Goldengrove

by Francine Prose

  I said, “I think I’ve had enough strangeness for one afternoon.”

  He said, “That book you were looking at, the art book—”

  I touched it under the counter, like a rabbit’s foot.

  “I have that same book. Your sister loved it. I’d been saving up. I was planning to buy her a copy for Christmas. I guess she told you that, right?”

  “No,” I said. “She never mentioned it.” I didn’t know which was more disturbing: the coincidence, or the fact that Margaret hadn’t told me about the book. Whenever she found anything she loved, she couldn’t enjoy it unless the whole world fell in love with it, too. One thing I’d liked about the book was its lack of painful associations. I’d discovered it on my own. Now that had been taken from me, and in its place was the thought that Margaret had, as Mrs. Akins promised, helped me find someone to help. For one shivery moment, I wondered if Aaron was lying. Why would he lie about a book and pretend that Margaret had liked it? On the other hand, why would someone get a book as a gift for a girl whose father owned a bookstore?

  “Come on,” Aaron said. “There must have been a couple of things about your sister that you didn’t know.”

  I didn’t want to hear what they were. I was sweating up Margaret’s shirt. I said, “Do you still have it?”

  “What?” he said.

  “The book.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t look at it. You want it?

  You can have it.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I can take this one home if I want. It’s so beautiful. It always makes me feel better. Did you ever notice how many paintings show angels saving people from shipwrecks and saints reviving drowned children and—”

  “Who gives a rat’s ass about beauty, Nico? Where was that saint when—”

  My father walked in.

  I said, “Okay. Sure. Let me check. I don’t think we have it.”

  Aaron registered something I wasn’t sure I liked him knowing. I would lie to my father for him. But that was hardly news. I’d lied to my parents every time Aaron and Margaret went out.

  “Aaron, how are you?” Jolly Dad seemed pleased with himself for remembering Aaron’s name. He was acting as if Aaron were just one of Margaret’s friends. Polite but distracted, the way he always was with our friends, whose names he never remembered. Violet and Samantha thought my father was cute. I couldn’t believe I’d liked them. The screw-loose part, the squirrelly Little Adonis part—all that was forgotten, vanished into the foggy world that still had Margaret in it. In this new world, the one without her, Dad looked glad to see Aaron.

  Before all that guy-on-guy goodwill disappeared, I said, “Dad, is it okay with you if we go get some ice cream?”

  My father didn’t want me to go. I was his only Remaining Child. And some part of him remembered exactly who Aaron was. He was trying to be reasonable. Maybe it would be good for me to go. To do anything. The odds—I could watch Dad persuading himself—were that I’d survive.

  “All right,” my father said. “But be back soon, okay? It’s almost time to close up.”

  I didn’t mention that closing time wasn’t for two hours.

  “Fasten your seat belt,” my father said.

  “The Dairy Divine’s five minutes away,” I said. “Less.”

  “Wear it,” said my father.

  “I always do,” said Aaron.

  “Especially if I’m going a short distance. They say most accidents happen within ten miles of your house.”

  Accidents, I thought. Margaret. What were Dad and Aaron thinking?

  “I know,” Dad said. “That’s why I always drive like hell to get out of the danger zone.”

  Aaron laughed. Dad said, “We’re kidding, Nico.”

  I said, “Three miles. Lee Marvin says that in Point Blank.” Neither of them got it. It made me sad to see them joking like they could have when Aaron was Margaret’s boyfriend.

  “Be back in half an hour,” Dad said. “But don’t rush. Drive slowly.”

  Aaron and I were already out the door. Dad was still watching as we got into Aaron’s pale blue soccer-mom van, which— how had I not noticed?—was parked in front of the store. Dad, I thought, are you getting this? You couldn’t ask for anything safer! Not only was Aaron so cool that he could afford to drive the world’s most uncool vehicle, but he’d made it seem so cool that other kids had started asking their moms for their hand-me-down, high-mileage vans.

