Rowing in Eden (4 page)

“According to Mike, Pynch's butterflies have been involved in an unusual number of fender-benders this morning,” Rosamund said.

Don't mind me.
That was the air Franny meant to project as she
started across the lawn.
I'm just heading for the porch, there, don't mind me.

“But, say, Fran.”

She sighed. Turned. Her father wet his lower lip with his tongue. Screwed up one eye, then crooked his index finger to show that she should draw near, he had something to say.

“What?”

The members of the group stood quiet and her father must have noticed, for he gave a stiff laugh before he murmured, “Well, dear, I was just going to say you should give some thought to the way you walk.”

Franny grinned—a stupid, frozen grin. Then, ears ringing—how strange, the sound was that of the smallest possible silver bells, falling like snowflakes—she started off across the lawn once more.

“And, Fran!” Brick again. Again, she turned. “Did you know that Prohaski was here while you were gone?”

“No,” she said, the word a stone on her tongue, her face so hot she supposed she must appear not just foolish but a liar as well.

“Was he the one in the tight pants?” tittered one of the girls in the coolie hats.

“Those god-awful pants!” Brick shivered his big shoulders up about his ears.

“Actually”—Franny's voice trembled now—“actually, Bob's family doesn't have much money. His parents both work at the creamery. Bob just has that one pair of pants.” A slight exaggeration. “Well, he and his brother share another pair.”

“Uh-oh!” the girl in the coolie hat grinned. “I think I offended somebody!”

“Yeah, you did,” Franny said, but Brick said, now, now, and here came Martie, calling out
choo-choo
as she crossed the lawn, locomotive style, arms working at her sides:

“Hey, people!
Que pasa?
Why so glum, chums?”

“Sh! Martie!” Brick lifted his finger to his lips and his thermal cup toward the branches of the oaks overhead. “Sh. You're disturbing all the little birdies up in the trees.”

Automatically, the members of the circle raised their eyes to the branches at which Brick pointed; then they began to laugh as Brick went on in a soft, soft voice, “Now, I don't know about the rest of you, but, at a time like this, when all the little birdies need their naps, it seems to me the thing to do—the really responsible thing to do—is to head on back to the kitchen and make sure that whatever got left in the pitcher there doesn't go to waste.”

T
HE FOLLOWING
M
ONDAY MORNING, WHEN
F
RANNY WOKE IN
her bunk bed, she felt slightly blank. Because the guests were gone? She supposed they did add dimension to her life. Borders. And—camouflage, yes, because a person could often hide out in the weekends' circus atmosphere.

With a sigh, she flipped her pillow. Flipped herself. Remembered: a Snow White nightmare. She never slept well after dreaming those goofy but horrible things (the evil queen forces Franny/Snow to wear a birdcage over her head, and that birdcage contains a woodpecker and the woodpecker will not stop pecking at Franny/Snow's head).

Outside the bedroom's old double-hung windows, the leaves of the big oaks rustled. Waves slapped the shore. A gang of jays let loose their raucous cries and flashed past like rocks shot from a sling. That
crack
would have come from the rowboat, tied up at the dock, swinging out to full length on its painter.
Eden
, Franny had painted on the rear of the boat after the Des Moines girl from down the beach had loaned her an anthology containing Dickinson's lines:

Franny's mother had never read that poem, but she objected to Franny's naming the boat
Eden.
Someone might think Franny meant to be suggestive, she said. Franny had painted over the letters, then, and painted in the number affixed to the poem:
#58.
Because she wanted to have that banner out there in the world. Because she had feelings like the poet in the poem even if she did not yet possess the person to whom she could attach such feelings.

If that made sense.

The Des Moines girl, Susan Thomas, seemed to think it made sense.

More morning noises: the thuds and howls from the antiquated pipes and taps. The mild thunder that meant Ginny Weston now dragged the vacuum cleaner out from the hall closet and across the floorboards. Which was a gift. Ginny Weston had cleaned for the Wahls since Franny was a baby, and the house always felt more peaceful to Franny with Ginny about, waxing floors, ironing, preventing any major outbreaks of domestic discord.

To rest her chin on her windowsill and stare outside made Franny feel as if she were a dog. A friendly dog. When she had her own house, someday, she would have not just one dog, but three or four. At the dock's end, the rowboat—white and green—appeared both mysterious and welcoming, like the boats in the van Gogh book at the home of her piano teacher. Boats with a thin stripe of red or some astonishing blue.
Red boats. Blue boats. Old boats. New boats.
(Was that a line from one of the old children's books?
The Friendly Book
?) Van Gogh's paintings of boats were somehow more like boats than any other paintings of boats that Franny knew. That is, the painting itself was somehow so clearly an object to be reckoned with, you felt as if you were in the presence of something magical.

