Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (9 page)

"What if I want to be a success at something? What if I want to be able to make some money?"

"That is crap." Even when he was trying to be nice, he was mean.

She snatched her hand away. "Crap to you, maybe. But other

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people actually need money. You'd like it a lot more if you had less of it."

"I'd take less, but I don't want to like it more." He was follow ing her now, down along the bay promenade and to the ferry dock.

"Listen," she said, walking briskly, her face turned away from him. "Not all lawyers are the guys who work for your grandpar ents, writing you checks and harassing your mother."

He was quiet for a minute. "I know. I know you won't be one of those guys."

She nodded awkwardly. She hardly ever got anything off him.

"But they will try to suck you in. You know that, too. You'll wear those suits and those shoes, and you'll never get out alive."

"Paul."

"I'm serious. They'll give you money to fight with people. You'll spend your days distrusting people and thinking of what will go wrong. You're an optimist. You'll get crushed by that."

"I won't," she said defensively. "I'm not so fragile."

He managed to get her hand again. He pulled her to a stop. "Everyone is fragile. Everything beautiful is fragile."

She chewed on her cheek. She stared at her feet. She tried to blink the water back into her eyes before she looked at him again. "You want to fish for crabs?"

She walked to the lamppost at the edge of the dock and pointed to where you could see the leggy shapes gathering. Crabs were so dumb, how they loved the light, how easy they made it for you to capture them at night.

"Okay," he said. She could see that he was hesitant to leave this

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conversation, strained and foreign as it was. But his face also showed relief to be back in their regular world. "I left my net at your house."

"Three years ago?"

"Yeah. I'll get Riley."

"Don't. She had a fever all day. We should let her sleep."

u

Alice had her purple bucket. Her brown legs. He watched her hanging out from the lamppost with one arm, ready to stab her net--his net, actually--into the water. And the poor, stupid crabs clacked around in her bucket.

How much could he say? How much could he tell her?

That he believed in her? That she had her special Alice-ness and she shouldn't just ruin it? That he knew her from the day she was born and he had faith in her? She was his avatar, his better angel. He knew he asked for too much.

"I think they mate for life," he mumbled into his hand, gestur ing to her bucket.

"You're thinking of lobsters," she said. She had supernatural hearing. She always heard everything he said. "You're such a wuss."

He was a wuss. Riley could gut a fish and forget to wash her hands. Alice would smash a three-inch silverfish with her bare heel. He was ashamed of the fact that he didn't like to kill things.

"I will never eat another one of Ethan's crab cakes. Hey,

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there's one." He was pretending to be her spotter, but his heart wasn't in it.

"That one 's tiny."

He felt sorry for the crabs, but suddenly he felt happy for him self. Here he was on a calm bay with his feet dangling off the dock. Here was Alice with her predatory expression and her large glow- in-the-dark gold eyes sweeping the bay floor. He would be happy if she kept crabbing but didn't catch any more. It was no wonder he couldn't come up with a better life to lead.

"So, you'll be back in New York," he said. Now that he had bro ken down the wall to this other part of her life, it was tantalizing to go in and look around a little. He'd have to fix the breach soon enough.

"Yes. Did you see that one? It was huge."

"Do you know where you are going to live?"

She squinted her fox's eyes at him. "Two of my high-school friends are getting a place in Greenpoint. They said they have room for a third."

"Which friends?" Now he was getting comfortable in here. He liked picturing her in her life. Did she wear shoes there?

"Olivia Baskin and Jonathan Dwyer. You don't know them."

It was true that he did not know Jonathan, but he was able to hate him nonetheless. In a fit of hypocrisy, he hated the idea of a man claiming to be her friend and planning to live with her. It seemed wrong. And yet, how many nights had he shared a room with Alice? How knowingly and willfully did he claim to be her friend, even feeling what he felt? Maybe this was why they didn't talk about their other lives.

