Turtle Moon (4 page)

In Levittown, Lucy had been the last chosen for everything. Now, after a month of starvation and mourning, all that had changed. Her gray eyes were luminous, she wore a size seven, and her pale hair fell down to her waist. When the school term began it was decided that she was the girl with talent. She was editor of the school newspaper, and president of the Honor Society, and, although she wasn't named queen of the junior prom, a title bestowed upon Heidi Kaplan, who had red hair the color of hothouse roses, she was one of the princesses. By her senior year, there were so many boys phoning Lucy that Andrea, who grew more sullen with each call, insisted Lucy be given her very own Princess phone, with a dial that glowed in the dark.

No matter how many boys were after her-and the thinner and paler she became, the more there were of them, as if she were a flickering light they couldn't stay away from-Lucy remained true to that first kiss, and to Evan. She can still recall the faces of some of the boys who followed her to her classes and hung around Uncle Jack's pool.

But she always believed that eventually one of them would see through her, and Evan was so even-tempered and so thoroughly bambooAed she thought they would be together forever. Instead, it only seemed that way; they lasted nearly twenty-two years past their first kiss.

Since their breakup, Lucy has found she doesn't miss Evan at all. She doesn't dream about him, or cry over him down in the laundry room the way some of her neighbors do on the anniversaries of their weddings or divorce decrees. Toward the end, all they had in common was Keith.

They'd sit in the kitchen in the dark, drinking tea, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Was it something they'd done or simply a nervous condition that made Keith so sensitive, ready to cry at the sound of a hornet, refusing to sleep for days on end, writing with black crayons on the walls? In spite of all this, Evan was a good father, too good, perhaps, since he'd wanted custody, and fought for it in his own mild way until it became clear Lucy wouldn't give in. Now, of course, there are times when she wishes she had. Keith has grown from a wary, difficult boy into a surly loner, a thief whose backpack has to be checked for contraband every day. When the other women at 27

Long Boat Street meet down in the laundry room or at the pool to talk about their children, Lucy keeps her mouth shut. She listens to their tales of grouchy adolescent girls who paint their fingernails purple and toddlers who eat handfuls of powdered soap, but she feels no kinship. Even physical illness cannot move her to compassion.

There is, after all, strong brown soap for poison ivy, iodine for cuts and bruises, mud for bee stings, honey for sore throats, chalky white casts for broken bones. But where is the cure for meanness of spirit?

What remedy is available for unhappiness and thievery? Certainly, if it were anywhere in Florida, Lucy would have already found it, since the sharp yellow afternoon sunlight hides nothing. It's the sort of light that makes it difficult to begin all over again and doesn't allow for much invention. You are what you see in the mirror above the sink-in Lucy's case, a pretty woman with slightly green hair whose son hates her.

Lucy does her best to avoid the other divorced women in her building.

She confides in no one but Kitty Bass, the secretary at the Verity Sun Herald, who has a daughter Lucy's age and is always a great one for advice. It was Kitty who suggested Dee down at the Cut n' Curl, although as far as she was concerned Lucy's hair was hardly green enough to notice. When Kitty's daughter, Janey, who now owns the Hole-in-One Donut Shop over by the golf course, was a teenager, her hair turned so green from swimming in the municipal pool that a loose parakeet mistook her for a cabbage palm and flew right into her hair, leaving her with a fear of birds that persisted for years. Since whole flocks of escaped parakeets nest on the rooftops in Verity, this is not comforting news to Lucy. Sometimes when she drives home at twilight, the sky is filled with heat waves and parakeets. She can see them out of the corner of her eye, a flash of turquoise or jade feathers just above the stoplights and the telephone wires. It has gotten so that Lucy doesn't leave home without a scarf or, at the very least, one of Keith's baseball caps.

"Sugar, you're just a worrier by nature," Kitty told Lucy at lunch while they ate their Alligator Salads on the veranda of the Post Cafe'.

Lucy had flinched each time a bird flew overhead; she shook too much pepper on her salad and then had to clean off the spinach leaves with a paper napkin.

