by T. Greenwood
I knew I had to do something, say something. I’d been carrying the words around in my head, at the tip of my tongue for so long now, they were no different than song lyrics to a favorite song anymore. While Betsy slept, I reached over her and quietly grabbed a pen and scrap of paper from her beach bag. I checked to make sure she was still asleep, and started to write down all of the things I’d been wanting to say. Couldn’t say. It was like a relief, a release, but it also felt dangerous: the simple union of ink and paper making everything I’d been feeling and thinking concrete. In the world. I felt anxious. Exposed.
I thought about tearing the paper up, shoving it into a pocket and tossing it onto the fire later. But there, on the back of an old envelope, was my entire heart. How could I deny that? Destroy that? And so I left Betsy on the grass asleep, folded the envelope into a tight square, and put it between my teeth. I jumped into the water and swam all the way out to the island. It had to have been a quarter mile away, and by the time I got there my body was tired. I crawled through some heavy brush and spit the piece of paper out. Close to the shore was a big shady tree, where I sat and reread all those words. When they started to blur together, I folded the paper back up into a tiny square and stuffed it into the hollow of the tree. Then I jumped back in the water.
My body was shaking with exhaustion as I pulled myself out of the lake again at the access area and stood, dripping wet, next to Betsy. She woke up, disoriented and groggy. “Harper! I’m burned to a crisp! Why didn’t you wake me up?” Her shoulders were bright red with sunburn.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Here.” I handed her my T-shirt, which she gingerly pulled over her bathing suit.
“Let’s get inside,” she said.
We made a feast of hot dogs and potato salad and a few beers I’d stolen from our fridge, and ate on the porch of her uncle’s hunting shack, sitting in a couple of ratty overstuffed chairs. Later, when the sun melted into the water, we stoked the fire and toasted marshmallows. Betsy’s kept catching on fire. “You can’t let it get too close,” I said, meticulously turning mine, keeping it a safe distance from the flame until it was golden. “Here,” I said, and sandwiched it with chocolate between graham crackers. A pile of charred marshmallows at her feet, Betsy sighed and said, “What would I do without you, Harper?”
If I’d been smart, I would have kissed her then. I would have reached to wipe the bit of melted chocolate that had touched the tip of her perfect nose and then kissed it off instead. But that moment, like every single moment of that summer, was gone before it had a chance to live.
She must have sensed that something was bothering me. That I was dying inside.
“What do you really want, Harper?” she asked softly.
“What?” I asked, sure now that she’d figured me out.
“Do you really want this?”
“What?” I asked again.
She picked a marshmallow up off the ground, blew on it, and studied it. “I’m never going to make perfect marshmallows.” She smiled, shaking her head. “I’ll always burn the marshmallows. I’m not patient. I’m not careful. Around me, things catch on fire. Things get ruined.”
“No,” I said. Reaching for the marshmallow. It was charred. Covered with dirt and grass.
“I’m contrary. I’m restless. I’m never happy. I’m a big messy mess.”
I looked at her, at my beautiful Betsy. At her wild hair and big eyes. Then I looked at the dirty marshmallow in my hand. “I do. Want this,” I managed. Then I popped the marshmallow in my mouth, the blackened skin gritty between my teeth. But the inside was still warm, sweet. I knew then that she would taste like this: that on my tongue, she would have this same warmth, this same sweetness.
“You’re nuts,” she said. “Certifiable. And I should know.”
We drove home just after ten o’clock, and right as we were reaching the Heights, our song came on the radio.
“Pull over!!! Pull over!!!” Betsy squealed.
I pulled the car over, lurching to a crooked stop. Betsy turned up the radio and threw open the door. She came around to my side of the car and used both hands to pull open the heavy door. “Come on! Dance with me!”
“Nah,” I said, shaking my head.
“Come on .”
And then I was out of the car, and she was scrambling up onto the hood of the DeSoto. She reached for my hand and motioned for me to join her. I shook my head again, stubborn, and she yanked my arm. Hard. “It’s almost over.”
Betsy meant the song, but it meant so much more, so I joined her on the hood of the DeSoto. And then Betsy Parker was, finally, in my arms. We danced until the song ended, but I held on. I held on, careful of her sunburned shoulders. I held on, trying to figure out how to say the words I’d been reciting in my head like a prayer. I held on, silent, smelling the sweet soapy smell of her hair, until finally she whispered breathlessly, I thought, though it could have just been my imagination, Soon.
Forgiveness
A week after the dance, Shelly still wasn’t speaking to me in anything but grumbles. I stood outside her door, attempting to coax her out, first with words and then with bribes. I brought home the things she loved: éclairs, maple candies, a brand new pair of tennis shoes. It was pathetic, this groveling, but I didn’t know what else to do. And nothing worked; she just wouldn’t take the bait. The éclairs grew stale in the fridge, the candies melted on the windowsill. The sneakers sat wrapped in tissue inside their box on the kitchen table. By Friday morning, I’d basically given up. I figured she couldn’t keep this up forever. I found myself grateful for Maggie’s company. At least she was still talking to me.
