Goldengrove

by Francine Prose

Aaron told me twice how to reach the clearing beside an abandoned barn. I already knew where it was. Margaret and I used to meet him there. I could bike there in fifteen minutes.

  “Who was that?” my father asked.

  “A friend from school,” I said.

  Why didn’t he ask, What friend? They’d always been so careful before, interrogating us on where we were going and whom we were going out with. But now they were glad I had a friend. They wanted to believe me. They didn’t want to hear that I’d just made a date with Little Adonis, the guy with the screw loose, the boyfriend they’d hated and suspected, the hero who could have saved her.

  THAT SUNDAY, I ANNOUNCED I WAS GOING TO GO HANG OUT with Elaine and Tycho. My mother’s faint assent barely registered above the racket of Dad’s typing.

  Two days had passed since Aaron called. I was sure he’d forgotten. As I biked down the sun-striped road, each tree shook its branches and whispered about my imminent humiliation. I braced myself for the pain of seeing the empty field where I would have to ward off the memory of all the times I’d gone there with Margaret. Now I would have to wait alone until I gave up and went home and tried not to think about how, in the past, Aaron had always been early.

  By the time I rounded the last curve, I was so convinced that Aaron wouldn’t be there that, when I saw him, I couldn’t have been more surprised if coincidence had brought us there at the same moment. He’d parked parallel to the road and opened the side door so he could sit on the floor of the van with his legs stretched out in the sun. I made my graceful entrance by skidding on the gravel. He dropped his cigarette and ground it under his sneaker.

  “Hi,” I said, remaining on my bike until it solved the problem of whether I should shake his hand or kiss his cheek or hug him.

  I slid off my bicycle, and he loaded it into the back of the van. I thought, All right. This is how it starts. Something is beginning.

  “Hey, kid,” he said, crooking his forearm to bump mine in a goofy soul shake.

  “Good to see you,” I said.

  “Me, too,” said Aaron. “I mean good to see you, too. Maybe we should get going.”

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” I said.

  “I stopped. Then I started again.”

  “You shouldn’t.” Margaret’s death had taught me nothing.

  “Ready?” said Aaron. “Let’s go.”

  I got into the passenger seat. This was only my second ride alone in Aaron’s van, but already it seemed almost normal. Auto-immunization. I wasn’t in pain over Margaret. Or I was, but just for a second.

  “What was that?” said Aaron.

  “What was what?”

  “You made a sound.”

  “Did I? I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize.” We both knew what the sound meant, and it silenced us for a while.

  Aaron drove smoothly, with his elbow out the window, his James Dean equivalent of Margaret’s old-movie steals. Oh, they were made for each other! I wondered if Aaron ever thought that he would never find someone so perfect, and that he might search his entire life for that smile, that voice, that laugh.

  “Up for a movie?” Aaron said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Sounds good.”

  Which it did. Light up the small screen. Bring on the popcorn and chips. There was a TV show I used to like that made you feel as if you were sitting in a theater behind a row of space aliens watching bad, low-budget sci-fi films. That’s how Aaron and I would be, Mystery Science Theater 2000, our tiny antennae bobbling as we wisecracked about the Martians in cheap Mylar suits emerging from their Frisbees.

  Why was I so jumpy? It was only an afternoon. The minute I felt uncomfortable, I could say I wanted to leave. Aaron wasn’t forcing me to do this. We were experimenting. Together.

  If only I didn’t have to talk to Aaron’s parents! The fact that he was hanging out with his dead girlfriend’s little sister would hardly reassure them about his snapping back. I imagined half a dozen ways that the meeting might go. They fussed over me or ignored me, they mentioned Margaret or didn’t, I stayed calm or burst into tears and begged to be driven home.

  Aaron pulled into a driveway beside a large, neat, barn-colored house. Instead of stopping, he hit the horn—It’s me! It’s me!— and kept going. I turned. I couldn’t see anyone. I’d been spared. But for what? I hardly knew Aaron. No one knew I was here.

