Things I Want to Say (2 page)

For the next twenty minutes, we made small talk. I found out Mitch was from Pittsburgh, a salesman in town to call on Markson Manufacturing, which was still Ridgeway’s largest employer. The plant made parts for hospital dialysis machines and other medical equipment. Unexciting but necessary, and apparently quite profitable, stuff.

When Mitch offered to buy me a third drink, I had the sense to refuse and switch to water. I thought about excusing myself to go get something to eat, but to tell the truth, I was enjoying myself too much to leave just yet. I couldn’t remember when a good-looking guy had sat and flirted with me like this. Working in the flower shop, most of the people I came in contact with were set designers for television shows and movies, and most of them were women or gay men.

Mitch was most definitely flirting with me. For all I knew, he had a wife and six kids back in Pittsburgh, or a mistress in every town between here and Pennsylvania. I told myself it didn’t really matter. Nothing was going to come of this. But I looked at it as a chance to brush up on my own technique before I saw Marc again.

Mitch had a third drink. Or maybe a fourth. I didn’t know how long he’d been in the bar before I showed up. His face was a little flushed, his conversation a little more garrulous, but I didn’t have the sense he was really drunk. “I love your hair,” he said at one point. “It’s so beautiful.” He leaned
forward, his tone confiding. “I’ve always had a thing for redheads. You caught my eye the minute you walked into the room.”

I refrained from pointing out that, since I’d been the only female in the bar at the time, I naturally stood out. There were a few more women in the place now, but Mitch had stuck with me. It was flattering, in a superficial way. But sometimes superficial is all I need.

By the time Mitch finished his drink, I was overdosed on snack mix and in need of real food. I slid off the bar stool. “It was nice talking to you,” I said, “but I have to go.”

“No,” he protested, standing also. “We’re just getting to know each other. Let me take you to dinner.”

I shook my head. “No. Thank you, but I have an early morning tomorrow. Thanks for the drink.” I headed for the door before I could change my mind.

He followed, making a few more feeble protests, but was enough of a gentleman to take no for an answer finally. Still, I was worried if I headed for the hotel restaurant, he might spot me in there later and try again to persuade me to further our acquaintance.

Call me old-fashioned, but picking up a traveling salesman in a hotel bar wasn’t my idea of the start of a wonderful relationship. I’d had a good time, but wasn’t interested in taking things to another level, which I was pretty sure was what Mitch had in mind.

As I said, I may be naive, but I’m not stupid.

So room service it was. I called in my order, then decided to check in with Frannie.

She answered on the third ring. I pictured her in her living room, piled on the sofa with both dogs at her feet, the TV tuned to that night’s lineup of sitcoms and crime dramas. “Just thought I’d call and let you know I got in okay,” I said.

She turned down the volume on the television. “How was your flight?”

“Fine. I would have called earlier, but I went down to the hotel bar for a drink right after I got here.”

“You were in the bar for what…two hours?”

It annoyed me that she’d bothered to do the math. “A guy bought me a drink.”

“You picked up a man in a bar?” She couldn’t have sounded more horrified if I’d told her I’d done a strip tease in the middle of the hotel lobby.

“I did not pick him up. We were both sitting there and got to talking and he bought me a drink. Nothing else happened.” Although it could have, if I’d wanted it to. The knowledge gave me a quiet thrill.

“Was he cute?”

I laughed. “Forty-year-old men aren’t cute! But he was nice-looking. It was good practice for the reunion.”

“So you still think you and Marc are going to hit it off after all these years?”

“I don’t know that. I’m just open to the possibility.”

“When are you going to see him?”

“I’m going to call him tomorrow.”

“He’s liable to get the wrong idea.”

I rolled my eyes. “This isn’t high school. A woman can call a man without having him think she’s fast.”

“You be careful.”

Frannie had repeated this advice so often there was a recording of her voice saying these words that automatically played anytime I did almost
anything,
risky or not. “I’ll be careful,” I reassured her. As I always did.

