Strays (10 page)

“She’s going to go on about how fat she is, okay? So let her and then say, ‘Stop being hard on yourself.’”

“I can’t tell her what to do. I just met her.”

“She’s fishing for a compliment. I’m telling you, man, she’s yours if you want her.”

I want to tell Astin I wouldn’t know where to start. Instead I say, “My father made me promise I wouldn’t get married, and my devoted mother told me once the only thing any woman would ever want me for is to get a piece of the business.”

He twists the throttle and we spurt ahead. “You know,” he shouts, “if those fuckers were alive, I’d go over there and set their house on fire.”

“Too late for that. Anyway, thanks for telling me what to say to Wanda.”

“Teddy, man. Relax. It’s just a day at the pool with a couple of girls.”

I’m not going to tell him I’ve never been anywhere with even one girl.

Megan and Wanda are waiting for us. Wanda’s not more than an inch taller than I am; she’s solid and strong when we shake hands. She’s barefoot in loose pants and a V-neck top. Megan’s wearing some kind of pool cover-up; she looks like a statue about to be unveiled to thunderous applause.

She kisses Astin like we’re not there, so Wanda leads me toward the kitchen. “I’d tell them to get a room,” she says, “but they would, and where would that leave us?”

I can hardly see the counter for all the stuff from Bristol Farms, a market so upscale that my parents went there to point at things, like they were on a field trip.

I say, “That would leave us alone with enough food for six people.”

Wanda pretends to think that over. “You know, that doesn’t sound all that bad.”

She gets a lot of potato salad on a big spoon. “C’mon. Friends don’t let friends eat alone.” She hands me a napkin as she says, “My goal today is to gain five pounds and fall asleep in the sun. What’s yours?”

Just to not do or say the wrong thing. But I tell her, “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll gain five pounds too.”

“There you go. I like you already.”

You wouldn’t say that if you’d gone to my other school.

I take a couple of spareribs and some slaw and follow her out toward the pool with its tables and chairs and umbrellas.

Wanda balances her plate of food and her Coke, then falls onto a red chaise. Its cushions match the bougainvillea that tumbles down the nearest wall.

“What’s it like at the Rafters’?” she asks.

I have to remind myself that she’s just making conversation.

“It’s okay, I guess.”

“That thing with your parents. That had to be hard. Did a cop come to the door and everything?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wow, Teddy. Just like in the movies.” She shakes her head. “Man, the things that happen to people. Astin’s hair caught on fire once.”

“On the way over here, he was talking about arson. What’s going on with him and matches?”

She checks to see that we’re out of earshot. “His parents used, and they’d get high and leave him alone or leave him alone so they could score. So he’d get out the old Bic. My dad was just waiting for him to torch the Rafters’.”

“How did your dad know Astin?”

“He knew Bob from church.”

“I heard your folks are seeing the sights.”

“You can say that again.” She chews as she shrugs. “Every week another postcard: the Grand Canyon, Pikes Peak, Mount Rushmore. Every week the same message: ‘Glad you’re not here!’” She leans over her plate of food. “I saw this thing on TV where they said about ninety percent of lottery winners are miserable.”

“You don’t look miserable.”

“I’m not the lottery winner unless their motor home goes off a cliff. All they do is make the house payments; the rest is up to me. Nice, huh? You’d think I’d been some drug-addicted shoplifting nympho. Instead I got a job when I was sixteen and came home by midnight on weekends.” She takes a serious bite of eggplant. “Who cares? I’m out of here the day after graduation, which of course they won’t be in town for because there’s a saguaro in Arizona they haven’t taken a picture of.” She holds out her plate. “Now, will you get me some more of everything or at least turn your back while I waddle into the kitchen?”

“Stop being hard on yourself, okay?” I rehearsed it so many times in my head that it comes out pretty smooth.

Wanda blushes just a little. “Sorry. You’re right.”

Just then Megan steps out onto the patio, points with a celery stick, and says, “I wish somebody would shut that dog up.”

I tell her, “Give me a minute and I will.”

In the kitchen Astin is busy loading up his plate. I step through the big sliding door that leads from the patio.

“How’s it going with Wanda?” he asks.

“Fine.”

“Do you believe the tits on her?”

