Grimshaw leans over. “If they fail us,” she whispers, “I’m not coming back.”
“What are you talking about? What will you do?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “But I have to do something. I can’t just wait around, like my life’s gonna fall out of a tree and land on me. That’s what I’ve been doing, just sitting on a rock and waiting. And it’s not working.”
“But you have to finish school.”
“Why? Obviously, I’m not learning anything.”
I wish I had an answer for this, a scheme for us, a vision, a plan, but I don’t. We always talk about leaving Colchis and going to New York City, where she’ll be a famous dancer and I’ll be famous, too. She dances, and I—well, I don’t know what I do, but I figure it out and do it and be famous, and we meet at sidewalk cafés and put our cold drinks on tiny tables. I feel like the future is coming at us too fast, though, and I wish I had known what to do to get ready for it. Claudette and Angel come out of the girls’ room, and then Mrs. Kmiec comes out and signals us all back into Mr. Van’s office.
“All of you have failed Western Civ for the year.” The principal’s voice is crisp. “If you plan to graduate next year, you do need that history credit.”
Claudette’s mouth hangs open. “You mean we have to repeat the whole year?”
“If you want to graduate, yes.”
“What about summer school?” asks Angel.
“We’re not offering Western Civ this summer.”
“I’m talking to my father,” Claudette storms.
“Good,” my mother says. “I will be, too.”
Mr. C. stands up. He rubs his hands triumphantly. “I’ll see you in September, girls.”
* * *
On the drive home, my mother seems more tired than mad. She informs me that of course she knows I didn’t plagiarize, but I didn’t deserve to pass Western Civ anyway, so yes, I do have to take it again next year, and so does Melody: she is not going to put her career in jeopardy defending my right to be an arrogant little smart-ass. Mr. C. plays golf with the chairman of the school board, and that’s probably where her candidacy for principal will be decided. “Not that there shouldn’t be further consequences—”
“Maybe you should get contact lenses,” I suggest, trying to divert that one at the pass. “Your glasses make you look more liberal than you really are.”
She lets out one long, irritated exhalation. “Serena,” she starts.
“What? Allegra gives you career tips all the time.”
She lets out another one of her tight sighs and grips the steering wheel. Then she remembers a recent commitment to take all her problems to the Lord, so she starts to pray. “Dear Lord,” she starts, “please help this family and guide our thoughts toward You.” When my mother prays, she has this creepy prayer voice she uses, which makes me feel like I have snails crawling up my back. “Lord,” she continues, “we just thank You today, for Your blessings, and also for Your wisdom, Lord, and we know that if we trust in You as a family, You will bring us to the same place together.” Then she gets to the point, which is to guide Serena’s footsteps closer to the will of God. At this point, I sigh heavily. It’s wrong to sigh in the middle of a prayer, but I can’t help it. In addition to being the new principal of the high school and raising five kids, my mom is in church multiple times per week and maintains committed prayer relationships on the phone. When Mom started dating my stepfather, she joined his church, where the half of Colchis that isn’t Catholic goes. That was seven years ago. Scot had been recently widowed and had a baby daughter, Nora, who is now my little sister. My mom got involved with him and then added religion later to smooth things out with his parents, who didn’t trust this older woman, this highly educated single mother of three.
We—Aaron, Allegra, and I—thought her relationship with Scot was going to be short-lived—after all, we’d seen Mom through other guys before—but then she got pregnant.
Oops.
A prominent educator in a conservative county getting knocked up by a younger man, what a disaster. When Mom and Scot told us they were going to get married and have a baby, all I can remember is Allegra sobbing about overpopulation. My mom and the baby, Zack, were baptized on the same day.
Since the prayer’s not likely to end soon, I take The Communist Manifesto, also from Mr. C.’s room, out of my backpack. When I open it up, it has that faint smell of burning paper that old books have.
“Put that away,” my mother snaps.
I turn the page.
“I said put it away.”
“Me? I can’t read now?”
“I’m waiting.”
“Fine.” I put it back in my backpack. “I thought you were talking to someone else.”
She resumes her prayer, still on the subject of Serena, which really irritates me. Even when talking to God, I think it’s rude for people to refer to you in the third person when you are sitting right there. She’s having a hard time maintaining her prayer voice, though, so she gives up and leaves God hanging.
“You’re grounded,” she says, “just on principle.” She keeps going. I will have to babysit Nora and Zack every day until I leave for Maine. And, no, I won’t get paid for it. Money is very tight right now, and Scot is moving his office to the bedroom over the garage, to save on rent.
“Does that mean Nanci Lee’s gonna be at the house?” I ask.
Nanci Lee is Scot’s secretary, so of course that’s what it means, my mother says, and if her girls are with her, I can babysit for them, too. For free. She keeps thinking of more punishments. As a matter of fact, I won’t even get to go to Maine. Nope, no Maine at all. I don’t deserve it. The more she piles on, the angrier she gets. Oh yes, I will have to write an apology to Mr. C., and not with another one of my smart-ass screeds, either, she will read it first. And I have to start going to church again; she should never have let me get away with a stunt like I pulled with the condom. I owe an apology to Pastor Don for that one. I endure this onslaught of consequence without responding to it. Reason would just be wasted on her.
