Suicide's Girlfriend (7 page)

Lily realized that her mother imagined the story as some convoluted version of her own tale, and so she never shared what she discovered at the library:

In China, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, revolutionaries sent round the Blue Willow plates to remind their followers of their aim to overthrow the government. The three figures on the bridge represented Past, Present, and Future; the doves, the souls of those already slain in battle.

Lily did not like it that the plates said one thing to mean another, but she understood. The plates had a secret, something that could not safely be said aloud.

At 11:20, the other children began to file past, on their way to lunch.

“Where's your dad?” Christine De Vries asked.

“He got held up,” said Lily.

A boy in the line stuck his finger into the back of the boy in front of him—like a knife. “Ha! Her dad got held up!”

The boy in front laughed and raised his hands high in the air. “I surrender!” he yelped. “Help, help, I surrender!”

Even after they were gone, Lily's head buzzed.

All morning long, Gwen Vander Schaaf had been watching for Randall Decker. Which meant that by the time 11:45 rolled around, Randall seemed hours off the mark.

Suppose he'd picked Lily up at the back door? Suppose he'd already come and gone?

She trotted down the stairs, making a show of traveling toward the lunchroom. Lily was at the door, still. In coat and gloves and red wool cap. Gwen had meant to say something chipper and impressive as she passed, but the sight of that pale child rendered her speechless. She stopped. She laid her hand on the girl's forehead, guessing precisely what temperature she would find.

Before she could situate the girl in the sickroom, Gwen had to move the big bucket Mr. Menecke had set on the cot earlier in the day. To her relief, the bucket was dry. The brown cloud that bloomed on the ceiling high overhead appeared no larger than it had for the last umpteen years.

“It shouldn't be long,” she told the girl. The sickroom held only the cot, a few chairs, the eye-test box with its scroll of paper E's multiplying, shrinking, facing this way and that. Gwen opened a flannel blanket at the foot of the cot. “Why don't you just lie down?”

The girl let Gwen help her off with her ratty coat and hat, her chalky white shoes. Gwen lifted one of the silvery braids, then set it back carefully. “You have hair just like your dad,” she said.

The cot creaked as the girl lay down. “His hair's brown now,” she said.

Gwen let loose a startled, hiccuping laugh. “Is that right? Your dad sat in front of me in homeroom, through high school. We were together most of elementary, too. He did cartoon voices. Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. To tell the truth, I think I was half in love with him!”

The declaration sounded like some amused admission Gwen
might have made a hundred times to a hundred different people—or, perhaps, like something she'd come up with at just this moment—but it traveled closer to the truth of the matter than Gwen had ever been before, and she shivered when she was through.

Lily narrowed her eyes at Gwen, as if trying to decide whether or not she was teasing, then rolled over on her side and stared at the wall.

The other children returned from lunch. Shoes scraped across floors as feet slid beneath desks. The hall grew quiet. The day settled into its after-lunch torpor. To Gwen's surprise and delight, Lily fell asleep.

Imagine that: Gwen sitting there beside a child who might almost have been her own! Imagine that. Gwen stared at the chalky whorls left on her fingertips by the girl's shoes, at the spot on the ceiling, puffed and brown as gingerbread. She picked up a book someone had left behind on the eye-test box. Nancy Drew. As a girl, Gwen had read Nancy Drew. She ran her fingers across the book's familiar felty paper. Nancy Drew. Off to Louisiana with pals Bess and George to solve the case of the haunted showboat.

As if an alarm went off—at one o'clock, when the sickroom door opened—Lily opened her eyes and sat up on the cot.

Gwen closed the book on her finger and stared. At Randall. Who looked like a peeled green twig, and wore a shrunken, orange sweater with diamonds of vinyl puckered across the front. Randall. Who said, “Sorry I'm late.”

A hefty woman with the gray and greasy complexion of a slice of headcheese followed Randall into the room and plopped herself down in a folding chair by the door. The woman—the one from the newspapers—kicked off her pair of high heels with a clatter, then padded across the sickroom in her bare feet to dangle a roll of hard candies in front of Lily's face. “Candy, hon?”

The girl looked to Gwen as if for answer. Gwen said, “She was feeling sick to her stomach. She may have a fever.”

Randall looked up at the ceiling. “A fever,” he said. He sounded like a man who had just been told the price of an object; a man who wished to appear to weigh his desire for that object against its price, but did not, in fact, know the going rates. Randall sucked in his skinny cheeks. “I remember that spot on the ceiling, there,” he said. “You”—he glanced over at Gwen—“didn't you and me go to school together? You remember that spot?”

Lily and Gwen looked at each other; almost involuntarily, Gwen reached down and squeezed the girl's hand. Lily squeezed back.

“Gwen Vander Schaaf,” said Randall, and then—as if he referred to someone not present, perhaps even dead—“she was one of the pretty girls.”

