Emily Franklin - Principles Of Love 06 - Labor Of Love (15 page)

I take the dress but shake my head. It's the one I wore to a dance at school sophomore year, but the problem isn't that it's dated. In fact, the article is timeless--from the midseventies--and still in great condition. My issue is that it came from the basement of my house, from boxes crammed with my mother's stuff. Arabella and I stumbled on them when she first came to Hadley, and at the time, I was annoyed with my dad that he cared I'd gone through them. But now I

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get it.All that past, coming into the now? Who needs it? And clothing--like tastes and smells and songs--can yank you to a specific moment. I never once thought maybe my dad had shared something special with my mother when she'd worn this with him. Now I see.

"Not this one," I say and step forward next to Chris so I can look through the clothing I've already looked through.

"God, you are so melodramatic," Chris says and huffs, taking a step backward like he wants to see me try and fail at finding something more suitable.

"What's your problem?" I snap, hoping he'll just fess up and I won't have to drop the I know bomb on him.

"You have this incredible life and you just don't even appreciate it."

I drop the search for clothing and turn around to face him, my hands on my hips, both sides of me feeling heated. "Of all people, I'm the one you say this to? I think I appre ciate my life, Chris. Maybe you're the one who needs help."

"What the hell does that have to do with anything?"

"So I don't want to wear the dress that my mother wore decades ago to some other function--that doesn't make me deranged."

"I never said deranged."

"Great, pick at my words why don't you." I shake my head and check my watch. Chili's party starts in twenty min

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utes, and I need to meet Charlie at the pink house before then.

"I learn from the best. . . ." Chris's sarcasm fills the room.

"You know what I think?" I say while Chris feigns sur prise."I think you're pissed off."

"And just why would that be?" He sits on the edge of my bed, then feels restless and leans on the door frame.

"Because I have Charlie."

"Oh, please," Chris says, too loudly. "Don't for a second give yourself that much credit. I don't care that you have a boyfriend. . . ."

"No--you just care that you don't." I spit it out and wait for Chris to react. His face goes stony and he crosses his arms over his chest. "You loved that I flew off to LA, potentially messing things up with him, and you thought it was great that Jacob came back.You were all into that soap opera, weren't you?" I don't wait for him to speak. "But now that the chips have fallen and I've sorted it out--you have nothing to say. Hell, even Jacob thinks it's great I have Charlie.You'd think maybe my best friend would have said something--anything--to me about how nice it is to finally be treated right by someone I care about."

We stare at one another. He doesn't move and I don't slither out from the two dresses. They're fairly representa tive now, actually--the lighthearted, pure me and the darker,

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moodier side. I don't want either tonight. I want fun, pretty, interesting. I want the dress Chris picked out--he got it right all along.

Chris doesn't add anything further--not a sigh, a hug, an apology, a comment. He just backs out of the room and closes the door. I remove the black-and-white ensemble and stare at Gala's dress. It suits me, but I don't want it to. Rather than wear it and have to think about it all night, I go to Arabella's room and look through her things, rushing so I won't be any later than I already am. Her bed, closet, and bu reau are still a vomitorium of fabrics.Tank dresses and tube tops, prissy frilly shirts, jeans, cutoff khaki shorts, dresses, and sandals adorn all surfaces. I reach my hand in the closet, all the way to the left, too deep to see, and pull out something lightweight and soft.

The dress is a V-neck, close-cut from the bust through the waist, slim through the hips, then a slight twirl from the thighs. The under layer is dark pink, the color of a garden flower, and the top layer is lighter pink, stamped with creamy white blooms. I slip it on.Very un-me, but in a good way, I think. I brush my hair, leave it long over my shoulders, slide some honey balm over my lips, and go to meet my prince.

Okay, so bringing royalty (princes, kings, and their female courtly counterparts) into my night is a slight exaggeration.

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But I drive past the pink house and spot Charlie before he sees me and thinks he's worthy of some kind of title. I love that; catching someone you know when they don't know you're there.You see how they move, their body language, nervous ness or sidewalk flirtations, fidgets--things you don't really no tice when you're with them. I park and watch him wait for me. He looks left and right, swaying slightly in his spot by the pink porch, his clean white shirt bright against his tanned face.

