The Yearbook (16 page)

When I was young I used to wait,

On the boss, and give him his plate,

And pass the bottle when he got dry,

And brush away the blue-tail fly
.

The house had begun to stir. Now they noticed, too, the distant clank of cooking pots. The judge's tune descended the staircase and trailed off somewhere in the vicinity of the breakfast room.

“He would shoot me, wouldn't he?” Peter said.

“Yeah,” Lola answered.

Peter got himself dressed. He looked around for his shoes and found them by the fireplace. “Meet me later. Can you?” he whispered.

“If you make it out of this house alive.”

“I'll pick you up. We can go to the Grand,” he said, tying a shoelace. There's a new picture tonight.”

“What about the snow?”

“It's too warm for any more snow," he said. “At least it seems that way to me.”

Peter left unseen by the garden door as Henrietta and Caroline argued in the kitchen, the judge worked in the front study, and Eunice took a bath. It was one of the shortest days of the year, and still purplish-dark out.

From her window, Lola watched Peter's shadow move through the fresh snow and away toward the field of winter cornstalks where he had stashed his car. She worried that someone might notice the footprints leading away from the house, but in less than an hour the north wind had blown them smooth as meringue.

That afternoon, Peter and Lola joined the line that snaked away from the ticket booth in front of the Grand Theater. The picture, much to Lola's surprise, was one she'd heard of:
The Sheik
, starring none other than Mr. Rudolph Valentino. She was going to get to see this Rudy in action. A photographer from the local newspaper walked up and down, taking pictures of the capacity crowd. A flashbulb popped in Lola's eyes.

“What about the rings of Saturn?” Peter was asking.

“What about them?” she asked, blinking.

“What are they made out of? How did they get there?”

Lola tried to remember. “They're millions of asteroids going around in a circle so fast they look like rings,” she said. “At least I think so.”

“You think so?”

“Sorry. We learned it in fifth grade. It was a long time ago.”

The theater, just as Miss Bryant had claimed, was a showplace. Vivid murals along the walls depicted bears, wildcats, toucans, and camels, and were framed by twisting pillars washed in gold. A chandelier the size of a compact car gleamed with thousands of crystal teardrops in the center of a ceiling painted with clouds.

They took seats in the balcony. Lola knew the feel of the velvet seats, although the ones Miss Bryant had salvaged were squashed from decades of use. She settled back, holding Peter's warm hand. The theater seemed vast now, without all the junk Miss Bryant had crammed in there—Miss Bryant, who lived in the projection booth but wasn't even born yet.

As the lights dimmed, the blare of the Mighty Wurlitzer rose from the orchestra pit and Lola remembered like a pinprick the typewriter she had borrowed and would never return. But had she borrowed it yet? It was a question to baffle greater minds than hers, so she sat back and prepared to enjoy the show.

An organ in a movie theater seemed like an innovation to Lola, until the movie began and she discovered it had no sound apart from the live music. She had never seen a silent movie before, and the exaggerated gestures of the actors, the contortions of their faces, were hilarious to her. She laughed at the suspenseful parts that made the other spectators clench their teeth, and giggled at the primitive special effects. Valentino himself was a disappointment. The cheesy robes, the tweezed eyebrows, the lipstick, made him look more like a girl than the smoldering heartthrob he supposedly was. As Valentino burst into his desert tent, hands on hips, seducing some lady, Lola caught herself thinking about his funeral. He would be dead in less than three years, at the age of thirty-one, and she knew how and where it would happen. Miss Bryant had gone over the whole grisly end: the perforated ulcer in New York City, the galloping lung infection, the administering of last rites, the throng of thousands camped out under the window of his hospital room.

Sorry, Valentino
, she whispered to herself under the strains of the theater organ.
I wish there was something I could do
. Peter seemed to sense her mood and put his arm around her. She snuggled into him, the man who knew her secrets, and felt the strange new peace of home.