Eventually, we roll through stone pillars that spell out Versailles in wrought-iron lettering, and drive the quarter mile to the last and only house in the development. We’re home.
When we pull up in front of the house, there is Scot, with his secretary and rumored mistress, Nanci Lee. Her nasty twins are with her, Madison and Taylor, looking like they drink ground glass out of their sippy cups. When we roll up in the car, everybody ignores us. Only our old dog seems happy that we’re home by standing up and wagging his tail. Nanci Lee’s glance flickers in our direction and dismisses us, like she’s the one who owns the place and we are the uninvited guests. She is always entering Madison and Taylor into kiddie beauty pageants, and nobody cares that they bully my little sister, Nora.
We sit for a minute in the car without getting out.
“I don’t understand this penchant for naming your baby daughters after early American presidents.”
“Serena,” my mother says with a tight jaw, “I’ve had just about enough of your—”
“If I had twin girls, I’d name them Hamilton and Burr and get it over with.”
After a second of silence, my mother gets the joke. She lets out a yelp of laughter, which is loud enough for them to hear, and they look at us. Nanci Lee looks at me and narrows her eyes. I give her the peace sign, and she looks away. Some people just instantly recognize each other as enemies, and that is me and Nanci Lee. She’s the cheerleading coach at the high school, and those two cheerleaders who failed Western Civ are her acolytes. My mother leans her head on the steering wheel, and her shoulders shake with laughter. Good. If you make your oppressors laugh, they can’t keep punishing you, which is something anyone who has read The Communist Manifesto should know.
My mother gets out of the car and goes at Nanci Lee with a big, phony hug, which Nanci Lee returns with as little enthusiasm as she dares. Scot doesn’t look up from his phone. I get out
and slam the car door. I walk through the middle of them without saying anything to anybody and go inside and lock myself in my room with French poetry. I’m not taking French IV next year, which broke Mlle. O’Shea’s heart. She gave me the poetry to keep my love of French alive “until college,” an institution for which I have no use whatsoever. It seems like four more years of high school to me, four more years of people telling you what to read. But Mlle. O’Shea is right that I love how French sounds: sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in a place where everything anyone says sounds like they’re breathing love at each other. If my mother knew how much I like reading Baudelaire, she’d probably take that away, too, so I stay in my room all night, reading “Spleen” and listening to sounds of conviviality from the family dinner below, in honor of my sister Allegra’s and brother Aaron’s successful school year.
* * *
My punishment starts after Allegra and Aaron leave for Maine. On my first full day of babysitting, I take Nora and Zack and go to Grimshaw’s. We ride bikes down the dirt road that comes out near the trailer park, and from there we cross the highway and coast about half a mile to the junkyard. It’s almost noon. When we get there, two of Grimshaw’s older brothers are staring into the engine of a blue Subaru station wagon.
“There she is,” they say cheerily when they see me, like I’m the one who just got out of jail. “How you been?”
“Good.” Nora and Zack shrink against me and say nothing.
“Hold this.” Dale hands me a flashlight. “See right down there? That little pipe coming out of the engine wall? Shine it right on that spot. I can’t trust these guys to do it right.”
I hold the flashlight just so while Dale crawls under the car. “You should get a headlamp,” I say down into the engine, which sets off a round of jokes about mining and joining the union and going on strike so you can get paid to do nothing. Under the car, Dale’s laughter comes up through the engine as I watch him loosen the nut I’m pointing the flashlight at. Nora and Zack stare up at me with their mouths open, like they had no idea I had such impressive skills. Eventually, Dale gets the nut loose, and I help pull him out from under the car by his boots. Then we head toward the house.
None of Grimshaw’s older brothers live at home, except for Gumby, who can’t take care of himself and so will never leave, and Ruby, the closest to Grimshaw in age, who sleeps on the pool table in the basement. Ruby’s boots are sticking out from underneath his pickup truck, a two-tone yellow and white antique, his pride and joy. I kick the sole of the left one as I go by. He grunts in his sleep. We find Grimshaw inside the house, already in her bathing suit. Her niece Whitney and her nephew Dallas are standing each with an arm inside a box of cereal, staring slack-jawed at a game show. I toss her the latest issue of her dance magazine. When she sees me, Mrs. Grimshaw greets me with her usual hospitality. She snaps off the TV, hauls herself to her feet, and shuffles massively away. She doesn’t have her teeth in.
“Take those kids outside,” she orders over her shoulder.
Grimshaw packs cookies and chips and soda, representing three of the four basic Grimshaw food groups—the other one being cigarettes—and we head outside into the June sunshine. The kids follow us in a line, like ducklings. At the edge of the woods behind her house is a field filled with old farm junk, plows and rakes and manure spreaders, as well as a wasp-infested wood-paneled Country Squire station wagon sitting on its axles. Grimshaw used to use the front hood as her stage, putting on dance performances for an audience of nobody. Between the field and the woods runs a stream where Grimshaw and I dammed a swimming hole a few summers back. Grimshaw sits down to read her magazine, and the rest of us slide down the shale and then pick our way upstream to a flat spot where the water pools. I start pulling rocks out of the swimming hole that have fallen in over the winter and spring. We build the dam back up so the water gets deep enough for the kids to dunk under. I catch a crawfish and show it to them. Then we make boats out of pieces of bark, decorate them with bottle caps and other trash, and race them down the stream.
