The Children's Crusade (13 page)

“Rebecca, look,” Ryan said. “Isn’t it pretty?”

It was pretty, and she said so. “Come on. Let’s do something.”

“Stay,” Penny said. “I’ve got a lot more shells. You guys can each make one if you want.”

“Why would we need three?” Rebecca said.

“Very funny. You might enjoy it.”

“I think I’ll read instead.”

Penny looked at Ryan. “Will
you
stay?”

Ryan said he would, and as Rebecca walked away Penny wished for a moment that her one daughter were more like her. Then again, she hadn’t been much like her mother. As a child, Penny had pretended sometimes that she was a changeling whose real parents were English nobility. She thought Royal Doulton was the name of a family rather than a china, and in school, when her teacher wasn’t looking, she practiced writing “Penny Doulton” in fancy handwrit
ing on the flyleaf of her grammar book. She wanted to be royalty and was wounded when she heard her mother criticizing a neighbor for putting on airs.

“Look at these,” she said to Ryan, pulling out a bucket of shells. “Aren’t they nice?”

Ryan leaned close. “They still smell like the ocean.”

They knelt together and Ryan poked through the shells. Penny loved the colors at Sea Ranch, the smoky gray-brown of the houses and the straw of the summer grasses. The ocean green and black. On a walk one afternoon she had come upon an older man near the edge of the cliffs, sitting on a folding chair in front of an easel. He was holding a palette with dabs of color on it, painting a picture of the sea and the sky. She stopped and watched and they began to talk. “How did you learn to paint?” she asked him, and he smiled and said, “I haven’t yet.” She puzzled over that for days afterward, wondering what he’d meant.

“Where are the cigar boxes?” Ryan said.

“I don’t have any more right now, but you start by laying the shells on the counter anyway. Choose some, I’ll show you. You can try out different arrangements if you don’t like the first one.”

“But I would like it if I did it.”

“Half the fun is trying a lot of different possibilities. You’ll see.”

Ryan picked out a dozen shells and set them on the counter in three rows of four. He couldn’t help noticing that they were all about the same brown and all had about the same white speckles. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so he moved them around and then moved them around again.

“Look,” she said. “See how the darker one looks good in the corner?” She slid one of the shells out of the middle row and repositioned it. “Then you probably want the next darkest one down near the opposite corner.”

“Not
in
the opposite corner?”

“No, near is better, see? I’ll get some more cigar boxes tomorrow.”

“I’ll
smoke
some cigars tomorrow!”

There was James, wearing his red cowboy pajamas and a maniac smile. Exultant over his escape from bed, he leaped into the air, reaching for the lintel though it was several feet above his head. “I’ll go with you, okay? To the cigar store, right? Can I get Red Hots? Can we go out for lunch, too?” Then, diving for the shells: “What’re these? Are these from Sea Ranch? Remember the kelp? Pee-you!”

“James,” Penny said, “you were supposed to be in bed half an hour ago.”

“I was, but I got back up! See, here I am!”

“No,” Penny said. “No and no.”

“Did you have trouble falling asleep?” Ryan suggested.

“Yeah, I had trouble falling asleep. I couldn’t fall asleep, it was too hard!”

“Get up from there,” Penny said, trying to lift him by his arm. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

“James, come on,” Ryan said. “I’ll take him.”

“Have Rebecca sit with him. You come back.”

Ignoring both of them, James poked through the shells. He’d helped his mother collect them, and he wondered if any of the shells in the bucket were ones he’d found. He’d had the best time at Sea Ranch, where every morning his father took him out to stomp the trails that crisscrossed the meadows so they’d still be there next summer.

“Maybe Dog can help you sleep,” Ryan said.

“Dog’s a frog,” James said. “Dog’s
dead
.”

Dog had been on a shelf below the window for weeks, and it upset Ryan that James thought of him as dead rather than resting or
waiting. Ryan remembered the day in September when his mother pointed out the picture of James holding Dog with his eyes squeezed shut, and he thought James really did love Dog but needed to be reminded.

At last James let Ryan take his hand. Ryan passed him on to Rebecca, and Rebecca got him a glass of water and followed him into his and Ryan’s room.

“I’m not tired,” he said.

“You will be.”

“I’ll never be tired again. I’m wide-awake man! Are you sleeping here? Where’s Ryan going to sleep?”

