“Point it out more. You don’t want it on the roof,” said Danny.
“I can manage this a little better than Dad,” said Tom.
During Danny’s fifteenth summer, his father, all heft and stiff knees, clambered out onto the roof from Libby’s porch to stamp out an errant firework in a muddy gutter.
“Lucky he didn’t blow his foot off,” said Tom.
It’s an overgrown sparkler, not a land mine, thought Danny. But he kept quiet. He had plenty of experience watching Libby say the things he was feeling, and Gwen do the things he was afraid to do. He knew it was not worth fighting Tom on much. Particularly since emotion and sentiment seemed to have no effect on him. Maybe Tom was a robot. Maybe Scarlet and Bob got him as a baby prototype, My First Kid.
Snap, the lighter, fizz and flare, the fuse. The two of them running up the ramp, ducked low, but high-kneed, looked like burglars.
This first one fizzled with a shrieking whistle, but without a light. Catcalls from the porch. The women enjoying themselves up there, leaning back in wicker chairs, moving from wine back to cocktails.
“Gotta try harder than that, boys.” Gwen.
“Yeah, Washington wouldn’t have seen much glory by that light.” Melissa, such a nerd sometimes, thought Danny.
“You’re thinking of Francis Scott Key,” called Tom back toward the porch.
“Just blow something up,” shouted Gwen.
They tried again. Approaching slowly in case something hadn’t gone off, in case it was a live one.
Danny pulled the spent cracker from the coffee can, and Tom slid a new one from the package. Up the ramp, they watched the thing whistle by in a stream of light and plume in the sky. Then the booming crack that was delayed and the umbrella of sparks, yellow, faded to green as it slid down the sky like so much electric rain.
Great whoops and whistles from the porch. More. Again.
“Make our ears bleed.” Gwen.
They went through four more; one with the whirling dervishes of “The Five Spangled Banner”; one with concentric rings, “Let Freedom Ring-a-Ding”; and two more different shades of Queen Anne’s lace, “Lady Liberty.”
There was a pause as they assembled the finale. Tom had these and more lined up along the float, perpendicular to the slats to be sure that none slipped through. Danny liked that. Together they weeded and traded, paired and grouped. Pantomiming reminders of different shapes, explaining that the star-covered ones were always blue, the ones with gold foil on the tips were yellow with an orange finish, with silver, yellow with a green finish. Back and forth.
“Tom,” Danny said—swapping out the Whistling Dixie for the booming Cannons of America—“we need to keep the house.”
Tom sat back on his heels, holding the paper-wrapped explosives across his knees. “‘Need’ is a strong word.”
They had turned off the dock light, for a better view, and with the light of town behind him, Danny couldn’t tell if Tom was looking at him or the house.
“Sometimes if you want something enough it becomes a need,” said Danny.
“That’s called obsession.”
“I love this house, Tom.” Danny didn’t want to say it, but he couldn’t help it. “When you were little, you guys had each other all the time. But for me, with you guys away at school, I only really saw you here. This is our house, you know? I understood when Mom sold Archer Avenue. Dad gone, us away. But here? We’re here.”
He could feel the tears coming, blocking out the right words. He never liked to cry in front of Tom. Brothers were supposed to be all slaps on the back and what’s the score and look at those tits. Or at least this was what Danny imagined brothers to be. He wasn’t sure, since he hated organized sports of all types and had never once heard Tom use the word “tits.”
In fact, Tom seemed to exist outside of sexuality. Unlike Gwen, who had no problem airing her lobsterman obsession in front of the entire family, often barking like a wild dog in the middle of the night. She’d feign modesty in the morning, saying that Kyle or Patch or whomever, just needed some encouragement. Gross, hilarious and gross. Even Libby with her maternal smell and quiet hands, had the hottest girlfriend Danny had ever seen. He knew that had to mean something. Libby was cute and smart, but he knew it took more than that to hook a girl like Patricia.
