Eden Close (9 page)

They played at the pond from early December until late in March. He remembers the way the toes went first, and then the ears, because they'd been bitten by the cold years earlier one day when you hadn't noticed. He remembers the way the ice felt when it was refrozen and bumpy and the sinking in the stomach when you'd caught an edge and knew you were going down on your kneecaps. In early December, after a cold snap, the ice was black and gorgeous, but for most of the season, in the late afternoon, it was snowy with streaks and ruts and graceful arcs, with the sun blinking red-gold behind the lacy silhouettes of the bare tree limbs, the sky already turning navy blue.

He remembers they'd been sitting one afternoon in the snowbank at the edge of the pond, unlacing their skates, timing it so they'd emerge from the cornfields just as it turned pitch, calling each other "shithead" and "fink" in a confusion of vocabularies, trying out words they'd heard at school or
from their parents. It was just after Christmas, because Andy and Eden had new skates. He remembers that his fingers were stiff with the intense cold and that he couldn't get the wet knots undone. And then suddenly, raising his head in frustration, in the thickening dusk, he saw it.

She drew from her pocket a pack of Old Golds—casually, as if the pack, wrapped in cellophane, were merely sticks of gum. He can see it still: the pleasure and triumph in her eyes at being the first to have them, thus cementing for herself, with this single gesture, a place among the elect.

One by one they stopped what they were doing to watch her as she expertly opened the cellophane and shook one cigarette from the pack. She lit it. She inhaled deeply, as none of them had ever done, and Andy realized she'd been practicing, possibly for days, watching and waiting for the precise moment to make her move. Sean, his nose running from the cold, tried to disparage the gesture, breaking the silence by saying that she had the only parent who smoked, implying she had an access denied the others, but the moment belonged to Eden, and she knew it. She held out the pack, and they each took one, holding it between their fingers the way, years later, they would learn to cradle joints. She tossed the matches to Andy, fixing him with her eyes. And with this look, she dared him to inhale as she had, though he could hardly breathe from the cold and his earlier exertions on the ice.

They had all smoked the one cigarette, and then they'd had another, till they were nothing but four embers glowing in the dark. And at the edge of the cornfield, as they were about to disperse—T.J. and Sean still with the long hike back toward town, their skates knotted and slung over their shoulders, their heads spinning and their stomachs rising—it was Eden who'd produced the roll of peppermint Life Savers, instructing them each on the importance of masking their breath. And if she had not already truly become one of
them earlier when she offered them the cigarettes, she would have done so then—for though they all "caught shit," as T.J. put it, when they arrived home later than they ever had for. dinner, none of them yet had to face the shouts and heated lectures that would come months later when smoking among them was already commonplace and they'd grown careless.

 

B
Y MIDWINTER
they were no longer a threesome but a foursome, a mismatched quartet (seen from behind as they walked the tracks with hockey sticks parked on their shoulders) of three tall, reedy clarinets and one short piccolo. Indeed, Eden had become so much a part of them that they minded when she wasn't there.

"So where is she?" T.J. said one afternoon when Andy and Sean got to the pond. T.J. already had his skates on, having arrived first, and was carving impatient circles in the bumpy ice near the shoreline.

Andy, aware that his friends looked to him as a source of information about Eden, his status enhanced by this circumstantial intimacy, knew she was at the dentist and said so, registering as he did a nicker of disappointment in the way T.J. stabbed the ice with his stick. At the very least, it was easier to play a game with four.

Sean, yanking at a lace, was still pretending then that Eden wasn't much more than a pain in the neck and clicked his tongue in disgust; but when he said, with almost too much of a complaint in his voice, "This was the day I was supposed to show her how to do an eagle," Andy thought that he, too, had come to expect her presence.

For a brief time, their days together were a satisfying blur spent on the ice, at the baseball diamond or in the cornfields, looking up at a summer sky that floated too quickly past them. It seems that then he and Eden were always together—sometimes in the larger group, often alone. He supposes now that you could say they were best friends, though
if you'd said it to him then, he'd have bristled at the thought, however unfeminine she was. Perhaps it was the circumstance of long summer nights spent tossing a ball after dinner, or the quiet of the fields where they hid to smoke, but when they had things to say then, they said them to each other.

