Rowing in Eden (20 page)

“Who's that with him?” Franny asked.

“His girl. Noreen Frye. A really
nice
girl.”

Franny licked her lips. Tim Gleason's head remained in Martie's window, a dark blot she refused to turn toward. “What do you mean, ‘his girl'?”

“Until you came along, he planned on giving her a
ring.
”

“Here.” Martie pulled the book from Franny's hands, and flipped to the section of senior photos. Noreen Frye. Blond hair, warm and lovely eyes, yes, but did he like her still? That was all Franny cared about.

“Do you know what it means that he was going to buy her a ring?” Tim Gleason asked.

Before she answered, Franny steadied herself against something that offered itself without explanation—some not entirely wholesome appendage she seemed to have sprouted in support of this love
for Ryan Marvell. “I guess it must mean he likes me quite a bit,” she said, then flipped through the senior photos pages. Ryan Marvell. His face. Look at that. Look at that chin. Those eyes like sparklers under the cliff of his brows. “Oh,” she said aloud, without meaning to.

“Damn it, Franny!” said Martie.

As if she could do something about the way she felt! As if knowing Ryan Marvell had meant to marry a Noreen Frye once upon a time—even last week—might cauterize her soul, and she would simply say, “I hadn't realized!” and go away. She lowered her head into her hands. The photographs had sealed her fate more exactly by documenting that Ryan Marvell was, indeed, what she had imagined him to be: that is, made for her eyes. And her eyes made to behold him.

“Listen, Noreen's a really nice girl,” Tim Gleason said. “She's broken up about this.”

Franny glanced up at Tim Gleason, his face so earnest and agitated. She wanted to make an appeal to him: Would you stop liking Roz because somebody told you to? But no one ever spoke of Tim Gleason liking Roz, and so she said only—voice low, ashamed at having to defend herself—“Well, I'm a nice girl, too.”

Tim Gleason made a face, as if she had said something loathsome. “You see
that
girl?” He reached into the car to tap a finger on a photo of an attractive girl in the row below Ryan Marvell. “Donna Nelson,” read the type below the girl's picture. “Now, that girl's a mink, Franny. Does Franny know what a mink is, Martie?”

Martie groaned. “Just—drop it, Tim.”

“A mink's something you don't want to get a reputation as, Franny. A mink's, like, a
whore.”

“Oh, really?” Franny found that, just then, she hated Tim Gleason for not being his own self—a boy in love with Rosamund—and, instead, being one of the creeps who despised girls for giving boys what the boys apparently wanted. “You mean, this Donna has sex for money?”

Tim Gleason smiled the thin smile once more. “As a matter of fact, Franny, she just gives it away.”

“So—the boys who have sex with her are whores, too?”

Martie groaned. “Franny, just—shut up.”

“You shut up! How does Tim even know about this girl?”

“Guys talk,” Tim Gleason said.

“Okay.” Martie handed the yearbook out the window. “That's enough, Tim.”

“No, it's not.” Tim Gleason bit down on his lip, but his chin still trembled. “If Roz were here—you want guys saying stuff about you, Franny?”

Without a thought, she flung herself between startled Martie and the steering wheel. She was a dog, then, barking at another dog, and it did not seem entirely impossible that she would bite. “
You're
the guy talking about that Donna!” she said. “I don't want anybody going around saying stuff like that about anybody!”

“
Franny
.” Martie tried to press Franny back into her seat, and in the scuffle and upset the girls missed the approach of a middle-aged woman with a potted palm in her arms.

“What's the problem here, Tim?” the woman called.

The girls settled back in their seats. Tim Gleason backed away from the car. “No problem, Mom,” he said. “They're just leaving.”

Whatever Martie had to say on the ride home—how their mother and father had hit her the time they found her “making out” with Roger Dale, how they had threatened her again and again with reform school—Franny did not want to hear it. She slumped against the car seat, and turned away, eyes closed. She made herself into the smallest possible wave, moving up to, and away from, a sandy shore. Up, back. From that day forward, she vowed, she would speak to Martie only when absolutely necessary—

“Reform school!” Martie murmured. “Is that insane, or what?”