Poor Melissa, poor cute, nerdy Melissa, who was probably a heartbreaker in college. Before Tom. She still was, really. She kept everyone going with her questions and her earnest nods in response. She’d taught Danny how to make crystals from sugar when he was young. Tied his bow tie at Gwen’s wedding. She whispered in his ear at their mother’s funeral, words that stayed with him, words that settled his heart more than Gwen’s “This sucks” or Libby’s “You were her favorite, and you’re our favorite.”
“What an adventure she is on,” Melissa had said. “She and your dad.” He liked that. That the two of them were loaded down with gear, buckled and strapped and cramponned and goggled. No, that wasn’t it. They were on the deck of a sloop in sun hats and boat shoes, loose billowing cotton shirts that the sun shone through. His mother at the tiller leaning out to starboard, watching the telltales. His father at a winch cranking in the spinnaker, with a good strong wind from the south.
He could be sailing too.
This was his moment to tell Tom: “Didn’t make it to the end of the semester, old man. Could’ve used a term off. Get ’em next year.”
“I’d like to stay here the rest of the summer,” said Danny. “Maybe even into the fall. I need some time up here. I’m sure Libby will be here until at least mid-August.”
“Well, when does your semester start?” said Tom. Enrollment is often required to start a semester, Danny thought, and he had not yet registered. He’d have to take quantum physics and golf. The reject classes.
“I’m not feeling so great about school these days.”
“Not happy with how you finished the semester?”
“Yeah, not really. I kind of took some time off.” Danny cringed there in the dark. There were some grumblings from the porch, a call to pause for bathroom breaks. Girls, always peeing.
“What do you mean, you took a break? When? Did you withdraw from your classes? Did you get your tuition back?”
Danny was on his knees facing the house. He felt as if he were in a church, the float and pier were the nave, and the porch its altar. For a moment he was praying.
“The add/drop period is only the first two weeks of the semester. And withdrawal is only another two weeks after that,” said Danny. Amen. Let it end there.
“And when did you leave?” Tom sounded like a doctor taking vitals.
Danny could practically hear Tom counting days in his head, adding up costs of meals not eaten and books not read.
“In May, right before finals.”
“Can’t you just make up the exams, then? I’m sure there are contingencies.” The relief in Tom’s voice was the worst part. “I could call your professors.” Tom put one knee on the ground and rested an elbow on the other, as if about to sketch an attack plan in the dirt.
“Well. I left in May, but my attendance record wasn’t exactly stellar before that.” Danny rolled a bottle rocket back and forth between his palms, feeling his callouses catch on the paper label.
“I don’t understand? When did you stop attending class?” How many clicks behind the enemy are we?
“Sometime in March maybe.”
“Have you talked to the bursar’s office? Did you take a leave of absence? Did you tell anyone anything before you left?” How’s your ammo stock, C rations, radiation shots?
Danny dug the tip of the bottle rocket into a callous on his hand. He just wanted to sail away.
“I just figured it was too late. Once they’ve got your money, they don’t exactly like giving it back.”
“Yes, Dan, that’s called nonrefundable tuition. It is supposed to be an incentive to go to class.” If the water had been warmer Danny would’ve happily slipped
silently off the edge of the float and paddled out into the darkness.
He hadn’t even attended enough classes to be considered a student in them. Danny did go a few times in the beginning of the semester. He had even taken notes. Notes on how his English professor was single-handedly reviving the suspender; on the correlation between girls’ exposed underwear, tags lapping at the back of their jeans, and class participation. But he’d never established a clear pattern.
He had been that weird guy you’d see on the first day of class and never see again without knowing why. He would wash his hands for twenty minutes, picking each fingernail clean, before deciding that he was, in fact, too late to bother going to class.
His knees hurt from kneeling, but he didn’t want to stand, he didn’t want to appear at all confrontational. Dinner had drained him of all the fire he had. He had nothing left but wet coals smoking and hissing inside him. He wanted to set off the fireworks and run up the ramp, all the way to the porch and finish his gin and tonic next to his sisters.
“That’s disappointing, Dan.”
