Edna in the Desert (11 page)

Edna was too afraid to turn around. She didn’t even notice that Johnny was holding her hand. Moments later they were driving through the sad neighborhood and into the open desert. The world fell into one of those quiets after something unbelievable has happened, but Edna couldn’t let the incident fade away.

“Thanks for defending my honor.”

“It wasn’t that. I don’t like being called a kid.”

Edna smirked.

“You’re not funny. That was a little dangerous.”

“It was wrong.”

He left out that he wasn’t sorry, and he would do it again.

“Betty would be upset if she found out I hit a guest.”

“Does your hand hurt?”

“No.” He opened and closed his fingers. “Not too much.”

“Do you get into a lot of fights?”

“No.”

He was sincere. Edna loathed violence, but there was no denying she was pleased, and she found this disturbing. She wanted to curl up next to Johnny like a kitten now that he’d punched someone for her. It was sick. Instead of doing that, she looked at her watch.

“So those guys must be having a great vacation if they have to be drunk by ten in the morning.”

“I don’t know what they were on,” he said under his breath.

“Are they going to be like that all day?”

“People come out here to do drugs.”

“Do you do drugs?”

“No. Do you?”

“No! I don’t know why you’d want to there. That oasis is even prettier than Hawaii. Maybe because it’s so fragile. The bugs and frogs and everything would all die if they were only a few feet away from that spot.”

“It’s true.”

“That must be why the town’s called ‘Desert Palms’ and not just ‘Desert.’”

He raised his eyebrow.

“I think so.”

“I can’t believe there are little fish in the pond. Did you ever sleep in that houseboat?”

“Sure.”

“I’d like to stay there. It must be beautiful at night, especially with a full moon. Did you see how bright the moon was the other night?”

He nodded that he had.

It might have been the idea of Edna in the moonlight, Bob’s crude suggestion, or the combination of the two that made Johnny stop the Bronco. Edna thought there was a problem, maybe the Bronco broke down, but Johnny didn’t say a word. He slid close to her, assessed her face and softly kissed her. Soon his lips separated hers, and his tongue searched the inside of her mouth. She inhaled his breath. Edna had never kissed anyone this deeply before. She was terrified, and thrilled, and she had no idea what to do other than to let it happen. They clutched at each other with an urgency that came out of the blue. The muscles in his shoulders flexed, the ones he used when he was steering the dirt bike. He caressed her soft hair and the adorable curve at the small of her back. They were horizontal. Distant and then increasingly persistent alarms grew louder in his head. He could take Mary’s granddaughter’s virginity if he wasn’t careful. On a dirt road, in their Bronco, no less. He had to tell himself a few times that this would
not
be a good thing. He made a low, involuntary sound as he peeled himself off this girl. He slid back behind the wheel and turned on the car. It sputtered before it started. He shook his head slightly.

“I shouldn’t have done that. I just hit a guy for saying…I’m sorry. That was crazy.”

He shifted the gears and drove on.

Edna’s brain exploded, slowly, like a mushroom cloud.

Johnny liked her.

It was, at first, too foreign a notion to comprehend. As they rode on in silence, the only two people in an empty world, the blurry thought came into sharper focus.

“I can kiss, you know,” she informed him.

“You should kiss someone your own age.”

“Why?”

“It’s safer.”

“Why? You’re not that much older than I am. I won’t call you a kid if you don’t like it, but you are still technically jailbait. The newspaper said you’re seventeen.”

She folded her arms and shrugged, as if he was no big deal.

“We’re not going to do anything, Edna, and we shouldn’t talk about it anymore either.”

Most girls Johnny knew didn’t challenge him. They wouldn’t have had much to say about an oasis. They usually went on about some problem or how they felt fat, turning the topic, and his eyes, to their bodies. Before he knew it he’d be telling a girl that she wasn’t fat and that he liked her body, and this usually led to some level of consummation, followed by crying later on when he got bored of it. Most girls Johnny knew had either been his girlfriend already or tried to be. It was a small town. In any case, it wasn’t like him to ditch work, hit people and take advantage of thirteen-year-olds.

