Wildwood (28 page)
Authors: Drusilla Campbell
“You’re early,” she said and followed him into the kitchen. “I was about to go over to Jeanne’s but I thought I’d recycle the rinse water first.” She opened the refrigerator. “Want a snack? There’s leftover lasagna.”
Eddie dropped his backpack in the middle of the kitchen tiles and sank onto a stool at the counter.
“I got cut.”
“Where? Show me.”
He turned away from her, disdainful of her ignorance. “Football. Coach said I should bulk up over the year then try again if I want.” He sneered. “Prob’ly wants me to shoot steroids for good old Rinconada High.” He mimed pumping a hypo into his arm.
“Don’t even pretend.”
“Who cares anyway? I never did want to play football.” He grabbed an apple from the basket on the counter and bit into it.
“Your mom told me you liked it.”
“What does she know?”
“You should do something you like.”
“Oh, yeah.” His upper lip curled like a tough guy in a B movie. “What I like.”
“Why’d you start football in the first place if you don’t like it?”
“She wanted me to.”
“You mean Hannah?”
“Who’d you think I meant?” He glared at Liz. She stepped back and threw up her hands in defense.
“Hey, kid, don’t aim your guns at me. I’m Liz. Your godmother. No blood kin at all.” Thank God. “Just an innocent civilian.”
“You don’t know what she’s like. All the time talking about how it was when she was in high school, how much fun you all had at the games—”
“She’s only making conversation, looking for something you can have in common. It’s hard on a mom when her boy isn’t little anymore.” How did she know this? His expression of hurt and defiance touched her heart and she felt a click somewhere inside, like tumblers in a lock. “In some ways you’re a stranger to her.”
“And she likes it that way.”
“Oooh, that’s cold.”
“So? Forget I ever even said it.” He eyed the kitchen sink and shot the apple core into it. “What do I know?”
“She loves you, honey.”
He scratched a pimple on his chin and examined his fingernails. Like an ad for teenage despair, he dug in behind a bunker of resentment and picked his face. Hostile and hurt, defended and vulnerable: Eddie was all these at once and Liz was a soldier ducking grenades, dodging land mines, fired on by snipers.
Welcome to parenting, she thought. Battlefield Tarwater.
“Try to imagine how it is for her: one day you’re three years old and you’re the center of the world for each other. When she looks in your eyes she sees herself reflected. Next thing she knows you’re fifteen, five feet ten and all the things she did best for you, you don’t want.” He stared off into the distance. Liz put her hand on his cheek. Under her palm, she felt his terrible skin but she didn’t pull back. He resisted and then submitted to the pressure of her hand. How long since anyone had touched him there, in that way? He turned his troubled face to her.
“This is a hard time for her too, Eddie, but it’ll pass. I promise you.”
He jerked away and headed for the hall.
She called after him. “What would you like to talk about, Eddie? What interests you?”
He stopped. From the set of his shoulders, she read his indecision. He turned back to her and said, with a note of challenge, “I collect football cards. Maybe that makes me a nerd compared to all those guys on the team, but I don’t care. I’m not a head-banger. I think you gotta be an idiot to do that shit for free.”
“Tell me about your card collection.”
“I got more than ten thousand cards since back when I was in elementary school.” His tone dared Liz to be interested. “And my fantasy football team’s beating out Sean’s, big-time. I won seven bucks off him yesterday.”
She recalled that the day before when Liz and Hannah returned from lunch Eddie and Sean were watching football on the den television, switching channels every few minutes, hooting and cheering.
“Tell Hannah. Show her your card collection.”
“Great.” He polished another apple on his Levi’s.
“Just say you want to talk. She loves you, Eddie. She’ll listen.”
“No way.” He fired the words. “If I was to tell her I don’t want to play football, she’d go all serious and say something like how if I quit I’ll miss out on So. Much. Fun.” A barrage of mockery backed up his anger. “She’d tell me about the time Mario Bacci ran for three hundred yards and what a great night that was and how no one’ll ever forget it. Then she’d look at the clock and tell me she’s going to Erection House and I should do my homework and don’t forget my chores and have a nice life whoever you are.” He exhaled a deep breath and stared at his half-eaten apple. “Oh, yeah, she’d ask me if I washed my hair. She asks me every day. She knows I do. I can’t help it, I got oily hair.” Eddie was a killing field of emotions.
“You’re making yourself miserable, honey, and you don’t have to. Tell her she has to listen to you. We all want to be needed, Eddie. We all want to be important to other human beings.”
He listened, fidgeting and making so-what faces but standing in one place.
“If you don’t tell her, the time’ll pass and you’ll be left with a big old scar in the middle of your gut and it’ll never go away. It’ll be there whenever you want to love someone or trust or . . . you know.”
She took the apple core from his hand, eyed the sink, and dished it in over her left shoulder. Surprised by herself, she laughed and raised her hand to Eddie. Their palms slapped together.
An hour later, Jeanne and Liz were on the patio, hidden from Hilltop School by the oleander hedge, stretched out on the lawn furniture drinking Mexican beer. Jeanne wore shorts and a T-shirt and no bra. Her hair was down and she couldn’t remember when she’d last combed it. It was early for beer, but she had decided to make an exception because Liz was there, because it was only Corona, and because she had been feeling almost giddy since her blowup at Teddy that morning. True, she had lost the high ground when she lost her temper; but she felt so good remembering the omigod look on his face.
“I love my guest house,” Liz was saying, rolling a peanut between her palms to break the shell, “and I’m proud of what we’ve done with it, but it’s not the same as a school. A school matters.”
“That’s because children matter.”
“How come you never had any of your own, Jeanne?”
