Rowing in Eden (22 page)

“Peg.” Turner Haskin smiled gently at Peg, then pointed to the mushrooms now blackening on the stove.

“Oh!” Peg pulled the pan from the fire. “Our dinner!”

“Don't worry about dinner.” Mr. Ayles gave Peg a wink of sympathy, then grabbed the bottle of rum from the counter and nudged it into Brick's back. “Brick and I will just head back in the other room to talk over old times, right, Brick?”

“And I don't want that Prohaski scum around here, either,” Brick shouted as Mr. Ayles guided him back into the den. “There's going to be some changes around here.”

Peg set her hands on top of her head. “What a mess! What a mess!”

“Now, Mom,” Rosamund said, “calm down,” and she linked her arm through Peg's arm as if the two of them were going for a stroll, and then she suggested Turner Haskin take the Wildcat into town and buy himself a hamburger while she and Franny and Peg had a talk upstairs.

“What about me?” Martie protested.

“I don't want to talk to you!” Franny cried.

“I was trying to help, brat!” Martie said, and kicked a foot in Franny's direction.

“Martie.” Rosamund waved goodbye to Turner Haskin as he made his way to the garage; then, one arm still linked through Peg's arm, she settled the other around Martie's shoulders and said a soothing, “Let Mom and me talk to her now, Martie. You go to your dance, and we can talk later, when you don't have company.”

Though Deedee Pierce responded to this with a snort that signalled both amusement and loathing, Martie wilted under Rosamund's arm.
She cocked her head toward the front door, signalling to Deedee that the two of them should, indeed, make an exit.

Dread filled Franny's heart as she began to climb the stairs with Rosamund and Peg, but, halfway up the stairs, Rosamund turned and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth as if suppressing a giggle. “How many pitchers of daiquiris have Dad and Mr. Ayles had, anyway?” she whispered, as if blame for everything—the appearance of Ryan Marvell at the door, the appalling quarrel—could be laid at the feet of too much rum and limeade.

And suppose Rosamund's intimation were right? Maybe Franny's father would feel differently about Ryan Marvell tomorrow?

Rosamund waved Peg and Franny into her bedroom, and Franny, heart full of hope, said, “Ryan really is nice, Mom.”

“Oh, Franny,” Peg said, “he's going to college, honey!”

“But we're all going to stay calm and cool, right?” Rosamund said, her voice light, almost teasing.

Peg smiled wearily as she took a seat at the dressing table. “I'm working on it,” she said. “His mother—I seem to remember the mother was quite charming.”

Franny stroked the wales of the bedspread back and forth. Charming. Of course she would be charming.

“He's a good friend of Timmy's,” Rosamund said. “He was trying to do the right thing, coming here to meet you guys.”

“Irregardless,” said Peg.

Rosamund nodded, eyes closed. “I know. Of course.”

They both looked at Franny then. “I didn't know he was so much older when I met him,” she said. “I really like him, Mom.”

“I didn't think—I mean, they could end up serious about each other,” Rosamund said. “He was supposed to be getting engaged, and now apparently that's all off.”

“Engaged?” Peg shook her head.

It seemed to Franny that Peg sounded almost impressed, and so Franny dared to plead, “Couldn't you just talk to Dad about it, Mom? Couldn't we just see if he'd calm down?”

“He's not going to calm down.” Peg's voice was unusually shapeless, so unformed by any design that Franny knew she could believe her.

“You're a brilliant and lovely girl,” Peg said, “and you probably are mature for your age, but—we wouldn't be good parents if we let you see someone so much older.”

Brilliant and lovely? Franny wanted to press up against the words. That Rosamund and her mother believed Ryan Marvell actually cared for her was, in itself, a miracle; really, in its way, this moment with Rosamund and her mother was almost as dazzling as her evening with Ryan Marvell. Look at the three of them, sitting there in Rosamund's room, talking! What they had in that room—it possessed a glow that Franny could only have imagined being given off by some dream version of her family—

But, then, a bellow sounded from the den below, and Peg whispered, “I know your dad can be a trial. His drinking's alienating everyone from us—”

“Well, Mom,” Rosamund said—almost brisk—“you could always divorce him.”

