Rowing in Eden (7 page)

A problem particular to the summer: all those unshod feet that did not provide the click of warning that meant someone headed your way. More than one someone, Franny decided as she wedged the poetry book back under her mattress.

“I get the skinny mirror!” crowed a female guest, and another said, “Well, hey, I like the fat mirror. It keeps you on your toes,” and a third,
“I'll
take a realistic assessment.”

Franny did not recognize the voices, but the girls had clearly been at the house before as they knew the trio of mirrors that Brick had hammered into place in the upstairs hall; and then Franny did recognize the voice of a certain newly engaged girl:

“
Anyway,
I sort of forgot about the fact that I'd helped out old Bruce with his hard-on and, my mom's, like, ‘Elaine, what on earth did you get on your jeans, dear?'”

While the others erupted in laughter, Franny silently lowered herself into the dark recesses of her bunk. Let the engaged girl speak gaily and without constraint to her friends; Franny knew
she
was not meant to have overheard.

“‘Elaine,'” one of the girls repeated in a high, mocking voice, “‘what on earth did you get on your jeans, dear?'”

More laughter.

What the engaged girl had said—Franny made her breathing so quiet her chest ached—what the girl had said did not quite jibe with certain bits of information that Franny had received on the trail to and from the dining hall at Camp Winnebago. Those bits of information were now fixed in an odd amber of sunshine and shade that also contained the taste of unripened raspberries, the buzz of
mosquitoes, the changes undergone by a certain small heap of scat—raccoon? fox?—that during last summer's four-week stay started out tawny and slick as a squirt from the craft hall's tube of ocher, but grew darker and darker until a colorless, long-haired mold overtook the shape, and, eventually, broke down its edges altogether.

Still: “Hard-on” must have to do with what the engaged girl's mother found on her jeans. Which went along, Franny supposed, with a recent afternoon in which she had tickled Bob Prohaski on the glider in the side yard. Without warning, Bob Prohaski had grown quiet. “Look, here,” he whispered, and pulled at the waist of his pants to reveal a rim of moisture shimmering on his belly.

“Oh. Well, that's all right,” Franny had said, and then she gave that big boy a sympathetic smile to ease what shame she assumed he felt at having wet his pants. But Bob Prohaski had put his arm around her and pulled her close and smiled at her as if he were not at all ashamed. And there was a reason, she realized now. Because the shimmer on his belly—she had not liked seeing his belly, the damp, dark curls flattened to the white skin—the shimmer there must have been made of the same stuff as the stuff on the engaged girl's jeans. Which also had something to do with certain cartoons Franny had seen in the books crammed flat against the piano teacher's bookshelves, behind
Masterpieces of the Louvre
and
Van Gogh in Arles.
It must have been the teacher's dead husband who had hidden those books behind the art books; the teacher probably did not know the books were there. And who would ever tell her? No one. No one could. It would be too embarrassing. And better not to think at all of that embarrassing night in May when Franny crawled into her parents' bed after a particularly bad version of the Snow White dream, only to reawake as something—neither elbow nor knee, something more like the rude nose of a dog—began to bump up against her from behind. “Wha'?” her father had mumbled when she sprang from the bed. Then he came wider awake and there was alarm in his voice as he called, “Who's there?” By then, however, Franny had made her way out the bedroom door and could pretend she had not heard.

Someone—the engaged girl or one of her friends—switched off the hall light before returning to the party below, and Franny's room went dark. Outside her windows, however, the ragged bits of sky not blotted out by the oaks still held their starchy blue, and in the bower of the bunk bed, she tucked her knees up to her chin, and felt pleasantly small, albeit in a theatrical sort of way. She thought of
A Child's Garden of Verses'
“Bed in Summer”—

—and how the summer light filtering into her room was very much like that in the book's illustration, magical stuff that revealed the checked counterpane on the boy's bed, and the bird that sang on a branch outside—

But, again, the light in the hall went on, and now Martie came down the hall, then turned into her bedroom.

Was she crying?

Oh, Franny did
not
want to go to Martie. Did not want to leave her cozy bower. Did not want to breathe in Martie's failure or despair or whatever it was—that exhausted air, that old-balloon air. Twice, Franny's feet drew back from the wooden floor before she made herself move into the hall, and even when she reached the small alcove that led into the bedroom proper, she hesitated before saying, “Martie?”

