The Sky Is Everywhere (20 page)

“How’s he doing?”

“You know.”

“Everyone’s been asking about him. He used to stop at The Saloon every night after he returned to earth from the tree-tops.” Maria’s stirring a vat of sauce beside me, a witch at her cauldron, as I try to cover the fact that I’ve broken yet another pastry shell. I’m a lovesick mess with a dead sister. “The place isn’t the same without him. He holding up?” Maria turns to me, brushes a dark curl of hair from her perspiring brow, notes with irritation the growing pile of broken cannoli shells.

“He’s just okay, like the rest of us,” I say. “He’s been coming home after work.” I don’t add,
And smoking three bowls of weed to numb the pain.
I keep looking up at the door, imagining Joe sailing through it.

“I did hear he had a treetop visitor the other day,” Maria singsongs, back to everyone else’s business.

“No way,” I say, knowing full well that this is most likely the case.

“Yup. Dorothy Rodriguez, you know her, right? She teaches second grade. Last night at the bar, I heard that she rode up with him in the barrel high into the canopy, and
you know . . .”
She winks at me. “They picnicked.”

I groan. “Maria, it’s my uncle, please.”

She laughs, then blathers on about a dozen more Clover trysts until at last Sarah floats in dressed like a fabric shop specializing in paisley. She stands in the doorway, puts her arms up, and makes peace signs with both hands.

“Sarah! If you don’t look like the spitting image of me twenty years—sheesh, almost thirty years ago,” Maria says, heading into the walk-in cooler. I hear the door thump behind her.

“Why the SOS?” Sarah says to me. The summer day has followed her in. Her hair is still wet from swimming. When I called earlier she and Luke were at Flying Man’s “working” on some song. I can smell the river on her as she hugs me over the counter.

“Are you wearing toe rings?” I ask to postpone my confession a little longer.

“Of course.” She lifts her kaleidoscopic pantalooned leg into the air to show me.

“Impressive.”

She hops on the stool across the counter from where I’m working, throws her book on the counter. I glance at it:
Written on the Body
by a Hélène Cixous. “Lennie, these French feminists are so much cooler than those stupid existentialists. I’m so into this concept of
jouissance,
it means transcendent rapture, which I’m sure you and Joe know all about—” She plays the air with invisible sticks.

“Knew.” I take a deep breath. Prepare for the
I told you so
of the century.

Her face is stuck somewhere between disbelief and shock. “What do you mean,
knew?”

“I mean,
knew.”

“But yesterday ...” She’s shaking her head, trying to catch up to the news. “You guys frolicked off from practice making the rest of us sick on account of the indisputable, irrefutable, unmistakable true love that was seeping out of every pore of your attached-at-the-hip bodies. Rachel nearly exploded. It was so beautiful.” And then it dawns on her. “You didn’t.”

“Please don’t have a cow or a horse or an aardvark or any other animal about it. No morality police, okay?”

“Okay, promise. Now tell me you didn’t. I told you I had a bad feeling.”

“I did.” I cover my face with my hands. “Joe saw us kissing last night.”

“You’ve got to be kidding?”

I shake my head.

As if on cue, a gang of miniature Toby skate rats whiz by on their boards, tearing apart the sidewalk, quiet as a 747.

“But why, Len? Why would you do that?” Her voice is surprisingly without judgment. She really wants to know. “You don’t love Toby.”

“No.”

“And you’re dementoid over Joe.”

“Totally.”

“Then why?” This is the million-dollar question.

I stuff two cannolis, deciding how to phrase it. “I think it has to do with how much we both love Bailey, as crazy as that sounds.”

Sarah stares at me. “You’re right, that does sound crazy. Bailey would
kill
you.”

My heart races wild in my chest. “I know. But Bailey is
dead,
Sarah. And Toby and I don’t know how to deal with it. And that’s what happened. Okay?” I’ve never yelled at Sarah in my life and that was definitely approaching a yell. But I’m furious at her for saying what I know is true. Bailey
would
kill me, and it just makes me want to yell at Sarah more, which I do. “What should I do? Penance? Should I mortify the flesh, soak my hands in lye, rub pepper into my face like St. Rose? Wear a hair shirt?”

