“Because I’m taking Alison Coffey out tomorrow night to the junior class dance, and I need the practice.”
My little brother.
First I babysat so Kate could have a date. Now I was to be dance instructor so my little brother could have a date. I was sitting around doing homework and thinking about miniature furniture and daydreaming of hot climates, and here was my kid brother getting on with life and asking girls to dances.
I wrote another three numbers down in my chemistry calculations. They were wrong and I’d have to erase them, but it gave me something to do. My stomach hurt a little.
“You don’t have to,” said Christopher, flushed with embarrassment. He got up off the bed.
“Sure,” I told him. “Glad to.”
The saint in action, I thought to myself. I may never have a social life of my own, but at least I’ll be known far and wide for my generosity and overwhelming kindness.
Christopher slid a cassette into his cassette player, put the volume on high, and gave me a fierce and sudden hug. At first I was kind of tickled to have all that brotherly affection and then I realized he was dancing with me. “Maybe a little looser,” I said. “Think how annoyed Mrs. Coffey would be if you suffocated Alison on the very first date.”
“Very funny,” said Christopher. But he held me looser.
I am a pretty good dancer. It’s too bad I have no one to dance with these days except myself or my brother. I debated what a saint would say in these circumstances. “Actually, Christopher,” I told him, “you’re not too bad.”
Christopher smiled complacently.
I said, “You don’t need that much practice. You’re fine. Alison is going to have a ball.”
Christopher swaggered around the bedroom, agreeing with me.
“You want to rehearse something to talk about?” I said. “That could be a problem.”
“Heck, no. I never have any problem talking to Al Coffey. In fact, I have a problem finding empty air time to fit my words in. The only human being on earth who talks more than Al is her mother.”
I got bored being saintly. “Give Al a few years,” I predicted. “She’s going to surpass Mrs. Coffey before long.”
Christopher just grinned, as if he’d considered the possibility of himself and Alison aging together, and I had a sudden lurch of the brain, feeling younger than my brother. Feeling awkward and gawky and little. Gosh, I thought, is he just sixteen? He seems so old, suddenly. And I seem so young.
I sank back down and stared glumly at my chemistry. I like to finish my homework on Friday nights. Otherwise it just seems to lurk there all weekend, like Evil, hunkering around Sunday evening and ruining it.
“Mind rehearsing something else?” said Christopher.
His anxiety was back. He was fidgeting and tugging at his belt loops. He looked like a very tall first-grader. I liked him much better when I was older and calmer and he was younger and more worried. “What else is there?” I said. I definitely was not going to rehearse kissing.
“The car.” Christopher got his driver’s license last month. It occurred to me that part of the reason he wanted to date was that he needed somebody to show off his driving skills to. The rest of us just weren’t very impressed. “I want to practice putting a girl in and out of the car.”
“You make it sound like a box for United Parcel. Anyway, Alison may be the self-reliant type, and she’ll get in and out of the car herself.”
“Just in case,” said Christopher. “Please? Be helpful and useful, please?”
How repellent, I thought. Here I am, aching to be slinky, alluring, sexy, and breathtaking, and what does he call me? Helpful and useful. Sainthood is a drag.
“I also want to practice holding your coat up for you so I get your hand started in the armholes right.”
I wondered if somewhere out there, beyond the drifts of snow and the glossy sheets of ice, there was a boy rehearsing how to put a coat on me. Stranger things have happened, I told myself.
I lapsed into a little daydream, where this suave gentleman helped me in and out of fur coats and cranberry-red Mercedes.
“Please?” said Christopher.
He has huge brown eyes. When he was small, people used to exclaim over him and claim to be absolutely melting under that gaze. When he was a grubby little urchin growing up, the effect of the eyes was lost in the general filth and hanging hair, but now the eyes had it again. Christopher turned them on me, as though he were some superhero, and tried to melt me.
“Okay, okay,” I said. I wondered how Alison Coffey felt when he tried his eye-melting technique on her. I wondered when I was going to melt somebody with my eyes.
