Rowing in Eden (3 page)

Tim Gleason stared at the lake while Mike Zanios talked to Rosamund. Poor Tim worked hard to appear detached, cool, but even from across the street, Franny could see the way bright lines of
tension tweaked the corners of his mouth, his jaw.

“I do worry, Roz, that people might misunderstand your friendship with Mike.” So Peg Wahl had said over a recent dinner. Rosamund just laughed and squeezed her mother's hand. “You're so innocent, Mom!
Everybody
in Pynch knows Mike has a thing going on with that sleaze who sings with the combo! Believe me, whenever I go to the club, she comes by to paw at Mike—so people can see he's hers!” Peg had seemed surprised by this, and asked Franny's father, “Is that right?” and Brick looked up from picking at his dinner to say he guessed so, honey, he guessed Roz meant that brunette with the green goop on her eyes.

So Rosamund was not in love with Mike Zanios. But maybe she was a little in love with the Florida guy, Turner Haskin?

“Look who we found!” Rosamund called as Franny returned with her triangle of ice cream cones.

Should she have gotten a fourth cone, perhaps? One for Mike Zanios?

As if he were a grave courtier, Mike Zanios bowed toward Franny. She smiled, but felt grateful that the cones in her hands precluded the possibility of a hug. It seemed to Franny that, like herself, Mike Zanios now considered her too big for hugs; it was awkward, however, to stop doing something you had done for years, especially when he and Rosamund kept it up.

“Hey, Roz.” Tim Gleason jerked his head toward the marina dock. “You want me to gas the boat?”

Rosamund grimaced, perhaps in memory of the conversation with the marina clerk. “We'll stop at Moore's later,” she said; then—with a wink to Franny—she took two of the ice cream cones, and presented one to Mike Zanios. “Farewell gift?”

“Why, thank you, ma'am!” Mike Zanios gave the cone an amused inspection, then raised it high in the air, like a standard, and hummed a bit of vaguely martial music while Rosamund and Franny and Tim Gleason made their way to the now empty dock.

“And, Timmy, this other cone's for you,” Rosamund said, just before the three of them reached the boat.

“Ha!” The boy leaned forward with a laugh to thumb a spot of ice cream off the tip of Rosamund's nose. “Caught you!”

“It was one
lick
!” Rosamund protested, but Tim continued to laugh,
hee, hee
, in what seemed to Franny clear relief at having taken Rosamund away from Mike Zanios.

Was it possible that Franny had seen Mike Zanios's singer/girlfriend at some time and not known it? A brunette, her father had said, and Rosamund called her a “sleaze,” which probably meant that Mike Zanios had sex with the singer.

Maybe he had even told Rosamund so. This was not impossible. In June, while Rosamund set about unpacking her suitcases—such wonderful things inside (the Pure Pearl lipstick, bars of lilac-scented soap with sprigs of lilac embossed on the front, an actual
bullfrog
, stuffed and posed to stand on its own hind legs and hold a tiny guitar)—Rosamund had revealed startling news to Franny:

After Rosamund's dates from the university took her back to her dormitory, they regularly went out for sex with town girls.

“But if you like a boy, and he likes you, how can you stand the thought of him kissing somebody else?” Franny had asked.

“Oh, honey, that's the way it works, is all,” Rosamund said. “It doesn't
mean
anything.”

To Rosamund, it did not mean anything. To Franny, it
did
. Just like it meant something to her when the boys at the junior high asked the girls, “Are you a
good
girl or a
nice
girl?” One answer was right and one was wrong, and a large part of the point of the question seemed to be to make a girl indict herself by her answer. A girl was supposed to remember that the correct response was “I'm a nice girl,” because “A ‘nice girl' goes out, comes home, and goes to bed, while a ‘good girl' goes out, goes to bed, and comes home.” Or maybe it was the other way around; on principle, Franny refused to memorize the correct response. Nice. Good. It was all stupid. People wanted to say stupid, vile, mean things about girls. Just that winter, at one of the high school basketball games, a freckly boy Franny did not even know had sidled up to her as she made her way to the refreshment stand. “You're Martie Wahl's sister, aren't you?” he
asked, and Franny had turned, smiling, before that boy went on to say, “My sister says your sister's a whore.” He was smiling when Franny slapped his face—a mess of Cheese Curls mortared between his teeth—and he continued to smile as he said, “I was telling you so you wouldn't turn out like her, but I guess it's too late, huh?”

Franny had never told anyone that story. For one thing, she knew that plenty of people believed that if a person were
called
a name, the name was deserved. To complicate matters further, the only other person Franny had ever heard call Martie a whore was her father.

Why was “whore” the ultimate insult applied to girls who were clearly not whores? Surely her father knew that Martie was not a whore. Franny knew. Still,
had
Martie been a whore, and that boy from the basketball game called her so from spite, Franny would have slapped him just the same.

