The Last Time They Met (34 page)

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Authors: Anita Shreve

Tags: #Contemporary, #Fiction, #Romance, #Adult

BOOK: The Last Time They Met
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The teacher gestures with his hand to take a seat. In Eileen’s stacked heels, she walks to a desk behind a boy.
“We’re doing Keats,” he tells her under his breath.
Linda studies the boy’s profile. Arrogant and aristocratic are words that come to mind. He has brown hair, slightly dirty and worn as long as is acceptable, and when he turns, the jawline of a man. There is a boil on his neck she tries to ignore. He must be very tall, she thinks, because even slouching he is taller than she is in her seat.
He hovers in a half-turn, as if bringing her within his sphere, and from time to time he gives her,
sotto voce,
bits of information: “Keats died when he was twenty-five”; “Mr. K. is a good guy”; “You have to pick a poet for your paper.”
But Linda knows all about Keats and the Romantic poets. Apart from having learned how to use a washing machine, she had a solid education with the nuns.
______
Before he has curled out of his desk, the boy introduces himself as Thomas. His books are folded under his arm, and a scent of something like warm toast wafts from his body. He has navy eyes, and like most boys his age, a moderate case of acne. Her shoes pinch as she walks out of the classroom. She has not worn stockings and is supremely conscious of her bare legs.
______
After school, Linda takes the bus to Allerton Hill and sits on a rock overlooking the ocean. The activity is familiar to her and reminds her of the home for wayward girls, about which she is now vaguely nostalgic. She chooses a place to sit that is not precisely in one yard or in another, but in a sort of no-man’s-land in between. From there, she can see most of the town as well: the hill itself, which winds around in concentric circles, each house grander than the next, though most are boarded up for the winter and the grounds look unkempt; the village, set apart from the rest of town, a community of quaint homes and historic landmarks; the beach, where cottages built in the 1930s and 1940s are occasionally washed into the sea during the hurricanes; Bayside, a neighborhood of bungalows and cottages neatly divided into alphabet streets that run from A to Y (what happened to the Z?); her own neighborhood of two- and three-family houses with rickety fire escapes and breathtaking views; and along Nantasket Beach, the amusement park and its honky-tonk arcade. The centerpiece of the amusement park is its roller coaster.
______
When Linda arrives home, she walks into the den to talk to her aunt about clothes. Her aunt, however, is not there. Linda sees, instead, the missal on the arm of the sofa and picks it up. It is a small, leather-bound book with gilt-edged paper, demarcated by ribbons in yellow and black and red and green. On the cover are the words
SAINT ANN DAILY MISSAL
, and in the lower right-hand corner, a name:
Nora F. Sullivan.
The book is laced with Mass cards and with lurid depictions of the Five Joyful Mysteries, the Five Sorrowful Mysteries and the Five Glorious Mysteries. Looking at these illustrated medallions, the name of
Thomas
catches her eye. She studies the picture in the circle: it is of a clearly penitent and disastrously ill-looking Thomas being crowned with thorns. Under the picture is written:
Crowned with Thorns: For Moral Courage.
She flips to the page marked by the red ribbon, and reads the prayer written there: “O God, Who by the humility of Your Son have raised up a fallen world, grant everlasting joy to Your faithful people; that those whom You have rescued from the perils of endless death, You may cause to enjoy endless happiness. Through the same, etc. Amen.”
With a snap that echoes through the apartment, Linda closes the missal so as not to let any of the words escape into the air.
______
The aunt works in the coat department of a store in Quincy. The cousins more or less fend for themselves. The dinner hour is an unknown event in the triple-decker, and consequently there is no dining table, only a table covered with oilcloth in the kitchen. One of the cousins is assigned each week to prepare the meals, but since Jack and Tommy are too young, and Michael is usually too busy, the work almost always falls to Linda and Patty and Erin. By common agreement, each of the cousins eats when he or she is hungry in front of the television in the den.
The noise in the apartment is constant. Jack and Tommy are always underfoot. Michael plays his radio loudly. Patty and Erin fight like cats.
The bedroom that Linda shares with Patty and Erin has green wallpaper and two twin beds. A mattress has been set between them to make a bed for Linda. In the morning, it is almost impossible to tuck in the sheets and covers, which is, under normal circumstances, something Linda can do well (the nuns insisted). When Patty and Erin get out of bed, they sometimes inadvertently step on her. To read, Linda has to lean against the nightstand.
A feature of the room that appeals to Linda is a small window set beneath a gable. If she sits on Patty’s bed, she can see the harbor, and beyond the beach, the open water of the ocean. She can also see the roller coaster.
It is in that room that Linda reads Keats and Wordsworth, studies advanced algebra, memorizes French verbs, lists the causes of the Great Depression, and, on the sly, looks at Eileen’s high school yearbook in which there is a picture of a boy who was a junior the year before: “Thomas Janes,
Nantasket
2, 3; Varsity Hockey 2, 3; Varsity Tennis 2, 3.”
______
On Saturday afternoon, Linda walks to Confession. She wears a navy blue skirt and a red sweater, a peacoat and a mantilla on her head. She tells the priest that she has had impure thoughts. She never mentions the aunt’s boyfriend.
______
That night Linda announces that she is going to visit a new friend she has made at school (a lie she will have to confess the following Saturday). There is a bit of a flurry amongst the cousins, because Linda has not been told any of the rules and doesn’t have a curfew as they do. Though no one ever follows it anyway. She leaves the house in the same blue skirt and red sweater and peacoat she wore to Confession. She has on as well a silk head scarf that Patty has lent her because the wind from the water is blowing the flags straight out.