In front of her dresser mirror—a thing half-obscured by its wreath of souvenir tickets, matchbooks, faded corsages—Martie beat at her long red hair, which crackled and ripped beneath the brush. She looked curvy and grownup in her ivory shell and matching shorts, in lipstick and eyeliner and all, but her tears spilled over her full lips in precisely the same way that they had when she was a flat-chested schoolgirl in a merciless Dutch-boy haircut and hornrimmed glasses.

“Hey, Martie.” Franny put an arm around Martie, patted her on the back. “What's the matter, honey?”

“Oh, nothing! Except, just as Mom and Dad came in from taking a walk, your charming, teetotaling sister made a point of telling me I was acting drunk!”

Franny looked away, fixing her gaze on a chain of green gum wrappers—Doublemint—that Martie had made in the days when the gum-chewing ROTC member was her boyfriend.

“Well, that's great, Franny.” Martie stepped away from the girl and resumed her hair brushing. “So I take it you think I act drunk, too? I love it! Everybody always takes Roz's side.”

“That's not true.”

“It is!”

“No!” Tears started to Franny's own eyes now. “This year, at a game, a boy called you a whore, and I slapped his face.”

Martie set down the hairbrush. “A whore?” She took a seat on the edge of her bed. “Who was it?”

“Well, just some little jerk obviously.” Sniffling, Franny sat down beside Martie on the bed. The combined weight of the pair on the old mattress made them tip, one into the other, and they exchanged teary half-smiles before straightening.

“I only told you to show I stand up for you,” Franny said.

Martie patted Franny on the knee. “Well, thanks, Fran. I appreciate that.” She stood and scowled at herself in the mirror. “And I am not drunk,” she said before leaving the room.

Franny fished around inside the purse Martie had left on the bed. A cigarette smoked in the bathroom—that sounded like something to do. But Franny found no cigarettes. Just a comb. A package of tissues. A lipstick called Mighty Like a Rose. She wound up the lipstick—a clear, bright pink—then wound it down again.

The weekend before, after the Sunday brunch and numerous Bloody Marys, Al Castor—weaving a little, holding his hands over his white-blond hair, which, for some reason, he had now chopped ridiculously short—Al Castor had said to Franny, “Of you three girls, Roz is coolest, and you're second.” Though she secretly had
appreciated the fact that she had not ranked last on Al Castor's list, Franny was offended on Martie's behalf, and told Al Castor so. Who was Al Castor to make such a list, anyway?

But, it was true, she thought as she returned the lipstick to Martie's purse: She had never wished to wear the color of lipstick that Martie wore. And when people spoke of family resemblances, she always hoped the pronounced epicanthic fold of her own eyes (and the Ackerman dimple in her chin) would make it impossible for anyone to say, “You remind me of Martie.”

Sometimes, when especially angry at Franny, Peg said, “You're acting like Martie!” and, then, Franny felt hurt, and then, guilty for feeling hurt. What made it so terrible to be like Martie, really? In fourth-grade Sunday school, Mrs. Dahlberg—plump, frisky, wedges of dark curl pressing against her very pink cheeks—Mrs. Dahlberg had explained that the love of parents was not a pie that had to be divided among the children, no, it was an ever expanding balloon that got bigger and bigger so there always would be enough love for each child. As if it were an indisputable fact—that was how Mrs. Dahlberg said what she had to say about the love of parents for their children, and Franny had cherished it.

There. Martie's cigarettes sat on the dresser. Winstons. In the dresser mirror, Franny considered herself with a Winston stuck between her lips. A pair of castanets sat in a dusty yellow bowl on the dresser and, to add a little flare to her reflection, she tried to slip her fingers into the soft brown and orange strings, elicit a clap of wood against wood. Hopeless. The things confounded her. She dropped them back in the bowl. Which also contained a yo-yo. And a brightly painted Mexican street toy that involved spearing a heavy block of wood on a peg. Martie had always been good at mastering physical skills—the castanets, the pogo stick—that required practice and patience, and that drew bursts of admiration that Franny herself found too short-lived to envy.

All that dust. She drew her index finger along the surface of Martie's dresser and brought up a good quarter inch of gray fur. Ginny Weston and Peg had agreed that Ginny would not clean
Martie's room as long as Martie kept the place a kind of shrine to her past.

