The Yearbook (14 page)

There was one other possible explanation for Peter's behavior: that he was, simply, a perfect candidate for Wing-B-as-in-Bonkers of Hillside Manor. She wondered if, in the excitement of the dance, the bizarreness of the situation, she had not paid close enough attention to her elegant dance partner. She could usually spot a crazy kid coming a mile away, she who had moved among them for so long and knew all their tics and tricks. Had he sneaked in under her radar?

She opened her eyes again and found herself at a dead end. The songs and laughter of the picnickers that had come faintly through the trees during her encounter with Peter were now inaudible. She must have run a long way, but which way? It was cold, and so dark. Whoopsie's voice rang in her head:
Well, we don't mean Teddy bears
. Lola considered herself a survivor, and a reasonably resourceful person. She'd kept her wits about her during all sorts of situations. But her sense of direction had always been poor, and her knowledge of nature right around zero.

Then something flew into her face. She was sure it was a bat but afterward wondered if her own raw nerves had formed the creature out of a few dry leaves on a gust of wind. The next thing she knew she was being lifted, and voices were calling her name.

“It's all right, fellows. I've found her,” boomed the voice of the person who was carrying her. It was Thumbtack.

In a moment, he brought her into the clearing where the bonfire was still burning, but lower now. A crowd gathered. Ruby chattered and fretted while Whoopsie fanned Lola with a linen napkin.

“Mike, you scared the dickens out of me,” Whoopsie said. “A city slicker like you, alone with Mother Nature. It's not natural.”

A few yards behind the others she saw Peter. The light from the bonfire flickered on his face as he calmly watched her.

“Where were you? Mike? What happened?”

She sat up. Her head was woozy.

“I got lost. It was so dark and something hit me—a bat, I think,” Lola mumbled.

“A bat? For the love of cucumbers,” Whoopsie said. “But I thought you were with Peter. Weren't you with Peter?”

“I couldn't find him,” Lola said.

Peter withdrew from the firelight then, and moved off toward where the cars were parked. A moment later she heard the start of his motor and watched the dark form of his car disappear onto the country road sloping down from the park.

A month passed and then it was nearly Christmas. Ashfield glowed with colored bulbs, and the smell of fresh-cut pine garlands and hot cider floated over the downtown. Lola strolled Main Street between Eunice and the judge, looking into display windows that had become villages of toy trains and wind-up soldiers. Little by little, she was beginning to forget the Ashfield she had once known, its routes and houses and smells. She could not recall, sometimes, what had stood on this or that street corner, or the price of a Golden Recipe jumbo basket or the precise schedule of her days. Her old life seemed more and more remote, like a recurring bad dream that had finally left her in peace.

Peter had not approached her since their encounter at Eagle Rock. The stories about Lola's background as a New Yorker and a mining camp girl continued to circulate; he had not given her away. The thought of him made her furious, but she longed for a glimpse of him everywhere she went.

When Virgil Ludlow asked her to the Christmas dance, she hesitated and then cursed herself. The hesitation was for Peter, a person who had ambushed and exposed her. She accepted Virgil's invitation and went shopping with Eunice for the most beautiful dress she could find, a silk chiffon evening gown of midnight blue with metallic brocade and a low-cut back.

The only person who questioned her about her decision to go to the dance with Virgil was Whoopsie Whipple, on the day before the event, when she came over to bob Lola's hair.

“I'm gonna ask you flat out, Mike. Why aren't you going with Peter Hemmings?” she said, lining up her beauty tools on Lola's bureau.

“Was I supposed to?” Lola said. “Anyway, he didn't ask me.”

“But you'd have gone with him, right?”

“No.”

“But he's the one you love.”

“No, he's not,” Lola said. “As a matter of fact, I don't love anyone. And especially not him.”

“Uh-huh,” Whoopsie said, and chopped off Lola's ponytail. Lola gasped. Whoopsie dropped the hair and went right on talking. “I know true love when I see it. But then things ran off the rails somewhere. You wanna know what I think?”

“Not really.”

Whoopsie snipped at the air. “You better change that to ‘yes,' since I'm holding the scissors.”

“Yes, then.”