“I mended that rag you been wearing to work,” Maggie said, handing me my favorite work shirt, which I’d worn threadbare at the elbows.
“Looks like you ain’t been shopping in a while,” she said.
Hanna had always brought things back for me when she went shopping for Paul. I made her give me the receipts and wrote her checks to cover what she’d spent. I had enough clothes in my closet to get me through a workweek. I ignored the loose buttons and torn seams.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said, taking the shirt from her.
“ Somebody did,” she said with a smile. “I’ll stop by that shop next to the drugstore. They got men’s clothes, right?”
“Ledoux’s,” I said. “I can go.”
“But you won’t go,” she said. “So I will.”
When I got home from work on Thursday night, there were two piles of clothes on the table. One pile was for me, and one was for Shelly. Somehow, with the small amount of money I’d given her, she’d managed to get me three new button-down shirts, a pair of jeans and some new socks. In Shelly’s pile were some shirts, a pair of jeans and a pale pink dress.
Maggie was sitting with her bare feet up on a chair, a washcloth across her forehead.
“You feeling okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, I just get real light-headed sometimes. If I can get my feet up quick enough then I don’t faint.”
“Is that normal?” I asked.
“I don’t need to see no doctor, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
I flinched. I
was worried. Partly about her, and partly about how on earth I might explain her to Dr. Owens, the town’s only baby doctor.
“I read in a book that it’s from havin’ low blood pressure. Book said eatin’ something salty’s supposed to help.”
I went to the cupboard and started looking through the shelves. Maggie had rearranged everything: canned goods, dry goods, spices. The half-empty boxes of stale cereal had been removed. The almost-empty bottles of vinegar and sticky jars of molasses had been replaced with brand new ones and were lined up in neat little rows. She’d replaced the crummy shelving paper with new flowered yellow lining.
“How about some Jiffy Pop?” I asked, pulling the popcorn out by the metal handle.
It had been ages since I’d made Jiffy Pop. I actually recalled setting off the smoke alarm in Hanna’s kitchen the last time. (I’d burned most of the kernels, and the rest had remained un-popped and stuck to the bottom of the aluminum pan.) “Alrighty then,” I said, and peeled off the cardboard top, reading the directions as I turned the burner on.
Maggie stayed in her reclined position at the table, her eyes closed.
“Where’s Shelly?” I asked.
“Over to Hanna and Paul’s. She’s got a paper on Abraham Lincoln or something, and Hanna said she’d help her out,” Maggie said. “I told her to be home in time for supper.”
I stood at the stove, waiting for something to pop.
“Whatcha got it on, low ?”
“No,” I said. “It’s on medium .”
“Oh, that burner don’t work at all,” Maggie said, opening her eyes. She put her washcloth down on the table and stood up. She gripped the edge of the table.
“I got it,” I said. “Sit down.”
I moved the popcorn to the back burner and turned it on. Shortly it was popping, the aluminum foil was ballooning, and I was elated. I even managed to pull it off the heat in time. “Ouch,” I said, burning my fingers on the hot tin foil and steam. I poured the popcorn into a bowl and set it down in front of Maggie. “Wait!” I said as she reached in for a handful. I grabbed the saltshaker and shook it vigorously over the bowl. “There.”
Maggie grabbed a handful of popcorn and threw a piece up into the air. She opened her mouth and caught it on the tip of her tongue. I tried the same, and my first attempt landed on the floor. “Try again,” she said, laughing.
I tried again, and the popcorn landed square on my tongue.
“You feel better yet?” I asked.
“World’s stopped twirling at least,” she said, and shoveled another handful of popcorn in her mouth.
Shelly opened the front door, and seeing us sitting at the kitchen table eating popcorn, she threw her backpack down and slammed the door shut.
“C’mere, Shelly-girl. It’s just like the movies,” Maggie said. “Just without Matt Dillon.”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
Shelly rolled her eyes.
“You hungry, I hope,” Maggie said, standing up. “I got some chili on the stove.”
Shelly looked at me and scowled. “I already ate. Hanna made me supper,” she said, her lips drawn tight. “She said I need to put some meat on my bones.”
I ignored the obvious attempt to make me feel rotten and grabbed another handful of popcorn.
“Hanna says I’m welcome anytime. She even set up a bed for me in our old room. Said I could sleep over whenever I want.”
Now I was pissed. I had made it clear to Hanna that we were doing fine. I felt undermined. Betrayed.
“Look what your daddy bought you today,” Maggie said, handing Shelly the pink dress.