  Come on, Nico, I told myself. Aaron was Margaret’s boyfriend. But maybe her death had unhinged him, further loosened that screw. She’d warned me to be careful of him. Freaky. In a heartbeat, I’d gone from being afraid of Aaron’s parents to wanting to alert them to my presence. Remember me? I’m the girl who sold you Ordinary Grief.

  He pulled up in front of a shack covered with green roofing tiles. Margaret had told me that Aaron had his own art studio, a cabin separate from his house where he painted and basically lived.

  “This is cool! Is this your studio?” My voice sounded robotic, like Tycho’s. I scrambled to remember what else Margaret had said. As each of Aaron’s brothers and sisters grew up and moved away, the next in line got to use the cabin as a command post from which to plot their escape. Aaron was the youngest. For now, the cabin was his.

  “It used to be my studio,” he said. “When I was pretending to paint.”

  “And now?”

  “Now it’s where I bake little children into gingerbread.”

  I did my best to laugh. Maybe this was where they’d gone to have sex while I waited for them at the movies. I didn’t want to go inside. I wanted to go home. I could say I felt sick. Aaron would drive me back, and that would be the last time I ever saw him.

  Calm down, I thought. Get a grip. Your sister’s boyfriend isn’t going to bake you into a cookie. You’ll have fun, watch a movie. You’ll be home in time for dinner. Mom and Dad will never know.

  Aaron got out of the van and stretched. I reminded myself to move. The van door slammed behind me.

  Aaron said, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Why?”

  “You jumped.”

  “It’s a hearing thing,” I lied. “I’m allergic to loud noises.”

  One of those stone garden sculptures, like a mailbox for letters to a Japanese god, bordered the path to the cabin. Aaron’s mom had put it there. I found that reassuring. This wasn’t the witch’s forest. This was Emersonville, with its folksy ideas about garden decor, placards of ladies bent over weeding so you could see their frilly underpants, flags with satin rainbows and unicorns, plastic reindeer at Christmas.

  Pushing open the door, Aaron warned me, “Hold your nose.” The shades were drawn, and a stew of putrid odors had been simmering in the dark: wet dog, pet food, mildewed carpet, cat spray, spilled beer, plus the various illegal substances that Aaron and his siblings had sneaked out here to try. Layered on top of the smell were all of Aaron’s mom’s industrial-strength attempts to kill it.

  I’d almost stopped minding by the time Aaron found the light switch. I was flattered that he trusted me enough to take me somewhere that smelled so bad.

  A window shade snapped, and a sizzle of daylight flashed along the hallway. I peered through a door that separated the corridor from a tiny kitchen. The burners were crusted black, and the sink overflowed with soda cans and yeasty-smelling bottles. The rest of the cabin was a tangle of hockey sticks, helmets, ragged sneakers, stacked magazines. A space in the center had been hollowed out and furnished with a lumpy couch and an old TV set.

  “This place is great!” I said.

  “Glad you like it,” Aaron said. “Make yourself at home.”

  I wandered around, pretending to look at things, pretending there was something to look at. I searched for signs of Margaret, though I knew it would hurt if I found them. Either Aaron had obliterated every trace of my sister, or else he kept secret reminders around, visible only to him, thorns that could snag only him, so only he would know he was bleeding.

  Across the room, a door led to a gl
assed-in porch littered with confetti. Not confetti. Paint spots. That was where Aaron painted. Used to paint. The easel was empty, the worktables knocked over. Coffee cans and paint tubes lay scattered, as if there had been a break-in. Breakdown was more like it. I thought about Aaron burning his paintings of the lake. There was probably still a charred patch outside on the lawn.

  “Oh, look, your studio!” I said.

  “Let’s skip that part of the tour, okay?”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s not your fault,” said Aaron. I jumped when he slammed the door between the main room and the porch. “Have a seat.” He pointed at the couch and went into the kitchen.

  The springs in the couch had collapsed so low that sitting was like having someone swipe it from beneath me. As I squirmed around, seeking a semi-comfortable place, a strip of flesh popped out from under the shirt I’d bought with the money I’d made in the bookstore. Pale yellow, with laces down the back, the shirt was nothing Margaret would have worn. I yanked it down over my stomach.

  Aaron returned with a plastic bowl of potato chips and two cans of Coke.