“I think something happened up there at Eagle Rock. The night of the bonfire. It was all sidelong glances and quickened palpitations up until then, and don't tell me it wasn't, Mike, because I'm not blind.”

“He's wrong for me,” Lola said.

“Did he get fresh?” Whoopsie continued.

“Not exactly.” Lola said, although she wasn't sure what “getting fresh” entailed in 1923.

“Aha. So he did get fresh. I thought so,” Whoopsie said, clipping away near Lola's ears. “How fresh, pray tell, did the man get?”

“I looked through his telescope and then he—”

“What? Then he what?”

“Whoopsie, is Peter like everyone else?”

“What's that mean? No, he's just like himself.”

“I mean, does his brain work right?”

“Peter Hemmings's brain? Why, it's the best brain in the whole class, the whole state, I'll bet.”

“Well, maybe not his brain, but his mind. Is his mind all right?”

Whoopsie put down the scissors and faced Lola, hands on hips. “Okay, what's eating you? What did he do out there in the woods?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?” Whoopsie looked disappointed.

“I couldn't understand him. He wasn't making sense.”

“Is that all?” Whoopsie went to work with a prickly hairbrush and some sort of glop from a glass jar. “Most of us can't follow half the things the professor says. He's a genius. But he's not a nut, if that's what you mean. Did he spook you with his moon-man talk?”

Lola groaned as the brush raked against her scalp. Nylon bristles were a thing of the future. “Maybe. Maybe he spooked me.”

“You love him. That's what spooks you.”

Whoopsie held out a mirror. Lola looked into it, and for a long moment she couldn't speak. It was no longer a kid, a teen, who looked back at her but a woman with sophisticated hair and beautiful clothes, a woman whose company people sought, and who was assumed by everyone to be good and sane and from a fine family. And it was also her, Lola Lundy.

“You're a living doll, Mike,” Whoopsie said. “But careful you don't wear out my mirror.”

Lola and Virgil rode to the dance in the back seat of Thumbtack's Nash, with Whoopsie in the passenger seat beside him. The night was cold with a light snow. Whoopsie shivered, opened her bag, and took a little nip from her flask. “Pardon me. I know this g-g-giggle water is destined for the Christmas punch, but I'm simply a g-g-glacier,” she said.

Virgil held a heaping plate of gingerbread boys on his lap. They were still warm, and he smiled at Lola and rubbed his hands over them as if they were a campfire.

“Can you turn up the heat?” Lola called to the front seat. Despite her long fur coat, she, too, was shivering.

“Huh?” Thumbtack craned his red ear toward the back.

“The heat. Is it up all the way?”

“I don't get your lingo, city girl. You mean hit the gas?”

“I'm cold, I mean,” Lola said. “It's ten-below back here.”

“Still, I oughtn't drive too fast on this ice,” he said.

Lola leaned over the seat and skimmed the instrument panel for the heat controls. There were none to be found. Cars, it seemed, didn't have heaters in 1923. Who would have guessed it? The car lurched on a patch of ice, flinging her back onto her seat. She pulled her coat tighter around her and hoped snow tires had been invented.

“Anyway, look,” Thumbtack said. “We're here.”

He parked at the end of a long line of cars. The teens of Ashfield, 1923, were passing through the courtyard in their finery, bright and beautiful, like ornaments against the snow. The foursome jumped out of the Nash and ran laughing and sliding for the gym. Through the flurries Lola noticed the bronze mermaid, presiding over a ring of ice.

On the stage a jazz band was playing.

“Five-foot-two,

Eyes of blue,

But, oh, what those five feet can do!

Has anybody seen my gal?”

The music sizzled and jumped like popcorn, and the wood floor vibrated with the slamming of leather soles. The gym had been decorated in silver and white, and glass stars dangled from the ceiling, flashing rainbows as they turned slowly on the currents of warm air that rose from the dancers.

A hundred kinds of Christmas cookies carpeted a refreshment table that ran half the length of the gym, and the smell of peppermint and cider flowed around the assembled bodies. Ostrich-plume headbands and sequined collars, fringed hems and silver shoe buckles, made everything glitter, flutter, twist, and float, an effect to outshine any disco ball.