• • •

The winter passed like a long but wonderful final exam in which any answer Lola could provide Peter was welcomed like the rarest of gems. She drew diagrams of cell phones and laptops, iPads and DVD players. They met whenever they could, often in Peter's workshop, a small converted horse barn next to his house, where he fixed things and worked on his inventions. They'd told Peter's parents, and the Wrigleys, that Peter was teaching Lola to read music and play the ukulele. And she was learning, at first to make it look good, and later, because she liked the instrument.

“What are we on today?” Lola asked, tuning up the ukulele. It was a beautiful spring day. The apple trees in the yard were covered in blossoms and their scent floated in through the open window.

“Mars,” Peter said, pulling a fresh notebook and pencil from the drawer of a beat-up bureau where he kept all sorts of things. “Everything about Mars.”

Lola played a chord. She'd learned three and could play her first song, “Little Brown Jug.”

“Like what, exactly?”

“Let's start with the species that inhabit it.”

Lola strummed a C chord. “There's no life on Mars.”

Peter smacked his workbench. “Not even a plant? Not even one plant?”

“There's no water,” Lola said.

Peter jotted it down:
Mars, no water, no life.

Lola added vocals.
“Ha-ha-ha. You and me. Little brown jug, how I love thee.”

“What year will the astronauts go there?” Peter continued.

“Huh?” Lola said. She was searching the fingerboard for the next chord.

“The astronauts. What year will they go there?”

“They haven't gone yet. They've sent up a few robot things over the years.”

Peter leaned forward. “Robot things? You don't say.”

Lola nodded. “I do say.”

“To do what?”

“Drive around and do experiments on the soil.
“Little brown jug, how I love thee.”
What's this song about?”

Peter turned his notebook to a clean page. “Moonshine,” he said.

“Moon shine. Now, that I'm not sure about,” Lola said. “I think the sun reflects off the moon. Or the Earth shines on it.”

“Moonshine is bootleg whiskey,” Peter said. “That's what the song's about, some hillbillies who love their jug of moonshine. What kind of robots went to Mars?”

“Intelligent robots. With very intelligent brains.”

“Not human brains?”

“Of course not. Whiskey's called moonshine? Why's that?”

“Because people make it in the woods at night, under the moon. It's illegal. Since Prohibition.”

“Prohibition doesn't last, by the way.” She strummed a G chord. “Only from 1920 until 1933. It was abolished under the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. I mean it will be.”

Peter glanced at her and said nothing. Although he was eager to find out all he could about science, Lola's little bombshells on history seemed to shake him. When she'd told him about Valentino's death, the date, the place, the circumstances, he'd seemed spooked by it, by what else she might know.

“But these robot brains—” he began again.

“Humans built the brains and put them in the robots,” Lola explained. “They're more like computers.”

“How do the robots get up there?”

“Rockets.”

“What kind of rockets?”

“I don't know. Space rockets.”

“But you must know something more than that.”

Lola shrugged.

Peter turned back a few pages. “All right. These satellites you mentioned. They do what, exactly?”

“I think they take pictures of stars and galaxies and stuff. And for television. And governments use them to spy on other governments.”

“They spy? How?”

“Okay, so the satellite's orbiting the Earth and it has cameras that can take pictures of everything going on down below so you can see what your enemies are up to.”

“You're saying the cameras up in space can see all the way down to the earth and make photographs? That's astounding.”

“Yeah, I guess it is.” Lola tried another verse of her song.
“Me and my wife and a cross-eyed dog, tried to cross the river on a rotten log
.
”

“How do the pictures get back to the Earth?”

“Some kind of signals going back and forth between computers.”

“What kind of signals?”

“I have no idea.”

“All right. Now, what's this television?”

“It's a screen, like a movie screen, but it's small and you keep it in your house and watch things on it—like entertainment programs, movies, the news, or you can watch sports, listen to music, things like that. You can change the channels to watch whatever you want.”

“There's sound?”

“Of course.”

“That's why you thought Valentino was so funny?”

“If I moved my mouth and nothing came out, wouldn't you laugh?”

