Illumination Night

by Alice Hoffman

“All right?” Andre asks.

  “All right,” Simon agrees.

  Andre starts his bike, and when he waves Simon waves back. Eleanor Freed is potting plants. All of her window boxes are filled with pink geraniums. Samantha holds on to the crab apple tree with one hand. She has one foot on the ground, the other balanced on the rope. Simon begins to walk toward her.

  “Don’t sneeze or anything,” Samantha warns him.

  Simon holds his breath. It is cool under the trees. Simon can see that Samantha has a package of gum in her shirt pocket. There are two scabs on her knee. Samantha slowly lifts her other foot and places it on the rope. Simon holds his breath tighter. He would rather turn blue and fall down than sneeze.

  Samantha concentrates on the rope. She moves her hand from the tree. She is standing on a tightrope, she moves first one foot, then the other. Her thin arms are straight out, crooked a little at the elbows. She walks almost the entire length of rope, then falls off suddenly. She sits on the ground, the breath knocked out of her, eyes shining. Simon walks over, so impressed he cannot speak.

  “I almost made it,” Samantha says. Her hair is tied back with an elasticized band. Small tangles have formed at the base of her skull.

  “Good for you,” Simon says, echoing exactly what his mother says when he almost does something well.

  The soles of Samantha’s feet are grass-stained from walking barefoot. Samantha takes out a piece of gum, unwraps it, and squashes it into her mouth. The smell of peppermint makes Simon’s mouth water.

  “Here,” Samantha says.

  She takes out another piece of gum and hands it to him.

  “You want to play Care Bears?” Samantha says.

  Simon nods his head yes. He has no idea what a Care Bear is. He is stunned by Samantha’s sophistication. At this moment, he is quite convinced she knows everything that is worth knowing.

  “You know what a Care Bear is, right?” Samantha says suspiciously.

  “Right,” Simon says.

  Samantha gets up and slips her sandals on. Simon rolls the gum in his mouth into a ball.

  “Come on,” Samantha says. “They’re up on the porch.”

  Simon follows her back into the sun. Two bears, one yellow, the other blue, sit on a bench. Simon has forgotten that he didn’t want his father to leave. He has forgotten that thinking about his mother makes a lump form in his throat. When he stands next to Samantha his head is level with her chest. He’s afraid that she’ll think he’s too little for her game, but Samantha allows him to be Birthday Bear, and it doesn’t take long for Simon to figure out that in order to play the game all he has to do is make his bear talk and occasionally throw him over the porch railing so that he can be rescued.

  AFTERWARD Andre will torment himself by wondering if he planned it. He could have kept Simon there with him, given him some Legos or a bag of marbles to keep him busy while he adjusted the clutch. He will wonder if the heat made him delirious; it must have been close to a hundred degrees in the shed. How furious was he that Vonny went off to ask her father for money? What can happen to a man who is left alone for just one day? He will almost believe that there is a dividing line between body and spirit, entities that inhabit the same space while having little to do with each other. He has problems with the clutch, and that sets him off. He pulls a chunk of skin off his thumb while tightening the flywheel with a wrench, and blood streams down his arm. It’s nearly three when he finishes the job. He rolls the Harley out into the driveway, then goes inside for a beer. In a couple of minutes the beer is warm. A red-tailed hawk circles the sky. He hears tires on the road and he looks out the door, wondering if Vonny has come back early. He thinks she’s a fool to go see her father when Reynolds has made it clear he wants nothing to do with her. He doesn’t understand the need to connect with your parents. If he sees his own father once a year it’s one time too many.

  A BMW with New Jersey plates pulls into the driveway. One of Jody’s boyfriends driving her home from Mad Martha’s, the ice-cream store where she’s working this summer. At least she no longer babysits for them very often. The kid wants to avoid the ruts next door, so he uses their driveway. Andre hates the kid after just one look. His parents have money, Andre can tell. He’s got a tape deck turned on full blast, calling attention to himself. Van Halen. It figures. Andre sips the warm beer and feels his anger boil up inside him. When he was seventeen his father wouldn’t even let him borrow his old Chrysler. He rode a bicycle until he could earn enough to get his first motorcycle. A scooter, really, which he modified. He has already decided he’ll never buy Simon a car. He doesn’t want him to grow up into this kind of kid, someone who pulls up in the driveway much too fast, able to swagger as long as he’s backed by his father’s money.