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Could he tell her not to go to law school and also not to live with Jonathan? He couldn't stand her doing things like that in close proximity with him knowing about it. Maybe he was better off in California.

He once dreamed that his soul took the shape of the mottled moon, but in miniature, and that she held it up to the sky and then put it on her tongue like a Communion wafer, and afterward he could see it glinting in her eyes.

She let go of the lamppost, seeming to grow weary of her war against the crabs. Her netting arm hung down by her side. She looked at him, unsure of how to be, of whether they were allowed to be here like this together.

"What about you? Where will you live?"

It was only fair, when you took the liberty of asking questions, that you also answered them. "I have to get into the program first--officially. I have to finish up the incomplete, so I'll have a BA. They get hung up on that kind of thing."

"That's the paper you're writing."

"Yes."

She surrendered his net and sat down next to him.

"And then . . . I guess I'll find a place. Maybe Brooklyn," he continued. He hadn't thought of Brooklyn before now. He hadn't thought of where to live at all.

The smell of crabs trailing from her bucket tricked his uncon scious mind into believing that no time had passed and nothing had changed. But this person sitting next to him, with her plans and her intentions, was not the same. The way they talked was not the

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same. There was the future unfolding here where it had not been before. He felt as though he was living the past, present, and future at once.

She peered into her bucket of crabs. Then he watched her care fully as she stood, steadying toes curled over the edge of the dock. She picked up the bucket, pulled aside the white handle, and tipped the captive crabs into the water, where instantly they scurried back into their circle of light.

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Red, Red Wine

W hen Alice was about eight years old, she learned that her

father was having an affair. She learned it from her mother. She didn't really understand what it meant until a few years later, when the affair was presumably over. If it hadn't ended or if another had begun, at any rate, her mother didn't tell her about it.

It was just one of those things. It didn't fill Alice with righteous ness or anger exactly. When you learned things young, you just stuck them into your haphazard pile of life and went along.

There was one piece of information that stayed with Alice more than the others--the fact that the woman with whom her father had the affair was on this island, in this town. "Right under my nose" was how her mother had put it. Alice knew this, but she didn't know who the woman was. And though she didn't really

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want to figure it out, she made a strange practice, at certain moments, of trying to figure it out anyway.

It was moments like this, even all these years later, when she was sitting in front of the market on a Sunday morning, for instance, watching people stream in and out with coffee, newspapers, bagels, donuts, when she would study each woman. Are you the one? she'd wonder, waving hello to Cora Furey in her running pants. What about you? she silently asked Mrs. Toyer, reading her Wall Street Journal, who was quite wrinkly now but might have been appeal ing many years ago. She thought of Sue Crosby, who was parking her bike. But it couldn't be her. Ethan referred to her as "that large woman."

Was it someone she knew well? Like Mrs. Cooley? That thought made her cringe. Or someone she knew barely or not at all? Like the lady who made gypsy jewelry and sold it from her house on Mango Walk? She wore pink, gauzy clothes and made a tinkling noise when she walked. Depressingly, she was the kind of fake exotic woman Ethan probably would have really gone for.

Sometimes Alice tried to tell by the way the various women looked at her, the wronged daughter. Were they guilty perhaps? Evasive? A little nervous? Alice was like an amateur detective, but she had no serious intention of solving the mystery. It was just a peculiar spectator sport.

She tried to talk about it with Riley once, not long after she'd heard. "Did you know about Dad?" she asked one night when Riley was lying in her bed.

Riley had nodded but not said anything.

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"Do you think that means Mom and Dad are going to get divorced?" she'd asked.

Riley had shrugged, looking troubled. "What did Mom say?"

"She said that they were trying to work through it."

"What did Dad say?"

"He got mad that Mom told me."

Of course, their parents hadn't gotten divorced. Neither had they quite worked it through. Her mother remained in a perpetual state of umbrage, and her father in constant contrition. Her father was a naturally guilty person, though, and her mother was natu rally drawn to umbrage, so it suited both of them to have a reason.

