The Second Summer of the Sisterhood 5

The Second Summer of the Sisterhood 4

Lena didn’t go crazy in the Pants. The first day she left them at home in her room on top of the pile of letters from Kostos. The second day she wore them to work, got reprimanded by Mrs. Duffers, and had to take them off before lunchtime. She left them on the chair in the back of the store, where a customer saw them and tried to buy them.

Her heart was still pounding from the horror of that experience when Effie strode in. It was closing time, and Lena hadn’t finished cleaning out the fitting rooms.

 

“So guess who called today?” Effie demanded.

 

“Who?” Lena hated Effie’s guessing games, especially when she was tired.

 

“Guess.” Effie followed her back to the fitting rooms.

 

“No!”

 

Effie looked sour. “Fine. Fine .” She cast her eyes upward for patience. “Grandma. I talked to her.”

 

“You did?” Lena stopped picking up clothes. “How is she? How’s Bapi?”

 

“They’re great. They had a big anniversary party in the old restaurant last month. The whole town was there.”

“Ohhh.” Lena could picture it. Her mind drifted slowly to Fira, to the view of the Caldera from the terrace of the restaurant her grandparents owned. “That’s so nice,” she said distantly. Picturing the harbor of course made her picture Kostos. Picturing Kostos gave her that zoomy feeling in the bottom of her abdomen.

Lena cleared her throat and resumed gathering clothing. “How are the Dounases?” she asked evenly.

 

“Good.”

 

“Yeah?” Lena didn’t want to ask about Kostos outright.

 

“Sure. Grandma said Kostos brought a girl from Ammoudi to the party.”

 

Lena tried very hard not to move her face one single millimeter.

 

Effie’s eyebrows went down. “Lenny, why do you look like that?”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Like . . . that.” Effie pointed at Lena’s tight, miserable face. “You’re the one who broke up with him .”

 

“I know.” Lena bumped her foot spasmodically against the mirror. “Your point being . . . ?” Lena needed to play stupid. Otherwise she might cry.

 

“I don’t get you. If you feel this way, why did you break up with him?” Effie asked, not seeming to care that they weren’t having the same conversation.

 

“Feel what way? How do you know I feel any which way?” Lena asked. She began sorting pants by size.

 

Effie shook her head, as though Lena were a hopeless and pitiable moron. “If it makes you feel better, Grandma doesn’t like the girl he brought.”

 

Lena pretended very hard not to care about that.

 

“And she also said, and I quote, ‘Dis girl is not nearly as boootiful as Lena.’”

 

Lena kept up with the pretending. “Does that make it any better?” Effie wheedled.

 

Lena shrugged, impassive.

 

“So I said, ‘Grandma, that girl probably didn’t break up with him for no reason.’”

 

Lena threw the clothes down. “Forget it,” she stated. “You are not getting a ride to work.”

 

“Lenny! You promised!” Effie said. “Besides, what do you care? I thought you said you didn’t care.”

 

Effie always won. Always.

 

“I don't care,” Lena mumbled babyishly.

 

“So drive me to work like you promised.” Effie was a genius at turning a favor into an obligation.

The sky had turned so dark Lena couldn’t believe it wasn’t nighttime. Cradling the Pants in one arm, she locked the front door and pulled down the gate. Outside, heavy, warm splashes of rain landed in her hair and dripped down her forehead. Effie ran to the car and Lena walked, protecting the Pants under her shirt. She liked rain.

The Olive Vine was less than two miles from the shop. Effie bounded into the restaurant in a couple of giant strides.

Lena drove on. The rain drummed and the windshield wipers squeaked. She liked being alone at the wheel when nobody was expecting her anyplace. Sometime in the last few months she had passed into the stage of driving where she didn’t have to think consciously about how to do it anymore. She didn’t have to think Okay, blinker. Brakes. Turn. She just drove. It left her mind free to wander.

She found herself driving past the mailbox where she used to mail the old letters, before she had stopped caring so much. Or before she had started pretending she had stopped caring so much.

She still held the Pants close to her body. She’d worn them when she and Kostos had kissed so exquisitely at the very end of the summer. She took a deep breath. Maybe a few of his cells still clung to them. Maybe.

Having the Pants with her now on this rainy night, far away from Kostos, gave her a deep, melancholic feeling of loss.

