by Ann Hood
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” Troy told her. He tugged on her arm, urging her outside.
“What is wrong with you?” she said again. She leaned against the school, her face in focus now.
“The other night,” Troy said. “At my house. I felt this … this thing between us.”
Her cheeks turned pink. “So?”
“I haven’t even really paid attention to you for so long and—”
“So? I haven’t paid attention to you either, you know. I mean, I do have a life too. A job. Plans.”
“I know,” he said. “I just have to kiss you. That’s all.”
Caitlin glanced around. “Now?” she said. “Here?”
He did it. He took her by the shoulders and pressed his lips to hers and it was exactly right. He was that man in the Chagall painting. He was flying, soaring even.
When the kissing stopped, Caitlin pushed away from him.
“Listen to me, okay?” she said. “I felt it too, that night at your house. All I’ve been imagining was this. Kissing you. But you have a girlfriend and I’m going to New York City and that’s that.” She walked away from him, fast. She turned once. “Besides,” she told him from a safe distance, “I would never never fall for a guy from this hick town. Do you understand?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. She just kept walking.
Troy watched her go. He could not stop smiling.
“I brought you something,” Troy told Jenny.
They were in Dunkin’ Donuts. It was seven a.m. and in one hour Troy would be in the high school cafeteria taking the SAT test.
She smiled at him. “A present?”
“Sort of,” he said.
Slowly, he unrolled the blueprints, smoothing them with his hands.
“Drawings?” she said.
She raised one eyebrow at him. She had told him that she’d practiced that in front of the mirror for years. It seemed like a silly thing to do, he thought.
“Of?” Jenny said.
“A house.” He looked at her light blue eyes, her soft skin. “I did these,” he said.
She brightened. “You could become an architect. That would be something.”
Troy shook his head. “No. It’s a house for me. I want to build it. I have the exact spot too. It’s on a hill with this incredible view. I want to show you.”
When Jenny ate doughnuts, she nibbled in circles until she reached the filling. Then she opened the center and licked out all the jelly or cream. That’s what she was doing now, licking the jelly from the middle of the doughnut.
“Fine,” she said. “Sometime we’ll go and look.”
Troy swallowed hard. He tried to think about all the math she’d taught him. There was a whole section in the SATs called problem solving. He could never make sense of it. If four men are on a train and the train is going two hundred miles an hour … He cleared his throat.
“I sort of wanted to show you now.”
She laughed. “You nut. The SATs are in less than an hour.”
“I know,” Troy said softly.
Jenny looked down at the blueprints. “Oh,” she said.
“I would wait for you to finish college,” he told her. He did not sound very convincing.
She twisted the scrimshaw ring he’d given her, around and around. “Oh,” she said again.
At night, when she could not sleep, Renata created a different life for herself. Millie was better and she and Tom were married. Dana and Troy were theirs and Libby Holliday didn’t exist. In this other life, everybody was happy.
Lately, though, ever since Millie had come home, Renata’s fantasy life seeped into the daytime too. She made meals from an old Betty Crocker cookbook—chicken Divan and Waldorf salads and canapés shaped like stars with olive faces. She spent the afternoon waxing furniture, polishing floors, Windexing windows. She watched General Hospital with Millie and spent hours wondering how the characters’ lives would turn out.
Only Dana, with her heavily lined eyes and teased hair could bring Renata back to reality. One look from Dana, and the fantasy ended. One look, and Renata remembered everything—why she had left Holly in the first place, and why she had come back. It was funny how when she first saw Dana she had been surprised at how unlike Libby the girl was. But now, Renata could see Libby Holliday in Dana’s eyes, in the way she held her head and the way she frowned.
Renata thought a person should face her enemy head on. So one warm May afternoon, while her chicken pot pie baked in the oven, Renata walked into Dana’s room to talk to her.
Dana was in her usual pose, sprawled out on her bed reading. This time it was Leaves of Grass.
“I have a feeling,” Renata said, “that you don’t like me.”
“Brilliant observation,” Dana said.
She had a way of talking as if everything she said was an aside. It drove Renata nuts.
“I’m not trying to take your mother’s place,” Renata said, suddenly feeling like one of those soap opera characters.
“Don’t worry,” Dana said, “you couldn’t even if you tried. She’s beautiful and thin and—”
“And she walked out on this whole family,” Renata said, imitating Dana’s aside technique.
Dana threw her book down on the floor hard. “Look,” she said, her voice a near scream, “you can’t just take over our lives. You can screw my father and you can move in here but you can’t adopt us. You can’t make us your family.”
On General Hospital, Renata’s character would have slapped Dana right across the face. Renata thought about that, about how it would look and sound and feel. But all she did was sigh, and sit down on the very edge of Dana’s bed. It was a twin bed, with an incongruously feminine pink chenille bedspread.
“I don’t want your family,” Renata told her. “Millie does.”
“That is really low,” Dana said. “Blaming your conniving on a sick kid. On your sick kid. I suppose it was Millie who wanted to screw my father too.”
