Flesh and Blood, Page 7

  “Last week was the time to tell me you hated your dress,” she said. “Last week, there was time to do something about it. Right now I want you in the dress, hair brushed and face washed, in exactly ten minutes. Got it?”

  Zoe nodded. She poked her fingers between her toes. From upstairs, Poppa whistled a song known only to him. Momma hated his whistling, though she'd never say so. His songs were like needles on her skin and she'd learned to enjoy the pain.

  “Zoe.” Momma wrapped a pink-nailed hand around Zoe's arm, yanked her out of the chair. “You're driving me to distraction. Do you know that? Now come on. I'm going to dress you myself.”

  Zoe let Momma pull her out of the room, up the stairs past the pictures. She passed herself as a baby, terrified in pajamas covered with dancing bears. She passed her parents' wedding, and Susan in her baptismal dress. She passed Momma as a girl, with a pearl necklace and a hard, hopeful smile.

  Zoe knew she'd never marry. A bride had to have a plan; she had to live in a house. Zoe would live in the outside, eat soup made from bark and rainwater. She was wrong for houses.

  “—not so much to ask,” Momma was saying. “A twelve-year-old girl can be trusted to get herself ready, to not have to be watched and babied every single second. Honestly, I don't know what to do with you sometimes.”

  Momma took her into the main bedroom, where time was slower. There, a white bedspread spoke silently about the patience of whiteness. Two silver dancers, a man and a woman, were stopped in mid-leap on the wall. Momma sat her down at the dressing table, which was cluttered with jars and tubes and little glass bottles, a miniature city of cosmetics. It had a jumbled, intricate life of its own. It was the center of something.

  Zoe would live elsewhere, let her hair go free. She'd smell like moss and fur.

  “Just sit still,” Momma said, taking up her brush. “If this smarts a little, I can't help it. Zoe, how do you get so many tangles in your hair? What do you do to it?”

  Zoe saw herself and Momma in the round mirror. She saw that she was the end of beauty. She had unruly brows and a hooked nose. Something that had started in Momma and advanced into Susan had crashed against her small black eyes, her jutting chin.

  She was somebody else. She couldn't carry the family manners.

  “Mmm,” Momma moaned, forcing the brush through. From down the hall, from the bathroom, Poppa whistled. When he whisded, Momma pulled the bristles harder through the thick black snarls. Zoe bit down on the pain.

  “It'll be over in a second,” Momma said. “If you'd done this an hour ago, when you were supposed to, we wouldn't have to rush.”

  Susan's voice came in from the hall. “Momma, have you seen my sharmbreslet?”

  “Your what?”

  Susan stood in the door. Her face came into the mirror.

  “My charm bracelet” she said. Her face moved next to Momma's face. They were all three in the mirror together. Zoe's eyes cupped their silence.

  “It's in your jewelry box, isn't it?”

  “I guess I would have checked there, wouldn't I?”

  “How about the pocket of your coat? Remember, the last time you thought you'd lost it—”

  “I looked there, too. I've looked everywhere.”

  “Do you have to wear it?”

  “I want to wear it.”

  Momma made the exhausted noise, the little growl that lived at the back of her throat. “All right,” she said. “You finish Zoe's hair, I'll go find the charm bracelet.”

  She gave the brush to Susan. She left the mirror and made impatient high-heel sounds in the hallway.

  “Yikes, Zo, look at this hair,” Susan said. She brought her skimming, soaped smell. She brought the optimism and the swift, confident clicking of herself.

  “I don't want to have my picture taken,” Zoe told her.

  “Well, there's no escape. The Christmas picture is going to get you whether you like it or not. Now brace yourself, this might hurt a little.”

  “Ow,” Zoe cried, although Susan's strokes hurt less than Momma's had.

  “Just be brave.”

  “I hate having my picture taken,” Zoe said. “I hate the dress she got me.”

  “I know, I know. Things are terrible. Criminy, look at this knot.”

  Poppa came into the mirror. He brought his size. He brought his eager, turbulent face.

  “Hello, ladies,” he said. “How goes it?”

  “I'm just wrestling with Zoe's hair,” Susan said. “It's the most amazing thing. It looks like hair, but then you try to get a brush through it and you see it's really something else. Wire, or something.”