Linda walks down the hill, passing other apartment houses like her own with asbestos shingles and tiers of balconies with charcoal grills and bicycles on them. She walks along the boulevard and crosses Nantasket Avenue. She keeps her hands in her pockets and wishes it were cold enough to wear gloves. At night, Patty rubs Oil of Olay into all the cracks and creases.
The lights of the amusement park are dazzling. Tens of thousands of bulbs illuminate the park by the beach on this last weekend of the season. Nearly all of the lights are moving
—
on the Giant Coaster, on the Ferris Wheel, on the Carousel, on the Caterpillar, on the Lindy Loop and on the Flying Scooters. The entrance is surprisingly ugly, though: only a chain-link fence and a sign. Flags whip at the tops of tall poles, and Linda’s scarf snaps at the back of her neck. She pays for her ticket and steps inside.
She knows that Michael would have taken her to the park if she had asked. He, of all of the cousins, even Patty, who has been nothing but sisterly, seems the most distraught by what has happened to Linda and is, consequently, the most eager to please. To make Linda feel welcome, he has given her his John Lennon poster, his denim pillow, and his royal-blue Schwinn. In the mornings, he always asks her if she has a ride to school. Perhaps it is too soon to tell, but Tommy and Erin do not seem as generous, possibly having inherited their mother’s temperament or simply resenting another mouth to feed.
Jack, the youngest, is smitten with his new cousin. Anyone who is willing to pay attention to a four-year-old in that family of seven children is, in his opinion, a goddess.
______
Linda plays Shooting Waters, Hoopla, and Ball Toss and buys penuche at the candy concession at the arcade. When she has finished the fudge, she walks directly to the Giant Coaster and stands in a short line with people who have their collars up. She has never been on a roller coaster before, but logic tells her she will probably survive the experience.
The sense of terror on the steep incline is deeply thrilling. She knows the drop is coming, and there is nothing she can do about it.
She rides the Giant Coaster seven times, using the money she has saved at the home for wayward girls (thirty-five cents an hour for ironing; twenty-five an hour for delivering). The ride lasts only a minute, but she thinks the Giant Coaster has probably provided her with the best seven minutes of her life.
While she is on the Ferris Wheel, from which she can see Boston, the wind blows the cars sideways, and people scream. In fact, people are squealing and screaming all through the park. Which is, after all, she thinks, the point.
To one side of the park is a pier of thick planking that runs out over the water. Above it, a lone streetlamp shines. She is slightly nauseous from the cotton candy and hot chocolate back-to-back, not to mention the penuche and the Lindy Loop, and so she is drawn to the pier for fresh air. She treads over the damp planks and listens to the shouts and squeals of the people on the rides, muffled now by the white noise of the mild surf. She is nearly to the end of the pier before she notices the group of boys, in sweaters and parkas, smoking. They hold their cigarettes down by their thighs, pinched between thumbs and forefingers, and take deep drags like Jimmy Dean. They shove each other’s shoulders with the heels of their hands for emphasis, and occasionally a high giggle rises like a thin tendril of smoke into the air. She has walked too close to them for anonymity, and now she finds herself in the awkward position of having to continue forward or having to turn and retreat, which she isn’t willing to do, not wishing to give the message that she is afraid of the boys, and not liking the image that she has of a dog retreating with a tail between its legs.
She moves sideways to the northern edge of the pier and glances down. The tide is in, lapping high on the posts. The boys have noticed her and are quieter now, though they still continue to whack each other on the shoulders. She watches as one boy throws his cigarette into the surf and sticks his hands into his pockets. His posture is unmistakable. She decides she will remain where she is for a good minute anyway, and then, having held her ground, will stroll casually away, just as she would have done had they not been there.
But the boy with his hands in his jacket pockets detaches himself from the others and walks to where she stands.
“Hello,” he says.
“Hi,” she answers.
“You’re Linda.”
“Yes.”
He nods, as if needing to ponder this important fact. Beyond him is their audience.
“Did you go on the rides?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“The Coaster?”
“I did.”
“How many times?”
“Seven.”
“Really?” He seems genuinely surprised. She imagines a raised eyebrow, though they are standing side by side and she can’t see his face.
“Do you want a cigarette?”
“Sure.”
He has to bend away from the wind to light it. He takes it from his mouth and hands it to her. She sucks a long drag and suppresses a cough. At the home for wayward girls, she smoked often. The breezes from the ocean blew the smoke away almost immediately. It was the one sin the girls could easily commit.
“Did you pick a poet yet?”
“Wordsworth,” she says.
“Do you like him?”
“Some of his stuff.”
“Did you like ‘The Prelude’?”
“I like ‘Tintern Abbey.’”
The boy sniffs. His nose is running in the cold. Beneath his navy parka, he has on a dark sweater with a crew neck. The sweater looks black in the streetlamp, but it might well be green. A sliver of white collar shows itself.
“Who are you doing?” she asks.
“Keats.”
She nods, taking another drag.
“The park is going to close in half an hour,” he says. “Do you want to go on the Coaster one more time?”
It is unclear whether this is an invitation or a reminder.
“No, that’s OK,” she says.
“Do you want to meet them?” Thomas asks, gesturing toward the boys.
She doesn’t know. Or, rather, she supposes that she doesn’t. She shrugs.
But the boys, wanting to meet her, are moving slowly closer, drifting on a tide of curiosity.
“They’re jerks, anyway,” Thomas says, but not without a certain kind of grudging affection.
A raised voice punctuates the air. “It is so, warmer than the air,” one of them is saying.
“Fuck that,” another says.
“No, seriously, the water’s warmer in October than it is in August.”
“Where’d you get that shit?”
“All you have to do is feel it.”
“You go feel it, dickhead.”
The boys start pushing the boy who said the water was warmer. But he, small and wiry, bobs and weaves and deftly outmaneuvers them so that he is standing in the middle of the pier and they are now on the edge.

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