  “Gee,” I said. “That’s so nice of you.”

  “We need to keep our strength up,” he said.

  Greasy crumbs sprinkled everywhere as I helped myself from the bowl.

  I said, “I’m making a mess.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Aaron. “The reason the couch has lasted so long is because we feed it.”

  Sipping my soda, I stared at the blank TV screen.

  “What’s the movie?” I asked.

  “You choose.” Aaron handed me two DVD sleeves.

  “No. You pick.” I shut my eyes, so I wouldn’t have to.

  “You didn’t even look,” said Aaron. “I thought we were in this together, Nico.”

  Ninotchka. Casablanca. Two foreign words with too many vowels. On one cover, Humphrey Bogart and an actress swooned toward an embrace, sharing a sort of poncho printed with a man in a trench coat, a vintage airplane, and an exotic city skyline. The other DVD said “Garbo laughs,” and featured a painting of a giddy, red-haired woman. I didn’t want to watch either one.

  “You’ve seen these, right?” said Aaron.

  “She knew them word for word.”

  “No.” I felt as if I’d lost some kind of contest.

  “Strange,” Aaron said. Like the art book, these films were private. She’d kept them for herself and Aaron. Didn’t that skew our experiment? However much pain old movies caused me, it must hurt Aaron more to watch the ones that had belonged to them. On the other hand, I was her sister, and he was only her boyfriend, which tipped the scales back toward me. I would never have another sister, and he would have other girlfriends, even if he doubted that now. He still had four siblings. He won on every count. He’d watched these movies with her. I hadn’t and never would.

  “Let’s do it,” Aaron said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

  “Whatever? Make up your mind, Nico. Sometimes you have to decide.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Stop apologizing,” Aaron said.

  “Sorry,” I said, and we laughed.

  “Okay. Ninotchka.”

  He popped a disc into the machine, then sat down at the far end of the couch.

  The credits rolled, and I braced myself to enter the black-and-white world that I’d sworn to stay out of if I couldn’t go there with Margaret.

  “Relax, Nico,” Aaron said. “You look like the statues at Easter Island. If you don’t want to do this—”

  I concentrated so hard on unfreezing my face that I must have missed something, because, the next thing I knew, three bozos in fur hats were bumbling around an elegant hotel lobby.

  “Russians,” said Aaron.

  “Right.” I must have been crazy to think I could stand this. The scene shifted, and a woman in a fur-trimmed robe was emoting into a mirror, “It’s really a wretched morning, wretched. I can’t get myself right. I wanted to look mellow and I look brittle. Oh, I’m so bored with this face. Whose face would you have if you had your choice? Oh well, I guess one gets the face one deserves.”

  “Now what’s wrong?” Aaron startled me. I’d been thinking of Margaret giving that speech, naked in front of her mirror.

  “Nothing. Why?” I said.

  He said, “You’re gasping.”

  “Asthma.” I faked a cough. “It’s dusty in here.”

  Aaron said, “Are you having some kind of attack?”

  I said, “Can we watch the other film? This one’s a little boring.”

  “Fine. Let’s check out Casablanca.” Aaron slipped in the other disc. “Might as well go for the hard stuff.”

  A map appeared on-screen, and one of those human-typewriter newsreel voices rattled on about World War II, Lisbon, the Nazis. The camera waded into a crowded Middle Eastern bazaar. A murder was announced, something about German couriers, and police swarmed the market.

  “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” I said.

  “Not exactly,” said Aaron.

  Cut to a nightclub full of international sleazes making shady deals. Zoom in on a hand signing a check and gradually move up—wrist, sleeve, white tuxedo—to the handsome, beagle-like face of Humphrey Bogart. How could I not have seen this? Margaret had made me watch everything with Bogart, everything in which brave French people resisted the Nazis.

  The Germans had not only captured Casablanca but invaded the sanctuary of Bogart’s club. The plot gave me something to focus on—letters of transit, refugees. And at the center was Mr. Rick, who never stuck out his neck, never drank with his customers, the hard-boiled egg with the warm liquid yolk.

  A guy with bulging lizard eyes was begging Rick to help him—

  “Peter Lorre’s the greatest genius who ever lived,” Aaron said.

