The Last Good Night (12 page)

“I'm going to New York,” I said instead, the glimpse I had seen from the harbor already working through my dreams.

I stared at the rain falling outside her bedroom window and dropped the butt of my Winston into an empty can of Tab, listening to the fizzle as it fell into the liquid. “Do you ever hear your parents doing it?” I asked.

“No,” Rosie answered, embarrassed. “I don't think they do.”

“Of course they do it. Everyone does it.”

“Why do you always ask me that?” she demanded.

“I don't always ask you that.”

“Yes you do.”

“Well, what do you want to talk about?” I asked.

“I don't know.”

I lit another cigarette and looked down at the pages of
Sixteen
magazine, filled with boys and their guitars, their satin pants tight about their bulging crotches, their long hair loose about their necks.

I had seen Astrid once in the bedroom of our tiny apartment in Dortmarr. One night, I crept to the door and opened it a crack. I saw my mother and the man just as they were prying away from each other. Saw him give Astrid's loose breasts a final squeeze. Saw, as he turned his back to pull on his pants, Astrid reach for the money he had left on the night table, count it twice, and put it beneath the mattress.

I looked up at Rosie standing before the full-length mirror
on her closet door, sucking in her chubby cheeks. Behind her, I saw my own reflection, outlined with new swells and indentations, the early etchings of breasts, hips.

“Come on, the rain's stopped,” I said. “Let's go out.”

The storm had brought no relief. The sun was once more severe and unrepentant as we wandered downtown to buy ice-cream cones. The streets were filling with other kids anxious for release after the rain, and we walked along watching the first tenuous couplings of our classmates, boys and girls pressing into each other as they leaned against parked cars, holding hands, touching lips, pushing each other away, pulling each other back, their arms and legs bare, their shirts rolled up on their tanned stomachs, skin brushing against skin.

I walked faster than Rosie, my eyes darting to the couples and then quickly away, not wanting to be caught, my curiosity and longing sputtering messily about. But Rosie, plodding a foot behind, was not disturbed by them. It was as if they had nothing to do with her.

We rounded the corner and sat down on a wooden bench in the shade across from the movie theater where
Jaws
was playing, our thighs sticking to the splintery wooden bench. I looked over at Rosie, her moon face placid, a drop of chocolate chip ice cream on her lower lip as she watched people line up for the afternoon showing. We had already seen the movie twice, sitting in the back, listening to the other girls' screams that signaled to their dates to hold them tighter.

“What about Mark Birch?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“He'd be a good boyfriend for you.”

Rosie rolled her eyes. “He'd never go out with me.”

“Why not?”

Rosie looked at me seriously. “Boys won't go out with me now,” she said. “My mother says I'm a late bloomer. All the women in my family are. It's okay.”

“You can bloom whenever you goddamned want,” I said, my irritation with Rosie's resignation mixing with the afternoon's heat, the anxious couplings, my own restlessness.

Rosie smiled patiently. “Actually, you can't. I've thought about this, and you can't. Bloom is completely beyond your control.”

I regarded her closely and then looked away, thinking of the boys and girls against the parked cars, the way their fingertips met so slowly in the heat.

In a little while we rose and started to walk back on the endless flat road that led out of town.

“They will later,” Rosie said quietly after a long bout of silence.

“What?”

“The boys. They'll go out with me later. That's the type I am. I think they'll appreciate me when I'm older.”

I looked over curiously at her, jealous of her patience and her certainty, jealous that she had complete theories about herself, about the future, when I had only loose fragments, random and troubling, swirling about within.

We said goodbye where the road forked.

As I continued the final half-mile alone, my head grew dizzy from the heat and my peripheral vision began to blacken. I rested on the sidewalk beneath a live oak on the edge of someone's front yard but rose again as quickly as I could. Garner had no patience for those who complained of the heat. “Your blood's too thick,” he told me. “That's the problem. Another few years here, it will thin out.”

 

T
HERE WERE THINGS
I wanted to tell Rosie.

About my real father, whom I had only seen once.