“Shut up. She seems nice. She’s easy to talk to.”

“Teddy!”

We both glance toward the pool.

“Teddy!” says Megan. “When you come back, bring me a Perrier.”

Astin says, “Tell her to get it herself, you don’t work here.”

“I’m going that way. It’s fine.”

I deliver Megan’s French mountain spring water and Wanda’s second helping, then head for the deep part of the yard. I pass a gardener’s shack with its mower, gas cans, and clippers and find a big Irish setter, who is glad to stop barking and chat.

When I get back to the others a few minutes later, Megan asks, “How did you do that? My mom is always calling the cops.”

“He’s just bored. The kid got tired of him, so now if he gets to go out, it’s with the mom, and all she does is go to her boyfriend’s house, leave him locked in the car, and then cry. He’s a bird dog. He wants to fetch. If I were him, I’d bark too.”

“How do you know all that?” Megan asks.

“My mom, I guess. Stuff I read. Like . . . did you know dogs and wolves are the same for thirty days? Then the wolves start turning into real wolves and the dogs just stop there so they can be dogs. Otherwise they can’t be around humans.”

Megan sits up. “So a dog who keeps maturing turns into a wolf?”

“No way,” says Astin, “does a Chihuahua turn into a wolf on day thirty-one.”

“I just know what my mom said, and we can’t ask her.”

“Well,” Megan says, “I’m going to swim before I eat.”

She unzips her silver cover-up and steps out of it. Astin puts down his plate and takes off his jeans. Underneath is a turquoise Speedo. The polo shirt goes, he shoves Megan, and they dive into the pool together.

“You know just a second ago when she dropped her robe?” asks Wanda. “She practiced it.”

“Are you kidding?”

“I was there. She’s got this like wall of mirrors in her bedroom, and she stood in front of it and got the move down just the way she wanted it. She is really entertaining.”

“You guys have been friends a long time?”

She nods. “Since grade school.”

“I’ve only known Astin since the Rafters. But he’s a good guy. He’s been really . . . Well, he’s just a good guy.”

“He cheats on Megan and steals from that garage he works for.”

“Seriously?”

She nods. “Just chump change mostly. Quarts of oil, filters, crap like that.”

I can feel my stomach tighten up like it used to. “Well, he doesn’t steal from me.”

“I’m just saying.”

We eat and don’t talk for a while. I make myself chew really slowly. In Santa Mira my stomach was always upset.

“You can swim, Teddy,” Wanda tells me. “I’m fine here on the beach with the Greenpeace people pouring water on me.”

Astin said she’s just fishing for compliments, but I think she sounds really down on herself. “I thought you weren’t going to do that anymore.”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway, I don’t know how to swim.”

That makes her look up. “Really?”

“My parents didn’t see the point.”

“Well, I know how, but whenever I get in the water, there are always unkind references to a certain Melville novel.”

“Wanda!”

“That’s the last time. I promise.”

We watch Megan and Astin play in the pool. They dunk each other and laugh.

Wanda says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if a celebrity spokesperson stepped out of the bushes and tried to sell us something.”

“Run that by me again?”

“They’re just so perfect, it seems like they ought to be selling something.” Then she waves that sentence away. “Don’t pay any attention to me. I watch too much television.”

Astin hammers a beach ball out of the pool, so I go and get it for him. When I come back and sit down, Wanda says, “Megan can be vain and a pain in the ass sometimes. But she’s a good friend, too. I hate being by myself, and I’m afraid of the dark. If I get freaked out, I call her and she comes over. If I need a couple hundred dollars for a few days, she goes right to the bank.”

“I just loaned Astin some money.”

Wanda puts down the sparerib she’s been working on. “Well, kiss that good-bye. He’s into Megan for eight or nine hundred. She can afford it, but it’s still crummy.”

She whispers the last part because the two of them are at this end of the pool. Then she says real loud, “Did Astin tell you I was going to New York in June?”

“Uh-huh. I have to go somewhere when I graduate. At eighteen, foster care is over.”

She takes a big gulp of Coke. “Well, I want to go, but the whole thing scares the crap out of me. It’s all the way across the country, I don’t know anybody, and an apartment about the size of my butt costs two thousand a month.”

“But you’ve got a job.”

