Fat Girl Dances with Rocks copyright Š1994 Susan Stinson. The characters
in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons is
purely coincidental. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. No part
of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews.

Spinsters InkP.O. Boa 300170Minneapolis, MN 55403-5170

Cover art entitled "Prana" by Jody Kim copyright Š1994 Cover design by
Tara Christopherson, Fruitful Results

Production:Sacha BushCarolyn Law

Melanie CockrellLori Loughney

Lynette D'AmicoRhonda Lundquist

Joan DruryStefanie Shiffler

Kay HongLiz Tufte Kelly Kager

Pages 136-142 first appeared in a slightly different form as "Sabotage,"
in Sinister Wisdom #48, Lesbian Resistance, December 1992. The last
seven lines of Chapter Nine, pages 92-93, first appeared as a poem,
"Chalcedony," in Fractals In the Arts, Winter 1992.

Delta Dawn by Alex Harvey & Larry Collins.

Copyright Š1972, 1973. c/o EMI UNART Catalog Inc. World Print Rights
Controlled and Administered by CPP/Belwin, Inc., Miami, FL.
International Copy-right Secured. Made in U.S.A. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted by Permission.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E by Bobby Braddock & Curly Putman.

Copyright Š1968 Tree Publishing Co., Inc. All rights administered by
Sony Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All
Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

I'm the Only Hell My Mama Ever Raised by Mack Vickery, Wayne Kemp &
Bobby Borchers. Copyright Š1975 Tree Publishing Co., Inc. All rights
administered by Sony Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville,
TN 37203. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

1 Don't Know How to Love Him, words by Tim Rice and music by Andrew
Lloyd Webber. Copyright Š1970 by Leeds Music Limited. All Rights
Controlled and Administered by MCA Music Publishing, A Division of MCA
Inc., New York, NY 10019. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

In My Merry Oldsmobile, words by Vincent P. Bryan and music by Gus
Edwards, 1905. Reprinted by Permission.

Satin Sheets by John E. Volinkaty. Copyright Š 1972, 1973, Champion
Music Corp. All rights controlled and administered by MCA Music
Publishing, A Division of MCA Inc., 70 Universal City Plaza, Universal
City, CA 91608. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stinson, Susan

Fat girl dances with rocks / Susan Stinson.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-883523-02-8 : $10.95

1. Title.

PS3569.T535F38 1994

813'.54-dc20

994-16522

CIP Printed on recycled paper.

THIS IS NO LONGER THE PROPERTY OF KING COUNTY LIBRARY SY% t-

Praise for

Fat Girl Dances with Rocks

"In this sensual, gently stinging first novel, Susan Stinson tells the
story of a young fat lesbian's sweet-sharp summer of awakening to
herself as an animal and moral being. Stinson's language dreams, drives,
and dances, loving the taste of everything it describes-a lover's mind,
an icy mountain stream, potatoes with sour cream and butter-in a
thoroughly American universe. Char is a character I won't forget, who
fills my heart as she begins to take in the immense truth of her own."

-Joan Larkin, author of A Long Sound

"Susan Stinson describes the pain and confusion of growing up fat and
female in America with such compassion and honesty that I found myself
sighing and nodding with recognition."

-Irene Zahava, editor of Lesbian Love Stories and

Word of Mouth

Hooray for Fat Girl Dances with Rocks! Susan Stinson's first novel is
full of big, beautiful language and not only that, her main character,
Char, is one of the best teenaged heroines I've ever met. Fat, dykey,
and determined, Char spends her days learning geology and her nights
learning to dance. When her best pal, Felice, goes to New Mexico for the
summer, Char stays behind and works full time at a nursing home. What
she learns that summer about commitment, community, and honest emotion
spins her on toward adulthood with magic and grace. Susan Stinson's
writing is music to my ears, and Fat Girl Dances with Rocks makes me
want to do the twist!

