What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [42]
I knew Sharla was very much taken with Wayne, too, but it didn’t matter: clearly, she was not his type. She only went for his looks. When he showed her a mockingbird, she barely looked, missing entirely the fabulous white bars on the wings. When he told a joke, her laughter sounded false. When he told her he was a magician, she did not inquire as to his repertoire; and when I did so, she listened only to be polite—I could tell by the fixed expression on her face. But for me, things were opening like a flower.
We had eaten lunch at Woolworth’s. Wayne and I got patty melts and coffee—the latter after Wayne told the sleepy-eyed waitress that we both had hypothyroidism and needed to drink it to stay alive. Sharla, tight-lipped, ordered a tuna salad sandwich and milk. After the waitress left, Wayne and I had talked about her earrings, how they didn’t match—one was a gold knot, the other a blue rhinestone flower. We wondered if it could possibly have been intentional; then, why that might have been so. “Maybe she wants to get fired,” I said. “Maybe her boss is mean.”
“Maybe she has two personalities,” Wayne said. “Two names. Two houses.”
Sharla hadn’t noticed the earrings. At that point, it was clear to me—and to her, too, apparently, since she stopped trying to make any kind of conversation—that Wayne was all mine.
So after we got home and Sharla went in the house, I had brought Wayne to our tepee, and he lay down in the center of it. I sat off to the side, cross-legged, in peaceful silence. Outside, buffalo roamed.
Wayne closed his eyes, breathed in deeply, then raised himself up on one elbow to look at me. “You want to get married?” he asked.
“I—what?”
“Do you want to get married?”
What did this mean, I wondered. “Are you kidding?”
“No.” There was, in his blue eyes, a steadiness older than both of us. I felt as though my real name had at last been spoken, my self cracked open unto myself. There was something inside me—not quite developed, but there nonetheless: a potential, a bud of my coming self that he recognized, and it responded to him. I believed he had a kind of rightness and wisdom. Instinctively, I trusted him—without reason, without thought, without care.
But married! “You mean, when we grow up?” I asked.
“No.”
“We can’t get married now; we’re too young.” I couldn’t believe I was saying words like these. It felt as if birds could fly down and pluck jewels from my mouth.
“No, we aren’t,” Wayne said. “We’re just too young to use a minister. So we’ll do the ceremony ourselves.”
I said nothing. My heart was stretched. I felt as though I were either going to start crying or laugh out loud.
“It wouldn’t be a real marriage,” he said.
“I know.”
“It wouldn’t be legal, I mean.”
“Oh. Yes.”
“But … otherwise, it would be real.” He lay down again, closed his eyes. “You’re the one for me.”
“I am?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
He turned his head, looked at me. “Don’t you?”
“I’m only twelve,” I said. “Well, soon I will be.”
“Yes. I’m fifteen.”
We stared at each other. I heard the faint drone of an airplane. A dog barked, then barked again; a car door slammed.
Finally, I looked away, drew a faint line in the dirt, laid my hand on top of it.
“We’ll have a ceremony tonight,” he said. “Meet me here at midnight.”
Midnight! Well, there you had it. It was meant to be. I took my hand off the tentative line I’d made in the dirt, etched the line deeper, drew a circle around it. “Look,” I said, wanting something.
Wayne studied my drawing, nodded once; twice. Then he drew another line in the circle, parallel to mine, the same size exactly, and looked up at me. I nodded back slowly. A foreign word wanted out of my mouth. “Ahuna,” I said. “Ahuna,” he said back, then whispered, “Take nana.” And then neither of us moved for a long time.
I was alive with love, generous because of it, and so I tried to make up to Sharla for taking the only available boy of