New Year's Eve (11 page)

Anne couldn't help looking at the glass doors where the latecomers were straggling in. When the floor rotated her away, Anne strained over Lee's shoulder to catch a last glimpse. She would not rest until she had seen Jade. But she might collapse when she did. Then what would she say to Lee? Pardon me, Lee, I have to faint. I'll be right back.

Jade
.

“Shall we get something to drink?” Lee asked.

Yes, she was thirsty, so they got something to drink and that kept her hands busy and gave them a new set of people to talk to. Lee was the only college kid there, and that was nice. The seniors were applying to college now, or waiting for acceptances, and they all had questions.

“You won't hear till mid-April,” Lee said.

“Where did you apply?” Lee asked her.

Kip rattled off the names of five colleges who would never even have opened Anne's application, let alone accepted her.

“You'll get in all of them,” Gary said. “I have faith in you, Katharine.”

They were all startled to hear him say, so easily,
Katharine
. It suited her: it was strong and formal. And yet she was really Kip: normal old, organizing old, Kip.

“Shall we dance again?” Lee said.

“Of course,” Anne said. It was a slow dance. Lee held her slightly away from him, and she made no attempt to control or guide. The floor moved, and eventually they were back where they started. She had not once looked out the window. We could be in somebody's basement family room for all I know, Anne thought.

She had to see Con with Jade pretty soon or she would fade.

But Con, not knowing her inner schedule, did not arrive.

The evening dragged on. Anne obeyed every suggestion Lee had, and he had a lot, and time somehow passed.

Every moment of the evening Lee was aware that his was the most beautiful girl there. Stunning in black, she was light and feathery. It wasn't like dancing with a person, though: it was like moving a fashion doll.

He had never understood very well what girls were thinking, but he knew exactly what the boys thought—a girl as lovely as that? Who had been around the way Anne had with Con? Who obviously belonged to Lee now?

Belonged.

He didn't want a girl to belong to him. He didn't want to belong to some girl either. He wanted to be two people who adored being together.

After all these months it still hurt that Kip chose Mike Robinson over him. Lee dated Anne for an excuse to stay in Kip's crowd. He didn't really care for Anne much. He was ashamed of himself.

Not once did Anne suggest a single action, or start a single conversation. She was slender and weightless, but her presence hung on him like a great burden. He looked continually at his watch.

But not as often as he looked at Kip.

All the way up to the twenty-second floor together Con talked with Christopher about going to school in Boston. Con hoped to go to B.U. “Boston's a great town,” Christopher said, “you'll love it.”

“Oh, no!” Molly exclaimed.

“What's the matter?” her date asked.

“I left my bag in the car. Did you bring it?”

“No,” said Christopher. “I didn't notice it.”

She had to have the bag. Without it there would be no revenge. She got panicky enough for the boys to notice. Con looked at her oddly. “Shall I go back and get it?” Christopher asked.

She could not risk Christopher glancing into the half open bag. “Oh, you're sweet,” she said, nuzzling him, embarrassing both boys. “It's all right, we'll forget it.” She would have to get it somehow. Later. Con was probably right; Christopher would get pickled and Molly could go then.

The doors opened on the twenty-second floor.

The place was packed. There must have been five or six hundred there: the boys mostly in black, with bright red, hot pink, or royal blue bow ties and cummerbunds. A few wore ordinary suits, and one tall character was stunning in tails!

The girls were
all
dressed Beth Rose style. Sweet, boring sugar.

At the door a laughing chaperone was passing out helium balloons in jelly bean colors: red and green and yellow and hot pink. A few kids had balloons of their own shaped like—like dinosaurs? Others had noisemakers or confetti or goblets to toast each other with at midnight. The band was playing even louder than Molly normally turned up her own radio, and the dancers were packed as close together as sunworshippers on a sandy beach.

She could not tell that anything was revolving except her own heart.

To the tulip girl ahead of Molly, the stout five o'clock shadowed chaperone gave two balloons: one hot pink and one green. “To make your garden grow,” he said, and laughed hugely, over and over, like a machine you wound up.

