Precious

by Sandra Novack

  “Nice night for a drive, too,” Frank said, raising his eyebrows. That Cheshire grin. “There’s no reason to walk.”

  God, how he adored that car—black, sleek-looking with leather interior and chrome wheels. Later, after they were dating, Frank would teach her to drive in that Chevy, and she, nervous to the point of shaking, would hit reverse instead of forward and slam into a tree. She’d shrieked, realizing that she’d caused considerable damage to the back end—the metal completely crushed from the impact, the fender leaning at a bizarre angle. But that night driving her home with the car still intact, Frank bragged and told her it was the first thing he’d saved for in his life, bought with money he’d made working at the country club after school and on weekends. “The pay at the club isn’t great,” Frank confessed. “But the tips, Christ. It’s a shame the old guys can’t find their own balls, but I’m not complaining. Got the car used, a good deal. Fixed it up myself in the old man’s shop.”

  When Natalia inquired about Frank’s family, she was surprised that he told her so much about his father, about his father’s temper. She didn’t know why—perhaps the night itself, the sky deepening over them, magically; or perhaps it was that he’d risked something with a stranger when he had no reason to—but she told him, too, about her life, about internment, about her German parents. She told him—the only person she ever told—about the camp, the wires, the burn around her neck. “I’m a Gyp,” she said, half ashamed, half ready for a rebuke.

  “Must be why you have that look.”

  “What look?”

  “I don’t know,” Frank said, grinning. “That pretty look, I guess.”

  “You won’t tell?” she asked, suddenly nervous and blushing.

  “I won’t ever tell.”

  “I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Then we won’t,” he assured her.

  “Frannie thinks you could be president.”

  “Frannie,” Frank said. “Frannie’s like a kid sister. I’ve known her forever. So where should we go? I’ll drive you anywhere you want, Natalia. Anywhere at all, even to the moon.”

  Natalia glanced out the window and felt herself blush again. “I have to go home.”

  “All the better reason not to. Want to go for a swim? There’s a pond out by a farm I know.”

  She smoothed her skirt. “I don’t have a bathing suit.”

  “Never stopped me.”

  She hit his leg playfully and turned. “Forget it, Frank Kisch.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m a gentleman. I won’t even look.”

  “You would, too!”

  “I wouldn’t look,” he said solemnly. “Even a little.”

  “I would be offended,” Natalia said coyly, “if you didn’t look a little.”

  They laughed and headed out the highway. At an exit on the other side of town, he turned off and traveled out roads populated with farms and orchards. “I always like it here,” he said, pulling into a small grove with a pond, the wheels hitting gravel. “It would be nice to own a place like this.” He parked. Though she would normally have felt uncomfortable in a strange place, she felt oddly protected with Frank that night, as if nothing in the world could harm them. She allowed him to put his arm around her.

  They threaded through the orchard. In the distance there was an old house, the lights on the bottom floor illuminated like eyes. The crickets sang, and Natalia swung her hips as Frank talked. She unleashed a thread of stories on him, telling him, happily, that she once knew a boy who would turn into a wolf at night just to howl at the moon, for the pleasure of it. “Are you like that boy?” she asked. “Free like that?”

  Frank howled then and climbed up a tree. He reached across a branch and picked her an apple. He inched down, presenting it to her, transformed again, not a boy but a gentleman.

  Remembering this, she thinks to place her hand on his leg now. How much she loved that boy and that sweet promise of a man. She wants to say time doesn’t really change us, that she knows that boy is still inside him, waiting. “The thing about memories,” she says instead, looking over, “is that you can pick which ones to hold on to, and which ones to let go of. You can keep the good and leave the bad. Remember that time in the orchard, after Frannie’s house?”

  Frank laughs suddenly. He pushes in the lighter. He leans back, drives with his wrist. “Frannie and Ben, God. We were young then. We were kids.”

  “We’re still those same people.”

