Criss Cross (4 page)

Debbie’s feet were still propped up on the dashboard and, in their fronts-only sunburned state, her bare legs reminded Hector of a freshly opened, unscooped box of Neapolitan ice cream, minus the chocolate stripe.

“Nice tan,” he observed.

Then he said, “What do you get when you cross a butterfly with a dog?”

“We give up,” said Phil. “What?”

“I don’t know,” said Hector. “Probably nothing.”

H
anging out in the truck listening to the radio show got to be a regular thing. It wasn’t an official plan, but almost every Saturday night through the spring, and then the summer, they all showed up and sat there in the parked truck in Lenny’s driveway, with the radio on.

Only three of them could actually sit inside the truck. The other two had to listen through the open windows, leaning against the doors. The fifth person was Debbie’s friend Patty, who came the second week, and whenever she could after that. The first time she and Debbie walked over from Debbie’s backyard, Hector and Phil were already sitting inside with Lenny, but immediately they slid out and offered up their seats.

This seemed unusual to Debbie. Then she realized that they were being chivalrous. Like gentlemen. Like men. A new part of them was emerging before her eyes, like leg buds bumping out on tadpoles.

Midway through the show, Debbie tested her theory by offering to trade places with Hector, who was leaning on the outside of the door beside her.

“No, no,” he said. “That’s okay. I’m fine. I like standing up. Leaning against a truck. For an hour.”

A few minutes later he shifted his weight and said, “It’s fun.”

“What is?” asked Debbie.

“Standing up. Leaning against a truck,” he said. “For an hour.

“I don’t want to be selfish, though,” he said after a pause. “If you wanted to have some fun, too, we could trade places for a while.”

Debbie looked at him. He was smiling a winsome smile. A hopeful smile.

“Okay,” she said, pulling on the handle, opening the door.

She smiled, too, as she swung her legs out and hopped down off the seat. Hector helped pull the door open and, as he stepped around it, Debbie landed with force on top of him, or at least on one of his feet, which was painful. There was a full frontal collision with vertical slippage as in the shifting of tectonic plates, and together they stepped one way, then the other, then back again, trying unsuccessfully to go around each other.

Finally, using a move he had learned from his mother, Hector put his right hand on the small of Debbie’s back, took her right hand with his left, and spun her around and away, ballroom dancing style. In his mother’s lessons his dancing partner had been Rowanne, and he had gazed into his sister’s chin. Now his gaze met Debbie’s eyes. Inadvertently, but all the same. His mother had said this would happen.

Debbie’s eyes looked surprised. Then they looked away. When they looked back, they had normalized. Normal eyes-ed. With the curtains drawn, at least partway.

“Sorry,” she said. “About stepping on your foot. Is it okay?”

“It’s okay,” said Hector. “I kind of liked it.”

He said it as a joke, but it wasn’t entirely untrue.

Then he remembered that he was supposed to be getting in the truck.

So he did.

D
ebbie and Patty stood inside a thriving mountain of rhododendrons, flowering with primeval abandon against a withered, sagging garage that was slowly subdividing into raw materials, basic elements and individual atoms on the edge of an oily, pothole-dotted forgotten cinder alley. The alley ran between the backsides of tall, uneven hedges that concealed parallel rows of backyards.

Across the alley from the rhododendrons, the hedge was high enough that only the top bar of the swingset inside was visible. Between the rhododendrons and the old garage, a sort of room had formed, an arched, private space among the branches, tall enough to stand up in. Even when it was raining, as it was now, it stayed fairly dry there.

It was the perfect place to change your clothes on the way to school. You could drape the clothes you were taking off over the branches while you got the other ones on. Debbie stepped out of a pair of turquoise, white, and orange plaid double-knit bell-bottoms. Patty unbuttoned a flowered blouse and tossed it onto a branch that already sported a brown jumper. The air was warm. They stood on top of their shoes in their underwear, the rain softly piffing on the leaves all around. Two Eves in the Garden of Eden.

“If you think about it,” Patty said, “it shouldn’t even matter what we wear. People will like us for who we are.”

Debbie knew this. She even believed it was true. But she also believed that certain articles of clothing could transmit almost impenetrable counter signals. Like camouflage.

“How will they know who I am if I’m wearing these?” she asked.

Patty laughed.

“They’re all right,” she said. “Sort of. They’re better than a jumper.”

“I think they’re equal to a jumper,” said Debbie. “Or less than. Jumpers can be okay.”

The reason they were changing their clothes in a rhododendron bush was cultural evolution. Both of them had mothers who were stranded in the backwaters of a bygone era, and who were unable to grasp many current trends and ideas. You could argue and argue, but they weren’t going to get it. At some point you just had to go change your clothes in a bush.