The idea that such words could even be spoken knocked a wall right out of the bedroom, and let in with a crash the beautiful, spooky dusk and all of the universe beyond—glorious, perilous—and Peg did not even sound angry when she responded, “Oh, Roz, honey, you don't divorce somebody after twenty-five years.”

“But why not?” Franny felt giddy. “Christy's parents are getting divorced. Turner's parents are divorced. Lots of people—”

“Franny.” Peg shook her head slowly, thoughtfully. “Now, you know we're not getting divorced.”

“But his drinking—you just said it's awful.”

“But we know why he drinks, Franny,” Rosamund said—almost impatiently, as if she had not been the one to bring up the idea of divorce in the first place.

Franny nodded, though she did not understand how it was that Rosamund and her mother—and Martie, too—could so easily hold on to the string that kept the bright balloon of that old story above
their heads. She herself felt tugged about each time she touched the thing.

“Well”—Peg smiled wearily as she stood up from the dressing table—“I suppose I better go check on him.”

Now? Franny did not understand. They could not stop talking now, surely.

“And I better get ready for Turner!” Again, Rosamund linked her arm through Peg's arm—imagine doing that!—and, with a little sidestep, the two of them headed out the bedroom door and into the hall.

Come back
, Franny wanted to call to them, but she was a creature pulled out of the water and left gasping for air on the unfamiliar shore.

What about Ryan Marvell? Did they think she now would—could—just say, “Okay, if you don't think it's a good idea, I won't love him”? Who were they if they thought that was possible?

Limp, panting a little, she lay back on the bed.

The thing about Ryan Marvell—the special and amazing thing—was that he had chosen her, while the rest of them were only stuck with her: a member of the family. The rest of them did not care about the fact that he had chosen her, but, to Franny, it meant the world.

Quietly, she made her way down the stairs and through the living room while her father continued his rant in the den. She passed out through the screened porch to the grassy bank where she had kissed Ryan Marvell. She lay down. Smelled the grass. Felt the twigs beneath her head and back. No one could take from her the fact that she had lain here on the bank with him. Not that, or his smile, tonight, when she stepped into the back hall.

From his smile, she had seen that he was purely
happy
to see her—happy in that way that her father used to be happy to see her when she was small and ran out to the car to greet him. Even happier. Because it did not seem there was something else Ryan Marvell waited for: She was it.

At the thought of losing that smile, the pain of it, she grabbed
the scruffy grass of the bank with both hands as if it might hold her to the earth.

“Franny?”

She recognized Turner Haskin without looking up; the light blue pants, the perfection of their creases. After giving a careful, but debonair hike to each knee of his pants—a Cary Grant kind of gesture, Franny supposed—Turner Haskin crouched beside her on the bank. He gazed off at the lake, his chin lifted just a touch.

“Roz sent me out here,” he said.

Franny nodded. It would have been pleasant to give him a little shove. Not so he'd get hurt, really—just so he'd topple over, have a clumsy moment.

Eh-hem. He cleared his throat. Thinking? “Franny,” he said. He pointed his index finger out over the lake, then cocked his thumb the way a boy would when pretending his hand was a gun. “A penis is like a loaded rifle, Franny: Safe till it shoots.”

She stared at the lake while Turner Haskin blew imaginary smoke from the tip of his imaginary gun. “Get my drift?”

She hoped her silent nod would make him go away, and soon enough the radiant blue pants did move off toward the house, and, shortly thereafter, the headlights of the Wildcat swung across the old lap siding, and the lawn, and the oak trees, and her back, and Rosamund and Turner Haskin drove away for the evening.

