Rowing in Eden (5 page)

The record that Rosamund now started on the turntable of the living room stereo: “You Were Only Fooling (While I Was Falling in Love).” Some old, old thing by an old, old group called the Ink
Spots. Antiquated falsettos and twinkly guitar strained into the kitchen. Martie sang along as she tended to her omelet on the stove.

“Ginny, did you see the picture where this Turner is the model?” From its spot behind a magnet on the refrigerator, Peg Wahl removed a newspaper advertisement (handsome, tuxedoed male assists his female equivalent in exiting a Lincoln Continental offered for sale by a Miami car dealer).

“Isn't he handsome?” Peg said.

Ginny Weston winked at Rosamund as the girl returned to the kitchen. “Be still, my heart!”

“But what's the deal, Roz?” Martie set her elbows on the countertop of the kitchen's island, then walked her feet up the cupboards across the way until she had made a kind of arch with her torso. “If his dad's place is so great, why hasn't he invited you there?”

“Martie!”
Peg said, but Rosamund just laughed—a tinkling laugh that demonstrated how far above being insulted by Martie she was.

“I'm sure Martie didn't mean that the way it sounded,” Franny said.

Martie looked injured. “Did I say something wrong?”

Rosamund smiled at Peg and Franny while the diplomatic Ginny gathered coffee cup and saucer and exited the scene. “Martie probably doesn't know I met Turner just before school let out,” Rosamund said. “It's not like I'd rush off for a weekend with him whether it was at his father's hotel or—wherever.”

“Of course not!” Peg said.

Steam from Martie's omelet pan rose with a hiss as Martie dashed the pan into the sink and protested, “I suppose you're implying
I
would?”

“Flower lady's on her way to the door,” Ginny Weston called from the back hall. Peg shook her head at Martie, then grabbed the old Hopalong Cassidy mug in which she kept change.

“Flower lady, here!” a tiny, ancient voice cried. “Flowers!”

Franny was more than willing to follow Peg to the front hall, to shift moods. Though the flower lady drove a light green Pontiac on her trips around Pynch Lake, her stooped arrival at the door with her flower basket on her arm always made Franny feel as if she lived in some far-off, gentler days of tinkers and peddlers.

Peg picked out four of the old woman's tiny bundles—bachelor buttons, pinks, coreopsis, black-eyed Susans. “That'll be forty cents, right?”

The flower lady nodded as she moved her tiny bird-bone fingers in among her wares, setting things to rights. “You might like to see the tiger lilies I got in my car.”

“Oh, I love tiger lilies,” Franny said.

“Expensive,” Peg murmured.

The old woman smiled. “Mrs. Wagner bought three dozen for her lunch ladies. She said they were a good price.”

“That's nice for you, isn't it?” Peg fingered four dimes up the side of the sugar bowl while giving Franny a sideways smile that Franny hoped the older lady did not see.

“Trug” was the precise name for the basket in which the woman carried her flowers to and from her car. When Franny first had come across the word, she had known immediately that it described the basket carried by the flower lady. A perfect word: trug. So humble. Like potato. Like—hummock.

“Honestly!” Peg said as the woman returned to her car. Something in the set of Peg's chin let Franny know Peg's feelings were hurt, and, sure enough, as they hurried the little bundles of dripping flowers to the kitchen, Peg said, “Who all could Kay be having for a luncheon? And did you see how that woman was trying to shame me into buying her lilies?”

With the word “trug” now slipped over her own arm—its size necessitated holding the arm away from her side—Franny smiled at Peg and said, “Well, I didn't, Mom, but, then, actually, I was thinking about having some of your tuna salad.”

Just to be nice. She knew the salad would make her breath stink at that afternoon's piano lesson.

A plump little quail of a woman, the piano teacher. A chain-smoker worn by recent widowhood. She gazed rather mournfully out a window obscured by ivy while she asked, “So, tell me, truthfully, did you practice at all this week?”

Franny mumbled frightened inanities about the difficulties of practicing with guests in the house, and how she would do better next week. She tried not to think about the hairy mole on the teacher's neck. A pathetic thing. Revolting. Like some furry pet cockroach that peeked out over the teacher's lacy collar.