  The police swarmed Rick’s place. Just as the uproar died down, a handsome couple swept in, as if someone had opened the door on the dusty desert night and admitted in a blast of clean, pure Nordic air. The couple telegraphed heroism, anxiety, weary sophistication. The blond actress seemed lit by a lamp inside her skull. From within the prison of her goddesslike calm, her hijacked eyes tapped out the SOS of a heart about to explode. It nearly detonated all over Rick’s piano player, Sam, whom she asked to play the one song that could get him in trouble.

  Aaron said, “Did you ever hear her sing that?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Wasn’t it something?”

  I couldn’t speak for wishing I’d heard it. “Who’s the actress?” I asked.

  “Ingrid Bergman.”

  I said, “Rick’s going to drink with them.”

  “Bingo,” Aaron said.

  What could Sam do? He played the song. Rick walked in and freaked until a nod from Sam redirected him to the luminous stranger. It took about three seconds for everyone except the husband to figure out the story. Ilse’s eyes spilled over. Her grief had nothing to do with mine. She was weeping over love, a minor problem that could be solved, while I was grieving over death, which could never be fixed.

  I gripped the edge of the sofa. Aaron pretended not to notice. Something about our being alone and sneaking under the grownups’ radar made it hard for him to comfort me or to say that he knew how I felt. It was too scary, too intimate. We had to keep our distance.

  “You know who they wanted to play Rick?” Aaron asked.

  I shook my head. Why was I so tense? Didn’t Aaron’s question prove that we were just a couple of old-movie fans swapping Hollywood trivia gossip?

  “Ronald Reagan,” said Aaron.

  “The worst president ever,” I said.

  “You weren’t born yet,” he said.

  “What difference does that make?” I said.

  On-screen, the handsome husband asked the waiter for a Cointreau.

  “My man orders a girl drink,” said Aaron. “That’s one problem right there.”

  Bogart pulled up a chair at the coup
le’s table and, surprising everyone but us, ordered a drink. Aaron smiled conspiratorially, as if we’d written this scene.

  Only the clueless husband believed they were talking about immigration. Arrangements were made, agreements reached. Then the bar went dark, empty but for Sam, playing music for Rick to get hammered by as he waited for Ilse. “If she can stand it, I can,” he said, as he asked Sam to play their song. That was another thing I’d learned since Margaret’s death. Every song may be someone’s personal implement of torture.

  I said, “Aaron, are we, like, destroying ourselves?”

  “We’re repairing ourselves,” Aaron said.

  As Rick killed the bottle, and his hangdog face sagged lower, I remembered a night I’d been at the movies. Just before the film ended, Margaret slipped into the next seat. The plot concerned a cutie-pie veterinary student who rejects her high school sweetheart because he isn’t rich or famous. Ultimately, she realizes he’s the love of her life, and she wins him back by performing a tracheotomy on his ailing puppy. Even though Margaret had left me there so she could be with Aaron, I was embarrassed to be caught watching something so moronic.

  She’d whispered, “Do you want to stay?” I did. I knew where the plot was heading, but not all the ridiculous twists it would take on the way. I said no. We went home. On the way back, she explained that they’d been at a party, and Aaron had drunk too much and gotten boring, and she’d asked a friend to drive her to get Mom’s car. I never asked what boring meant. High school boys got drunk all the time. Now, watching Bogart, I recalled that last Sunday on the lake. There had been some question about their going out that night. What had she and Aaron argued about? I thought about it until I got distracted by the love that had Rick and Ilse falling apart, years later, in Casablanca.

  Flashback. Car ride, boat trip, champagne toast.

  Bogart said, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” I couldn’t look at Aaron. “Kid” was what he called me. Maybe he’d tried it on Margaret first, and she hadn’t liked it.

  Now Rick and Ilse were gliding in a slow, enraptured dance. Ilse was wearing one of those silky robes that, in old movies, signal the lovers are having sex. Robe or no robe, anyone could tell. Sex was the bright bubble encasing them, and everything else was as flat as the Arc de Triomphe jiggling in the distance on their obvious-fake car trip.