Beyond the dark ruff formed by the trees on the other side of the lake, the sky pulsed with heat lightning. Eventually, Mr. Judd came out and began to fiddle with the fishing poles he had rigged up on his dock. A queer thing: her sense that she had to stay outside until someone called her in.

Stars fell. Great numbers of them. But, of course, they were not stars. Meteors. She could swear some of them made a little zipping sound as they moved, a sizzle like sparklers tossed into the lake on the Fourth of July.

At the beginning of the summer, had something gone wrong, Franny would have called Christy Strawberry or Joan Harvett. Now, she thought of calling Susan Thomas, but she hesitated because if
Peg knew that Franny called someone outside the family, Peg would almost certainly accuse Franny of judging the conversation in Rosamund's room as deficient, and that conversation needed to be shown respect, enthroned, built upon.

Well, then, the person she should talk to was Peg, wasn't it?

Though Mr. Ayles's car remained in the parking area, and Franny could hear his voice and the voice of her father in the den, the downstairs was perfectly dark. From upstairs, however, light from Peg and Brick's bedroom window shone on the lawn. Peg would be reading her craft magazines. In bed. A pillow behind her back. Franny could picture her exactly. Reading under the lamp with the ugly green shade that Peg wanted to replace but felt she must use until it wore out.

Franny did not dare turn on a light in the front hall for fear Brick would come to see who was there; and so, very slowly, she worked her way through the dark dining and living rooms to the staircase, and up the stairs.

The door to her parents' bedroom stood slightly ajar, and it opened the rest of the way when Franny began to knock. There stood Peg, in the center of the room, red-eyed, a fistful of her nightgown balled up in her hand.

“I hope you have some idea of what you've done!” Peg cried. “Your father may just pack up and leave us altogether!”

“Mom,” Franny pleaded, but Peg backed away, shouting:

“Don't give me that wide-eyed look! I'm not dumb! There's only one reason a college boy would come to see you, which gives me a good idea of what you were up to the other night!”

“Mom, please.” Franny did not understand what was happening until she heard her father's footsteps begin to pound their way up the stairs.

“What the hell is she doing now?” Brick bawled, while from below, Mr. Ayles called, “Come on back, Brick. Come on, pal.”

Her father was a bear, coming at her. She tried to crouch in a ball in the corner, by the bedside table, but he yanked her to her feet. “Get up!” he shouted.

“Brick,” Mr. Ayles called, his voice full of misery. “Come on back down here, buddy.”

Brick did not respond to Mr. Ayles. Like an athlete too long confined by bad weather, he seemed delighted to use his muscles. His face contorted into something almost a grin, he picked Franny up by her hair and rushed her into a wall while Peg slapped at whatever bit of girl she could find. Arms, face, back, neck—

Both of them: close, personal, astonishing.

“I'll teach you.” Her father's big head and lips snarled alongside her right eye. Revolting. Him. Not him. She felt his spit on her cheek. “I'll teach you to act like a whore.”

T
HE CAB DRIVER WHO CAME TO TAKE
T
URNER
H
ASKIN TO THE
airport was a jolly guy with a gap between each of his pumpkin-colored teeth and a crescent of sunburned backside visible between his T-shirt and low-hanging pants. That noon, the winds were high enough to raise whitecaps on the lake, and at first Peg and Franny and Martie, waiting at a polite distance while Rosamund and Turner kissed goodbye, could not hear what the driver called to them above the wild swish of oak leaves, the buck and crack of the sheets on the Judd clothesline.

“I said, ‘I never picked anybody up out this far before.'”

Though a little misty-eyed at the sight of Rosamund and Turner Haskin's farewell—and laughing at themselves for being misty-eyed—the trio nodded politely at the driver's words. Nodded when he admired the Wildcat and said he'd rather have gone to the airport in
that
than his old cab any day.