Tom stood up and walked to the edge of the float, looked out toward the town, toward the moored boats that would give feeble honks of their air horns, for the few fireworks set off. There was a darkness in his voice, just like their father. Rarely, only at times of true peril, had Danny heard it. Like when, at age nine, he took out the Whaler alone. When, in their hundred-year-old wooden house, he left a candle burning in his bedroom.
“Gwen’s right. We can’t make any decisions about the house right now,” Tom said. These disturbingly foreign words, “Gwen’s right,” made Danny nervous.
“Have you talked to the girls about this?”
“Not yet.” Danny heard Tom make a surprised humph.
“But you should know that money, it has to go to school. It’s earmarked. There isn’t much left. Maybe enough for now, but a few tuition increases from now? I don’t know. Think about that, Danny. Think about what it is that you truly need. What I think you need—”
Danny jabbed the bundle of rockets into the sand-filled can, lit them, and then grabbed Tom by the wrist, pushing his older brother up the ramp ahead of him. He couldn’t listen to any more. They ran up the path, Tom now pushing Danny ahead of him, up the steps, and onto the porch.
“Jesus, Danny, that’s how you blow off your hand or end up with a glass eye.”
Melissa came through the screen door. Tom stopped talking. She turned and shouted back into the house, “Hurry it up, ladies. The Wonder Twins couldn’t wait.”
Their finale was already bursting over the float. The fireworks squealed. Someone had cleared away his gin and tonic.
“Dan,” Tom said, “tomorrow we will make some phone calls.” Danny thanked God for bad cell reception and rotary phones.
EIGHT
LIBBY
July 5
After she washed the lunch dishes, Libby went up to her porch and found Gwen topless, basking like a bird, arms out, on a white towel. The glare from the towel and the white railings imprinted on Libby’s eyes, and with each blink, she saw the negative image of her sister’s silhouette. A white bird in a black sky. Libby took off her shirt and sat leaning against the house in her bra and shorts.
“Where is Miss Patricia?” Gwen asked, not moving or opening her eyes. Gwen was one of the few people who always rolled the r and gave the c the sibilance that the Spanish pronunciation required.
“She’s back in Boston,” Libby said. Her legs were perpendicular to Gwen’s; if Libby pointed her foot she could touch Gwen’s calf.
“Bibs, she can be here when we’re here. I love that lady.”
“I know. I’m just . . . Anyway, she had things to do.”
“You still think Tom doesn’t approve?” Gwen rolled onto her side and propped her head up on one elbow. “I hate to break it to you, but we all saw this coming. If anything, he’s just jealous that you can get a hotter chick than he can.”
“She always jokes that, in Segovia, she’s no one. But in Boston, she’s a goddess.” Patricia was all beauty and passion, not just for sex, but for everything. She was more like Gwen in that way, sumptuous and slow in her enjoyment of things: escargot, the swan boats, the curve of Libby’s stomach. Next to her, Libby felt clumsy and awkward, all slapping feet and pathetic breasts.
“She should be up here for family time,” said Gwen. “Next year, no excuses.”
Libby kicked softly at her sister’s leg as Gwen rolled over. Gwen shared a not-so-ample bosom with Libby, but on Gwen, Libby thought it looked svelte and trim and somehow more sexy. Maybe it was because Gwen never wore a bra—“What’s the point?”—and wore those tissuey tanks with dangerously wide armholes. Though today her breasts had a plump quality, not bigger exactly, but somehow more ample. Libby in slinky tops felt exposed, simultaneously slutty and unfeminine. Like a dyke. She kept her hair long to offset that impression. Still, she wondered if there wasn’t something in her skin that let everyone know, an undertone of cerulean or magenta.
Patricia was an administrator at the nursery school where Libby taught. At school Patricia was the only one in heels or tall boots and knit dresses or jeans tight enough to flood her heart with blood, like high-style compression hose. If Patricia was fire in the classic Spanish sense, Libby was water, boat, sea, breeze, house—in the WASP sense. Lesbian or not, Libby refused to even use the term. She didn’t call Patricia her girlfriend, but Gwen did. She didn’t call herself a lesbian, but Gwen did: “If you’ve only slept with women, you’re a lesbian.” There had been one man, though, a boyfriend of Gwen’s, which Libby, of course, never mentioned to her sister.