Charlie's mouth forms the word amazing when he sees me, which is all I want to hear. Not that Chris is annoyed with me, not that my family life is all over the place, not that school is beckoning. Just that this boy on this night thinks I'm amazing, and I kiss him as a nod back to him.

We walk hand in hand along the sidewalk near the ocean, across from the bandstand and the expanse of green where picnic blankets already cloak the lawn. Out in the ocean, ferries arrive and depart; a subtle backdrop to reinforce that leaving and arriving are a daily part of life, even here in my wondrous setting.

"You're practically skipping," Charlie says, watching me walk in my ballet flats, the hem of my dress flitting with the wind gusts off the water.

"I'm happy." My smile stretches clear from one side of my face to the other, and I'm sure I'm showing way too much gum, but I don't care. Charlie pecks me on the mouth.

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"Happy is good." He pulls me across the street, toward the mayhem of crowds and food and music. It's nice to feel a part of everything. So much of the time I feel apart from it all. I try to explain this difference to him.

"I know what you mean. It's sort of the same feeling I have about being back at school. Or, not being back yet, but going back." He puts his hand on my waist, guiding me to a back street rather than Circuit Avenue, which is jammed with bodies. "I had this group of friends. . . ." He looks down at the pavement, then pulls me aside. I rest on the side of a large planter that's filled with geraniums. "My friends freshman year were pretty much all assholes." He pauses, dropping my hand."The sad thing is that I was totally one of them."

"But you're different now, right?" I look at him with a smile, to show we both know it's true. He's changed.

Charlie nods. "I am. Sure I am. But . . ." He sighs and kicks at the concrete."But you're still you, you know?"

"What are you saying, that you worry your asinine ways will resurface?" A miniscule pang nudges at my stomach. Not hunger, just this gut feeling of uh-oh.

"I'm not going to tread over that ground again. That's not what I mean. It's like, part of me is really glad to gain back my parents' approval. And go back. But I also know that, in a way, I'm not really going back. I'm starting again.

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But with all these people I know and who know this older, shittier version of me. Does that make sense?"

"Of course." I stick my bare legs out so they touch his, enjoying the slight fuzz from his hair, the warmth of the fad ing sun on his skin."You can't ever really shake off your old persona. Unless you do that thing where you transfer or ap pear at a new summer place and take on a different persona completely. Then you don't know who you are and you're just splintering yourself."

Charlie moves closer, puts his hands on my face."You know a lot, Love Bukowski." He doesn't say the "for a not-yet-senior in high school," but we both know that's what he means.

"Are you going to start emphasizing our age difference now?" I ask, nervousness creeping in.

"Uhh-okay. . . ." He's clearly thought about this before. "I didn't think this would be the optimum time to delve into the long-distance age conflict, but . . ."

My dress suddenly feels trite. My worries about the fall-- which, who am I kidding, is too close to discount--come back all at once.

"Don't get that look, Love," Charlie says. He stands there, his legs still touching mine but not in the same way.

"This is what I mean. . . . I'm going back to this place that I left on pretty poor terms.And I'll see people who I'm not sure I want to know any longer."

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"Like Henry Randall?" I ask, thinking about how Henry kept speaking about some old friend of his who left Harvard and kicked their friendship in the shins.

Charlie's eyes flash with anger. "Yeah. Like him. He's a perfect example of what I don't want to be."

"Well, who's making you? Just go back there, do your work, and become that guy--the person you want to be."

Charlie looks dismayed, as if I'd made light of his situa tion."Sometimes you're really . . ."

"Oh, now this is my fault?"We're not arguing. Not ex actly. But it feels like we're about to. Still touching hands and slightly smiling, but tense.

"No--you're na�ve."

"So, one minute ago I was beyond my years, and now I'm too young. Okay." I stand up and hate myself for want ing the fairy tale.When will I realize that when you repeat edly imagine how things could be, it messes up how they really are?

