Two Rivers (15 page)

A
week after the dance, Shelly still wasn’t speaking to me in anything but grumbles. I stood outside her door, attempting to coax her out, first with words and then with bribes. I brought home the things she loved: éclairs, maple candies, a brand new pair of tennis shoes. It was pathetic, this groveling, but I didn’t know what else to do. And nothing worked; she just wouldn’t take the bait. The éclairs grew stale in the fridge, the candies melted on the windowsill. The sneakers sat wrapped in tissue inside their box on the kitchen table. By Friday morning, I’d basically given up. I figured she couldn’t keep this up forever. I found myself grateful for Maggie’s company. At least she was still talking to me.

“I mended that rag you been wearing to work,” Maggie said, handing me my favorite work shirt, which I’d worn threadbare at the elbows.

“Looks like you ain’t been shopping in a while,” she said.

Hanna had always brought things back for me when she went shopping for Paul. I made her give me the receipts and wrote her checks to cover what she’d spent. I had enough clothes in my closet to get me through a workweek. I ignored the loose buttons and torn seams.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said, taking the shirt from her.

“
Somebody
did,” she said with a smile. “I’ll stop by that shop next to the drugstore. They got men’s clothes, right?”

“Ledoux’s,” I said. “I can go.”

“But you
won’t
go,” she said. “So I will.”

When I got home from work on Thursday night, there were two piles of clothes on the table. One pile was for me, and one was for Shelly. Somehow, with the small amount of money I’d given her, she’d managed to get me three new button-down shirts, a pair of jeans and some new socks. In Shelly’s pile were some shirts, a pair of jeans and a pale pink dress.

Maggie was sitting with her bare feet up on a chair, a washcloth across her forehead.

“You feeling okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, I just get real light-headed sometimes. If I can get my feet up quick enough then I don’t faint.”

“Is that normal?” I asked.

“I don’t need to see no doctor, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

I flinched. I
was
worried. Partly about her, and partly about how on earth I might
explain
her to Dr. Owens, the town’s only baby doctor.

“I read in a book that it’s from havin’ low blood pressure. Book said eatin’ something salty’s supposed to help.”

I went to the cupboard and started looking through the shelves. Maggie had rearranged everything: canned goods, dry goods, spices. The half-empty boxes of stale cereal had been removed. The almost-empty bottles of vinegar and sticky jars of molasses had been replaced with brand new ones and were lined up in neat little rows. She’d replaced the crummy shelving paper with new flowered yellow lining.

“How about some Jiffy Pop?” I asked, pulling the popcorn out by the metal handle.

It had been ages since I’d made Jiffy Pop. I actually recalled setting off the smoke alarm in Hanna’s kitchen the last time. (I’d burned most of the kernels, and the rest had remained un-popped and stuck to the bottom of the aluminum pan.) “Alrighty then,” I said, and peeled off the cardboard top, reading the directions as I turned the burner on.

Maggie stayed in her reclined position at the table, her eyes closed.

“Where’s Shelly?” I asked.

“Over to Hanna and Paul’s. She’s got a paper on Abraham Lincoln or something, and Hanna said she’d help her out,” Maggie said. “I told her to be home in time for supper.”

I stood at the stove, waiting for something to pop.

“Whatcha got it on,
low
?”

“No,”
I said. “It’s on
medium
.”

“Oh, that burner don’t work at all,” Maggie said, opening her eyes. She put her washcloth down on the table and stood up. She gripped the edge of the table.

“I got it,” I said. “Sit down.”

I moved the popcorn to the back burner and turned it on. Shortly it was popping, the aluminum foil was ballooning, and I was elated. I even managed to pull it off the heat in time. “Ouch,” I said, burning my fingers on the hot tin foil and steam. I poured the popcorn into a bowl and set it down in front of Maggie. “Wait!” I said as she reached in for a handful. I grabbed the saltshaker and shook it vigorously over the bowl. “There.”

Maggie grabbed a handful of popcorn and threw a piece up into the air. She opened her mouth and caught it on the tip of her tongue. I tried the same, and my first attempt landed on the floor. “Try again,” she said, laughing.

I tried again, and the popcorn landed square on my tongue.

“You feel better yet?” I asked.

“World’s stopped twirling at least,” she said, and shoveled another handful of popcorn in her mouth.