Judith Katz, author of Running Fiercely Toward A High Thin Sound

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the energy, insights and
support of members of Fly-By-Night, Valley Lesbian Writers Group, and
other readers:

Janet Aalfs, Athena Andreadis, Sally Bellerose, Toni Brown, Carrie
Dearborn, Susan Eschbach, Ellen Frye, Vicky Greenbaum, Chaia Zblocki
Heller, Tryna Hope, Christine Ianieri, Elaine Keach, Terry McMillan,
Emma Morgan, Marcie Pleasants, Amanda Powell, Patricia Roth Schwartz,
Stephanie Smith, Judith Stein, Sarah Van Arsdale, Irene Zahava, and others.

I thank the Mt. Holyoke Writers Conference, and the lesbian communities
in Colorado and Massachusetts that have given me so much. I thank fat
activists everywhere. I thank the staff at Spinsters: Kelly Kager, Joan
Drury, Lynette D'Amico, Liz Tufte, and Melanie Cockrell. I thank my
family: Mollie and Bill Stinson; Donald and Barbara Stinson; Karen
Stinson; Michael and Eva Stinson.

There are more reasons for tenderness and respect within these lists
than I could begin to express.

For Jacqueline Yvette Morales-Ferrand

Chapter

On(

FELICE LIFTED THE NEEDLE BACK TO TH1 start of "Last Dance," then grabbed
my hand and put on her hip. She swung her rear end back and forth to giv
me the beat. Her disco purse bounced against my knuct les. I whirled out
when she pushed my shoulder, an tried to whirl in again without letting
my breasts ru against her tank top.

She closed her eyes in concentration. "Listen to th bass," she
whispered. "Here comes the hard part." All I had to do was follow.

We had a couple of hours before Felice's parent would get home from
work. She pushed me through tY: moves again and again: twist, step,
twirl out, twirl bacl We circled each other, crossing and uncrossing our
arm; then bumped hips. I wanted to be in perfect time, but 07 whole
dance moved us out of time. We had no relation 1 five o'clock, when we'd
have to open the sliding glass do(

to clear out the smell of pot, when Felice would finally let the needle
slide on over to the next song, when she'd have to turn on the stove and
start browning the meat for her family's supper. That was never going to
happen. She would keep her hand firm against my back. I would learn to
understand the beat.

WHEN I GOT home, Mom was in the kitchen, stirring eggs and oatmeal into
ground meat, wearing her apron with the bluebird on it that stretched
across her stomach. I tucked my shirt in and popped a peppermint
Lifesaver into my mouth so she wouldn't smell pot on my breath, then
grabbed a handful of spoons and forks and knives. Felice and I had plans
to go out after supper.

I slapped the silverware onto the table: Jeff, Dad, Mom, me. The dog
always sat under the table at Mom's feet. The plates felt good-thick and
dependable-but I forgot to fold the paper napkins in half. Mom gave me a
look.

We edged through the meal: meatloaf and scalloped potatoes, seconds for
Jeff and Dad, green beans, salad, diet dressing, and a Jell-O dessert. I
left the beans on my plate, and sopped up the extra catsup with a piece
of bread. I was still high enough to feel private doing this, but the
eyes of the table were upon me.

"Charlotte." Mom leaned toward me across the salad bowl. "Where are your
manners?"

Jeff patted his mouth with his napkin like a shocked gentleman. "She
doesn't have any."

"No one asked you, Jeff." Mom sighed loudly.

Dad looked over the top of his newspaper. "Keep your mouths shut, all of
you. Betty, aren't you teaching the girl anything?"

2

I think I actually hissed, because Jeff ostentatiously wiped spit out of
his eye. I apologized, "Excuse me. I'm sorry. I should have used a
spoon. Forgive me."

"That's enough," Dad told me.

Jeff wasn't finished. "Remember the time she put cat-sup on her angel
food cake?"

"Enough." Mom's lip was quivering, so Jeff knew he had to stop. "Char,"
she said, "eat your beans."

AFTER CHANGING MY shirt and combing my hair, I drove the Pinto over to
Felice's house. She answered the door in her bathrobe.

"I've got to take a shower," she said. "You can go watch TV with my dad,
if you want." She walked down the hall into the bathroom and shut the door.

I stuck my head into the TV room. Mr. Ventura gave a hunched-up nod.
"Hello, Char," he said.

"Hi, Mr. Ventura." He sank a little further into his easy chair. I felt
large and hearty.