Franny flopped back on the bunk. Pressed her toes hard against the wires supporting the mattress overhead, a fifties' thing whose cloth cover bore a design of bitter-yellow satellites and mottled-white planets on a sky of gray. When she pushed against the wires, their resistance traveled down her calves and thighs and made her feel pleasantly exhausted.

Tiny blond hairs had sprouted on her lower legs since the last time she shaved. Nasty-looking, but they felt nice, ticklish when brushed lightly with the tips of her fingers. “A girl should shave her legs every day during the summer,” Martie had warned Franny, and Rosamund agreed but added that, on her spring break, friends had taken her to visit a farm outside New York City where there were girls who did not shave or wear makeup or even bras.

Fascinating. Repulsive. The idea that a girl could choose not to shave. A girl could choose to become practically invisible. Franny knew this was possible because there had been a girl in her seventh-grade gym class whom Franny recognized as potentially beautiful, yet no one at the junior high ever said a word about that girl. Sometimes Franny had wanted to tell her, “Look, you don't seem to understand, you could be beautiful!” But, then, she could be of other minds—one of them jealous of the possibility of the girl's entering the fray, another protective of the safe and happy world in which she lived, ignorant of her moon-maid charms.

And suppose the girl had not been ignorant. Suppose she had
chosen
to stay just as she was.

It must have been about eleven when Franny heard Peg calling for her to come to the basement. Franny did not find Peg in the laundry area, and so she stepped behind the fold-out screen that concealed the spot where Peg kept her “things”: A set of metal shelves held a greenware crèche in a cardboard box and interesting sponges and other tools for ceramics; and there were boxes of pastels and tubes of watercolors, brushes, fierce-looking scrapers with toothed edges.

Peg herself sat on a stool in front of those shelves, reading the instruction booklet for the enameling kiln Brick had given her for their anniversary. She looked up, frowning. “They're supposed to send me something else—this isn't complete.” She waved the booklet in her hand. “Could you run down to the mailbox and see if it came?”

Franny was relieved to be excused from helping with the housework—Peg had assigned the girls to the bathrooms that day—and
she smiled as she made her way down the hill and across the scruffy remains of the church camp's baseball diamond. What grass grew underfoot there was dry nubs, no more than weeds mowed to within an inch of their life; still, Franny's soles were tough from a barefoot summer, and she took pride in the way she could run on the stuff, run on rocks, on hot asphalt or burning cement.

A meadowlark sang on top of the sign at the edge of the property: D
ODGE
B
APTIST
C
AMP
. She hardly knew that she knew the local birdsongs but they ran in her head—they were part of her days—and she smiled as the lark swooped away and across Lakeside Drive and soared over that dream sweep of green and brown—swaying cattails and meadow and distant, thumbnail-size steers—that rolled up to meet a sky that seemed a pearly excrescence of the land itself.

A good day. Maybe she could slip away for just a quick walk through the Nearys' swamp where the high grass looked continuous but, in fact, grew in little hummocks a person had to jump from, one to the other, or get her feet soaked. Or maybe she could take a walk along Lakeside. Walk to the west until Lakeside ran out and there was farmland on both sides of the road and the lake was no longer visible. Or to the east, past the ramshackle neighborhoods of tiny cottages—

The big upside down U of the neighborhood's shared mailbox wheezed when she tugged on the door. Aluminum against aluminum. It made her shudder. And she felt suddenly guilty at the realization that she toyed with the idea that a boy other than Bob Prohaski might glimpse her by the mailbox, and like her. Yes. Just now, though she appeared only to sort her family's mail from the mail of the neighbors, she stood at the well, waiting for her prince to come, insert his reflection alongside that reflection of herself already held by the dark water.

Not much mail. An issue of
Life
magazine, a letter for her mother, a flyer from the Hobby Shack with a penned note on the front:

Most of the bills and things went to Brick's box in town, or to the law office.

Did someone stare at Franny? If someone stared at her, she could almost always tell, and someone stared. She felt the eyes at her back, though she had heard no footsteps.

We don't do that, Franny
, Rosamund had said at the marina, but you had to turn to know if you were in danger, didn't you? Or if your prince had come?

The Nearys' bull. That was all. An enormous black creature—Aberdeen Angus, according to her farm-girl mother—the bull stood stolidly at the edge of its private enclosure. “Hi, bull,” Franny called, and waved the
Life
magazine the animal's way, but that was bravura. She did not feed handfuls of the taller grass from the ditches to the bull in the way she sometimes fed the old horses that pulled Mr. Neary's trash cart.

A bull that looks like a bull.