  “We’re not kids anymore, so there’s no point pretending, dressing up like kids.” His tone isn’t gruff, but earnest, truthful.

  “Still,” Natalia insists, “a part of us is, the part that remembers us that way. I still love you, you know, despite everything. I still love you like that girl did.” She glances out the window and focuses on the highway: the rock formation that rises up to her right, the spring that trickles down it, the bits of peeled rubber lying by the side of the road. “We were so young when we got married. If I hadn’t gotten pregnant—”

  “I’ve only ever regretted a few things,” he says, peeling out another cigarette from the pack. “That wasn’t one of them, Natalia.”

  “We had to borrow money from your parents, and that tiny apartment.”

  “I found work.”

  “Steel …”

  He says nothing. He tips his cigarette on the side of the window. He looks over for the first time since they’ve been in the car. He picks a piece of filter from his mouth. “I knew you were lying all those months, each time I asked about him, the way you’d turn your head. I thought it would pass.”

  “My home,” she says, “is with you. You’re the only one in the world who knows me. You’re the only one to be with.”

  His gaze returns to the road, and she cannot tell what he’s thinking. Perhaps he’s thinking about the time when they were younger. Perhaps he’s thinking about the doctor, or even Ginny

  After a pause, she says, “You and Ginny—” She stops, feeling something catch in her throat.

  “What about me and Ginny?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re right,” he says, flicking his cigarette out the window. “There’s absolutely nothing between me and Ginny. She was someone to talk to when you were gone.”

  “We never seemed to talk.”

  “We knew each other,” Frank says. “What was there to say?”

  Over the next half hour, the houses thin out to long stretches of land, flat fields, farms with dilapidated roofs and bent, twisted barbed-wire fences. Hex signs for good luck and harvest are painted on the rickety barns. Silver silos loom in the sky. She realizes he’s headed toward Amish country, the long drive that would end at the farmers’ market where people would be idling about, shopping for groceries or getting a bite to eat. She listens to the sound of the wheels humming on the highway. They turn and head straight, to the rolling pastures that spill out on both sides of them, the fields planted with corn and alfalfa, the white solitary houses and grazing cows spotting the hillsides, trees that shoot up here and there, giving shade. A horse-drawn carriage eases its way down the road, a yield sign fastened to the back. The day is made beautiful by men and women and children dressed simply, in bonnets and hats, young girls in plain blue dresses. “I wish we could get Eva to dress like that,” Frank says.

  “Eva,” Natalia says, more to herself. “She’s always so angry.”

  “She’s angry with me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” he lies, not looking over. “Ask her.”

  “I’ve tried,” she says. “She won’t talk to me.” Natalia studies the long white fence that stretches down to the valley. Behind it, horses graze lazily. A man in the field works a plow. “I wish everything could be simple,” Natalia says. “Simple and green and easily tended.”

  “Life is what it is,” Frank says. “Different seasons, different gains and losses.”

  That her parents think it unnecessary to explain, that th
ey believe they can do as they wish and charge Eva with their unwanted tasks, infuriates her. She reads a note left by her mother, looks outside to see the Chevy is gone, and she feels her stomach turn again in nauseating knots. She is already tired, she is already moody, she has already thrown up today, and now this. She crumples the paper. She wants to call Peter, but whatever desire she has is lately replaced by hesitation. There is too much to say, too much to tell, and none of it tantalizing, all of it plainly bad.

  She slams the door in the kitchen and walks outside, holding her hand to her forehead, wiping sweat. She’s still dressed in her cotton pajamas, a T-shirt. By ten, Sissy has rediscovered the pool—each day brings a new love affair with it—and she floats facedown on the water, her dark hair undulating around her while she bobs across the surface like a dead fish. Eva can only imagine what her sister’s fingers and toes look like now, if she still has them, if she hasn’t somehow miraculously, like in one of their mother’s stories, grown fins and learned to breathe under chlorinated water. Down the street Eva hears screams of children, the infernal noise. She raps on the lip of the pool, three times—hard. Sissy lifts her head, the water pouring from her bangs and down her tanned face. She presses her lips together.