Mr. Ventura picked up the TV remote control and started switching
channels. I looked down the hall toward the bathroom. The door was still
shut, of course. She'd be another half hour at least. I wondered if Mr.
Ventura would think I was rude if I went to wait in her room.

He was shunting back and forth between news broad-casts. "How's school?"
he asked. The screen flashed three versions of the weather report in
quick succession. He paused on a weatherman wearing a tie that said
"COLORADO" down his chest.

"School's okay." I was getting a little dizzy, watching the TV. He
looked exhausted, but kept punching buttons. I decided that he would be
relieved if I moved on. "Well, see you later," I said. He winced and
smiled at the same time, then gave his nod.

3

As I headed for Felice's room, I caught sight of Mrs. Ventura in her
bedroom at the end of the hall. She was reading a magazine, flipping the
pages very quickly. Her hair shone under the sharp light from her
bedside lamp.

Suddenly she stopped and stared at something in the magazine. I jumped a
little when she ripped the page out. She beckoned to me with her hand
without looking up.

I was surprised that she had known I was standing there, but I went to
her. "Hi, Mrs. Ventura." I wished Felice would hurry up.

She looked at me then, with eyes shaped exactly like Felice's. Before I
knew what was happening, she stood up, grabbed my shoulders, and pushed
me in front of her big mirror. She spread the magazine page across the
fat-test part of my stomach and held it there.

I looked into the mirror and saw that it was a picture of a model, just
her shoulders and head. She had a big perm and looked very odd with Mrs.
Ventura's red finger-nails pressing her between the elastic waistband of
my slacks and the fold where my breasts began. I looked back at Mrs.
Ventura's eyes in the mirror.

"There, Char," she said. "You should get your hair done just like that."

Felice threw open the bathroom door and called my name. "Come keep me
company, Char."

"Excuse me," I said to Mrs. Ventura. I went into the bathroom, feeling
shaky. Steam enveloped me. Felice shut the door behind me. She had on
jeans and a green shirt with silver threads, but her hair was still wet.

"I stood on the scale before I got in the shower," she said. "I've lost
21/2 pounds since yesterday."

"Great," I said, "you look great." We were on a diet together, but we
had a date to cheat that night. I had lost fifteen pounds since we
started, but that hadn't even begun to give me a waist.

4

She turned on her blow dryer. She worked her comb and hummed. The dryer
made a white noise like water dropping over rocks in a long fall. It was
kind of relaxing.

Felice was pulling her hair into a bun. "Have you finished Fear of
Flying yet?" She had given me a paperback copy with all the dirty parts
underlined.

"Yeah. It was hot." I raised my voice over the noise. Felice smoothed
the last tendrils behind her ears.

"Much better than The Happy Hooker, don't you think?"

I noticed that the bones in her wrists were beginning

to stand out. "Definitely. Much more class."

She shut off the dryer. I heard the voices of "Dallas" from the TV room.
"Where do you want to go tonight?" "I don't know. Somewhere fun."

Mrs. Ventura yelled behind us as we left. "Be careful, girls. Be sure to
keep the car doors locked."

I put the Pinto into gear and pulled out, smooth and slow. We drove past
Mrs. Peterson's. She was standing in her garden in a floppy straw hat,
watering in the dusk to avoid evaporation.

She waved her hose at us. "Hi, girls."

"Hi, Mrs. Peterson."

We had always admired her flowers. She favored soft, feathery varieties
in purple and red. One night three years ago, Felice and I had snuck
into her yard and chewed the centers off a couple of her poppies. We
were fourteen then and had heard that certain flowers would get us high.
We tasted the morning-glory petals, too, but all that did was give our
lips a blue tinge.

"Mrs. Peterson must have a great grief in life," said Felice now,
nodding again at the solitary figure in her blue housedress surrounded
by the gathering dark and her extravagant blooms. But it had been her
garden we picked to crawl around in, trying to get a bite of some-thing
good.

5

WE DIDN'T LEAVE the Pinto all night. Driving up and down Moody
Boulevard, we sang "Delta Dawn." We passed the Lucky U Motel, Jack in
the Box, Hurt's Chevrolet. Felice lit a joint. I steered, out of
sequence with every traffic light. We passed a billboard about a career
as a dental hygienist. We put the joint in the ashtray and hit the
drive-through at Arby's for a jamocha shake. I had applied there for a
summer job, but you had to be eighteen to run the meat machine.

