Best Friends Forever (6 page)

After lunch, my mother would return to the screened-in sunporch, taking along a notebook and a pitcher of iced tea. My father would return to the basement or the garage. Jon would dump his dishes in the sink, jump on his bike, and vanish until dinnertime. I’d pack snacks—cherries and pretzels, apples and granola bars—and wait for Valerie to determine our afternoon activity. She was ful of ideas, and I was happy to go along with them. Let’s try to

skateboard down Summit Drive, she’d say, and off we’d go, to borrow a skateboard and give it a try. Or, Let’s ride our bikes to the

mal and see a movie! I was terrified of biking on busy roads, but even more terrified of tel ing Val that and having her find another friend, so I’d fol ow her, the taste of copper pennies in my mouth as I pedaled, my hands greased with sweat as I gripped the handlebars for the length of the two-mile trip.

Most days, though, we’d end up at the pool. Jon and I had summer passes to the Kresse Rec Center. Once Val’s bike was unpacked, we’d ridden there together. While I’d careful y locked my bike to the bike rack, Val had squinted at the sign above the desk that said admission was fifty cents. “I don’t have any money,” she’d said.

“Oh.” My face heated up. This was a complication that hadn’t occurred to me.

“We could go back home. I’ve got my al owance…”

“Let me think,” said Val. She frowned at the sign. “Wait here,” she said, then hopped back on her bike. A few minutes later she was back, flushed and sweaty and looking pleased.

“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what we’l do.” Her plan was for me to present my card to the bored, magazine-reading, gumchomping teenage girl at the booth, then spread out my towel at the far edge of the deck, near the chain-link fence, and slip the card through the fence to Valerie, who’d use it to get herself in.

“But isn’t that stealing?” I asked.

Val shook her head. “You’re real y just paying for the lifeguards, and I don’t need a lifeguard. I’m a very good swimmer. In California, I swam in the ocean.” I was meant to be impressed by this, and I was. I locked my bike to the rack, flashed my card at the girl behind the desk, who barely looked up from her Cosmopolitan, and made my way to the edge of the concrete. A minute later, Val was there waiting for me. I rol ed my card into a tube, looked around to make sure no one was watching, and passed it through one of the chain-link diamonds. A minute later, Val was walking past the pool, a raggedy towel tucked under her arm, the knot of her bathing suit halter top sticking up from the back of her T-shirt. “See?” she said, spreading her towel out next to mine.

“No big deal.”

On rainy days we’d stay in the kitchen, making concoctions of peanut butter and coconut flakes and whatever else we could scrounge from the pantry, or we’d go to the basement and take turns doing laps with my old pair of rol er skates while listening to Val’s favorite (and as far as I could tel , only) record, a 45 of Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler.” Sometimes my father would sing along.

One Saturday morning, Val gave her usual knock at our door, then, as had become her habit on the weekends, pushed it open and presented herself at the kitchen table. “Hey, Addie, can you come over? My mom and I are going to paint my room.”

I looked at my parents. My father was scrambling eggs. My mother stood at the sink, rins-ing juice glasses and humming to herself. “It’s fine with me,” she said. “Do you girls want some breakfast first?”

Valerie did. Perched on the edge of her seat at the kitchen table, al skinny legs and scabbed elbows, she polished off a plateful of eggs and French toast and bacon, then squirmed impatiently as my mother rejected the first two outfits I tried on, final y okaying an old pair of shorts and a ripped T-shirt previously destined for the rag pile. Val and I ran out the front door, dashed across my lawn, grabbed each other’s hands, and sprinted across the street.

After her parents had died, Mrs. Adler had inherited the house on Crescent Drive. Her brother, Val’s uncle who lived in Sheboygan, had gotten al of the furniture, and so far, Mrs.

Adler hadn’t bought anything new. There was a folding table and two metal chairs in the kitchen, a television set that stood on four orange milk crates in the living room, and in front of it, the DiMeos’ old couch, a hulking antique made of red velvet and carved dark wood that I guessed the uncle either hadn’t wanted or couldn’t fit through the door.

When the DiMeos had lived there, the bedroom at the top of the stairs was crowded with a queen-size bed, two side tables, and a squat club chair covered in cabbage-rose print fabric. Now the room was almost empty, and the yel ow carpet

—pristine in spots where the bed and club chair had stood, sun-faded and stained everywhere else—was covered by a sheet of plastic. No, not a sheet. There were actual y multiple sheets of Saran Wrap lining the carpet, and someone—either Valerie or Mrs.