They’d probably think my mascara was blinding me and hand me a Kleenex. Besides, I didn’t know who I’d want to melt in the first place.
So we practiced. We got in and out of my coat at least twenty times, with Christopher demanding me to be more awkward so he could be prepared for Alison’s worst. Then we practiced getting in and out of the car, so Christopher wouldn’t slam any doors on Al’s feet or scarf tips.
“You were wonderful, Christopher,” I said at last, heading back into the house. “I wouldn’t sit in a freezing car on a freezing night for just anybody. But now we know that you can open doors with the best of them.”
Christopher beamed at me and loped on into the house. A little of his polish dimmed: He forgot to hold the door open for me. By the time I got there, it had slammed and locked. I rang the doorbell for about ten minutes before he came back to let me in.
“What took you so long?” I yelled. “It’ll take me half the night to thaw out! I probably have frostbite! I bet I rang that bell for thirty minutes!”
“Long!” yelped Christopher. “It took me about fifteen seconds.”
“I almost died out there. Do you have any idea what the windchill factor is right now?” I demanded.
Christopher just looked at me, and I had the same lurching, unpleasant feeling of being the younger one. The shrimp and the pest. “Honestly, Holly,” he said, sighing in annoyance, “people get tired of you always knocking the weather. It’s boring. Everybody loves winter. No wonder you don’t have any dates. Every time a guy is good at something, like ice hockey or cross-country, you make some snide remark about your blood congealing.”
He went up the stairs three at a time, and I didn’t even have the front door properly closed by the time he was dialing the upstairs telephone. “Hello, Al?” he said eagerly. “How’re you doing?”
I leaned against the door, feeling a draft, feeling lonely and worthless. I will not cry, I said to myself. It is all right for me to dislike winter. Weather does not completely dominate my thoughts. I don’t go without dates just because I don’t like winter. I go without dates because…
I found that I really did not want to consider why I went without dates. There are times when you are ready for heavy thinking and times when you are not. Instead I walked into the TV room and switched on the tube. You never have to think when you’re watching television.
Seconds later my parents came in, moaning about how stupid the meeting had been and how stupid our elected officials were and how they didn’t know why they were even bothering. I could identify with that. I moved over on the couch and my father flopped down beside me. We fought over who got most of the afghan. I won.
“What are you watching?” said Dad. “It can’t be any more rotten than that shabby excuse for democracy we just came from.”
“I just tuned in. It’s a movie, but I don’t know what.”
We watched intently for about one minute, discovering nothing, and then a commercial came on. My father can’t stand commercials. He likes us to talk through them. “Annie,” he said to my mother, “please create a distraction. If I see one more Irishman pushing deodorant soap, I’m going to have a heart attack.”
I found myself memorizing the commercial. Every time Dad makes us turn the sound down on an advertisement, I am seized by the overpowering desir
e to lip synch the words and sing lustily of American-made cars or tougher floor waxes.
The station identification came on. It was a five-second spot showing our village green, drenched in glittering snow, with the TV station letters seemingly impaled on the steeple of our church.
“Isn’t that beautiful, Stewart?” said my mother in a dreamy voice. “Doesn’t it restore your faith to see that, dear?”
My father didn’t seem particularly restored, but he did kiss her.
“Somehow all that lovely pure white snow crusting the spire makes it all seem worthwhile,” said my mother. “I don’t think there’s anything lovelier than our village in winter.”
I reached for the TV Guide. I personally felt there was considerable room for improvement. Like a geographical position one thousand miles farther south and a lot of handsome, nonathletic seventeen-year-old boys.
Four
A CAR WENT PAST us, flinging up white snow and turning it gray. I knew it was Ted Zaweicki, because he feels the entire state should listen to his radio. I’m surprised his car hasn’t vibrated apart at the seams. “If Ted had heart failure, no one would ever know,” I muttered.
I thought I was alone at the bus stop. Everybody else was in the field practicing. The Ice Sculpture Festival has lots of prizes; most inventive, most lifelike, largest, and so forth. If you win, you get lots and lots of attention and your picture in the paper and invitations to the Ice Ball and so on. I’d love to have all that without having to make an ice sculpture, but this seemed unlikely.
