Mary Ann said, “You know, Mike turned out to be an asshole, but Jake’s not that bad a guy.”
Alice’s ears felt hot all of a sudden. Was the heat on in the bus? “What?”
“We just went by Jake Stewart’s house, and I’m saying he’s not a total shit. Despite that stupid Jake the Snake nickname.”
“Yeah? Don’t forget I’ve known him since kindergarten.”
“So?”
“So I know he’s so vain he spends half an hour blow-drying his hair every morning, and uses Sun-In to lighten it.”
“Come on.”
Alice shrugged. “Maybe I’m just biased against pretty boys like him.”
“You prefer ugly?”
“No. I prefer someone who’s not so full of himself, who’s capable of a little yearning.”
Someone like Stephen, the British university student Alice had met and dallied with the summer just past, when she’d worked at an archeological dig in England. She kept a photograph of him at home, pasted into her journal, a picture she’d taken of him standing outside, leaning against a stone wall and squinting in the sunlight, looking Stephen-ish, with his scraggly hair, scrawny body, deep blue eyes, and crooked smile. She said, “You know what else pisses me off about this math test situation?”
“Oh god. How am I going to tell my mother they think we cheated?”
“Simple. Don’t tell her. But what bugs me is the flawed logic in the accusation. We had no motive to cheat. The math competition doesn’t count for anything.”
Mary Ann gripped the handle of the seat in front of her. “There. We did it again.”
“Did what?”
“Communicated telepathically. One minute we were talking about some skinny long-haired boyfriend of yours with a crooked smile, and the next we were back to the math test. Both at the same time.”
How did Mary Ann know what Stephen looked like? “What did you say?”
“Both at the same time.”
“Before that. About a boyfriend.”
“Skinny guy with long brown hair and blue eyes? Leans against walls? Into yearning, I have a feeling?”
Alice felt her worldview tilt, and like maybe there’d just been a small earthquake. “That was Stephen. Someone I met in England last summer. But how did you —?”
“Don’t you see? We’re reading each other’s minds!”
“No. We can’t be.”
“Get off the bus with me. Come to my house for dinner. We’ll experiment, see if I’m right or wrong.”
“This is crazy.”
Mary Ann stood up in the bus aisle. “What’s the harm in trying?”
“You’re crazy.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Come on. This is my stop.”
It wasn’t like Alice had anything better to do.
Inside Mary Ann’s plushly furnished house, Alice was introduced to Asta, the dog, and in the kitchen, to Mary Ann’s mother, Sarah, a well-groomed blonde who was wearing a white chef’s apron over what Alice thought might be golf clothes.
Mary Ann said, “Alice is a friend from school. She’s staying for dinner, if that’s okay.”
“We’re delighted to have you, Alice,” Sarah said. “Do you want to call home? Let your mom know you’re staying for dinner?”
“Thanks, but my parents are out of town, so no one’s expecting me.”
A line crossed Sarah’s forehead. “All right, then.”
Mary Ann said, “We’re going to work on some math homework upstairs in my room. What time will dinner be ready?”
“In about half an hour. It’ll just be the three of us. Your brother’s at football practice, and your father won’t be home till late. Would you girls like something to snack on? I baked Stilton shortbread today, for no real reason.”
Mary Ann thanked her, took several pieces of shortbread from the offered plate, wrapped them in a napkin, and led Alice upstairs to her pink-and-white bedroom. She locked the door behind them, sat down on the floor, gestured to Alice to sit facing her, and spread out the napkin containing the cookies. “How about we start with something simple? I’ll think about an object, and you see if you can read my thought. Here I go.”
Alice had little faith in this experiment working, but her first bite of the shortbread tasted amazing. “This is so good. Does your mother bake often?”
“Yeah. Suzy Homemaker, that’s her. With baking, especially. Are you ready to try mind-reading or not?”
“Ready.”
“Where are your parents, anyway? Are they really away?”
“Yeah. In Boston. Just for a few days. Their quartet is performing.”
“And you don’t mind being alone in the house?”
“No, I like it. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want.” Though, to be fair, she did what she wanted most of the time when her parents were home. They’d encouraged her to look after herself from an early age, in keeping with their benign-neglect model of parenting. And housekeeping, and cooking.
Mary Ann shuddered. “I’d be awake all night, hearing weird noises. But let’s start. I’m thinking of an animal.”
“Your dog, Asta.”
Mary Ann jumped up. “See? It worked!”
“That wasn’t telepathy. It was too obvious. Try something else.”
“How about a number between one and ten?”
“I might guess it by chance.”
Mary Ann walked over to her bookshelf, pulled down a dictionary. “Okay, then. I’m going to open this dictionary at random and pick a word, any word.” She closed her eyes, stabbed the page with her finger, looked down. “Got it. I will now send the mystery word to you. See if you can receive it. Transmission beginning.”
Alice stifled a laugh and said, “The lines are open.”