Cold and hard. She stuck her hand over the side of the big boat and the speed fanned the lake water, cold and hard, against her fingers.

Just the same.

There were plenty of people who would think Franny were a whore if they knew that she had allowed handsome Bob Prohaski to stick his tongue in her mouth. Which meant she could not ask anyone for advice on the kiss. Certainly not her mother, who had sent Bob home, immediately, the day she came into the yard while Franny pitched grapes across the picnic table and into the boy's mouth (“I don't know what you're up to, but it looks awful!”).

Certainly not Joan Harvett and Christy Strawberry, who spoke of sexual matters as if on the verge of nausea.
So-and-so let so-and-so French her. Feel her on top. Down below.
And not her sisters; though, it was true, last summer Franny had once watched through the staircase spindles as curvaceous Martie and the ROTC member entered into a clothes-wrinkling struggle on the living room couch. All that slow and serious movement had seemed so utterly foreign to Franny—like the first time she had seen a newborn puppy nurse
or a cecropia moth make its way from its cocoon—that she did not judge it by any parental injunction she might have overheard. Martie loved the ROTC boy, and he loved her, and Franny watched their activity on the couch not from mere curiosity but from envy and sympathy and worry, too. Heart aching, she sensed that the sum of all that writhing could not equal Brick and Peg's taking center stage at a party to touch-dance to “So Rare.” And suppose that Martie and the ROTC boy's species of living room struggle were all that was left for the rest of them? This impoverished, privately formed notion contradicted all that Franny had been raised to believe lay in wait for her grown-up self, but there was a measure of comfort in the fact that Martie appeared to know, at that acute moment, exactly where she lay, and that someone cared—at least for a while—for her movements and her breath and her lips.

The taste of the kiss that Bob Prohaski had given Franny in the Strawberrys' dark garage: elemental, almost a little bloody, reminiscent of the way that the old-fashioned porch screens at her own house tasted when she pressed her tongue to their rusty weave.

C
HUNK
.
T
HE DARK, COLD WAVES SPANKED THE BOAT'S WOODEN
hull,
chunk
, and then
chunk
again, and Rosamund bounced up and down on the lip of the seat's back in a way that looked both exciting and dangerous.

“Better put on a life-jacket, Fran!” Rosamund shouted over her shoulder. “Mom might be watching when we come in!”

“What about you?” Franny shouted back.

Tim Gleason turned in his seat to wag a finger Franny's way.

“Oh, stop,” she said. “Just—stop.”

As they drew closer to the steep bank of the Wahl property, it was possible to make out a sliver of sandy beach beneath the green ruching of scrub willow and rogue mulberry that grew along the shore. The bank's unmown grass and poison ivy rose up behind the scrub plants, and still held a large, crookedy cross of whitewashed stones that was a remnant of the property's stint as a church camp. Next came the bank's crown, with its crew cut of lawn and stand of oak trees, and the stout, white, gambrel-roofed lodge built by the Pynch Lake Huntsmen at the end of the last century.

“If I can't get out of this podunk town, at least I can live in a place with character,” Franny's father had said when he bought the property with life insurance money received at his own father's death. Franny's rather elegant grandmother, Charlotte Wahl, still shook her head each time she drove out for a visit, but Franny felt a shimmer of pride in the place. As her father said, it had a history, and Rosamund and Martie agreed, and liked to tell how they and a
boy with a BB gun had once wandered through the derelict lodge, and shot out whatever windows remained unbroken.

And wasn't it
ironic
, they declared, that when their dad decided to renovate the place, “we were the ones who had to clean up all that mess?”

Franny had helped, too, of course. That had been the summer before last. 1963. In June and July, she prepped and varnished hundreds of pieces of wood. She had been varnishing strips of molding in the front yard when a group of men arrived with a crane and wrenched the camp's little church right off its slab—the church gave a kind of gasp, then flew up into the air, like Dorothy's house in
The Wizard of Oz
—and off it was hauled, teetering and tottering on a flatbed truck, to be tacked onto the Baptist church in town.

“Look, Timmy!” Rosamund backed the throttle down, the big engine quieting to a low chortle. She lifted her chin toward the set of concrete stairs that ran up from the shore to the top of the bank. At the top of the stairs a girl in pink kissed a boy in surfer trunks. “Lovebirds!” Rosamund said, then sucked in her cheeks—attractive derision—which made Tim Gleason smile. If Rosamund did not take him seriously, well, he was clearly glad that she did not take the wooing and winning of others seriously, either.