"Edith doesn't like me," he remembers her saying one night as they lay on their backs in the path through the cornfields, just out of sight of the houses. They were eating Fudgsicles; he recalls that a bit of chocolate had melted and had dribbled onto her neck. The ice cream man passed the houses every night after dinner that summer and made a point of parking his truck at the end of the drive and ringing his bell on his way to the next town. Andy and Eden would buy something for themselves, and often Andy would get something for his mother as well. (What a wonderful mix, he thinks now—the innocence of the Fudgsicles and the secret acrid thrill of the Old Gold cigarettes they smoked afterward.) She was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, as he was, and they smelled of 6-12; the mosquitoes in the cornfields were ferocious on humid summer nights.

"Sure she does," said Andy. "You just think she doesn't. Everyone thinks that once in a while."

"I think it all the time."

Andy could not remember a scene he had witnessed lately that would prove Eden wrong, though he found it nearly incomprehensible, in the abstract, to imagine a mother not liking her child.

"What are we doing tomorrow?" she asked.

"I don't know," Andy said. "T.J.'s gotta do the lawn for his father, and I don't know about Sean."

"Why don't just you and me do something?"

"Like what?"

"Like take our bikes and ride to a town we've never been to before and have a picnic."

"We could...."

The idea appealed to Andy. He tried to remember if he, too, was supposed to do something for his father in the morning.

"We could discover a new lake, go fishing," she said.

"Bring the poles on the bikes, you mean?"

"Sure. I bet it could be done."

Andy pondered the logistics.

"I think I'm going to die young," she said, licking the last of the chocolate off the wooden stick.

"Don't be stupid. Why do you say that?" It was one of the things Andy didn't like about girls, this tendency toward melodrama. He tried to quash it in Eden whenever he thought it was surfacing.

"Because I can't picture myself doing anything as an adult."

"Huh?"

"I can't see myself as a housewife, and I can't see myself as a schoolteacher or a secretary or an actress or anything. So I must be going to die young."

Apart from a vague image of himself going off to school somewhere, and a feverish wish to become a major league baseball player, Andy could not picture himself doing anything either.

"Well, neither can I, and I don't think I'm going to die young," he said.

"Sean doesn't like me very much, does he?" she said.

"Sean's a jerk, and besides, I think he likes you as good as he likes any of the rest of us."

"But you like me," she said.

He sat up, swatted at a cloud of no-see-ums that were hovering about his forehead.

"You're all right," he said, unable to commit himself out loud any further, for the truth was he'd come to prefer her
company to that of TJ. or Sean. He turned to look at her lying on the grass.

"But don't let it go to your head," he said, shoving her in the shoulder. She sat up quickly, catapulted a Fudgsicle stick with expert skill. It landed on his ear. He tried to zing one at her and missed.

"I think my real father must have been a jock," she said.

Andy knew that Eden had been told at an early age that she was adopted—even the story, which Jim managed to make charming, like that of a princess in a fairy tale, of her arrival in a cardboard box. According to Andy's own father, Jim was smart to have done this, because it would have been impossible to keep the tale from her once she'd entered school. Indeed, when she did encounter the children of the town, whose parents regarded Eden as a curiosity if not something of a living legend (her arrival itself a historical event in the unofficial town record), she was sometimes the butt of childish and cruel teasing: "The girl in the box! The girl in the box!" the boys in her class would call across the playground.

"He might have been," said Andy.

And then the two of them lay back on the dirt and dried grasses and smoked the cigarettes she stole from Jim (how can the man have failed to notice the two or three packs a week they were putting away then? he wonders now) and thought about these questions and other, more pressing matters, such as whether or not Andy's father would carry through with his threat to keep him off the hockey team if he didn't pass French in the fall. Or whether T.J.'s father was going to get the pool built before the summer was over. Or, failing that, the best way to talk yourself through the gate at the town pool, above which Eden swore she could actually see the chlorine shimmer.