Other years, other visits they had talked about politics and economics, women’s issues, books and clothes, gossiped and recalled the time they stole golf carts and spent half a summer night tooling over Rinconada golf course, the summer they learned about sex from the little green book Jeanne found in her father’s bureau, barely recalled boyfriends, parties, scandals, the way things used to be. But this trip it was babies, all babies.
She said, “If you want to feel like you belong to something, like you’re connected . . .”
“Don’t start, Jeanne.”
Jeanne smiled and tipped her head back. The sky was a terrible clear enamel blue. If she reached up and laid her hand on it, the surface would be hard and slick like tile. No wonder it never rained. There was a tile barrier between the earth and sky. If the army shot holes in it, the rain would pour through like a shower-head.
She said, “I had a baby once. A boy.” James now Mark.
Jeanne felt Liz waiting.
“I never told anyone. We were in New York.”
The light on the patio became more intense, draining the color from the blossoms on the oleander bushes. She thought of the sun as an interrogator’s weapon focused on her. But no one had forced her to tell Liz about James. There was no third degree going on. Maybe holding the secret had become worse than the secret itself. Maybe this was the only way to convince Liz not to have an abortion. Maybe—probably—she’d had too much to drink.
“We put him up for adoption. Teddy said . . .” Jeanne watched the bubbles rise to the surface of her glass. Garrulous, confessional Mexican beer was at work here, and she wasn’t going to fight it. She wanted to talk, to blab, to tell all her nasty secrets, every one of them. If Liz could do it, if Hannah could . . .
“You were in grad school—”
Jeanne shook her head.
“But I thought—”
“I quit. Teddy said it was too much.” Teddy, Teddy, Teddy. She closed her eyes and made a sound that came out a groaning laugh.
“I think I should get you something to eat, Jeanne. And how ’bout some coffee?”
“Don’t take care of me. I can take care of myself.”
And now that I’ve begun, don’t give me an excuse to stop.
“I’ve always taken care of myself.”
That’s what happens to the children of drunks. They either fall apart or they become most marvelously self-sufficient.
Jeanne said, “My soul craves a Marlboro.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Go look on the end table in the living room, will you, Liz? There’s a Russian enamel box with cigarettes in it. Get me one, okay?” Jeanne laughed at the look on Liz’s face. “For godsake, it’s not the end of the world. I want to smoke, so let me smoke.”
Liz returned with one Marlboro, holding it at arm’s length between her index finger and thumb.
“I’ll buy you a gun but I won’t load it. If you want a match, you’ll have to find one yourself.”
Jeanne stood up, steadied herself on the back of the chaise, and made her way around an arrangement of glazed Mexican flowerpots to the gas grill. She lifted one end of the plastic cover and found a box of safety matches. “Ah-hah!” She scraped one on the grill, stood rocking slightly, the cigarette in her left hand, the match in her right, weaving before it.
I feel too good to kill myself, she thought and blew out the match.
I feel wonderful.
I feel wonderful.
She broke the cigarette in half. “I don’t believe I care to smoke after all. But I do want another beer.”
“Jeanne . . .”
“Lizzie, don’t. I choose to get a little tanked, unburden myself at long last and reveal my dirty secrets, and all of a sudden you’re Mrs. Grundy. Will you cut me no slack?”
Liz lifted her arms in a show of resignation. “Just stay put so you don’t hurt yourself.” Jeanne let herself be maneuvered back to the chaise and pushed gently down.
She had come home from lunch and had two shots of vodka from the freezer. She’d drunk three?—four?—maybe she’d had five?—beers. But she’d been drunk before and kept her silence. Something else had nudged her over the border into a new country.
Liz came back with the beer and set it on the table beside Jeanne’s chair.
“I made you a sandwich.”
“I ate.”
“If you’re going to drink, you have to eat.”
“What kind?”
“Just eat it.”
Ham and pepper cheese with iceberg lettuce.
She ate the whole sandwich, aware that Liz was impatient. “I’ve never told anyone this before. Teddy’d kill me.” She grinned, imagining his face.
“Just so you don’t wake up with a hangover, blaming me.”
“Just listen, will you? You know you’re dying to hear this.” Jeanne slurped the foam off her beer and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “I was pretty sure I was pregnant when we got married, but I didn’t tell anyone, of course.”
Hard to believe now the power of the taboo against unmarried mothers. Even going to the altar a little thick at the waist was a mortification to the family
Liz said, “It sure would have put a crack in your image.”
“My image? What was my image?”
“Same as now.” Liz shifted, brought her bare feet up under her on the chair cushion. “Always in control. You always know what’s happening.”
“My father—”
“Actions have consequences,” Liz intoned.
“Right.” Jeanne stared at the bright Corona label for a minute. “I threw up for three months. Teddy was furious when I finally told him.”
Jeanne heard Liz mutter something, but it was only background noise.
Not once in twenty-five years had she considered telling anyone what really happened in New York. Now that she was about to, she was perplexed to find the story no longer either vivid or all that shameful. What was Liz going to do when she heard it? Run from the house screaming,
“Shame, shame”?
And what if she did? Compared to the rest of her life would that be so terrible?
“Shame, shame”?
And what if she did? Compared to the rest of her life would that be so terrible?
“He wanted me to have an abortion, but I wouldn’t listen to him. I was sure he’d love the baby once he saw it. And I had this superwoman image of myself. I was going to go to grad school, raise a baby, fix gourmet meals and be perfect.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Teddy said I was one of those people who had to learn the hard lessons by living through them. And if I wasn’t going to get rid of the baby, he was going to make me pay. So he cut me out of his life. For a few weeks he moved in with another grad student, a dancer. That was the consequence.”
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