I look up at Grimshaw, a nonparticipant in our fun. She’s sitting cross-legged on the bank above us, with her face tilted up at the sun. Her chin makes a shadow that vees down between her breasts. Her eyes are closed. I climb up and sit next to her and throw grass at her face.
“Ruby says there’s a big party in the gorge tonight,” she says.
“That’s cool. Except I’m grounded for failing history.”
She’s incredulous. “Just for that?”
“Yup. The only difference between me and a political prisoner is that I can lock my own door.”
“Can’t you sneak out tonight?” she asks.
“No problem. I’ll sever the chain-link fence with my bolt cutters, crawl through the concertina wire on my elbows, and tunnel under the guards at the perimeter with a spoon.”
Grimshaw sighs heavily. Her eyes remain shut. Sometimes my sarcasm wears her out.
“Is Ruby going?” I ask.
“Of course. He asked me if we wanted a ride.” I don’t exactly have a crush on Grimshaw’s brother Ruby, but I do sort of think of him as mine. If Grimshaw has a boyfriend with a car, sometimes we go on double dates. Grimshaw and friend sit in the front and make out, and Ruby and I sit in the back, usually with Jake and Jaws, Ruby’s two Rottweiler mixes. If Grimshaw and friend want to get serious, they get out and go somewhere else, and Ruby and I usually stop kissing and talk about cars.
“Are you going to meet up with Junior Davis?” I ask.
She opens her eyes. “Will you let go of Junior Davis? I told you, he doesn’t have a car. Besides, he left for football camp yesterday.”
“How do you know that?”
She shrugs. “I know things, too, you know.”
“You better watch out for that cheerleader.”
“I’m not worried about any cheerleader. So if you don’t go tonight,” she says, “I’m going with Mike Lyle.”
“Not the one in the Corvette,” I guess.
“Yes. That one.”
“Figures. I knew you knew who it was.”
“You’re not allowed to be a snob, Serena. He has wheels.”
“Yeah, but it’d probably go faster if he stuck his feet through the rust holes and ran.” That gets a laugh out of her, the first one of the day.
“Don’t give him any crap about it, okay? He paid a lot of money for that car. He’s very sensitive about it.”
“How old is it? How old is he?”
“I don’t know. Old. Promise you won’t give him any crap?”
“I won’t give him any crap. It just looks like the car is about six sizes too small for him, that’s all.”
“He thinks you don’t like him.”
“I haven’t even met him! He is sensitive. What does he want with you, anyway?”
“Nothing. He just comes by and we get to talking.”
“Yeah. After he stalks you. What a loser.”
“He’s got a car,” she says. “And he’s not a loser, anyway, he’s okay.”
I remember how I noticed the car in the first place. There was something deliberate, something watchful about the way the car moved down the street. I would bet anything he was looking for her. And then he came here, which was weird. Not that she’s not pretty, because of course she is. It’s just that she comes from this long and proud line of Grimshaws, who are gun-shootin’, chaw-chewin’, school-quittin’, weed-growin’ rednecks, and if you take her on, you get the rest into the bargain. Not many guys come by here. Until Mike, I can’t even think of one.
Grimshaw starts telling me not to be jealous, either, that there are guys out there for me, too, but I might have to wait for college to find them. They might not be here in the Valley, boys who walk around with their face in a book like I do.
“I’m not going to college,” I remind her. “College is for people who can’t figure it out on their own.”
“Don’t be a dumb-ass,” she says.
“Anyway,” she concludes, “you shouldn’t worry about Mike. I don’t even like him. I mean, he’s nice, but it’s just that something needs to happen with me. I’ll be eighteen, and if something doesn’t happen soon, it won’t ever, and then I’ll be stuck here.”
I try to think of something reassuring, like we can figure it out ourselves, but I can’t really think of any specific ideas.
“Mike says he knows people who can help me.”
“Help you do what?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Dance? Make something happen?”
“You’re sure he’s not saying what he thinks you want to hear, just to make you happy?”
“What the hell’s wrong with trying to make me happy? Who’s ever wanted that?”
The four kids come clambering up the shale toward us for food. They’re hungry.
“And try not to wear that stupid hat tonight, okay, just once?” she says. “Everyone thinks we’re communists.”
“I have to wear it. My roots are growing out.”
She sighs. “Nobody even remembers what color your hair is. Or cares.”
“That’s the whole idea.”
“I was buying cigarettes, and the guy behind the counter asked me how the revolution was going. Because of you.”
“Dancers shouldn’t smoke.”
I pass out the food and the drinks. As far as asking my mom if I can go to the gorge tonight, I might as well ask her for permission to grow wings and flap them all the way to the moon. It would be one thing if I were Allegra, who gets away with murder because she’s so trustworthy, but I’m not Allegra. If you’re not trustworthy, you need a plan.
The Spaces Between Us Page 3
