Shout Her Lovely Name

by Natalie Serber

  “What?” I wasn’t paying any attention to his voice.

  He slumped forward to pull his other boot off. “It would just be my family.” He dropped the second boot, then raked his fingers through his hair.

  Again I hardly breathed.

  “They don’t know.” He held his finger to his lips when he said it, like we were in on this together.

  Something about his finger made me sit up in bed. “I’m a secret?” My heart clunked in my chest, like it had just hit the absolute hard bottom of my story.

  “I haven’t had the opportunity to tell Gretchen yet.”

  With my full life in California, there were so many other places I could be. At home with my mom and the avocado facemask. Yolanda was probably grounded because of her hickey. I could be at the movies with Doug Jordan, his hand claiming mine. But I was here, a whole weekend of my life, doing this thing I’d imagined forever.

  “The girls are still too young to understand.” He stepped back into the bathroom, ran the water. “Okay?” He tried to sound charming but it came out brusque.

  Though he wasn’t looking at me, I nodded, up and then down, as if the secret didn’t mean our weekend had a definite end.

  “Here’s your water.” He set a glass on my nightstand. “And now I’ll turn off your light.” He leaned over to pinch my toe. He said, “Sweet dreams, Nora,” as if he’d said it every single night of my life.

  Plum Tree

  Nora cupped the pot in her hand and stepped out to her backyard. Her best friend, Zellie, was waiting, digging through her backpack. “I don’t have any papers,” Zellie said. Instead she held up a Tampax and ran her tongue along the edge of the wrapper. “We’ll have to use this.” She ejected the tampon onto the struggling lawn, where it lay like a white firecracker.

  Nora had scraped together just enough from her mom’s stash to make a slim joint, the words slender reg along the side. The pot was hidden under Ruby’s bed on a silver tray that in better times had displayed a tea set. When Ruby bought the tray at a neighbor’s yard sale, its scalloped edges were already tarnished, and she never bothered with polish.

  “My mom claims this pot is the same kind Hitler smoked before he committed suicide.” Nora wondered if the pot actually had a family tree or if her mother was just trying to scare her off, or if Hitler even smoked pot. “It was one of my mom’s voice-over moments. You know, when moms try to tell you stuff without telling you stuff. As if . . .” She sat in the dirt, leaning against the plum tree behind her bedroom.

  “Here’s to Hitler’s suicide,” Zellie said, sucking her voice down her throat with the smoke. Nora’s mom croaked like that when she smoked pot. Sometimes she croaked out entire sentences, like “What should we make for dinner tonight?” or “There’s a Thin Man movie on at ten.” Then they’d roll the TV into her mother’s bedroom. Nora was named for Nora Charles, and she imagined reclining in a satin dressing gown with a dry martini and a sublime husband like Nick. Nora Hargrove would stroll across the bedroom imitating Nora Charles, her mother’s cigarette held elegantly between two fingers. “A little more hip,” her mother would say, or “God, I’d kill for your legs.”

  Zellie twisted a plum from the branch above her. “The only thing worth stealing from my mom is a diuretic pill.” When Nora shrugged, Zellie continued. “You know, pee pills, for water retention. She’s practically turned herself into a piece of beef jerky trying to pee away twenty pounds.” Perfect and pert Zellie, with her straight blond hair, major tube-top collection, and the ability to say the exactly right hilarious thing, had nothing to pee away.

  “I’d like one of those pills.” Nora held her hand open and Zellie dropped a plum into her palm. This was the first house Nora ever lived in that had a fruit tree.

  “Maybe I’ll learn to preserve,” her mom had said to their new landlord. He’d lit her cigarette and she re-inhaled the curl of smoke escaping from her mouth. French, she called it. He told her he’d come every winter to prune and spray for mold.

