A Ticket to Ride

by Paula McLain

  Patrick stood, brushing his hands on the knees of his jeans. “Now the coyotes won’t get him,” he said, looking at the ground near my shoes. Then: “We should go.”

  I rose and followed him along the row where the grapes were fat and gold, clarified. He seemed older, walking ahead of me in the slanted light, his shoulders square under his navy T-shirt, his neck straight and stiff as the standpipe that threw a blade of shadow into the road.

  We’d reached the graveled entrance to Berna and Nelson’s driveway.

  “Well so long,” he said. There was a thumbprint of dust under his right eye. His lips were tight.

  “So long,” I said back. I turned into the drive but had gone only twenty or thirty feet before I heard footsteps pelting behind me. I spun around and was surprised to see, once he reached me, that Patrick was crying. His face was twisted and damp. And before I could think of what to say, he grabbed my shoulders and kissed me. He was taller by several inches and when he bent in, the kiss landed hard and wrong near my nose. Still, his face stayed there for a moment, wet, insistent, and then he said something. I hate you? I’ll miss you? His voice was so soggy I couldn’t make the words out. It sounded as if he was talking through wet paper, and then he pulled away and ran home.

  I didn’t miss Bakersfield exactly, but bits of memory tugged at me, like children not wanting to be forgotten for a moment. Some recollections were eerily available, like the smell of alfalfa, green and malty in early summer. Like jack-rabbits and kissing bugs. I hadn’t told Patrick I was moving to Illinois. I hadn’t said anything about leaving to anyone, but as the school day neared its end, Mrs. Ortiz, my eighth-grade teacher, had announced it to the whole class. Didn’t they want to say good-bye? Patrick sat in the second row, up and diagonal from me. I glanced at him as Mrs. Ortiz made her announcement. He looked as if he’d been shot in the foot with Myron’s BB gun.

  Patrick never did say good-bye to me. In fact, he never said a word after the day he’d kissed me. Still, I wanted to say something to him. I wasn’t sure what, but something. When I climbed on the bus, I saw he was sitting on the back bench seat with Myron and Leonard Sparks and Joey Carnelle, tough boys who used the time on the bus to chew tobacco. They spit the slimy brown juice right out on the floorboards, and the kids all knew to lift their feet when the bus rolled to a stop, to spare their shoes. Patrick never sat with those guys—they were Myron’s friends, not his—but he did that day, and I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like he might have a plug of chew in his mouth too.

  The ride home was long and lurching, made doubly so because I could feel Patrick at the back of the bus not looking at me. Finally, our stop came. I sat still, waiting for Patrick to pass first, and he did. I heard the tread of his sneakers in the aisle, rubber on rubber; heard his breath, and the zschub-zschub of his jean knees, one against the other; heard (or thought I heard) his jaw clench and unclench, blood thrumming just under his skin, his pupils narrowing to pinheads. Then, just as he passed my seat, I felt a sharp, stinging pain in my thigh. Looking down I saw a yellow school pencil sticking straight up out of the top of my leg, perched there like a quill pen in an inkwell. He’d stabbed me and kept on walking. I thought I might be sick. The quilted aluminum of the seat back reeled, rivets spinning. I closed my eyes and could smell saliva and the mint of Copenhagen congealing on the floorboards, could smell Adorn hair spray on the girl in the seat ahead of me and, more subtle, fallow alfalfa fields beyond the open window. The bus grumbled. I knew it would drive away in a few seconds, leaving me stranded with a longer walk home, so I yanked the pencil up and out as hard as I could. Even so, the lead tip remained lodged there, like shrapnel, like a kissing bug’s kiss, and the skin quickly rose up all around, preserving it.

  It was still there, that piece of lead, like an inkier freckle in a constellation of freckles on my thigh, a sort of X marks the spot—you are here—reminding me that in every way that mattered, I was still that Bakersfield girl, the leave-able one who’d been stuck for more than a decade in a house full of old and indecipherable ghosts, who knew more about willow trees and grasshoppers and characters in books than real people, who seemed destined to receive only pathetic and unfathomable kisses.