We drove on, singing in a Texas accent we used a lot that spring: "Delta
DAWN, what's that flower you have O N ... " over and over.

It was dark, and the moving car made a breeze. Felice lit the joint
again. We were on familiar streets, moving as fast as we knew how to go,
trying to feel safe. We built the song up, repeating the chorus,
forgetting the verses. Felice might forget, that is. I thought I knew
every word. I'd correct her. "No, it's `she walks downtown with a
suit-case in her hand, lookin' for a serious dark-haired man."' I didn't
know I had some of it wrong.

The "dawn" part was loud, then soft. We made the accent sharper, less
nasal, more mysterious. The joint went out, we were singing so long. I
drove, not deciding where to go, just doing the long western loop up
from our suburb. By the time we got downtown, our voices were fading
from "Delta Dawn," so we moved into "Let Me Be There," with a high part
for me and a low part for Felice.

6

Chapter

Two

"BOOGIE-OOGIE-OOGIE" WAS PLAYING OVER the loudspeaker in the high school
cafeteria. Felice took the top slice of bread off her tuna sandwich. She
ate the tuna with a fork, then stuffed the bottom slice back into her
plastic baggie.

"Come on, Char," she said. "All you'd be missing is home room and Health."

I toyed with my macaroni and cheese. I'd gotten the hot lunch.
"Attendance is a big deal in Health. That's all they have to grade you on."

Felice sipped her Tab. "Oh, right. They're going to flunk you because
you didn't hear the lecture on sprains and ice packs." She crushed the
can. "Let's go."

"They give you one unexcused absence before they call your mother." I
picked up my tray.

Felice opened her pack and started rummaging for her lip gloss as we
walked. "Forget about your mother. If

7

F

she knew half of the things you do, she'd have a cardiac arrest."

"I know." I pressed my fists to the sides of my head and screwed up my
face. "And I'm racked with guilt."

The sun was shining out in the student parking lot. Rows and rows of
cars were parked on the packed dirt. I watched Felice digging in her
pack for her keys and remembered the first time she mattered to me.

It was afternoon recess. We were both in second grade, but we were in
different classes. I was out behind the backstop, playing with the wind.

That wasn't what I usually did at recess. I usually sat against the
school building and read Louisa May Alcott books. I was into Jo and Meg
and sickly Beth. Pretty, golden Amy I could have done without. Mrs.
Simms, the playground monitor, put a stop to my reading. She reported me
to my teacher who reported me to my mother who told me to cut it out. I
was shocked. Mrs. Simms's job was to break up fights and arrest Lisa
Mogul for smoking, so it was awful to come to her attention. I decided
to stop giving my mother goodnight hugs in pro-test, but at the last
minute I had to go into the living room and hug her in spite of myself.

I understood, of course. I was a fat little girl with sparkles on the
corners of my glasses. Nice people called me chubby; the boys said tub
of lard or fatso. Grownups who wanted the best for me didn't want me
sitting and reading at recess. I was supposed to be running around
playing and trying to burn off calories. But dodgeball was the rage of
the playground that fall, and I hated dodgeball. Alan Gerkin could hit
me in the stomach fifty times in five minutes. Mrs. Simms insisted I do
something besides read, standing over me and blocking the sun until I
closed the book, prodding me a little with the toe of her tennis shoe if
I was slow getting up. So I took to hiding

8

Little Women in the waistband of my stretch pants and walking all the
way across the gravel field to the back-stop, where I could read in peace.

That particular fall afternoon, the sun was bright. There was a sharp,
warm wind that rattled the swingset and changed the distances between me
and the kids clumped up inside a chalk circle playing dodgeball, as
usual. I walked steadily away from them toward the backstop, but the
wind carried their shouting right along with me. Then the wind shifted,
and suddenly all I could hear was the clanging swingset and the roaring
of the wind itself. It rustled my clothes all around me, especially my
poncho, which was loose and bright.

When I got to my usual spot, I was annoyed to see a huddle of four boys
bending over something near the fence that marked the end of school
property. They weren't far enough away for my liking, but they seemed
intent on whatever they were doing, so I decided to ignore them.

