies on Barry’s desk, a pair of tube socks on his chair, math papers on the floor.
“Have you seen Barry around?” I ask.
Betsi stares straight into the mirror, fixing the back of her hair and humming slightly. She says, “Nope. Haven’t seen him. I was asleep, remember?” She turns around and winks at me. “You havin’ a good birthday?” I nod. “Good. Let’s go downstairs and get some more cake before Grandpa and Grandma leave with half of it, huh?” She places her hand on my shoulder to guide me, reaching back with the other to turn off the light as we walk through the doorway. The outside light is almost completely gone now, and the shadows in the hallway are beginning to fade and blend with the darkness. But when we get to the top of the stairs, I sense another shadow moving from the corner of my eye, dancing near Barry’s room and then disappearing into the bathroom like a ghost. Halloween is just a month away, and I think about whether I’m too old to go out trick-or-treating anymore. I decide it might be fun to dress up and pretend to be something else for one more year.
Chapter4
Trick or Treat
The hardest partabout carving pumpkins is pulling out the guts. Only then can you really begin to cut into the shell. Betsi and I have spread out old issues of theTimes across the kitchen floor to help contain the mess. Our hands are dusty with newsprint, but we grab our weapons, knives with plastic orange handles made especially for jack-o’-lantern use. Betsi has promised she’ll be in charge of removing the insides; she is brave. I can’t stand reaching in or how it feels in my hands, cold and stringy and endless.
This year we bought two medium-size pumpkins, one for each side of the front porch steps. Betsi is attempting a more complicated design, a black cat with an arched back, the kind that looks like it’s screeching and spooked. I’m sticking to the traditional approach: triangle eyes and nose with a jagged, nearly toothless mouth. We cut around the stems, and after I lift off the top, I pass my pumpkin over to Betsi to take care of the dirty business. Mom, Dad, and Peter are out running errands.
“You going out for Devil’s Night this year?” she asks, dumping pumpkin guts onto the newspaper and shaking her hands to get rid of the sticky seeds left behind. Chris Carroll asked me the same question earlier in the week during gym class. Around here the tradition breaks down to a lot of houses draped in toilet paper and iced with shaving cream. If you’re someone like Fred Portis, who is always complaining at city council meetings about kids skateboarding near the library, it can also involve rotten eggs tossed at your windows. In middle school, I heard rumors about the high school kids raising the ante by making shit bombs: left-behind dog droppings stuffed inside a paper bag and smashed against a front door. I’m pretty sure Barry’s been out several times in his high school career, and even launched a shit bomb or two, but not me—I’ve always been too scared of getting caught.
“No, I don’t think so. What’s the point?”
“What’s the point? It’s tradition! It’s fun! Now that you’re in high school, you have to go out at least once.” I know what Betsi is going to say next, and my prediction comes true. “I went outevery year of high school, and middle school too.”
I am starting to realize that I am not living up to expectations. I’m less than two full months into school, but it’s already becoming clear to me that our family, both sides, has a reputation of being recognized. Barry’s advice was administered during the Fourth of July fireworks on the lake at the cottage. We sat on towels waiting for the light to fall away from the sky and the show to begin while the younger cousins ran around the beach holding lit sparklers.
“So what’s the plan for the fall? You going out for any sports?” Barry asked. His tan was well established by then, his golden arms resting on top of his bent knees.
“I haven’t really thought about it. I didn’t exactly play a lot of sports in middle school.” I was chewing on the plastic orange straw sticking out of my lemonade glass.
“That’s not a big deal. You seem like you’d pick things up pretty quickly. No need to be perfect.” He picked up a stick nearby and started tracing circles into the sand.
“But you are. At sports. Lots of things.” I bit my lip to stop myself from gushing any further, but it was true. Barry made his mark in athletics and academics—he was involved in a sport every season, took college-prep history and English, and still managed to find time to edit the school paper.
Behind us, Aunt Helen yelled at her kids: “Stop running around with those sparklers before you fall and burn your eye out!” My cousins froze and began waving the sticks in rapid circles while standing in place.
