The Guineveres (35 page)

We stood there for a while, quiet as prayer. Nobody knew what to say. We rubbed circles on Ginny's back, bony through her flimsy gown. I gave her my sweater. Win gave her some socks. Gwen gave her a ponytail holder, and we finger-combed her hair to settle it down a bit. We huddled together, hugging tightly, like a real family does.

And then we said good-bye. We watched Ginny scramble up the hill toward the church, then disappear beyond our sight. The three of us stood side by side, holding hands so tightly our fingers became numb. After we were sure she wouldn't return, we turned inside and found our way to the chapel. We fidgeted in our Easter bonnets that dug into the undersides of our chins. We hated ourselves for not joining Ginny, who by now had made it beyond the church, beyond the houses that dotted the town until the road branched in several directions. And it occurred to us, there, as we rested the weight of our bodies on the back of the pew, that
this
was sacrifice. We leaned into the dwindling effects of the whiskey that made us drowsy, woozy with love. We crossed our fingers beneath our hymnals, and we prayed in a way that could only be described as authentic. Rapturous, even.
Boys, hear our prayers.

Of course, they found Ginny by evening. No cars had stopped to rescue her. Nobody had asked her about the War Effort. She appeared rather out of place, one can only imagine, a dirty pixie girl in a long, ill-fitting gown, only socks on her feet. Sister Tabitha found her wandering alone on the side of the road and brought her back to the convent by the time the stars had dotted the sky. Shortly thereafter, Sister Fran sent her away. We didn't see Ginny again, not even to say good-bye.

For a long time, we could only imagine where Ginny had gone. In our minds it was somewhere worse, somewhere stricter: perhaps a hermitage where she'd be forced to live a life of solitary silence, in a room overlooking a jagged cliffside. Or maybe some sort of prison for wayward youth. Win speculated that she was transferred to a boarding school somewhere in the wilderness. “There are convents everywhere, even in the wilderness,” Win reasoned.

Later Ginny wrote me, and I learned the truth: She returned home, or to what was left of it. She went to live with her elderly grandmother, her father's mother, who was too sick to pay her much mind. Ginny cooked her meals and cared for her the best she could. When her grandmother smiled in thanks, Ginny saw her father somewhere beneath that wizened face, and this made her feel close to him still, somehow. They never talked about him—he'd died in prison, before Ginny ever had a chance to see him again—but the poor woman kept his artwork on her walls. When her grandmother died, Ginny packed up some of her father's old paintings, including the portrait he'd made of her as Dorothy in the field of poppies. When she looked at that painting, she still very much saw herself as the young redheaded girl sitting on a milk carton in her garage. She remembered watching her father's freckled face behind the canvas, the arching of his eyebrows as he smiled and painted. She'd been happy in that moment.

Shortly after the funeral, Ginny moved far away. She got an apartment, and she hung her portrait on the wall. I'm not sure if she was better off with her grandmother or not. Or with us in the convent. I guess there's no point in wondering now, is there? Because Ginny turned out just fine.

After all we'd experienced in our lives, Ginny's departure was our first true loss. Or maybe it's just that we hadn't thought we could hurt more than we had, but we did. We felt stunned, as if someone had ripped off a leg and expected us to keep on walking.

But we didn't know Ginny's fate yet, not during Easter mass. Instead, we clasped our hands and pressed them together until our biceps strained.
Boys, hear our prayers.
Sister Fran observed our reverence, pursed her lips, forming wrinkles that looked like stitches. After a thorough examination, she nodded at us in approval. “Good girls,” she mouthed, but she didn't know this: The Guineveres were falling apart.

 

Gwen's Revival

Daddy said I was the prettiest girl in the world, and he would know because he traveled all over before he married my mom. He was in the army. We used to have a picture of him as a young man in uniform hanging in our living room. He looked like a movie star. The photo had been tinged pink to highlight his cheeks, ruddy with youth. His hat just barely tipped sideways, and the most handsome smile I've ever seen spread across his face, like he could be either a devil or an angel. I know he's had lots of women; he was married once, too, before my mom, a fact she never liked to discuss. I bet you he could have had anyone, because he's a charmer—that's where I get it. We can just look at people in a certain sort of way, like we're burning holes through their skin, right down to their bare bones. Believe it or not, people like to be exposed for what they are. I guess it's sort of like confession in that way; there's a freedom to it.