What did the girl guests think when they dumped their sleeping bags and purses in here? Franny hoped—hard, almost like a prayer—that the girls did not think poorly of Martie. Martie certainly did like
them.
Almost all of the guests were people Martie invited. Rosamund might tell Tim Gleason to stop by with his friends—his “little friends,” she always called the boys from St. Joe's, as if to emphasize the fact that she took none of them seriously—and, now and then, Rosamund might dance with a boy guest, but that was it. She had made it clear at the beginning of the summer that she did not mean to house girl guests in her extra twin bed, nor did she want people stashing their purses and things in her room.

Just in case her mother or father should be in the hall, Franny slipped the stolen cigarette down the front of her bra before stepping out of Martie's room. In passing, she glanced into Rosamund's room. Clean, spare. A single bottle of perfume sat on the dressing table and Franny knew its scent: Esoterique. The only item on the bureau was Rosamund's stuffed frog, its green throat raised in song above its tiny guitar. How kind and intelligent that brown-eyed frog seemed. Like someone with whom you could have a decent conversation.

A single travel poster adorned Rosamund's walls: Blazing-white buildings climbed rugged hillsides above the teal sea. M
ALLORCA,
read the big black letters.

“Oh,” Rosamund had said when Franny asked her about Mallorca, “it's a place in Spain that I'll probably visit someday.”

T
HE RULES GOVERNING
F
RANNY AND HER ROWBOAT:

No boys on board.

No going beyond the Point.

No swimming off the sides.

Still, Franny liked the rowing, the way each stroke began in adversity and ended in progress; and that very tall girl now stepping into the rowboat, Susan Thomas—head a jumble of the juice cans upon which she wrapped her hair in an effort to make it fashionably straight—Susan Thomas appeared perfectly willing to let Franny do the work.

“Merde!”
Susan Thomas settled herself in the bobbling prow, and stretched out her well-oiled legs as Franny began to row away from shore. “Just let me recuperate a minute,” Susan Thomas said, setting the fat book in her hand over her face to block the sun.

Minutes before, the girl had telephoned Franny to announce that her father had measured her height, and now that she knew that she stood five foot nine, she intended to swallow the contents of a fifty-pill bottle of aspirin.

Franny had doubted that Susan Thomas was in real danger—the girl's mother stood close enough to the phone that Franny could hear her croon,
You're a lovely, statuesque girl
—but Franny had rowed down the beach anyway.

“Five-nine,” Susan Thomas grumbled as she tried to position her head and its burden of juice cans on the prow's gunwale.

“Fashion models are tall,” Franny said. “Maybe you'll be a fashion
model.” Susan was pretty enough to be a model, as far as Franny was concerned; but Susan glowered at Franny.

“Are you patronizing me, St. Frances?”

“No.”

“All right.” She lowered her book into place.

Anna Karenina
was the name of the book, a selection from the Bell Academy's summer reading list that Susan Thomas had found at the Pynch Lake Public Library. Franny had accompanied her there, eager to breathe in the familiar smell of the old building and its books, and to see the creamy merging galaxies that the floor polishers buffed onto the black linoleum. She and Susan Thomas had gone into the woods behind the library, and Franny had shown Susan the area recently outfitted with permanent paths and the brass sign that read:

“Franny?” Susan Thomas again raised the book from her face. “You understand that's one whole inch since school let out?”

“I understand.”

It would have been nice if she could have rowed the boat into the next cove over, even if the next cove contained only more of the same of what they saw in their own cove (trees and small summer cottages interspersed with the occasional campground or big year-round place). Martie always said that Franny had missed out on one of the best parts of living in Pynch by being born too late for the amusement park that had sat in the next cove; Franny knew perfectly well that a series of pastel ranch-styles recently had been built on the grounds of the old Funland site, but she still had a habit of watching for the hills of the roller coaster to rise again above the trees.

“Idiots,” Susan Thomas groused as an inboard passed too close to the rowboat and the skier behind the inboard sent up a spray of
lake water that looked pure white, like tossed pearls—though, closer to hand, over the side of the boat, sunlit, the water appeared a broth of lemon green.

“It's not
dirty,”
Franny's mother always said when guests commented on the fact that they could not see to the bottom of Pynch Lake. “It's just bits of algae and reeds.” Was that true? Franny's mother also had told Franny that the brown spots on lettuce were full of iron, and extra good for you, but when Franny shared this information in home ec class, the teacher laughed. “Where'd you get that idea?” she asked, and Franny felt stunned by her own foolishness. Of
course.
You could see that the brown spots signalled damage.

Still: Had her mother believed in the truth of what she said? You could hardly ask,
Did you believe that what you told me was true?

