Durable Goods (3 page)

When Diane has finished, I stand up and thank her. “What are you wearing?” she asks.

“My black straight skirt, and my hot-pink blouse, with the big buttons.”

“All right,” she says, and I exhale, relieved. “You can wear a pair of my nylons,” she says.

“I can?”

“Don’t run them, and you wash them out good when you’re done.”

She hands me her garter belt and a pair of light-brown stockings rolled up perfectly and smelling like baby powder. She sighs then, a sadness in her, and waves me out of her room. I close her door quietly, to thank her.

I
arrive first. Cherylanne is wearing a light-pink blouse and a pink skirt, nylon stockings, and pink flats with jewels all over the tops of them. “Well, I didn’t know
you
were wearing pink!” she says. She doesn’t even notice my eyebrows.

“Mine’s hot pink,” I say.

“Well, I am going to have to change,” she says, scowling.

“
I
will,” I say. “Sorry.” I go home and put on a yellow blouse, the first one I put my hand to. I want to get out of the house before my father comes home. He has already told me I could go, but he is an expert at changing his mind.

D
ownstairs, I hear the grandfather clock strike one. I cannot sleep. I feel a sweet warmth lying across my chest. I have gone over and over the events of the party. I want only to know how to work
time, to make the party come back again and stay longer.

I get up, bring my pillow with me into the living room to press it against the air conditioner for a moment. Then I stretch out on the couch, lay my head against the coolness. I close my eyes, feel myself again in the arms of Paul Arnold. We slow-danced to “Theme from
A Summer Place”
moved around and around in our intimate circle. Cherylanne turned the lights off as soon as her parents shut their bedroom door. I pushed my face into Paul’s neck, felt the bristles at the end of his haircut, smelled his aftershave, its mysterious combination of scents that were not woman’s. He was wearing black pants, a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a watch, and a ring with a red stone. He danced with me over and over, pulling me closer each time. I knew he was tired of Cherylanne and he didn’t like Vicky Andrews for the way she bragged, so he was mine for the night. When we played spin the bottle, he was first and he cheated. He put his hand on the bottle to stop it when it pointed at me. Then, despite the complaints from the others, he looked right at
me, held out his hand. He led me into the kitchen while Cherylanne watched the door. I had never felt so mature. I stood still in the center of the dark room.

“Have you done this before?” he asked.

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.” He put his hands on my shoulders. “First, you relax.”

I stepped back and he followed me. I stepped back again, bumped into a kitchen chair, and nearly fell. I looked up, laughed, and he kissed me on the lips. I felt electrocuted. I never knew bodies were capable of this. I put my arms around his neck. I kissed him back. And then it was over and he took me by the hand and led me out. Cherylanne grabbed my arm and pulled me aside. “Now,” she whispered in my ear, “you are a woman.”

I was the one. I was the most important one at the party.

I run my hand across my chest. Something. Yes. I can feel something. Maybe when your brain decides you’re a woman, your body gets going.

I flip the pillow over, breathe in deep. Sometimes life is so hard and then bingo, it’s like happiness is pushing at your back, waiting to come out your front.

T
he next day, I see Paul at the swimming pool. I am ready. I have Vaseline on my lips. But he has forgotten everything. He waves casually at me, then keeps talking to a girl in a polka-dot bikini. She is wearing a matching headband and a gold ankle bracelet. I cannot turn away. I stare at them like you watch a cut bleed.

“Well, what did you expect?” Cherylanne asks later as we lay by the side of the pool, drying off. “Just ’cause they kiss you doesn’t mean they love you!”

She says this with her eyes closed, her face pointed at the sky. I turn toward her. I want to ask why not. I
feel
why not. But I say nothing. I sit up and draw with the water that drips from my fingertips onto the concrete. I make a little heart, then an
X
. Then I say, “I do mean to leave here, Cherylanne. I want to run away.”

She turns toward me, shields her face from the sun. “Is this more of your little Dickie Mac dream?”

“It isn’t a dream. Maybe he doesn’t have to fall in love with me, but he likes me and he has a truck and I know I can get him to take me somewhere.”