  If it wasn’t too late, I wanted something else, but what exactly? I felt lost, as if I were tangled in the vague throes of a hedge maze, running toward a center I couldn’t see or even imagine. What would I be when I got there? Who? Fawn knew, or seemed to as she rode beside me on the city bus, headed toward the glamorous new haircut. Fawn seemed so certain of herself and the world at large that I felt relieved to be guided by her, trusting Fawn’s sense of things, her compass. And that Bakersfield girl? She would have to be sloughed off or rooted out. I looked critically at the lead freckle on my thigh and began to pick at it.

  At the beauty college we spotted on Ninth Avenue, my “student stylist” was named June. She looked like a June, like she’d been trapped under glass in 1952 and would never change or outgrow her mousy brown flip, frosted pink lipstick, or her smock. I was worried and so was Fawn, I could tell, but I sat down in June’s chair, letting myself be swaddled with the cotton draping and squirted down with a spray bottle of water (shampoos were three dollars more). In the end, it was fine. Fawn stood next to me the whole time, making suggestions, critiquing when necessary. June might have worked the scissors, but Fawn gave the haircut. When the cut was finished, I didn’t even need to swivel around in my chair to face the mirror. The expression on Fawn’s face said everything: I looked amazing.

  When we stepped out of the beauty school, it was late afternoon. Bullets of sun ricocheted from the doorknob to the chrome bumper of a Plymouth Stardust in the parking lot to a Fresca can wedged fast in the gutter grate. I blinked and shook my head lightly. It felt weightless now, streamlined, and more itself—as if the hair had been unnecessary, a sort of husk that required shucking as part of the natural order of things. I lifted my hand and touched my neck. It was so long, so flexible—a stem, bending. Was everything slenderer now? I glanced into the shop window for verification, but the sun was dead behind me. There was nothing to see but a shadow blob, a thick marriage of myself and Fawn, borderless and indistinct.

  We walked through the parking lot toward the bus stop, passing a doughnut shop and a hopelessly outdated women’s clothing store called the Dress Corral. In the window display, a wigged mannequin wore an unspeakably awful yellow pantsuit zippered to the neck. “Yee haw,” said Fawn. To the left of the Dress Corral, wedged between it and a dentist’s office, was a church, of all things, the Cornerstone People’s Church, according to the sign front, which had bubble-plump letters, making the Os in particular look like inflatable rubber rafts. (Float your way to Jesus!) I stopped to peer in the window, framing my eyes with my hands to shield out the sun. Inside, folding chairs stood in two ordered rows with a large aisle between. The carpet was blue and plush but for the strip of aisle where a red runner pointed the way to a pulpit up front, behind which stood several rows of risers, the same variety my sixth-grade choir had stood on to sing “Send in the Clowns” at an all-school assembly.

  “Ground control to Jamie,” said Fawn. “Come in, Jamie.”

  I turned away from the window, blinked to bring her into focus.

  “The bus is coming, Space Case.”

  And so it was. We took off at a run across the parking lot and boarded it laughing, tripping up the three oversized steps, digging in our matching white purses for the fare. The driver scowled menacingly, but instead of rushing to apologize for making him and everyone else wait, as I certainly would have done a week before, I found myself laughing harder, taken over by a fizzy feeling that bubbled up from the place where Fawn touched me lightly on the arm as the bus grumbled away from the curb. Fawn released me and we lurched together toward the back of the bus, but the feeling stayed. That lightness. Everything weighed less: my shorn head, my feet, my lungs.

  Out the half-cracked window, barns and silos looked thumb-tacked to the h
orizon. Cars pushed up Ninth Avenue toward home, humidity-dense air siphoning into their opened windows, five o’ clock news reports siphoning out, like a simple gas exchange. We passed Riverside Park where a long-haired lanky boy pitched a boomerang into the air at himself, at the self he would be, rather, when it finished its wild ellipse. I watched as the bent toy hurtled in a blur, half-believing it might never arrive, that it might lodge there in the gauzy sky, stuck in a fat, beautiful moment.

  DRIFT AWAY

  The flattest, grassiest spot for sunbathing was a ten-foot wedge along the side of the house between the maypole clothesline and the garage. This was where we snapped our beach towels and let them flutter down; where we lay and baked like pottery, our hair rinsed with a combination of lemon juice and Sun-In, the flats of our thighs glazed with baby oil. From down the block, the tower bell at Queen of Peace plumbed the hour. Fat, sluggish bumblebees circled Mrs. Romelin’s clematis, sounding like bomber planes. On the nearby high school ball field, a drum corps practiced, fifty or so snares pttummp-pttummping a manic “Up, Up and Away.”