“Actually, Susan,” Franny said—though there was nothing she “actually” contradicted, or clarified, so maybe the word sounded foolish, but here it came again, along with a little throat-clearing—“actually, I thought of killing myself last fall.” She watched to see if
Anna Karenina
would rise, and when it did, and there were Susan's long green eyes, she continued. “I had this crazy idea I was, like, spinning a cocoon—and when I got through, I wouldn't be dead, just different.”

Susan Thomas nodded. “I'm not really going to kill myself,” she said, then sat up and wiped the underside of her neck with her towel. “So, you feel like singing the Secret Seven?”

Franny smiled. “‘Chances Are'?”

Susan Thomas gave an amiable grunt, and the pair proceeded to hum their way toward a mutually satisfactory key. After “Chances Are” came “Young and Foolish,” and then “I'll Never Smile Again”—old love songs they had learned from a handful of record albums left behind by the last owners of the Thomas cottage. Slightly corny songs, the girls knew, but the lyrics' reverence for the beloved moved the girls, and as they sang they smiled at one another, and nodded, and sometimes clutched their hands in front of themselves in an attitude of fervent prayer.

“I'm going to start drinking coffee, like you,” Susan Thomas said when they finished “I'll Never Smile Again.” “Do you think that'll help?”

“It might.” Franny tilted her own face up to the sky. Was there any color in the world quite so rose as the rose with which the summer sun limned the closed lids of her eyes? Bain de Soleil was the brand of tanning oil that now cooked on Susan Thomas's skin. Expensive stuff. Franny recognized the scent: rich, musky, the way she imagined biblical oils of anointment must have smelled. Her own mother bought Rexall's house brand and said not to waste it.

“If I were a guy, I would definitely give flowers to my girlfriend, wouldn't you?” Susan Thomas said.

“Of course.” The ROTC boy had sent Martie roses. And both Rosamund and Martie had received mums for homecoming dances and orchids for spring formal. But nobody had written them poems, as far as she knew. “I'd write her poems, too,” Franny said.

“Boys,” Susan Thomas groaned, and Franny smiled and groaned “Boys,” too.

On the shore near the Camp Winnebago docks a dog began to bark—a chubby beagle, tail stiff with guard-dog fury—but Franny knew the animal to be a lovable old thing whose hindquarters performed a hula dance at the prospect of a pat on the head, and she called out, “Hey, Cocoa, it's Franny!”

On the dock below the beagle lay a woman: facedown, heavy limbs tanned to the dusty hue of a pecan shell. That would be Mrs. Siebold. The Siebolds—jolly summer people from Waterloo—had been friends with Franny's parents last summer, and the summer before that, too, but, these days, the couples only exchanged waves at the Top Hat when they happened to eat there at the same time. Which Franny suspected had something to do with a trip her parents and the Siebolds had made to a University of Iowa football game the fall before. “Three hours is not a few minutes!” So Franny had overheard Peg say as she and Brick arrived home from that trip. At the time, Franny and her sitter, a high-minded lady in orthopedic shoes, sat watching the TV in the long, sunstruck chamber
that had served as the trophy room for the Pynch Lake Huntsmen and the dining hall for the church camp. “The den,” the Wahls called the area, but that was only because they had had a den in the Ash Street house. Both Franny and the sitter kept their eyes on the
Amateur Hour
contestant—a man who played “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” on a saw—until Brick, laughing and red-cheeked, had bounced into the room and declared,
Say, we had a ball! The game was a dandy!

“Franny!” Susan Thomas cried.

In fright, Franny jumped up in the rowboat. Like some giant, mindless wave, a large red and white inboard now bore down upon the rowboat—so fast, and with prow so high in the air, that Franny could not see the driver at all.

“Hey!” She waved her arms high. “Stop!”

The inboard's prow dropped lower into the water as the engine's roar became a low gurgle, but the boat still came on.

Three boys. Two grinning. One looking harsh, almost reproachful.

“Who are they, Franny?” Susan Thomas cried as the inboard pulled up alongside the rowboat. Franny flushed; maybe it was an outcome of attending girls' school, but Susan Thomas sometimes behaved as if a boy could not even hear a girl talk.

“Hi, girls!” called one of the grinners.

Franny looked down at the copy of Emily Dickinson she had brought onboard. Still, out of the corner of her eye, she could see the boy. Cute. In the surfer mode. Hawaiian print swim trunks. Shock of blond hair.

“What'cha reading?” he said.

“Franny,” Susan Thomas cried, “do something!”