Adler—had

Scotch-taped

them

together. Bare light switches jutted out of the wal s, and strips of tape lined the edges where the wal met the ceiling and the floor. A third strip of tape split the wal in half. Two alu-minum pie tins, one fil ed with pink paint, the other with green, sat on the Saran Wrap. Val’s flimsy wooden dresser and single bed in its metal frame had been pushed into the center of the room. Lying on the bed, propped on one elbow, was Mrs. Adler.

“Good morning, Addie,” she said, in her drawling voice. Her running shorts—navyblue cotton with white piping—were as brief as the ones Daisy Duke wore on The Dukes of Hazzard reruns, and she didn’t have a bra on underneath her white cotton T-shirt. She smel ed like mentholated cigarettes and Breck shampoo, and looked more like a teenager than like a regular mother, barefoot with her hair pul ed back in a blue bandanna and a thin gold chain around her neck.

“What does your mother do al day?” I’d asked Val once, when we were at the Kresse Park pool, treading water in the deep end (I stayed close enough to the wal to grab it if I had to). Al of the mothers I knew were busy. They complained about it al the time—“I’m frantic,”

they’d say, or “I’m exhausted!” They drove carpools and led scout meetings and taught Sunday school; they shopped and gardened and cooked and cleaned. Some of them had part-time or ful -time jobs in doctors’ offices or banks or shops. Then there was poor Mrs.

Shea at the corner of Crescent Drive, who had eleven children and spent al of her days doing laundry, or going to the grocery store to pick up her daily five gal ons of milk. But Mrs. Adler didn’t seem to do anything. She was always home, curled up on the couch watching soap operas, or lying on a towel in the backyard, wearing a white crocheted bikini, listening to the little boom box that she kept plugged in on the porch.

“She gets alimony,” Val had told me, explaining that alimony was money her explaining that alimony was money her father paid her mother so that her mother could take care of herself and Valerie.

“But what does she do al day?” I’d asked again.

Val had shrugged under the water. “I guess she waits,” she said. “She waits for it to be night.”

In Val’s room, I ducked my head shyly as I said hel o. Mrs. Adler made me nervous. It wasn’t just that she looked like a teenager. She behaved like one, too. She cursed, and smoked, and sat in the corner of the kitchen having long, tense conversations on the telephone with a boyfriend back in California. She did not believe in balanced meals, and thought that popcorn and Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup was a decent dinner, even a decent breakfast in a pinch. Sometimes she’d let Val go days between showers—if she’d been swimming, she said, that was close enough. Val had no official bedtime. She got to watch whatever she wanted on TV, even movies and Tales from

the Crypt on HBO, whereas Jon and I were always getting herded into the bathroom to wash our hands or upstairs to do our homework, and we didn’t even have premium cable. Mrs.

Adler, who was always saying Cal me Naomi, seemed sometimes like an impatient babysitter, waiting for Valerie’s real parents to come home and relieve her of her duties so that she could go live her actual life.

That morning she’d been lying on Val’s bed with her torso curved around a clamshel that she’d been using for an ashtray. “My daughter”—she indicated Val with a cocked elbow—“wants a pink-andgreen room.”

“It’s pretty,” said Val.

“What should I do?” I couldn’t wait to kick off my shoes and tie back my hair in a borrowed bandanna, to baptize myself in pink and green paint.

“Grab a rol er.” Mrs. Adler yawned, then fished a mother-of-pearl lighter and a box of Salem Lights from her pocket.

“Ugh. Ma!” Val coughed. “Remember? Lung cancer?”

Mrs. Adler flicked her fingers at her daughter cheerful y. “We’re al gonna go sometime.” I watched, entranced, as she extracted a cigarette from the crushed pack, tapped it against the crinkled plastic, lit it, and sucked in the smoke.

“She’s disgusting,” Val announced. I waited for the reprimand, for the don’t-you-talk-to-your-mother-that-way that surely would have fol owed such a remark in my house. It never came. Mrs. Adler gave me a sly, pleased look— That Valerie! Isn’t she something? She blew twin plumes of smoke out of her nostrils, then tapped the ash on the lip of the clamshel .

I crossed the room, my bare feet sticking to the Saran Wrap, and picked up a rol er, aware that Mrs. Adler was watching me and looking amused. “Addie Downs,” she said (talking about me like I wasn’t even there was one of Mrs. Adler’s favorite things).