Shelly opened the front door, and seeing us sitting at the kitchen table eating popcorn, she threw her backpack down and slammed the door shut.

“C’mere, Shelly-girl. It’s just like the movies,” Maggie said. “Just without Matt Dillon.”

“Who’s that?” I asked.

Shelly rolled her eyes.

“You hungry, I hope,” Maggie said, standing up. “I got some chili on the stove.”

Shelly looked at me and scowled. “I already ate. Hanna made me supper,” she said, her lips drawn tight. “She said I need to put some meat on my bones.”

I ignored the obvious attempt to make me feel rotten and grabbed another handful of popcorn.

“Hanna says I’m welcome anytime. She even set up a bed for me in our old room. Said I could sleep over whenever I want.”

Now I was pissed. I had made it clear to Hanna that we were doing fine. I felt undermined. Betrayed.

“Look what your daddy bought you today,” Maggie said, handing Shelly the pink dress.

Shelly looked at the dress. “Probably won’t fit,” she said. “He doesn’t even know my size.”

Maggie peered at the tag and said, “Looks like he do.”

Shelly shrugged.

“Want some popcorn, honey?” I asked.

“I said I already
ate
,” she said angrily.

“You shouldn’t talk to your daddy that way,” Maggie said sternly. The change in her tone of voice took me by surprise. Shelly’s mouth gaped open, her eyes wide.

“It’s okay,” I said, feeling sorry for Shelly. “She’s just…”

“She’s
bein’
rude,” Maggie said to me. And then to Shelly, “You’re
bein’
rude. He’s your daddy. I ever talk to my daddy like that I be laid across his knee. That’s the truth. One time I sassed him in front of some church friends, and I couldn’t sit down for a whole week.”

The idea of Maggie getting a spanking seemed ludicrous. I kept forgetting how little distance was between her childhood and now. Only about four or five months.

“I’ve got homework,” Shelly said, picked up her backpack, and started for her room. But then, as if she’d had second thoughts, she grabbed the dress off the table and ran down the hallway, slamming her door behind her.

Maggie smiled at me.

“Thanks,” I said.

She tossed a piece of popcorn up into the air, and realizing it was for me, I opened my mouth and waited for it to land, salty and warm, on my outstretched tongue.

I
n August, in the season of wild blueberries and fireflies, Jeffrey Norris died in Vietnam. He was the first of our classmates to be killed. And after his body was flown home, I mowed the lawn around his new grave, thinking that the last time I’d seen him had been at graduation, and he’d used white medical tape to spell out
USA
on his mortarboard.

It was maybe a week later that I saw his mother sit down on the floor, in the middle of the post office, and weep when she received what must have been a posthumous letter from Jeffrey. It was embarrassing, this public display of grief. I was waiting in line to send my mother a package of items she had requested. Despite her earlier plans, she had decided to stay on in Mississippi through the fall. She’d asked for her Swiss Army knife, a piece of beach glass she had found on Nantucket when she was a little girl, and a check for $200. My father had packaged the objects up for her and carefully penned the address on the box. But he sent me to the post office, blaming a busy schedule. He missed her. We both did.

The post office was hot, one whirring fan spinning overhead, making shadows on the linoleum floor. When Mrs. Norris crumbled, after Larry Knowles (Missy’s father, the postmaster) handed her the parchment airmail letter, it only looked as though she’d fallen. Someone offered her a hand, as you would to someone who had slipped. But when she refused his help, and a small moan grew in her throat and escaped through the painted O of her mouth, filling the post office lobby with the animal sounds of her sorrow, the post office patrons, including myself, looked at the floor, at the large numbered clock on the wall, at anything but Mrs. Norris, legs splayed out in front of her like a child, as she grieved.

In one week, I was to leave for Middlebury, and I hadn’t packed a single thing. Betsy’s room was filled with neatly labeled cardboard boxes. She was buzzing with excitement, positively antsy. I, on the other hand, was a sentimental fool, eighteen years old going on eighty. Every afternoon in the final weeks of summer, I insisted that we visit one old haunt or another: Vanilla Cokes and Orange Crushes at the Rexall, car rides to the Heights, bike rides to the river. Betsy humored my premature nostalgia primarily because our little outings made time go more quickly; she could barely wait to leave. Her excitement about the future mixed with my longing for the past (
for her, for her
) finally made me so melancholy I could barely stand it anymore. At the post office that day, when Jeffrey Norris’s mother sat down and cried on the floor, I wanted to join her. I wanted to throw myself to the ground next to her and cry like a baby.