I imagined husbands and wives had these little verbal rituals, too.

“The reunion doesn’t start until Saturday, right?” Frannie said. “What are you going to do in the meantime?”

“I don’t know. Look around. Maybe I’ll see some old
friends.” I hadn’t planned a detailed itinerary, too nervous to think that far ahead.

“Did you go by the house yet?”

Her voice was strained, and her tension carried over to me. “No. I don’t intend to,” I said. “It’s not ours anymore.”

“It’s not even cousin Lou’s anymore,” she said. “I heard he sold it.”

“Maybe they tore it down.” The house hadn’t been in that great a shape when we lived in it. By the time Mom died, it was pretty run-down.

“I’d have burned it down if I could get away with it,” Frannie said.

After all these years, I didn’t react to her anger anymore. Her words just made me tired.

A knock on my door saved me from having to reply. “Room service.”

“I have to go now,” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know how it goes with Marc.”

I ate dinner while I watched the news, then got ready for bed and stretched out on the floor and did sit-ups. I hate to exercise. I mean really hate it. I feel like a sinner doing penance, which I guess isn’t too far off. But I’m scared enough of gaining back the weight I lost to keep at it. That’s probably a different kind of neurosis, but one I’ll keep.

I said my prayers and climbed into bed. I don’t think of myself as an overly religious person, but I believe in a higher power, and he-she-it has helped me out a lot over the years. You don’t know what faith is until you’ve spent an hour praying you won’t go into the kitchen and eat a whole tub of frozen cookie dough from the freezer.

I fell asleep thinking about Mitch from the hotel bar, who dissolved into Marc and the memory of a game of spin the bottle we’d played at a birthday party when I was in sixth grade. Six of us had knelt in a circle on the rust-red shag
carpeting of the Kincaids’ family room and Marsha Kincaid had spun an empty Coke bottle.

Even then I’d been a chubby girl, the waistband of my yellow dotted Swiss minidress digging into my sides, the bands of the puffed sleeves cutting into my thick arms. I’d held my breath as the bottle spun, praying it wouldn’t land on me, hoping at the same time it would.

The first spin landed on Rachel Mayfield, who grinned and took her time choosing a boy to kiss. I hoped she wouldn’t choose Marc, though he was, in my eyes at least, the handsomest boy there.

But Rachel chose Scott Ruston as the object of her favor. He made a feeble protest, but when Rachel leaned forward and pressed her mouth to his, I noticed he didn’t seem to mind all that much.

By the third spin, I could feel the carpet making crosshatch patterns on my bare knees, and one foot had fallen asleep. I forgot to focus on the bottle, so was startled when everyone began shouting my name. I looked down and saw the bottle pointing right at me.

I swallowed hard, and my face felt hot. “Who you gonna kiss?” Rachel teased.

I glanced up at those in the circle. Every boy there was looking away from me or down at the carpet. They seemed to have physically recoiled at the idea of kissing fat Ellen Lawrence.

At other times, in similar situations, I’d have made a joke. Maybe I’d try to skip my turn. But that year, when I was twelve, I’d begun to feel the first longings to be like other girls—thin and pretty and
normal
. And I was in love with Marc, even if he never looked at me.

Reasoning I couldn’t be any more miserable than I already was, I sat up straighter and smoothed out the skirt of my dress. “I choose Marc,” I said.

To his credit, he didn’t flinch or protest. He merely sighed,
then closed his eyes and waited. Hands on my knees, I leaned toward him, aware of the giggles and smooching noises the others were making. But all my attention was focused on Marc.

I thought he had beautiful lips—pale pink and not too full. When I got close enough to be sure of my aim, I closed my eyes and pressed my mouth gently to his. I held the pose as long as I dared. It was the first time I’d ever kissed a boy and I wanted to remember it.

When I did finally pull away, I opened my eyes and smiled. The kiss had felt good. Right. And now I knew a secret. Not only was Marc the handsomest boy in the sixth grade…

He tasted like chocolate cake.

