The Hidden Summer (14 page)

“Don’t be ridiculous. You have beautiful hair.” She reaches out and lifts the ends of my hair, holding it like she’s weighing it.

I sit down at her feet and lose myself in the feel of her hands in my hair. It feels like I thought it might—gentle and distracting. I close my eyes.

Too soon, she taps me on the shoulder. She’s digging through her canvas bag with one hand, and she comes up with a piece of a mirror.

“See for yourself,” she says.

I angle the mirror to catch the light the right way. She’s gathered my hair into one thick braid that starts at the top of my head and then falls to the side, over my shoulder. The braid’s loose enough that curls have pulled free and fallen around my face. I have to admit, it looks good. I almost don’t recognize myself with my fancy hair and the flickering light. My eyes are bright, the color of sky. I have a sudden flash of my mother—I’d like her to see me like this. Pretty. Unrecognizable. For this second, at least, in this fragment of a mirror, I could be someone else from a long time ago. I could be powerful. I could be someone who rode horses bareback. I might give important speeches and lead ceremonies.

“It’s beautiful,” I say, still looking into the glass.

“You’re beautiful, silly,” says Gloria. “You both are.”

I lay down the mirror and hope she will not keep talking like that. It makes me feel ridiculous—Lydia is beautiful. The golf course is beautiful. When Gloria uses the word to describe me, I know she’s just being polite. I finger the mirror’s edge, worrying it with my fingernail. Gloria doesn’t say anything else, and in the silence, I realize part of me did not want her to stop talking. Part of me wanted to hear her say it again. The mirror seemed to agree with her, even though it still doesn’t feel like the girl in the mirror was me.

I scoot sideways and turn toward Gloria, who has leaned back, her palms flat on the concrete. Lydia has lain down flat on the fake grass of Hole One, separated from us by a narrow cement walkway.

“Gloria, why haven’t you been able to find another job?” I ask. I want to touch my hair, but I’m too afraid of messing it up.

She sighs. “You want the long answer or the short answer?”

“Give us the short one first,” says Lydia, sitting up.

“It’s not easy to find one,” says Gloria.

We wait a second.

“Okay, give us the long one,” says Lydia.

“All right,” Gloria says, and starts twirling the short hairs at the nape of her neck around one finger. “I spent months looking for work, applying to every job I saw listed. And then we ran out of money and couldn’t pay the rent any more. So we moved into the car for a little while. And that changed things. To apply for a job, I need to turn in job applications. If they need to be typed, I need a computer. If I get lucky enough that someone wants to call me back, I need a phone number. So where do I get a printer? Whose phone number do I use? If I actually get an interview, I’ll need nice interview clothes. I need, I need, I need.”

Gloria rolls her head from side to side like she has a crick in her neck. Her earrings jingle.

“What about a homeless shelter?” asks Lydia.

“A homeless shelter would help me with the clothes,” Gloria says. “They’d help me with phone calls. And I did stay in a shelter with the kids for a few nights when all this started. We were in bunk beds. And all around us women were snoring and tossing and turning and coughing and maybe vomiting, and I was desperately trying to sleep so I could make a good impression at an interview. I’d get a couple of hours of bad sleep, then I’d have to start moving about six
A.M.
And my kids were with me, exhausted, wandering around. We’d go back to the shelter at night for another couple of hours of sleep. Then we’d start another day where I’d hope someone would call, and they wouldn’t.

“At least here we have our own space. We have our own rules. Jakobe gets to play and feel like he’s got the biggest backyard in the world. I keep an eye on the listings in the paper, and I still apply for anything that looks possible.”

“You can get unemployment, right?” Lydia asks.

“I don’t have an address, sweetie. That’s another ‘I need’—I need an address. So, no, I don’t get checks. We scrape by here. I have a little bit left in my savings. I sell my jewelry when I need to. I go to a food pantry sometimes.”

“Could you go back to school?” asks Lydia. “Get trained for another job?”

“That would cost money,” says Gloria. There’s another jingle of her earrings. She looks at me.

“You’re quiet, Nell. What are you thinking?”

I’m different than Lydia. When she doesn’t understand something, she asks questions until she does. When I don’t understand something, I turn it over in my head until it makes sense. I don’t speak until my thoughts are still, because I don’t want to say the wrong thing. I watch Gloria’s face—crinkle lines around the eyes, wide mouth, sun-browned face—and one question comes to me.

“Are you happy?” I ask.

She looks up at the willow branches swaying in the wind. “No,” she says. “But we’re together. That’s enough for now.”

CHAPTER 14

CHANGING THE RULES

The main difference between the idea of living on a golf course and the actual fact of living on a golf course is that the idea only takes a few seconds. The actual fact lasts sixty full minutes of every single hour. You can only walk around and swim and fish and eat for so many of those minutes. And in this heat, trying to think of new things to do is exhausting. Usually at least once a day I wind up just lying on my back under a tree, staring up at the leaves. It’s not exciting, but it’s free and it’s easy.