About Astrid and her men.

About Garner. Garner and his gimlet eyes watching me, always watching me.

But I didn't.

How could I? Rosie, with her pharmacist father who always smelled of antiseptic, and her mother with her shirtwaists and her garden club.

All I could do was try to keep her away from the motel.

 

S
OME MOMENTS ARE
like spotlights that will not disappear even when you shut your eyes, while everything else falls away, into the blackness of the past.

Midweek the motel was often empty, desolate. Astrid and Garner slept late, stayed indoors, left the mail unopened.

So I was surprised to open my eyes to see Astrid standing over me, dressed in a loose turquoise shift, her naked white forearms pendulous and dimpled with fat, her bright red lipstick already beginning to melt. I pulled the sheet over my face.

“Wake up,” Astrid insisted. “Dad's going to take us on an outing.”

“Don't call him that. He's not my father.”

“What would you like me to call him?”

“I don't know, just don't call him that.”

I looked up and saw Garner pass by wearing faded plaid shorts and soiled sneakers, his belly pushing against a gray cotton sweatshirt.

“Why do I have to go? You go,” I said to Astrid.

“He wants you to come, too. It'll be fun.”

“I have school.”

“This is a special occasion. School can wait. Be nice, sweetie. Promise me? Just meet him halfway.”

I got reluctantly out of bed.

We drove along deserted roads until we came to a wooden
shack on the Indian River with a sign that promised Budweiser, fishing tackle, worms, and pontoon boat rentals. Inside, it was dark and musty, the walls lined with rods and buckets, maps of the tides, ancient postcards, and a refrigerator full of sodas, beers, and worms. Astrid and I stood a few feet away while Garner argued with the owner about money. “Four dollars an hour means four dollars an hour,” the man said. He was missing one front tooth, and when he spoke, certain syllables seemed to get lost in the hole. He showed no inclination to bargain, but Garner, who always suspected that someone was trying to pull something over on him, could not resist trying. In the end, he paid the asking price and then led us onto the boat. Astrid smiled at me as we began to move slowly through the water, the breeze running into our faces, the sun pushing at our backs. “This is an adventure, isn't it?” she said. “Admit it.”

Garner commandeered the wide flat vessel downriver, muttering to Astrid about the conservationists who had just managed to get Florida to outlaw the cutting down of mangroves, while I lay on the deck, feeling the sun bake my skin, and then seep in and bake me inside too, layer by layer until it reached my very marrow. I loved the way the heat became a universe unto itself, scalding all in its wake, so that everything—my mother's and Garner's voices rising and ebbing a few feet away, the occasional airplane overhead, the buzzing of mosquitoes—everything but the sound of my own blood thrumming in my temples seemed a million miles away. I loosened the neck ties of my lilac bikini top and lowered them so that only tiny patches of my breasts were covered, and then I rolled down the sides of the bathing suit bottom beneath the sharp rise of my hip bones.

At noon, we ate bologna sandwiches and then I watched Astrid and Garner climb down the rope ladder on the side of the boat and swim in the river. Their heads bobbing in the green water as they wrapped their arms around each other's necks, laughing and splashing. Kissing. When they climbed back onto
the boat, I could see my mother's large nipples and dark bunchy pubic hair outlined beneath her white suit.

I shut my eyes as Astrid went to the other end of the boat to see if there were any potato chips left in the picnic basket. In a moment, I felt a shadow pass across the sun. When I opened my eyes a slit, I saw Garner standing over me, smoothing his wet hair off his forehead, staring down at me, his mouth parted.

He took a step closer.

His big toe skimmed my skin just under my rib cage and began to work its way slowly down.

I shut my eyes again, immobilized, unable even to breathe.

His toe moved over my hip to my bikini bottom and wiggled underneath.

But as soon as Astrid came sashaying back, smiling and licking her greasy fingers, Garner stepped away.

 

T
HAT NIGHT
, I ran away from home. I crammed my schoolbooks and a change of clothes into my green canvas knapsack and then sat on the edge of my bed waiting for the light in Astrid and Garner's bedroom to go out. As soon as it did, I slung my bag over my shoulder and left.

