Stony River (23 page)

AUGUST 8, 1956
. Summer was boss. Tereza could go outside whenever she wanted without worrying about a truant officer nabbing her or Dearie bugging her about going back to school. She bought sunglasses with glow-in-the-dark orange frames and a white bathing suit to show off her naturally tan skin at the Linden pool. She could swim like a shark but preferred sauntering around the edge of the chlorine-stinky pool, attracting “Hi doll,” “Hey baby” and “Ow, you're breaking my heart” from guys in plaid trunks with bulges. Their calls and whistles made her wonder why Buddy hadn't made a move on her when Dearie wasn't looking.

Summer was boss for him, too. He got to work the eight to fourthirty shift and had Wednesdays and Sundays off. At night he'd record stuff for her to practice reading during the day. Sunday mornings, after breakfast, he'd insist she read out loud. If she did well, he'd smile, making her heart open up like the little morning roses in Dearie's garden. If not, he'd ball up his fists, clench his jaw and stalk away. He could be such a prick, like on Wednesdays when he went to the shore without her, even though every Tuesday Dearie would say, “Take our little actress with you tomorrow; she needs some fun.”

“She needs to stay home and practice her reading,” he'd say.

It was Tereza's own fault. She'd given herself away on a Sunday morning at the end of May. She could still see it happening, still feel the shame stinging her face.

Dearie had been standing at the stove in that zip-up blue-and-white seersucker housedress, slicing bananas into pancake batter. Buddy and Tereza sat opposite each other at the kitchen table. “Look
at them, Alfie,” Dearie said. “Like baby birds waiting to be fed.” She'd turned to Tereza then and said, “The funnies ain't funny anymore, but God's truth I'm hooked on 'em.What's old busybody Mary Worth up to today, Ladonna Madonna? Read her to me.”

Tereza tried to fake it, coughing and sneezing between words, but it was obvious she couldn't read worth shit. She felt like a turd, but Buddy just narrowed his blue eyes at her like she was a broken carburetor and said, “I can fix that. What would you read if you could?”

“Photoplay, Movie Fan, Silver Screen.”
Her fork traced the black-and-white checkered pattern on the oilcloth. She bought the magazines mostly for the pictures.

Buddy stilled her fork with his hand. “Actresses have to read scripts, and fast.”

She hadn't thought of that.

He asked what kind of movies she liked. It should've been obvious. She went to the show every Sunday afternoon, getting home in time for the supper Dearie insisted the three of them eat together since it was the only day both Herman's and A&P were closed. Over supper she'd act out the plots for them: humans replaced by zombie-like aliens, a giant H bomb–infected octopus terrorizing San Francisco, a woman turning into a cobra and killing with a single strike.

“Sci-fithrillers,” she reminded him.

“You like being scared?”

“I like how good it feels when it's over.”

He cocked his head as if wanting more.

“Like going on a roller coaster,” she said. “You know, after that slow climb to the top, when it tears to the bottom and you can't hear nothing but your own screaming—it's like you're this close to death. Sci-fithrillers are like that, only safer. Plus, even if your life stinks like a backed-up toilet it'll never be as bad as a planet blowing up.”

Buddy borrowed a Dictaphone from a typing teacher for the summer. At night he'd record articles from Tereza's fan magazines
so she could listen while reading them alone. She held a ruler under each line, like he suggested, to make the words stop jumping all over the page. She found out that John Derek had a son and a daughter and that Grace Kelly's parents had given Prince Rainier two million bucks to marry her.

When she handed him a second batch of magazines to record, he said, “These are unworthy of you.” She couldn't see how they were any less worthy than the magazines with bare-chested soldiers and sailors she'd seen on the floor in the back of his car.

He borrowed
Dracula
from the library and recorded it for her, a chapter a night. She'd never known it was a book. She found it boring: too much description and too many words she didn't understand. What the hell was a Carpathian and who cared? She tried to remember words to ask Buddy about later because she couldn't write them down fast enough and the library didn't like you making marks in the book. He loaned her his dictionary and showed her how to replay the Dictaphone for parts she didn't understand. His reading voice was the reason she kept listening: it was so dramatic (“The coffin was empty!”) you'd swear he was a professional actor. His everyday voice was kind of flat. She wanted to learn more about him and read well enough so that he'd take her down the shore. She practiced every morning before Dearie got up and every afternoon when Dearie took her nap.

It must've paid off, because last night, driving home from Herman's, Buddy had said, “If you're going to the shore with me tomorrow, be ready at seven. I want to beat the traffic.”

IT TOOK NEARLY AN HOUR
and a half to get to Seaside Heights. Tereza loved the hot air on her face. Felt boss when they stopped at a traffic light and people sneaked peeks at them. She tried to make conversation but Buddy only grunted. He gripped the wheel with both hands like it might fly off. She wanted the radio on, but he said
it was rude to force your music choices on others when the top was down.

They parked on a side street and hoofed the few blocks to the beach. Buddy toted a blanket and Tereza carried their suits wrapped in towels. She took in the salty air, the seagulls circling overhead crying like babies and the whoosh-slap of the ocean she couldn't see yet. The shore was another world, just a car ride away. Buddy gave her a dime for the ladies' change room and waited for her at the end of a tunnel of wet sand leading to the beach. He didn't look as freaky as Charles Atlas, but his thighs strained against white trunks and his leg and arm muscles stuck out. Beside him, Tereza felt as puny as a tick he could squash between two fingers.

She sat on the blanket and watched his cute ass strut across the sand to where you could rent an umbrella. Other heads turned and gave him the once-over. She wanted to shout, He's mine! Nobody'd know she'd goaded him into taking her; they'd think it was his idea.