  The tree was nestled at the back of the yard, where the two fence sides sharply met. If Nora had gone to geometry often enough she’d remember what kind of angle it was, acute or oblique or something worse. She’d hated her geometry teacher. Supposedly he was hypoglycemic. He nibbled sandwiches through all of his classes. His wife made them, and his suits. During quizzes Nora stared at the crust and bits of bologna sitting on a cloth napkin on his desk. She read the labels sewn into the suit jackets he hung on the back of his chair. HAND SEWN BY MRS. LESTER. If he didn’t remove his jacket, no one would ever know the work she’d put into that suit. Now Nora took courses in which she knew she’d excel, typing instead of geometry. She quickly mastered the home keys and aced all the self-tests. Now is the time for all good men . . . That’s how she slipped off the college track in school. She still hadn’t told her mother about her schedule change. Ruby had sympathy for screwups, but Nora thought this change was just a decision. Sometimes Ruby made snap decisions—like dyeing her hair red, or adopting strays, or moving to Santa Cruz, or, one time, as if she’d done it a thousand times before, passing Nora her little stone pipe. “What the hell,” she’d said, releasing a long, steady stream of what smelled like burned honey. “We’re home, you’re safe. I’d rather you try it here than somewhere else.” Nora wanted to make decisions like that, change big parts of her life in a heartbeat.

  The plum tree’s branches dipped over either side of the fence, the plums dangling into the alley, tempting anyone who passed by. Two years in a row Nora had watched the blossoms give way to green lumps, tight as eyes squeezed shut, and then, with the warmer days, when she came outside to get stoned or escape her mother’s moods, she noticed they’d begun to soften and purple up. Someone had taken the time to plant this tree.

  When Nora shelved books at the library to work off detention for cutting classes, she’d come across a book on fruit trees. First she thumbed through the pictures, then she found the chapter on plums, and she’d slumped down in the stacks and read the names: beauty, damson, elephant heart, Golden Nectar, Nubiana. Judging from the description—large, amber-fleshed pulp, deep purple skin, sweet and firm, perfect for baking—she had a Nubiana tree in her yard. There was even a recipe for a tart, and Nora thought that this summer she might bake one. To plant a plum tree you must dig a hole three times the size of the root ball, mound up a pile of soil and compost in the center, and then spread the roots as gingerly as a child’s hair. She imagined a gardener tamping down the soil around the trunk with the toes of her shoes, tucking it in. For such a colossal effort, you’d better know you were sticking around. A fruit tree meant total commitment.

  Nora and Zellie passed the misshapen joint, biting hard plums between hits. The tart flesh made Nora salivate. When they couldn’t hold the joint without burning their fingers, Zellie spit on it and dropped it in the film can with their emergency supply of roaches.

  “What now?” Zellie asked.

  It was the dead zone of the school year, a week left until summer, reports already turned in, finals taken. Yesterday the entire school participated in a rollicking locker purge. Teachers paced the corridors while students chucked torn pictures from Rolling Stone, empty lip-gloss applicators, old tests, and shriveled orange peels into strategically placed trash cans. Those who attended school today would be enduring cobwebby videos of Masterpiece Theatre, watching the institutional timepieces click: half a notch back, full minute forward. Nora had spent many hours staring at the clocks’ stuttering hands, as if even the clocks had to work hard to gather enough momentum to make it through Junior Composition.

  She stood, her left hand pressing against the trunk for support. Overhead, the sky was swept clear of clouds, and the afternoon stretched out before her, full of absolutely nothing. A light feeling crept up from the arches of her feet, along her thighs, and up her spine until she felt herself upright as a sunflower. “Head rush.” She wiped the dirt from her ass. Plum pulp smeared the seat of her pants. “Shit. I prom
ised I’d rake these up.” She kicked at more fallen fruit around the base of the tree.

  “Let’s just hang until the party,” Zellie said. Yesterday during PE, when Nora and Zellie were smoking, slouched against the cyclone fence in the senior parking lot and checking their reflections in car windows, a boy they hardly knew told them about a kegger on Ocean View Drive.

  On Fridays Nora’s mother could be counted on to hit happy hour after she finished teaching. Zellie and Nora had the house to themselves. Zellie flipped through the channels for an old movie. Nora settled onto the wide sofa cushions where she and her mother used to sit together in front of the TV, first eating dinner and watching Dan Rather and then doing schoolwork to Taxi. Her mother had a crush on Judd Hirsch, and she liked Tony Danza.