With a rap, the teacher brought Franny's pile of books together on the corner of the piano. A Steinway. Once, Franny's father had come to fetch her at lessons and had stepped inside and admired the Steinway and played a version of “Mack the Knife” that the teacher seemed to find charming.

“Frances”—the teacher held the books out to the girl—“you need to consider whether you want to continue lessons.”

Then it was over, and the next student could be heard, opening the screen door to the porch, coming inside. That girl was gawky, with hair the sickly yellow of the unguent Franny's family used for burns, but she had talent, and dedication, too. Usually, while waiting to be picked up at the lesson—why did her mother always have to be late?—Franny sat in a corner and looked at the teacher's art books while the talented student played. Today, however, mortification drove Franny onto the screened porch. It had rained while she was inside, and the raindrops had beaded on the porch's painted concrete floor. She extended the toe of her shoe to push one of the beads, see if it would roll, but it only smeared.

Her parents would kill her if she quit piano, she thought, and a queer pressure moved down her body, head to toe, as if she were being swallowed.

What was that?

Last winter, once, after a basketball game, she had waited for her mother in the foyer of the junior high school while the snow got deeper and deeper and the evening grew darker. All of the other students
had been picked up and the janitors finally shut her into the foyer with the metal accordion doors that made a second defense against intruders. Friendly, good-hearted men, they did not realize it frightened Franny to be left alone in the dark building. The old one said to the young one, laughing, “I guess we can trust Franny not to let anybody into the foyer, huh?” and the young one said, “I suppose, but, hey, Franny, don't step outside till you're sure you're ready to go, 'cause otherwise you'll be locked out.” Then each man left the doors he had locked, one man heading up the stairs to the second floor, the other disappearing down the hall. She watched the snowflakes sweep across the parking lot. A little while later, the janitors, both of them hunched against the wind, appeared in the lot and climbed into their cars and drove away and left the lot empty. Franny had told herself: She'll come now. Now. Now. The next second. In five seconds. When her mother did finally arrive—the car sour with the smell of those fired enamel plates Peg was bringing home from the Hobby Shack kiln—Franny had burst into tears. Her mother said she was silly, overly dramatic, and maybe she was. How could you tell?

The tall trees in the piano teacher's neighborhood cast such dense shade on the street in front of the teacher's house that the light there appeared green, and just suppose that this time Franny's mother really did
not
come. Not because she was hurt and unable to come, no, but because she simply did not want to come anymore.

“Frances?”

She jumped. The teacher stood in the open porch door though the talented girl continued to play her piece (something sprightly and slightly maniacal). “Do you want to try to call your mother? See what's holding her up?”

The teacher's telephone hung in the kitchen. It was easy enough to pretend to call. If she were actually to call, and Peg were still at home, she would be angry.
If I could be there, I'd be there.
How embarrassing, then, when Franny finished her fake conversation—did the teacher and the talented girl overhear?—to step onto the porch again and discover that the white Wildcat convertible, top down, now sat, idling, at the curb.

“So?” Peg glanced at Franny as she steered the car out of the piano teacher's neighborhood and back toward Lakeside Drive.

“So—what?”

“So how was your lesson?”

“She said”—Franny felt as if she swallowed a burr—“I should think about whether I want to keep coming.”

“Oh, Fran! That means you're doing poorly! And when I think of all the children who would be thrilled to have a chance at a piano lesson!”

Franny ignored the tears escaping the corners of her eyes. She pointed up the street to her grandmother's driveway, the maroon Chrysler now waiting for a chance to back out onto Lakeside.

“There's Grandma,” she said.

Peg honked. A hand emerged from the Chrysler. Waved.

“Well, at least she acknowledged me,” Peg muttered.

Franny ignored that, too. From past experience, she knew that if she were to say anything negative about her father's mother, her mother would correct her. And if she said something positive, her mother would say, “Oh, well,” implying Franny did not know the whole story.

Since there was nothing to say, Franny made a game of keeping hold of a glimpse of the lake as the road dipped close to the water, then away, then back again. Sometimes, she lost the lake completely as they started up a hill but then she found it again in the branches of trees. An entire field of it shimmered and shook silver when the car came level with the shore and passed Moore's Marina and Johnny's Casino—

“It'll kill your father if you quit, Fran.”

