Durable Goods_ A Novel - Elizabeth Berg [7]
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.” He put his hands on my shoulders. “First, you relax.”
I stepped back and he followed me. I stepped back again, bumped into a kitchen chair, and nearly fell. I looked up, laughed, and he kissed me on the lips. I felt electrocuted. I never knew bodies were capable of this. I put my arms around his neck. I kissed him back. And then it was over and he took me by the hand and led me out. Cherylanne grabbed my arm and pulled me aside. “Now,” she whispered in my ear, “you are a woman.”
I was the one. I was the most important one at the party.
I run my hand across my chest. Something. Yes. I can feel something. Maybe when your brain decides you’re a woman, your body gets going.
I flip the pillow over, breathe in deep. Sometimes life is so hard and then bingo, it’s like happiness is pushing at your back, waiting to come out your front.
The next day, I see Paul at the swimming pool. I am ready. I have Vaseline on my lips. But he has forgotten everything. He waves casually at me, then keeps talking to a girl in a polka-dot bikini. She is wearing a matching headband and a gold ankle bracelet. I cannot turn away. I stare at them like you watch a cut bleed.
“Well, what did you expect?” Cherylanne asks later as we lay by the side of the pool, drying off. “Just ’cause they kiss you doesn’t mean they love you!”
She says this with her eyes closed, her face pointed at the sky. I turn toward her. I want to ask why not. I feel why not. But I say nothing. I sit up and draw with the water that drips from my fingertips onto the concrete. I make a little heart, then an X. Then I say, “I do mean to leave here, Cherylanne. I want to run away.”
She turns toward me, shields her face from the sun. “Is this more of your little Dickie Mac dream?”
“It isn’t a dream. Maybe he doesn’t have to fall in love with me, but he likes me and he has a truck and I know I can get him to take me somewhere.”
“What about Diane?”
“She can come, too. So can you.”
“Why should I come?”
Why, indeed. Cherylanne likes Texas. Her father has a job in the army where he can stay put. Plus, he never hurts her. He doesn’t even yell. He gives her extra money when she asks for it for the movies, tells her with a wink not to tell Belle. If Bubba would die, her life would be perfect.
“You’re not going anywhere, either,” Cherylanne says. “So just stop talking about it. Let’s go practice back dives.” She stands up, hikes up the straps of her suit, pulls down on the bottom, puts her hand petulantly on her hip. “Come on!” I have to come. I can’t get her too mad at me. I am always on thin ice, being so much younger than she is. At school, I am not allowed to sit with her in the lunchroom or say anything to her in the halls. But in the neighborhood, I can know her.
I stand up, but rather than concentrate on back dives so I can assign them a number value, I let my own thinking in. Cherylanne is probably right: Dickie will never agree to take me away, even if Diane sits between us. But there is an alternative. My mother could come back. This thought is dangerous, something I shouldn’t do, like a sin. But I fall into the luxury of it, let it have me like quicksand. I think, she could be not dead. Her sickness made her look dead. But then right after we left the grave site, she woke up and said, “Just a minute, just a minute, I am still alive.” Someone helped her out of the casket and said, “Well, for heaven’s sake, let me call your family.” But she said, “Oh, no, let me rest a little and surprise them.” Now she was ready, and when I got home from swimming, there she would be, making dinner, and she would see me and rush to take the wet towel from me, say, “Why, honey, look at you. Why don’t you dry off and I’ll fix us a snack.” She would give me red Jell-O, slices of banana suspended in it like magic. She would be making scalloped potatoes and ham for dinner because they were my favorite. She would be singing in her shy voice, and when it was time for my father to come home, she would watch out the window for him. She always