“I’m just saying it might be smart to start thinking about ways to get involved. That’s all college recruiters care about—how you look on paper. I’m sure it doesn’t seem like it right now, but you’ll be a senior before you know it.” Barry stood up, brushing the sand off his board shorts. “Think it’s too late to go swimming?”
“The fireworks are going to start soon. We’re not supposed to go in the water after dark,” I reminded him.
“Right,” he said, and then sprinted into the water. None of the parents objected. I wasn’t sure they had even noticed. I wondered if he wanted me to follow, but when I looked back, he had already drifted too far away from the shore for me to catch up.
“…homecoming?” I hear only the last fragment of Betsi’s question.
“What?”
“Are you going to homecoming?” she repeats.
“Oh. I don’t think so.” The homecoming game and dance are later this year, the weekend after Halloween. “Isn’t it mostly juniors and seniors who go?”
“Well, yes, but that’s not a rule or anything. You have a much better chance of going, because the upperclassmen like taking younger girls. I wentevery year,” she says.
“Yes, I remember.” Not only did she go every year, but she was crowned homecoming queen as a senior. After the fire in the den, she took out a bunch of old high school photos to help make the place feel “more familiar,” propping them up in the windowsill next to the pull-out couch. Each dance photo showed her with a different date: senior boys when she was a freshman, freshman boys when she was a senior. By graduation she had also earned the titles of Best-Looking and Class Clown, as well as Most Likely to Become a Groupie.
“You need to take advantage of these moments, Pres. They’re all that really matter. Grades, quizzes, exams? It’s all just bullshit.” Her words of wisdom are the complete opposite of Barry’s, but I’ve seen all the evidence that supports her side of the argument: her yearbooks with the important pages bookmarked by dance ticket stubs, cigar boxes crammed with dead corsages and candid photos, wrinkled formal wear shoved into banker boxes, still stained with cigarette ash and alcohol. It’s like the Betsi Museum, and I am the most frequent visitor.
“Chris Carroll and a bunch of people are going out,” I tell Betsi as she scrapes the inner walls of my pumpkin.
“How do you know that?” Betsi asks.
“He told me.”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about. He told you because he wanted to see if you had any interest in going too.”
&nb
sp; “Oh, no…I don’t think so.”
Betsi stops midscrape. “Jesus, Presley. You have got a lot to learn about picking up signals from guys.”
She has a point. Betsi’s much more of an expert in this area, and she must be doing something right, because she goes out almost every night, though none of us are sure who with or if it’s even the same person. Mom is always probing Betsi for more details, but Betsi keeps saying that she doesn’t want to jinx it by revealing anything too soon. I’m pretty sure it’s the same guy I heard her talking to on the phone the night of my birthday, but I haven’t asked her about him since then. I just hope he doesn’t drink. Betsi’s been going to her meetings on a regular basis, and I haven’t seen her with a glass of wine since the summer.
“Here you go!” Betsi hands over the hollow gourd, far lighter now and ready for carving. I take a sharpened pencil and sketch out my incision plans. If I don’t create a blueprint first, I end up cutting the eyes either too close or one way bigger than the other.
“Are you going out tonight?” I try to make it sound like I don’t care one way or another.
“Hmm. Not sure,” Betsi says, finishing up her own pumpkin. “Probably.” It’s already getting dark outside, and the rest of the family will pull into the driveway before too long. I figure my only chance of getting her to tell me more about the mashed-potatoes-and-gravy guy is when we’re alone, though my window of time is shrinking quickly.
“So is this like a meeting, or something else?” I stab my knife into the left eye of my soon-to-be jack-o’-lantern and hope for the best.
“Meeting?” Betsi seems genuinely confused.
“You know. Your group meetings.”
“Oh. Right. Um, no, not tonight.” She holds the black-cat pattern up to her pumpkin. It’s a complicated procedure that involves pricking dozens and dozens of tiny pinholes into the surface before cutting everything away. It seems like a lot of effort, especially for something that might not even work out the way you want it to. I don’t know why Betsi bothers.
The Girl I Wanted to Be: A Novel Page 6
