Love & Darts (9781937316075) (11 page)

“See what? Do it again,
Hoss.”

Hoss? Now, if I had a child, and I
don’t—my husband says we don’t have the money—and I were a man,
which I’m not, and my child were a little girl, which I hope to God
I never have, I’m thinking that one of the least endearing terms I
could ever use for my daughter would be Hoss. I mean, sure the
kid’s a little fat, a little boorish, a little—well, yeah, Hoss is
apt. But certainly she grew into her expectations.

If I had a daughter, she’d wear dresses every day
and have gorgeous long hair that I’d braid across the top of her
head or into two matching fishtails. I’d help her with her
homework. My husband wouldn’t scream profanity at the computer
screen in the back bedroom behind a locked door. I wouldn’t turn up
the volume on the TV. No. My parents would come and visit. They’d
stay in the back bedroom. I’d have four pillows for them to choose
from and a new, warm blanket that matches the curtains.

I’m not afraid of them or anyone.

The girl in the pool keeps trying to do flips.

I want to be nice. I want to not
care that this girl is playing at whatever kind of back flip she
hopes that is. Who thinks they can plant a handstand without
pointing their toes? She’s got one leg bent and both feet angled
like an inline Egyptian statue. Lord. I would love to just throw
the bratty little ass-child straight up over the blasted fence into
the dumpster. Yet I am forced to resort to the much-abused pleasant
onlooker who seems to give a shit. Now her dad and his friend
aren’t watching at all. Dammit. She’s made eye contact with me and
seems to assume I’m enjoying her show. As if I would ever want to
be an audience for her. I’d rather watch my father organize his
pressed-penny collection.

Okay. Well. Fine. That was a good one.

She needs to tuck her chin.

Better.

She’s just pushing water backwards. Pushing off too
hard with her legs and she’s not getting the height. Damn, girl.
Needs to spring up, then arch her back, then lead with clasped
hands.

There. Good. She arched her back enough. Another
good one.

But the rest of her tricks have been poorly executed
and lacking in grace.

Oh. She definitely got water up her nose with that
move.

Plus, she needs to scoot back about five feet to be
in a more shallow part of the pool. That water’s up to her
shoulders. She’s fighting all that buoyant resistance. No wonder
she’s not getting the height. By the time she pushes off, she’s
already sinking.

Who am I to tell her she’s in too deep?

I call out to the girl maybe because of the charge
in the sky. “Sweetie!”

The child is defenseless. She
looks down at her father. Her father looks at the little girl and
then at me. But I have them divided. The little girl treads water
and looks at me unresponsive.

The pool is surrounded by crepe myrtle and a
mockingbird flicks her tail.

“Sweetie, why don’t you just play quietly like all
the decent children?”

Finally, she is ready to play
elsewhere and stop making all those irritating waves. Good. Her
father is up. His friend is glowering but it doesn’t matter. She
wants to go home. She wants to watch NASCAR and do the laundry. She
wants a soybean burger and chips.

Resistance dissipates. They leave.

The pool is quiet again and my husband is
snoring.

It doesn’t matter. I hear the
cicadas live their loud surges after seventeen years. I am watching
the side of the mountain play dress-up with the clouds curling by,
romantic-like. And we are finally alone again at the pool just like
I wanted to be after an electrical storm in the summer.

Girls with something to prove aren’t the best to fall in love
with. The best type of girl to fall for is one who has given up
altogether—a girl who wants nothing and can’t remember if she ever
cared anyway. The best type of girl, if you’re looking for girls,
is a girl who can offer you only herself. You’ll know when you meet
her. She’ll have hollow eyes and never enough to do. But not
everyone listens, and sometimes a girl, a stubborn and beautiful
girl, gets herself fallen in love with. And then I say, pitying,
pompous, loving, kind:
Why don’t you
ever listen?

“No. I don’t want to, and I won’t.” Her childhood
bedroom door muffled Jeanie’s voice.

Her mother held the locked
doorknob and leaned heavily against the door, hoping pressure might
help her reach her daughter. “But he’s come all this way,
sweetheart. Don’t you want to talk to him? Hear him out?” There was
only silence. After a minute her mother heard a page turn. Her
daughter was reading and relaxed with no intention of speaking to
anyone.

Mrs. B. turned slowly in the hall trying to come up
with the right words to offer this young man with his earnest
intentions. She didn’t want to see his face again. No one had
expected him from the way Jeanie made things sound, and yet here he
was. He drove over two days to face a family that hated him and a
girl who didn’t want to open her door. It wasn’t right. Mrs. B.
pictured the poor boy waiting in the living room. His eyes filled
with misunderstanding. His limbs loose and unwanted. His hair meant
that he had given up and his smile was too vigorous.

Mrs. B. slipped her hands into the pockets of her
apron and leaned back against the hallway wall. Her head knocked a
picture frame and she sprang away to prevent it from falling. As it
swung on the tiny nail, she looked at the picture. It was from some
professional photography studio. Jeanie was two or three in the
picture and smiling brightly into the dark hallway across time.
Mrs. B. remembered fighting and piling everyone into the car that
day. Jeanie had cried all the way to the studio and all the way
home, but for a few minutes under the big silver umbrellas of
light, which intimidated some of the most brave children, Jeanie
basked happily, smiling, and cooing for the camera.

The picture was beginning to turn yellow.

Next to it there was a shot of Jeanie in ballet. She
was third from the end in a long row of Saturday morning
ballerinas. The other thin little figures stood with their feet
together and their arms at their sides. Among them, Jeanie stood
resolutely with her arms thrown open and her feet planted wide
apart. None of the girls was over six years old, and Jeanie was
certainly one of the smaller ones, but somehow the command of her
stance filled her smiling mother with courage. It was impossible to
know what was going on that moment, whether Jeanie were stretching,
behind a step, or just plain ignoring directions, but the picture
led one to believe that it was Jeanie, little tiny round-bellied
Jeanie, who was bounds ahead of the rest and quickly catching on to
the newest motion.