"Don't you have anything better than birds to worry about?" Kitty had asked her, and of course she has. She has Martha Reed, formerly of Valley Stream, New York, calling her every week to report on Keith's transgressions and set up conferences in the guidance office at the junior high. She has full custody of a twelve-year-old boy who's been marking off the days on his calendar until he can finally go back to New York for summer vacation, and who now wears a skull earring. She has trouble with the cooling system of her Mustang, so that the motor cuts out whenever the air-conditioning is turned on high. And of course, she has her job at the Sun He said, where she writes obituaries, and cultural pieces that are almost as deadly; earlier this week she had reviewed the high school production of West Side Story, making certain to mention Kitty's granddaughter, Shannon, who'd had her brown hair tinted black at the Cut n' Curl for her role as Anita.

Lucy has not even begun to worry about the fact that she seems to be addicted to Diet Dr Pepper, or that if she keeps on devouring the jelly doughnuts Kitty brings to work every morning she won't fit into any of her jeans.

Every afternoon, at a quarter to five, Lucy begins to dread going home, because every evening she and Keith fight. They fight about his lack of privacy, as she roots through his backpack, about his failing grades and bad attitude, about the Florida heat. They have even had a particularly savage battle over the right way to replace the ice cube tray in the freezer. Their arguments seem to escalate with the humidity, and tonight the air is so damp and thick that Lucy's straight hair has begun to curl by the time she drives home. A bad sign. The sign of screams, accusations, slamming doors, sleepless nights. Every day at five-thirty the parking lot of 27 Long Boat Street is a madhouse, and the lobby isn't much better. For the past few months someone has been jimmying open the mailboxes, stealing child-support and alimony checks, so everyone wants to pick up the mail pronto, especially around the first of the month. There are thirteen divorced women in the building, and although they might reveal their baby-sitters' phone numbers or meet for dinner at the Post Cafe', they never, ever speak about their past histories. Occasionally, a bit of a previous life accidentally surfaces. Karen Wright from the eighth floor had also been a customer at Salvuki's, the salon in Great Neck where Lucy used to pay fifty dollars for a haircut; Jean Miller and Nina Rossi discovered they had been students at Hofstra College at the same time. But the facts of their lives mean so little; they know what they all have in common: some hard disappointment, best forgotten, which has propelled them to Florida.

That is why Lucy knows that Diane Frankel, who holds the elevator open for her tonight, goes to aerobics class during her lunch hour and eats nothing all day but two Ultra Slim-Fast shakes and a tossed salad, while she has no idea where Diane grew up or what her ex-husband's name is.

"I'm starving," Diane says as Lucy steps into the elevator.

"Yeah, right," Diane's sulky fifteen-year-old, Jenny, says from the rear of the elevator. "You look it."

"Be glad you don't have a daughter," Diane tells Lucy.

"Oh, I am," Lucy says. "Now if only I didn't have a son."

Lucy and Diane look at each other and grin, while Jenny gives them the evil eye. Jenny has long brown hair worked into dozens of braids, and, Lucy knows from conversations in the laundry room, she's already on the pill.

"That is so weak," Jenny says. "Like we asked to be born."

Lucy knows that the girl has a point, but it's a point she forgets as soon as she walks into the apartment and hears the stereo blasting.

Guns N' Roses. She gets herself a Diet Dr Pepper from the refrigerator, kicks off her shoes, then counts to one hundred before she heads for Keith's room. She knocks once, knowing he can't hear her, then opens the door. As usual, all the shades are drawn and the room smells like cigarettes and popcorn. Keith sits in the center of the rug, methodically dismantling the motorized car Evan sent last November for his birthday. He's almost as tall as Lucy, and his hair is short like hers but spiked up in front, as if naturally agitated.

Ever since they moved to Florida, the ridge of his nose has been sunburned.

Immediately, Lucy smells french fries and oil on his skin.

"Where did you get the money for Burger King?" she asks.

Who says I went to Burger King?" Keith says coldly.

Lucy goes to the window and pulls up the shade.

"How was school?"

"Okay," Keith says, running his hand through his hair as he lies. By now he can forge her signature on a suspension notice without much trouble. "Boring."

Keith's backpack is hung over the edge of his bed. The guidance counselor has told Lucy not to feel guilty; she has a perfect right to search his possessions.

