Circle of Three (38 page)

She flashed me a look of surprise. “Sure,” she mumbled, pleased, coloring. “Thanks.” We separated casually.

“We’ll come back for the car tomorrow.”

“Good deal.”

In the car, Ruth showed me her new tattoo. And then we went home.

S
CHOOL’S OUT, FINALLY.
For the very last thing in English, Mrs. Fitzgerald told us to make a list in our journals of the two or three major things most on our minds as we say good-bye to sophomore year and look forward to becoming juniors, and then try to develop strategies for dealing with these issues over the summer vacation. Most kids didn’t bother because she was never going to check and see if we did it, but I came up with a big list, a huge list. The first item was—

No. 1.
My tattoo
.

This experience continues to suck and be as putrid and humiliating as ever. First I put a bandage over it for school and told people I had a burn. Then I told Jamie the truth after making her swear never to tell a living soul, not even Caitlin. Surprise, surprise—the whole school knew all about it within one day.

Gram hates my tattoo and said she’d pay to have it lasered off, so she and Mom took me to the dermatologist, Dr. Ewing, who said it would be pretty major to remove the whole thing and how about if he just took off the arms and the top of the circle, and after that healed I could go to a reputable tattoo place and have the arms put in lower and the loop more oval, so like a real ankh tattooed over the old one.

Nobody was in favor of this but me. Luckily the money factor kicked in, so that’s probably what we’re going to do. I’m pretty stoked, but it won’t happen until August, and meanwhile I’ve got this, like, lollipop on my hand. Not to mention a lot of stupid gay jokes to put up with. Some guy at school called it an “all-day sucker.” Which, when you think about it, is pretty much what I was.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking.
Why
is the female symbol a lesbian thing? Men wear stupid macho symbols, swords and guns and flaming motorcycles and what-have-you, and nobody says
they’re
gay. Just the opposite. I don’t know, I’m torn. Sometimes I think screw it, I’m keeping this, it’s a sign of my female power. I’m strong in myself, I know who I am, and to hell with what anyone else thinks. Okay, but then I think—but why does it have to be so hard? And do I really want a tattoo I’ll always have to be
living down
? And besides, I really
want
an ankh. Because I’m
for
life.

So I don’t know. I still have a few more days to decide.

No. 2.
Raven.

I guess he’s not my boyfriend anymore. Not that he ever was, except once for about five minutes. I’d been noticing he wasn’t as friendly as before, and I found out why: The Other Woman. “Cindy.” She’s this total Goth, a sophomore, honest to God she looks like a corpse, they’ve sent her home twice that I know of for ghoul makeup. I saw her with him in the library two times and once in his car. They’re perfect for each other. I don’t miss him. In fact it’s a relief not to have to hear his atrocity stories anymore.

I can’t believe I used to worry about my name, like it wasn’t dark enough or something, I should change it to Hecuba—and now this.
Cindy
??

No. 3.
Krystal
.

Mom made me quit working at the Palace. God, she’s still so mad. Much madder at Krystal than me, which doesn’t make too much sense. “You’re not the adult, she is,” is all she’ll say. I ran into Krystal in the video store one night—luckily Mom wasn’t with me. It was weird at first, but after a
few minutes of chatting, it was like old times. She broke up with Kenny. Now she’s going out with the UPS man—Walt, I’ve met him plenty of times. “He’s a very gentle meat eater,” she says. When we finished catching up and all, Krystal said, “You stay in touch now, and don’t be a stranger.” I said I wouldn’t be, and then I thanked her for helping me out, letting me sleep on her couch and everything. She said, “Anytime,” and I was about to go on and thank her for the rest, but when I heard in my head how it would come out—“Thank you for lying to my mom and not telling the cops that I took the car and drove by myself illegally to D.C.”—I couldn’t say it. Like, it almost sounded sarcastic or something.

I’m not saying Mom’s right about Krystal—I definitely think her heart was in the right place and she was a true friend when I needed one. Just saying, there are different ways to be a person’s friend, and maybe aiding and abetting them no matter what they do is not the best way every single time. That’s all.

No. 4.
Punishment
.

