“Well . . .”
“I love onion rings. When I was a kid in New York, we used to go to this one place where they would just give you a paper bag full of them, and the whole bottom would be soaked through in minutes—”
“That’s just like here!” She smiled.
We got two orders, and Arley asked me suddenly, “You want to see where my grandma is?”
“Okay,” I said, glancing involuntarily at my watch. She saw it. “It won’t take long,” she said, with a burble of laughter in her voice. “It’s not like what you think.”
She directed me a half block down the road to a little cemetery, almost invisible from the car. I followed Arley up onto a small ridge, through a choke of weeds and wildflowers. We came to a black marble stone, shaped like a square footlocker. “This is my grandma,” Arley said softly. “Amelia Mowbray. My grandfather, I never knew him. He’s buried somewhere else, I guess. But Grandma I remember. I was about nine when she passed. She used to live right here, down on Miranda Street, with my mother’s brother Randall, who has schizophrenia. He lives in a state home now. I always thought he was kind of nice. Grandma was nice too. She worried about Randall all the time, but sometimes she would come over and play checkers with me, and sometimes took me to bingo. Langtry, she stayed home with Randall, and they had a teacher come in once in a while because of a hardship situation. So Lang never had to go to school. She did the cooking and cleaning for Grandma, because Grandma had an ulcer. I wish Mama would have named me for her, instead of how she did.”
“I think you have a beautiful name.”
“It’s humiliating, though, when you know how I got it. See, she named us after the towns where she was when they . . . when she . . .”
“What?”
“When she got pregnant. That’s what she said. When I wanted to change my name to Amelia when I was about ten or eleven, she said, ‘I named you what I named you for a reason. Just count yourself lucky you’re not called Brownsville or Matagorda.’ I told Dillon that right off. You can’t imagine telling something like that to a stranger. That was how I knew there was something special between us.”
Arley settled down on the tombstone like an old lady snuggling into her favorite settee. “Well,” she said, clearly enjoying the chance to recite her life, “about a year ago was when I started my program.”
“Your program?”
“I took stock. It was when Ricky Nevadas told me he saw Lang in San Antonio at the Alamo Plaza with his uncle Frank. It wasn’t like some big surprise. She used to go out with older guys all the time. One of the gym teachers from the middle school went out with her. I heard that. And he got in trouble, because she was only fifteen or so. Not that I have any room to talk. But it’s different for Dillon and me. I mean, it’s like we are the same age. It’s like I’m even teaching him some things, in a way. It’s not just guys being older. It’s what they are. See, everybody knows about Ricky’s uncle.”
“Knows what?”
“Well, he’s . . . he’s like fifty years old,” Arley admitted, now brushing her lips furiously with her hair, as if trying to paint away her words. “But that wasn’t it. He’s . . . he’s like in the Mafia. Or something. He’s been on the news.”
“Did you tell your mother?”
She laughed, a deep-throated little-girl hoot that made me want to cradle the back of her head in my hand. “Uh, no! I surely didn’t tell her!” Arley’s face clouded over again. “I just figured then I had to decide what I was going to do with my life. ’Cause I wasn’t going to end up like Lang! So I took stock. I did it like . . . See, when Elena’s father travels for business? He gets these maps from Triple A, with a big fat red line on a map and stars for all the places to change highways or stop overnight?”
That’s how she’d laid out her teenage years. A map. There were choices to make. The girls she read about in Seventeen were all popular. Elena was popular, “though she’s a little wild. But not really. It’s all like a big act.” Elena’s big sister Connie was a nice girl, and really pretty, and played girls’ softball all the way to state and was the first person in the whole Gutierrez family to go to college.
“I got out books on dating dos and don’ts and Christianity and low-fat cooking and color matching. I started making little charts about what I ate, and I decided to do one thing every day to improve myself, even if it was just flossing. I lined my poetry books up in alphabetical order by author, and I painted my room up there and made curtains, and I got on the track team.” She looked at me shyly. “I could make All-State in the hurdles. You don’t hardly ever get to do that in just ninth grade.”