"Love, wait. I don't want to get into this now." He takes my hand and leads me along a small path of stones set into the dirt between two buildings, behind the movie theater and out toward the other ferry terminal, the smaller one that goes to Nantucket. He positions me so that I'm on a bench as though I'm waiting to board and he's on the brick walkway.

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"We haven't had that talk."

"We haven't?" I think back to the sex, or my lack thereof, discussion on the beach.

"Not that . . ." Charlie smirks. "The one in which I say how glad I am to be with you, and you say you are, too, and then we deal with the fall."

"The fall."

"Yes." He puts his hands in his pockets and taps his foot.

"I'm assuming you mean the season, not the biblical."

"Yeah, Love . . . are you . . ." He takes a deep breath."Are you thinking this is--has been . . ."

I hear our relationship in the past tense and immediately I get that sting of pretearing. Here I am telling myself it'll all work out when I really don't know, do I?

I get off my passenger bench and stand next to him. We lean on the guardrails, looking out at the cluttered har bor. Buoys bat and dip, boats rock on their tethers, seagulls squawk. None of those inanimate objects knows how much I want this to keep going. So I say it. I take that leap and decide to--yet again--just tell him what I'm feeling.

"I want to keep being with you," I say. I don't look at him, but instead fix my gaze on a red mooring ball."I never saw this as a summer fling, if that's what you're getting at. And I didn't think . . . especially after . . . when I'm with you, I feel good, you know?" I sneak a look at him. He, too,

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is fixed on something out at sea."It's not like I go to UCLA or even Wesleyan."

"You're so not the Wesleyan type," he says.

"I know. It's just an example."What type am I? Hearing him say that, something occurs to me. "What about your family?"

"What about them?"

"Do you . . . you know, are you planning on lots of Ad dison family dinners during the year?" I say it kidding, but his tone is serious.

"Every Sunday night." He clears his throat. "With a jacket.And a tie."

"Sounds--" I don't get out the thought before he blurts out his.

"Can we not talk about them right now?"

I nod and think but he is one of them.

Now we look head-on."At first," Charlie says,"I have to be honest--I wasn't . . . I didn't think . . ." He blushes.

"You thought I was going to be your hot little summer thing, didn't you?" I make a flirtation out of it to hide my incredible slice of pain that comes when you realize you and your beloved are not on the same page.

"I did," Charlie says. "I figured, I knew you--kind of-- that we'd started something--and now we had the summer to see where it led."

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"You make it sound like it's over," I say, and the sting makes its way to the forefront of my mind. Forget that Chili's party is waiting, that Chris and I are semifighting about things unclarified; I couldn't walk away from this without knowing where we stand.

"Do you want it to be?" Charlie's expression tells me nothing.

"All I want to know is what's going to happen," I say.

"Spoken like a true writer," he says. "But you know I can't tell you that."

"No, but you can tell me what you want, what you think," I say. My voice is verging on pleading, which I hate, but honest, which I like.

"I like you, Love," Charlie says. "A lot. I hated being away from you when you were in LA and that was--what-- twenty-four hours?"

"A bit longer than that."

"Fine--but my point is that I'm not good with separa tion. I know Hadley is all of fifteen minutes from Harvard, but it's a world away otherwise."

"I get it," I say defensively. "You're all college-oriented and you think I can't keep up, but I can."

"Oh, I have no doubts you could attend Harvard this year and blow off your own senior year with relatively few problems."

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"So, what then?"The wind pulls my hair from my shoul ders to my face where I scratch it away. Maybe it's the force of wind, or maybe it's the salt air, but I feel the tears rise and pray they won't reveal everything by slipping out.

"Oh, no, Love." Charlie hugs me tightly to him. "I didn't mean to have this kind of talk. It's not a breakup conversation."

I speak into his chest."It's not?"

"No." He pulls back so I can see his face while he speaks. "The opposite. I don't want to get burned. I'm . . ." He sud denly looks pale, like he might throw up or pass out. "I'm totally in love with you."