  Jody gets out, her face expressionless. She’s wearing blue jeans and a black sleeveless T-shirt. Her hair, which is longer than it was last summer, is pulled back in a silver clip. When the kid reaches and grabs her arm, Andre walks away from the screen door. By the time Jody allows this boy to kiss her good-bye, Andre is throwing his beer can into a plastic garbage bag. The tires spin as the kid backs up. When Andre hears the sound of metal on metal he can feel the crash inside his body. He runs to the door in time to see the BMW, now in first, try to pull away from the Harley. But there’s no quick getaway. The Harley is stuck beneath the BMW’s rear fender. Every time the kid shifts his car, he drags the bike with him. The kid gets out of his car and is trying his best to get the Harley unstuck as Andre runs across the lawn.

  Jody, who was at the refrigerator when she heard the crash, drops her Diet Coke on the counter next to the cans of cat food. When she sees Andre tackle Gary, she pushes open the screen door and flies across the lawn. Andre has Gary down on the ground. Gary is swearing that it was an accident.

  “Come on. Relax, will you?” he says to Andre. “My father will pay for the bike.”

  It is the wrong thing to say to Andre. Instead of making him realize he’s dealing with a boy, it makes him want to shift the kid so that his back is up against the Harley’s tire spokes. But he lets go and is standing up just as Jody reaches them.

  “Stop it!” Jody screams at him.

  When she says this to Andre, something vicious rises up in him. As soon as the kid attempts to get up, Andre moves toward him, frightening him into lying prone, his hands up over his face to protect himself. There is little pleasure in this sort of humiliation. Gary is a senior in high school in Livingston, New Jersey, here for the summer with his family. Andre feels as though he has just beaten Simon to the ground. Disgusted, Andre grabs the keys out of the ignition. He unlocks the BMW’s trunk and takes out a tire iron, which he uses as a lever to bend the car’s fender. The Harley will need at least three more weeks of work. Andre could kill the kid right here and now. As he struggles to get the bike out from under the car, the paint on the BMW’s fender is gouged.

  “You’re scratching it on purpose!” Gary cries.

  Meaning to scare him, Andre walks toward the kid with the tire iron raised. To his great surprise, the kid bursts into sobs. For a moment Andre doesn’t know what he’s doing or even how he got here in the first place. He cannot remember running across the lawn. He realizes that the sound he’s hearing is his own blood.

  “Don’t you dare touch him!” Jody says. She cares nothing for Gary. She has known him for only two weeks, since the day he came into Mad Martha’s for a frappe and wound up waiting all afternoon for her to get off from work. But her fury is real; she will defend Gary, even fight his battle.

  “I have insurance,” Gary says. He wipes his eyes with the cuff of his shirt.

  “I think I will call your father,” Andre tells him. “I think I’ll have a talk with him. Come on,” he says when Gary hesitates. “Who’s your father, bigshot?”

  “I’ll get the money for you,” Gary says. “Don’t call my father.”

  Andre sees that the kid is shaking. He’s sick of this game.

  “Get out of her
e,” he tells the boy.

  Gary looks at him carefully, not trusting him.

  “Go on,” Andre says, exhausted. “I don’t want to see you back here again.”

  Gary runs to his car and gets behind the wheel. Andre turns to walk back home as the BMW pulls out of the driveway.

  “You can’t tell my friends not to come here!” Jody screams.

  Andre keeps walking. He cannot bring himself to touch the Harley. He knows Vonny will use this against him, especially if she gets the money from her father. He is too irresponsible to take care of a motorcycle, let alone a family.

  “Who do you think you are?” Jody shouts after him. She is in tears.

  “Go back to your ice-cream stand,” Andre calls back, without turning.

  Watching him walk away, Jody feels something inside her break apart. She runs after him, and when she reaches him she hits him between the shoulder blades. Andre turns to her, shocked. His T-shirt is soaking wet and his throat is so dry it hurts. Jody is still crying and her face looks pulpy, like a piece of damaged fruit.

  “You’re disgusting,” she says to Andre. She wonders if she’s going insane. She hits him again, this time in the chest.