The next morning after breakfast I called Marc at the number I’d gotten from the reunion Web site. A woman answered the phone and I froze. Was it his wife? Girlfriend? “May I speak to Marc Reynolds?” I managed to get out.

“One moment please.”

“This is Marc.” His voice was deeper than I remembered. Sexy. I pinched myself and remembered the script I’d come up with in my head. “Hi, Marc. I don’t know if you remember me, but it’s Ellen Lawrence. I’m in town for the reunion and wondered if I could do anything to help.”

“Ellen!” His voice had all the heartiness of a used-car salesman. Or maybe that was merely my inner cynic butting in with her opinion. “Great to hear from you. We can always use volunteers.”

“I’m happy to lend a hand. How have you been?”

“Great, great. Let me see here….” I heard the rustle of papers. “All right! We could use help with the cleanup committee.”

Garbage detail? Not the glamorous image I was hoping to project. “I…I’m not sure I’ll be able to stay after everything’s over,” I said.

“Oh. Well then, we could use help with child care.”

Child care! Stuck with a bunch of squalling babies and fussy toddlers who wouldn’t appreciate my stunning
transformation in the least? I searched frantically for an out. Saying I didn’t like children wasn’t very attractive. “Um, I hate to admit this, but I’m allergic,” I said.

“You’re allergic to children?”

Okay, maybe that didn’t come across quite right. “Not children,” I said, a nervous giggle escaping. “Baby powder. Oh, and that sunscreen little kids wear. Something in it makes me break out in a rash.”

“Oh. Well, what
did
you want to volunteer to do?”

Be your personal assistant,
I thought. “Is there anything
you
need help with?” I asked. “Maybe I could stop by your office and make phone calls or something.”

“No, that’s all taken care of.”

I sensed he was ready to hang up and fought to keep the conversation going. All those articles I’d read in
Seventeen
as a girl about getting a boy to like you came back to me.
Ask him about his interests,
they all advised. “What are you up to these days, Marc?” I asked.

“I sell real estate. You were lucky to catch me in the office—I’m usually out showing properties.”

His office. Of course. So that was his secretary who’d answered. “Really? I’ve been thinking of buying a place.” A lie, but I was desperate to keep the conversation going.

“Hey, maybe we could get together while you’re here.” The car-salesman heartiness returned to his voice. “I could take you to lunch.”

“I…I’m not free for lunch. How about dinner?” Dinner was so much more romantic. I’d wear the blue dress, and my highest heels—when I walked in he wouldn’t know what hit him. He’d kick himself for ignoring me in school and vow to make up for his past neglect.

“Let me check my calendar.” I heard him flipping through pages. “Sure. I could do that. Could we meet at the Captain’s Table around six this evening?”

“That would be great. I’m looking forward to seeing you again.” I tried to add an extra sultriness to the words. “You, too.”

I hung up the phone, then did a victory dance around the hotel room. I was a little out of breath by the time I stopped in front of the mirror. “Not bad for a middle-aged spinster,” I said.

An ugly word,
spinster
. Not dashing like
bachelor
.
Bachelorette
made me think of silly game show contestants.
Old maid
was even worse, conjuring up memories of the ugly crones depicted on children’s playing cards.

Just as there are no attractive descriptors for overweight women—men can at least be
stocky
or
solid
—single females get short-changed in the language department.

I glanced at the bedside clock. Nine-thirty. A long time to kill until six.

I grabbed my purse and headed for the door. Time to see if any of the old Ridgeway I remembered still existed.

When you’ve lived with a picture of a place fixed in your memory for so long, it’s a shock to the system to find out how different reality is from that image—similar to the feeling when you first discover your parents have actually had sex.

In my memories, Ridgeway was a little town, with only one real shopping center, one grocery store, two banks, a feed-and-seed store and half a dozen churches. Markson Manufacturing was the biggest building in town, and several seedy bars lined the highway leading out to the Markson plant.