“And then?”
“And then I started learning about poetry.”
“Do you like to write?”
“Well, sure, I mean—” She cast her eyes down at her broom of hair. “All girls like to write, I think. It’s like you can’t help it. You feel so much, it just comes out.”
“But you’re good at it.”
“I’m not very good at it. Missus Murray says . . . well . . .”
“What?”
“That I have the eye. Just because I was writing about how the surface of leaves were like skin . . .”
“That’s pretty creative.”
“Not really. It’s obvious. But that wasn’t the only reason I got into it. . . .”
“Why else?”
“Because Missus Murray told me once that no matter what else you know or you don’t know, if you can quote from poems, people will always think you’re smart.”
“Makes sense.”
“But she said not just from one poem. Like, anybody can say, ‘And miles to go before I sleep . . .’ You have to know lines from a lot of poems. Like . . . Yeats.”
“Yeats?”
“That’s Missus Murray’s favorite. The words are so beautiful, but they’re hard to understand. You have to really concentrate, like being an athlete. When you’re reading a poem, you can’t think about anything else. It clears you out.”
“I can see what you . . .”
“And, of course, that turned out to be a good thing because Dillon’s really into poetry too, though not very many poems. . . .”
“What do you mean?”
“He . . . says there’s no reason to study other poets once you know Dylan Thomas, because he’s the best.”
Right, I thought.
“I think it’s because of his name, though, really.”
“Sounds kind of juvenile.”
She looked up sharply. “Not really. Lots of people could be really smart if they got the chance. He just didn’t get the chance—”
“Well, he got as much chance as you. . . .”
“Not exactly.” She started gazing around the cemetery, losing interest in her line of defense, apparently, and then said, “So the last thing was, I got to be friends with Elena, and I got my job, and then . . . I met Dillon.”
“All in a year?”
“All in a year. But you know, Missus G. says our years, for Elena and me, are like dog years, seven in each one.” I nodded. “I like this place, don’t you? It’s not really cooler in here, but it feels like it is, you know? And nobody can see you. I used to sit here and read sometimes.”
“Why not now?”
“No.” She lowered her voice. “I’m afraid, a little, of some of the boys who come here to drink. They come right in the day now, and you know, if you’re by yourself you can get scared. . . .”
I nodded, thinking, But not of your boyfriend and his .45.
“What I figured was, writing to Dillon was just supposed to be a part of everything else.”
“Of your program.”
“Right.”
“He understands everything, Miz . . . I mean, Annie. He understands how I feel. . . .”
It was getting dark, and in Texas, darkness falls, there’s practically a sound to it. Arley needed to get herself home or she’d get in hot water. But suddenly I wanted to, had to, tell her about Rachael a
nd Carlos. And if I didn’t do it now, this moment, before I knew her better or thought better of it, the moment would disappear as quickly as the faint halo of light above the big cottonwood at the edge of the field.
“My sister was in love with a boy like Dillon once,” I told her. “And we aren’t the kind of people stuff like this happens to.” I could feel, though not really see, the quick lift of her eyebrows. “I mean, not that you are. But my father was a doctor. Of course, your mother’s a nurse . . . I mean . . .”
“I know what you mean,” Arley said softly. “You can just tell it.”
And I did. About the book-storage room and the time Carlos’s five aunts came to my parents’ apartment for dinner, and about the fight Carlos had in a campus bar with a boy he thought looked at Rachael and how the boy ended up with a concussion. “But it was like she didn’t even care. She saw him hit that kid with a beer mug, and she didn’t even care!” How cloddish, I thought. How utterly stupid! She understands; look what she did. . . .
Arley said, “What Dillon did . . . it seems like on TV to me. I don’t rightly know how I would feel if I saw him with a gun in his hand. I try not to think about that, because he’s so sweet in his letters.”