“I'll try harder.”

Peg gave her head a little shake. Before driving Franny to the lesson, Peg had complained of her own appearance in one of the hall mirrors—“I look like a cow!”—but now, chin lifted, short golden hair brushed back in Greek-goddess wings, she appeared impenetrable. Even the gold bangles that had slipped down her
wrist and rested on her forearms as she drove contributed to this picture of competence, strength.

Tanglefoot was the name of Bob Prohaski's neighborhood, a dank, mosquito-infested place. The road to Tanglefoot lay just on their right, and if her mother were to turn, they would soon pass by the Prohaski house. Peg did not turn, of course—Tanglefoot would have been out of their way. On this stretch, for a time, the lake disappeared completely from view. On the right sat the pink motel that served as the dormitory of tiny Stanford Fanning Fellow College. Franny wished her father were in the car, then, because he would have made some tension-releasing joke about the school, which had been founded by an enormously successful and unscrupulous land developer after his son flunked out of several mediocre colleges. These days, well-heeled academic flops from around the region came to Pynch for easy credits and—if they were males—a way to avoid the draft. “Pompon majors,” Brick called the girl students. “Stanford,” he called SFF, and “School for Fools.” Though not around Franny's mother, who had not gone to college, and was touchy on the subject.

Franny and Peg did not speak at all as they passed Stanford Fanning Fellow or Water Tower #2 or Woolf Beach or even the trailer court where a manic Irish setter—a beautiful creature with a glossy red coat but only three legs—made its usual barking charge at the car. In silence, they passed Mother Goose Miniature Golf. Crossed the causeway that spanned a short stretch of marsh dotted with those muskrat dens that Franny always hoped would one day turn out to be beaver lodges, a beaver being infinitely more appealing than a muskrat.

On the left: the chimney-shaped brick building that housed tiny Karlins' Grocery. During the spring, when her school bus had let out the kids who lived in the shabby homes huddled around Karlins', Franny sometimes got off with them and bought a pack of cigarettes or a Milky Way before walking the last mile home. A comforting old grocery, Karlins', with its scuffed wood floors and poor lighting and candy behind the counter. Franny felt loyal to
the place, and to the house next to the grocery as well. A girl from her Sunday school, Kimmy Estep, had lived in that house, and, once, when Franny visited the girl—they must have been five or six at the time—Mrs. Estep gave them each two cents and they took the money to Karlins' to buy Sputnik gum balls. That had been long ago. The Esteps had kept the house nice and neat, but now the insulating bales of hay set against the foundation the winter before lay scattered about the yard, and the paint job had gone chalky. Whenever Franny's father glimpsed the place, he became infuriated, as if someone had given him a personal insult.
A pigsty. Somebody ought to get in there with a bulldozer. A couple of carefully placed sticks of dynamite could go a long way toward improving that spot.

“What on earth?” Peg said, and pointed.

High on a ladder that leaned up against the old church camp sign at the edge of the Wahl property, there stood Martie, removing the letters that spelled out D
ODGE
B
APTIST
C
AMP
and handing them down to Rosamund.

“What are you two doing?” Peg called as the Wildcat drew up alongside the girls. “And in your swimsuits, no less.”

Rosamund smiled and called back, “We're going to repaint the letters! Spruce things up!”

Martie climbed down from the ladder and she high-stepped through the tall grasses that grew in the little ditch that separated the property from the road. “We got this great idea!” She leaned an arm on the roof of the Wildcat. “We'll take a picture of the sign and the house, see, and paste it to a postcard, and then, Roz can send it to Turner Haskin. As kind of a spoof on his sending her that postcard of his dad's hotel.”

In the end, Rosamund and Martie decided to scramble the freshly painted letters of the sign. “Poddigbattes Camp” was the result. Awful, Franny's mother said, and wanted the girls to put things right before their father got home, but then Brick did get home, and he thought the name so funny that he grabbed a camera and hurried
the girls and the ladder back to the refurbished sign; and, there, he captured a shot of Rosamund pretending to be in the process of hanging the last of the letters, while Martie, below, supported the ladder with one hand and, with the other, slapped at a bug on her thigh.