  Over our heads loomed maples that held, I guessed, about a billion cicadas. I’d never heard cicadas before coming to Illinois, and imagined, from the sound, that they looked like crickets. Wrong. They looked like bumblebees that had been crossed with June bugs, or at least their abandoned husks looked this way. The first one I encountered was at Turner Park, way up on the chain of a swing. It was a little kid’s set, but I crouched down anyway, on one of the first truly warm days in May, to see if I could fit. The park was just waking up from winter. The picnic benches, which had been leaning against trees for months, like dogs frozen while begging, were down and positioned near bricked barbecue pits. The pavilions were swept free of leaves and the playground refilled with sand, raked into a pattern I was the first to step through that day. I sat in the baby swing, reaching up to grasp the chain before kicking off, and felt and heard a light crunching under my fingertips. I screamed and flung the thing into the sand, and then went to peer at it. It was dead. That’s what I thought at first, but then I saw a small split in the shell, up near the head. The bug inside had somehow shimmied out of that space, as out of a narrow cave opening, into daylight. I took it home to show Raymond, and he identified it for me and then set the shell gently down in the center of my palm. It was so light, lighter than a paper clip or a dried pea pod. With the kitchen light behind it, it looked a little like a shrimp shell, grayish and striated, with an onion dome for a butt. This was the bumblebee part. The frontmost legs were hairy and pincher-like, framing freaky-looking mouthparts.

  Raymond briefly explained the way they lived underground, sometimes for up to seventeen years, and how they came out all at once, hundreds of thousands of them, like a plague or something out of a Japanese movie.

  “How do they know when it’s time to come out?”

  “I don’t know. Whenever they’re done cooking, I guess.”

  I thought about this as I lay next to Fawn in the yard, feeling my skin actually sizzle under baby oil. We were cooking too. When would we be done? Today, we’d fold up our towels at two. Between now and then, we’d do a few strategic flips and break for lunch—just like a job. Beauty was work, according to Fawn. Thinking it wasn’t was where most people took a wrong turn. Pretty girls were notorious for slacking on the job, she said—going to bed without removing their mascara, or shaving just the bottom halves of their legs, or buffing their nails once a month when it occurred to them. And that was fine, but they would never be beautiful. Beauty was the real ticket, the way you got doors opened and dinners bought, the way you got third dates and raises and even extra onion rings from the counter guy at A&W.

  I wanted the world to notice me, but increasingly that world seemed to spin on Fawn. I found myself dressing for Fawn’s approval, parting my hair the way Fawn had instructed, brushing my teeth twice each night, once with Close-Up, and then again with a paste of baking soda and salt. Daily, I studied my face in the mirror with the seriousness of a cartographer, examining my pores and the arc of my eyebrows, the size differential between my top and bottom lip, wondering just how these separate features did or did not work together, could or could not be prodded, plucked, coerced.

  On rainy afternoons, we watched TV or read magazines in the room we shared, which was a wraparound screened porch attached to the back of the house. Our beds were matching army cots separated by three feet of turf green indoor-outdoor carpet and a bureau with a milk-glass lamp and fly-spotted shade. The porch looked like a fairly legitimate room, now, after a full morning’s work preparing for Fawn’s arrival. Raymond and I had pulled the storm windows down, rinsed the screens well, and patched them with ribs of duct tape. From the basement came the porch’s make-do summer furniture, which we’d aired on the lawn. Aside from the lamp and bureau that would serve as both nightstand and dresser, there was a white wicker chair with a badly patched seat and the two army cots, which had spent who knows how many years hibernating in the crack between the washer and dryer, and which had surfaced with a beard of lavender-gray lint, and a dank, rainy pond smell.