  Then I stopped seeing it through Dad’s eyes and saw it through my own. I remembered how happy I’d always been to see the van outside the Rialto. The memory knocked the wind out of me. Aaron’s van was way high on the list of Margaret-related things. Everything else—music, films, the lake—slipped down a rung, like guests at a table shifting to make room for a late arrival. Aaron must already have managed to detach his van from my sister. Otherwise he could never have left the house. Maybe it was possible to decontaminate certain activities, the way flood victims wash the silt off family treasures and set them back on the mantel.

  I slid in and fastened my seat belt. Aaron eased away from the pavement and drove a few blocks as if he was taking his road test. Then he hit the gas, and a warm wind roared into the window.

  “Jailbreak,” Aaron said.

  I waited for self-consciousness to leave me paralyzed and mute. In fact I felt oddly relaxed. I didn’t have to talk, because Aaron already understood the most important things: the mornings, the dead of night, the dreams, hearing Margaret’s voice. It was as if his sharing the weight made the heaviness lighter. I felt free, or anyway, freer than I had in weeks. But as we rounded a curve in the road and the Dairy Divine appeared, I remembered we weren’t free. We’d dragged our prison along with us.

  “Is something wrong?” said Aaron. I must have looked as if I had no idea how someone opened a car door.

  “No, why?”

  “You seem like you’re about to lose it again.”

  “I’m not. I’m fine,” I lied.

  A girl I’d never seen before was working behind the counter. She wore a long black vampire dress and a checked farmer’s handkerchief tied backward over her dead, inky hair. One nostril looked red and swollen, as if from an infected piercing.

  “What’ll it be?” she asked the wall behind us. She didn’t seem like someone who’d be patient when I took all day deciding. Nor did she seem aware that Aaron was the sole surviving member of a royal couple.

  I half wanted Aaron to explain who we used to be, what we’d been through, and that this was no ordinary out-for-ice-cream excursion. That’s what she must have thought. A good-looking guy was taking his little sister for a ride. Maybe he’d stayed out late last night and needed to get off Mom’s shit list.

  “What’ll it be?” she repeated, to Aaron this time.

  I adored Aaron for ignoring her. “Get what you want, Nico. Take your time.”

  “Chocolate.” Picking the flavor I wanted was easier when there was nothing I wanted.

  “Excellent,” said Aaron.

  I tried not to look at the filthy glass counter, like some bad abstract painting smeared with colored dabs. One drip of pistachio would send me racing out the door.

  “ ’Scuse me?” said the girl.

  “The lady said chocolate,” Aaron told her. “Double scoop.” Then to me, “Quick thinking, Nico.” He meant to sound approving. But he knew that my not caring wasn’t a good sign.

  The girl smashed two brown globs into a cone, handed it to me, and turned back to Aaron.

  “I think I’ll have the pistachio,” he said.

  I stared at him as if he’d said, I think I’ll have the rat poison. We watched the girl dip the scoop in a blender jar of filthy water and approach the neon-green vat as if the sight of it wouldn’t make the planet topple off its axis. Aaron turned toward me, without seeing me. He had a funny twitch of a smile, and his eyes looked glassy. Then he bopped himself on the side of the head. “On second thought, make that butter pecan.”

  The
girl seemed not to have heard him and continued toward the lethal green. Then, as if she’d changed her mind, she spared us and swerved toward the beige.

  “Thanks.” Aaron put four bills on the counter.

  “That’s four-fifty,” said the girl. Everything was different.

  “Cost adjustment,” she said, touching the inflamed nostril with the hand about to give Aaron change for a five. “Every Middle Eastern country we invade, the cost of oil skyrockets, which jacks up the price of your pecans and whatever carcinogenic shit they put in that pistachio. Plus every bomb we drop shortens the time until the next dirty-bomb attack. I figure the human race has got about another fifteen minutes, max. That’s why I like selling frozen dessert. Enjoy it before it melts—along with the polar ice caps. Ha ha.”