Franny distracted herself by inventing ways by which she might obtain a photo of Ryan Marvell without actually asking him for a photo. To actually ask him for a photo—that would be to ask him to agree to the reality of their romance. Which might be to ask too much.

“Look, I know you're mad at me,” Martie said, “but there's nothing you're going through that I haven't gone through worse.”

Franny opened her eyes to slits. The Wildcat was passing the far end of the Nearys' farm. She could see the Poddigbattes Camp sign in the distance. If they had not been so close to home, she believed she would have jumped from the car, taken her chances on bones, skin.

“Looks like somebody's at the house,” Martie said.

On the front steps stood a boy and girl of about Franny's own age. The grandchildren of Mrs. Conover from down the beach. “I don't want to see them right now,” Franny said. “Just—drive by.”

“Don't be silly!” Martie honked the horn, then pulled the convertible to a noisy stop by the front steps, and called, “Howdy, guys!” before whispering to Franny, “Get out and talk to your friends!”

“I could kill you,” Franny hissed, but she did her best to smile as she walked over to the pair. The Biancos. They had had a nice time together, two summers ago, when Franny first had moved out from town, and they had come from New Jersey to visit their grandparents. Marie, with her almost lidless brown eyes, had become very pretty since then, and though her sweet brother had gone from soft to stout, Franny would have known him anywhere. Billy. With his big black glasses frames forever sliding down his nose.

It was decided that—for old times' sake—the three of them should test the apples on the Nearys' remaining tree and, while they walked down the drive toward the orchard, Marie leaned close to Franny to whisper, “Our grandma made sure to tell us you were ‘busty.' Like we'd faint if we saw you without being warned!”

Franny blushed. “She probably meant Martie,” she whispered back, and bent to pick a handful of the butter-and-eggs that grew along the road.

“Hey, Franny,” Billy Bianco said, “remember how you got us to roast acorns? You'd read some book where the Indians ate acorns?” The boy wrinkled up his nose at the memory. Franny laughed. No more than a week before, she had eaten a few waxy
bites off an acorn, just to recall its acrid taste, the curling of her tongue.

“And remember how Billy always
wanted
us to be Indians so he could kill us?” Marie asked.

Franny liked the Biancos for remembering things—so much so, in fact, that it seemed to her that if the Biancos would only stay the summer, she might be restored to her old life. She would not tell them about Ryan Marvell. Or even about Bob Prohaski—

With a shout of exuberance, she ran ahead and jumped for a branch of the old tree, and though the bark hurt her hands, she managed to swing back and forth several times.

Unfortunately, when the Biancos caught up with her, they explained that they were in Pynch Lake for only two days. Tomorrow night, they would take a plane to California to visit their father. Billy Bianco, halfway up the apple tree, struggling a little, explained that their parents had divorced since their last visit to Iowa:

“That's one reason we didn't come at all last summer. Vacations, now, we're usually at Dad's.”

If the Nearys' apple tree had been healthier, then perhaps Bob Prohaski would not have spied Franny and the Biancos in the tree. As things stood, however, years of disease had left a great gap in the branches that faced the road, and no sooner had Bob Prohaski stepped from the Oldsmobile that had brought him from town than he began to move down into the ditch and toward the tree, the big muscles beneath his cut-offs and T-shirt pumping.

He heard about Ryan, Franny thought, and the thought must have shown on her face, for Billy Bianco asked in a breathless voice, “Do you know that guy, Franny?”

Before she could answer, Bob Prohaski began to shake the limb upon which she stood. “What's going on here?” he demanded over the swishing leaves, the clunky beats of Franny's heart.

Though too high up in the tree for a safe jump, Franny jumped. The jolt of the earth rose through her feet to her shoulders, and the very top of her head, but she was okay. “Bob, these guys are my
neighbors'
grandkids,
” she said. She tried to send a smile of reassurance up to the pair, though Billy Bianco's eyes had already acquired the milky look that Franny had noticed on other boys in the presence of Bob Prohaski. Playing dead, maybe?

“Get down here, man!” Bob Prohaski shouted. He grabbed the fat limb supporting Billy Bianco and began to shake it. “I'll kill you if you've been messing with Franny. How'd you like that?”