“Why, Randall!” Mrs. Kramer winked at Gwen like some mother who hoped a second party might forgive her child his rudeness. “Randall, the lady still
is
pretty!”

When they were gone, Gwen stepped up on the chair she'd been sitting in, and, on tiptoe, looked out the sickroom's high window. An unfamiliar view, but she got her bearings. There, beside a car—old, gray—Randall was taking off his orange sweater. Mrs. Kramer, and then Lily, climbed into the car, and disappeared behind the glare on the windshield.

The car moved off through town, past the co-op, the gas station and houses, and, finally, the Tasty Treat and the school bus barn. As it traveled over the rise by Yoder's farm, Gwen believed she had lost sight of the thing entirely, but then, squinting, she spotted it again—gray, shaped like a snail—climbing what she realized must be the ridge along Penn's orchard.

Penn's orchard. She hadn't thought of Penn's orchard in years.

She caught the car once more as it neared the stand of oaks beside the turnoff to Lily's grandparents' farm. And, again, as it rose up from what had to be the bridge over Salisbury Creek; but then something—wet, disagreeable—fell onto the top of Gwen's head and she jumped off the chair.

Grainy, tan, and white. Plaster from the rotten ceiling.

By the time she climbed back up on the chair, the brightness of the day had swallowed the car as neatly as it had the last bits of snow on the hillsides, and so she sat down wearily in the chair by the cot and she read on Nancy Drew in Louisiana: stolen cars and voodoo magic, broken hearts and grits and Spanish moss and ghosts in the bayou night. How empty such a story seemed to Gwen now, particularly when she knew that somehow or other an ending would be drummed up from all those bits and pieces, that nothing whatsoever would be left unexplained.

T
HIS
is
THE
Dorans' house: sad, fake grandeur. Corinthian columns made from U.S. aluminum. You stand in the Dorans' front yard, you get the feeling the burlap hasn't rotted off the root balls of the little ashes and hackberries, in a hard wind they'll tilt like the buoys at the lake; and
inside
the house, someone seems, at every moment, night or day, to have just snapped on a light, especially in the kitchen. No doubt this has had an effect on Mrs. Doran, who's very sweet, but also a sort of constantly startled-looking alcoholic.

Blue is the color of Mrs. Doran's kitchen. Blue-blue. Like in the Bible stories they have at dentists' offices.

Mrs. Doran's blue kitchen is where my big sister Ann and Ann's boyfriend, the handsome Jimmy Doran, and I sit when the two golfers, in town for a tournament, walk in the Dorans' front door. The golfers don't bother to knock, and, from the way they look around the Dorans' mostly empty kitchen, I think maybe they expected loud music, a keg in the corner, many available girls, even chips, dip.

Does Jimmy Doran notice the way confusion tweaks the corners of these golfers' mouths and sends their shoulders
up?
Not a bit. Jimmy's mom and dad are out of town for the weekend, and he's king of this
air-conditioned plantation. Jimmy says to the golfers, in his sultry way, “Hey, man, hey.” Jimmy has his good points, but news of his attractions got back to him at an early age and led to a number of creepy habits, one being this slow escape of drugged greetings between his showy teeth—white, everywhere, a regular operating room of teeth.

“How you doing, Jim?” says the first golfer.
Tall
. Has to
duck
so he won't hit the ceiling lamp, that's how tall the first golfer happens to be.

“Hey, man,” Jimmy says once more, and smiles at the tall golfer, and smiles some more. The tall golfer, Dane, and his buddy, Rex—shorter, burly—they smile, too. Rex extends his smile to me, lets it inch around the room and lap its way up my legs, etc., but nobody can hold a smile as long as Jimmy. Although it's also true that no one could ever say whether Jimmy's really happy to see them, or if he's just doing Jimmy Doran's idea of what that might be like, or he's just thrilled by what jerks the rest of us are.

I mean, is
he
ridiculous, or is this ridicule, you see?

“So, where's the party?” asks the shorter golfer, Rex.

Ann smiles at the golfers like they're old friends. “Jim-
my
,” she says, “what'd you tell these guys?” Ann's particularly skinny these days, which makes her confident and energetic and sexy in the right kind of way, unlike myself, who inspires boys like Rex to stare, not at just my face, but at my breasts, too, and my neck, and my thighs, as if I'm maybe the next course, and would somebody hurry up and clear, please?

Jimmy laughs and hops and glides on the counter like a chimpanzee. “Dane!” he says. Smoke comes out between his fingers as he puffs and pulls on his Luckies. He begins a crazy explanation of how he
meant
to have a party, Dane man, but then—his eyes crackle with mischief, for a moment he's the cute little kid from a family TV show—hey, then he realized that he and old Dane here would probably just want to discuss the many happy times they knew at their alma mater, ha, ha, ha.