I guess I’d been too insulated by grief and worry to notice all the changes when Frannie and I had visited five years ago. Now I had the disorienting feeling of having landed in a giant fun house, where nothing looked the way it should. The Markson plant was still there, but now it was old
and shabby, dwarfed by a new office complex that sprawled beside it.

The bars still lined the road to the plant, but there were more of them now, along with
adult
bookstores and “theaters” that advertised
XXX
shows.

The shopping center had been replaced by a mammoth Wal-Mart. I counted three other grocery stores and at least six banks. This modern version of my hometown was definitely more prosperous than the one in my memories, but I couldn’t say it was more attractive. Acres of woodland where the men and boys I’d known spent fall weekends hunting had been wiped away, replaced by strip malls and apartment houses.

Road construction on the south side of town had replaced large chunks of whole neighborhoods—houses and churches and playgrounds had been knocked down and paved over. A sign announced they were building a bypass around town. A detour took me around the back side of the cemetery where my parents were buried, and I thought about stopping, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I found Ridgeway High School, but it was a sleek, modern building, not the redbrick structure I’d attended. A stadium big enough to host a pro football game rose behind the school, and the whole complex sat in a sea of black-topped parking lot.

If not for the blue smudge of mountains in the distance, I might have thought myself in suburban Bakersfield.

Driving all those streets with unfamiliar names, where nothing fit the pictures in my head, I became disoriented. So when I finally did spot something I recognized—the old ball fields off Green Dairy Road—relief surged through me. I turned the rental car onto the narrow paved street and soon was back in our old neighborhood.

There was the little store where we’d exchanged empty soda bottles for nickels, which we used to buy more pop.
There was the park where I’d scuffed the rubber off countless pairs of Keds, dragging my toes in the dirt beneath the swings.

There was the street where we had lived: Amaranth Avenue. A fancy name for a short row of almost identical cinder-block houses, each with a brown patch of front lawn and a short gravel driveway leading to a detached one-car garage.

I hesitated, then took a deep breath and turned onto the street. I’d come this far; I couldn’t leave without taking a look.

I slowed the car to a crawl and craned my neck, looking for the green-shingled house where we’d lived. I really was hoping it had been torn down, but no such luck.

I pulled the car to the curb directly across the street from the house and studied it. It’s such a cliché to say it looked smaller than I remembered, but it was true. It had diminished in more than size; it had diminished in significance.

It was a cramped, square building with a small stoop in front and a screened porch along the back. Inside, it was divided into a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a single bath. We had eaten at a table at one end of the living room. Our parents had had the front bedroom, across from the living room, while Frannie and I had shared a smaller room that opened onto the screened porch.

Someone had added a green metal awning over the front stoop, and at some point the shingles that covered the exterior had been painted gray. The color did nothing to improve the house’s appearance. Looking at it, a big knot of sadness formed in my chest and began to swell like a balloon inflating.

Why the hell hadn’t I listened to Frannie and avoided coming back here? It wasn’t as if seeing the place again was going to conjure up a slew of happy memories.

I started the car again, drove to the end of the street and turned around, driving too fast in my haste to get away.

If I didn’t already know my love affair with food was deeply ingrained, the fact that I ended up at the old hamburger stand, like a pigeon homing in on its coop, should have told me something. How many summer afternoons and crisp autumn evenings had I spent at this low square building with the red-and-white-striped awning out front? My friends and I rode our bicycles here after swimming lessons or after football games and shared root beer floats and chili cheese fries while flirting with boys who sat in booths across the way. There was no childhood sorrow that couldn’t be made better with a chocolate shake and a double cheeseburger with extra ketchup.

The gnawing in the pit of my stomach urged me to order that double cheeseburger now, with onion rings and a triple chocolate malt. I stared at the menu over the order window, my nails biting into my palms.

The window slid open with a snap. “What can I get you?” asked the freckled girl inside.

“A Diet Coke and a junior burger,” I said resolutely.

“Would you like fries with that?”

Yes
. My mouth watered. “No, thank you. But could I have an extra pickle?”

“Sure.”