Riley had turned to the wall and said nothing more.

Both her parents had an oddly theoretical relationship to chil dren and child-rearing. In her mother's ardor for both gathering and sharing information, Alice flipped and flopped between subject and audience. When she was older, it got worse. Her father began teaching a puberty class for sixth-graders when she herself was in sixth grade. Alice was mercifully put with a different teacher, but still she found the whole thing embarrassing and terrifying. Only later could she find it funny. She knew how little her father knew, how completely clueless and tone-deaf he was to kids her age. If he was the authority, what did that mean? She tried not to extrapolate from that bit of inside knowledge. Unlike Paul, she wasn't naturally prone to doubting the things you were supposed to believe in.

Alice stretched and got up from her picnic-table perch and went into the market for more coffee. When she came back out, her father appeared as though she'd conjured him, wearing his customary

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too-short running shorts made out of a silky material. It seemed more clueless than vain in the case of Ethan, but it was sometimes hard to tell. Just as some people believed that every person had one natural age, Alice believed that every person had one natural fashion moment, and her father's had occurred in the late seventies.

"Heya, Allie-cat," he said, waving to her as he stretched his calves by the wooden fence.

On Saturdays and Sundays, her father ran around the island waving at friends, jumping ceremonially into the ocean at the end of it. He ran the same loop every time, not faster or slower, not longer or shorter, whereas her mother was all about progress.

He kept his tan all year round, it seemed to Alice. At one point she thought for sure he was visiting a tanning salon, but she never actually caught him doing it. "It's the beta-carotene," he told her, rather inexplicably, when he discovered her following him down Columbus Avenue. He teased her about it for months and bought her a Christmas gift certificate to Portofino Sun. He had that way of making you laugh and also of turning the tables.

"Your father enjoys himself too much," her mother used to say. Until she learned about the affair, Alice hadn't understood the trouble with that.

u

On Monday morning, Alice sat in the waiting area of Dr. Bob's office. She'd forced Riley there when she saw that Riley was sick enough to miss her lifeguarding shift for the second time in a row,

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but she couldn't reasonably force herself inside the examination room when Riley clearly wanted her to get lost.

"It's strep throat," Riley announced, coming out of the doctor's office, fluttering her prescription in her hand.

"You had that before, didn't you?"

"Everybody's had that before."

"You'll have to swallow pills."

"So says Dr. Bob."

"Did you request the chewables?"

"So funny," Riley said, but Alice could tell she didn't have enough spark for a fight.

"I'll pick them up for you at the ferry. Go back to bed."

"Are you Mom?"

Alice was instantly hurt by this, not because it was outrageous but because it was quite plausible. She wanted to be Riley, but she feared she was her mother.

"Sorry. You are not Mom."

Riley didn't take well to being mothered by one mother, let alone two. Alice tried not to be grudging. Riley never was. Her anger flashed and then vanished, and afterward she had no mem ory of it at all.

"If you get them, that would be great," Riley said gallantly.

"Fine. On the ten-fifty?"

Alice patiently waited for the 10:50, but she felt strangely out of sorts. Two nights before, Paul had lifted the veil between two worlds and she felt a strange wind blowing through, carrying unexpected things back and forth. They had let the veil fall again,

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she thought, but now she wasn't sure. The wind still blew, and she found herself mixing. She was mixing Paul into New York. She was mixing New York into here. She was mixing the past into the future.

She'd tried to shake herself out of it by doing familiar things that did not include Paul. The night before, she 'd gone with a bunch of friends to The Out in Kismet and tried to keep up her end of flirting with Michael Hunte, but she wasn't really there.

The feeling pervaded, against her efforts. It made her feel like she was not really present on this ferry dock. It made her feel only half-visible to the people waiting alongside her. It made her feel strangely guilty for not really being there to pick up Riley's pills, even though she was and she did.