Durable Goods_ A Novel - Elizabeth Berg [9]
“You know,” she said. “She is May, and he is December.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
But I know now, and I know, too, that my job is to splash the competition to make her makeup run, to make her hair flatten against her cheeks. I slide into the pool, take a deep breath, swim underwater until I am nearly beside the lifeguard and the woman. Then I surface and swim close by them, kicking violently.
“Hey!” The lifeguard jumps back, pulls his sunglasses off his face. The woman giggles, holds her hands up before her as though they were a shield. Cherylanne smiles at me from the edge of the pool, nods. But nothing happens. The lifeguard resumes his conversation with the woman, stands even closer to her. He does not stand back in horror as we’d hoped, then swim over to Cherylanne to say, “Ah. A natural type. Not afraid to get her hair wet, and a good back diver to boot.” Cherylanne’s smile fades.
I swim over to her, spread my arms out along the side of the pool. “Didn’t work,” I say. I let my legs rise up, kick them slowly under the water. My cuts are all healed.
Cherylanne is still watching her competitor. “I hate her,” she says. “She’s so trashy. She probably paid ten cents for that bathing suit.”
I look across the pool and see that Paul Arnold has stretched his towel and himself out beside the girl in polka dots. He is tuning her transistor radio. I turn to Cherylanne. “Let’s go. We are about all struck out here.”
We are at the snack bar, eating french fries covered with enough catsup to be camouflage. Cherylanne sighs, pokes at one fry with another.
“What?” I say.
“I am so tired of only waiting,” she says. Here is why we are friends. Sometimes she says something and I know so much what she means I could have said it myself, and at the same exact time, too.
I reach out to touch her arm. “I know.”
Her eyes widen and she sits up. I think for a moment I have cured her. But then she says, “Your dad’s coming.”
I turn around and see him crossing the room toward me, covering the distance quickly with his long strides. He is a tall man. But that’s not what people say about him. They say he is big. I am confused by the urgent look on his face. I think for a moment that he is coming again to tell me my mother has died. But it is not that: he is upset about something else. When he reaches our table, I wave, say, “Hi.”
“Where’s your sister?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Sometimes on Saturdays she goes shopping.”
He looks away, considering this, then back at me. “What are you doing here?”
I point to the french fries. “Eating.”
He stares at the towel wrapped around me, the plastic sandals on my feet. “Get home.”
Cherylanne has not moved. She has barely looked up. “I have to go,” I tell her. She nods.
I walk ahead of my father. I believe this is happening because I am dressed wrong. But I’m not sure. I try to walk straight, not too fast, not too slow. When we are outside and no one is in sight, he takes my arm and turns me around. “Just what do you think you’re doing in that snack bar?”
Well, I have answered one way already. He needs something else. “Cherylanne was hungry.”
“Hungry for what?”
“French fries, obviously.”
There it is, his hand across my face, the familiar sting. “Don’t get smart!”
I stare up into his eyes. They are only blue, like a movie star’s. And yet.
“And get that look off your face!”
Now comes the part where I must rearrange my face so that a definite change can be seen. But the change must be in the right direction. If you do it wrong, he gets madder. I make myself blank, all on the inside, all on the outside. Wrong. He hits me again, harder. But it is only on my arm this time. And we are almost home.
I am sent