“Patricia wants to move in together,” said Libby as she picked up a pair of pine needles, joined at one end like delicate tweezers, and pulled them apart. She found the idea stifling. Her space, her home, her identity—all would become linked to someone else. Linked to someone so beautiful and loud people stared at her on the street, someone who inexplicably wore a bra to bed (actually there was a totally irrational explanation Libby preferred to ignore about a grandmother’s old wives’ tale and voluptuous Spanish flesh).
“Watch out, your excitement might be contagious,” said Gwen. “She’s smart and funny and she cooks. How bad could it be?”
“It’s just the accent,” Libby said. “She’s really not that clever.”
“Everyone is a sucker for an accent,” said Gwen.
Libby managed to see both ends of the spectrum simultaneously. Patricia was sophisticated and totally exasperating, and Libby was at once mesmerized and annoyed by her.
Gwen rolled a pinecone toward Libby; the porch was scattered with them, like beer cans on a public beach. The pinecone wobbled in an arc and stopped a foot short of Libby’s leg. They both closed their eyes and let the sun grow hot on their skin.
No, she wasn’t ready. Maybe there were other women out there, other men. Not that she wanted anyone else; she simply wanted to be able to extract herself easily in case she did. But the idea of life without Patricia made her feel sick, congested, her ears blocked, her olfactory nerves deadened. Life without her would be a perpetual flu.
It was Libby who had stepped forward, put herself on what she imagined was a long government roster of women who fell in love with women. The list of women who fuck women was too long to maintain; women’s colleges skewed the data. Three years before, at a play, Libby had held Patricia’s hand. She was the one who reached out first. It was not like her. She was someone to wait, to let things develop, to give things space to breathe. On the day of her high school graduation, Libby’s mother had told her that she stood back from life, that if she weren’t careful it would go right by and she wouldn’t even know what it tasted like, smelled like; it would just be a breeze and then gone. So Libby had made moves before this, to be sure that life, one small corner of life at least, grazed her hand, her lips. Later, she realized her mother hadn’t been telling her to find Life, but to find a certain acceptable lifestyle.
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br /> Libby chose to take the version of the advice she preferred. She hoped for experience, for vibrancy, but didn’t believe it was a thing that could really happen. Or, rather, she knew that it could, just not to her. She could flip a switch in her living room, and the desk lamp would come on, but she couldn’t explain how electricity worked beyond an explanation that would suit her three-year-old students: it is made in a station and travels down the wires to your house, but you don’t want to waste it. Don’t waste it, she had thought, with Patricia’s hand in hers. Don’t let this current expire in an empty socket.
Days before the hand-holding, she had felt a current, a small charge rush through her feet. While Patricia was at lunch, Libby crept into her office and, something that shamed her like masturbation or childhood shoplifting, she picked up the lavender sweater hanging over the back of Patricia’s chair and pressed it to her face, inhaling deeply. It smelled like honey and musk. A charge swept through Libby and brought the arches of her feet up from the soles of her shoes.
So it was then, standing in the dark of the theater, after the curtain fell with the stuttering sound of applause all around them, when Libby had slid her hand into Patricia’s. Months later, she asked Patricia why she hadn’t been clapping. Why had they stood with the rest of the ovation, neither of them clapping, like the still spot of a stone beneath rippling water? The play was Twelfth Night, and some of its magic must have swept over the seats, over the little orchestra, and down the broad aisles to Libby’s fingertips. She wrapped them first around the corner of Patricia’s hand opposite the thumb and then slid them into the small bowl of her palm. Patricia’s fingers closed over hers, then opened as she slid Libby’s fingertips between her fingers, just there, pressing Libby’s rings down.
“Is Patricia coming up in August, then, with the rest of your crew?” said Gwen.
Libby opened her eyes, but everything was white and blurred at its edges. She picked up a pinecone, bent her knees, and let the pinecone roll down her thighs into her lap.
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