 

So that was how it was. Kostos had a new girlfriend. Lena had a mean sister and a job selling beige clothing.

 

Who, exactly, had come out on top?

At first Bridget thought she remembered nothing from Burgess. Then, as she ambled around town, a few little things jogged her memory. One was the peanut machine outside the hardware store. Even as a six-year-old, she’d thought it was weird and old-fashioned that the gumball machine dispensed peanuts. And yet, here it still was. She strongly suspected the peanuts were as old as she was.

Another thing was the rusted black cannon from the Civil War, in the grassy patch in front of the courthouse. A pyramid of stuck-together cannonballs stood by its base. She remembered clowning around—sticking her head in it as though she were a cartoon character and making Perry laugh.

She also remembered climbing on the high wall next to the bank, and her grandmother shrieking at her to get down. She’d been such a monkey as a little kid. She’d been the best tree climber in her neighborhood, even among boys and older kids. She’d felt so light and rubbery then compared to now.

Bridget let her feet guide her, because they seemed to have a better memory than her head. She walked farther along Market Street until the village stretched out a little. There were hydrangeas in bloom in front of every house—big purple balls.

Past the Methodist church, a wide field stretched out, green and lush. It went along for three blocks, bordered by giant, ancient oak trees and pretty iron benches. At the far end she noticed soccer goals marking a beautiful green regulation field. She felt breathless as she looked at it. There was a rumbling, creaking feeling in her brain as it searched its many dusty, unconsidered files.

She sat on a bench and closed her eyes. She remembered running and she remembered a soccer ball, and then she started remembering many, many things all in a rush. She remembered her grandfather teaching her and Perry how to kick the ball when they were only three or four. Perry had hated it and tripped over his feet, but Bridget had loved it. She remembered holding her hands behind her back to remind herself that soccer was only kicking.

She remembered dribbling past her grandpa and him shouting proudly after her, “Folks, I think we have a natural!” even though there was nobody else on the field.

The summer she was five, her grandpa had stuck her in the Limestone County Boys’ League, amid loud protests from the other parents. Bridget remembered forcing her grandmother to cut her hair short, like a boy’s, and she also remembered her mother crying when she saw Bridget at the end of the summer. Bridget led the Burgess Honey Bees to a trophy for two summers straight, and the parents stopped complaining.

God, she had forgotten about that team until this very minute. And it had been so meaningful to her then—the coincidence of her nickname and the team name. “She’s the Bee-all! She’s the Bee’s Knees!” her grandpa used to shout from the sidelines, thinking he was so funny. Her father had never cared for sports, but her grandpa had adored them.

Had her father known when her grandfather died?

 

She let her mind drift. She’d never stopped to think about how soccer had started for her, but this was it. This was the beginning.

There was a strange thing about her memory, and she had noticed it before this. When she was eleven and the terrible stuff had happened, her brain had sort of erased itself. Everything from that time or before she’d either forgotten completely or remembered as though it had happened to somebody else. They’d made her see a psychiatrist for a few months after her mom died, and he had said her brain had formed scar tissue. She had never liked that image much.

She sat there, resting her scarred head on the back of the bench for a long time, until, as though in a dream, she heard footsteps and shouts and the beloved hunk of a foot against a soccer ball. She opened her eyes and watched, startled, as a group of boys took over the field. There were fifteen or twenty of them, and they appeared to be around her age, maybe a little older.

When one of the boys passed close by, she couldn’t help flagging him down. “Are you part of a team?” she asked.

 

He nodded. “The Burgess Mavericks,” he said.

 

“Is there still a summer league?” she asked.

 

“Sure.” He was holding a soccer ball. Though Bridget hadn’t touched one in more than nine months, she looked at his with longing.

 

“You have practice now?” she asked.

 

“Tuesday and Thursday evenings,” he answered in his twangy Alabama way. People seemed to talk with more syllables down here.

She remembered loving that accent, listening to it magically insert itself into her own vowels and consonants by the middle of August. And then she’d go back up north, her friends would giggle at the way she talked, and by October it would be gone again.

The guy kept turning his head to look at the drills starting up on the field. He was polite, but he didn’t want to talk to her anymore.

 

“And you play games on Saturday?” she asked.

 

“Yep. All summer long. I gotta go.”

 

“Okay. Thanks,” she said after him as he joined his friends on the field.