The boy in the surfer trunks was new to Franny, but there were always new people. Earlier in the day, a gaggle of them had arrived—friends of Martie's from the University of Iowa—with sleeping bags, cases of beer, a favorite slalom ski, vanity kits in olive green, powder pink, fake alligator. The girl guests were mostly blondes in coon-dark eye makeup, pretty, but often red and puffed from the sunburns they acquired while “lying out” on the Wahl docks and lawns. The male guests: psychology and business majors in madras shirts; beer drinkers who wore their hair shaved across the neck despite the changing times.
Deadly dull
was Rosamund's analysis, but this did not prevent Franny from appreciating certain thick necks and shoulders, the sandy stubble visible on a hard jaw as its owner devoured Peg's scrambled eggs.

Whooomph!
In the distance, a small explosion sounded: an
empty aerosol, or maybe a discarded gas can in the garbage heap of the farmer who hauled trash for both summer residents and the handful of year-round people like the Wahls. The Wahl house sat far enough from town that what lay across Lakeside Drive, there, in the almost-country, was the farmer's scruffy gray barn, pasture, and bits of marsh where, now and then, the cattails rustled with nesting red-winged blackbirds.

Should Franny tell Rosamund to smooth her hair before they docked? A teased bundle—a tiny haystack—had lifted during the boat ride. Where the roots grew in, the hair appeared black, but that was only a matter of contrast. In its natural state, Rosamund's hair was a soft oak, the color that Franny supposed her own hair would darken to by the time she went to college.

“We'll see,” Peg Wahl had said when Franny announced that she would never dye her hair. It seemed to Franny that her mother viewed the tiny flaxen braid in her handkerchief drawer as not just a memento of her own blond childhood but proof that she was entitled to stay a blonde. (“People who never were blondes,” Peg had said the time that redhead Martie subjected her hair to a bottle of bleach, “those people have no business trying to be blondes.”)

“Hey, Tim!” Smiling, Rosamund steered the boat in along the dock. “Maybe we should ask that cute Cheryl Stafford if she'd spot for you this afternoon. I bet you'd like that, right?”

The corners of Tim Gleason's mouth twitched at this suggestion, and, not for the first time, Franny wished that Rosamund would not pretend that she believed Tim a boy on the prowl; that she did not know he preferred to sit by her side like a faithful pooch. Rosamund thought she did the boy a favor, of course. Still, it was too preposterous.

But, then—Franny flushed inwardly—
I'm
the one who's really preposterous. I'm the one.

Along with Tim Gleason, she scrambled from the boat, began tying the ropes.

Pre-pos-ter-ous.

“You're only saying you love me 'cause I said I loved you.” So
Bob Prohaski had mumbled into Franny's hair after that kiss in the Strawberry garage. Heartbreaking words. The two stood near a dim but potentially dangerous clot of power tools, the acrid odor of oily machinery mixing with the powder-soft sweetness of the boy's worn T-shirt.

“You can't like a guy like Prohaski!” That was what the girls in Franny's honors classes had said back in May, but Franny was different from them. She could not make herself like those seventh-grade boys who considered it clever to flip up a girl's skirt in the hall, or even the nice ones who often measured four inches shorter than herself. Tough Bob Prohaski had the face of a Mongolian warrior and stood five foot ten and weighed a muscular one hundred and sixty-five pounds.

It was true, however, that Franny had come to see that Bob Prohaski was kin to those creatures that lolled in squares of sunshine, or sprang. Bob Prohaski's ultimate dream, shared in the Strawberry garage: to one day own a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a house with a sunken living room. Still, it was nice he'd shared his dream with her, wasn't it? And that he'd implied Franny was the one he wanted snuggled up beside him in that sunken living room? And that he had stopped certain annoying boys at school from calling her on the telephone? Really, she was obliged to him for all of that and, so, in the Strawberry garage, wrapped in his big arms, she had insisted, “I do, too, love you, Bob!”

Preposterous.

WHIRRWOO! WHIRRWOO!

The wailing from the top of the bank meant that someone blew the emergency siren that Franny's father had picked up while in Des Moines for a state bar association meeting. Brick had intended that the siren be used to call in his daughters from boating. Its wail—
WHIRRRWOOOoooo!
—had proved far too disturbing, however, and so that handsome, silver siren generally sat on Peg's cookbook shelf, silent unless—as now—some wag picked up the thing and decided to give everyone a jolt.

Was the wag her father? No, but Brick Wahl did stand at the top
of the bank. A massive man. Florid, with cheeks that hung big and soft as the velvet ropes that cordoned patrons of theaters and museums into entrance and exit. Though his red hair had started to fade, Brick's general effect was Big Little Boy, and this effect was heightened today by the fact that he wore soft yellow golf pants with matching cardigan and shirt. He might have been a giant toddler, just installed in his pj's for a midday nap.