The tall golfer, Dane, shakes his head. He twists his big jaw this way
and that. His hair is that dried-blood sort of red, and the day at the tournament burned him good. Where his sunglasses sat, there's a white mask, very precise; you can even see where the bow was thickest! And his arms—You look at this Dane, you want to sort of draw into yourself, not just because you don't want to bump his sunburn, but, also, the burn, and just how irritated he seems . . . well, maybe a person that tall would always look scary.

Dane lifts one of his big hands. He wears an enormous ring, gold, with a big red stone. He checks out his watch for the second time since he walked in the door. “Can I have a word with you, Jim?” he says.

Until this afternoon, when Jimmy set up tonight, Ann and I had never heard of Dane; it seems he knew Jimmy last year, in Phoenix, Arizona, where both spent twelfth grade at a private high school for wealthy and troublemaking kids.

“An intimate evening, Dane man,” murmurs Jimmy. Dane pops a beer. For about one millionth of a second, he looks down at me over the top of his can, and he's got his mouth sort of screwed up, like we're boyfriend and girlfriend and we're in the middle of a fight. As if he is, in fact, my own true love, whose name I cannot say. He is a secret and my parents would murder me if they knew—

Crazy, this Dane. Intriguing. But certainly not a boy for me; though, having found love to be both exciting and terrible, I
do
keep my eyes open for better prospects at all times. Still, Dane here is like one of the young entrepreneurs who come by our house to try to get Dad to back, say, Italian restaurants or the manufacture of plastic pipes. Both Dane and Rex—his name, I swear, I have no intention of protecting the innocent—both wear golf pants, and Rex wears what Ann and I call a “Perry Como sweater,” after a singer our Grandma Kaiser likes. Rex could actually be one of those bamboozler guys who turn up in strips like
Mary Worth
and
Judge Parker
. The cartoonists give the guys the wrong cars, wrong lapels, wrong names, and you know the code and it means: creep.

Ann gives me a quick look. Whom did we expect? Oh, handsome, intelligent delinquents from good families who would look—just
crazed
by a crazy afternoon spent with irons and woods or whatever you call them.

Jimmy frowns at Ann and me, like maybe he expects a mutiny. “Now Ann here's my hometown honey, Dane, ha, ha, ha!” he says. He yanks Ann over to the spot where he sits on the counter and takes a chomp on her shoulder blade.

“Ow!” Ann says. She follows this with a blurt of laughter, but anybody can see the bite hurt.

“Jimmy!” I say.

Jimmy smiles. Ann shakes her head.” It's okay, Clare. Shh.”

“And Clare, there, is Ann's little sister.”

“Ah,” say the golfers, and just like that—so
that
was the boulder in the road: which one of us belonged to Jimmy?—just like that they turn to me.

“Jesus, Doran,” says Rex, “the
little
sister?”

“Fourteen,” says Jimmy. Quite proud. Like he grew me himself, I'm this year's prize pumpkin. “And smart, too!”

“Fourteen!” says Rex. “How can she be fourteen?”

I pretend I don't hear a thing. I plunk down, red-faced, on the linoleum and pat the back of the Dorans' schipperke, Dino. Dino is old and fat and smelly, but he's all right. He turns his head toward me when I pet him. He watches me with his milky old eyes, like he wants me to know he's appreciative.

“Fourteen!” says Rex.

Dane presses his hand down on the back of Rex's neck. “Knock it off, Rex,” he says.

For a moment, nobody says anything, it's awful, but then Rex sort of laughs. “Okay, okay, I get the picture,” he says. “I go check out the
TV Guide
, right?”

When I can bear to look up again, Rex stands with his back to the rest of us, helping himself to expensive scotch from the Dorans' liquor cabinet. Once, Ann told me this sad story about a time she and Jimmy hunted all over the Dorans' for a bag of coke they'd hidden while they were high; they kept finding pints of rotgut booze in places in which
they thought only
they
would have been messed up enough to stick something, like the thirty-cup coffeemaker and a bag of that grass people use in Easter baskets. “Scotch, anyone?” Rex asks.

No one even answers. Jimmy and Ann are whispering furiously. Dane—he kind of squints out into the dining room, as if being in the Dorans' kitchen hurts his eyes, too. He's taller than anyone I've ever been near in real life, with legs so long that, from where I am, down here on the floor, he seems almost distorted, like a retarded person, like his head will be too small when you finally get there.

After a while, he looks down at me. “Clare,” he says. “What kind of name is that?”

Poor old Dino starts to act gross if you pet him too long, so, very fast, I have to get up off the floor, and this Dane rears back, like he thinks maybe I'll wrap my legs around his waist the way Dino wraps my embarrassed calf. Though isn't that, in fact, what Dane does want? Oh, who knows what goes on in the minds of boys? They want you because they hate you, they hate you because they want you.

