Durable Goods_ A Novel - Elizabeth Berg [44]
Paul Arnold comes up to us as we are drying off after the first swim. He has hair above his belly button in curly rows. “I heard you ran away,” he says. I can see Cherylanne’s lips tighten. Happy as she is to see me again, she can’t stand that I am so interesting now.
“Yes, I did.”
“With your sister?”
“Yes, and her boyfriend, Dickie. He has that truck?”
Paul nods.
“Well,” I say, “it was pretty exhausting and dangerous. I’m actually glad to be home.”
He nods. Say he was my husband: I would have told him about running away while we were in bed. He would have pulled me over, the crook of his arm a house for me. He would have had me say the good parts twice. I would feel low down how much he loved me. Low down and all around.
“We’re having a water war,” he says, interrupting my fantasy. “Want to be my partner?”
Ride on his shoulders while he walks around tough. The idea is to knock another girl off another boy’s shoulders. I have never been asked.
“Okay,” I say. And then, “Is there someone for Cherylanne?”
He shrugs. “Sure.”
“I am tanning,” she says, and closes her eyes snotty, but then when Bobby Simpson comes up to ask her to fight, she is on her feet in one second flat.
I unseat three girls, but not Cherylanne. When we come up against each other, neither one of us tries. At the end, it is the two of us and we say we both win. Then we all go to the snack bar together, two boys, two girls, and I guess I have had a date. We are moving in three days, but it all counts.
On the last day, after the moving van has gone, I walk around the empty house. There are marks on the walls, evidence of how we were. It is the loneliest thing, to see those last pieces of you that stay behind. I go into the laundry room, remember her ironing and folding. In the kitchen I turn the water on and off, open and close a cupboard door. I hear, “Kaaaatie!” Dinnnnnner!” and I whisper, “Coommming!” I push shut a partially open drawer. The sound echoes off the walls.
I walk through the living room, which is bigger-seeming now. I am standing by the door when it opens and Cherylanne comes through it. She has been crying, and so of course this starts me in, too. We hug each other, make our little sob sounds together. It is a comfort to me that she feels so bad. “I brought you something,” she says, finally, and pulls out a small gift from behind her back. I open it, find an all-in-one makeup kit. Even Cherylanne doesn’t have this. There is miniature everything: shadow, mascara, lipstick, liner, blush, all in a beautiful shiny black box with a mirror on the inside lid. “Oh, thank you,” I say. “Did you get one, too?”
“No,” she says, shaking her head, her eyeballs glued to the kit. “Not yet. And I’m waiting a good week to get one, in your honor.”
“Well,” I say. “Thank you.”
“Will you write me?” she asks, and her voice is shaky sad again.
“Of course,” I say.
“Maybe you could send me some poems.”
“Well,” I say, “you never liked them before.”
“I know,” she says, and pulls out a lace-trimmed hanky to dab at her nose. “But now they will be mailed.”
“Oh,” I say. “That’s right.”
“Well,” she says, and sighs big. “I hate this part.”
“Me, too.”
“Okay. So—have a good trip and write me. Every day.”
“I will.”
“And I will, too.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” She shrugs, goes to the door, turns back. “’Bye.”
I watch her going back home, and though the distance is very short, she runs. “Shut up, Bubba!” I hear her yell. He must have made fun of her crying. I wipe my eyes.
I go upstairs, walk past my father’s empty bedroom, mine, the bathroom, then come to the closed door to Diane’s room. I open it and see him in there, just standing in the middle of the emptiness. “Ready?” he asks, as though he has come in and found me.
“I guess.”
“Okay.”
I look at his hands in his pockets. I believe he has put something in there, something he found in Diane’s room. I wonder what it is. But I