  Poppa laid a hand on Susan's shoulder. “We got to hurry,” he said softly. “The photo guy's gonna be here any minute now. Your mother's going out of her head.”

  “I guess there'll still be Christmas if he has to wait five minutes,” Susan said.

  Poppa nodded, and smiled. That had been the right answer.

  “Found it,” Momma called. “It was in the clothes hamper, for heaven's sake. I might have put it through the washing machine.”

  She came into the room but didn't enter the mirror. Poppa took his hand off Susan's shoulder.

  “Zoe's almost ready,” Susan said.

  Momma came into the mirror. The air took on noisy possibilities, an electric impatience.

  “Let me finish,” Momma said. She took the brush from Susan and forced it through Zoe's hair so hard that buried thoughts were pulled to the surface of her brain. Zoe let her eyes water, let the thoughts boil. She didn't make a sound.

  Later, they all sat in the afternoon dusk of the living room while Mr. Fleming made his adjustments. Mr. Fleming was a small, busy man with heavy glasses and an astonished aspect. Something invisible, known only to him, seemed always to be happening a foot in front of his thin, serious face. His camera stood on three stork legs, aiming its blind eye at the room.

  “Just relax, everybody,” he said, lowering a lamp. “This 'll only take a few minutes. Right? A few minutes.”

  Zoe sat on the sofa with Billy. He wore his blue blazer, with a red handkerchief peeking out of the breast pocket like a proud secret. Billy sat to make himself bigger, with his legs wide and his skinny arms splayed on the cushions. He believed things were important but not necessarily serious.

  “Great dress,” he said to Zoe from the side of his mouth. She hunched up. Her forehead burned. Sometimes Billy meant what he said and sometimes he meant the opposite. The dress was green, tied at the middle with a red bow the size of a cabbage. When Momma brought it home, Zoe had shrugged in haphazard assent. She had somehow not fully understood that she was meant to wear it, and soon.

  “Let's have the kids on the sofa,” Momma said. “And Con, you and I can stand back here.” She had about her an air of avid, defiant sorrow. She was already preparing to be dissatisfied with all the proofs Mr. Fleming would send.

  “Ma,” Billy said. “That's what we do every year.”

  “Well, professor,” Momma said, “do you have a better idea?”

  “I want to stand this year,” Susan said. “I look fat when I'm sitting down.”

  Susan wore the dress she'd fought for, white ruffles with an emerald sash. Momma had insisted it wasn't Christmasy enough.

  But Susan wanted what she wanted with a glacial singularity. Momma's desires were too far-flung. She wanted Susan in a more Christmasy dress but at the same time she wanted new cordovan loafers for Billy and a different hairstyle for herself (would it look too young?) and six boxes of white Christmas lights instead of the colored ones she'd bought. Susan could always win that way, by knowing with a jeweler's precision.

  Momma said, “It'll look funny if three of us are standing behind the sofa and just Zoe and Billy are sitting on it,”

  “Why don't you sit between Zoe and Bill,” Poppa said to Momma, “and Susie and I can stand back here.”

  Momma's mouth made its line. It said its no, silently, while Momma turned inside herself. She wore
a red dress with a sprig of holly and three gold glass balls trembling at the breast.

  “What if you and I sat on the sofa,” she said. “And all three kids stood in back?”

  “Zoe's too short,” Billy said. “All you'll see is the top of her head.”

  Momma nodded. “All right,” she said. “Fine. Whatever. I'll sit. Susan, you stand in back with your father.”

  She was lost in multiplicity. She wanted to stand behind the sofa with Poppa but she also wanted new records of Christmas carols and a set of dishes hand-painted with candy canes and a real pearl necklace to give to Susan for high school graduation.

  “Get ready,” Mr. Fleming said. “Get in your positions. Right?”

  Momma put herself on the sofa between Billy and Zoe. She blued the air with her nervous shining and her pride, the tiny music of her earrings. In three weeks the cards would be back from the printer: Season's Greetings from the Stassos Family.

  “Mr. Fleming?” she said. “How does this look to you? As a composition.”

  Mr. Fleming rotated a lamp a fraction of an inch. He looked at the Stassos family with awestruck myopia.