I have two older sisters, but Daddy said the day I was born it was like the world opened up and swallowed him whole. He knew I was special. But even so, I wasn't supposed to tell anyone about the gifts he'd sometimes bring me or the drives we'd take together, where we'd park out at some overlook and hold hands and just talk, the two of us. I'd curl up against him, make a nest of his armpit, and sometimes we wouldn't even say anything; we'd just look out at the town, tiny from where we sat. One day, after we'd been sitting in the car for a while, Daddy gave me a little gift box and told me to open it. It wasn't my birthday or anything, and I asked him the occasion. He told me it was simply because I was the prettiest girl in the world. I never got tired of hearing that.

Inside that box was another box, and inside that one a ring sat wedged between two satin cushions. The band was thin, gold, with three tiny opals set inside of it. The opal is my birthstone, and Daddy told me to keep it in a special place where nobody would find it, especially not my mom or my sisters because then they'd wonder why they didn't get one, too.
It'll be our little secret,
Daddy said, and he told me I could wear it as often as I liked when I turned eighteen. For a long time, I kept the ring in a slit Daddy had cut into the side of my mattress. He said that way I could keep it right there with me when I slept. He called it my Princess Pea.

My mom never did like the attention that Daddy showed me. Sometimes I'd curl up with him on the couch at night while he read the paper, just rest my head on his chest so I could hear his heartbeat, feel the gentle rise and fall of his stomach beneath me. Lying on Daddy's chest felt like I was floating out on a raft in the water, and I liked that sensation. Daddy would run his fingers through my hair.
My beautiful little Blondie,
he'd call me. One day, when my mom found me this way, she made me go to my room, and from there I could hear my mom yell, and though I couldn't make out what she was saying, I knew exactly what it was about.

If you really want to know what I think, I think my mom was jealous of me. See, she used to be pretty, like me, but years had aged her, grayed her hair and widened her hips. She wore these big formless shifts to cover up her growing figure, and she'd be just as likely to wear lipstick as she would be to take a rocket to outer space. In the mornings, she'd sit in the darkened den smoking her cigarettes, just one after another, her hands shaky as she flicked her lighter. This is probably the image I'll hold in my mind when I think of my mom: her dried feet stuffed into slippers, her ankles so white they practically glowed in the dark. Spirals of smoke looked like they could be spelling out something in the air, and if that were true it probably said,
Stay Out.
We knew better than to mess with my mom in the mornings.

Sometimes, before the school bus came, I'd ask Daddy to braid my hair, and he'd try his best. I had to teach him once, how you drag one piece over the middle piece, until it becomes the middle, then you pull another piece over, like they're all taking turns. Daddy would sit in a chair behind mine, tell me my hair smelled like the blackberry patch where he used to work when he was my age, only that my hair was much softer than those prickly bushes. His fingers grazed my skin, and sometimes he'd trace the outline of my neck with his thumb and forefinger, like he was measuring the width. Whenever Daddy did my hair, it came out a little crooked, but I didn't care. He told me I was the prettiest girl in the world and gave me a ring that I could wear as often as I liked when I turned eighteen.

One day, when I got home from school, my mom and Daddy were sitting at the kitchen table, and it wasn't even close to suppertime. My mom didn't wait for me and my sisters to sit down. “We're moving,” she said abruptly. She had a wrinkle above her lip that looked like a mustache, and when she looked down, a roll of fat extended from her chin like some thick bubbling liquid. Once, Daddy gave me a photo of her when she was younger, and she looked like a movie star, too—just like Daddy did in his photo. In the picture, her hair was pulled away from her face, and big curls fell over her shoulder like she was in a shampoo advertisement. She was leaning back, resting on her hands, and even though the picture was black and white, I could tell her lips were red. I wished that version of my mom in the picture could have been my real mom, but it wasn't. My real mom sat at the table before us, her large body spilling out over the chair, her lips the color of morning biscuits. “Did you hear me? I said we are moving,” she said, this time more forcefully.

