Greenville (25 page)

It’s hot enough today, though, especially up under the eaves. The sun beats against the checked blue curtains, which seem to fade visibly beneath its onslaught. Too hot to sleep, too hot to stay in bed. The girl sits up languidly, pulls on yesterday’s cutoffs, exchanges Justin’s old T-shirt for the white halter top with the blue embroidery on the sides, the one he calls her hippie halter top but loves anyway, she knows—knows from the way he comes up behind her and wraps his arms around her, folding them one over the other on the slice of bare skin between the halter top and her shorts.
Hey, hippie chick
, he says whenever he does that,
how’s about giving me some-a that free love
?

She sorts through the jumble of brushes and combs and picks and products on top of her dresser, the endless bottles and tubes of mousses and gels and sprays that seem to proliferate like buildings in a crowded city—and this is just the stuff she left behind when she moved out. Sort of moved out. Whatever she did. At any rate all she wants is a hair tie, but though she finds loose coiled hairs in plenty there’s no sign of a rubberband amid the skyline of beauty products. How
can
one person have so much hair? she thinks, looking at her unruly blonde spirals in the mirror. She pulls it back off her face with one hand, wonders yet again if she should cut it all off. Oh, but Justin loves it, she thinks. Loves the halter top, loves the hair. Well, what boy doesn’t love long curly blond hair? Yes, but Justin
loves
it.

Something catches when she goes to pull her hand away, and she feels yet another strand detach itself from the million or so remaining on her head. Her engagement ring. Oh yes, that’s right. She’s engaged. Even though she’s alone in the room, she blushes.

She holds the ring up, examines for the thousandth time and the first time the pale square-cut stone and the diamond-flecked loop that binds it to her hand. It seems like a particularly elegant hand for so early in the morning—hard to believe she’ll be waking up with that hand for the rest of her life. She looks now at the translucent filament hanging from it. It’s not the first time her hair’s gotten caught in her jewelry, won’t be the last either. She’s always liked rings, and always had problems with them—in high school her friends joked she had more hair on her palms than a Catholic choirboy. But the engagement ring with its quarter-carat pronged setting is particularly lethal. She could
make a voodoo doll with the hairs it’s pulled from her scalp. By now she’s used to it though, not just rings, but bracelets and necklaces. Her mother’s pearls—double stranded, with an ornate gold clasp. She wore them to the prom with that black dress she lost five pounds to get into, and it was practically a sadomasochistic experience when Justin pressed her to his chest during the slow songs. An auger would have done less damage to her head. But even as she thinks that she suddenly remembers: she didn’t go to the prom with Justin, but with Billy Atwater, and, a little guiltily, she untangles the hair from the ring and lets it drop to the dresser. She slips a few thin silver bangles on her wrist—three, to hear them jingle. She jingles them, then lets her hand fall to the dresser.

Billy Atwater. She can hardly bring his face to mind—when she tries all she gets is Justin’s. Is that what married life will be like? The filling in of all those murky faces in your memory by your spouse’s? Or is the replacement simpler? She looks around her old room again. God, it’s so true what they say. It really does seem smaller since she moved out.

Meanwhile her hair’s still hot and heavy on the back of her neck, and not even a barrette on the dresser. She steps into her Tevas, finds even their thin straps too constricting in this heat and kicks them off, then heads into the hall. The floorboards are worn smooth as a baby’s bottom beneath her feet. She hasn’t noticed that in years.

Twins! she calls, skiing her feet over the soft planks, avoiding by instinct the domed nailheads that rise a little out of the warped old wood. Christine, Carly! Have you been in my things again?

She looks into their empty room and the first thing she notices is the clock between the unmade beds. It’s after ten. She whirls around then, looks in her parents’ bedroom, and there on her mother’s half of the crisply made bed is a rectangular outline impressed into the taut bedspread with its repeated motif of a basket of violet irises. Her mother’s suitcase, she realizes with a pang.

She turns and heads toward the stairs.

Twins! she calls again. Are you guys in here?

