If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (20 page)

“Thank you,” I said. She laughed, and I was glad that she seemed happy. “Could you read my cards?” I asked her. “You know, one for the road?”

“Ach!” Claudine let go of my hands, threw her own up in the air. “No. No more readings. You’re a young girl, everything—everything!—is just beginning for you. Let life surprise you.”

I laughed. “What about you?” I asked. “Sitting here night after night, shuffling away? Marcel said you must have read your own cards a thousand times these past few months.”

Claudine laughed, too, and shook her head vehemently, so that tendrils escaped from her piled-up hair and fell over her forehead. “Not anymore,” she said. “Not since I made my decision. When you know what you’re doing, you don’t need the cards.” She took my hands in hers again. “No more about this boy, eh? Over and over again, asking the same question. You go up to him and you tell him that you want him. No more waiting. You go out and live life, eh? Remember: You live life or it lives you.”

•   •   •

B
efore it was so many years later and Claudine had finally left the man she’d met in Montreal and would stay with for thirty years, who treated her neither well nor badly but with an indifference that made her flail at him, rage at him, and finally turn from him toward the wine, so that her nightly glass or two became a half carafe and then a full carafe and then out to the cafés if she hadn’t yet passed out; before the phlebitis took over and she could barely leave her little apartment above the bakery in Montreal that the owners had let her hold on to all those years out of kindness; before Marcel, now living in Albuquerque, close to her sons, stopped answering the phone when her mother called, weary of the litany of complaints and criticism she had endured for too many years; before everything that was to happen had happened, that day in October, at Kennedy Airport, Claudine looked so radiant that even people running toward their gates, afraid of missing their flights, paused to look at her. I drove over with them, Claudine and Charlie and John Paul and Marcel, who’d taken the bus down from the Cape alone, and met Claudine’s best friend, Renee, and Renee’s husband, Max, in the boarding lounge. Charlie was red-faced and teary, but Renee and Max had brought champagne and Dixie cups, and we sat at a small constellation of chairs and couches and toasted to Claudine’s new life. When it was time to board the plane, Claudine hugged all of us one by one, clinging to us, crying, and when she finally broke away from John Paul, who she of course hugged for the longest, she ran toward her gate, the last one to go through, and when she turned back to blow one last kiss, her face, oh, her face! If you could have seen her!

the feeney sisters forever

I
cannot believe this is still dragging on,” Georgie said. He was slowly scrolling the Rod Stewart poster off the wall of his bedroom, careful not to take the paint off with the Scotch tape. “You should have at least been screwing his brains out by now.”

“It’s not that easy.” I sighed.

The room was almost bare. I’d been at Georgie’s since eleven that morning, helping him pack for the move into Manhattan. Through Ray Mackey’s cousin’s girlfriend, he’d found an apartment in Greenwich Village, on Sullivan Street. It was a fourth-floor walk-up with a tiny fireplace and a bathtub in the kitchen, where Georgie couldn’t wait to have sex with a tall, dark stranger.

“Darling, nothing’s that easy,” Georgie said dramatically, dragging his syllables. “But life is a banquet, do you want to be a starving sucker for the rest of your life?” He turned toward me and bowed. “Go to him, dearest; love him. Love him forever and ask nothing in return.”

“Where is that from?” I asked.

Georgie straightened up and shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said. He
looked around at the bare walls, the sagging double bed that he refused to bring with him to the new apartment. Then he looked down at the Rod Stewart poster in his hands. He rolled it up and gently pushed it into a cardboard cylinder. “I’m thinking of having it framed,” he said.

“So Rod the God will be your new roommate?” I asked.

“I could certainly do worse.” Georgie put the poster into a box that held all the others. “Hang tight, I have to take a leak,” he said, and went out the door to the bathroom down the hall.

It was better teasing Georgie than concentrating on his leaving; I was afraid I might start crying and then he might and it would start a whole hullabaloo. It wasn’t like I hung out with him all the time but I always knew he was there: at his house, at MarioEstelle’s, on the East Turn bus, which he drove through the opposite end of town. One night last week, I’d met him at the bus station for the last run of his shift, and we’d each drunk a beer and then shared a joint and ended up singing “I Only Want to Be with You” at the top of our lungs until he pulled into the station. Walking home through the silent town, the summer air was sweet and clear and smelled of honeysuckle and fresh-cut grass and I wondered why anyone wanted to leave Elephant Beach for the tar-stained streets of the city.

I looked around the bedroom. It badly needed a paint job and the splotches of white left by the posters only made it more obvious. I hadn’t thought he’d have that much to pack, but there were boxes and half-filled black plastic garbage bags all over the place. I wanted to hurry up and finish so I’d be gone before Fiona Feeney and her crazy sisters showed up to drive him into the city. They made me nervous. I had once seen Fiona throw Ella Hamilton over a table in the lunchroom during the race riots, the year she was a senior and I was a sophomore. Ella lay on the floor, her body looking bruised and crooked, and Fiona would have still kept going if the cops hadn’t come and her sister Moira hadn’t pulled her away. I didn’t want to drive into the city with them, because I’d have to drive back with them alone, without Georgie’s protection, and who knew what might happen.