Franny was relieved when Turner Haskin threw open a door of the cab and climbed in (she had sensed that Peg was on the verge of explaining to the driver that, of course, her daughter would have given her boyfriend a ride to the airport had he not called a cab in order to spare her a depressing goodbye, and wasn't that a gentlemanly thing to do?).

“So”—as soon as the cab started up Lakeside, Peg turned to Rosamund with a giddy smile—“so,” she asked, “is this serious?”

Martie sniffled and laughed. “Of course it's serious!”

Rosamund, however, lifted her shoulders. “Too soon to know.”

“But your dad and I thought you really liked him!” Peg protested.

“I do really like him.” Rosamund smiled at the now empty road. “He's as handsome as a movie star and he's smart and absolutely charming.”

Martie made a sour face at this response, but Peg seemed to like it, and she smiled at Franny as if to say
See what nice things await you if you behave?
That smile of Peg's—it suggested that the scene of three nights before had never happened at all. Just this morning, however, Peg had come to Franny's bedroom door to plead, “You have to be nicer to your dad! Every night since that Marvell came here, your dad's left his shoes by the bed. In twenty-three years of marriage, he's never done that. I think he's planning to leave us!” The next thing Franny knew, Peg had flung her arms around her and begun to weep, and Franny—confused by the rare embrace—promised to be nicer, really, Mom, though she could not think that she had ever
not
been nice to her father; and remembering that moment, now, as Peg—half playful, half chiding—said to Rosamund, “If I were you, I sure wouldn't let Turner get away,” Franny felt irritated, and obliged to object:

“Why don't you say
Turner
shouldn't let Rosamund get away? Did you tell Turner that?”

Peg laughed as if this were pure silliness, and Franny wanted to object to Peg's laughter as well, but the telephone had begun to ring inside the house and—quick, to conceal whatever might be on her face—she stooped to pick up one of the small green acorns that had fallen onto the drive. Chucked it at the garage door. See? She did not care about the telephone. Not a bit. Let Martie be the one to hurry ahead to answer.

“Rosamund”—Martie stuck her head out the door to call—“Mr. Z. calling.”

Rosamund wrinkled up her nose as Martie disappeared into the house once more. “Did she mean Mike?” she asked Peg.

“Probably. He probably wants to thank you for driving him to Des Moines.”

“Oh, dear.” Rosamund stopped to hold open the front door for Peg and Franny. “I don't feel like talking just now. Could you tell him I ran Franny into town, Mom?” She glanced toward Franny. “You're ready to go, aren't you?”

Yes. To Christy Strawberry's and, later, from Christy Strawberry's to the carnival now making its annual visit to Pynch Lake. At the carnival, she would see Ryan Marvell.

Amazing that she had arranged to do such a thing. That, yesterday, she had arranged to be by the pay phone at Karlins' Grocery, waiting for his call. That she had picked up the ringing pay phone when it rang. “Is that wild or what?” Ryan Marvell had said after Franny told him of the call her father had received from the manager of Mother Goose Golf. “Johanson told me all about it, too, and I acted totally dumb, and, like, ‘Hey, man, I'll help you out if anybody tries to hurt you!' and now Johanson thinks I'm a real pal!”

“I shouldn't have gone this way.” Rosamund tapped her nails on the steering wheel as a group of pedestrians crossed in front of the Wildcat. “This is crazy.”

In a ring around the grassy center of City Park, the machinery of the big carnival rides—the Ferris wheel, the Bullet—rose above the trees. The carnival's herd of semitrailers pulsed and whined in the streets surrounding the park. Still, it was possible to see the band shell, and, on stage, a bee of a girl in black and gold sequins, twirling a baton.

“Do we go right when we get to Payson, or left?”

“Left.” Franny smiled at the full-size cutout of the winking Dutch boy that stood behind the plate-glass windows of Grant's Hardware. The day before, on the telephone, Ryan Marvell had mentioned that his father was making him paint the family garage, and now the world of ladders, brushes, and buckets of paint shimmered with significance, trailed banners of gold.