Her eyes bug out. “Yes, that’s exactly what I think you should do!” she cries, but then her mouth twitches a little. “That’s right, wear a hair shirt! A hair hat! A whole hair ensemble!” Her face is scrunching up. She bleats out, “St. Lennie,” and then folds in half in hysterics. Followed by me, all our anger morphing into uncontrollable spectacular laughter—we’re both bent over trying to breathe and it feels so great even though I might die from lack of oxygen.

“I’m sorry,” I say between gasps.

She manages out, “No, me. I promised I wouldn’t get like that. Felt good though to let you have it.”

“Likewise,” I squeal.

Maria sweeps back in, apron loaded with tomatoes, peppers, and onions, takes one look at us, and says, “You and your crazy cohort get out of here. Take a break.”

Sarah and I drop onto our bench in front of the deli. The street’s coming to life with sunburned couples from San Francisco stumbling out of B and Bs, swaddled in black, looking for pancakes or inner tubes or weed.

Sarah shakes her head as she lights up. I’ve confounded her. A hard thing to do. I know she’d still like to holler:
What in flying foxes were you thinking, Lennie?
but she doesn’t.

“Okay, the matter at hand is getting that Fontaine boy back,” she says calmly.

“Exactly.”

“Clearly making him jealous is out of the question.”

“Clearly.” I sink my chin into my palms, look up at the thousand-year-old redwood across the street—it’s peering down at me in consternation. It wants to kick my sorry newbie-to-the-earth ass.

“I know!” Sarah exclaims. “You’ll seduce him.” She lowers her eyelids, puckers her lips into a pout around her cigarette, inhales deeply, and then exhales a perfect smoke blob. “Seduction always works. I can’t even think of one movie where it doesn’t work, can you?”

“You can’t be serious. He’s so hurt and pissed. He’s not even speaking to me, I called three times today . . . and it’s me, not you, remember? I don’t know how to seduce anyone.” I’m miserable—I keep seeing Joe’s face, stony and lifeless, like it was last night. If ever there was a face impervious to seduction, it’s that one.

Sarah twirls her scarf with one hand, smokes with the other. “You don’t have to
do
anything, Len, just show up to band practice tomorrow looking F-I-N-E, looking
irresistible.”
She says
irresistible
like it has ten syllables. “His raging hormones and wild passion for you will do the rest.”

“Isn’t that incredibly superficial, Ms. French Feminist?”

“Au contraire, ma petite.
These feminists are all about celebrating the body, its
langage.”
She whips the scarf in the air. “Like I said, they’re all after
jouissance.
As a means, of course, of subverting the dominant patriarchal paradigm and the white male literary canon, but we can get into that another time.” She flicks her cigarette into the street. “Anyway, it can’t hurt, Len. And it’ll be fun. For me, that is ...” A cloud of sadness crosses her face.

We exchange a glance that holds weeks of unsaid words.

“I just didn’t think you could understand me anymore,” I blurt out. I’d felt like a different person and Sarah had felt like the same old one, and I bet Bailey had felt similarly about me, and she was right to. Sometimes you just have to soldier through in your own private messy way.

“I couldn’t understand,” Sarah exclaims. “Not really. Felt—
feel
so useless, Lennie. And man, those grief books suck, so formulaic, total hundred percent dreck.”

“Thanks,” I say. “For reading them.”

She looks down at her feet. “I miss her too.” Until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to me she might’ve read those books for herself also. But of course. She revered Bailey. I’ve left her to grieve all on her own. I don’t know what to say, so I reach across the bench and hug her. Hard.

A car honks with a bunch of hooting doofuses from Clover High in it. Way to ruin the moment. We disengage, Sarah waving her feminist book at them like a religious zealot—it makes me laugh.

When they pass, she takes another cigarette out of her pack, then gently touches my knee with it. “This Toby thing, I just don’t get it.” She lights the smoke, keeps shaking the match after it’s out, like a metronome. “Were you competitive with Bailey? You guys never seemed like those King Lear type of sisters. I never thought so anyway.”

“No we weren’t. No ... but ... I don’t know, I ask myself the same thing—”

I’ve crashed head-on into that something Big said last night, that awfully huge something.