Shelly looked at the dress. “Probably won’t fit,” she said. “He doesn’t even know my size.”
Maggie peered at the tag and said, “Looks like he do.”
Shelly shrugged.
“Want some popcorn, honey?” I asked.
“I said I already ate ,” she said angrily.
“You shouldn’t talk to your daddy that way,” Maggie said sternly. The change in her tone of voice took me by surprise. Shelly’s mouth gaped open, her eyes wide.
“It’s okay,” I said, feeling sorry for Shelly. “She’s just…”
“She’s bein’ rude,” Maggie said to me. And then to Shelly, “You’re bein’ rude. He’s your daddy. I ever talk to my daddy like that I be laid across his knee. That’s the truth. One time I sassed him in front of some church friends, and I couldn’t sit down for a whole week.”
The idea of Maggie getting a spanking seemed ludicrous. I kept forgetting how little distance was between her childhood and now. Only about four or five months.
“I’ve got homework,” Shelly said, picked up her backpack, and started for her room. But then, as if she’d had second thoughts, she grabbed the dress off the table and ran down the hallway, slamming her door behind her.
Maggie smiled at me.
“Thanks,” I said.
She tossed a piece of popcorn up into the air, and realizing it was for me, I opened my mouth and waited for it to land, salty and warm, on my outstretched tongue.
Heat Lightning
I n August, in the season of wild blueberries and fireflies, Jeffrey Norris died in Vietnam. He was the first of our classmates to be killed. And after his body was flown home, I mowed the lawn around his new grave, thinking that the last time I’d seen him had been at graduation, and he’d used white medical tape to spell out USA on his mortarboard.
It was maybe a week later that I saw his mother sit down on the floor, in the middle of the post office, and weep when she received what must have been a posthumous letter from Jeffrey. It was embarrassing, this public display of grief. I was waiting in line to send my mother a package of items she had requested. Despite her earlier plans, she had decided to stay on in Mississippi through the fall. She’d asked for her Swiss Army knife, a piece of beach glass she had found on Nantucket when she was a little girl, and a check for $200. My father had packaged the objects up for her and carefully penned the address on the box. But he sent me to the post office, blaming a busy schedule. He missed her. We both did.
The post office was hot, one whirring fan spinning overhead, making shadows on the linoleum floor. When Mrs. Norris crumbled, after Larry Knowles (Missy’s father, the postmaster) handed her the parchment airmail letter, it only looked as though she’d fallen. Someone offered her a hand, as you would to someone who had slipped. But when she refused his help, and a small moan grew in her throat and escaped through the painted O of her mouth, filling the post office lobby with the animal sounds of her sorrow, the post office patrons, including myself, looked at the floor, at the large numbered clock on the wall, at anything but Mrs. Norris, legs splayed out in front of her like a child, as she grieved.
In one week, I was to leave for Middlebury, and I hadn’t packed a single thing. Betsy’s room was filled with neatly labeled cardboard boxes. She was buzzing with excitement, positively antsy. I, on the other hand, was a sentimental fool, eighteen years old going on eighty. Every afternoon in the final weeks of summer, I insisted that we visit one old haunt or ano
ther: Vanilla Cokes and Orange Crushes at the Rexall, car rides to the Heights, bike rides to the river. Betsy humored my premature nostalgia primarily because our little outings made time go more quickly; she could barely wait to leave. Her excitement about the future mixed with my longing for the past ( for her, for her ) finally made me so melancholy I could barely stand it anymore. At the post office that day, when Jeffrey Norris’s mother sat down and cried on the floor, I wanted to join her. I wanted to throw myself to the ground next to her and cry like a baby.
By the time it was time to actually go, I’d resigned myself to four years of desperate unhappiness. I saw the school year ahead as something to endure before I could return to my life in Two Rivers the following summer: three seasons of misery to suffer through. I packed reluctantly, and on the day before I was to leave, I only wanted to be with Betsy. I only wanted the last hours and minutes to decelerate, to freeze. I pictured the day as a photograph, a frozen image of the last day I would truly be happy.
Despite Betsy’s pleas to go on an adventure (drive to Canada, go to the granite quarries in Montpelier, go try to get into bars in Burlington), we ended up spending the day swimming. It was so hot and muggy, there was little else to offer relief from the heat, and I didn’t want to spend the day driving. It was the most ordinary of days. And, because of its import (in my mind at least) the most extra ordinary. It took every bit of my energy not to call Betsy’s attention to the significance of the smallest things (the muddy bottom of the river, the slant of sun through leaves, the frogs that joined us as we cooled off on the cool, wet rocks). By the time the sun fell, heat lightning was lighting up the sky in intermittent pink flashes of light. Lightning without thunder, a storm without rain. It made me anxious, unsettled. Betsy’s anxiety was also palpable.