Mary Ann scrunched up her face and seemed to be concentrating very hard. The least Alice could do was open her mind. She closed her eyes too, and tried to let her consciousness drift. She thought of Mary Ann’s mother, alone in the kitchen, chopping onions, wiping tears from her eyes; saw Miss Alexander sitting at her desk, her head in her hands; swooped by Jake Stewart throwing a football with Mary Ann’s Mike in front of Five Oaks; and came upon some bananas, arranged on an old-fashioned hat, displayed in an old-fashioned hat shop window.
“Well?” Mary Ann said.
Alice opened her eyes. “Sorry, I didn’t get anything.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Unless your word is banana.”
“Banana?”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Banana in what context?”
“This sounds so stupid, but a banana on a hat. One of those nineteen-forties deals, with a pineapple?”
“Oh my god! That was it!”
“It was?”
“Sort of. My word was milliner. I was trying to send you a picture of a hat shop. One of the hats had fruit on it.”
“Bloody hell. I need a cigarette. Can I smoke in here?”
“No. Now go. It’s your turn. Send me a thought.”
“Okay.” Alice picked up the dictionary, opened it, pointed blindly to a spot on the page, peeked down at the word, which was robot, and shut the book. “Here it comes.”
Alice visualized the robot from Star Wars. C-three-something. Had he been silver or gold? Gold, she thought. But how tall? She couldn’t remember. She wiped that image from her mind’s blackboard and sketched in the old robot maid from the Jetsons cartoon show. What was her name? Dolly? Dotty? Rosie! Rosie the robot with her apron and her duster.
Mary Ann said, “All I can see is my mother cleaning the house. Not it, right?”
“Fuck me. You’re close. But it’s not your mother. I’ll try to send it out stronger.” Alice animated her picture, added some background scenery, and brightened the colours — she made Rosie motor around in circles and dust the furniture of the future.
Mary Ann said, “Does your word have anything to do with the Jetsons?”
Could this really be happening? “The word was ro
bot!”
“IT WAS?”
“Don’t shout. What does this mean?”
“That we cheated on the math test?”
Alice reached in her bag for her cigarettes and lighter, Mary Ann shook her head no, and Alice put them back. “We didn’t cheat,” Alice said. “Not consciously, anyway.”
“We must have exchanged the test answers without knowing it.” Mary Ann had a big smile on her face. “This is so cool!”
Alice’s head hurt from suspending so much disbelief. “You know what’s crazy about this? I mean, aside from every single aspect of it?”
“What?”
“That this thought-transference ability — or whatever the fuck it is — if we really have it, only works between you and me. Because you said you tried it on people before, right? And it never worked?”
“I tried it on my brother, my parents, on Asta. On kids in my class.” Mary Ann pinched her lower lip with her thumb and forefinger. “Maybe the reason it didn’t work on any of them is because you and I were destined to be telepathic partners. Or something.”
“Even a semi-scientific explanation isn’t plausible, how likely is it that we both carry a chromosomal abnormality that results in telepathic ability, for instance?”
“I know, we’re mutants! Like the X-Men.”
Alice gave Mary Ann a withering look. “You’re right. That has to be it.” She got up and began to pace. “Here’s another puzzle: what good is telepathic ability, really? What could we do with it?”
“Cheat on more tests?”
“And what else? If we are telepathic, and only with each other, I’m not sure I know how we could use this thing to our advantage. Do you? You who once badly wanted to read minds?”
“Come on, there has to be a bunch of applications for telepathy.”
“Like what?”
“Like that we could talk to each other without using a phone.”
“Sort of like we’re doing right now, face to face.”
“Or we could talk to each other without speaking. If we were bored in math class, we could carry on a private conversation in our heads, and no one would know what we were saying.”
“Which would be like passing each other written notes. Except without the writing. Or the notes.”
Mary Ann tsked. “Stop being so negative. Let’s develop this thing and see where it takes us.”
At that point, Mary Ann’s mom called up the stairs that dinner was ready, and Alice said, “Let’s not tell your mom about this. Or anyone.”
“Of course not. It’ll be our secret.”
Over the next few weeks, Mary Ann and Alice spent all their spare time in telepathy training. They started out sending each other words and pictures in close quarters, and when they’d mastered that they tried it from different rooms, then from opposite ends of the school — Alice making Mary Ann laugh out loud during chemistry when she sent over a montage of her geography class sleeping through a video on “Mexico, Our Neighbours to the South.”
Soon, they could communicate house-to-house, and could engage in telepathic conversations while talking out loud to someone else. The only problem was Mary Ann’s occasional loss of control.
“So there I am in the library after school,” Alice said one night on the phone, “studying away, and suddenly, wham, I get you, full blast, in my head, raving and cursing about how you’re going to rip the head off number fourteen. Did you play basketball today, by any chance?”
“You should have seen this bitch from St. Theresa’s. She played so dirty. She hacked me non-stop, and the ref didn’t call any of her fouls. To top it off, the whole time she’s taunting me. I wanted to punch her out.”
“You’ve got to exert control, Mary Ann.”
“Over my temper?”
“No, over your thoughts.”
“Shit. I forgot to put up the wall again.”
“Any time we enter into a situation with the potential for strong emotion.”
“You’re better at it than I am, though.”
“That’s because my telepathic power isn’t as strong as yours. You seem to have higher wattage than me.”
“Okay, from now on, I’ll try. I promise.”