Later that day on the porch, Edna was feeling calm and very much like a woman. When she’d first heard that boys put their tongues in girls’ mouths, she didn’t believe it. She knew about sex, but somehow the part about tongues was even more disgusting. She was eleven. She thought she was being punk’d by these idiots at a party.

Edna knew everyone was kissing this summer, and if she hadn’t been sent away, she would have been too, but it wouldn’t have been anything like real kissing. Real kissing was way more fun than playing a game where you go into a closet and let boys do things to you. Edna was horrified when she found out that according to the rules of these games it could be any boy, even snot-nosed Jason Sinclair. Edna had watched him pick his nose all year. She refused to play and felt betrayed when Brit ended up in the closet with him. They’d always agreed: Jason was disgusting. In the last few years, Edna’s society had become polluted with these games in which boys pressed their lips against girls’ faces and flicked their tongues in and out. It was a waste of time, and she didn’t see why she should kiss anyone she didn’t even like. Feeling Johnny’s tongue made her understand way more about sex than any of that, even more than the pornos she’d seen. No one even kissed in the pornos. Johnny’s tongue made Edna understand a lot.

She was drunk from the kiss for the rest of the ride back to the cabin that day and scrambling for a way they could spend more time together.

“It’s Grandpa’s birthday coming up. We’re going to make him a party on Saturday. You’re invited,” she threw off, as if she’d meant to mention it earlier. She congratulated herself for coming up with an idea and managing to get it out before he drove away for another week.

“This Saturday? I can’t—”

“Not
this
Saturday. Next Saturday.”

It wasn’t a good idea to hang around Edna, but he figured they wouldn’t be alone at a party for Zeke.

“OK. I’ll be there.”

Edna would have made the party on any Saturday. She had no idea of the date, either of that day or of the next Saturday, or of her grandfather’s birthday, but she would work it all out if Johnny was coming. She would legally change Grandpa’s birthday if she had to.

The party idea must have escaped from the place where Edna stored annoying junk from Shimmer after the explosion in her brain. Nothing on Shimmer was real, the rules were all notions that Jill made up and passed off as if they were upper-class gospel. This particular notion was that if a woman liked a man, she shouldn’t ask him out directly, but it was all right to host a party and invite him. Shimmer warned that you should be sure you liked the man a lot, since throwing a party required effort, especially, Edna thought, if you took all the advice on Shimmer about how to throw one. There were also probably some ideas about promising a birthday party at someone’s house without asking them, especially if you didn’t know when their birthday was, but Grandpa was unlikely to say he didn’t want a party, or anything, to ruin it. So, a party was scheduled for next Saturday, but at the moment, Edna and Johnny were the only ones who knew about it.

Edna had a high standard of what a party should be. In the real world, birthday parties were a competition between parents and an art form for party planners who created installations worthy of museum exhibition for their four-year-old clients. Edna had no idea how to have a party here. In fact, it might not be possible; Grandma had made it clear that she never entertained. The cabin and the property around it were dismal. Edna had seen the town of Desert Palms, and she was certain there wasn’t a party planner or an adequate party store in it. Lacking Google, she was beginning to feel like a part of her brain had been removed. She had to have some idea of how a party could happen before she approached Grandma and forced it on her, because Grandma was not likely to jump for joy. Edna remembered seeing some old phone books in the pantry.

The next morning she pulled out the phone books from where she’d hidden them under the couch. They were four years old. She’d never looked anything up in a phone book before. There were both yellow and white pages for the area designated “The Southern Desert Basin,” and they were remarkably thin compared to other phone books Edna had seen, which she presumed was because there were no people here. Edna looked up the word “party.” To her surprise, four party stores were listed. The first number she called was no longer in service, and neither was the next. At the third number someone answered in Spanish, and a baby cried in the background. Edna hung up. At the fourth number someone fumbled with the phone. It was an old woman.

“H-hello?”

She sounded like she used her phone about as much as Grandma did. Edna asked her if this was Party Central. The woman laughed.

“N-no dear, not for years.”

“Oh, sorry to bother you.”