I looked up. Georgie was standing in the doorway, watching me.

“What?” I asked.

“I was just remembering the first time I saw you on Comanche Beach. It was one of the Christmas tree bonfires, around ’69, ’70.” He came in and flopped down on his naked bed. In January, we would drag all the discarded Christmas trees left out on the curb for trash pickup down to the beach and try to light a fire; the trees never burned well and usually sizzled out slowly, a smoldering hunk of branches. Still, every year, we’d all chip in for a case of Budweiser and go back down the beach and do the same thing. I wondered what would happen this year, now that we were out of school and people were scattering to the wind.

“That first night you came down with Liz, and you were standing there in that gray coat with the belt in the back that I hated, looking so scared and lost by the firelight—”

“And you came up to me and asked would I like a beer to go with my cigarette,” I said. I was ashamed to remember that night, because I’d wished someone else had come over to offer me a beer, Billy or Conor or one of Nanny’s cousins, someone who people didn’t roll their eyes about behind his back.

“I recognized a kindred spirit,” Georgie said, and then looked at my face and said, “Oh for God’s sake, I didn’t mean it that way. And darling, you needn’t look so stricken; being of another persuasion, so to speak, is not exactly a fate worse than death, contrary to popular local opinion. What I meant was—”

“I know what you meant,” I said, and I did. Because even though Georgie had lived in the Trunk all his life and was best friends with the Feeney sisters, he’d always been an outsider, too. It was why we’d become friends in the first place. I went over to the bed and flopped down next to him.

Georgie lit a cigarette, taking an old seashell from under the bed to use as an ashtray. “You want the truth, I never understood why you were
so hot to hang around down here in the first place,” he said. I wanted to tell him how it was; how the Trunk was a place where everyone’s footsteps seemed to fit so firmly, but then I thought about Georgie’s footsteps and the scar on his forehead, a souvenir from the night when Jimmy Murphy and the Hitter boys had jumped all over his face.

“I’ll miss you,” I said, taking his hand, guiding the tip of his cigarette to light my own. I couldn’t help it; I was never good at hiding my feelings beyond a certain point.

“I’ll miss me, too,” he said in his airy-fairy voice, gazing up at the ceiling. “I’ll always have a great deal of affection for who I was. But now it’s time to leave all that behind. Because really,” he said, touching his forehead, “next time I might not be so lucky.”

I leaned over and kissed his cheek. He put his fingers over mine and said dramatically, “We’ll always have Paris.”

“Here’s looking at you, kid,” I said, and before my voice could become more wobbly, we heard a soft stampede up the staircase and Fiona Feeney and her sister Moira were in the room, dressed in cutoffs and beach thongs, Fiona’s hair wrapped in huge curlers. “We ready to get this show on the road or what?” she said, and then laughed her crazy laugh that sounded like machine-gun fire.

Georgie sprang up off the bed. “Please tell me you are not driving me into the city looking like that,” he said, horrified. “I’m starting a new life in Greenwich Village, not the A&P parking lot.”

“Relax, Georgina,” Fiona said, looking around the room, making no move to take off her sunglasses.

“Where’s Deirdre?” Georgie asked.

“Indisposed,” Moira said, lighting a cigarette. “Had a rough night.”

“Besides, we got what’s-her-name over here,” Fiona said, turning toward me. “Katie, right?”

I nodded. “I’ll be right back,” I said. “I’m going downstairs to get a drink of water.” I slid past Moira, who watched me with her cold gray
eyes. Deirdre was beautiful, Fiona was crazy, but Moira was the quiet, dangerous one, waiting and watching and then suddenly pouncing when you least expected it. One time, in the smoking bathroom at school, Debbie Maurer had asked her for a drag of her cigarette; Moira had silently handed it over, and when Debbie took a second drag, Moira grabbed the cigarette back so quickly that Debbie had to frantically wave the sparks away from her face. Moira snapped, “You’re going to take two fucking drags, say so.” She became more animated when she drank, but you never knew which way that was going to go, either. She could just as easily do a striptease in the basement of St. Timothy’s Church as punch somebody in the mouth. There was something smoldering about Moira; you felt that flames could burst through her pale skin at any moment and paint the air with fire.

I went downstairs to the big yellow kitchen. Sissie, Georgie’s grandmother, was at the refrigerator, putting ice cubes into a pitcher of tea.

“How’s the packing going?” she asked in her kindly voice.

“It’s going,” I said. “What smells so good?”