The unlit streets hummed with the night sounds of the tropics, a constant background of wings and antennae. I passed a rare lit window among the sparse houses, the sparser trees, but other than that the world seemed suddenly deserted, vast and dark and empty. There was only my heart beating against my chest, and my footsteps.

When I came to the end of Loyola where it petered out into an unpaved dirt lane, I walked onto the field before me, the tall grass tickling my shins. Exhausted, I curled up on the ground, using my knapsack as a pillow and an extra shirt as a blanket.

I lay awake, staring up at the sky. My body was alien in its
aloneness, cut off, unmoored. I touched myself tentatively, my forearm, my belly. My breasts. There was no one, nothing within sight. I looked up at the brilliant pinpoints of white stars amid so much blackness. The motel seemed as far away as the constellations themselves, and I saw it rising into the night, leaving only the smoky tail of a comet in its wake, until that too disintegrated.

When I woke, it was dawn. The sky was lighting up in gradual increments, as if the night was being erased before my eyes, revealing a fragile gray and pink sheet behind it, pearly as the inside of a shell. My skin was clammy with dew. I hadn't eaten dinner and my stomach grumbled, but there was no one there to hear it. Astrid was always so brazen about bodily functions, grumbling, farting, snoring, but I was ashamed.

That afternoon, I told Rosie I'd had a fight with “the asshole” and went home with her, setting up camp in a corner of the Jensons' garage behind a lawn mower. In the evening, she brought me food she had sneaked from the dinner table.

We sat in the dark garage amid bags of old clothes, and Rosie watched as I ate. When I was done, we both curled up on the quilt she had brought in, our bodies close enough to feel the rise and fall of each other's breath, our faces invisible in the blackness.

“If I tell you something, do you promise never to tell anyone?” I whispered.

“Yes.”

“You know how I told you my real father was dead?”

“Uh huh.”

“He's not.”

“Where is he?” Rosie asked.

“In Germany.”

“Do you write to him?”

I shook my head. “I only saw him once, on my fifth birthday. He brought me a gingerbread house. It was two stories high, with icing on the roof and three front steps.”

We lay in silence for a long time.

“My mother wouldn't let me touch the cake,” I said quietly. “It sat on the kitchen table for days, but she kept saying it was too beautiful to eat.” I paused. “Sometimes, when she wasn't looking, I broke off tiny pieces of the steps and ate them.”

“How come you never saw him again?”

“He was married to someone else,” I answered matter-of-factly. “He broke my mother's heart.”

Rosie nodded.

I rolled onto my back, pulling the quilt up to my neck. I parted my lips and began to speak again, but the words clumped like glue in the center of my throat.

In a little while, I heard the soft steady murmur of Rosie's sleep.

 

I
SLEPT IN
Rosie's garage for three nights before Astrid showed up to claim me. In fact, Rosie's mother had found out about me the first evening and called Astrid to tell her not to worry. When it appeared that Astrid was too busy to come for the first couple of nights, Mrs. Jenson made sure that the leftovers Rosie brought me in the garage were particularly plentiful and savory. Finally, on the fourth night, Astrid drove up just as the Jensons were locking the front door.

She stood inside the dark garage and reached over to touch the side of my head, her hand lingering in my unwashed hair, and despite myself, I leaned into the warm soil palm as familiar as my own soul. “Let's go, sweetie,” Astrid said. I gathered my things while Rosie and Mrs. Jenson watched wordlessly.

I sat close to my mother as we drove, the car filled with her breath and her particular smell, her Astridness, sweet and acrid at once. I wished that we would never reach home, but could drive on like this in the dark together forever. “Why do you stay with Garner?” I asked.

Astrid breathed deeply. “It's not so easy to explain. You'll understand when you're older.”

“Adults always say that when they don't understand something themselves.”

“I made a choice,” Astrid said.

“So? You can change your mind.”

“He made us a family,” she said. “That was the choice I made. That was what I wanted. To be a family.”