By the time it was time to actually go, I’d resigned myself to four years of desperate unhappiness. I saw the school year ahead as something to endure before I could return to my life in Two Rivers the following summer: three seasons of misery to suffer through. I packed reluctantly, and on the day before I was to leave, I only wanted to be with Betsy. I only wanted the last hours and minutes to decelerate, to freeze. I pictured the day as a photograph, a frozen image of the last day I would truly be happy.

Despite Betsy’s pleas to go on an adventure (drive to Canada, go to the granite quarries in Montpelier, go try to get into bars in Burlington), we ended up spending the day swimming. It was so hot and muggy, there was little else to offer relief from the heat, and I didn’t want to spend the day driving. It was the most ordinary of days. And, because of its import (in my mind at least) the most
extra
ordinary. It took every bit of my energy not to call Betsy’s attention to the significance of the smallest things (the muddy bottom of the river, the slant of sun through leaves, the frogs that joined us as we cooled off on the cool, wet rocks). By the time the sun fell, heat lightning was lighting up the sky in intermittent pink flashes of light. Lightning without thunder, a storm without rain. It made me anxious, unsettled. Betsy’s anxiety was also palpable.

“Why won’t it
rain
?” she asked, as we threw our towels around our necks and got on our bicycles to make our way back home. I had the new camera in my backpack, waiting for the right time to give it to her. As we rode through the woods, I could feel it banging against my back. (It was heavy, an Argus C-33; they called it the “Brick” because of its shape and heft.)

The rushing air against our wet skin was the only relief from the heat. I rode behind Betsy, as I always did, as she chose the path that would lead us out of the forest. My eyes stung with river water as I watched the familiar way she navigated both branches and brush, her bare feet callused and pedaling furiously. I paid no attention to where we were going; I was preoccupied with the dimples on either side of her spine, just above the waistband of her cutoffs. I only realized that we weren’t headed home when my legs began to strain with the incline. We had plans to listen to records at my house, as I finished my packing.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To watch the lightning,” she said.

Betsy surprised me with her sudden fearlessness. Normally, she would have wanted to be anywhere but out in the open like this.

Just as the sun was starting to go down, we arrived at the top of a large hill. Though the view wasn’t as spectacular as from the Heights, you could still see down on most of Two Rivers. Lightning streaked the sky, which was also brilliant with a setting sun. Betsy laid her bike down and stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the scene before us.

“Oh my God,” she said.

I nodded, behind her, where she couldn’t see me. If she had, she would have seen an eighteen-year-old boy so sick in love (with his hometown, with his life, with this girl in cutoffs before him) that the idea that this moment, like all the other moments before them, would soon be gone was almost unbearable. But she didn’t turn around; instead she faced the sunset and the exploding atmosphere, feet planted firmly on the ground and hair tangled from the ride.

I thought about the camera, but just as I was reaching into my backpack to retrieve it, Betsy flinched, just the slightest bit, slapping at the raindrop as if it were a mosquito. And then the rain was coming down in hard, cold slivers and Betsy had turned to me with that familiar look of terror.

“Come with me,” I said, reaching for her hand and pulling her down the other side of the hill where I could see a dilapidated barn in the distance. We ran across a pasture that was endlessly green and soft. Betsy could run fast, especially when in danger, and I was breathless when we reached the barn, which was, indeed, an abandoned structure. Shelter.

Inside, Betsy laughed, shaking her wet hair like a dog. It sprayed me, and the cool water felt good. “Phew!” she said.

The barn smelled heavily of hay and rain, a wet sweet smell. The roof was leaking in so many places, we had to search for a dry place to stand. There were some rusty farm tools hung on the wall, hammers, sickles: a rustic museum. Outside, the sun was rapidly setting, and I wasn’t sure how we would find our way back to our bikes, never mind find our way home, once the sun was gone. But inside that warm wooden barn with the rain pounding against the roof and the impossible violet of heat lightning illuminating the fields beyond the barn outside, I didn’t care if we never found our way home again.

“I have something for you,” I said.

“Hmm?” she asked, distracted by the sky.

I pulled the camera out and offered it to her. “It’s not the best one, but it takes good pictures. I don’t know much about photography, but the salesman said this is a good starter. It has four lenses. You can use regular thirty-five millimeter film….”