It was still strange to her how she related to the world now. A year ago, this same boy would’ve taken a look at her hair and been happy to tell her anything she wanted to know. He would have been show-offy and loud so his friends would see that he was talking to her.

Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen Bridget had attracted more wolf whistles and phone numbers and corny pickup lines than she could count. It wasn’t because she was—had been— beautiful. Lena was beautiful, truly and uniquely, and boys mostly looked scared when she passed by. It was that Bridget had been thin and striking and outgoing, and, of course, she’d had the hair.

She watched them kick around and run a few drills. When they started a scrimmage, she walked a bit closer to the sidelines. Already some girls—probably girlfriends—had appeared. As she studied the faces of the players, a few of them transformed from strangers into long-ago teammates before her eyes. Amazing. There was a ball hog she definitely recognized, what was his name? Corey Something-or-other. And the midfielder with red hair. He looked and played almost exactly the same as when he was seven. She was sure she recognized one of the goalies, and then there was . . .Oh my. Bridget clasped her hands to her chest. The name jumped right into her head: Billy Kline. Oh, my God! He had been the second-best player on the team and her best pal off the field. She remembered him distinctly now. She probably even had a letter or two from him stuffed away somewhere back home.

Unbelievable.

He had grown up very nicely, she couldn’t help noting. He was both wiry and muscular, her favorite type. His hair was darker and wavier, but his face was the same. She’d loved his face when she was a little kid.

She watched him with a pounding heart and a scrambling mind. His house was down close to the river. They’d spent hours and hours collecting rocks together, certain that every one was an ancient arrowhead and that they could sell it for big bucks to the Indian Mound Museum in downtown Florence.

Billy threw the ball in from the sidelines. She moved quickly out of his way. He looked at her and through her.

She wasn’t worried about him recognizing her. Back then she’d been skinny, yellow-haired, and full of joy. Now she was heavy, muddy-haired, and full of care. She might as well be a different person.

It was a relief, in a way. Sometimes it felt like a relief to be invisible.

Tibby sat on the outside of a group of kids in the film program. There was a lot of dark clothing and heavy footwear, and quite a few piercings glinting in the sunlight. They had invited her to sit with them while they all finished up their lunches before film seminar. Tibby knew that they had invited her largely because she had a ring in her nose. This bugged her almost as much as when people excluded her because she had a ring in her nose.

A girl named Katie complained about her roommate while Tibby chewed listlessly on pasta salad. It had as much taste as her sleeve. She chewed and nodded, nodded and chewed. It was a good thing she’d been born with her friends, Tibby realized, because she was terrible at making them.

A few minutes later she followed the group up the stairs of the arts building and into the classroom. She sat on the edge so there would be empty seats next to her. Partly she wanted to lessen her commitment to this particular group. Mostly she was waiting for Alex.

Her heart sped up when he arrived with Maura and sat down next to Tibby. Maura sat on his other side. Granted, they were the only two empty seats together left in the room.

 

The instructor, Mr. Russell, organized his papers. “All right, class.” He held up his hands. “As you know, this is your project seminar. This class is not about listening but about doing.” Alex was taking notes in his binder. Tibby couldn’t resist glancing at them.

 

Class about doing.

 

Was he joking? He glanced at Tibby. Yes, he was joking.

 

“You’re each going to make a film this summer, and you’ll have nearly the entire term to do it. You’ll spend a lot of time out in the world and a little time in this class.”

Alex was now drawing a picture. It was Mr. Russell, only his head was very tiny and his hands were very large. It was a pretty good picture. Did Alex know Tibby was peeking at it? Did he mind?

“The assignment,” Mr. Russell went on, “is to make a biographical piece. Focus the film on somebody who’s played an important role in your life. You are welcome to use scripts and actors or to make a documentary. It’s up to you.”

Tibby had an idea of what she wanted to do. It just arrived in her head. It arrived in the image of Bailey. Her friend Bailey, last summer, sitting against the slatted blinds in Tibby’s bedroom window with the sunlight sliding through in the last month of her twelve-year-long life. It made Tibby’s eyes ache. She looked to her left.

Up to you, Alex wrote in flowery calligraphy under the picture of Mr. Russell.

Tibby rubbed her eyes. No, she didn’t want to do that idea. She couldn’t do that idea. She didn’t permit herself to even give that idea a worded tag in her brain. She let it float back out the way it had come.