“What about Diane?”

“She can come, too. So can you.”

“Why should I come?”

Why, indeed. Cherylanne likes Texas. Her father has a job in the army where he can stay put. Plus, he never hurts her. He doesn’t even yell. He gives her extra money when she asks for it for the movies, tells her with a wink not to tell Belle. If Bubba would die, her life would be perfect.

“You’re not going anywhere, either,” Cherylanne says. “So just stop talking about it. Let’s go practice back dives.” She stands up, hikes up the straps of her suit, pulls down on the bottom, puts her hand petulantly on her hip. “Come
on!”
I have to come. I can’t get her too mad at me. I am always on thin ice, being so much younger than she is. At school, I am not allowed to sit with her in the
lunchroom or say anything to her in the halls. But in the neighborhood, I can know her.

I stand up, but rather than concentrate on back dives so I can assign them a number value, I let my own thinking in. Cherylanne is probably right: Dickie will never agree to take me away, even if Diane sits between us. But there is an alternative. My mother could come back. This thought is dangerous, something I shouldn’t do, like a sin. But I fall into the luxury of it, let it have me like quicksand. I think, she could be
not
dead. Her sickness made her look dead. But then right after we left the grave site, she woke up and said, “Just a minute, just a minute, I am still alive.” Someone helped her out of the casket and said, “Well, for heaven’s sake, let me call your family.” But she said, “Oh, no, let me rest a little and surprise them.” Now she was ready, and when I got home from swimming, there she would be, making dinner, and she would see me and rush to take the wet towel from me, say, “Why, honey, look at you. Why don’t you dry off and I’ll fix us a snack.” She would give me red Jell-O, slices of banana suspended in it like magic. She would be making scalloped potatoes and ham for dinner because
they were my favorite. She would be singing in her shy voice, and when it was time for my father to come home, she would watch out the window for him. She always did. And he would come home and his happiness in seeing her would set him right. I knew rightness was in him. I’d seen it. Once Cherylanne and I were in the book section of the PX. She was picking out magazines, and I was reading a horse book, one of the Black Stallion ones. I saw my father at the same time he saw me. I put the book back fast, waited for some punishment. But he wasn’t mad. He took the book off the shelf, asked me, “What’s this?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

He flipped through a few pages, then looked down at me. “You want this?”

“I don’t know. I guess. Okay.”

“Come on, then,” he said, and he bought it for me. The only thing better would have been if he’d said, “Give me your magazine, Cherylanne. I’ll take care of that, too.” But that would have been too much. I have a bad habit of doing that, wanting too much. Once I kissed a horny toad to see if he’d change into a prince. I thought all I had to do was
believe hard enough. I kissed him where his lips would have been if he’d had any. Then I watched him carefully. No blinding flash. No small, seizure-like tremors to show he was ready to turn. No glimmer of humanness coming to his round, yellow eyes. He stayed a horny toad through and through. Still, looking at him close up like that let me see his holiness. I rubbed his tough underbelly and he cut loose on my hand. Scared, I guess. I dropped him too hard and he ran away.

But my father did buy me that book, for no reason. I know it happened, because I still have it. And always at Christmas, he buys everything we put on our lists. Except not my mother’s. On her list she would put “Stationery. Bath oil. Gloves.” He would buy her negligees, filmy things the color of butter or twilight. He would buy her cashmere sweaters, ropes of pearls. She would hold them up and say, “How beautiful. Oh, how lovely,” and then put them away. I never did see her wear any of those things. I was allowed to look at them, spread them across her wide bed in different arrangements when my father wasn’t home. I couldn’t put anything on, though.

He did it this past year, too, the first Christmas
without my mother. That part stayed the saune. He bought so much for Diane and me and watched us open everything, and it made me so ashamed, that bigger and bigger pile of presents. “Oh,
thank
you,” we always say after we open each one, and he nods, not saying a word. He’s sorry, that’s all. Sometimes he tells you he is sorry about the way he is. And then, you can’t help it, you feel sorry for him. My mother in her apron, breaking off the ends of the green beans, then putting them into the colander: “You must understand that he doesn’t always know what he is doing. He doesn’t mean it.” Her forgiving hands along either side of my face, her close and still look into my eyes. “You must understand this, all right?”