“That’s all right. God bless you, dear.”

“Um, thank you,” Edna said, and she added “you too,” hoping that was a polite response to “God bless you” from a stranger on the phone.

There were no party stores in the vicinity. Or at least there weren’t four years ago in the phone book, and Edna sincerely doubted that there were now. This party had seemed like a terrific idea when she came up with it in the Bronco, when she was thinking about things that might lead to more kissing and not at all about logistics.

Edna listed the only people she knew in the area. There was the jolly man she hadn’t been friendly to at the store, the girl she thought was Jenny who didn’t even turn around to say “hi,” and the kind old lady she’d just called by accident. It was not a good list. The jolly man was all she remotely had going for her. Jolly Man certainly liked Grandma. Edna wondered if he might know of any nearby party planners until she realized, if he was milling around Bishop’s, that he could be related to Johnny. Was Jolly Man Johnny’s grandfather? Even if he wasn’t, Johnny might find out that he was the first one invited to the party. It might be obvious that she had no party, that the whole party was being made after she’d already invited him and, by extension, because of their kiss. Sadly, as a source of information, Jolly Man was out.

If she were at Nanny’s condo, Edna would ask around by the pool and everyone there would help her. In fact, the lipsticked old ladies would drop their bridge games to fight over who was doing what to make the party, and there would be too many people to invite within twenty minutes. Here there was no one to reach out to except Grandma. Or Grandpa. She might as well enlist a cactus. There was obviously no way to have this party.

Edna remembered how the pioneering Mrs. Anderson told herself to be strong as she looked at the impossible distance left to travel. She remembered that she herself was once hopelessly lost in the desert at nightfall with a dead coyote, and things still ended well. Edna had to be brave. It was too soon to give up.

“So, Grandma…?”

Grandma looked up from her dinner. Edna tried not to read too much into her hard expression. Maybe it was just how Grandma held her face.

“I was thinking about how we’re going to make Pineapple Upside-Down Cake, and I guess Grandpa’s going to have some, and I was thinking about Grandpa and how he doesn’t usually see very many other people—”

Edna wasn’t presenting this as well as she’d imagined.

“—I don’t know…he must be in there somewhere, you know, because he can hear and see things and he definitely tastes food, and I thought it might be nice for him to have some people around while he was eating cake. I don’t think he has that very often.”

She felt like an idiot and couldn’t stop rambling.

“And I don’t remember ever celebrating his birthday with him
ever
, so I thought it could be like a birthday party if we want. Even if it wasn’t really his birthday…”

She trailed off. Grandma’s unchanging expression was too distracting, and a party, something Edna had in the real world once or twice a year, suddenly seemed like an outrageous ambition. And Edna had to create more urgency. Grandma might mull this over for a while. She had no way of knowing that Edna wanted an answer about having a party immediately, and to set the date too, for next Saturday. It might as well have been written in stone.

“So I was thinking about a week from—”

“I think that might be a bit much.”

“What?”

“I said I think it might be a bit much.”

Grandma looked down at her food. Edna had not heard the word “no,” but she’d just hit a wall. Luckily, with the slow pace of Grandma’s conversation style, Edna had an extended moment to react. She also had years of experience twisting things with her parents.

“What about it would be too much? It’s just a little cake.”

Grandma didn’t answer.

“Grandma?”

“Edna, I said I think it might be a bit much—”

“But I’ll do everything. And we’re making the cake anyway. Do you mean too much for Grandpa?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Well, I know he’s sick—”

Grandma’s eyes widened but Edna continued.

“—but maybe he could use a little stimulation. Maybe we all could.”

“Are you this disrespectful to your parents?”

“Oh my goodness, I’m much more disrespectful to my parents. What do you think I’m doing here?”

Mary looked hard at Edna. Her granddaughter might have a nice idea with the party, but she was too used to getting her own way. Edward was relying on her help with that, and Mary just couldn’t get around Edna’s disrespect. For Edna’s part, she regretted her last comment. She always went too far for the drama of it or because she thought of something funny to say. But she was usually the only one who thought it was funny, and it did not move things forward. It never did.