She took my money and, after parking the car, I walked over to one of the outdoor picnic tables and sat down. I took deep breaths, trying to center myself.
It’s just an old house,
I told myself.
It can’t hurt you. Don’t let it.

“Ellen? Ellen Lawrence, is that you?”

I turned and saw a nice-looking man in a Markson’s work shirt striding toward me. He had thinning light brown hair and a wide smile. Definitely familiar, but I drew a blank on his name.

“Hi,” I said, manufacturing a smile. “I’m amazed anyone remembers me after all these years.”

“I wasn’t sure, but that hair is hard to forget, and those blue eyes reminded me of Frannie.” He held out his hand. “I bet you don’t remember me, though. Walt Peebles.”

“Of course I remember you, Walt.” I did now. He’d been Frannie’s date to her senior prom. A sweet, gawky guy who had tried hard to make that evening the best of Frannie’s life.

Walt sat across from me at the picnic table. “How is Frannie?” he asked.

“Good. She’s a hairdresser in Bakersfield,” I said. “She’s made a real name for herself, has a lot of famous clients.”

“That’s great.” He nodded. “I’m glad she’s doing well. I guess she’s probably married with a bunch of kids, too.”

“No, she never married.”

“Really?” One eyebrow shot up. “A pretty girl like her?”

“Well, you know Frannie. She’s always been particular.” I tried to laugh off the comment, as if my sister’s choice to isolate herself from everyone was a big joke. Ha, ha.

“What about you?” I asked. “Are you married?”

“Was. We divorced a couple years ago. But I have two great kids.” Before I could say anything else, he pulled out a wallet and flipped it open to a couple of head shots—the kind that come in packets of school pictures—of a boy and a girl. They had their father’s thin hair and brown eyes.

“How adorable,” I said. “How old are they?”

“Sybil is eight and Jeremy’s seven.” He closed the wallet and replaced it in his pocket. “They live with their mom, but I see them every weekend.”

“Order up.”

He stood. “I gotta go. It was good seeing you.”

“You, too.”

“You tell Frannie I said hello. Maybe she could give me a call sometime. I’m in the phone book.”

Frannie would never call. I should have given him her number, then he could have called her.

Of course, if he was so interested, why hadn’t he asked me outright for Frannie’s number? He was probably just being polite, making conversation about the only thing the two of us had in common.

Though I wanted to believe this nice man had been carrying a torch for my sister for twenty years, I knew better. He had been her prom date, for goodness’ sake. Why would he be interested in Frannie now?

Of course, why was I so intent on hooking up with Marc Reynolds after all these years? Not because I was in love with him.

But maybe because I thought I was capable of falling in love with him.

Frannie says I’m a romantic, but she doesn’t mean it as a compliment. To her, it’s a synonym for
delusional,
to which I counter that I prefer my delusions to her version of reality any day.

“Your order’s ready, ma’am,” the freckled girl called.

I carried the paper bag back to the picnic table and unwrapped my food, telling myself that a burger without cheese is just as good as one with cheese, and that greasy fries were bad for my complexion.

I’ve always been a terrible liar.

A slender woman with close-cropped silver hair walked up to the window and ordered a chicken finger basket. She stood with one hip cocked, her fingers drumming on the counter in a way that was eerily familiar. I had a flashback to ninth-grade chemistry class, and those same drumming fingers on the lab counter.

I blinked. What were the odds of running into two people I knew from school, here at our old hangout? Coincidence?
Or one of those weird metaphysical tricks my new-age acquaintances in Bakersfield believed in?

“I’ll have that right out, Alice,” the freckled girl said.

Memory confirmed, I half stood. “Alice Weston?”

The woman turned toward me. “No one’s called me that in years.”

She didn’t remember me. The realization made me feel as if I’d swallowed rocks. Alice Weston had only been my best friend in the world from the time we met in sixth grade until I left town. “It’s Ellen,” I said. “Ellen Lawrence.”

Alice’s smile could have lit a stadium. “Oh my God, Ellen!”