It’s probably more foolish for a
bunch of little girls from a nowhere town to ever think they could
become ballerinas than for them to believe in Santa Claus. But then
it’s even funnier that mothers and aunts go on encouraging hopes
of
Nutcracker
stardom long after Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy become the
silly forgotten nonsense of childhood.

The next picture showed Jeanie with her brothers and
sisters and a number of other children at the beach. Her mother
remembered the day. Jeanie had organized every child in a two-mile
radius into an elaborate game. There were children running along a
jetty diligently scraping barnacles and directing the water
traffic. There were children pulling beach grass and raking seaweed
into enormous piles that other children were building into
fortresses. There were children who ran, children who cleared
rocks, and children who defended boulders. There were children
making piles of clam shells, and mussel shells, and there were
children grinding the shells, in exact proportions, into a
medicinal slag with rounded stones in the bottoms of six
brightly-colored pails. There were children clearing the ravine of
the sharpest rocks, and children screaming to one another from
king-of-the-mountain vantage points. There were two tiny children
looking for live periwinkles for the sake of an activity, and there
were some bigger children who stood awkwardly nearby, wishing they
were younger so as to be less inhibited and more involved. No one
understood the rules. Jeanie was at the center of it all and the
children swarmed around her looking for tactical advice,
reassurance, a reassessment or clarification of the rules, and
guidance. They brought their products for her approval and asked
her to mull over this or that strategy and plan.

Most of the children were running nonstop the entire
morning but Jeanie sat in her emerald green suit and dark tan on
top of a rock dictating the show and making sure to include
everyone. When no one needed her she sat looking at the water.
Sometimes she looked out at the horizon with conviction. Sometimes
she looked down into the shadow of the rock and watched the
clinging seaweed thrash in the water. Mrs. B. remembered so much
motion from those hours of that day but in the picture Jeanie’s
little feet were drawn up close to her body. Amid the ocean and the
swarm of children she was tiny. Waves crashed all around the huge
rock.

To get the best picture, her mother had strolled up,
in the way that mothers sometimes do in their broad-brimmed hats,
and dropped in to visit the self-appointed queen. When she asked
her daughter to explain the game, Mrs. B. remembered Jeanie's
saying to her, from behind Mickey Mouse sunglasses, “It’s like war,
Mommy. No one understands it, so someone just has to pretend so
that nobody will be scared. Then everyone will be okay.” The game
ended late in the day when the troops were exhausted and the
queen’s throne was overcome by the tide. Even when every child on
the beach fights as hard as any full-grown squadron can, they don’t
defeat the tide.

There were other pictures on the wall but Mrs. B.
looked past them and let her eyes rest on another one of Jeanie.
She was onstage lighting a candle. It was the honor society
induction ceremony her freshman year of high school. No one in the
family had heard about the upcoming event. There was no mention of
it from Jeanie. Mr. B. had been reading the paper and saw his own
daughter’s name among those listed to be honored that evening.
Confounded, frustrated, confused, he stood up and wandered into the
utility room where Mrs. B. was folding towels. He read the article
aloud to his wife and then stared at her. It was close to six
o’clock. The paper said the ceremony started at seven thirty. They
had decided to confront their child with the paper and had gone
together down this hall to their daughter’s door to ask Jeanie
about it. She said that, yes, she was being inducted but that she
didn’t understand why they had to make a big deal out of it. There
was no reason to go. She didn’t feel like going. Mr. B. said he
didn’t really care what she felt like and that it wasn’t her
decision to make. This had escalated to a loud altercation mainly
between Mr. B. and Jeanie.

At seven fifteen the whole family was in the van and
they were all in foul moods. There were several complaints of
hunger, as dinner was left in cold pots on the stove. B comes early
in the alphabet so they hurried. Mrs. B. watched her daughter walk
up to the candle and light it without pride. She noticed the smug
looks on some of the other students’ faces. She witnessed the honor
that some students felt, or even the discomfort at being in the
midst of such a formal affair. But as all the inductees stood in a
row at the end of the ceremony, there was no contempt in Jeanie’s
face. No hostility. No smug countenance. Her face wasn’t blank,
really. She just smiled faintly, and waited. Mrs. B. realized that
out of all the kids on the stage she only recognized her daughter.
None of Jeanie’s friends was there with her; such a simple
explanation for all her stubborn noise at the house.

Mrs. B. ran her finger along the top of the frame,
dusting it.

Another picture on the wall in the
hall was of Jeanie and her grandmother. It was the last picture of
the two of them before her grandmother had passed away. They were
sitting in the garden under a tree with their backs to the camera.
The light filtered through the leaves in such a way that only their
faces were lit by the sun. Both of them looked at a single pink
rose which had struggled its way through the weeds to stand out in
the full sun. The profiles of the women were identical. The old
lady’s lips were parted in explanation of life, and the young woman
listened. It was funny enough to smile, even laugh alone in a
hallway, because Jeanie never listened to anyone else but her
grandmother. And at the funeral Mrs. B. remembered how Jeanie had
insisted on speaking. She had also read a Bible verse, which was
written on a tiny piece of paper and remained wedged down in the
corner of the picture frame. It read: “Hope deferred makes the
heart sick; a wish come true is a staff of life. To despise a word
of advice is to ask for trouble; mind what you are told, and you
will be rewarded. A wise man’s teaching is a fountain of life for
one who would escape the snares of death.”