  “Right,” he said. “Perfect. Just about perfect. Susan, move a little to the left of your father. Right. There. That's perfect.”

  Zoe shifted on the sofa cushion. She repositioned her arms in an effort to conceal the red bow at her waist.

  “Zoe, don't fidget,” Momma said. She leaned toward Billy, adjusted the handkerchief in his pocket. She whispered to him, and he put out a helpless spasm of laughter. Zoe glanced back at Poppa and Susan standing behind the sofa. Briefly, she thought Susan was wearing a wedding dress, all sheen and lace. Susan stood next to Poppa. She was calm and beautiful.

  “Fine,” Mr. Fleming said. “You look aces, all of you. Now you're all going to smile for me. Right?”

  Zoe saw that she was not in the picture. She shifted her weight, moved closer toward the center. She still wasn't in the picture.

  “Hey, Zoe,” Mr. Fleming said. “Are you going to smile? For me?”

  She nodded. She started to smile. The room exploded with light.

  1968/ It was too late not to have done it. The kisses had become something Susan did and now there was no language to say no in. Now it was only possible to let it happen. Not saying anything gave it no shape, no beginning or end; it was only possible to not say anything.

  If she hadn't started it, if she was innocent, she might have been somebody who could say no. An innocent girl could have done that.

  As herself, with no one else to be, she let it happen. She wanted it. She didn't not want it. And it was only kisses and hugs. It only happened when he drank. She was like a little girl and she was like a nurse. He kissed her with romance, playfully. He was careful about his hands.

  He wasn't, to blame, not really. She had started it and now it existed, a secret they shared. Saying no would have given it a name.

  It was two minutes to halftime. The band waited in formation under the bleachers, quick glimmers of gold glancing off their trumpets and trombones. As Susan and Rosemary led the victory cheer, they smiled at one another. Two minutes. All four cheerleaders turned cartwheels, and Dottie Wiggins, popular in spite of her looks, mugged for the crowd, wiping her brow as if it had been a strenuous effort. Laughter rose up into the chill air. Someone threw a streamer, a liquid ribbon of dark red against the black sky.

  “Victory victory is our cry, V-I-C-T-O-R-Y.”

  When play started up again, Susan and Rosemary stood close together, watching the field. “Are you nervous?” Rosemary whispered.

  “No. A little. Are you?”

  “No. You're going to win.”

  “No, you are.”

  The ball was snapped. Maroon jerseys collided with orange. Susan heard the grunts and cries, the musical click of one helmet striking another. The ball sailed, spiraling, in a graceful arc, and Rosemary whispered, “Have you seen Marcia? She looks like she's ready for Halloween.”

  Susan nodded, grimacing. Marcia Rosselini was a tough, beautiful girl who did everything. When the nominations were announced, Rosemary had said to Susan, “Marcia just got all the boys she's slept with to vote for her.” Although Susan didn't despise her the way Rosemary did, she understood about Marcia's unsuitability. No one could question her lavish, cocoa-colored hair and hazel eyes, the buoyant languor of her body. She was the most beautiful girl in school. But she drifted from boy to boy, went all the way. She squandered her beauty like an heiress spending her whole fortune in a few crazy, glittering years. Boys gathered around her like hungry dogs, growling and snapping, and for all her good fortune Marcia was, finally, a pathetic case. Because she fed herself to the dogs. Because she laughed too knowingly and wore tight skirts and would end in an apartment in Elmont or Uniondale, married to the fiercest, sexiest boy, who'd carve the years straight into her skin with his tempers and habits. You could see the Marcia Rosselinis of ten and twenty years ago, working as waitresses or cashiers or shouting from front porches at their own wild children. They'd lived a life of desire and desire had burned to ash in their perfect, practiced hands.

  Being queen didn't mean anything so simple and doomed as desirability. The homecoming queen was destined. She had grace. She was someone particular. She was vivid enough to live without shame, and any mistakes she'd made were burned clean by the radiance of what she'd become.

  “Marcia can't win,” Susan said. “She can't. You're going to win.”

  “No, I think you are,” Rosemary said. “I have a feeling, I just do.”

  Impulsively, Susan squeezed Rosemary's hand. All right, she'd admit it, at least to herself. She desperately wanted to win. She needed to win, more than Rosemary did. She permitted herself a prayer. Please, God, let me be chosen. Let me be the one.