Finally he gave up and got into bed. Not trusting him to stay there, Rebecca sat at Ryan’s desk. Down the hall, her father was helping Robert, and she heard him say, very clearly, “I think they’re both important—the concepts and the practice.” This meant they were having yet another conversation about how Robert liked to solve problems before taking the time to understand them. Their father always said he sympathized with this because of his work: when he saw a child in terrible pain, or feverish and limp, he wanted to relieve the child’s misery immediately, but he couldn’t do that until he figured out what was going on. A high fever could mean a number of different things, so you had to go through the differential diagnosis. Then you came up with a treatment plan. Dx before Tx.

James sighed and rolled over, and Rebecca reached for Ryan’s badger. The fur was worn away in places, and she recalled a conversation between her father and the mother of one of Ryan’s friends. This woman said she was worried because her younger son had worn a hole straight through his security blanket from rubbing the same spot over and over, and Rebecca’s father told her not to worry. He said, “I always tell parents, just be glad he has so much love in him.”

Ryan had a lot of love in him; Rebecca knew this in her bones.
And she wasn’t sure if she did or not. She had other things, like maturity and common sense, but she felt she wasn’t quite as lovable as Ryan. Which, she understood, was not the same thing as having or not having love inside herself, though it was close. Being lovable versus being lov
ing
. She thought again of Leanne Mack and decided that she really didn’t need to consult her father.

• • •

This marked the beginning of a new phase for Rebecca. She began bringing girls like Leanne Mack home from school, inviting them for Saturdays, even sleepovers. The first time, Leanne sat on Rebecca’s bed and Rebecca stood at the record player and played different songs from
No Secrets,
always lifting the needle when a song finished and holding it above the record so she could tell Leanne what she liked about it without ruining the next song with talk. Leanne had never heard of Carly Simon and admitted to not having a record player, though when Rebecca tried to find out if that meant Leanne didn’t have one in her room or in her house, Leanne’s disjointed reply told Rebecca she should drop it.

After they had listened to all the songs Rebecca liked, Leanne accepted the album cover from Rebecca and made a comment that Rebecca would remember for years. “Do you think those are peas?” Leanne said, giggling as she looked at Carly Simon’s chest. The simple fact was that Carly Simon wasn’t wearing a bra and her nipples were sticking out. Rebecca had discovered recently that her own nipples felt good when she touched them; the lighter the touch, the better the feeling, especially if she went around in circles. Leanne’s comment was very immature and Rebecca had to try a lot harder to give her the benefit of the doubt.

That wasn’t quite it, though. She wasn’t just trying to give Leanne the benefit of the doubt; she was trying to give her whatever the
opposite of doubt was. Faith, said the antonym dictionary, but that didn’t sound right to Rebecca, as if Leanne were God or a religion. “Hope” and “charity” were words that went with “faith,” and they were more like what Rebecca was trying to give. She was trying to give Leanne a friend, which was strange, because if asked she would never describe Leanne as
her
friend. There was a difference.

She invited Edith Ketler over, too. Edith had woman-size bosoms and obviously wore a bra; you could see the indentation of the straps on her shoulders and across her back. She didn’t look at the picture of Carly Simon at all. When she slept over she put on her nightgown in Rebecca’s closet, but it was thin and clingy and Rebecca could see the exact shape and size of her bosoms, which were even more huge and hanging than Rebecca expected. Rebecca’s mother’s bosoms were small, and she began to wonder what that might mean about the future of her own body. She was curious about her future in general and sometimes thought about how every single step she took sealed off a hundred or a thousand other steps she no longer had the option of taking. Ryan disagreed and showed her, with wet footprints on her bedroom carpet, how you could step backward into your own footprints and return without a trace to the place you’d begun.

Ryan was a mama’s boy—so Robert said to Rebecca. In Robert’s view it went along with Ryan going to Sand Hill Day and augured nothing good for his future. Robert, as of March a bona fide teenager who managed to find something sarcastic to say at any and every juncture, thought Ryan needed a good kick in the pants.

“Don’t hold Mom’s hand,” Robert said. “You’re nine. And don’t hold James’s hand, either, he doesn’t need it anymore. You can put your hands in your pockets if you need something to do with them. See, look, my hands are in my pockets and I’m just walking. I’m strolling.”