“So”—Rosamund cleared her throat—“I guess you're meeting Ryan at the carnival tonight?”

Franny glanced her way. Rosamund was smiling a profile smile,
nothing collusive, but a smile nonetheless. “Just be careful,” Rosamund said. “Don't get hurt,” and Franny smiled back as if she were as lighthearted as Rosamund herself.

“And watch out for Martie,” Rosamund added with a laugh, then murmured a more somber, “everybody watch out for Martie. This morning, I swear to God, she would have followed Turner into the shower if he hadn't barred the door. It's—weird. She's always wanted to date everybody I've ever dated.”

“Poor Martie,” Franny said; her love for Ryan Marvell made her generous. “Maybe she isn't sure if a guy's any good unless you've already gone out with him, Roz.”

Rosamund shook her head. “That would be too pathetic.”

But not necessarily untrue, Franny thought, and switched the topic by asking how Turner Haskin would spend the rest of summer.

Wasn't it curious, she thought—while Rosamund went on about Turner at some length—that in just one week, the formerly flavorless brick buildings of St. Joseph's had magically popped out from behind Mailer's Auto Body and the Red Owl. All over Pynch, sacred ground accumulated: the staircase where she and Ryan Marvell had met, the pay telephone at Karlins' Grocery where they had planned tonight's meeting, the loveseat where they first kissed, the street she now knew to be the street on which he lived;
and
there were the streets that led to his street, and, then, all streets. He was her Rome.

But what he gave, he could also take away. He had even changed the carnival. The rides rattling on their tracks, the booths for games of chance, the buttery lights against the red paint and gilded mirrors of the merry-go-round—if he did not come to meet her tonight, all of that would wait in darkness, as if only he controlled the switch that could make the pleasure begin.

It was Christy Strawberry's mother who drove the girls to the carnival. On the radio, the newscaster spoke over a background of sirens. He was in Los Angeles, where black people were rioting,
burning things, sometimes the very buildings in which they lived. The governor had called out the National Guard.

“How depressing,” Mrs. Strawberry said. “Maybe I ought to go to your carnival, too, take a ride on the merry-go-round.”

In the backseat, Franny and Christy clutched each other's hands. Of course, if Mrs. Strawberry—so recently abandoned by Mr. Strawberry—wanted to accompany the girls to the carnival, they would have to let her. And Franny would be forced to smile a warning to Ryan Marvell:
Not tonight.
And maybe her life would be ruined.

“Don't have a heart attack!” Mrs. Strawberry said into the rearview mirror. “I wish you girls could see your faces!”

The girls found Joan Harvett leaning up against the front of the chamber of commerce building. She was not alone, but with a bone-thin, heavily made-up girl whom Joan introduced as Lola Damon. “She just moved here from Minneapolis! Isn't that cool?”

Franny sneaked peeks at the girl. In the queer light made up of the dusk and the carnival lights, Lola Damon's teased hair—surely dyed that flat black—and her pale, pale makeup gave her a spooky look.

“Nobody in the Cities can believe I'm living in
Iowa,”
Lola Damon drawled.

“She'll go to Roosevelt with us in the fall,” Joan Harvett said, and Christy and Franny smiled and said “Great.”

The night was perfect. The globe lamps marking the park's old underground toilets lit up the iron guard rails so exquisitely that when Franny stepped through the ring of rides and into the grassy center of the park, for a moment she felt magically lost, she was in Paris or London at the turn of the century, and those stairs led to the trains—

“Look, Franny!” Joan Harvett pointed to the bandshell, and Franny's heart let loose a spangly cymbal crash as she momentarily mistook for Ryan Marvell the long-haired boy to whom Joan pointed: Richie, from Richie and The Craft.

“Franny's been to their practices,” Joan told Lola Damon.

“Well,
one
practice,” Franny said.