The surfer's stern-looking friend—a handsome boy, with the surprise of a silver tooth—put his foot on the rowboat's oarlock, and said a squeaky, “Franny!”

Franny cast a low glance back toward the bank—home—to see if anyone were in view. But, please, not her parents because her mother would be sure to say, “What were you doing to attract them in the first place?” and if her father heard her mother, he might go
along with her mother's suspicions, or he might decide to chase down the boys, give them a scare.

Someone did stand at the top of the Wahl bank. A sturdy male. He waved both arms over his head. Franny waved back even before she understood that she waved at Bob Prohaski, who now started down to the dock, taking two concrete steps at a time.

Another push on the oarlock by the boy with the silver tooth. Susan Thomas lay her head upon her knees and wailed.

“So what're you doing this afternoon,
Franny
?” the boy asked. “You and your friend bringing in radio transmissions on her orange juice cans?”

Haw, haw, haw.

“You think if your boat goes down you can use her head for a pontoon?”

Haw, haw, haw.

“Bob!” Franny stood up to shout and wave. “Bob!”

He was too far away to hear, she knew, but the boys in the inboard did look toward the shore. Even at that distance, Bob Prohaski's arms and legs appeared slightly bowed by muscle.

“That's my big brother, there! And that's our speedboat in the lift! He'll come out here! You better watch it!”

“Like we're really scared,” said the boys, and then, “bitches” and “sluts” and “sloppy” something—a word Franny did not know—and with whoops and hollers, they sped away.

Though the rowboat rocked wildly in the boys' wake, Susan Thomas managed to whimper, “Thank God they're gone.”

“No kidding.” The boys' words rang in Franny's head as she set the oars back into the water. “Bob doesn't even know how to swim, let alone drive a boat.”

Susan Thomas peered toward the shore and Bob Prohaski, now waiting at the end of the Wahl dock. “So that's him, huh? Why'd you say he was your brother and not your boyfriend?”

Franny flushed. “Just—to make him sound older.” She began to row in, then, quickly, with a sense that, really, she ought to rescue Bob Prohaski. Though the boy never said so, Franny understood
that not knowing how to swim made him nervous around water. On an early visit to the Wahl house, he and Franny had dangled their bare feet from the dock, and one of his shoes had fallen into the lake. The fear that rumpled his cheeks before Franny jumped in to retrieve the thing—a cheap, canvas slip-on—had made clear to Franny what it would have cost for Bob Prohaski to jump in the water, or to have to go home with one foot bare.

“He's good-looking, all right,” Susan Thomas murmured as Franny rowed closer to shore. When she grinned at Franny and wiggled her eyebrows, Franny could not help grinning back. Bob Prohaski
was
handsome. Still, Franny sincerely hoped that in Susan Thomas's company he would
not
talk about, say, his big brothers' grinding some guy's teeth into a curb outside the Knights of Columbus Hall, or a bowling alley, or another spot equally foreign to Franny's experience.

Bob Prohaski stood at the end of the dock, unsmiling, appraising Franny. He liked to look at her. Liked her to know he looked. Creepy, Franny thought, but flattering, too.

“Howdy!” she called. Not a greeting that belonged to her. A greeting that belonged to some other cheerful girl in some other circumstance. A Martie-sort-of-greeting that made Franny look down into the unbailed water in the bottom of the boat.

“What was going on out there?” The boy's voice floated toward them, low and flat. No hello. No acknowledgment of Susan Thomas at all. From the start, Bob Prohaski had made it clear to Franny that as long as he had her and his big brothers, he did not need anyone else.

“They were just some jerks, Bob.” She brought the dinghy up against one of the old tires that hung from the dock posts. The jarring roused a muskrat that snoozed in the sun-warmed water that had gathered in the tires. With a sickening
plop
, the creature dropped into the lake, and Franny gave a screech that sounded, she knew, girlishly guilty. Which made her irritated with herself, and then with Bob Prohaski
and
Susan Thomas, both of whom looked at her as if she had lost her mind.

“There was a
muskrat.”
She pointed to the triangular ripple of water now heading away from the dock.

“So, were those guys trying to pick you up, Fran?”

She did not answer as she set the oars into the boat. Bob Prohaski's anger still took her by surprise; the way he wrapped himself up in it as if it were a luxury item. Sometimes, she could not help liking the anger. It bestowed upon her a new power: She could put an
end
to that anger by wrapping her arms around Bob Prohaski's neck, saying something sweet or funny.