The boy to whom Brick now spoke—Franny did not recognize him, but she understood from the way her father raised his arm that he talked football to the boy. It had been high school football that transformed Harold Wahl into Brick. Also: In the hand
not
clutching the imaginary football, her father held a drink. Scotch was his drink of choice, but, at this hour of the day, not much past noon, with houseguests about, that thermal glass might still contain a Bloody Mary. The houseguests—several now visible on the screened porch—always praised Brick for the pitchers of wicked Bloody Marys he poured at the weekend brunches.

“Mr. Ed!” Franny called as a harlequin Great Dane raced past Brick and barreled down the long stairs to the dock. “Come here, Mr. Ed!”

At the base of the stairs, Mr. Ed paused. Franny hoped he would come to her. His coat was the finest velvet and she would give him nice pats and scratches. The Wahl dog, a faded cocker by the name of Suzie-Q, had been put down the fall before, and Franny missed curling herself up against the animal's warm back, or pressing her nose to Suzie-Q's nose or to her lovable, asphalt-textured paws with their odor of toasted corn chips.

To Franny's disappointment, however, after Mr. Ed lowered his soft gray mouth to the lake, he shot back up the bank, silky skin slipping and sliding over his fine ribs and spine.

There were certain to be more guests on the lawn than Franny could see as she followed Rosamund and Tim up the steps, and she felt shy of the guests—who were generally nice until they knew she was just the little sister. Actually, she felt shy of her father, too. Until—last summer?—he had seemed to like Franny, even if his attention lay
elsewhere. Now, more and more, both he and her mother stared at her as if she were dry prairie about to burst into flames.

Something was making him laugh. Something he himself had said? Something said by the young man or by one of the two girls in coolie hats who had joined them? He laughed his soundless laugh—the infectious one that he produced with teeth clamped together. His big cheeks, so shiny and well-shaven and spanked with Aqua Velva, jiggled in pink delight.

Hard not to smile at such delight. Franny herself smiled.

“And then”—her father squeezed his eyes tight; tipped his head back as if he might sneeze—“this fellow says, ‘Why, surely you're too young to be flying across the country alone, honey!' and it turns out he thinks Roz is all of
twelve
years old!”

“Daddy!” Rosamund stopped at the top of the steps. Tim Gleason stopped behind her. Franny stopped behind Tim. “You're not supposed to tell everybody that story!” Rosamund said, but you could tell she was not angry, and, with a laugh, Brick Wahl reached out to wrap a big arm around Rosamund's shoulder:

“Honey! It's just you're so darned tiny! I'm sure he thought you were cute as a bug!”

“Cute as a bug.” Tim Gleason leaned forward to give Rosamund a soft thump on the head with his fist.

And there was Martie, swinging on the tire that Brick and one of the boy guests had recently tied to the big pin oak. Today, Martie wore her long, red hair in a braid that hung straight out behind her when the tire swing went up in the air and Martie leaned far, far back—

Who pushed Martie on the swing?

Not a houseguest. No. Al Castor. A local boy. White-blond hair grown to his chubby shoulders during his first year at Cornell. Owner of the Great Dane. Repository of firecrackers and obscene riddles and faultless impressions of cartoon guys (Daffy, Bugs) and bodily eructations. Al Castor had been Rosamund's buddy-of-choice last summer; then he made the mistake of declaring his true feelings and, as Rosamund had said, that was that.

So Martie recited while Al Castor pushed the swing. Franny knew that poem from an old book she had found after the family moved out of their house on Ash Street:
A Child's Garden of Verses.
By Robert Louis Stevenson. Peg Wahl had stored all of Rosamund and Martie's children's books (
Winnie the Pooh, In My Mother's House
, and so on) in the Ash Street attic and, by the time Franny was born, forgotten the books' existence. During the move, however, Franny had found the books and saved them. Now she had her own favorites from
A Child's Garden of Verses
, but she would never have shared them with this crowd. Martie's noisy recitation struck Franny as hopelessly naive, precisely the opposite of that fake baby stuff cooked up by the occasional girl guest who, say, toted a teddy bear with her sleeping bag, or made a show of sucking a giant lollipop.

“Higher, Al!” Martie cheered. “Higher!”

“Good Christ!” Brick gave a pained grin to the group about him. “That girl does hurt my ears!”

Though the others in the circle laughed at this remark, Franny pretended not to hear it. Even to herself, she pretended, and she told herself,
Yes, it is a Bloody Mary, you can tell by the way, after each sip, he raises his lower lip over his upper to clear away the juice and Tabasco and salt.

“So, kids,” Brick said, “how was your trip into the big city?” and Rosamund related a story that Mike Zanios had apparently told her and Tim Gleason regarding the mess that had resulted when one of his dishwashers bungled an attempt to sneak a bottle of Kahlua out the back of the Top Hat Club.