  At first Andre just stares at her, as though she were from another planet. Then he grabs her arm and holds it so she can’t move. Now Jody knows. They are both going crazy. She kicks at him, but Andre grabs her leg and she falls to the ground. Andre has never despised himself or another person so thoroughly. When he leans down and puts his arms around her, Jody stops crying immediately. It is the moment just before Jody gets what she wants. Andre tells her to be quiet. He helps her off the ground, then leads her across the lawn and takes her into the shed. They don’t deserve clean sheets, pillows, a fan in the window. As soon as the door to the shed is closed, the heat is unbearable, they both feel faint, but they are no longer thinking anyway. There isn’t even time to take off their clothes. Andre unzips Jody’s jeans and pulls them down, to her thighs. If her back were not supported by the rough wood behind her, Jody would fall down. After all this time, they can’t wait another minute.

  When Andre has allowed himself to think about her he has imagined kissing her slowly, watching her take off her blouse. Now, he doesn’t even look at her. If he did he would see that her eyes are closed. She cannot bear it that she is thinking of Vonny. She will not think about Vonny. All those high-school boys Jody has been with are meaningless. She knows absolutely nothing. She only knows that if she looks at him, if she sees how angry he is, she will have to stop this. So she looks at the ceiling. She doesn’t move, except for an involuntary shudder when he pulls down her underpants. She is melting in the heat. Something is wrong with her nervous system. Sounds echo. When Andre pulls down the zipper of his fly she can feel the zipper slide along the row of metal teeth. Her shoulder blades are slammed up against the wall as he enters her and, for a moment, she is weightless. She is on the verge of weeping, but she won’t. She tightens her arms around his neck, she pulls at her jeans so she can wrap her legs around him. Andre has one hand under her T-shirt, the fingers of his other hand push into the flesh of her bottom. They are going to regret this for the rest of their lives. Deaf, dumb, and blind, the only part of them that seems real is their desire. Hundreds of times Jody has gone over how she would appear to him once they were together. She thought she had everything planned. How her neck would seem longer if she arched it, how she would manage everything so neatly. Now, her mouth is all over him. When he finally kisses her on the mouth, groaning, Jody dissolves. The molecules that hold her together split apart. She is only one more arc of heat and her skin turns black and blue, and days later she’ll stroke the bruises Andre leaves on her, bruises he’d be shocked to discover, since he never meant to hurt her.

  VONNY can hear the Southern State Parkway inside Jill’s kitchen. She realizes that as a child she never once noticed the sound, although the hum of the parkway must have snaked through her dreams, leaving her with the sense that traffic always led away from the house where she lived. Jill, who hated the suburbs, came back when she and her husband discovered they couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. She would move in a minute, but now Jill is trapped. Her daughters actually like it here. The younger one, who is twelve, is now at ballet. The oldest, Melissa, sits across the table from Vonny drinking Lo-Cal iced tea with lemon. Melissa’s blond hair is pulled into a French braid and she looks a lot like Jill at sixteen. Jill was four months pregnant when they graduated from high school, and Vonny was the one who set up Jill and Brian’s first date, so she has an uneasy feeling of responsibility.

  On this visit, Vonny feels closest to Melissa. With her pale pink nail polish and purple sneakers, Melissa seems more recognizable than Jill, who no longer looks anything like the girl she used to be. Jill has never visited Vonny in Chilmark. Once, before Vonny met Andre, Jill came up to Boston, wept for an entire weekend, then went back home to Brian and her two young daughters. Things are much better now, Jill assures Vonny. Jill talks about excruciatingly personal things in front of Melissa, whose presence makes Vonny back off from giving her true opinion. Her opinion is that Jill continues to do what she’s always done: sell herself short. She has convinced herself that she is stupid. Vonny wonders if, after all these years, they are really friends. They talk on the phone, but see each other only on Vonny’s infrequent trips to New York. Jill has met Andre twice, seen Simon only once.