 

T
HEY WERE
together that first year, through the summer and well into the spring of his junior year. By then he had long
ceased to think of her as an anomaly among his friends. She was simply Eden, his friend too, though if pressed, he'd have said that he worried more about Eden, looked out for her in a way that was never necessary with T.J. or Sean—or perhaps with Sean when Andy and T.J. would have to cool him off to avoid a penalty on the ice.

But when he thinks of the summer Eden turned thirteen (the summer he was waiting for his senior year in high school to begin, the summer inaugurated, it seems now to him, by that fateful day on the baseball diamond), it is as if a wave were pulling away from him then with the force of a powerful undertow.

They had let her play third base that spring for their unofficial sandlot team. She was a so-so hitter, but fast and accurate in the infield. He remembers their team was losing narrowly that day. She was on the bench beside him, hunched over as he was, her elbows on her knees. It had rained earlier in the day, but the sun had cleared the mist, leaving only puddles in the depressions in the field behind the school. He saw her sit up, put an arm across her abdomen. He thought her face was especially white, whiter than it ought to have been. She was wearing her cap backward, with the brim pointing down her back. She moaned slightly, almost too faintly to be heard, but he had, and he asked her if she was all right. She looked at him but didn't answer. And then T.J. hit a home run, and they were on their feet, for this brought in two runs, and they were tied.

He sat down on the bench. Eden was still standing. And then he saw it, the dark red stain.

At first he was scared. She'd been hit, injured somehow, and hadn't told anyone. That would be like her, he thought. But then, in the second instant, it came to him.

"Eden?" he said quietly.

She turned to look at him, and when she saw his face, she sat down.

"Don't get up," he said.

He looked down the bench and saw a jacket on the other side of Sean. Leaning behind his friend, he jerked the jacket off the bench, casually laid it on his lap, and then he slipped it to Eden.

She tied it around her waist, knotting the arms in front.

"Hey, look," Andy said to Sean, who was absorbed in the game. "Eden's sick to her stomach." He was surprised how easily the lie came to him. "I'm taking her home. Put Warren in for me, OK? He's been dying to play first." Sean nodded absently without looking at Andy.

Andy turned to Eden. He hesitated. Then he said: "You know what's going on?"

She shrugged. "I guess."

They walked home the two miles from the playground diamond, each carrying a glove, Eden with the jacket tied around her waist. He punched his glove repeatedly, sometimes arced his arm in a pantomine of a pitch. Neither spoke of the reason why they were walking home before the game was finished. Neither mentioned that Andy needn't have come with her. Indeed, Eden hardly said a word. He thought she must be embarrassed, so he tried to talk of other things, tried for a tone just this side of flippant, but there were long pauses in his monologue.

When he thinks about that walk now—now, twenty years later—it is not embarrassment he feels (he smiles to think of their awkwardness and of her delicacy); rather it is sadness that overtakes him. For though she was young and tongue-tied, though she was barely able to negotiate this strange and bewildering matter, he has no doubt now that it was, for Eden, her last pure day of childhood.

 

T
HAT SUMMER
she quit the team, quit playing sports. She gave no explanation save that she found them "boring"—an
explanation that puzzled Andy. For though he, too, was reaching puberty—with his broken voice and faint mustache—he felt himself to be essentially unchanged, still passionate about hockey and baseball, still tied to his friends like a brother. He was busy days with his first summer job—at the dairy, unloading the trucks as they came in, setting up the bottles for the washer. In the evenings, after supper, in this second summer they had together, he and Eden sometimes played catch or escaped from doing the dishes into the fields. But they bickered for the first time. He said he thought her newly pierced ears were barbaric; she stubbed out a cigarette and called him "an infant." She teased him when he couldn't name the Top Ten, and he accused her of doing nothing all day but lying in her plastic chaise longue in the backyard, listening to the radio. That was not all she did, she said, and showed him earrings and rings she'd shoplifted from the Woolworth's in the next town. She got on the bus in the mornings, she said, and got off when she felt like it. She said she'd try for a Timex for him next time, and he said, irritably, "Don't bother." In truth, he was horrified. Stealing frightened him. Finding a ten-dollar bill on the floor of a truck he was emptying just the week before, he'd sought out the driver at once; simply holding the ten had made him feel guilty.