First, though, you had to acquire the clothes you wanted to change into, which were slightly faded bell-bottomed jeans that almost touched the ground, or did touch it, even dragging a little bit. And if you weren’t yet financially independent, or had spent all your money on movies and pizza, you had to get your mother to buy them for you.

That could be hard.

It wasn’t hard for Debbie to get her mother to go shopping. But Helen Pelbry was opposed to spending money on something that was going to drag on the ground and get ruined. She could not hear the siren call of the dragging jeans.

Debbie heard it. She believed that it was the only way to wear pants that made any sense. That wearing the dragging jeans did not actually guarantee that good things would happen to you, but not wearing them could almost guarantee that the good things wouldn’t.

She felt sure that when she found the perfect pair, her mother would recognize their perfection and relent. But they weren’t finding the perfect pair. They had been searching for hours, in every store in the airy, light-filled Merionville Mall. The fountains burbled, and sunlight poured in through the skylights, encouraging the tropical trees and flowers, but Debbie and her mother had become acutely focused on the two inches of the earth’s atmosphere just above the carpet of the dressing room floor.

Though the jeans were wrong in other ways, too. It was almost dreamlike, how many ways they could be wrong in, ways that a person would not have imagined. They had wandered into quicksand, into a shopping swamp. A fog of fatigue and unreality crept up on Debbie. She could tell that her mother was getting exasperated, too. They stood close to each other in a tiny dressing room with the maximum number of items hanging from a hook on the wall. Debbie was wearing a unique pair of turquoise, white, and orange plaid bell-bottoms that hovered three inches from the floor. Her mother had found them.

“What’s wrong with these?” she asked Debbie. Her voice was careful. Her face was composed, with a trace of hopefulness. Her purse dangled from the crook of her crisscrossed arms.

Debbie considered. She tried to be objective.

The plaid was all right, maybe, kind of, but the pants were so short, and they had a peculiar, zingy bell curve that would always be there because they were made of some miracle fiber that “remembered” its shape, washing after washing. It was amazing how wrong they were, but they did have a weird perfection, as objects. Not objects you would wear. Just objects you would look at. Like a vase. That was it, that was the shape. The shape of an upside-down, plaid vase. Or two of them, her feet blooming out on long stems.

Maybe her resolve was broken by some mild tranquilizing vapor seeping out of the ventilation vent along with the air-freshening perfume. Maybe there were subliminal messages in the upbeat, impersonal music softly emanating around the flimsy partitions. Maybe she just wanted her mother to be happy, and for them to be having a nice time together, the way they always had. Maybe it finally seemed stupid to care so much.

Debbie heard herself saying, “These are good. I really like these.”

In the instant she said it, she almost believed it. She wanted it to be true. If she could have spent her whole life in the tiny private dressing room, she might have worn those pants a lot.

She said the same thing about the next pair she tried on, a pair of jeans with a machine-embroidered image, at the bottom of one leg, of a bunny nibbling on a bunch of carrots. In this case she had an ulterior motive. They were, by sheer accident or luck, the right length.

“I can hem them,” she said, wondering why she hadn’t thought of it before. She was fibbing, but it was a noble fib, because she was really saying, “I love you. I want us to be having fun.” She was also saying, “If you really love me, you won’t make me hem them.”

But her mother only heard the words she said aloud. Her face relaxed. She looked pleased and relieved.

“You’re sure?” she asked.

“They’re great,” said Debbie. “I like them a lot.”

In the hollow of the rhododendrons, Debbie and Patty used the seam rippers they had smuggled out of their mothers’ sewing boxes. Debbie was carefully removing the bunny and the carrots, dropping bits of white and orange thread on the dirt. Patty was taking out the large hems she had sewed in her jeans the night before, like Penelope unraveling her weaving in the Odyssey, only backward and for different reasons.

“Maybe I can iron them out in the home ec room,” she said. “So they hang down better.”

“And then maybe you can smoosh them up so they’re not all crispy,” said Debbie.

“I don’t care so much if they’re crispy,” said Patty. “Just so they’re long enough.”

While they were working, a pair of playful chipmunks chased each other through the branches, and a few fat robins, seeking refuge from the rain, now more a downpour than a drizzle, chirped. It felt very Arcadian, as if a shepherd might appear with a harp and some grapes.

What appeared instead was a car blasting down the alleyway, throwing up wild sprays of puddle water as it clunked in and out of potholes. The two girls froze, only their eyes moving, and remained hidden. In the noise and commotion, neither one noticed that behind them a startled chipmunk had jumped from a narrow limb to the ground. A slender gold chain was momentarily tangled around his front paws. He dragged it for a short distance before he got free of it and scampered away. It settled down into the neatly mowed grass of someone’s backyard, in the rain, getting wet.