When the Wahls had first moved out of Pynch, they had gone to introduce themselves to the Nearys. The Nearys had merely stood silent in their yard and, finally, Peg pointed across the road at the bull and said, “My dad always told us, ‘When you're in the market for a bull, make sure you get a bull that looks like a bull,'” and that line was now a family joke, something one of them could say when a conversation came to an awkward silence:

“When you're in the market for a bull, get a bull that looks like a bull.”

Franny inspected the
Life
on her way back to the house. Some layout person had cut into the photo of the four U.S. soldiers on the magazine's cover in order to make one soldier's head lap the red block containing the bold white letters spelling out “LIFE.” That soldier wore a silver ring on his finger that might have been a wedding band. He and another soldier were helping a third soldier—an injured man—cross a field while a fourth man, mouth screwed into an odd grimace, looked on.

The first page of the magazine showed a photo of a model in a kerchief. “Do you have to hide your hair to look prettier?” asked
the advertisers at Clairol; and, next, there was the actor Louis Jordan, behind a pair of Foster Grant sunglasses. The magazine's many advertisements for liquor showed people having a wonderful time at elaborate parties. A model in a gold swimsuit and gold bathing cap and goggles promoted Revlon's new frosted lipstick and nail polish colors. Sugar and Ice was a faint, iridescent pink and Frosted Malt its beige twin, and Franny felt certain one of the colors would make a great deal of difference in how she looked, but
which
one?

From out of the pages of the magazine and onto the drive, something fell. A postcard. For Rosamund. Reading other people's mail was wrong. Of course. However, the handwriting on this postcard was so enormous, Franny could hardly have missed the explosive signature of Rosamund's friend Turner Haskin, and surely there was nothing wrong with looking at the picture on the front of the card. La Playa, Franny knew, was the name of the beachfront hotel belonging to Turner Haskin's father, and here was a photo of that hotel and its sandy beach, both of which looked as white and matte as confectioner's sugar. On the rooftop of the hotel, enormous burgundy letters stood up against the Florida sky to spell out the name: L
A
P
LAYA
.

“People like Frank Sinatra go there,” Rosamund said when Franny brought the postcard inside, into the kitchen. Martie and Peg and Ginny Weston were in the kitchen, too. A rangy woman in beige glasses and beige slacks and a beige peasant blouse decorated with green rickrack, Ginny Weston sat at the breakfast table, testing the pin curls she would brush out before driving home to serve lunch to her farmer husband. Because of the growing midday heat, no one had bothered to turn on the overhead light, and it was dim in the old kitchen with its dark tongue-and-groove walls and ceiling, and Peg carried Turner Haskin's postcard to the little fluorescent over the sink in order to take a better look.

“Turner says they'll have Mafia bosses sitting next to movie stars. People who need privacy and expect the best.” With a butter knife, Rosamund edged a pan of brownies left from the weekend,
and ate the fragile slivers, one by one. “Turner says when a celebrity goes by, you pretend you don't notice.”

Martie looked up from the eggs she was whipping. “Well, of course. You wouldn't make an ass of yourself by
gawking.”

“Martie!” Peg said in response to “ass,” and Rosamund, with an amused twist of her lips, added, “It's not like you get a chance to see Frank Sinatra every day, Martie.”

Ginny Weston gave a laugh as she wound a still-damp coil of hair back into place, and reinserted its bobby pins. “I couldn't go there, Roz! I'd probably scream if I saw Old Blue Eyes!”

“Oh, no doubt you and I would botch it completely, Ginny! A couple hayseeds like us!” Peg looked up from the can of tuna fish she was opening and she grinned at Ginny Weston. Sometimes it seemed to Franny that Ginny Weston was her mother's best friend, though Peg never had told Ginny to stop referring to her as Mrs. Wahl.
Mrs. Wahl.
Still, Franny had never seen Peg cry in front of her regular friends, but she had overheard numerous teary sessions between Ginny and her mother.

Which struck Franny as sad.

Also sad: the way that Peg forgot she was no longer the maker of lunches, and, so, regularly fixed large bowls of food—tuna salad, just now—that later she would have to throw out.

“Fran.” Peg wagged a celery stalk Franny's way. “Stand up straight!” she said; and, then, “Not
that
straight!”

Rosamund, passing out of the kitchen, gave Franny a sympathetic wink. It was nice having the big girls home. The family seemed more like a family again. During the past school year, Brick often had said he had eaten a big lunch at the Top Hat and thought he would skip dinner. Peg came home from the Hobby Shack later and later; she had started working on enamels that fall, making everybody cuff links for Christmas, and more and more often Franny had ended up eating TV-dinners, alone.