“The good influence.”

I bobbed my head affirmatively and dabbed pink paint on the wal . Valerie, meanwhile, was slathering green on the bottom half of her section in speedy strokes, splashing droplets on the plastic, like she couldn’t get the wal paper to disappear quickly enough. I watched her, my forehead scrunched, as the paint pooled and beaded up on top of the wal paper.

“Um,” I said. Mrs. Adler raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t you supposed to take the wal paper off before you paint?”

Mrs. Adler looked at me, then at the wal .

“Huh.”

Valerie threw her rol er onto the SaranWrapped floor, leaving a big blotch of mint.

“MOM!” she yel ed. I tensed, waiting for Mrs. Adler to tel Valerie not to raise her voice, but Mrs. Adler just shrugged.

“Honey, I never said I was an expert,” she said, and ground out her cigarette in the clamshel .

“We could ask my dad,” I volunteered. “He could help us. He did Jon’s room last winter. I think that he rented a steamer from somewhere. You steam the paper first, and then you scrape it off, and then you paint the wal with white stuff. Primer, I think.”

“Huh,” said Mrs. Adler. “This is starting to sound complicated.” Valerie, meanwhile, was staring at the half-painted wal with her chin trembling.

“You STINK,” she said without looking at her mother. “You are the WORST MOTHER

EVER. We’re doing this al wrong!”

Mrs. Adler uncoiled herself from the bed, planted her feet on the floor, placed her hands on her hips, and leaned backward. Her hair spil ed out of the back of the bandanna, brushing the smal of her back.

“You’re right,” she said, not sounding especial y concerned. “I have screwed this up completely. Then again, I never claimed to be a professional.”

“You didn’t have to be a professional!” Val yel ed. “Al you had to do was read a book or something!”

“You’re right,” Mrs. Adler said again.

“Read an article, ” Val said miserably. “You could’ve just read an article. ”

“Let me make it up to you,” said Mrs. Adler. She put her hand on Val’s shoulder. Val shook it off, rattling her mother’s silver bangles. “You can’t. This is a disaster. Al I wanted was a nice pretty room, with PINK

and GREEN, a nice room like Addie has, and you said that I could…”

“My dad can help,” I offered again, but no one was listening. I recognized that this was a bad situation, but I was stil flushed with pleasure: Val wanted a room like I had.

“Disaster,” Mrs. Adler agreed. “You’re right. I vote we go clamming.”

Valerie sniffled. “I don’t want to go clamming. I just want to paint my room, and you promised that I could.”

“It’s one of the last nice weekends of the summer. We can paint your room anytime. But summer won’t last forever.”

Valerie frowned. “How are we supposed to get to Cape Cod?”

“We can drive.”

I inched toward the bedroom door, unsure whether this was a private conversation, but reluctant to leave. Three years ago, my parents and Jon and I had driven to Lake Charlevoix and rented a cabin for a week. The cabin had been cobwebby and had smel ed musty, and on the way up I’d shared the backseat with Jon, who’d spent hundreds of miles farting and then categorizing the smel of each of his farts (“This one smel s like a McDonald’s ham-burger…ooh, here comes baby food”). I’d pinched my nose shut and kicked his legs, tel ing him to stay on his side of the seat. Jon had grabbed my seat belt and pul ed it until I felt like I couldn’t breathe. My father had snapped at us (“That’s enough, you two!”), and my mother had tried to distract us with the license-plate game, which was hard to concentrate on when you were trapped in what smel ed like a bowel movement on wheels.

“It’l take, like, two days,” Val was saying. She’d gotten an atlas from between her mattress and her box spring and spread it open on the floor. “You see? This, right here?” She stabbed the state with her finger. “That’s Il inois, and this…” She stabbed the map again. “Is Massachusetts. And this…” She whacked the page so hard that it rattled. “Is Cape Cod. Al the way up here at the top.”

Mrs. Adler adjusted her bandanna. “When does school start?” She looked at her daughter. Valerie looked at me. I swal owed.

“September third.”

“That’s not for another week!” Mrs. Adler said. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

Val pouted. “We need a license.”

“We’l use Poppy’s.”

“And a canoe…”

“We can borrow a canoe. Come on, come on, come on!” Mrs. Adler was saying. “It’l be an adventure! Go find your swimsuit!”

“We should cal Poppy first.”

“And a toothbrush! Pack your toothbrush!

”

“Is there gas in the car? Do you have money for gas?”