Wallflower In Bloom (7 page)

I trudged through some ground cover, then put my feet together and jumped up to the next step. “Because I’m lazy?” I whispered.

I sat down hard on the edge of the stone slab. It was still warm from the heat of the day. Steve caught up and sat down beside me.

“Is that ginger I smell?” I said, mostly to change the subject.

He pointed at a plant with fuzzy leaves and pretty salmon-colored flowers. “
Costus guanaiensis
. Spiral ginger.”

“Gee, what don’t you know?”

He laughed. “A lot. But I do know that life’s way too short to spend it doing something you’re not that into.”

I shrugged.

“Summer or winter?” Steve said.

“Summer,” I said. “Spring or fall?”

“Toss-up.”

“I agree,” I said. “That one was kind of a trick question.”

When he grinned, the crinkles around his shiny brown eyes got deeper. Our eyes met and held. I started to look away, but then I didn’t.

He tilted his head. “Ask first or just kiss?”

He smelled like soap and tasted like dinner, but in a good way. He kept his hands on my shoulders as we kissed, as if I might start to keel over again at any moment and he wasn’t taking any chances.

“Hey, hey, hey, what’s all this?” my brother’s voice said out of nowhere.

Change is hard, so people hardly ever change
.

W
e were lined up on the long curved cement walkway, facing each other like opposing teams about to play Red Rover. Cindy/Kimmy and Stacy/Tracy stood on either side of Tag, giggling. Tag and I were glaring at each other. I wasn’t sure what Steve was doing, because I was afraid to look. In my mind’s eye, I could picture him backing away slowly until he could safely turn and run.

“Get a life,” I said.

“You get a life,” Tag said. “Keep your hands off my friends.”

“What?” I said. “Are you freakin’ kidding me? How old are you?”

“Hey, buddy,” Steve said. “Come on.”

“
You
stay out of it,” Tag said.

“What. Is. Your.
Problem?
” I said.

“You know the rules,” Tag said.

“Unbelievable,” I said. “Okay, I’ll tell you what your problem is, besides a bad case of arrested development. You actually believe your own press clippings.” I hiked up my pashmina. “You’re not
my
guru, Tag, so get over yourself.”

The Tambourine Twins stopped giggling.

Blood was pounding in my ears, and oddly I could really smell the
ginger now. “Just because you run the rest of the family doesn’t mean you can tell me who the hell I can and cannot freakin’ kiss.” I could feel resentment bubbling up and up inside of me like heartburn. I fought to find the right words. “You’re not the boss of me,” I yelled.

Tag smiled. “Uh, technically I am.”

I wanted to wipe that stupid smile right off his face. I wanted to punch his lights out.

“Not anymore,” I said. “I quit. I quit. I quit. And just in case you missed it, I. Freakin’. Quit.”

We glared at each other.

“I hate you,” I said.

“I hate you more,” he said.

I turned to the Tambourine Twins. “He doesn’t actually remember either of you. And just so you know, cowboy boots look really stupid with sundresses.” I took a wobbly breath. “Even when you’re blond and skinny.”

Tag turned to Steve. “And here I thought you wanted to talk business with me. So, what, were you thinking it might pay better if you hit on my sister first?”

“Stop,” I said, but it came out almost like a sob. I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t seem to remember how. I put a hand on my forehead to shield my face as I looked around for an escape route. I could continue up the hill, but I didn’t know where I’d end up. To go back the way we’d come, I’d have to push past my brother and his groupies.

Steve reached for my arm.

I shook him off and turned to take the high road.

“Wait,” he said. “This is ridiculous.”

Maybe I’d take the low road after all. I turned around and pushed past him. “And just so
you
know, I have better underwear. Much better underwear. Which you will never see.”

Running in strappy sandals with hot tears streaming down your face and a pashmina flowing out behind you like a sad twist on a
superhero cape isn’t easy, but I did the best I could. I saw a group of women in white bathrobes heading in my direction, so I jumped off the path before they could ask me what was wrong.

Tag was an idiot, but I was an idiot, too. What was I
thinking
? Of course Steve Moretti only wanted to use me to get to Tag. Maybe he’d developed some new kind of plant and he wanted Tag to endorse it. They’d plaster Tag’s face all over the label, just like that stupid Jesus Toaster. Maybe it was even named after him. Ha. It was probably an eggplant. An eggplant named Tag. It would be shiny and perfect.

By dodging the bathrobe-clad women, I’d stumbled on a shortcut back to the reception area. And in the first stroke of luck I’d had since birth, a black town car was just dropping off a guest. I asked the driver if he had time to take me back to the hotel.

He held the door to the backseat open, and I climbed in.

I handed him my brother’s credit card.

The good news was that I had only nine more first kisses left.

What goes unsaid in some families could fill the deep blue sea.

Unfortunately that has never been the case in ours.

When we were growing up, my friends’ mothers had watched enough episodes of
Bewitched
to know that at the end of the day you put on some lipstick and change into something sexy, but not too. You kiss your husband at the door and take his briefcase with one hand while mixing an aluminum shaker of martinis with the other.

