April Love Story (3 page)

Every time I went to a junior high dance, afterward the boy would look at me very nervously, and we would kind of leap at each other, lips first. We pretended those were kisses. We both knew kisses had better be better than that, or the heck with the whole thing.

“… some chestnuts, Marnie?”

That would teach me to daydream. “Oh, Joel, that’s nice of you. But I’ve got some homemade cake at home. How about that instead?”

“Sounds good. You like cooking?”

“Actually I don’t know anything about cooking. Mother assigns me the chopping or the scraping or the peeling, but she’s the one who actually cooks.”

“You’re lucky. I have to clean up. My mother says she’s not raising any male chauvinist pig, so I scour pots and mop floors and do laundry and scrub the oven.”

“How horrible. The only thing I ever do is make my bed. What’s your attitude after all that housekeeping? Are you a male chauvinist?”

“I am someone who definitely plans to earn enough money to hire somebody to clean for me.”

“What do you want to do, anyhow?”

“I have no idea. It really worries me, Marnie. A person should at least have some faint remote glimmer of his future by the time he’s eighteen, but I don’t.”

I poked the up button for the elevator to our apartment.

“You know what?” I confided to Joel. “Every time I ride in an elevator, I wonder what I should do if the cable breaks. Should I be calm and stoic, accepting my squashed fate, holding the elbows of old ladies and speaking gently to little children? Or should I leap up and down, trying to be on an up jump when the elevator whacks the bottom?”

Joel howled with laughter. “I vote for being on an up jump,” he said, and immediately began leaping up and down. Basketball players tend to be good leapers.

“Stop it!” I said. “What if the elevator stops and somebody sees you leaping all over the place like Super Frog?”

He leaped harder.

“You’re going to break the cable just jumping,” I protested.

But he kept jumping, and when the doors opened at our floor one of our neighbors was standing there, looking at Joel as if he were a disease she thought the World Health Organization had eradicated. I blushed nine shades of red, but Joel simply bowed to her and swept me out of the elevator to our door. Oh, to be a senior and not blush!

“Mother?” I yelled, unlocking the door. But nobody was home. I was delighted. I am fond of my parents, but conversation that is interesting and funny when I’m alone with another kid is stilted and difficult when my folks are around. I’m not sure why. Mother is polite, but no matter who is with me—even Susannah—I always feel she wishes I had found somebody better.

“So. What’s to eat?” said Joel.

“There are quite a few choices, but you’re not going to like most of them any more than you did last time. Mother is still deep into her natural foods kick.”

“That carrot juice she foisted off on me last week was nauseating.”

“Well, today we’re featuring pomegranate juice, iced herb tea, buttermilk, carrot cake made with whole wheat and pineapple, and four varieties of tasty cheese.”

“Carrot cake? Cake made with carrots? I thought you meant real cake, not rabbit food.”

“Actually carrot cake is moist and good and you don’t even know the carrots are there.”

“Then why add them?” Scowling, Joel broke off a corner of cake. “Hey. It is good. Okay. I’ll have carrot cake and … and … and ice water.”

We took our food into the living room to eat.

I love our living room. I never want to move or change a thing, because it is perfect. My mother has bought every interior decorating magazine ever printed and she has a wonderful color sense, anyway. The walls are a warm, welcoming yellow, not blatty gold or pumpkiny orange or little girl weak, but a cozy, rich yellow. Lots of cherry and walnut furniture with neutral upholstery and pillows and a forest of green plants on the south window ledge. An oil painting my parents got for an investment splashes a sort of half-eaten rainbow over the dining table. Everywhere are magazines, books, and lovely pieces of pottery. People who visit us invariably exclaim that ours is the handsomest, homiest room they’ve ever seen. “Like the country,” they say happily, as if a room that was “like the city” wouldn’t be half so nice.

“You have to take lots of vitamins and pills with this natural diet, Marnie?”

“Oh, no, absolutely not. Mother believes an honest diet from wholesome foods supplies you with every nutrient you need.”

“I saw you getting a candy bar from the vending machine.”

“I know. I sin. Mother wouldn’t be pleased. She thinks she’s taught me enough about the evils of refined sugar and artificial additives that I’ll make informed choices. And I do.”