  “Just checking,” Eva says. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “I can swim by myself.”

  “You could drown.” She swats at a fly that buzzes around her face.

  “You might drown,” Sissy says. “But I won’t.”

  “Parents are MIA, I see, again.”

  The phrase strikes Sissy as odd, one that Vicki Anderson often used to refer to her father, in that time he was lost in the jungle. Sissy imagines her parents lost in a similar weedy place, somewhere far, far away, slogging through dense vegetation with a machete. She spits out water and says, “I saw the note.”

  “Then you know you weren’t supposed to go swimming alone.”

  Sissy ignores this. “Where did they go without us?”

  Eva shrugs. “You read the note.”

  “Come in.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You still pee in the pool.”

  “Do you think they’ll stay together?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither,” Sissy says, imitating Eva’s casualness. She dives down and then comes up to play dead man’s float again. Her hands rise to the surface, waterlogged and wrinkled. Then she swims across the pool—a seal, a sea lion, a fish, a streak of silver, finally just a girl. She reemerges, spits out water again. She studies Eva. “Actually, it makes me scared.”

  “Being with Dad?”

  “Dad isn’t bad,” Sissy says.

  “Yeah,” Eva tells her sarcastically. She flips her hair over her shoulder. “Watch your back.”

  “Why are you mad at Dad?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I would,” Sissy says, offended. “I heard you fight.”

  “When? We always fight.”

  “After Christmas. Late at night, when he came upstairs.”

  “What did you hear?”

  Sissy shrugs. “Stuff. You were crying.”

  Eva thinks about this and waits, debating. Finally, she says, “I would tell you, but you’re a total Neanderthal.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “How long have you been in there, anyway?”

  “Forever.”

  “Well, it’s time to get out.”

  “I don’t think it is.” Sissy sinks down, underwater, and comes back up. She refuses to get out of the pool and come inside. This retaliation quickly descends into an outright power struggle, Eva fussing and raising her voice and Sissy content to play sides, to claim their mother when it suits her, and to claim Eva when it does not. Any ounce of authority Eva might have gained disappears in the dwindling weeks of summer. Though she always thought she would relish not having to watch over Sissy, she now finds herself missing that time, when the summer was freer, when there weren’t as many lies and secrets. How easy Sissy is, she thinks. How fickle.

  “Fine,” Eva says, turning to go inside, wiping her hands clean of any responsibility. “Drown, then, for all I care. I think you’re ridiculous and overbearing anyway.”

  Eventually, Eva hears Sissy slam the back door. “I’m in!” she says, calling upstairs. “Okay, are you happy? I’m in already.” Then Eva hears the living room television blast at full force.

  In her room, Eva, now showered and naked, stands in front of the mirror and turns sideways, examining herself. The morning light makes her feel ghostly, invisible, wholly accidental. She hoists up her breasts, which are sore, letting them rest in the spaces between her fingers. She releases them, turns frontal, and runs her hand over her smooth, dark stomach. She tilts her head. She sees nothing but the rounded curve of herself. Her skin is electrified by touch. Still, under no circumstances will she put on a bathing suit. She is ripe with a secret, ripe with a story, ashamed. Ugly The thrill of expectation, of getting what she wanted, does not match what she knows now: Expectation does not always produce imagined results, like so much else this summer, like so much having to do with Peter.

  What did she expect? she wonders. Love, a life away from this one, but certainly not this. She imagined the two of them traveling to a distant, provincial countryside, meandering through quaint towns and haggling over antiques, an image Eva finds both achingly simple and yet finessed somehow—full of refinement and worldliness. She expected that Peter would help her to forge a greater sense of the world beyond her own room, beyond this town.

  What she didn’t expect was that Peter would become a great disappearing act.