“There's Grandma!” Marie Bianco shrieked, and all eyes turned toward the Cadillac that now made its ponderous way down the main drive toward Lakeside. “Grandma!” The girl and her brother began to slip and scrape their way down the backside of the tree as the Cadillac came to a stop.

The grandmother—a fragile but erect woman—leaned out her window. “Is that Franny with you?” she called happily—one split second before Bob Prohaski grabbed her grandson by the scruff of his T-shirt. Immediately, the grandmother screeched in alarm, and tried to put the Cadillac into park. The car lurched forward and died as Franny grabbed a handful of Bob Prohaski's own T-shirt and whispered an ardent, “Bob, let go of him! You're all wrong! Let go!”

From a safer distance, Marie Bianco called, “Let him go, you creep! Let him go!”

Bob Prohaski turned toward Franny. For a moment, she thought he meant to spit at her, but then he released Billy Bianco, and the boy took off, running, for his grandmother's car.

“It was a misunderstanding!” Franny called after them. “Really.”

Neither Mrs. Conover nor the Biancos looked her way as they drove off in the Cadillac, and Franny knew it was preposterous for her to wave as the car turned onto Lakeside, but she waved anyway, as if she and Bob Prohaski saw off guests after a weekend of fun and hospitality.

Their jagged breaths filled the silence that followed. The whistle of the air through her nostrils frightened Franny a little, but she rustled up a smile when Bob Prohaski gripped the back of her neck with his hand and started her up the drive. She kept her mouth shut.
Things were not so bad as she had thought: He did not know about Ryan Marvell.

“You hear the woodpecker?” she asked when they were in the shade of the oaks. He made no reply. “It's a red-headed woodpecker,” she said.

She was wondering if she should tell him about her Snow White dream—just to fill the silence—when he brought his knee up behind her knees and collapsed her onto the lawn. “Hey!” she cried.

With a grin, he flipped her onto her back, and straddled her belly. “See, I thought you were messing around on me. I didn't see the girl up there.” He brought his face close. Something like cotton had gathered at the corners of his mouth—something like the foam that caught in the rocks along the shore. She had seen that same foam at the corners of her father's mouth when he was in a fury. “I guess you know now what I'd do if you messed around on me.”

She glanced off to one side to conceal what was in her eyes: the thought that he was dull, but dull in the dangerous way of dull knives, which slip and cut because they lacked a good edge.

“FRANCES JEAN WAHL!”

Here came Martie, barreling across the lawn, and what did Martie begin to do but kick at Bob Prohaski? Who scuttled off of Franny, shouting, “What the hell?”

“Get up immediately, Frances Jean!” Martie shrieked.

“Like I
asked
him to sit on me!” Franny stood and brushed herself off. “You are so nuts, Martie!”

“What the hell's going on?” Bob Prohaski repeated.

“Just get out of here, bud,” Martie said. She began to push Franny toward the front door, saying as they went, “I'm nuts? What's that make you, Frances? Messing around with a Prohaski
and
that Mother Goose jerk!”

Impossible for Franny not to look back to see if Bob Prohaski had heard that last.

He had heard. His eyes narrowed, and not just in suspicion, but in pain, too. “What's she talking about, Franny?”

“Oh, Bob.” She wanted to go to him, then, take it all back, offer
comfort, but Martie continued to push her toward the house, and to shout, “You get off our land,” and, really, Franny wanted that, too. She felt half grateful for Martie's shoves, and went along with it when, with a bang, Martie opened the front door and pushed Franny inside.

“Unless you want the police to come!” Martie called over her shoulder.

Bob Prohaski burst into furious huffs of laughter. “My uncle's with the police, bitch! You don't scare me.”

“That's your mistake, then!” Martie shouted at the boy before she slammed the big door shut and locked it.

“Martie,” Franny said. “I hope you understand he
tripped
me. I don't even like him anymore.”

“Yeah. Now you're in love with some guy who's going to college in the fall.” Martie held her head down as if she did not want Franny to see her smile, but she let Franny see her eyes. Because she could not help but find some happiness in Franny's being in love? Because it made them more alike?