“Turned-up nose,

Turned-down hose,

Yes sir, flapper, one of those.

Has anybody seen my gal?”

Lola and Virgil tossed themselves into the mix. Virgil was a slim, elfin-looking boy, popular and a good dancer, the best in school. Lola felt lucky to have him for a partner. A dozen other girls had been crushed when he'd asked Lola to the dance. She knew, now, what it was to be one of the most popular girls in school, embraced and admired and even envied, instead of the weird outsider best avoided.

After four or five numbers, Lola turned Virgil over to one of his many admirers and moved to the sidelines for a breather. She ladled some red Christmas punch into a cut-glass cup and wandered along the base of the stage, sipping and watching the band. There was a banjo player whose fingers moved faster than she believed human fingers could. It was the first time she'd ever seen anybody playing a banjo, the first time she'd seen a real banjo at all. A slow number began. Lola turned her attention to the saxophones, the clarinets, and tapped her feet along with them. The drummer smiled down at her and she waved.

When she turned back toward the dancers she saw Peter some twenty-five feet away, holding a girl in his arms. The punch cup dropped from her hand and smashed on the floor. She bent to pick up the shards, and in a moment Miss Roach was next to her, wiping up the spill with a tea towel and warning her not to cut herself.

Lola stood up. Her legs were rubbery. Why had she assumed Peter wouldn't be at the dance? It seemed ridiculous now that she had taken it for granted he wouldn't come without her. After all, what were they, really, to each other?

And that girl. Who the hell was that girl? Lola had noticed her around school. Peter was holding her close, and Lola could see that they were talking, confiding, smiling.
That must be Paulette Waters.
She was beautiful, with pale skin and thick auburn waves. Her teeth were white and straight as she smiled, and Peter, in a formal suit, was breathtaking. Had he given her the red rose that was pinned to her dress? Had he pinned it on for her? What was he saying to her? Could she feel his breath the way Lola had in the woods? At the memory of it she put a hand to her ear.

Then she saw Virgil. He was coming toward the refreshment table, flushed and euphoric. She turned her back on Peter and his date and poured Virgil some punch. As soon as he had gulped it down, she led him onto the dance floor.

The Ashfield High Christmas Ball of 1923 was cut short by a blizzard, but even so, Lola managed to dance with almost every boy in the room. Peter never approached her. He seemed not even to have noticed she was there.

Thumbtack's Nash skidded to the Wrigley house in the thickening flurries. Lola's heart sat like a hunk of lead in her chest. Virgil hummed scraps of songs as they drove along, tapping out the rhythm on his empty cookie plate.

The judge met Thumbtack's car in the drive, signaling like a railroad man with his lantern.

“Electricity's out,” he shouted above the motor and the wind, as Virgil helped Lola from the car. “Not sure when we'll get it back in order.” Snowflakes caught in his moustache and he sniffed.

Then Eunice leaned out the big front door. “Hurry, you two, before you freeze.” She wore her favorite red velvet dressing gown and looked like a holly berry.

The judge rapped on the side of Thumbtack's car. “Better get these people home, Matthews.”

Thumbtack saluted the judge, and Virgil jumped into the backseat and slammed himself in. The Nash fishtailed out of the drive. Whoopsie's gloved arm was still waving from the window as the car vanished into the snow. Lola took hold of the judge's arm and skated up the walk in her smooth-bottomed dancing shoes.

In the parlor the massive fireplace blazed, its reflected light capering among the glass bulbs of the Christmas tree in the corner. Oil lamps burned here and there. Lola thought the room looked like a fairy cave.

“Reminds me of the old days, by gum,” the judge said, removing his gloves and slapping them against his thigh. “Things were simpler then. I almost miss them sometimes. Almost.” Then he headed off to his study, saying he had some papers to read. He often consulted his law books until one or two in the morning, and seemed to require little sleep.

Eunice asked about the dance and Lola described the good parts—Virgil's dancing, the orchestra, the decorations, and the refreshment table.

“The whole thing was first-rate,” she said. It was an expression the judge often used, and she had adopted it as a substitute for “cool,” which everyone misunderstood as meaning unfriendly or dull. Lately she'd even uttered “swell” a few times.