  Not that she hasn’t tried to find him. Over the past week she’s driven by his home several times, not in her car but in Greg’s. She made Greg park down the street on one such outing. “Eva,” Greg told her, rubbing his boy stubble and then pushing back his owl-shaped glasses. “You’re insane.” She made Greg promise not to tell, and she knew he wouldn’t tell, that he might be the only one left, short of Sissy, who Eva felt somewhat assured wouldn’t betray her. Her and Greg’s friendship was solidified in the torture of middle school, when they’d sit together at the lunch table, sharing parts of sandwiches. Everyone teased that there was surely a romance budding between them (the two of them sitting in a tree), causing both to inch away from each other and then take to bickering.

  They waited in Greg’s car until the sky darkened and pale stars peeked out. No lights came on at Peter’s house. She opened the door, her face warm with moisture, her pulse racing. She stalked around the house, peering into a darkened window, and saw only shadows, the shapes of ghostly furniture. She felt along the side of the house to the back. Every time she heard a noise, any noise—a car driving by; a woman and man out for a walk, their conversation drifting to her—she crouched down suddenly, her knees scratching the bushes, holly leaves scraping her skin. She held her breath and waited. She raced back to Greg’s car eventually, but only after stealing the gardening hat and gloves left at the side of the house. It pleased her to take them, just as it pleased her to later dump them both into the trash.

  Today, when she woke, she hoped, as always, that Peter would call. She washed and shaved her legs, her bikini area. She lathered coconut butter on her skin until she felt slick. But already the morning is almost gone, and the phone hasn’t rung. And the phone isn’t broken.

  She looks at herself, turns again. What will she say when Peter finally does call? She doesn’t want to think about how she sat on the toilet, the piss streaming between her legs. She didn’t know what to do with the apparatus or the box, so she brought it back to her room and buried it under old papers from school, old report cards and valentines she had stacked on the top shelf in her closet. She will not tell Peter any of this. She’ll tell him instead that she checked the indicator several times, that she read the box over and over again. She’ll tell him she triple-checked. How many times, she wonders, did she accidentally forget�
�one pill, two, a row? She’ll tell him she was careful but life so often is unexpected. Perhaps she wanted it. Perhaps she believed it would help solidify something between them, something she sensed was precarious and easily broken. She mills through the possibilities now, the truths, the lies. It would be a lie to tell him she was utterly careless. But lies of omission, she believes, are not lies at all but merely blank spaces, silences in a conversation. She dresses and goes downstairs. She passes by Sissy without so much as a word. Still in her wet swimsuit, her sister sits on a beach towel eating a hot dog.

  “You’re ridiculous and overbearing,” Sissy says. “I came in because I’m hungry and I wanted to be fed.”

  “Like I care.” She goes into the kitchen, pours a glass of soda, and drinks it. She steps outside, walks out to the alley. Nothing. Only the black strip of road, the overhanging weeds from the neighbor’s fence, trash cans so full that their tops have popped open. Whatever tenderness she is capable of feeling, whatever tenderness she has felt, dwindles in the day.

  Sissy calls outside for her. At the front door, Greg leans against the frame, his hands shoved into his jeans pockets, his shirt untucked under a leather vest, the peach shell necklace he bought at the shore hanging around his neck, close to his Adam’s apple. He pushes up his glasses when he sees her. Eva can’t remember when he didn’t have that annoying slouch. “Hot outfit, Evie.” He says this in a calmly placid tone. It is as if a pale light surrounds him and he is suspended on a dreamy cloud, skimming across the sky.

  “You’re soaring,” Eva says.

  “You’re way too low.” To Sissy, he says, “Doesn’t Evie look hot?”

  “She looks ridiculous and overbearing,” Sissy says confidently. “I got a new bathing suit.” She models, spinning in a circle. She doesn’t tell him it was from the second-time-around shop.

  “Cool,” he says. “I like silver on you.”

  “Me, too. I feel like a fish.”

  “Let’s go,” he tells Eva. “There’s a bunch of us at the beach.”

  “I don’t feel like swimming.”