“Yeah. A guy I work for at the playhouse hooked me up. But I’m already lonely.” She shifts a little and fans herself with one hand. “I started as an usher two years ago and worked my way backstage. I love set design. It’s just playing house on a grand scale. I like figuring out how the sofa in act one can be the canoe in act two. And then I get to build it! What about you?”

“Well, I thought I’d just be stacking fifty-pound bags of Alpo and ringing up goldfish for the rest of my life. Now I don’t know.”

Just then, Megan and Astin start kissing like there’s no tomorrow.

Wanda sits up. “That’s my cue to show you around. This house is really something.”

I follow Wanda into the kitchen, where she points. “On your left you’ll find the Sub-Zero refrigerator that keeps the takeout food fresh.”

“Does anybody ever cook?” I ask.

“I don’t think so. Melanie brings in a chef every now and then if she’s having lots of people over. Otherwise, somebody from Organic Express drops stuff off.”

She leads me out of the kitchen and down a short hall lined with Audubon prints, then into a room full of books. The desk probably had to be lowered in with a crane since it’s way too big for the door.

“Stay behind the velvet rope, sweetheart.”

I know she’s just playing docent, but what if she actually liked me? What then?

She points to the desk. “Where Megan’s father sat and talked to his bimbo girlfriends.”

“So you knew him.”

“Oh, yeah. A total sleaze. Put the make on me when I was fourteen. You know how people have stuff and you wish you had it, and then you see what it does to them and you think, ‘No, thanks’?”

“You mean money?”

“More like how good-looking he was. Totally gorgeous. But he’s just like a prince in one of those stories where some crone comes into the queen’s bedroom with a curse up her sleeve. When he grows up, women throw themselves at him, he can’t say no, and he can never be happy. He still calls Megan’s mom and cries.”

I walk to the nearest wall and check out the books. They’re real, but they’re also stiff. The spines crack when I try to open them.

“Where’d the money come from?” I ask.

“She brought some with her, and he made the rest in real estate.”

I run one hand across the amazingly shiny desk. “So,” I say, “it’s a study, but nobody actually studies in here.”

“Megan sometimes. Two years ago she published this essay called ‘My Body Is a Treasure I Want to Squander.’ It’s already in a couple of anthologies. I know she wrote that here because she told me.”

She links her arm through mine and tugs. I try and act like this happens to me all the time.

Just then, we hear a dog bark. “I thought you took care of that,” says Wanda.

“It’s not him — that’s a spaniel.”

“So you know all this about animals, just from working in that pet shop of your parents?”

“Mostly. But let’s not forget the noble institution of Scouting.”

“Seriously?”

“God no. My scoutmaster gave me the creeps.”

Wanda grins. “Was he just a total mo?”

“That would’ve been okay with my dad as long as Mr. Mathis brought all his gay friends in the store to buy teacup terriers.”

“He actually said that?”

“Maybe not exactly, but according to him, every black guy’s a crack addict, every gay guy’s got a little fluffy dog, and every Chinese kid can do calculus in his sleep. The whole reason I was a scout in the first place was because he made me. I was supposed to forge all these relationships, right?”

“Let me guess,” says Wanda. “So that every time somebody wanted a parrot, he’d think of you?”

That makes us both laugh. “The whole thing was truly stupid. If all that bogus networking wasn’t bad enough, there were badges for everything: Rabbit Raising, Pulp and Paper. There was even something called the American Heritage badge.”

Wanda slouches against the wall. If I put one hand next to her and leaned in, I’d be flirting.

“What’s an American Heritage badge look like?” she asks.

“Like the Statue of Liberty is holding a ham.”

Wanda takes me by the arm again and we set out. She says, “You’re kind of cute, you know that?”

I doubt it, but I know for sure I smell good. I took two showers.

Megan’s mother’s bedroom is huge: his-and-her bathrooms, a spa in one corner, a mini-gym in the other. And a bed that only needs chalk lines to double as a soccer field.

“Watch this,” Wanda says, reaching for a remote. One remote among many.

At the push of a button, the blinds open onto another patio: koi pond, one teak chaise, ferns and calla lilies, a statue of a Buddha.

“Holy cow.”

She nods. “Yeah, I know. You kind of have to wonder what old Siddhartha would think about ending up in a place like this.”