“Remember that time we watched the Kentucky Derby?” I ask Sarah, not sure if this will make sense to anyone but me.

She looks at me like I’m crazy. “Yeah, uh, why?”

“Did you notice the racehorses had these companion ponies that didn’t leave their sides?”

“I guess.”

“Well, I think that was us, me and Bails.”

She pauses a minute, exhales a long plume of smoke, before she says, “You were both racehorses, Len.” I can tell she doesn’t believe it though, that she’s just trying to be nice.

I shake my head. “C’mon, be real, I wasn’t. God, no way. I’m not.” And it’s been no one’s doing but my own. Bailey went as crazy as Gram when I quit my lessons.

“Do you want to be?” Sarah asks.

“Maybe,” I say, unable to quite manage a yes.

She smiles, then in silence, we both watch car after car creep along, most of them filled with ridiculously bright rubber river gear: giraffe boats, elephant canoes, and the like. Finally she says, “Being a companion pony must suck. Not metaphorically, I mean, you know, if you’re a horse. Think about it. Self-sacrifice twenty-four/seven, no glory, no glamour ... they should start a union, have their own Companion Pony Derby.”

“A good new cause for you.”

“No. My new cause is turning St. Lennon into a femme fatale.” She smirks. “C’mon, Len, say yes.”

Her
C’mon, Len
reminds me of Bails, and the next thing I know, I hear myself saying, “Okay, fine.”

“It’ll be subtle, I promise.”

“Your strong suit.”

She laughs. “Yeah, you’re so screwed.”

It’s a hopeless idea, but I have no other. I have to do something, and Sarah’s right, looking sexy, assuming I
can
look sexy, can’t hurt, can it? I mean it is true that seduction hardly ever fails in movies, especially French ones. So I defer to Sarah’s expertise, experience, to the concept of
jouissance,
and Operation Seduction is officially under way.

 

I HAVE CLEAVAGE. Melons. Bazumbas. Bodacious tatas. Handfuls of bosom pouring out of a minuscule black dress that I’m going to wear in broad daylight to band practice. I can’t stop looking down. I’m stacked, a buxom babe. My scrawny self is positively zaftig. How can a bra possibly do this? Note to the physicists: Matter can indeed be created. Not to mention that I’m in platforms, so I look nine feet tall, and my lips are red as pomegranates.

Sarah and I have ducked into a classroom next to the music room.

“Are you sure, Sarah?” I don’t know how I got myself into this ridiculous
I Love Lucy
episode.

“Never been more sure of anything. No guy will be able to resist you. I’m a little worried Mr. James won’t survive it though.”

“All right. Let’s go,” I say.

The way I get down the hallway is to pretend I’m someone else. Someone in a movie, a black-and-white French movie where everyone smokes and is mysterious and alluring. I’m a woman, not a girl, and I’m going to seduce a man. Who am I kidding? I freak out and run back to the classroom. Sarah follows, my bridesmaid.

“Lennie, c’mon.” She’s exasperated.

There it is again,
Lennie, c’mon.
I try again. This time I think of Bailey, the way she sashayed, making the ground work for her, and I glide effortlessly through the door of the music room.

I notice right away that Joe isn’t there, but there’s still time until rehearsal starts, like fifteen seconds, and he’s always early, but maybe something held him up.

Fourteen seconds: Sarah was right, all the boys are staring at me like I’ve popped out of a centerfold. Rachel almost drops her clarinet.

Thirteen, twelve, eleven: Mr. James throws his arms up in celebration. “Lennie, you look ravishing!” I make it to my seat.

Ten, nine: I put my clarinet together but don’t want to get lipstick all over my mouthpiece. I do anyway.

Eight, seven: Tuning.

Six, five: Tuning still.

Four, three: I turn around. Sarah shakes her head, mouths
unfreakingbelievable.

Two, one: The announcement I now am expecting. “Let’s begin class. Sorry to say we’ve lost our only trumpet player for the festival. Joe’s going to perform with his brothers instead. Take out your pencils, I have changes.”

I drop my glamorous head into my hands, hear Rachel say, “I told you he was out of your league, Lennie.”