What is it about those two? She calls them twice more as she heads down the steep narrow staircase—it’s almost like a ladder, she thinks, nearly tumbling, has it really only been a month since the last time she slept here?—but it’s not until she goes into the living room and pulls the rubberband out of Carly’s palm-treed pigtail that they actually look up at her.

Um, sleep much? Christine says.

Yeah, what time did you get in anyway? Carly says. She makes a production of blowing away the pale brown bangs that have fallen in her face even though they barely graze her eyebrows.

The girl walks to the mirror set in the ornate Victorian hat stand by the front door, begins the elaborate process of twisting her hair into the rubberband. It takes both hands to do it, and she can’t help but notice how her breasts press against the halter top when her arms lift up to frame her face. It seems slightly vulgar all the sudden, and she finishes her hair quickly and turns from the mirror.

What time did Mom and Dad leave?

Um, like
seven
, Christine says.

Did Mom do the pot thing?

Practically cymbals, Carly says, pantomiming.

Shit. I can’t believe I slept so late.

How
was
the movie? Christine says, smirking. Did you even
see
it?

For the first time the girl notices the scattered magazines and piles of little bits of paper all over the floor and coffee table. The piles are color-coded, red, blue, green, black. It looks like her sisters are making confetti by hand.

Um, what
are
you doing?

Carly makes a face.

We have to make these like
collage
self-portraits for camp. It’s the stupidest thing ever.

What are you guys going to be, airheads?

No, no, it’s totally cool, Christine says. She reaches around behind her and holds up a big piece of glossy white cardboard. There are lines drawn on it—some kind of sketch?—but it takes the girl a moment to realize it’s the twins’ faces because she forgot to put her contacts in and because the white spaces of the drawing seem to be filled with writing. When she squints she realizes the sketch is based on the picture they took at the fair last year, the one they had scanned onto matching T-shirts. Christine points with her finger: First we like projected that picture we took at the fair last year on this cardboard, you know, the one we had scanned onto T-shirts—

Christine like
totally
took her shirt off.

Christine blushes.

I had my swimsuit on.

Barely
.

Anyway. Then we like traced the picture, well, not the whole
picture, just like the outlines of the major color groups. It’s not as easy as you’d think because your hand keeps like making a
shadow
and then you can’t see the lines, and then when you
do
get it done you have to write in how you’re going to lay out all your colors and whatever.

She just did it just to flirt with this boy.

Did not!

Did too!

Whatever
, Christine says, blushing even more hotly.
Anyway
. After you’ve finished the
picture
. You cut out all your colors from magazines and glue them in
place
.

Paste by numbers, Carly says, blowing at her bangs. It’s like
so
eleven years old.

And what are you, twelve?

Thirteen! the twins protest in unison.

The girl blinks.

Well, all I have to say is, if that’s this month’s
Redbook
you shredded Mom’s going to murder you. She starts toward the kitchen then, then veers toward the stairs. What do you want for lunch anyway? she says, ducking instinctively at the third step, which is only six feet below the landing above. I was thinking I might barbecue asparagus. Justin’s mom gave me a recipe.

Ew, stinky pee! the twins say at the same time, falling into a paroxysm of laughter.

Upstairs the girl rummages through half-empty drawers, eventually trading the suggestiveness of the halter top for a more demure T-shirt, orange, blousy. She tries it tucked and untucked, then decides she doesn’t like the way it goes with the cutoffs and finds the ancient pair of olive cargo shorts she got at the
Army-Navy in Albany. She tucks the T-shirt in and slips on her Tevas again.

I was thinking chicken shish kebabs, she says as she descends the stairs. Or beef. Onion, cherry toms, some pineapple. I think there are green peppers in the garden too. She is in the doorway to the living room. How’s that sound?

Carly pushes her hair off her forehead.

What?

Never mind, the girl says. I’m going to the grocery store, I’ll be right back. You want anything? she calls as she leaves the room, but they are already absorbed in their picture.

That is
so
the color of poop, Christine is saying. And it is
not
going to be
my
shirt.