The family was on its way to a recital in Atherton. They had to park almost a block away and proceed one by one up the shoulder of the road, crowding to the side when a car zoomed past. Hundred-year-old shade trees filtered the sunlight, and through gaps in walls and hedges they glimpsed neat beds of daylilies planted in front of mansions.

Halfway there, Penny said she had to return to the car for something. She got the keys from Bill and headed back.

“Come along,” he said to the children. “We’ll get seats.”

The daughter of one of his colleagues was an aspiring cellist, and her grandmother was hosting this special afternoon performance. She was to be accompanied on the piano by a prodigy Robert knew slightly from his days as a piano student, and this was one of the reasons he felt grumpy. Another was that he was dressed in a stiff blue shirt with fold marks from the cardboard. His brothers wore identical shirts, Ryan’s big in the shoulders with cuffs nearly covering his hands, and James’s a little small, which their mother had pointed out only as they were getting into the car. Their father, who had bought the shirts late the afternoon before, smiled grimly but didn’t comment, and Robert had almost wished he’d just snap a response at her. He wondered if she ever felt that way herself.

“Why,” Robert said, “do you need good seats at a recital? It’s not like you need to see.”

“He didn’t say good seats,” Rebecca said. “He just said seats. But it does matter where you sit at a recital, especially at someone’s house. The acoustics may not be that great.”

“The
acoustics
may not be that
great,
” Robert muttered, but when his father raised his eyebrows he feigned a look of distraction.

Harold Lawson stood on the gravel drive in front of the house. His wife was from an old Atherton family with roots in early San
Francisco banking, and the house was an imposing stone structure with three floors and a five-car garage. Harold had come to the Peninsula from a small town in eastern Washington, and to Bill he was a kindred spirit, modest and reserved, markedly different from both the California natives and the East Coast transplants.

“Dr. Blair,” he said, shaking Bill’s hand. “What a fine-looking family.”

“How are the jitters?” Bill said.

“Janet is fine. My wife is a wreck.”

“Like any good mother under the circumstances. Children, do you remember Dr. Lawson?”

Dr. Lawson had taken care of each of them on occasion—sent James for an X-ray, swabbed Rebecca’s throat. He was tremendously tall, and Robert had always been a little afraid of him.

“Young man,” Dr. Lawson said to him.

Robert offered Dr. Lawson his hand, and Dr. Lawson registered a flicker of surprise and possibly amusement before extending his own hand and giving Robert’s a hearty shake.

Ryan looked up at their father. “I’ll just wait out here for Mom.”

“No, let’s go in,” their father said. “She’ll be along.”

The front door opened into a large entry hall that was full of people, maybe thirty altogether. A young woman approached them, wearing a jumpsuit patterned with green and blue chevrons. She handed each of them a mimeographed program. “The recital will be in there,” she said, indicating a pair of closed double doors. “We’ll open up in just a few minutes. For now we’re asking everyone to wait in the foy-yay.”

She moved on to another family, and Rebecca said, to no one in particular, “I thought it was ‘foyer.’ ” She looked up at her father. “Isn’t it ‘foyer’?”

“Well, we knew what she meant.”

“But which is it?”

“It depends where you live, Rebeck. In France it would be ‘foy-yay.’ ”

“So here it’s ‘foyer’?”

“Rebecca,” Robert said. “You’re being a nitpicker.”

“I’m being meticulous.”

“Same diff.”

“No, it’s not. In fact, the diff between ‘nitpicker’ and ‘meticulous’ is bigger than the diff between ‘foy-yay’ and ‘foyer.’ ”

“Oh, my God,” Robert said. “I’m going to kill myself.”

“Now you’re being melodramatic.”

Robert walked away. He hadn’t wanted to come, and even his trump card—the fact that he was thirteen—hadn’t made a bit of difference. He saw that there were no other teenage boys, which was partly a relief (no one to see him here) and partly a confirmation that attending a cello recital on a Sunday afternoon was not an appropriate thing for him to be doing. What would his friends say if they could see him? The fact that he didn’t really have friends anymore made the question all the more painful. It seemed junior high meant you needed four or five people to be able to do anything, and otherwise everyone stayed home. He’d been invited to go bowling by a guy in his German class, and then on the evening before the guy called and said there weren’t enough people so he was canceling. Robert couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to anyone’s house just to play, though obviously they wouldn’t call it that.