  Her eyes were a pale, Siberian-husky blue, the pupils ringed with black as dark as the kohl around her eyelids. I thought she was someone I could be friends with, even though I realized her little speech had been entirely for Aaron’s benefit.

  Aaron said, “You can say that again.” He smiled.

  “But don’t.” He toasted her with his ice cream cone, and I did the same.

  “Respect,” said Aaron, and the three of us fake-laughed. I loved it that the ice cream girl saw him hold the door for me on our way out.

  “Can you eat ice cream and drive at the same time?” I asked. When the weather was nice, Margaret, Aaron, and I always finished our cones at the picnic table in front of the Dairy Divine. It was romantic, how they’d delayed the moment of saying good-bye.

  “I could eat a lobster and drive if I had to,” he said. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

  He headed up a narrow road I’d never been on before, though I’d thought I’d memorized every inch of the county. The road twisted up through the forest, then popped out into a clearing overlooking the mountains, their craggy silhouettes lined up in parallel rows and fading from green to purple to gray as they marched into the distance.

  “I didn’t know you could get this high here,” I said.

  Aaron said, “Well, actually, that’s why people come here.”

  I prayed, Don’t let him pull out a joint. “Does this place have a name?”

  “Miller’s Point,” he said.

  “Who was Miller?” My father’s doomsday cult—wasn’t the leader named Miller? I wasn’t going to spoil our nice time by mentioning my dad. Anyway, Miller was practically the world’s most common name.

  “I don’t know,” Aaron said. “Some lucky motherfucker. How would you like this view to be yours?”

  “Maybe he didn’t own it,” I said. “Maybe he discovered it, or maybe he just liked to come here and look.” Maybe this was where he waited for an angel to rapture him and fifty thousand friends. Maybe this was where my dad’s maps and calculations would take us. Maybe I’d have to come here with Dad and pretend I’d never been here.

  “Right,” said Aaron. “That’s how it works. All you have to do is hang out somewhere, and they name it after you.”

  “Aaron and Nico Point.” I was horrified that I’d said our names together.

  Aaron said, “They’re not going to call it that unless we both jump off.”

  Neither of us spoke for a while after that.

  Finally, Aaron said, “I haven’t been here since . . . I mean, it was always my favorite place, from when I was a kid. I used to imagine being a bird. Like every kid, I guess. But I’d always imagine flying out over my teacher’s houses and shitting on their roofs.”

  “That’s so brilliant,” I said.

  “I thought I would never be able to come up here again. I thought that if I came up here, I would want to throw myself off—”

  “You don’t still think that, do you?”

  “Not exactly.” As Aaron stared out the windshield, something in his face made me wonder if this was where he and Margaret had sex.

  “Are you cold?” he asked.

  “No, why?” I said.

  “You shivered.”

  I held up my ice cream cone.

  “Stupid me,” Aaron said.

  Aaron and I worked on our ice cream, both watching a small, solitary cloud inch across the sky.

  Aaron nodded at it.

  “Check that baby out. What do you think it looks like?”

  “A sheep?”

  “I get where you could see a sheep. I was thinking Abraham Lincoln.”

  “I can see that,” I lied.

  Margaret would have seen something even odder and cooler than Lincoln. Or maybe she would have heard the cloud singing Otis Redding. And now she was gone, and here was Aaron with the dull little sister, and all she could see was a sheep. His ice cream hand clutched the steering wheel. Butter pecan trickled between his fingers.

  I said, “I’m really sorry. I have no imagination.” I’d never said that aloud before. Why was I telling Aaron?

  Aaron said, “That’s not true, Nico. That’s not true at all. I’m not saying everyone has an imagination. But you do. I always thought you were the funniest kid. And you can’t be funny without an imagination.”

  “I never saw it that way.” Maybe I just liked to think I had no imagination. Because there were times I was proud of the twisty way my mind got from Point A to Point B. I just couldn’t see how a sheeplike cloud looked like Abraham Lincoln.

  “Look again,” said Aaron. “Let your eyes go out of focus. Your mistake is zooming in too hard. That’s how you get the sheep thing. But if you just let everything blur a little, you’ll see the beard and the top hat.”