My friends would magically disappear during this interlude, perhaps locked in the basement playroom with their siblings. If they were lucky, the bar was located in the playroom and every once in a while they’d have their own happy hour. They’d take turns mixing a splash of gin with a splash of rum with a splash of crème de cacao, keeping the quantities tiny enough that their parents wouldn’t miss them at the next party, and backfilling with water when necessary. Eventually
the playroom door would open and the whole family would sit down boozily at the dining room table to some crisp potatoes and an unidentifiable roast cooked to shoe-leather consistency.

I loved eating over at my friends’ houses.

My parents were politically opposed to martinis. Instead, they tucked a few marijuana plants in between the beefsteak tomatoes in our garden. On weekends after the harvest, when they thought we were all sleeping, they brought out their bong. It was an enormous red Lucite thing, at least three feet high. They stored it in the attic, next to the Christmas decorations, and told us it was a telescope. When the bong came out, the Grateful Dead sang nonstop from speakers the size of small continents and the sweet smell of pot wafted its way under the closed family room doors and up to us. We used to tiptoe out of our bedrooms and halfway down the stairs and just sit there, breathing it in.

The bong was the only thing we never talked about. Maybe my parents just couldn’t connect the dots between their own need to take another walk on the wild side and their desire for us to stay out of trouble.

But everything else we discussed at family meetings. By the time my father walked through the front door after a hard day’s work in the Sears appliance center, my mother had her fifth graders’ papers corrected for the next day and a tuna-noodle casserole baking in the oven, whole wheat breadcrumbs sprinkled on top instead of the Ritz crackers dotted with butter my friends would get. My father would take off his suit and tie and slip into a flannel shirt and his old dungarees with the peace sign embroidered on one back pocket.

My sister Colleen would set the table while my sister Joanie poured milk into a pitcher, since we weren’t allowed to put containers on the table. I’d set out the bread and the margarine dish, the salt and pepper shakers. Tag would waltz in when dinner was ready.

“Why doesn’t Tag ever have to do anything?” one of us girls would say.

“I washed the car last weekend,” Tag would say.

His words would be muffled, since nine times out of ten he’d be speaking through the cut-off leg of a discarded pair of panty hose. Long, straight hair was the rage back then, and we’d all been born with thick wavy locks. So the girls took turns ironing one another’s hair, or dousing it in Dippity-do and rolling it around empty orange juice cans. Tag stuck his head under the kitchen faucet to wet down his hair twice a day and pulled a stocking over his head to flatten it into submission until he had to go out in public again. He looked like a wannabe bank robber.

My mother drew the line at cutting a hole in the part of the stocking covering Tag’s mouth so he could eat, which meant he had to remove the contraption at dinnertime. Which in our family was a synonym for meeting time.

“Change is hard, so people hardly ever change,” my father might say by way of grace.

“Oh, Timmy,” my mother would say as she spooned a big gob of casserole onto a dinner plate and passed it to him. “How about something a bit more optimistic?”

“You spend nine hours hawking refrigerators at Sears, Eileen, and see how optimistic you are,” my father would say. My father dreamed of owning his own surf shop one day. When I struck it rich, the first thing I was going to do was buy him one, right across the street from the beach. The storefront would be fluorescent green with hot pink trim and daisies in the window boxes, and it might also rent bicycles built for two.

My mother passed a plate to Tag.

Colleen sighed dreamily. “All you need is love, and love is all you need.”

Tag pounded the end of his fork on the scarred wooden table. He looked like a judge about to proclaim, “Order in the court.”

“Keep your mitts off Bruce O’Dell,” he said instead.

“Mind your own beeswax.” Colleen glared at him and blushed at the same time.

“Which one is Bruce O’Dell?” I asked.

Everybody ignored me. It was pretty much the story of my life. Tag was the oldest, and Colleen was a year younger, the oldest girl. They crashed through boundaries and pushed the limits. I was a year younger than Colleen, never the oldest or youngest anything, just the middle child, which by definition meant not special. By the time it was my turn, the battles had all been won or lost, and I had my marching orders. Then Joanie Baloney, a year younger still, came along and somehow it was all adorable. She danced her way through the same borders that fenced me in, doing exactly what she wanted.

Tag leaned across the table. “You might think he’s a nice guy, Coll, but he’s my friend. I know what he’s really like. Trust me, he’s a bad motorcycle.”

“Define your terms,” my mother said.

“A bad scene,” Tag said. “The worst.”

Colleen leaned across the table, too. “Bag it, Tag. You say exactly the same thing about every guy who asks me out.”

“Well, am I right, or am I right?” Tag held his palms up to the heavens in what would become one of his quintessential It gestures.

“What’s the big deal?” Colleen said. “I mean, they’re good enough to hang around with you, and you think you’re God’s gift to the world.”

“Coll, face it. There’s a big difference between being good enough to hang out with and good enough to date my sister.”

“He has a point,” my father said. “I used to be one of those boys. They only want one thing.”

“Guys talk,” Tag said.

“Chicks talk, too,” Colleen said.

“Don’t degrade yourself,” my mother said. “I did not give birth to poultry.”

“Sure, girls talk,” Tag said. “They talk about did he take you to a nice restaurant and did he remember to pull out your chair. Guys only have one question.”

“Did you get laid,” my father said.

“Language,” my mother said. “And just to be clear, as long as you are living under this roof, the aforesaid will not be an option for any of you.”