  After dinner, when they leave Brian and the girls to take a walk around the neighborhood, Vonny has the urge to put her arm around Jill. Instead, they walk so close their shoulders touch. It is dusk and they can smell cut grass. Children are calling to each other in backyards. They walk to the high school, where the darkening sky is reflected in tall arched windows. Jill takes a cigarette and a lighter out of her pocket and recounts what has happened to some of the people they used to know. She goes through four divorces, a nervous breakdown, and a list of girls, women now, who have recently gone back to school.

  “How did we get old so fast?” Jill says.

  “You’ve been saying you’re old since you were seventeen.”

  “Well, I was,” Jill insists. “I am. Only now I have fat thighs to prove it.”

  “You don’t,” Vonny says.

  “You look the same,” Jill tells Vonny.

  When Vonny laughs, disbelieving, Jill says “Really. If anything, you look better.”

  They sit down on a curb so Jill can have another cigarette before they walk home. They used to do this every night in the summertime, waiting for boys, getting away from their mothers. They can see Jill’s younger daughter, Kerry, riding her bike down the street. When Vonny and Jill were in high school, girls who were almost thirteen didn’t ride bikes, or play ball either. They combed their hair and fought with their mothers and swore they would never forget what it was like to be young. They have forgotten, and they know it. They wish they still lived next door to each other. They wish they could still tell each other their secrets. Jill used to tell Vonny about her affairs, but recently she stopped. They both realized it was the same story, over and over again. If they met now as adults they would not even like each other, let alone be best friends.

  The lights along the Southern State are turned on, reminding Vonny that tonight is Illumination Night. She’s purposely avoided it after what happened last year and now she wonders if she’s made a mistake. She could be in Oak Bluffs now. She could be with Andre, who she hopes doesn’t go without her.

  As they walk back to the house, a miniature schnauzer runs off a porch and follows them, barking, until Vonny turns around and shouts, “Boo.” When the schnauzer takes off, they double over with laughter.

  Kerry has parked her bike and is sitting on the cement stoop in front of the house.

  “Do you wish you were that age again?” Jill asks.

  “You bet I do,” Vonny says.

  “No, you don’t,” Jill says. “You were miserable.”

  “I was not,” Vonny insi
sts.

  “I remember you better than you remember you,” Jill says. “You were.”

  Jill’s girls share a room so Vonny can have Melissa’s bed. There are pictures of Bruce Springsteen all along the wall, and Vonny feels as though she’s being watched. The sound of traffic makes it difficult to sleep. She thinks about her father and the day he left. He was thoughtful enough to pack up his boxes and move after midnight, so Vonny wouldn’t see. She saw anyway. A rented van was in the driveway parked behind Suzanne’s car. Vonny had had supper and stayed late at Jill’s. She can no longer remember if they were nine or ten, but she knows they made a tent out of sheets, supplied themselves with flashlights, cookies, Thermoses of water. They had made a vow to always tell each other the truth, but when Jill asked, “Don’t you feel terrible about your father?” Vonny made a sour face and said no.

  When her father drove away in the van, Vonny watched from the window; then she went out in the backyard. There was a cherry tree in bloom and Vonny sat between it and the willow tree Reynolds had planted the week Vonny was born. Later, the willow had to be cut down—its roots were interfering with the sewage tank—but on that night its leaves were silver, stars attached to twigs. All that week Vonny slept on a roll-away bed in her mother’s room. Her mother was afraid to be alone, and Vonny was too. If her father could move out, anything could happen. Houses could catch fire, homes could be wrecked, children could wander into any one of the identical houses on their block and never be missed.

  When she wakes in the morning, in Melissa’s single bed, Vonny doesn’t know where she is. After a shower and breakfast, she still feels oddly unconnected. Jill drives her to the airport, then asks her to stay a few more days. Vonny is suddenly terrified that something may happen to Simon if she doesn’t get home quickly. She leans over and gets her bag out of the backseat.

  “I miss you,” Jill says.

  Vonny hugs Jill and swears she’ll come back to visit soon, an empty promise that makes them both grin. She gets out and waves, then goes to buy her ticket. She runs her pocket-book and suitcase through the metal detector and has a coffee until her flight is called. It’s a little too crowded on line. Vonny is behind a family, and just as she is about to walk from the ramp onto the plane, something happens. She leans against the wall and lets the people behind pass her. Her legs will not move. Her skin is cold. She is not quite sure why but she knows that if she walks into the plane she will die.