To Molly he gave three green ones, and she started to smile, but he said nothing about her dress or her balloons. To the girl behind Molly he gave a pink one and cried, “Sweets for the sweet!”

Christopher fastened one balloon close in to her dress, using the spaghetti strap on her left shoulder, and one slightly higher, and one at the full length of its white string, so that she had a rising bouquet of balloons.

Christopher wound through the crowd, calling hello to everybody he knew and everybody he didn't. Molly followed him, green as grass with all her balloons. Everybody they knew and everybody they didn't cried, “What color balloon did you get?”

“Happy New Year!”

“Oooooh, it's so nice to see you!”

Nobody used her name.

Perhaps nobody knew it.

In all that light, in all that glow, not one person said one thing about her dress.

They danced hard, so close together that they did not seem to have partners at all, but were only molecules bouncing in their tiny-allotted space. She had eaten nothing for two days in order to be sure the dress fit perfectly.

Astonishing
? She had not made an astonishing impression. She had made no impression at all.

Molly was dizzy with being nobody.

I'm not a person, Molly thought. I'm not real. They gave me three balloons to hold me up.

Christopher turned as he danced. With his back was to her, she was not sure which black tuxedo was his.

Kids flocked around Beth Rose who looked idiotic with a new haircut. They were laughing over stupid dumb Beth's dinosaur balloons, as if Beth were a clever person. They were laughing over Kip's stupid little brother, George, who couldn't even keep his shirt tucked in. Anne, stunning Anne, danced like a blind woman. Molly danced right next to her and Anne never saw.

Molly gasped when she saw Gwynnie. What a wig, what clothes, what style! Molly maneuvered closer to Gwynnie, to show off her own dress, and to remind Gwynnie she had invited Molly to her party. That Molly was pretty astonishing, too. But Gwynnie did not scream for Molly. “Beth Rose!” Gwynnie screamed.

“Present,” Beth said.

“Beth Rose, give up your date. Now. I want him.”

“Why?”

“He,” Gwynnie pronounced, “is astonishing.”

Nobody saw Molly. Beth, stupid Beth, was the center of action.

I'll astonish you, Molly Nelmes thought.

You'll be sorry.

You'll see.

Molly fought through the crowd.

She took an elevator down.

She would get her bag, and then they would see.

Matt and Emily stood in the snow, looking up at the revolving restaurant. You could not tell from the ground that anything was moving; it was simply a blur of light through the falling snow. People came and went from the building, hunched over as if the snow offended them. Matt loved the snow, and he loved it that Emily did not try to cover herself from it, but enjoyed it, and turned her face up to it, and smiled.

“I don't want to join the party yet,” Matt said.

Emily had never been in such a party mood. “Why not?” She could hardly wait to see everybody's dresses, and hear everybody's laughter, and dance long and hard to the rhythm of rock.

“Want to talk,” he said.

Matt always talked. But talk was something you did at the same time you did something else. Matt could drive and talk—swim and talk—repair cars and talk—and even kiss and talk. But talk and talk—no.

“Let's dance and talk,” she said, pulling him toward the bank of elevators.

He gave her coat to the cloakroom attendant and pocketed the ticket. He wasn't wearing an overcoat. His tuxedo jacket was dusted with snow.

“You're snowy,” she said.

Matt shook himself like a retriever coming out of the water. Snow landed on her bare arms like tiny cold freckles.

“Over here,” Matt said, pointing toward an oversized beige armchair near the piano bar. The piano was a gleaming white grand sitting on a white “shelf” over the pool. Its gentle notes mingled with the sound of the fountain.

Emily was in the mood for loud throbbing rock bands, not tinkly little piano melodies. She did not cooperate at all. “Over here,” she argued, leaning toward the elevators.

“No, here.”

“Oh, for goodness sakes. All right.” The armchair was so deep her legs were too short to reach the edge and stuck straight out instead of bending at the knees. “This is graceful,” she said. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Families,” Matt said promptly. “Next year. Life. Future.”