  “Something for everyone,” Nora whispered to herself now. That was before Nora started cutting classes. Before she met Zellie. Before she mixed vodka and crème de menthe in pint milk cartons and brought them to school to share before fifth period. Before she joined her friends screaming insults out car windows at pigeon-toed, D-cupped Tara Danforth. Before she’d made out with a boy and let him slide his hands up and down inside her clothing. Before she was fitted for a diaphragm because all the girls she knew had one.

  Her mother tried to get information out of her, calling Nora in to sit on the toilet while she soaked in the tub, a shell-shaped inflatable pillow behind her neck, a hot washcloth spread over her cheeks and chin, opening her pores. Nora didn’t want to hear that her mother had done the same things—that she and her mother were similar in any way. “Beanie, take advantage of my experience,” she would say, staring right at Nora’s face. Nora couldn’t stand when her mother was earnest and dumb. She wanted to make her own new and unique mistakes. She was nothing like Ruby.

  After Planet of the Apes, and a rerun of Hogan’s Heroes, Nora peeled Zellie off the couch. “You’re such a slug.” They walked through her neighborhood to the beach and The Boardwalk, just to kill time. Long arms of late-afternoon sunlight pierced through a fog bank that hung just offshore. A breeze fluffed the girls’ hair around their shoulders and carried the smell of baked kelp up the cliffs to where they stood.

  “Do you think Randall looks like Charlton Heston?” They both knew what Zellie was doing, shoehorning the potential glory of Randall into their conversation.

  “You mean the noble astronaut George Taylor?” Nora climbed onto the guardrail, hooked her feet beneath the bottom rung. “Nah, more like the apes.”

  “No way.” Zellie picked at her split ends as if she didn’t care.

  “Okay, Tom Petty.”

  “He’s doggly!” She shoved Nora’s shoulder, causing a lurch and a grab for the railing.

  Nora yelp-laughed. “Relax. He’s hot and he’s into you. Trust me. I can interpret the way a guy stares.” Though guys didn’t stare at her. It was always at her mother. Fervent men in cars, at gas stations, in checkout lines, and her friends’ dads—even her mother’s ninth-grade-class school bus driver. Her mom used to sit in the third seat behind him just so they could “make eyes” in his rearview mirror. Now whenever Ruby smelled Old Spice cologne, she brought up Leroy, the bus driver, like he was some amazing treasure from her past instead of a creepy older guy. Nora once asked her if anything had come of the flirting, and her mother tipped up her voice and raised her eyebrows expectantly: “No?” Then she paused. The quiet between them was like a gaping window waiting to catch a breeze on a hot day, only she was waiting for Nora to share something about her life. When Nora didn’t, Ruby finally said, “When you’re ready, I’m here. Whatever you need: advice, birth control, a shoulder.”

  “I told Randall about the party.” Zellie continued to pick at her hair. “I hope you don’t care.”

  Nora shrugged as if she didn’t, although with Randall at the party, she’d be either relegated to third wheel or on her own.

  The sun was gone now and The Boardwalk lights flickered on. Shrieks from the roller coaster reached all the way to the cliffs. The screams were always louder in the fog. Shrill at the first drop and then quickly fading, as if the riders plummeted straight down a rabbit hole. Nora could sometimes hear them in the dark of her room. She followed the route in her mind, and like the passengers whose hips slid from side to side on the rattling train, Nora would sway in her twin bed, her heart pounding.

  She had to lie down to lace up the front of her jeans, which were meant to look like sailor pants. Zellie was digging a straightened paper clip around the bowl of Ruby’s pipe and up the draft hole. She smeared residue along the length of a cigarette and then lit it. “Wear the batik skirt, it makes your ass look good.” Zellie passed the cigarette, then rifled through the pile of clothing on the floor. “Can I wear the raspberry angora?”

  “It’ll be tight.”

  “Exactly!”

  Nora slipped the skirt on and turned sideways in the mirror, ran her hands over her hips. She’d seen her mother do this exact thing, stand in front of a mirror saying, “This is relaxed,” letting her stomach pooch out, then sucking it in tight and saying, “and this is held in.” Nora sucked her stomach in. She shouldn’t have eaten so much today.

  “I look fat.”