“Harper,” she said, tentatively taking the camera from me. “This is too much. This is…”

“If you want to exchange it, it won’t hurt my feelings.”

“Is there film in it?” she asked, turning the camera over and over in her hands.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“We have to take pictures of this,” she said. She held the camera up to her eye and fiddled with the lens. She clicked several times, rushing from one dry place to the next, peering out at the fracturing sky. After a while, she stopped shooting and came back to me. It was getting dark outside. She sat down on a wooden sawhorse, facing the open barn door, and set the camera down next to her. She pulled her hair behind her head and then over one shoulder, wringing out the rain. She sighed and stared out at the sight before us. “It’s a beautiful world, Harper Montgomery.”

I nodded again.

“I might not notice that sometimes, if it weren’t for you.”

I smiled.

She turned around to face me, but it had grown darker, and the brilliance of the sky behind her made it impossible to see the details of her face. I had them memorized though, so I imagined her smiling at me. I knew the way her lips curled a bit at the edges, the two faint lines at the corners of her eyes.

“Are you going to come sit with me or not?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, and ambled as coolly as I could toward her. I sat down and we faced the last remnants of the orange skyline together. Another hot pink flash of light, and she took my hand.

“Tomorrow’s just another day,” she said. “Just another beautiful day.”

I couldn’t have disagreed more, but I returned the squeeze.

The sun quickly and completely disappeared, but I didn’t let go of Betsy’s hand. The rain kept coming, thunder kept cracking, and lightning kept flashing. At least between the fireflies and the lightning, there were moments of extreme clarity, sometimes one after another. And each time the sky filled with light, I could see Betsy’s face. Single seconds to study her and speculate what she might be thinking. Finally, I summoned up courage I didn’t know I had and asked softly, “Do
you
want this?”

Betsy was so quiet, I wasn’t quite sure she’d heard me. Wasn’t sure I’d spoken at all.

“Yes,” she said, finally, and in the next flash of light I saw that her eyes were wet.

And because I wasn’t sure when the next flash would come, or if it would come at all, and because I had left everything to the last minute (as I always left everything to the last minute), and because I felt fearless and hopeless, exhausted and exhilarated, I turned to Betsy Parker, framed her face with my hands, and kissed her. And kissed her.

Our clothes were wet, stuck to our skin and difficult to peel off. I struggled with my shirt, my jeans, my shoes and socks. Betsy slithered out of her shorts and T-shirt and stood in front of me in only her panties and her bra. The skin of her stomach trembled. I went to her, wrapped my arms around her, and the second my skin touched her skin, I could barely stand it. I held her face in my hands and kissed her lips, her eyelids, her forehead. The top of her scalp. Her throat. I buried my face in her neck and kissed the skin there until my skin and her skin were hot. I wanted to disappear into her, into that incredible heat.

“Stop,” she said, pushing me back gently, and I felt my heart sink.

I backed away, hard and ridiculous. Panting.

“Take a picture?” she said. “Of me?”

“Really?”

She nodded, reached for the camera, and handed it to me. She stepped in front of the open door, the rough wood with peeling paint making a sort of agrestic frame for her silhouette. She unhooked her bra and it fell to the floor. She bent over and wriggled out of her panties. When she stood up again she was naked, her body luminous in each flash of light. I watched this through the viewfinder. I listened to the shutter click. I made myself breathe.

“It’s too dark, isn’t it?” she asked softly. “It won’t come out.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“What if we forget?” she asked, desperate. “What if you forget?”

I shook my head. “We won’t.
I
won’t. I promise.”

As we lowered our bodies to the hard floor, I thought about a lot of things. I thought about Betsy’s body, pressed against mine. I thought about those dimples I’d never noticed before, feeling them with my hands as I explored her back. The rise of her behind. The slope of her thighs. I thought about the rain on the roof and the rain that was dripping down through the roof onto my shoulders. I thought about leaving, about not wanting any of this to end. And I also thought about Jeffrey Norris, writing a letter that didn’t show up until after he was already dead. I didn’t want to be gone before Betsy Parker knew how I felt about her. I didn’t want her to read it in a letter when it was already too late. And so I whispered, “I love you.” Just a simple comma at the end of first one kiss, and then the next. I must have told her a hundred times, until, at last I had disappeared inside her, and there was no longer any need for words.