We’ve been here almost a month. Lately, when I’m staring at how the branches cut the sky into interesting blue shapes, I’m thinking about Lodema. I’m thinking about how Jakobe keeps talking about the sprinklers, about how fun they are at night. I want to see those sprinklers in the moonlight. Maureen said building a fire is much better at night, and of course it is. Fires are always better at night. Gloria says she has some really scary ghost stories, but, of course, she only tells them at night.

I remember the first night we snuck out here and how weird and fantastic the putt-putt course looked in pitch-black with the glow of the lights coming out of Marvin and the rocket ship. When you think about it, it’s a total waste that we’re only here during the day, when nights are the most pleasant time. If we could just play all night and then burrow into the cool dark ground like moles or gophers and sleep all day long, that would be perfect. Claustrophobic and dirty, but still perfect.

I think I’ve figured out a way to make that happen. Not the gopher part, but the night part. We could go to sleep here and wake up here. It would be like we really lived here, like this was our actual home.

I find Lydia wading through the edges of Go-for-a-Swim Lake. She’s watching the mud squishing between her toes. She looks up as I make my way through the weeds.

“How come when you cool your feet off, it cools off the rest of you, too?” she asks.

“Dogs have sweat glands in their feet,” I say. “They cool off through their paws and their mouths.”

“But we’re not dogs.”

“We’re mammals. Dogs are mammals. Maybe that means something.”

She kicks a spray of water at me. “Science is not really your thing.”

“I want to ask you something,” I say. “What would you think about your camp sending home a letter telling your mom that you’re invited to spend the night at camp for a whole week? Starting next week.”

“You mean I’d spend a week here,” she says, popping a piece of hair into her mouth. “Since camp is completely imaginary.”

“Well, yeah,” I say. “And, I told you, the camp is not imaginary. The camp exists. You’re just not going there.”

“And you’ll tell your mom what?”

“That my summer school needs to have an intensive all-night study camp that week.”

Lydia does not look that excited. She steps out of the water and makes her way to the Hut. I guess I haven’t mentioned the Hut. That’s been Lydia’s project for the past few days—she said she wanted a house with a nice view. So she stuck a bunch of dead branches in the ground and made three walls. She used some kudzu vines and tied two branches in an
X
, criss-crossing them across the top of the walls. Then she piled fresh, leafy branches on top of the
X
to make a real ceiling. The leaves hang down over the walls and blow in the wind. You can see through the walls—it’s like a house made of giant toothpicks—but it looks cool. It’s what you might build if you were stranded on a desert island. I keep thinking she should be sitting in there eating coconuts.

Now she climbs into the Hut, brushing the hanging leaves away from her face. She pats the ground next to her, and I come inside, too. It smells like dirt and rain and grass.

“Why?” she asks, once I’m sitting down. “I mean, I’m not saying no. But why do you want to stay out here at night?”

“Because night will be so much fun.”

“It’s because you want to spend more time with them, don’t you?” she asks, pinching a leaf off her ceiling.

The truth is that we have been spending more time with Gloria and Maureen and Jakobe this past week. Sometimes we eat lunch or go for a hike. A few times we’ve spent the afternoon in the aquarium. It’s a lot cooler belowground, and you can do a lot more with a group—more games, more conversations, more stories. I know Lydia likes Jakobe, and I’m pretty sure she likes Gloria. (I’m not sure about Maureen.) I also know Lydia has been unusually quiet while we’re with them, and, honestly, I haven’t wanted to ask her what’s the matter. Because I think I know.

“Don’t you like them?” I say finally.

“I like them fine,” she says. “But I don’t exactly want to move in with them.”

“We’re the roommates,” I assure her. “Just the two of us.”

There’s a house on Clairmont Avenue, an old Victorian with gingerbread-icing trim along the eaves and a porch bigger than our whole apartment. It doesn’t look so great now, but it could be beautiful. Lydia and I noticed it years ago and started to plan. We think we might live there under the gingerbread roof and stone chimney when we grow up—maybe during college if we go to college here in Birmingham, or maybe later when we have jobs.

Then again, we might move to New York and work as waitresses while we try to write a movie. We might get jobs on a cruise ship and sail from island to island, parasailing and scuba diving in our free time. We might move farther away: Lydia’s Spanish is good enough to move to Madrid or Buenos Aires right now, but I’d need to do some serious practicing. We also heard that you can make a lot of money in Alaska. Alaska seems as different from Alabama as possible. If we went there, we would wear fur coats and be unrecognizable, just big bundles of cloth and fur with our breath smoking in the freezing air.