“Oh, Matt, no! Not tonight! Let's just have a Happy New Year. Nothing heavy.” She struggled to get comfortable in his lap. “Matt, you're quivering all over! What's the matter?”

“I have a fever.”

“Oh, no, why didn't you say so?” Emily tried to sit up.

“I'm all heated up over you,” he said, laughing.

She let go of all her muscles until she was a velvet puddle on top of him. “Matthew O'Connor, get to the point. First you're lost. Now you have a fever. Do you think your first love is getting out of hand?”

“Who says it's first love?” he teased. “I'll have you know I am a very experienced man.”

“You'd better be precisely as experienced as I am, no more and no less. If you've been feverish elsewhere, you're in trouble, Matthew O'Connor.”

“I'm in trouble when you call me by my whole name anyway. That's how I know you're mad at me.”

“I'm not mad. I just want to dance through the evening. If we talk about where I'm going to live and how my family has fallen apart, I'll cry. Who needs that?”

“Which is why I want to talk about it,” Matt said. He sat up so suddenly she practically rolled onto the floor.

“It's a good thing nobody can see us back here behind the piano,” Emily muttered. “I have never looked so un-graceful in my life.”

“You look perfect. I want to talk family.”

“No, Matt! I can't bear talking about selfish, unkind, uncaring—”

“I mean us,” Matt said

“Us?”

“Our family, Em. Yours and mine.”

“Matt,” she protested, “you and I aren't a family.”

“We could be, though.”

Emily was aware of every texture in the lounge. A voice speaking into a phone placed a rental car order; the piano played a slow rag; a glass was set down on the bar. The upholstery beneath her was nubbly and Matt smelled of his father's aftershave. Her heart was pounding so hard that the crimson ribbon at the top of her gown trembled.

Matt held her hand. Hers was like ice; his was hot as fever. There was something in his hand, and at first she thought it was a salted nut, that he was offering her something to eat.

It was a ring.

A lovely tiny diamond that sparkled in his palm like a thousand, thousand snow flakes.

“M&M,” Matt whispered, “let's get married.”

B
ETH ROSE AND GEORGE
danced three dances together. He was energetic, and that was about all you could say for his technique. But at least he was willing. A lot of the boys simply would not dance. Ever. They would buy tickets to dances, and they would dress up for dances, but once they got there, they would eat, drink, talk, or watch. Period. So Beth counted herself lucky.

Gwynnie's knot of hair bobbed between them. “I am very attracted to your date,” she informed Beth Rose.

And not for the first time, Beth thought.

“George,” Gwynnie demanded, “what languages do you speak? English is too boring.” She was so truly strange, in her feathers and white tower of hair, with her orange sunglasses and her black boa, demanding George to speak in a foreign language. Maybe Gary was dating Gwynnie strictly for entertainment value and not because he liked her. Was Gwynnie a circus and Gary had bought a ticket? Even Gwynnie could not want that. Even Gwynnie must want to be asked because she was special, not because she was crazy.

“Illway you anceday?” George suggested.

“Well, I like that, George,” Beth Rose said. “All this time you've been fluent in Pig Latin and you never told me?”

George grinned. “I was saving the important stuff for later, when we're alone.”

Beth Rose laughed. “Take her,” she said to George. “Dance the night away.”

“The night?”

“Five minutes of it,” Beth Rose corrected. Gwynnie danced George backward, using him like the prow of a ship to push through an ocean of crowd.

“Hold your dinosaurs for you?” Gary offered.

“No, thanks. They're tethered securely.” She was getting the quivers now, with the two of them alone, their dates traded off.

“You look lovely,” Gary said after a while.

“Thank you.” She brushed her dinosaurs aside to look out the window. The sky was dense with falling snow. Far down, the lights were not distinguishable as dots, but simply as yellow blurs. It was too bad the evening was not clear.

“Getting on toward midnight,” Gary said.

“What happens then? Does Gwynnie turn back into a pumpkin?”

Gary laughed. “You're mixing your mice and your Cinderellas. No, I meant midnight as in New Year's Eve.”