“Hey, there!” A cluster of big boys in matching gray sweatshirts now bore down upon the girls, like a truck out of control—

What're you doing?
Joan and Christy and Lola protested as Franny turned and ran. Though complaining all the way, the three girls followed her down the stairs into the park's rest room:

God, Franny, some of those guys were really cute!

Franny laughed, but she felt buzzy and strange and a little embarrassed as she stepped up to one of the trio of smudgy mirrors over the rest room sinks and began to comb her hair.

Lola Damon joined her at the mirrors. “I should have stayed up there.”

“So you wear mascara?” Christy Strawberry said as Lola Damon pulled a mascara wand from her jeans pocket. “At Roosevelt”—Christy broke off with a squeak. “What happened to your arm?”

Lola Damon looked down at the arm in question as if, for a minute, she did not know that Christy Strawberry referred to the row of rusty scabs that marked its surface like so many dried-up earthworms. “Oh. Chicken.” Concentration on her application of the eye makeup constricted the girl's voice. “Won four, lost three.”

Christy Strawberry drew closer to the scabs. “What's ‘chicken'?”

“You know!” Joan bugged her eyes at Christy, as if to say,
At least pretend.
“It's when you put a cigarette between your arm and another person's arm—it's more fun if it's a guy, right, Lola?—and you try to not be first to pull away.”

“So—you get burned?” Christy asked.

“Boys like it.” Lola Damon began to work on her lower lashes. “It shows you can stand up to a hard time if you have to. Like, you could be good for a girlfriend.”

“Oh, pff!” Franny said, but Christy continued to stare at the burn marks as if they contained a message she needed to decode.

“I'm going to see if I can go up against Bob Prohaski,” Lola Damon said with a glance Franny's way. “Joan told me you dumped the doll! I live just a couple doors down.” She stuck the mascara
into her pants pocket. “I hear Bob and his big brothers are going to beat up your Ryan Marvell.”

The moment slid out from under Franny's feet. Her ears filled with a kind of hiss. “What? And how do you know his name?”

“I guess you told me?” Lola Damon said to Joan Harvett.

“Joan!” Franny protested.

“Like anyone couldn't find out,” Joan said. “Like everybody doesn't already know.”

Quickly, Franny headed up the rest room stairs. She felt obliged to the many people—sweethearts, picnickers, families with toddlers—who had spread blankets and bedspreads out across the center of the park, and so made it necessary for a person to concentrate upon where she stepped next, not talk. “Testing, testing, one, two,” Richie Craft called over the bandshell microphone. Franny recognized the trio of tough high school girls who stood next to him on the stage: hoody girls who got in fights and stole and stood in foyers on Main Street and called out things—almost like boys—when other girls walked past. Franny was surprised to see them with Richie Craft, but then the caramel-corn girl joined the group—she was much more visibly pregnant than when Franny had seen her at the Craft house—and she slung an arm around one of the tough girls while Richie continued testing the microphone.

“There's Greg and those guys.” With a jerk of her head, Joan Harvett indicated a stretch of street given over to the pinball arcade; then she shouted—apparently for the benefit of the Roosevelt boys at play on the machines—“Let's go on the horses!”

Christy and Lola Damon and Joan ran toward the park's playground equipment. “I get dibs on the pink horse,” Christy cried, “the pink one's mine!”

The three girls took seats upon small resin horses meant for toddlers. The horses bounced woozily upon their thick metal coils while the girls tossed their hair and limbs.

Franny was miles from them, miles, lonely, cold. She stroked the tops of her arms with her palms. If Ryan Marvell did not come. If he did not come . . .

She stared across the park at a battered booth of white plywood. Even from here, she knew the wobbly bits of bright yellow before the booth operator were toy ducks. Little ducks that bobbled on a narrow tank of water, and after you paid your dime, you plucked a duck from the water, and the number on the bottom corresponded to your prize.