“Saints preserve us!” She hurried over to the stove, took two pot holders from a basket on the counter and opened the oven. She slid a tray of cookies out and put it across two burners. “Good thing you said something, or I would have let them burn.” She smiled at me. “Getting absentminded in my old age.” She took the cookies and put them to cool on the windowsill. “Chocolate chip oatmeal,” she said, turning off the oven, taking a spatula from the drawer. “Off the recipe from the Quaker Oats box. Georgie’s favorite, since he was a little boy.” She began loosening the cookies from the baking sheet, sliding them onto a pretty blue plate. “Figured I’d give him a little care package to take with him so he won’t get to missing us too much.” She sighed. “Poor Bobby left here crying this morning. It’s always a—a trauma, you know, when the first one leaves the nest.”

“Have you always lived in Elephant Beach, Sissie?” I asked. She carried the plate of cookies over to the kitchen table and began packing
them in a Christmas tin, the kind my parents brought to holiday parties and open houses on New Year’s Day.

“Goodness no,” she said. “We moved here back in, what was it now, ’49, after the war. From the West Side, Forty-third and Ninth Avenue. I was always a small-town girl at heart, couldn’t wait to leave the city.” She left a few cookies on the plate, then placed the top firmly on the tin, pushing it down carefully to make sure it was sealed. “And now he wants to go back to that jungle.” She shuddered.

“He likes the city,” I said. “He’s been talking about it for ages.”

She nodded and began moving briskly around the kitchen. “Well, to each his own, I always say. And really, it’s for the best.” She opened a drawer and took out a paper shopping bag. She patted the cookie tin fondly, as though it was human, and put it in the bag. “You know his father can’t stand the sight of him,” she said matter-of-factly. She moved over to the sink and began washing the cookie tray. I watched her for a moment, then said, “I’ll be outside if anyone’s looking,” and went out the side door and around the front and sat on the stoop.

Through the open window upstairs, I could hear Fiona’s madwoman laugh bouncing off the walls. I lit a cigarette and watched the sky for a while. They said everything came in threes: first Maggie and Matty, then Ginger, and now Georgie. It was unsettling, all this leaving; it seemed more suited to the fall, when the sand began to cool and the wind lifted the curtain of heat and you could almost smell change in the air.

I was about to head back upstairs and say a final good-bye to Georgie, even though we’d planned an outing in the city once he got settled, when I heard footsteps through the screen door on the porch and Fiona came bounding outside, carrying a plastic bag over her shoulder. “Give me a hand with this,” she said, her voice scratched and blotchy, and I realized she was crying. I had never seen Fiona cry before. She opened the trunk of the car and started jamming things around, rearranging boxes, squeezing the garbage bags in wherever they would fit. At one
point she gazed up at the house and sighed. “I’m gonna miss the shit out of him,” she said. “But there’s nothing for him out here, you know what I’m saying?” She paused to put a cigarette between her lips, and stood looking at the tightly packed trunk.

“You did a great job,” I said, because it was true and I had no idea what else to say to her.

Fiona nodded. “I’ve got good organization skills,” she said. “That’s what my boss says. He’s giving me a promotion which, hey, I could use the money, because come next winter, I’m blowing this pop shop for good.”

I looked at her, startled. Fiona had practically put people in the hospital for bad-mouthing the Trunk; she’d even gone after teachers who made snide remarks. I’d always thought of her as a lifer, someone who would die on her stool at the counter in MarioEstelle’s. She was still working at the insurance agency in town and I assumed the night classes she was taking were in secretarial administration. That’s what most of the Trunk girls went to Carver Community College for. Then I remembered how when she’d broken up with Mickey Fallon, he’d gone on a three-day bender and stood outside her house and yelled her name so that the whole street could hear. She’d never even opened the window.

“Where will you go?” I asked.

“Miami Dade,” Fiona said, promptly. “They’ll take my credits from Carver, I already checked. Carver has a great transfer rate, one of the highest in the country, so I can get my associate’s degree down there. We have people in that part of Florida, my mother’s cousins, so I’ll have family close by. It’s nice. I went down for my vacation in April. You ever been?”

“No,” I said.

“It’s cool,” she said. “Funky. Too many spics, but they’re Cubans, at least they look white. The city’s too much for me, man. Miami’s more like a—a small-town city. Plus you got the beach, so it’s, you know, it’s like home, but you’re still way the hell out of this shithole.”

I looked at her. “What are you going to get your degree in?”

She lifted her face to the sun. “Some type of administration,” she said. “Hospital, public health, some shit like that. I don’t mind starting at the bottom, but eventually I got to run the show, know what I’m saying? I wasn’t meant to take orders. That’s not for me.”

“That’s—that’s great,” I said. “I mean, you—I always thought—you always seemed—”

I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. With all the Feeney sisters, you never knew what would set them off.

Fiona tossed her head. She’d taken out the curlers and her hair bounced down her shoulders, clean-smelling and shiny. She’d stopped teasing it into a ratty bird’s nest. She took off her sunglasses and through the heavy black streaks of her mascara, the bruise beneath her left eye winced in the sunlight. “You know how I got this? That motherfucker Jimmy Murphy was whaling on my sister Deirdre and I got in the middle of it. And it wasn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last and it started when they were going out and still she went ahead and married that animal. What?” she said, staring at me, her eyes searching my face.