“That’s true,” said Jamie Winter. “His car would go right on making his heart fibrillate.”
I had forgotten Jamie, leaning so silently on the phone pole beside me. We agreed that Zaweicki and his car were possibly the two least useful commodities in New Hampshire. The music in Zaweicki’s wake was still hanging in the air, as if it had frozen there. I couldn’t recognize the song. The volume completely distorted it.
“Those singers took voice lessons from a wolf,” I said.
It wasn’t my best line, but Jamie grinned. It was the kind of grin people give when you’re not really a comedian but they like you, so they smile to keep your humor company.
It occurred to me that Jamie was very good-looking. This was not the first time I had made this observation, but it was the first time I’d actually thought about it at length. I had this terrible impulse to kiss him.
Oh, wow, I thought. He’s sixteen. He’s Christopher’s age. That’s when you know it’s really a lousy winter. When you’re ready to kiss little-brother types. “Who do you have in English Comp this year?” I said, to keep my lips moving and thus prevent them from freezing into an awkward expression.
Some poor little frostbitten dog skittered across the road in front of us and just barely missed being hit by another car.
“Zinn,” said Jamie. “We just had her usual ‘What Do You Plan to Do in Life That Will Affect the World?’ writing assignment.”
“Oh, I remember it well! I wrote what I thought was a witty and brilliant one-word response.”
“One word?” said Jamie. “For an essay? What was the word?”
“Survive.”
Jamie laughed. “I can just imagine her reaction to that. ‘One word, Miss Carroll, does not an essay make.’”
We giggled.
“What did you write?” I said to Jamie.
“Oh, the usual. First I plan on negotiating peace in the Middle East. Then I’m thinking of dabbling in silver futures for my first million dollars. Perhaps after that I’ll salvage the Titanic, and of course before I’m thirty I plan to put an end to world famine.”
“Did you get an F?” I said. “Zinn wants her assignments taken seriously.” Together Jamie and I chirped Mrs. Zinn’s favorite closing line. “English,” we said, “is preparation for life, and life is not a joke.”
“Holly, Holly,” said Hope Martin, in her thick, lazy voice. She had just come to the bus stop. “In a town full of college men you keep going after high school juniors?” She looked at Jamie as if he were an eight-year-old with no front teeth and a collection of snails in his pockets.
“I’m not going after anybody, Hope,” I said irritably, knowing even as I protested that I should have stayed silent, because Hope was always looking for a new teasing front, and Jamie might well supply her with one.
Hope had Grey with her. Grey was wearing a beautiful down-puffed jacket, slim cut, so he didn’t look like a walking bathtub the way most people do in down coats. He even had the jacket unbuttoned. Now, I ask you, what is the point of buying a down coat to warm your body when you go and leave the coat unbuttoned?
Pencils were growing out of Grey’s shirt pocket like a picket fence. I got the message. He was rich (the down jacket) and macho (the open down jacket) and athletic (the muscles under the open down jacket) and also a scholar (pencils).
Grey said, “Hope, I hate dumping you here like this.”
“It’s okay, love. You couldn’t get the car started, that’s all. I understand.” She kissed him.
Getting a car going in subzero weather is no easy trick. You need shelter, heaters, and a good measure of luck. College kids whose cars sit out on the mountainside often walk.
“No mechanical sense, huh, Grey?” said Jamie gladly.
Grey looked at Jamie without interest. “Who’s that?” he said to Hope.
“Nobody,” said Hope. “A kid. Sixteen.”
They stood right there next to us and proceeded to discuss important things, like the fact that she could eat at his fraternity the following night and did she like fried apples?
“My age doesn’t make me nobody,” said Jamie. “My personality might. But merely being sixteen does not cancel my existence.”
I saluted him, but neither Hope nor Grey even looked up.
Grey said, “I don’t know about Saturday, Hope. I may have to skip the festivities then. I really do have to study now and then. How would you feel about skipping our date Saturday?”