“But you know what he did—”
“Annie, I know, of course I know, but a lot of boys do bad things. A lot of girls too. I could have done like that. I think a lot of kids who get a little attention from their parents, but not too much, they do bad things to get more.”
“But you didn’t get any attention, and you didn’t do anything bad.”
“Well, I did all that good stuff. It’s the same thing. So everybody would—you know—notice me.” She whipped her dark hair back and forth like a wave. “And think, what if I tried everything but I wasn’t good at any of it? What if I was fat or slow and I couldn’t make the team? I think that’s what Dillon did. I mean, I think he tried to be good but he wasn’t as smart or as big as—”
“Arley, the way he describes himself, he could do anything he wanted—build houses, move mountains—if he weren’t . . .”
“But you don’t believe that, do you? It says in magazines that boys brag all the time because they’re insecure. If he really could do all that stuff he says, he wouldn’t need me so bad. I’m just a fourteen-year-old kid!”
I felt the breath escape me with a rush that made me dizzy. He hadn’t taken her in at all. She saw him clearly, with all the womanly wisdom Seventeen magazine could provide. “Arley,” I said slowly, “you are a good person. And I believe you when you say that Dillon needs your love. But what will you get out of this, in the end?” She didn’t answer right away. She stood up and headed for the car, brushing off her hands on her jeans.
Finally, she said, “I don’t know.”
“What about your life? Maybe you could get a scholarship with track. Go to college. What about your program? What’s going to happen to all that?”
“Well,” she said, glancing at the dashboard clock and looking out the window. “I don’t think I would have to give up on myself to love someone else. Or even a lot of other people. Like, Dillon says his mama is real lonely. He says when his little brother, Philippe, was born, she really wanted a girl. And she’s got a bad back, so she can’t work—”
“His mama?”
“Yes, she wishes she had a daughter.”
“What?”
“Well, she wishes she had—”
“I heard you,” I snapped, exasperated. That was just what Arley needed, another steel magnolia to take care of. “Do you two get along?”
“I never met her. She might go see Dillon at Christmas, and then he’s going to tell her about us.” She turned to me. “But, Annie, no matter what else happens, look what I already have! If I didn’t learn all my poems and do all that other stuff to improve myself, maybe he wouldn’t even like me. He says he had lots of chances to write to other girls. But he never did. Except me. And he wanted to marry me. I wake up in the morning sometimes and think, I’m married. I’m a married woman. I can’t believe it sometimes. My mother never even got married. You know? I’m already farther than my mama was. And the more I know Dillon, the, like, stronger I get. When somebody loves you the way he loves me, it’s just like you have to live up to it. You want to make them proud of you. It’s as though I was waiting all my life for somebody to be that proud of me. . . .”
It terrified her when I started to cry. To tell you the truth, it sort of terrified me. I’m not high-strung or even premenstrual. I don’t cry, except over “Soldier in the Rain.” But I put my head down on the steering wheel and I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop. In a couple of minutes, my head felt like I’d inhaled a public pool. Was it just the pure pity of this kid, who reminded me of . . . me, but not really. I’d never been anything like her, never been in such old shoes at such a young age. But had I ever been as young as she was right now, so ascendant with the glory of a situation that could serve as the model for a textbook called Ten Rules for Fucking Up Your Life Permanently? Pathos and melodrama were the sausage and eggs of my professional life. In my personal life, I relished order and predictability. Was this some kind of germ for middle-aged chaos finally blooming into a full-fledged illness?
“Annie,” Arley kept saying, patting my arm. “Are you sick? Do you think it was eating those onion rings? It’s too hot for that kind of food. . . . Do you want me to call somebody?”
Finally, I got enough of my composure in both hands to hold the wheel and take Arley home. Then I charged through construction traps like . . . well, like a Texan, laying on the horn and swerving onto the shoulder until I got home, where I didn’t even bother to use the garage, just tore open the door of our town house and jumped on Stuart, where he sat on the couch, separating sections of the Times.