Renata shook her head slowly. “You’re just like I was. A real tough kid, right? I bet I could tell you things about yourself that you think nobody knows.”
Dana was on her feet now, standing, fists clenched, in front of Renata. Renata focused on the way her knees poked through the holes she’d torn into her jeans, on the small red heart embroidered on one pocket.
“Don’t you understand?” Dana was saying. “I can’t be like you. You aren’t my mother.”
Below the heart were Dana’s initials in white spidery letters. DLH.
“I left this town for New York when I was seventeen,” Renata said. “I was going to set the world on fire.”
Dana’s fingers were moving back and forth, as if she was kneading bread.
“By then,” Renata said, “I really had slept with almost all the guys people thought. I figured it was a way to be happy. I was that sad a kid.”
Slowly, Dana bent and picked up the book. She smoothed the pages and laid it gently back on the bed.
“I could maybe help you,” Renata said. Her voice sounded hopeful. “I just want to be your friend while we’re both here. While we’re all here.”
“I don’t need another friend,” Dana said.
Renata studied the girl’s face. She’d seen lots of teenagers like Dana walking around the mall when she was working at the bookstore. They all looked so tough at first glance, and so young if you really looked at them closely. Like Dana now, all clear smooth skin and scared eyes.
“What do you need, then?” Renata said quietly.
Dana forced a laugh. “Me? Nothing.” She swept her arms across the sad little room. “Can’t you tell? I’ve got everything.”
Renata wondered if she should talk about all the boys who called here for Dana. Not as many lately, but Renata understood what was happening. It had happened to her, after all. Confusing sex with love, or with feeling loved at least. In fact, Renata wasn’t sure she’d learned the difference even
now.
“Maybe,” Dana was saying, “the real question here is what you want. Maybe this isn’t about me at all.”
Renata smiled at her. It was funny how sitting here with Dana was almost like going back in time and looking in a mirror. How she wanted to take this girl in her arms and give her comfort, protect her not only from the world, but from herself.
“You don’t have to be related to someone to be like them,” Renata said. She had to press her arms close to her side to keep from going over to Dana and wrapping them around her. “That’s what friends are, right?”
“Did my father tell you to talk to me?”
Renata shook her head.
“I’ll never like you,” Dana said, but she did not sound at all convincing. “Or be like you.”
Renata inched toward her. “Tell me,” she said, her voice low, her heart breaking for this girl with too much makeup and funny hair. “What do you want?”
Dana narrowed her eyes. “To send my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
A challenge, Renata thought. She picked up the book. “Walt Whitman,” she said.
And finally Dana smiled, a little. She sighed and sat on the bed beside Renata, still keeping a safe distance.
“New York is as hard as here,” Renata said. “Don’t think you’re going to move there and everything will be different.”
“But I’m moving with Caitlin. We have such great plans. I mean, we practically have our apartment all decorated and everything.” Then she added, “I want to see it. That’s all. I want to have a pastrami sandwich delivered to my door at three a.m.”
Renata reached over and put her arm around Dana’s shoulders. “I know,” she whispered.
Libby answered on the second ring. Her voice slapped him in the face. It sounded exactly the way it always did. People who spoke to Libby on the telephone sometimes thought she was a young girl. Is your mother home? they’d ask her.
“Who is this?” she was saying.
Tom pressed the phone to him, as if he could feel her through it.
“Libby,” he said. “Libby, it’s me.”
She didn’t say anything. This, he thought, was worse than if she’d hung up.
He laughed nervously. “I feel like it’s the first time I ever called you. Do you remember that? I practiced for a week. I highlighted parts of Romeo and Juliet to talk to you about. Well,” he added, laughing again, “parts of the Cliff Notes for Romeo and Juliet. I never could read Shakespeare. But you know that already.” He was babbling. Stop it, he told himself. Ask her questions. “Are you … all right?”
“Yes,” she said.
Good, he thought. Questions are good. “I saw you on television. In that floor wax commercial?” Those aren’t questions. Damn it, he thought, get a grip. He closed his eyes, tried to think.
“You did?” she was saying. “You watched?”
“We all did. You looked so great.”
“Really?” she said.
“God, Libby, come home. I miss you so bad.”
“Don’t,” she said. All the softness was out of her voice then.
“Would you think about coming home at least?”
“It would be a little crowded, wouldn’t it?”
She knew. He closed his eyes again.
“How could you?” she said. “Of all people to bring into my house?”
“You left us. What did you expect? Libby—”
“And don’t think I don’t know that voice,” she said.
“What voice?”
“That sleepy after-sex voice you have right now.”
“How could you know it?” he said, starting to shout. “Since you never wanted to make love I’m surprised you remember anything about it.”
“Goodbye, Tom.”
Then he was shouting, loud. “That’s right. Hang up. Run away. Don’t try to fix anything.”
“You’re the mechanic. I’ll leave the fixing to you.”
When he heard her hang up, he started to bang the phone against the wall. He banged so hard that all of the insides fell out. Wires and pieces of metal. Still he kept banging until there was nothing left to bang and he had to kick the wall instead.