Grey’s voice was never-changing. Smooth, suave, one word never seeming to mean more than any other. Hope, however, was very dramatic. “Grey!” she said. “If you desert me on a Saturday night, I shall fling myself down the stairs!”
“You live in a ranch house, Hope,” said Jamie.
I doubled over laughing, and Jamie and I whopped each other on the back, enjoying his joke. Hope looked at us in revulsion. “Grey, please get your car fixed. I hate riding on the bus with these kids. They’re all so juvenile.”
The bus arrived before Jamie could make another comment, and everybody else deserted his or her snow person to shove and elbow into the bus. In the thick of this press, Kate said to me, “Holly, if you’re going to make an effort with a boy, why not Pete Stein? Why Jamie? He’s only sixteen.”
Jamie was already on the bus, making his way toward the rear where the sophomores and juniors sat. I said, “We were just talking, Kate. Is it a crime to laugh?”
“No, but Holl, it looks as if you stand there every day just so Jamie can stand there and talk with you. I mean, people are starting to wonder. You can’t go out with a junior. Nobody does that.”
“I’m not dating him,” I protested. “I’m not thinking about dating him, either. I’m just standing there, and he’s making funny remarks, and I’m laughing.”
Obviously Kate thought I was weird. And Kate has to be the most open-minded person I know. If Kate thought I was weird, who knew what everybody else was thinking.
I sank back in my seat and told myself I didn’t care what everybody else thought; I was my father’s daughter, and I could shrug off the comments of the world and take the path less traveled by…but it was not true. I didn’t want them talking about me and making sideways faces at me and snickering. I didn’t want to be different. It was different enough just to be Holly Carroll, minister’s daughter, dollhouse-builder, and winter-hater.
“I mean, there are eleven hundred college men running around this town,” said Kate. “
You don’t need to look at rejects like Jamie Winter.”
“He isn’t a reject,” I said. “He’s just younger.”
Kate looked at me nervously, as though she was afraid I would next announce my engagement to this younger person. She began telling me about her date with Gary Beaulieu. I don’t know if she was trying to change the subject or encourage me with descriptions of excellent eighteen-year-olds, but what she did was depress me terribly.
My pesky kid brother Christopher was dating. My best friend Kate was dating. My nemesis-in-homeroom Hope had dated since she was in her cradle. And what was I doing? Talking to some junior about English assignments.
We were passing Nelson’s Clothiers on the opposite side of College Avenue. There’s a sign in the window at Nelson’s: CLOSED FOR INVENTORY. The sign’s been up for two years. They take very thorough inventories in Nelson’s. “I am beginning to suspect,” I told Kate, “that Nelson’s has gone out of business, but I don’t want to be premature in my judgment.”
Kate giggled. “You’re so funny, Holl,” she said.
I was about to tell her that the person who was funny was Jamie Winter, but then I thought, better not. If I keep bringing him up, she’ll start worrying about me. Pretty soon there’ll be gossip about Jamie and Hollyberry. I’ll be accused of cradle-robbing, and Jamie will get teased for wanting older women. And I’ll be embarrassed because Jamie didn’t mean a thing by it, and he’ll be humiliated because everyone will think he did.
Life, I thought, staring at the fresh flakes of snow that were gently drifting down on the street and the cars, is too complex for me.
Five
“OH, COME ON, HOLLY,” said Lydia irritably. “Don’t be such a spoilsport all the time. You won’t go skating. You won’t go skiing. Now you won’t even go to the movies with us! I’m beginning to think that you have whatever it is, that fear of crowds, or something.”
“Agoraphobia,” said Kate. “She doesn’t have agoraphobia, Lydia.”
I shifted my weight from one frozen foot to the other. I know I spend the majority of my time comfortably indoors, but my winter memories are all of the discomfort outdoors. “Can’t go,” I said. I tried to think of good excuses other than the real one, but I am not much of a fibber. I’m not sure if it’s lack of practice or the conscience my parents instilled in me, but I find fake excuses hard to come by.
Holly in Love: A Cooney Classic Romance Page 3