“Good, because when you go out with that guy you met at the game, I don’t want to live through the date with you.”
“Davey? How’d you know about him?”
“How do you think?”
“I gave him my phone number. Did you know that?”
“What’s he like?”
“Cute. A junior. He complimented me on my jump shots.”
“Sounds like the perfect candidate for a fling to help you get over Mike.”
“If he calls me,” Mary Ann said, “should I ask him if he has a friend, so we can double?”
“Please, no. I don’t date high school boys.”
“More for me, then.”
Mary Ann’s first time out with Davey Zimmerman was at a big house party in Oakdale — the host’s parents were away, and there were kegs. She and Davey talked for a bit, drank a lot of beer, and made out for hours on a basement family-room sofa, until the cops showed up and closed the party down.
Mary Ann had trouble walking in straight lines on the way home afterwards (all the more reason to lean on Davey’s shoulder). When they finally got back to her house around two a.m., she kissed him goodnight on the curb, staggered up the walk, and let herself in.
She groaned when she took her shoes off. She moaned when she dropped her coat on the floor, and the coat-floor combination looked so tempting that she lay down on it, just for a second. And started at the sound of her mother’s voice, very quiet, coming from the darkened living room. “Mary Ann? Are you all right?”
“You scared me,” Mary Ann said. “What are you doing in there?”
“I couldn’t sleep.” Her mother got up and came over, stood beside her, looking down. “How was your evening?”
Mary Ann closed her eyes. “Good. Great.”
“You didn’t do anything you’ll regret tomorrow, I hope?”
“No. Did you?”
Her mother didn’t answer.
Mary Ann said, “How come you’re up so late?”
“Your father and I had a few words.” She reached out a hand. “Come, sweetheart, don’t lie on the floor. Come in here on the sofa, at least.”
Mary Ann let her mother help her up, guide her into the living room, and settle her on a sofa. The darkness was comforting. The cushions were soft.
“Is he nice, this new boy?” her mother said.
As if Mary Ann would tell her mother she was almost definitely in love again. “He’s okay.”
A minute or two of silence passed. Mary Ann considered getting up and going to bed, but she was too tired to move. “What did you and Dad fight about, anyway?”
“The usual.”
“What usual?”
“Me going crazy being stuck at home.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Go ahead and mock me. I’ve signed up to take a real-estate course.”
“Why would I mock you for that?”
“Your father seems to find it a comical concept.”
“So you’ll sell houses? Have your name on lawn signs?”
“Eventually.”
“Why does Dad care what you do during the day, anyway?”
“He doesn’t want to help out around the house any more than he does now.”
“But he doesn’t do anything now.”
Mary Ann’s mother piled up a few cushions at the end of her own sofa, and lay down. “He’d like to keep it that way.”
Mary Ann said, “I think maybe I’ll never get married.”
Her mother snorted. “You, who hasn’t been without a boyfriend for more than two months since seventh grade?”
Mary Ann sat up. “Okay, I’m going to bed.”
“There’s such a thing as self-sufficiency, you know.”
“Goodnight,” Mary Ann said, and wait
ed until she was halfway upstairs to stick out her tongue at the wall.
Alice called Mary Ann the next day. “How was your date with Davey?”
“It was good. I like him.”
“Well, good work on getting that wall up. I didn’t hear a peep from you the whole evening.”
“Thank you. I laid the bricks extra thick.”
“They looked very sturdy. But you can take them down now.”
“I thought I had.”
“I tried reaching you this morning and I couldn’t get through. I’ll try again.”
Mary Ann sent a wrecking ball hurtling toward a wall she didn’t think was there, and when the dust settled, she saw Ms. Alexander, in living colour, standing in the math room, writing an equation on the blackboard. “You’ve got it wrong,” she said. “With those pants, she wears the plain black belt, not the braided brown one.”
“So I can still reach you.”
“Hey, what about the math mid-term next week? Are we going to use our mind skills to do well on it without Alexander catching on, or what?”
On the day of the exam, Ms. Alexander made Mary Ann and Alice sit in opposite corners of the classroom — Mary Ann in the front row by the window and Alice tucked in the back corner against the wall. They would have exchanged a mental laugh about this, if Mary Ann’s mind hadn’t been fully occupied staging a detailed reenactment, in stop-motion and with frequent replays, of the night before, when she’d deflowered Davey, her first (and only) virgin.
His parents had been away in Bermuda, his older brother out for the evening. They’d locked his bedroom door, put some makeout music on his stereo, and gone at it.
Davey had been so loving, so grateful, so willing to try everything. “Show me,” he kept saying. “Show me what to do.” So she had.
With a night like that to remember, who could care about some stupid test?
Alice was waiting for Mary Ann in the hallway when she came out of the classroom, waiting to grab her arm and walk off with her, away from Ms. Alexander’s death-ray glare of disapproval that they were on speaking terms. “What happened back there?” Alice said, through gritted teeth. “I thought we were going to consult about the test answers, but I couldn’t get through to you at all. There was no wall, just a big, blank void. And without your help, I’ll be lucky if I got more than seventy percent.”
The Oakdale Dinner Club Page 2