Under the blue-and-white striped umbrella, they could've been the only ones on the beach. Hugging her knees, wishing she'd painted her toenails, she asked if he thought his ma was still alive. She couldn't picture her own too well anymore.

“No reason to think she isn't.”

“You ever look for her?”

“She knows where to find me. I wasn't the one who left.”

Had he said that to be mean?

They bounced up and down in the waves like jack-in-the-boxes. Lay on their backs afterward, wet arms touching. The sun-bleached hair on Buddy's arms and chest stood up on his goose bumps. He asked her to name the worst thing she'd ever done. Staring up at the umbrella ribs, she thought about what had happened behind Tony's Garage, but told him instead that she'd lifted a pack of cigs from Jimmy.

She could hear the frown in his voice when he said, “You smoke?”

He must not have remembered her taking a drag at White Castle.

“Not anymore.”

“Bravo,” he said. “Live clean, think clean.”

“Something Atlas said?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

He wanted to know if she'd enjoyed stealing the cigs, if it had made her want to do it again. She said she couldn't remember. That was honest in a way: even she wasn't dumb enough to take Jimmy's smokes. She
had
gotten a rush with the men at Tony's, a feeling that she had some secret power over them she didn't have over Buddy.

She went up on an elbow. “It's okay if you kiss me.”

“Holding hands is better than kissing,” he said. “Holding hands is magnetic.”

They lay on their backs and held hands until Tereza's bathing suit felt so steamy against her skin she thought she'd melt. She ran into the ocean and pretended not to know he was sneaking up behind her. He grabbed her ankles, pulled her under and held her until she bit his hand. “Bastard,” she said after she got her breath back and was struggling to stand with waves sucking the sand out from under her feet.

“Forgive me, m'lady!” he shouted. He lifted her up like a bride and carried her back to the blanket, the people around them cheering and clapping. She was pissed off at him for making her lungs want to burst, but proud that he'd carried her for everyone to see. She wanted him to kiss her, tell her he was so scared she might die it made him realize he loved her.

But he plopped himself on the blanket and lay with his hands behind his head as she gulped down lemonade, her mouth dry from salt and fear. She waited until her heart had stopped thumping before asking, “So what's the worst
you
ever done?”

“I got sent to juvie a few years ago. Dearie doesn't like anybody knowing, so I won't tell you why in case you let it slip. I don't remember much about it anyway, except seeing an Atlas ad for the first time. I couldn't afford the lessons then, but the ad itself started
me down the right path. It said: ‘With good health goes honesty and integrity.' Made me realize my body was full of poison and I was denying my true manly nature.”

She turned on her side to face him. “What's ‘integrity'?”

“Being who you are and not what you think others want you to be.”

“What if integrity gets you a black eye or a busted jaw?”

“Then you need to keep somebody like me around.” He sat up, puffed out his chest and flexed his arm muscles. “Try to open my fist.”

Even with two hands she couldn't pry a single finger loose.

When the beach closed they changed their clothes and sauntered along the boardwalk. On the merry-go-round she rode a white horse with a golden saddle while he stood on the edge reaching for the brass ring, the two of them like planets, he said, orbiting around the booming calliope. Later she ate thick, salty fries from a white paper cone. She told him her favorite vegetable was beets because they made her pee turn red—always good for a scare until she remembered and then good for a laugh. He said one thing he liked about her was how uncomplicated she was.

She said, “What else?”

“I appreciate that you let me help you. I can teach you a lot more than how to read.”

“Yeah, like what?”

He cracked his knuckles. “How to tell when the devil turns into a guy like me.”

By the time they left Seaside, Tereza suspected Buddy was as screwed up as she was, but she wanted him to do more than protect or teach her. She wanted him to want her.

AUGUST 27, 1956
. “Is a puzzlement,”Yul Brynner would have said.

How could Linda once have considered Richie a slimy lizard, like the other neighborhood guys Tereza had hung around with, and now want nothing more than to get this family trip to Kansas over with and spend more lazy afternoons with him? The answer came between Springfield, Illinois, and Hannibal, Missouri. She sprawled on the back seat in green shorts and a white blouse, the hot, dusty wind blowing her hair every which way while the motion of the car and the monotonous vista of corn, beet and bean fields hypnotized her.

God had sent her to watch over Richie. Not as a guardian angel— she wasn't virtuous enough for that. More like a flawed missionary who could be perfected if she cajoled Richie into spending more time with her and less with troublemakers. She could help him tell right from wrong, like when he wanted to use a crude word in a speech bubble.

She wouldn't have seen that so clearly had the old Nash not broken down three days ago on her thirteenth birthday for which Mother had planned a dinner at a fancy Springfield restaurant that served Baked Alaska. (She'd had Daddy telephone ahead to make sure.) “This year will be different,” Mother had said, having felt guilty about being in the hospital on Linda's twelfth and then, three months ago, going in for an operation to remove what turned out to be a perfectly healthy appendix, just as the uterus had been. That annoyed Daddy because even with a good medical plan you didn't get away scot-free.

They had to be towed into Springfield—a real hoot because they got to stay in the car, staring at its nose in the air, their backs pressed against the seats. The tow truck had room for only the driver and his pimply son—younger than Richie, maybe fifteen, and so shy he could hardly look Linda in the eye long enough to say his name was Dwayne. His denim shirt and dungarees were oil-stained and he shook her hand with a sweaty palm. When he and his father hooked up the Nash and Linda and her parents were tipped back, ready to
roll, Mother said, “He seems like a nice boy.” Linda rolled her eyes at the back of Mother's head, imagining the sympathy she'd get at school if Mother died during one of her hospital stays and how tragically romantic she'd look to Richie in black.