I brush Dino away. I look out the open window over the Dorans' sink. Moths tap the screen, and june bugs. Our neighbors at our lake house have a machine that electrocutes every bug that likes its blue glow. All night: zzzzip!

“Clare means ‘bright.'” I tell Dane, ‘“illustrious.”'

He reaches around me and closes the window. “Air-conditioning's on,” he says, a little stern. That's who he is, but let
me
say, immediately, though Dane makes me mostly sick, still, I would like to have his admiration, and I don't think that's entirely unfair: I didn't miss the fact that he wrinkled his nose when Jimmy said I was smart, that he swallowed my supposedly very pretty face in one bite, and no doubt will begin working his way down soon.
And
he's a guy, he's big, he plays golf and looks like it. Compared with Dane, I may as well be one of those blurry photographs of missing kids they put on the back of milk cartons, right?

Actually, everything would be better if I were in love with a golfing
entrepreneur-type like Dane instead of the person I do love (twenty, unreliable, this summer crisscrossing North America, lugging people's furniture and books and dishes from out of their old houses and, then, a few days later, into their new ones). My father could set a husband like Dane up manufacturing mobile homes or some necessary computer part. I could skip high school and take the GED. . . .

So
try
, I think. You could at least try!

I try. I let my eyes soften. I listen to the nervous, picked-up beat of my heart. That's love! Listen: Love! Love! Oooh, you're in love!

Well, this feels like holding your breath, you can't do it very long without knowing you're about to suffer irreversible damage.

Dane smiles at my shoulders. Should I see if he likes lasagna and antipasto, or has an interest in, maybe, the construction business, or tell him that Ann and I started golf lessons once? What happened to our golf lessons, anyway? Mother decided she didn't really want to drive us in from the lake house to the club, or maybe it was our own fault. Summer before last, Ann and I went to this ritzy camp, and, believe it or not, out of all those kids, Ann won Honor Camper, and I, Achievement Camper, which meant Ann was friendliest and I was willing to try the most things; but what do either of us really know how to do? Take the tennis court at our lake house: no one in our family knows how to use it. “I want to see you girls out there playing tennis!” says Dad. A sad bully. He doesn't play, Mom doesn't play, but it's a good idea, we agree, and out we go that very afternoon because we want to make him happy. We want to exercise our bodies, don't we? In the slamming sunlight, we laugh at the crazy balls and the red haze that floats over everything green, but the fact of the matter is, we don't last. We stagger back into the big house overlooking the lake, our dock with the unused water and three kinds of boats, and we drink Diet Pepsi and think of funny things to say about the people on
Oprah
. The truth, in my opinion, is that Ann and I don't know how to do anything worthwhile except read good books, and even that may turn out not to be an accomplishment:

Look at Ann over there, so marvelously skinny and tan, but also
choking, wriggling in one of Jimmy Doran's almost-wrestling holds. I know what she would say if I interfered: “Don't interfere, Clare!” And who does she imagine she is? Anna Karenina today? Madame Bovary tomorrow?

And me? I read William Blake and imagine myself sheltered in the caves of peaceful golden lions; or maybe I'm
Green Mansions'
lovely and mysterious Rima, always racing ahead of my true love, who will go mad with grief at my death, and carry my bones with him all his days so we two may be buried in one tomb.

“You came in first today, huh, Dane?” says Jimmy, smiling, a little breathless from his struggle with Ann. Dane nods, but also appears concerned for Ann. This makes me think better of him. “Rex came out okay, too,” he says.

Jimmy winks at me over Ann's hobbling head, as if to say,
Aren't you glad you're spending the evening with this modest guy who won the golf tournament?

I know better than to even pretend to be pleased; how Jimmy would spring at the throat of any real joy on my part isn't worth thinking about. He likes me dispirited. I'm the sort of isolationist he wishes Ann would be. Or he
says
he wishes that. Really, he loves Ann, there's just something wrong with him. Jimmy—he's like the people who have to be wheeled around school; when you do something nice for them, they want to give you a pat on the arm, but their hand flies out and, instead, they poke you in the eye.

Rex holds up the scotch again. “Drinks?” he says.

Ann laughs over her shoulder, escapes into the Dorans' powder room, probably to make herself vomit the grilled cheese and chili she ate before Jimmy picked us up. Personally, I wouldn't enjoy a meal I meant to throw up, but Annie's lucky in this regard.

“I guess I'll just have a beer,” I tell Rex.

“Beer?”
says Rex, and then Dane moves closer to me, and then,
bang
, I say something obscene about scotch, a word I wouldn't ordinarily say, just because I know boys like these cannot abide such a word from a girl.

“So,” says Dane, “a toilet mouth.”