“I suppose I would,” Peter said. “Anyway, how will it work, the television?”

“I have no idea.”

“When was it invented?”

“Oh, a long time from now ago.”

“Once upon a future past?”

“Or even sooner,” Lola said. She set the ukulele aside. “I know what you're thinking.”

Peter raised his eyebrows. “All right. What am I thinking?”

“You're thinking, of all the future girls, why did you end up with one who doesn't know anything about science?”

Peter tossed his notebook and pencil over his shoulder and gave her a long, long kiss.

“No. What I'm thinking is, if you hadn't come to me, I would have found you,” he said. “Somehow I would have.”

Once Peter had asked Lola about her parents. She'd told him she was an orphan, but he pressed forward and she had explained: Her mother had been young and alone. She'd gone crazy and jumped off a bridge.

“And your father?” Peter wanted to know.

“As far as I know, she never told anybody who he was. He was probably too embarrassing—some jackass—and she couldn't bear to admit it.”

“Or maybe not. Did you ever think,” Peter began, and then stopped.

“Did I ever think what?”

He turned back to his tinkering. He'd taken apart an old motorcycle for the heck of it.

“Go on,” Lola said. “What were you going to say?”

“Well, that your parents were like us?”

“Like us, how?”

“Separated by time. But they weren't as lucky as us. And when she couldn't get back to him—”

Lola finished the thought. “She went crazy.”

Peter had stopped tinkering and waited for her reaction. But she didn't answer right away. Her mind had never turned in that direction. If it was true, it was too sad to think about. She decided to forget it, to laugh at it. “Nah. It had to be some guy from school,” she said. “Some nobody.”

• • •

The seventeenth birthday of Judge Wrigley's beautiful niece from Denver and New York was a social occasion not to be missed. The rose garden was thrown open for the event, and all the dignitaries of town came bearing gifts. Mayor Wilfred appeared, and Clyde Meyers, Esq., the district attorney. Mr. Glidden, who owned the steel mill, stopped by with Mrs. Glidden and their little twin boys, as well as the entire Ashfield City Council and every neighbor within twenty miles. Mr. McCloud, the milkman, paid a call, along with Elvira Downing, with a gift from her shop, a blue chenille cloche hat with gold embroidery.

In a few hours, Lola received more gifts than she had in all her years combined: There was an Art Deco rhinestone choker, a pair of white deerskin gloves with a trio of nacreous buttons at the wrists, and another pair, net mesh for the opera, in silvery pink. There was a powder jar of pale yellow glass with a pineapple design on the lid, a string of hand-painted beads of Venetian glass, a sterling silver bookmark in the shape of an oak leaf, a Chinese green porcelain inkwell, a Spanish fan with an olive-wood handle, a tiny cellulose rouge box, a perfume atomizer of Marigold Carnival glass, and a glittering evening bag of rough-cut indigo glass beads with a push-button clasp in the shape of a flower.

Eunice had hired Mildred Longsworth to sit among the roses in a long white gown like a Greek goddess and play the harp, and the music, the perfume from the roses, the glint of the sunlight on her new gifts, the taste of lemon sponge cake, and Peter by her side, fresh from his graduation, made Lola feel that this day could never, even in many lifetimes, be surpassed.

But then Ruby Gadd arrived. She came darting into the garden with two other girls in tow, all of them overwrought and shouting for Lola. The party guests turned. The Greek goddess hit a wrong note. A man dropped his finger sandwich onto the walkway of white pebbles.

“It's Whoopsie,” Ruby said, advancing, red-faced, up the lawn. “She's gone up the flagpole.”

“What's that mean?” Lola whispered to Peter. She figured it was a piece of unfamiliar 1920s slang.

“I believe it means she's gone up the flagpole,” Peter answered.

Ruby leaned on a trellis, out of breath.

“The flagpole?” said the judge, who had been enjoying a moment of peace on the davenport. “How the devil did she get herself up there?”

“She shimmied,” Ruby said. “She's a great shimmier, it must be said.”