Lydia and I enjoy each other plenty now. But we plan to enjoy each other much more in the future. And there are countless futures out there, all of them a world away from our mothers.

“It’s not that I’m jealous,” Lydia says. “I’m not.”

“What are you?” I ask, curious.

She thinks about it, ripping another leaf into tiny strips of green. “Surprised,” she says. “You seem different out here.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Farther away. Sometimes it feels like I just met you, and I don’t know you at all.”

First of all, I think that’s ridiculous. Lydia knows everything about me. But second of all, if that were true, it would be sort of wonderful, wouldn’t it? If you could turn into some new, exciting person? There’s a part of me that wants to jump up and clap when Lydia says she doesn’t know me. That’s how I feel out here sometimes. Like I’m turning into someone new. Like I have amazing things inside me.

But if I’m someone new, am I still Lydia’s best friend? I have to be. I have to be.

“I’m not different,” I say to her. “You can still read my mind.”

She rolls her eyes at me.

“I’m thinking of an object,” I say. “Just one object.”

She tries to fight off a smile for a while before she says, “Pepperoni pizza.”

“Amazing!” I shake my head like I can’t believe it.

She props her elbows on her knees and stops destroying leaves. She shrugs.

“You know, I really would like to see those sprinklers at night,” she says.

That night, Mom meets me at the door with a spoon in her hand. On the spoon is chocolate icing, and when I take a long lick of it like it’s a lollipop, the chocolate is so cool and sweet it makes my teeth hurt. It’s perfect.

“Your favorite,” she says. “White cake with chocolate icing.”

“Thanks,” I say, licking my lips. My favorite is chocolate cake with yellow icing, but I like this kind, too.

“And Grandpops and Memama are coming over for dinner.”

“Great! I’ll set the table.” I clean every molecule of chocolate off the spoon. Mom doesn’t bake much, and when she does, she uses mixes, which taste plenty good to me. (Memama would never use a store-bought mix for cakes, but she’d also never mention that Mom uses them. She’ll act like she can’t taste the difference, even though she can.)

“So what are you doing with your hair?” she asks.

“What?” I’m not sure what she means. The combination of the sugar and seeing Memama and Grandpops has me giddy. I’ve missed them.

“What’s going on with those braids?”

I touch my hair. I’ve got two French braids, one on each side, and they meet together at the back. Gloria taught me how to do it. She said it showed off my cheekbones. “I like the braids,” I say.

“Okay,” she says, “It’s your hair.”

“So you don’t like them?”

“Look,” she says, coming back from the kitchen, drying her hands on her skirt. She kneels in front of me and puts a hand on each side of my face. She turns me one way and then the other like she’s trying to catch the right light. “You choose your hairstyle based on what kind of face you have. That’s one of the basic rules of beauty.”

I have not heard any of the basic rules of beauty. But I’m sure Mom knows them all.

“Okay,” I say. “So my face doesn’t work with braids?”

“You get your face from your father’s mother,” she says. “You want to soften it some. Bangs. Layers.”

Let me just say that I never knew my grandmother on my father’s side. But from old photo albums, I would guess that she weighed four hundred pounds. She also looked a little—and this could be some technical glitch with old pictures—like a rhinoceros. (Memama’s old pictures, on the other hand, show her lovely and delicate and smiling. Like a movie star. She was even prettier than my mother.)

Something tells me that my mother also thinks my father’s mother looked like a rhinoceros. But I can’t prove that.

My thoughts must show on my face, because my mother cocks her head and smiles at me. “She had a very interesting face. Distinctive.”

A distinctive rhinoceros she means. I pull the hair band from my hair and start untwisting my braids. My hair feels sweaty and tangled in my fingers. I’m not sure I can get it into a ponytail without needing to use a mirror, and I don’t feel like looking in a mirror. I can tell how I look just by watching my mother’s face, and all the joy of the day seems to drain out of me. Everything drains out of me—I’m not angry or disappointed or anything. I am empty. An empty rhinoceros.

But even though I rake my fingers fast and hard through my hair, the braids don’t totally disappear. Soft waves fall around my face, like my hair doesn’t want to forget the braids. I feel the S-shaped sections, and because my hair remembers, so do I. I think of Gloria’s face. I think of how she makes a totally different kind of mirror than my mother does. I think of the actual shard of mirror she handed me, of how magical and powerful I looked.

That memory makes me turn around to the entrance hall, my hands still in my hair, where there’s a small round mirror trimmed in silver. I look away from my mother and into the mirror and see myself with my own eyes instead of hers. And, honestly, it’s kind of a crummy mirror. It’s dusty and a little blurry, and I don’t see the magical girl I saw reflected back at me on the golf course. But I don’t see a rhinoceros, either. I see an out-of-focus face that might be beautiful or it might not be. I can see whatever I want to see.