Joel grinned. “When you eat junk, at least you know it’s junk, huh?” He got himself another piece of cake and began leafing through the magazines that filled an enormous brass bucket by Mother’s painstakingly constructed false fireplace. “Strange stuff,” he commented.
Organic Gardening. The Mother Earth News. Dairy Goat Journal. Alternative Energy Sourcebook. Country Living.
“Hmmm. Do I want to learn how to make my compost quicker and better?”

I tried to laugh, but a quiver of Lucas-induced fear was darting around in my brain. What had happened to
House Beautiful
and
Fortune
and
Glamour?

“Catnip as a cash crop,” read Joel. “Say. I’ve been worried about my college major, but with this article I can get my whole future squared away.”

“And look over here,” I said. “How to grind your own bread flour. How to make windchimes out of discarded Coke bottle bottoms. How to tighten a fence.”

“Tighten a fence,” said Joel. “Who would have thought that fences had to be tightened?” He stared at a photo of an apparently self-sufficient couple posed, beaming, in front of a shack in which they actually lived. They wore shapeless bib overalls and were knee deep in huge overgrown leaves that looked like a vegetable’s nightmare and turned out to be rhubarb. “I can’t even stand the thought of gardening,” said Joel. “All those bugs and worms, sinking up to my ankles in dirt. That field trip today was enough country to last me for years.”

I fought my fears, telling myself Lucas was a fool and a creep and nothing he ever said was worth two cents, but I was suddenly aware that in the last year there had been an awful lot of changes in our household.

“Look at these classified ads,” exclaimed Joel. “‘Sincere, virile, outdoor-type philosopher looking for willing companion interested in sunshine, common sense, holistic living, and pigs to help run my farm in the Ozarks.’” Joel choked on his carrot cake. “Don’t know why the man specifies common sense. It’s a cinch he’s not offering any.”

I was seeing my mother reading seed catalogs the way she used to read
Redbook.
My father thumbing through the farm and ranch edition of the Sears catalog looking at beehive equipment. The library books, not mysteries or spy novels these days, but
How to Raise Chickens and Ducks, How to Buy Country Property, Your Best Woodstove Buy.

Both my parents would read anything. From the ingredients on the Cheerios box to forty-five things to do with Arm & Hammer Baking Soda. From coffee table photograph collections of Andes Mountains civilizations to guides for getting ham radio licenses.

So they were reading about farming now. So what? It was just this year’s winter entertainment. That was all.

“Enough of this rural stuff,” said Joel, a sentiment with which I heartily agreed. “Back to what matters. There’s a new Burt Reynolds movie playing at that theater down by the school. You want to go tonight after supper?”

He had asked me. A really truly date with Joel Fiori. I couldn’t wait to telephone Susannah. And what should I wear? What would … “I’d love to, Joel,” I said. We leaned toward each other just a fraction, kind of apprehensively, but very eagerly, and I thought, Do I want my first real grown-up kiss to be with my eyes closed, or—

“Yoo hoo, I’m home!” shouted my mother.

Joel leaned back and turned the page in the magazine. Thus went my first grown-up kiss.

“Hello, Marnie. Hello, Joel. How are you?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but bustled on into the kitchen to put down her packages.

“Mother, Joel and I are going to the movies tonight after supper, okay?” I knew it would be okay. Susannah and I go out by ourselves lots of times and Mother never objects. And with Joel!

But Mother appeared in the kitchen door and said no. She actually said no. An expression of disgust fleetingly crossed Joel’s face, as if I had lied to him about my age, and he hadn’t realized I was going to turn out to be some little girl.

“But, Mother—”

“I’m sorry, Marnie. I didn’t know you were making plans or I’d’ve told you not to. Today we found out—well, things have rapidly come to a head, Marnie, and tonight we have something to talk about.”

“We can talk over supper,” I offered, “or when I get back from the movies.”

“No, Marnie. You wouldn’t listen then.”

Joel was trying to look as if he were a passing traveling salesman. He got up and his whole body took on a leaving-now look.

“Marnie,” said my mother, “all you do is whip from one thing to another. This is serious and you have to sit still and give it the amount of time it deserves. The Petersons are coming over for dinner to talk about it with us and you are not going anywhere.”

I felt slapped. Right in front of Joel.