  “Yeah, right.” Zellie slipped out of her shirt and pulled the sweater over her head. It was tight and it would never look that good on Nora. After tonight, Nora would give it to her. They stood before the mirror together, Zellie taller and blond. Nora liked the way her own hair curled and her small waist, but she would kill for nice boobs. If she and Zellie were blended together, they would be so foxy. She squeezed back into her jeans and relaced the front with a rainbow-colored shoestring. Both girls bent over and yanked brushes through their hair, then flipped their heads back and forth a couple times. Nora stroked a lip-gloss wand over her mouth.

  “Your house tonight, right?” Zellie was already dialing home. “Mom . . . Fine . . . I’m sleeping at Nora’s . . . I said fine . . . I dunno, the movies . . . how early?” She took a drag off the cigarette and blew the smoke out the side of her mouth. “What? . . . Bounce? . . . I know what it is . . . Okay. Bye.” She hung up and stared at Nora. “My mother needs Bounce.” And they burst out laughing. “My mother has been doing laundry for sixteen years.”

  “Bounce,” Nora said in her springiest voice and she laughed and felt at ease because now the evening had a theme, a private joke. If she felt uncomfortable, all she had to do was turn to Zellie and whisper, “Bounce.”

  Nora left a note for Ruby.

  At the movies. Zellie is sleeping over.

  Love, N.

  They plucked more plums to eat on the way. The fog never did come in and the first stars made pinpricks of light in the clear dark sky. The girls passed clapboard homes and cottages. Wavering blue light and the smell of cooking onions seeped out windows toward the street along with bits of the evening news, the clatter of dishes, “I’m in the kitchen,” someone practicing piano—the loose connections of family in the hours between dinner and bed. Nora had the feeling of swimming past all that life on the inside.

  “I’d want to live there,” Zellie said, pointing to a dark house. “Everybody’s out doing their own thing.”

  “There’s mine.” Nora pointed. Tiny lights illuminated shrubs on both sides of a straight path to a porch, like guide lights on a runway. A tabby cat perched on the rail, lazily flicking its tail, watching them through slit eyes. There was something solid, inviting, about the house that made Nora shiver. The porch light glowed off the doorknob, as if the house could hardly wait for someone to wrap a hand around it. “Wouldn’t you love to come home to that?”

  “You are so weird.” Zellie pointed to the window boxes. “Those are plastic flowers.”

  “Maybe they went to Europe and they didn’t want the plants to die.”

  “Europe’s not so great.” Zellie lobbed a plum pit into the hedges. Zellie tossed off statements like that all the time. As if her family vacations, family meetings, family meals, family cod
e words, family outings were nothing compared to the freedom, the laissez-faire child-rearing Ruby claimed bloomed from her complete trust in Nora.

  There were no plastic flowers at the party house. These parents had left for just a few days. Nora followed close behind Zellie. She hoped Randall wouldn’t show up and whisk Zellie off, at least not until Nora found someone to talk to. It was awkward being alone in the center of so many people. Three clans populated the front porch: the smokers, the talkers, and the kissers. Nora knew she was a member of the first and she patted the pack of Winston Lights jammed into her waistband. She recognized people from school but no one she knew well enough for her to say hi first, so she drifted past, her hand ready in case anyone greeted her. The Stones’ “When the Whip Comes Down” bellowed from washing-machine-size speakers just inside the living room. Music vibrated up from the floor into her stomach and throat as if she were nauseated. A black leather couch, its chrome arms glinting, held three too many people. As Nora and Zellie walked by, a boy thrust a corn dog toward Nora. She waved it away and then yelled over the music, “No, thanks. I’m a vegetarian.” It sounded ridiculous. She was a vegetarian because she liked the way it sounded when she told her mother and her mother’s friends, as if she believed in something besides men and fun.

  Someone clicked off the overhead light and draped sheer scarves over floor lamps as Nora and Zellie weaved through knots of dancers toward the keg in the kitchen. White tiles covered the walls and ceiling; there were enormous stainless steel appliances, everything was sleek and hard, bright and loud, and the room reeked of pot and fast food. Der Wienerschnitzel wrappers littered the counters. A girl with black bangs unwrapped corn dogs she took from a greasy brown bag and loaded them onto cookie sheets. She said, “Voilà, et voilà,” again and again while wrappers spilled to the floor.