For the rest of the class she felt haunted by the feeling of the idea, even though the idea itself was gone. She forgot about Alex and his notes. Her eyes seemed to focus only a few inches in front of her face.

She forgot about him until he was talking right next to her ear. It took her a few moments to realize he was talking to her ear. Or rather, to her.

 

“Do you want to get coffee?” he seemed to be asking.

 

Maura was looking at her expectantly too.

 

“Oh . . .” When Alex’s words arranged themselves into the proper order, Tibby discovered she was pleased. “Now?”

 

“Sure.” Maura appeared to have taken over the planning. “Do you have another class?”

 

Tibby shrugged. Did she? Did it matter? She stood up and lifted her bag over her shoulder.

 

They sat in the back of the café at the student union building. It turned out both Alex and Maura were from New York City, which Tibby might have guessed. It also turned out Maura’s room was on the seventh floor of Tibby’s dorm. Maura was particularly interested in Vanessa, the RA. “Did you see her room?”

 

Tibby’s attention was drifting over to Alex. Maura wasn’t willing to let it go.

 

“Seriously, did you see it?”

 

“No,” Tibby said.

 

“It’s full of toys and stuffed animals. I swear to God. The girl is a freeeeak. ”

 

Tibby nodded. She didn’t doubt that, but she was more interested in listening to Alex talk about his project. “It’s pure nihilism. Think Kafka, but with a lot of explosions,” he was explaining.

 

Tibby laughed appreciatively even though she didn’t know what nihilism meant and she couldn’t name a single thing Kafka had written. He was a writer, wasn’t he?

 

Alex had a wry smile. “Kafka meets early Schwarzenegger, and the whole thing takes place in a Pizza Hut.”

 

He is smart, Tibby thought. “And how is this biographical?” she asked.

 

Alex shrugged and cast her a low-level smile. “Dunno,” he said, like he couldn’t be bothered.

 

“So what’s your project going to be? Do you know yet?” Maura asked her.

 

Tibby didn’t even allow herself the idea of her first idea, though it cast its shadow from high above her head. “I don’t know. . . . I’m thinking probably I’ll . . .”

Tibby had no idea how she was going to end this sentence. She looked down at Alex’s Pumas. She wanted her movie to be funny. She wanted Alex to smile at her the way he had in Bagley’s class.

She thought of the stuff she’d already filmed this summer. She’d caught this hilarious bit of her mom bustling around the kitchen, unaware that she had Nicky’s lollipop stuck to the back of her head. It was a dumb gag, but it was funny.

“I’m thinking I’ll probably do kind of a comic one . . . about my mom.”

 

Carmen wished the ride to the Morgans’ were longer so she could complain longer. She could tell Lena felt the ride was long enough.

“I understand, I really do,” Lena said sweetly but with diminishing patience as she pulled up in front of the large white clapboard house. “I’m just saying, your mom hasn’t gone on a date in a long time. It’s exciting for her.”

Lena glanced at Carmen’s sour face. “But then again, she’s not my mom. If she were, maybe I’d feel exactly the same way.”

 

Carmen studied her suspiciously. “No. You wouldn’t.”

 

Lena shrugged. “Well, I don’t think my mom ever kissed a guy other than my dad, so it’s pretty hard to picture,” she reasoned diplomatically. “But if she did—”

 

“You would be kind about it,” Carmen finished.

 

“No one is kind to their mom,” Lena said.

 

“You are,” Carmen accused.

 

“Oh, no, I’m not,” Lena said with feeling.

 

“You get annoyed and maybe huffy sometimes, Len, but you’re not openly bratty.”

 

“Annoyed and huffy can be even worse than bratty,” Lena argued.

 

The shiny red front door opened, and Jesse Morgan stood waving at them from the top step.

 

“I have to go,” Carmen said. “Can you pick me up? I’ll drive tomorrow.”

 

“You can’t drive tomorrow. If you do, I’ll be late again,” Lena said.

 

“You won’t be. Seriously. I’ll get up early. I promise.”

 

Carmen often promised this but never actually did it.

 

“Oh, all right.” Lena always gave her another chance. It was a little dance they did.