My sisters started crying, but not me. “Why?” I asked.

If her eyes could have been released from their sockets, they might have turned into attack dogs. “Ask your father why,” she said, but this time in a singsongy sort of voice that held anger on the edge of it.

Daddy stared down at the table, pretending to read something that wasn't there.

“Is this true, Daddy?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes, I'm afraid it is.”

“Ask his secretary why,” my mom interjected. “Or her husband, for that matter.”

We moved two weeks later.

As we were packing, my sisters told me that Daddy had an affair, and that's why we had to move, and I told them no way did I believe that for a minute. Not a second. But I did believe it, and I have to admit it hurt my feelings, that news did. I felt betrayed, not for my mom, but for myself. I don't know why. On moving day, I took my ring out from its hiding place in my mattress, and I tucked it into my shoe for safekeeping. I liked the way it felt digging into my heel. A Princess Pea.

Daddy said I had a mind that ticks like a clock, constantly moving. I did well in school, even when I didn't try. But the kids in my new school didn't like clock-ticking minds or pretty girls, or new girls for that matter. In the cafeteria on that first day, I held my tray and scanned the room, then finally sat off in the corner by myself picking at my lunch. After a while a group of boys came up to my table.

“So, who are you?” one of them asked. He wore glasses, and his hair was slicked back, rounded out at the front. From behind him I saw a group of girls across the way, rolling their eyes and scoffing in my direction. I caught one of their glances, smirked, then turned to the boy in front of me. “Well, that depends,” I said, and I smiled without showing my teeth, in a way I know reveals a dimple. “Who's asking?” I batted my eyes. The boy nervously fidgeted with his sleeves, and his face turned pink in the cheeks. “It's Guinevere,” I finally said, and I extended my hand to shake his.

When Daddy got home from work that night, he made his favorite drink. Then he sat me on his lap and tucked my hair behind my ears, said he liked it when he could see my face better. He wrapped his arm around me like a belt, and I told him about my day, about sitting in the cafeteria, about the mean looks from the girls, about the boys who were nice to me. Daddy leaned in close to me; he smelled like sweat and like whiskey, but I didn't mind. He told me not to trust those boys. Said all men are snakes, they slither in the grass, and they bite you on the ankles. Then he pinched my sides until I wriggled off his lap.

“Are you a snake, Daddy?” I asked.

He laughed in one short breath, like a sneeze, and poured himself another drink. He was wearing his undershirt, and I could see rings of sweat that had dried in half circles beneath his arms. “Sometimes a man can't help what a man is,” he said. Then he turned around and looked at me like he was looking at something else. “You look just like your mother when she was young,” he said, no segue, no nothing. “You know that?” Daddy looked up and down my whole body as if his eyeballs were rolling across my skin. And just as he was about to say something, my mom came in and told us supper was on the table and to hurry before it went cold.

My first day at school signaled what was to come, I learned. The girls would push up against me in the hallways or whisper insults beneath their breath as I walked past them down the halls, but I tried not to let it worry me. They were just jealous, and what did I need them for, anyway? Were they the ones who passed me notes between classes or offered to carry my books? Were they the ones who invited me to dances or asked me to meet them behind the baseball diamond after school?

Three boys, in particular, began to pay me the most attention, leaning against the lockers when I gathered my belongings at the end of the day. They were older than me by a couple of years, and they all sort of looked the same, except one had darker hair than the other two and was a little bit shorter. The two blond ones were cousins, and they had a dusting of freckles across their faces that made them look sick, with the measles or something. All of them had the same squinty look, like they needed glasses. Still, I didn't complain about the company, especially since I didn't have any other friends. They all three told me they thought I was the prettiest girl in the school, though I already knew this because that's what Daddy told me all along.