I got grounded for three weeks, including all the end-of-school parties I was invited to, and I have to pay for the dent I made in the car out of my allowance. I guess this puts to rest for all time Mom’s theory that she’s too lax. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

The worst was when the cops were going to push back by one year my eligibility to get my driver’s license. Which would’ve been the end, I might as well have committed suicide. But somebody intervened (guess who? Jess, who’s like a big effing deal on the city council), so that went away. Thank God.

No. 5.
My new job
.

Grampa hired me to type on disk all the corrections and revisions to the book he and his colleague are writing. So far there aren’t very many, so obviously this was a pity hiring. He gives me the minimum wage, same as Krystal, but it’s nowhere near as much fun. I have to work in his office at his
house for the first few weeks, until I know what I’m doing. It’s more or less part-time.

One thing I’m learning, besides more than I ever wanted to about minor English eighteenth-century poetry, is that Grampa isn’t as quiet as I’ve always thought he was. In fact I can’t get him to shut up. What does he talk about? The weather a lot; he’s got a weather radio, and he likes to watch the weather channel on TV. Yesterday he talked about this incredible deal he got on four radial tires for his Honda. I mean at length. And other stuff, how his lawn is doing, his tomato crop, how lawyers are ruining the country, why the Atlanta Falcons aren’t as good as the Carolina something or others. It’s boring. But it’s sort of nice, too, because it’s easy and relaxing, I can listen or not. I can tell he likes me. We’re almost getting to be friends. He’s nice. I’ve figured out the reason he doesn’t talk to Gram is because she talks all the time. Which is so funny, because she complains to Mom that she can’t get a word out of him and she might as well have married a mute. I feel like sending her an anonymous note—“Shut up for a while, why don’t you, put a cork in it!” But I bet she wouldn’t even see herself. She’d think it was for somebody else.

No. 6.
The Ark.

Old Mr. Pletcher died. Late in the afternoon on the day of the ark launch, he had to be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance because of his heart. He stayed there for four days, then he said he wanted to go home to die. And that’s exactly what he did, two days later. The Clayborne paper did another long story, and more people than you’d think showed up for his funeral, including Mom, and afterward the ark was even more popular. The Richmond paper did this sort of tongue-in-cheek article that made fun of the whole situation, but not in a mean way, and they said the “animal constructions are imaginative and delightful” and “unexpectedly affecting.” Mom was dancing on the ceiling. The only bad part was one night when some kids from out of town (the paper
said, but since they never caught them how do they
know
?) threw a burning stick from the pier onto the ark and started a fire that did damage to the owl, the pelican, the panther, and the grizzly bear. Well, that stirred people up and ended up causing even more visitors to come and look at it. It was a genuine tourist attraction.

But then the forty days and forty nights were over, and they dismantled it and sold it for scrap lumber, proceeds going to the Arkists. Up until then, nobody had thought about what would happen to the animals. (I thought they’d just throw them away, but that was before I realized how
imaginative and delightful
they were.) Mrs. Pletcher, who is the actual owner of them, called up one night and told Mom a big petting zoo in Pennsylvania, which happens to be called Noah’s Ark, had offered to buy the whole menagerie for three thousand dollars, to put in their welcome building. She wanted to know what she should do—sell them to the zoo and give Mom the three thousand minus expenses for materials, which takes it down to about two thousand, or give them to the new Church of the Sons of Noah she’s having built out on Route 634 in her husband’s memory. We could really use two thousand dollars. But Mom told her the church should have them—especially since the petting zoo could never have used all of them and would’ve ended up throwing some away. Plus Mom likes the idea of them decorating the aisles in the Church of the Sons of Noah. Sort of like Stations of the Cross, she says.

No. 7.
Mom’s Job.

She doesn’t have a real one yet, but everybody is hopeful. Her friend Chris, who is also unemployed, had an idea that Mom could do illustrations for these kids’ books Chris wrote. First it was just an experiment, to see if it would work at all, and Mom only did some pen and ink drawings. But they were good and Chris liked them a lot, so next she tried some watercolors. Well, they were a hit, too, so now they’ve teamed up. Who knows what will happen, but at least for
now they’re going to see if they can write and illustrate books for children who are between the ages of four and seven. I read the one they finished and it wasn’t bad.