“Fuck,” he said finally, and slumped against the wall. That was when he saw them, all of them, shadowy figures in pajamas standing in the doorway, watching.
“I …”he started, but it seemed so hopeless to continue.
“We heard,” Renata said. She turned toward the kids. “It’s okay now,” she told them.
When they left, shuffling back to bed, she did not move toward him.
“Tell me something,” she said. “Could you ever love anyone like that again?”
He shook his head.
“Answer me,” she said.
He tried to make out her face in the darkness, but couldn’t.
“No,” he said finally. “No.”
Libby quit Von’s and said she was running out of money. For the first time in a long time, maybe in her whole life, she did not have a plan. Some people from work had told her she should think about moving up to Seattle. “Lots of opportunity up there,” they’d said. On television there was a show about a little town in Alaska where everyone seemed attractive and happy, well read and cultured. But Alaska and Seattle did not seem like the answer.
When Harp called her she thought her heart might burst right out of her chest. She even forgot for a minute that he was living with Renata Handy in the house he’d built for them and their family. Instead, she thought about the first time he ever called her. She was fourteen years old, in her room studying American history, the Mayflower Compact. Her mother knocked on her bedroom door and said, “There’s a Tom Harper on the phone for you.” That night Libby had played it so cool, taking her time to walk down the hall, as if it meant nothing. But it had meant everything.
Tonight when he told her he’d been thinking of that first phone call too, Libby had suddenly remembered everything—the first time he’d kissed her and how she used to think she could kiss him forever, how her lips used to feel bruised from all those kisses.
But then the sound of his voice, gravelly as an old gangster’s, reminded her of what was going on, of how he’d probably snuck out of bed with Renata Handy just to make this call. Once, Libby had read about how anthropologists have this theory that an embryo imitates evolution during the nine months before it’s born. How it starts like a tadpole and then a fish, all the way to a human. That was how she felt that night. In about nine minutes she and Harp recreated the whole twenty years of their relationship—from that first excitement to all the anger and bitterness, right up to her leaving him.
When she hung up, Libby went and looked out the window. It was a funny thing, that window, there was nothing out there to see, just a little path and more apartments. But she looked out it anyway, into the night. In the apartment directly across from hers, framed in the window, she watched as a young couple kissed. They kissed for a very long time, and when they finally pulled apart, Libby saw that they were two men.
She watched as one led the other away, into another room, leaving the window lit but empty. She could make out a framed print on the wall, the kind you buy at a museum. But she did not recognize the artist. Standing there like that, Libby knew she did not want to stay here anymore. She did not want to go to Seattle or Alaska. She wanted to go home. But Harp had betrayed her and she had betrayed him. That did not seem to be something two people could ever forget.
Summer
TROY COULD TELL CAITLIN anything. That first night, when she finally agreed to go for a ride with him after weeks of avoiding him, sometimes even running away from him, they sat up all night drinking wine and talking. He did not even touch her. They just sat side by side in the spot where someday soon he would build a house, and they talked.
With Nadine it had been all sex and wild adventures. With Jenny he had tried to be something he was not. But on that first night with Caitlin he was the man who soared when he
kissed the woman in that painting. He was the man who got the electrical jolt and flew into the air saying “Oh!”
She told him everything too. She said, “No one would believe it but I’m terrified of everything.” She said, “I don’t get what the big deal about sex is. It doesn’t feel like much at all.” She said, “I wish I had known my father. That I had looked into his eyes even once.”
When the sun came up they had not decided anything out loud. But they both knew that everything was different.
Dana and Caitlin sat on the roof of Pizza Pizzazz, waiting for a meteor shower. Tonight was supposed to be the best night for viewing them. Roald had wanted Dana to go with him to Mount Graylock, but she felt that maybe she’d been ignoring Caitlin too much these days. Now that they were together, waiting for the sky to explode, Dana found herself wishing she had gone with Roald. He would point out constellations, tell her how many light-years away the planets were, explain what was causing the meteor showers to happen.
Caitlin, however, was not even talking. She didn’t even seem interested in watching them. “But it’s a scientific phenomenon,” Dana had said. “And it’s beautiful.” And she kept checking her watch as if she had something more important to do.
Lately, Dana had been losing her patience with Caitlin. Caitlin was starting to act like all the goofy girls from school they used to laugh at. The ones who never read, who talked about makeup and clothes and boys, who could not even name the vice-president of the United States. Maybe she was jealous of Dana’s friendship with Roald. But he made Dana feel like somebody. He made her think.
But Caitlin only shrugged or played with the ends of her hair in response.
“Don’t tell me you’re mooning over Kevin?” Dana said.
That made Caitlin laugh at least. “Oh, no,” she said. “Not even a little.”
“What then?”
Caitlin laughed in that silly way she’d developed lately. She shook her head.
Dana sighed real loud so that Caitlin would know how exasperated she was. But still Caitlin didn’t say anything more.
“Roald said—”
“I am so sick of Roald,” Caitlin said. She wasn’t even looking up at the sky.