  While Raymond pushed a broom into ceiling corners, crushing spider sacks and dislodging dead wasps, I wielded the vacuum, digging for the wide-mouthed attachment to tackle particularly large dead leaves and the sills, which were littered with ladybug husks sun-bleached to a pale tangerine color. The leaves and the bugs made the same dry swishing as they were sucked past down the hose, becoming, I knew, mottled powder in the body of the bag. Still, I cleaned with relish. This was winter’s thick skin coming off, and working in the morning sun next to Raymond, I could feel my own loosening as well.

  When I first moved to Moline, I slept on Raymond’s living room sofa. The sofa had been bought new, just after I arrived, ordered from the Montgomery Ward catalog and delivered in an enormous plastic bag, which Raymond had slit open with ceremony. Immediately, I found myself wishing he’d left the plastic on. The fabric was a green I’d seen only in bottles of cleaning fluid, and felt like an S.O.S. pad. Or the inside of a mosquito bite. Raymond had simply clucked, a sound that could have meant disappointment or surprise—I would spend months decoding his noises—and went to the hall closet for the bedding that would serve to glove the couch, night and day, season to season, for as long as I would live there.

  At one end of the sofa sat Felix’s aquarium complete with colored rocks and a pirate-ship diorama with sunken treasure and a skull-and-crossbones flag. Felix was an oscar, and, like the piranha, had teeth like arced tines, long and nasty. No flaky fish food for Felix. He fed once a day on little mouse fetuses that Raymond kept in a plastic baggie in the freezer. They were called pinkies, the frozen mice, and they were pink and curled and intact, like something in a chrysalis. The pet store guy had said that oscars were one of the fastest-growing fish there are and that before we knew it, he’d need a bigger aquarium. There was a streetlamp in front of Raymond’s house, which threw a wand of pinkish light into the yard, and depending on the position of the blinds, sometimes I thought I could see Felix growing, straining against his glittering fish skin, plumping like an air mattress.

  Raymond’s place wasn’t much. The house was square, aluminum-sided in an eggy color, not yellow, not white, with a black door and black-framed windows. To each side was pressed another house identical in size and shape and color, so that the line of three appeared to have come out of a kit and been constructed all together, in one day: joint, simultaneous mistakes. Inside, the kitchen was tiny, with pink and gray linoleum and a two-burner stove; the tub was permanently clogged so that we never showered without standing in four inches of our own mungy water; and the carpet, as well as every piece of furniture, was mingled with the brown-black wiry hairs of Raymond’s Airedale, Mick, who by all reports had been a good dog in his day. Now he was so old he didn’t know his nose from the newspaper, and spent most of his time on his “bed,” a molting feather pillow that lived in one corner of the small living room and hoarded his
smell.

  Fawn took an instant shine to Mick, and he to her, or as much of a shine a dog Mick’s age could take. “Who’s my big boy?” she’d say, scratching the grizzled ruff under his collar, and he’d thump the pathetic stump of his tail, lift his head to gaze at her with glazed, rheumy eyes.

  I couldn’t help but notice that Fawn had this effect on all males, no matter the species, as if she were a kind of virus, or emitted a signal at a male-specific register. Whatever she had or did, it rendered them all silly and useless before they knew what had hit them. I saw this over and over. When we walked over to the Dippy Quick for soft-serve cones after dinner, a pimple-riddled kid named Dennis never failed to flush wildly under his paper hat and take forever counting back Fawn’s change, only to get it wrong and have to start over. Skinny Man was another example. He lived alone in the pink stucco bungalow directly across from Raymond’s, and every time we sunbathed, he found something to do in his yard, mowing the lawn in denim shorts that drooped from his garter-snake-narrow frame, ogling Fawn and her bikini conspicuously over his garden hose, fumbling with the sprinkler attachment as if it required an ever-elusive higher order of thinking.

  Fawn was an extraordinarily pretty girl, long and angular without being skinny. She had strong cheekbones, a nose that turned up at the end, and almond-shaped hazel eyes that gave her a slightly feline appearance. Finally, there was the hair: waist-skimming, board-straight, extraterrestrially shiny—like a meteor careening through the asteroid belt trailing star-fizzle. Skinny Man seemed dazzled by this—by the whole package, likely—and would sidle as close to the intervening street as possible, sweeping invisible piles of dirt to the tail end of his driveway, or running his weed-eater back and forth along the line of curbing until the whole swath had a crew cut. Didn’t the man have a job?