So that’s one thing. Another is that some professor’s wife in Clayborne wants Mom to paint a mural in her dining room of people sitting at a big table and eating. She wants it to take up two whole walls and be sort of old-fashioned and French, like Renoir or Toulouse-Lautrec or somebody, with lots of French bread and wine bottles and candles on the table and the people dressed like the nineteenth century—EXCEPT—she would like four of the diners to look like herself, her husband, and her two kids! Mom thinks it’s a riot! She’s probably going to do it. The lady will pay big bucks, even more than the petting zoo would have, so she’s going to give it a try.

The third thing is—Mr. Wright asked if she’d teach a course in art next semester at the Other School!! No one could believe the balls on this guy. She said no, of course, especially since he was paying squat, but now she’s actually rethinking her decision. She could do it for “practice,” she says, because maybe Gram’s been right all along and what she should really do is go back to school for a teaching degree and then teach art. Jeez. I’m just glad I’ll be out of here by then and there’s no way she could ever be my teacher. Who knows if this will happen or not. It’s sort of a last resort, as I get it, in case the other gigs don’t work out. “Something to fall back on,” Gram keeps saying. Mom says she doesn’t hate the idea as much as she used to. I guess that’s something. But me—whatever I end up doing, I know it won’t be the thing I hate the least. It’ll be the thing I love the most. Whatever that may be. I said that to Mom the other night, as a matter of fact, but she didn’t pick up on it or defend herself or anything. She just said, “Good for you,” and let it go. So that made me think. Easy for me to say. I don’t have a kid to send to college in two years.

No. 8.
Jess
.

I’m grounded, so naturally I’m in my room last night
doing E-mail when Mom comes in and sits on the bed. She’s got her serious face, so I know we’re going to Talk, and I’m even pretty sure what about, but I say nothing, to make it harder for her to start. This doesn’t work, because she says right out, “What are you going to do about Jess?”

I’m not really mad anymore, I’m more like, oblivious. Or trying to be. Just trying to live my life without any of that in my face, and until now she’s been okay with it. I mean, maybe she sneaks over to his house all the time, maybe they have hot phone sex every night—I don’t know and I don’t care to know. (I still can’t believe he rode up to D.C. with Grampa. I wish I’d been a fly on that windshield!)

So anyway, I try to cut the conversation short by saying I’m not doing anything about Jess, and if she wants to bring him around and be his girlfriend, hey, be my guest, no skin off my nose. I mean it’s not like he needs my permission to come a-courtin’, right? This doesn’t amuse Mom. We go around for a while, and finally she admits that what she really wants me to do is talk to him.

Long story short, Jess calls today and invites me to go for a ride with him and Tracer in his pickup truck, and I get to drive. Yee-ha, big deal. I outgrew that stupid cowgirl fantasy a long time ago. But I don’t point that out or act smart, in fact I am incredibly polite. Butter, as they say, won’t melt in my mouth. It’s much better to peace out in these situations and act like nothing is going on under the surface, no mental alternative dramas. You’ve got a lot more clout when you chill than when you act sullen or argue or show your hand. This I have learned over the years and at tremendous personal expense.

Jess freaked me, though. We were going south on back roads, down toward Orange, which is a pretty little town, and I was being extra careful not to speed so he couldn’t get anything on me. It was hot, but we didn’t turn on the AC, the air smelled so good, even the fertilizer smell when we went by the new fields. Cows everywhere—I used to ask him what the different breeds were and he’d tell me, Hereford,
Guernsey, Brown Swiss, Jersey, etc., but today I didn’t ask because already I could see how easy it would be to slide back into our old friendship as if nothing had happened. I think it’s partly the silences, which are weird with other people unless they’re like your parents or your best friend, but they’re never weird with Jess. Why is that?

So it’s a beautiful day and we’re driving along, not talking much because I am being cool, when all of a sudden he goes, “I’ll get lost if you want me to.” I say something brilliant like, “Huh?” and he says, “It’s up to you.”

I’m thinking, Shit! I didn’t know what to say. Finally I told him I didn’t think my mom would agree with him, I seriously didn’t think she’d say it was up to me. He said she was taking a lot for granted with me, she was making an assumption that eventually I was going to be okay with them being together, but it was because that’s what she wanted to happen. But that he could see clearer. He said, “Ruth, I’ll do whatever you want.”