“Joel, I’m afraid I have some chores for Marnie to get to. Nice to see you.” She literally escorted him to the door. I couldn’t believe it! Not even allowing Joel a moment to say good-bye. She was acting as if Joel were a dust kitten she needed to sweep out.

“See you, Marnie,” said Joel, and he left quickly, shutting the door behind him.

“Mother, how could you? You were positively rude. What’s wrong with seeing a movie with Joel? Joel is a super person. He’s very important to me. And just because the Petersons are coming to dinner! Mother, they come all the time.” What would Joel say to the senior girl he’d call next to go to that movie with him?
I thought about dating a sophomore girl once, but she had to have her mother’s—no, make that Mommy’s—no, Mummie’s—permission to go anywhere.

I angrily brushed away tears, swallowing a lump in my throat. How could Mother be so thick? So unsympathetic?

She didn’t seem to notice my tears or hear my complaints. “Set the table for six, Marnie. Use that beautiful slubbed woven cloth we got from the weaver in Tennessee. And the wooden-handled knives, forks, and spoons.”

“But—”

“There isn’t time for arguing, Marnie. Set the table.”

Maybe because there are just three of us, two grownups and one daughter, we don’t have many arguments. We get along. My mother’s first rule is, If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. Every now and then we have a long silence. Mostly we shrug off the hurts and annoyances and go on being pleasant.

So I didn’t have the background to yell at my mother. I’d never done it before.

But then, she’d never thrown out my almost boyfriend before, and refused me my first really truly date.

I would just as soon have smashed the plates as set the table with them. “Mother, what’s so important about this dinner?”

The Petersons come over a lot. Mr. Peterson and my father work in the same brokerage firm and Mrs. Peterson and my mother are old sorority sisters who like to have coffee in the mornings and talk about setting up a kitchen enterprise, the way energetic superwomen in the magazines do. But nothing ever came of it.

My mother was a whirlwind in the kitchen, which was very unusual. She likes to cook, and does it slowly and methodically—says it’s a deep pleasure and shouldn’t be rushed. That night she whipped through the preparation of an involved meal in a fraction of her normal speed. And she wouldn’t answer my questions. She wasn’t being obstructive: She just seemed to have her mind on fifty other more important things.

Nothing has ever been more important to my mother than me. Yet I had the distinct feeling that I was at the bottom of her thoughts, that she’d brushed me out the way she’d removed Joel.

“Not five plates, Marnie. I said six. Lucas is coming, too.”

“Lucas! You know I detest Lucas.” It was the ultimate blow! To be forced to exchange an evening with Joel for one with Lucas.

“I know nothing of the sort. I just know that you and Lucas are involved in this.”

“Involved in what? Are we all plotting the perfect crime?”

My mother laughed gaily. She took my face in both hands and kissed the top of my nose with a queer tenderness. “No, baby. The perfect life.”

Maybe they were arranging a financially intelligent marriage between Lucas and me. One that would produce genetically satisfactory grandchildren for them.

But I was finding it hard to breathe. Goats and strawberries.

Lucas just knows my weak spots, I told myself. He knows that nature is something I detest, so he made that up to shake me.

I set the plates down carefully, because I was still tempted to break them and they were too beautiful. Thick, handmade pottery my mother had acquired on each of the long southern weekends. Lovely, lacy wildflowers had been pressed into the wet clay before baking and glazing, and the plates had an ethereal suggestion of meadows in bloom. If they were mine, I’d keep them on a shelf to look at, but Mother likes to use her good things.

Cork trivets for the casserole in the oven. This was made of soybean mush, fresh tomatoes, peppers, and three cheeses, and it tasted exactly like lasagne, so I always wanted to know why we couldn’t just go ahead and have lasagne. Mother would say irritably, “
Mar
nie,” as if my name were a nutritional explanation.

I tossed the huge salad: lettuce, sprouts, bits of red cabbage, tomatoes, green peppers, onion, raw cauliflower, and broccoli. I wrapped the whole wheat rolls in the cotton cloth my mother embroidered for wrapping rolls in. ROLLS, it says.

The sight of the embroidery suddenly made me understand something. A pattern to my mother’s life.

I don’t think I had ever really thought about her life before. I guess I thought that grownups, and my parents in particular, were “done.”