“Is it my birthday?” he asked me, incredulous. I usually needed a glass of merlot and a half hour of arctic air from the vents before I could bear to be touched on a day like this. “Do I have a terminal illness I don’t know about yet? Are you crying?”
“No.” I burrowed my hands under his golf shirt and felt his bowed ribs and his flat belly with its hint of give. “I just love you. I love you because you’re the same every day. I love you because you’re my best friend.”
“Anne,” he whispered, “do you ever say the right thing at the right time? Huh?” But he pulled me down across his chest and ruffled my hair before he kissed me. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll take it.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Arley
WHEN WE first started writing, I didn’t think Dillon and me would ever run out of things to tell each other. It was like there were things in me I’d been saving up a whole life to say, things I didn’t even know I knew. I couldn’t see him, so it was like practicing singing in the mirror. I didn’t have to watch him scrunch up his face the way Elena did when I hit a clunker. I could say anything I wanted. He sort of had to pay attention. I mean, he couldn’t go out and work on his motorcycle or something, or go out with another girl. It made me feel strong and really confident.
Those letters to him were my treat I saved up for when I had all my chores and my studying done. I really had to be alone in the house to go down into thoughts about Dillon. I couldn’t think about him fully during the day, when I was so busy, or at track, when the pounding in my knees and my neck drove out every hope but thinking my way over the next hurdle. So I started to set aside little times, fifteen minutes before bed, when I could brush my hair out and have on my clean nightgown, light as paper on my skin. When I would look in the mirror at one of those times, I would be cloudy and pretty, the way you always look right before you go to bed, when nobody is even going to see you.
Dillon’s letters to me I would read in school. There was only so much time in class you actually had to pay attention. And then I would start planning my answers. Late at night, I would stand out on the porch, hanging the dish towels out, and I’d be noticing the dark. There weren’t many lights on that street—maybe becaus
e Avalon is the kind of place you leave when you grow up, so there were lots of old people on our block. And they go to bed early. I’d start thinking words about that dark, words I’d normally write about in my notebooks, for poems, stuff you could never say to another kid your age. But I could write all that to Dillon now. Like he was a journal too, my diary. I would keep copies sometimes, because they were like theme papers.
One of those nights, I wrote: “The lights are really all that separate you from everything else out there. I can hear the wind blowing down from the hill country, and it scares me. That same wind is blowing through all those rooms at the Alamo, where there’s nobody lived there for a hundred years. And it’s blowing down in canyons where somebody could be lying, a skeleton, and his people not even know where he is. I think you can get lonelier in Texas than anyplace on earth, and I used to think you could get lonelier in Avalon than any other place in Texas. But I guess it’s probably the same anywhere in a little town. You can’t imagine anyone feeling that way in Dallas.”
Dillon wrote back and told me this thing about how his grandpa used to have a place way out in the far corner of nowhere. This was when his mama, Kate, was a little girl, and she used to complain about how lonely it was. But his grandpa would say there was all kinds of life you wouldn’t notice in a lonely place. Bats and lizards. Even mesquite and gorse bushes. All kinds of life people didn’t even see. Prison, Dillon wrote, was a lonely place too: “You wouldn’t notice much in the way of human life in here. But I feel full of life, even in this place, when I get your letters.” I would read those things, and every part of me would go soft. I would feel the breath flood into me like I once would have from seeing a surprise shining under a Christmas tree.
Then there would be sometimes when the mail was slow, or he missed a day or two, and then I couldn’t think about anything else; I would start making deals with the school clock—like, if I looked up and more than five minutes had passed, that would mean I had a letter. If I looked up and it was less than five minutes, it would mean I should write to him again first. If I could better my time even by a tenth in wind sprints, there would be a letter. If I couldn’t even beat Paula, then I would get punished, and I wouldn’t get one. Those days were like not having enough breath to live on. But there was never a day bad enough I didn’t want more of him, even if it meant more waiting.
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