“Hi, Jesse,” Carmen said, hurrying up the walk. She grabbed him in a brief headlock as she passed through the door. Jesse was four and liked to keep track of who came and went on Quincy Street. Also, he liked to yell puzzling things to people on the sidewalk from his secondstory bedroom window.

Carmen walked straight back to the kitchen, where Mrs. Morgan was cleaning Rice Krispies off the floor with one hand and holding Joe, the nine-month-old, with the other.

Carmen had already learned not to give the kids Rice Krispies, because they were harder to clean up than, say, Kix. That was something an outsider could figure out in a day and a mother would never think of. Wet, walked-on Rice Krispies were part of Mrs. Morgan’s unquestioned burden.

“Hi, everybody,” Carmen said. She held out her hands to Joe, but he clung to his mother. Joe did like Carmen, but only when his mother was out of the house.

“Hi, Carmen. How are you?” Mrs. Morgan threw some Saran-wrapped objects from the refrigerator to the garbage can. “I’m going out to run some errands. I’ll be back at noon. I’m on the cell if you need me.”

Prolonging the inevitable, Joe surveyed Carmen from where his head lay on his mother’s shoulder. Carmen remembered what Lena had said about not being kind to your mother. Joe was kind to his mother. He adored her. Had Carmen been kind to her mother when she was a baby? Maybe you were kind only when you were very young or very old.

She accepted a wriggling, protesting Joe from Mrs. Morgan.

As soon as she had him settled on the floor with stackable buckets, he took off his sock and started chewing on it. The sock had a little rubber tic-tac-toe pattern on the bottom. For traction, Carmen figured.

“No, Joe. Don’t eat your socks.”

 

Jesse was watching the cars go by through a small pane of glass just the height of his face at the side of the front door. “Hey, Jess. What do you see?”

 

Jesse didn’t answer. Carmen liked the fact that though grown-up people felt the need to check in with a lot of useless questions and statements, children rarely felt the need to answer them.

“I have to make a pee,” he said after a while. Carmen picked up Joe and followed Jesse upstairs. For some reason Jesse only liked to use the bathroom upstairs. She decided to change Joe’s diaper while she was up there. She laid him down on the diaper pad and let him gum the tube of ointment. Could zinc oxide hurt you if ingested?

She opened the top drawer of his bureau, admiring the neat assortment of socks, all carefully matched, all primary colors, all with the little tic-tac-toes on the bottoms. Mrs. Morgan seemed like an intelligent woman to be spending so much energy on socks. Hadn’t she gone to law school? Could you be overqualified for this job?

Carmen thought of her mother sitting at the kitchen table of the old house, dragging a fork along the bottoms of Carmen’s new birthday-party shoes so Carmen wouldn’t slip on the shiny floors at Lena’s house.

Downstairs, Carmen called her mom at work. “Hi,” she said when her mom answered. That was really all she wanted to say.

“ Nena, I’m glad you called.” Christina was breathless. “I’m going out for dinner with David tonight. If that’s okay. There’s, uh, lasagna in the freezer.” Her mother sounded distracted. Not distracted as in looking for the stapler, but deeply distracted.

“Really? Again?” Carmen paused awhile, wishing her mother would pick up on her mood.

 

“I won’t be late,” her mother assured her. “It’s crazy this week.”

 

“Well. Okay.” Carmen’s voice was soft. “Bye.”

 

There had definitely been a time, maybe as recently as the day before, when Carmen would have loved the idea of a night with the apartment all to herself. But right now she didn’t.

An hour or so later she checked her messages. There was one from Paul, returning a call of hers. There was one from Porter. The notorious after-date phone call. If a guy called within three days, he liked you. If he waited a week, that meant he didn’t have any better options and was probably just trying to get lucky. If he didn’t call at all, well, that was obvious.

Porter’s call fell just inside the three-day mark. And an hour before, this also would have mattered to her.

 

Tibby,
Well, here are the Pants. I admit I didn’t exactly set the world on fire. I got scolded by my boss and watched a trendy fifty-year-old try to buy them. I hope you’ll do better.
Anyway, I don’t know what Carmen told you, but I’m totally okay about Kostos and his new girlfriend. I was the one who broke up with him, remember?
Have fun with the Pants. I miss you. Call me later tonight if you are not out being cool and sophisticated with your cool and sophisticated new filmmaker friends.

Love, Lena 

The Second Summer of the Sisterhood 4