Me, taking a bean, being so bold. Saying, “Okay, all right,” and then leaving a room full of lies that could burn you if they took another form.

C
herylanne surfaces like a seal in the blue water. She stays in the spot where she came up, treading water, pushing her hair off her face, squinting in the sun. “How was that one?” she asks.

I hadn’t been watching. “Ten,” I say. “Perfect.”

“I thought so!” she yells and then swims to the side of the pool, pulls herself up the ladder, swaying her butt back and forth, her happiness dance.

I see the lifeguard Cherylanne has a crush on come out of the changing room. He will take a dip before he mounts the chair; he always does. When Cherylanne comes over to me, I point in his direction. “Look who’s here.”

She pales slightly, sets her mouth for duty. “Let’s go.”

The lifeguard is in the shallow end of the pool, splashing water on his muscles. The woman he is talking to is wearing a black suit made strictly for a grown-up. She has a puffed-out blond hairdo, draw-on eyebrows, and spiky black lashes. She has kept on her dangly silver earrings and a bracelet. It’s a cinch that woman will not be swimming one stroke. She
moves her hands through the water gently, her fingers ballet posed. Then she leans over slightly, revealing her big bosom, looks up to smile at Cherylanne’s man, and he smiles right back at her. I have told Cherylanne she should forget about this lifeguard. Obviously he is too old for her, way in his twenties. But Cherylanne likes older men, ever since she read some story a couple years ago about what she called a May-December romance. “What’s that mean?” I asked.

“You
know,” she said.
“She
is May, and
he
is December.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

But I know now, and I know, too, that my job is to splash the competition to make her makeup run, to make her hair flatten against her cheeks. I slide into the pool, take a deep breath, swim underwater until I am nearly beside the lifeguard and the woman. Then I surface and swim close by them, kicking violently.

“Hey!” The lifeguard jumps back, pulls his sunglasses off his face. The woman giggles, holds her hands up before her as though they were a shield. Cherylanne smiles at me from the edge of the pool,
nods. But nothing happens. The lifeguard resumes his conversation with the woman, stands even closer to her. He does not stand back in horror as we’d hoped, then swim over to Cherylanne to say, “Ah. A natural type. Not afraid to get her hair wet, and a good back diver to boot.” Cherylanne’s smile fades.

I swim over to her, spread my arms out along the side of the pool. “Didn’t work,” I say. I let my legs rise up, kick them slowly under the water. My cuts are all healed.

Cherylanne is still watching her competitor. “I hate her,” she says. “She’s so trashy. She probably paid ten cents for that bathing suit.”

I look across the pool and see that Paul Arnold has stretched his towel and himself out beside the girl in polka dots. He is tuning her transistor radio. I turn to Cherylanne. “Let’s go. We are about all struck out here.”

W
e are at the snack bar, eating french fries covered with enough catsup to be camouflage. Cherylanne sighs, pokes at one fry with another.

“What?” I say.

“I am so tired of only
wait
ing,” she says. Here is why we are friends. Sometimes she says something and I know so much what she means I could have said it myself, and at the same exact time, too.

I reach out to touch her arm. “I know.”

Her eyes widen and she sits up. I think for a moment I have cured her. But then she says, “Your dad’s coming.”

I turn around and see him crossing the room toward me, covering the distance quickly with his long strides. He is a tall man. But that’s not what people say about him. They say he is big. I am confused by the urgent look on his face. I think for a moment that he is coming again to tell me my mother has died. But it is not that: he is upset about something else. When he reaches our table, I wave, say, “Hi.”

“Where’s your sister?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. Sometimes on Saturdays she goes shopping.”

He looks away, considering this, then back at me. “What are you doing here?”

I point to the french fries. “Eating.”

He stares at the towel wrapped around me, the plastic sandals on my feet. “Get home.”

Cherylanne has not moved. She has barely looked up. “I have to go,” I tell her. She nods.