  I squinted. “I see what you mean,” I lied again. “Sort of.”

  “It takes a while. Try catching it from the corner of your eye instead of dead-on center. Because what you’ve really got to be careful about is looking in the wrong direction. Missing the main event.”

  Listening to Aaron felt less like being part of a conversation than like chasing a runaway pet I was never going to catch.

  “Like what, Aaron?” It felt strange to say his name.

  He thought a second. “Like . . . I’ve always hated magicians. Because their whole thing is distracting you, making you look away from what they’re really doing. If you spend too much time watching magic tricks, you won’t be fit to live in the world. You’ll lose your survival instincts. You’ll be like a baby bird that falls out of its nest, and the humans adopt it, and the mother won’t take it back.”

  I wondered if he was talking to me, or if this was how he used to talk to Margaret. How could anyone spend too much time watching magic tricks? It didn’t make sense, but still it seemed like the most interesting thing I’d ever heard. The cloud morphed into a Q-tip, but I didn’t say so.

  I said, “Have you done any paintings?” I could ask to see them, and that would be another reason for us to get together.

  He said, “I can’t imagine ever picking up a paintbrush again.”

  “You should try.” I sounded as lame as Dad telling Mom to play the piano.

  “I don’t want to,” Aaron said.

  “Then don’t,” I said. “I mean—”

  “And you know what? When people say, ‘You’ll get over this,’ I want to tell them to go fuck themselves. Sorry, Nico.”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “Because what will I have then?” Aaron asked as if I might know. “The world without her in it? I keep wondering what she’d say about this or that. I can’t see or hear anything without wanting to tell her about it.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Me, too.”

  He said, “You know what? I quit my job. I retired before it started.”

  “What job?”

  “I was supposed to teach art in the town rec program.”

  “I used to go to that program.” It would have been fun if Aaron had been a counselor when I’d gone there.

  “Everyone did,” said Aaron. “I didn’t feel like watching the little rugrats throw paint at each other. I didn’t feel like convincing myself it’s their
way of being creative. I didn’t feel like anything.”

  “Were your parents mad?” I said.

  “Insane. But what’s saving my ass is that they’re too worried about me to get angry. They tiptoe around the house as if any loud noise might send me over the edge and—”

  “And what?”

  “And . . . I don’t know. Their fantasy. Whatever that is.”

  Aaron’s dad was some kind of contractor-builder. I didn’t know what his mom did besides raise five kids. I thought about her coming into Goldengrove for a book that advised her to think of Aaron as a kitten who wouldn’t come out from under the couch. Poor Aaron. His parents should have been grateful to have a son like that.

  “What’s their problem?” I said.

  The Q-tip cloud had vanished. I’d studied the water cycle. Rain into cloud into rain into earth. The thought of it comforted me. I wished I could have told Aaron where the cloud had gone without getting lost in the maze of an explanation.

  “My failure to snap back. They can’t figure out why I can’t snap back. So tell me, Nico. What am I supposed to snap back from and snap back to?”

  “I don’t know.” Every time he’d said snap back, his lips twisted like rubber bands. He was imitating or mocking someone. Now I felt sorry for his parents. I wished he hadn’t mentioned them, because now all I could think of was Dad pacing the bookstore and imagining the worst.

  “I should probably drive you back,” Aaron said.

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  As we switchbacked down the road toward town, Aaron said, “Do you ever think about reincarnation?”

  “All the time. Why do you ask?”

  Aaron said, “Remember how your sister liked Laurel and Hardy so much? Well, I found this Web site all about these two brothers from New Jersey. Lots of people think the brothers are Laurel and Hardy reincarnated.”

  “And?”

  “And . . . the brothers were always big Laurel and Hardy fans even when they were in preschool, and they sort of look like them, and they made this video about them, and—”

  I said, “There’s a movie where Hardy gets reincarnated as a horse.”

  He said, “I watched it with Margaret.”