"Mind if I take a look?"

Keith salutes her as though she were a member of the 55, and he watches, grinning, as Lucy unzips the backpack. When she screams and drops the backpack, Keith scrambles to catch it. He reaches inside and pulls out the baby alligator he found behind the toilet at Burger King.

"Oh, great," Lucy says. "I can't believe you did this."

"I'm not letting it die," Keith tells her. "You can't make me."

She could fight him. She could flush the alligator or call the super and begin their last fight, the one that would end with Keith running out of the house and hitchhiking to the Interstate, where he'd stand in the dark hoping for a ride to New York, if he wasn't murdered first.

Lucy knows enough to keep her mouth shut. She goes into the bathroom and runs cool water into the tub. Kitty Bass has assured her that twelve going on thirteen is the worst; if she can get through this year she can get through anything.

Keith brings the alligator into the bathroom, and they sit on the edge of the tub, watching for signs of life.

"We're not allowed to have animals," Lucy reminds him.

"We're not allowed to do anything," Keith says as he holds a piece of lettuce under the water, waving it so that ripples form.

Most probably, this alligator has been dying in the Burger King for weeks, and now it seems to be finishing the process in their bathtub.

"I think he has a fighting chance," Keith whispers.

For the first time in months he actually looks hopeful. Back home all the boys on the block have golden retriever puppies and aquariums filled with neon tetras. They have everything they've ever wanted and more. That's why Lucy doesn't think about how many times she will have to scrub the bathtub with Comet, and instead changes into jeans and a T-shirt before gathering her laundry and eating a yogurt for dinner.

Keith doesn't come into the living room until the ten-o'clock news has already begun. He says he needs a break since his legs are cramping from sitting on the edge of the tub, but the truth is, he knows it's too late, and when Lucy finally forces herself to go into the bathroom, the alligator is already dead.

Keith insists they bury it, and because his voice breaks, because Lucy doesn't know what else to do with the creature, she agrees. They get a shoe box from her closet and wrap the alligator in the Metro section of the Sun Herald. The body is very small, that's the surprising thing, that a dead alligator is so much smaller than a pair of size-eight high heels Lucy has not worn for years.

Outside, the air is thick as soup. They quickly discover it isn't easy to dig a grave in Florida. The earth is so sandy it keeps falling in on itself each time it's scooped out with one of the silver ladles, a tenth-anniversary present from Evan's mother.

They are crouched behind the ficus hedge, on the far side of the pool, fearful of the super and any passing cars. The lights are on beneath the water, so the pool seems to float in space, a black hole surrounded by white moths and palmetto bugs. Finally they manage to dig a large enough hole, and Keith places the shoe box inside, then covers it with sand. They can hear a siren somewhere down Long Boat Street; they can hear the crabs that burrow beneath the sea grape during the heat of the day scuttling across the concrete walkways surrounding the pool. On someone s balcony a wind chime sways; it sounds like stars falling, or glass breaking into pieces.

Together they are shivering in the heat, beneath the black-and-gold sky. Along the shed where the chaise longues are stored, there is a vine of snowy white flowers that bloom only at night. When Keith finally rises to his feet, his breathing is shallow and much too fast.

"Are you okay?" Lucy whispers.

Keith nods, but he isn't. Anyone can see that.

"It was only an alligator," Lucy says.

"Yeah," Keith whispers. "Right."

J As they walk back to the building, their rubber thongs beat a rhythm on the blacktop and the scent of the white flowers follows them. No one ever tells you how hot it can get in Florida during the month of May before you move down.

No one mentions that sharks' teeth as big as a man's thumb can be found in the gutters after a storm or that the night air brings on spells of homesickness and bad dreams. When they get upstairs, Keith goes to his room and slams the door behind him. Lucy cleans out the bathtub, twice, with Comet and scalding hot water, then gathers the used towels together. When she first started writing the obituary column at the Sun Herald, she'd had a hard time; now it comes easy to her. She thinks in short, trim sentences of death and disease. Young alligator, dead of unknown causes, natural or unnatural, survived by no one, mourned by a single, sullen boy who would never in a million years allow anyone to know how often he cries himself to sleep.