A magnet in the shape of a milk bottle holds a twenty-dollar bill to the refrigerator, and the girl grabs it on the way out. Outside, it’s a perfect day. Just perfect. Not nearly as hot as her south-facing bedroom, thanks to the shade of the two maples that flank the front walk and a breeze that carries the smell of phlox and manure and fresh-cut grass. Not theirs though. It looks like her father hasn’t gotten to the lawn in weeks. The grass is so long it folds over and brushes the tops of her feet in her sandals. That
is
something she noticed even before she moved out, the slight deterioration in things since Brian and Darcy left. Unmown grass, untrimmed hedges. When she got in last night her headlights had glinted over something shiny in the ditch in front of the east pasture: a six-pack of empties someone must have tossed out a window. That’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t have lasted an hour when Brian still lived here. Either he or their father would have picked them up
immediately. But with Brian gone most of her father’s time is taken up with the cows and so little things slip by. The cans have been there long enough that the grass has folded over them—it looks like the ditches haven’t been mowed at all this year—and the girl had fished them out and tossed them in the back seat before parking in the driveway and sneaking into the house, and when she pulls the door open this morning the first thing she notices is that her car reeks of stale beer. It’s an oven too, and she rolls down the window and takes the six cans to the recycling barrel before she starts it. Or, rather, tries to.

One, two, three,
start
, she says, and turns the key on the LTD. The engine turns over easily, jauntily even, just refuses to catch, and she turns the key off, gives it a little gas. Okay, two, two, three,
start
, she says, and this time the engine coughs a little at the end of its cycle, then goes quiet again. She pumps the pedal one more time, then, Three, two, three,
start
, she says, and the engine groans, coughs, splutters, and catches. She guns it a little, pats the dashboard. That’s it. That’s my girl.

At the Shop-Rite in Greenville she can’t choose between chicken or beef and picks up a package of each. It looks like a lot of meat for only four people, though, but then she remembers the boy, who always eats as if it’s his first and last time. Okay then. Canned pineapple, two big white onions, a net bag of cherry tomatoes—why her mother only plants beefsteak she’ll never know. A package of butter and a head of garlic for the asparagus. She counts the stuff in her cart. The express lane in the Greenville Shop-Rite recently went from eleven items to nine. You wouldn’t think it would make a difference but it does. She still has room for salad dressing though, and she grabs a
bottle of Lo-Cal Thousand Island on her way to the front of the store. And what was that spice Justin’s mom told her to get for the asparagus? Thyme? Parsley flakes? Something green and—marjoram, that was it. She grabs a bottle. With the marjoram she has ten items in her cart, and she transfers them all to the baby seat as if to emphasize the smallness of her load. If the checkout girl says anything, she’ll say she thought the onions counted as one thing. Like the tomatoes, she’ll say, if it comes to that.

Back at home she kicks off her Tevas outside the side door.
Of course
no one cleaned the ashes from the barbecue the last time they used it, so she has to get the shovel and bucket from the living room fireplace before she can light the coals. The twins are still in the room, which is awash in bits of paper.

I thought you were making a portrait, not a mural.

Carly frowns.

“Choices,” she says. She makes the quotation marks with her fingers.

Christine looks up. Looks at the girl, then at Carly. They frown in unison, then smile.

Right, Christine says, Justin called, even as Carly says, This guy came by.

The girl’s eyes rally between her sisters, settle on Carly.

Who came by?

I don’t know, Carly says. Christine talked to him.

The girl looks at Christine, who shrugs.

I don’t know. He said he was looking for Donnie. His dad knew him or something. I sent him to Junior Ives’.

Donnie’s not at Junior’s today, is he? I thought he was at Walsh’s.

Christine shrugs. I don’t know. I thought he was at Junior’s. That’s where I sent him.

Right, the girl says. Dad didn’t call, did he?

Carly shakes her head. He said they probably wouldn’t know anything until this afternoon. Justin called though. He said he
misses
you.

Oh, grow
up
.

On the way back out the girl grabs her mother’s garden shears from the mudroom. Hercules, drawn by the activity around the grill, has stretched out in the sun on the driveway, and the girl stoops down to scratch his swollen belly.