  At halftime, as the band marched onto the field, Susan waited with Rosemary and Marcia at the fifty-yard line. Susan and Rosemary wore their cheerleading outfits. Marcia wore a low-cut powder-blue dress and a sapphire on a thin gold chain. She had a prominent collarbone and a small, well-shaped head. She'd outlined her eyes with heavy black pencil, and brushed sparkling blue shadow from her lids to her brows. She looked at Susan and Rosemary with the sleepy, irritated expression that had become her trademark.

  “This is it, girls,” she said.

  Rosemary smiled, and picked a speck of lint from her sweater. She hated Marcia the way a housewife hates disorder. Susan harbored a certain admiration for Marcia's harsh self-confidence, but so feared the fate Marcia would make for herself that she felt a twinge of nausea in her presence.

  “Right,” Susan said wanly. “The big one.”

  Todd walked up to them, grinning, his shoulders thrown back and his left hand thrust casually into his pocket. He moved as if this occasion, the next second and the next, contained a series of openings exactly his size. He held the sealed envelope. It was his duty as class president to read out the name of the winner. He wore his gray slacks and navy-blue blazer, which Susan knew as intimately as she knew her own clothes. She felt related to prominence, magnified, because she had lain with her head on that blazer, bare-breasted under the stars. Then she felt shamed by what she'd done, accused. It was impossible to know what to feel.

  “Hi, everybody.” Todd smiled. “You ready?”

  Because he believed in duty, Todd didn't look directly at Susan. He didn't wink at her, or sneak her a special smile. In his official capacity he conducted himself as if he were on cordial but distant terms with all three contestants, and Susan briefly and bitterly hated him. She glanced at Marcia, who probably considered Todd a joke. A team player, too dull and honorable.

  “Let's get it over with,” Marcia said. Susan wondered if she was so certain, so lost to her own future, that she genuinely did not care about being chosen. If she won—for being foolish and beautiful and doomed—would she end the evening drunk, laughing, makeup smeared, setting the rhinestone crown over Eddie Gagliostra's erection? Susan felt an envy more poten
t than anything she'd known with Rosemary or the other celebrated, well-behaved girls. By being mean and sluttish, Marcia had taken herself to a realm where losing meant nothing because winning meant nothing.

  Rosemary pinched Susan's arm, gently, through her sweater, and Susan returned to herself. Rosemary was her best friend, her true sister. Rosemary was what she wanted to be. Todd led all three girls to the middle of the field, where the band members had arranged themselves in a half circle around the pale green Cadillac convertible that would drive the queen and her court around the track. Underclass boys stood ready with flash cameras. Peggy Chandler, last year's queen, waited to crown the new winner. Peggy, a handsome, forceful girl wearing an expensive dress covered with red poppies, had taken the train down from Albany, where she would soon marry a state attorney's aide. “Good luck,” Rosemary whispered, and Susan said “Good luck” back. She felt dizzy, short of breath. The world shrank before her. Please, she said silently. Please, God. Neither Rosemary nor Marcia needed the crown the way she did. They were already on their way to the places they were going.

  The girls stood in a line before the Cadillac, facing the bleachers. Peggy Chandler stood on one side, waiting, staunch and satisfied within her dress. Susan knew where her family was sitting, though from where she stood they were merely part of the shifting, admiring crowd. The world was so large. There was so much to win or lose. Todd stepped up to the microphone stand. He adjusted the mike, grimaced over its squawk, then smiled expansively at the crowd.

  “Welcome, everybody.” His voice boomed, hollowed and deepened, through the loudspeakers. “Welcome fellow students and alumni. Hope you're enjoying the game. No. I stand corrected. Hope you're enjoying the way we're clobbering those Panthers.”

  The night filled with cheers and hoots. Maroon streamers flew. Clouds of confetti cascaded through the electric light.

  “We Trojans are known around these parts for our team spirit, our honor, our ferociousness on the playing field. Well, some of us are. Others are just as well known for beauty and charm. Now the time has come to crown the girl who best represents those qualities. Ladies and gentlemen, it's my privilege to announce the queen of the 1968 homecoming game.”