I pulled my book out of its hiding place, but the wind fluttered the
pages, and I didn't really want to read. Instead, I took off my poncho
and held it over my head. It streamed out behind me, and made me feel
like Sister Bertrill, the Flying Nun. I ran a little ways, straight into
the wind, my poncho stretched tight and pulling against my hands. Then
it felt like me flying. The sky was arching low over the playground. My
hair whipped into my face, and I could taste dust on my teeth. I had to
stop and breathe. I had my arms raised so high that my shirt had ridden
up, and part of my stomach was out in the air. I looked down and saw
that the waistband of my under-pants was showing, so I glanced toward
the boys. They hadn't looked up. Then, so fast it made me jump, Felice
Ventura appeared. She was barreling toward the

r

backstop, chasing a red dodgeball. Her black hair was

9

rubberbanded into two puppydog tails that stuck out from each side of
her head and bobbed wildly as she ran. She was wearing a red skirt, but
it had blown up and uncovered the green shorts she had on underneath.
Her skinny legs were churning. I thought she looked faster than the wind.

The ball bounced toward me, and I tried to stop it, but it hit my foot
and ricocheted toward the boys. It hit the back of Alan Gerkin's leg,
and he turned around and yelled something rude. He tried to grab the
ball, but she was right behind it. She caught it on the rebound,
screeching to a halt in front of him. She stood on tiptoe trying to see
around him to the center of the huddle. When she saw what they were
doing, she let out a cry and pushed him out of the way.

I watched Felice stomping the ground and cussing at the boys, but I
couldn't see what had set her off. She whaled into them with her rubber
ball, slapping it at their calves and arms until their skin had bright
red blotches all over.

I was trying to ease away from the trouble, but when I saw Alan Gerkin
pick up a handful of rock and gravel to throw at Felice, I ran at him,
waving my poncho over my head, screaming at the top of my lungs. Alan
threw his rocks, anyway, but the wind whipped up, and they scattered
without reaching Felice. The wind must have carried my voice all the way
back to the playground, because Mrs. Simms came to the edge of the
blacktop blowing her whistle. The boys took off running toward the
school. Felice stood her ground, and Alan knocked the ball out of her
hands as he passed. I was completely out of breath, and was leaning over
wheezing. Felice waited until I lifted my head, then took hold of a
corner of my poncho and dragged me over to show me the anthill still

10

boiling with red ants, and the big, flattened grasshopper that the ants
were swarming over.

"They pulled the grasshopper's legs off," Felice told me. "They were
feeding it alive to the ants. I had to smash it."

The whistle blew again, louder, and I looked up to see Mrs. Simms
starting across the field. I elbowed Felice, and she ran out to head
Mrs. Simms off. I followed as fast as I could. All of us, even the boys,
knew it was no good getting adults in on a life-and-death thing like this.

Felice and I were friends.

SHE FINALLY UNLOCKED the door of her mother's green Mustang and spent a
long time moving books off the seat and checking her makeup in the
mirror before she reached across and opened the door for me.

"Thanks," I said.

"Sorry," said Felice, two beats late.

We drove to the vast Safeway parking lot and sat in the car, psyching up.

Felice handed me a couple of dollars. "You buy the beer," she said. "You
look older than me."

My hands were shaking as I took the money. I hated breaking the law.
Felice and I called this my problem with authority, and I was trying to
overcome it.

"Okay," I said, "but we should buy some other stuff, too. Not just beer.
Beets, powdered milk. Something respectable."

Felice had taken out her raspberry lip gloss and was greasing her lips.
"Don't be so paranoid. People buy beer every day."

We walked down the long, clean, well-lighted aisles of the supermarket.
The aisles were full of women who moved so slow they looked like they
were dancing, or else

11

dreaming. They pulled out cartons of chocolate milk, cold white packs of
green beans, red mounds of ground meat. The small children in their
carts were alert as they scanned the shelves, searching for boxes they
recognized. "This! Quisp!" Everyone looked familiar. I picked up a box
of Velveeta.

"Not that." Felice waved a tub of sour cream at me. "Something real."

We made it through the checkout line with our sour cream and Doritos and
our Scotch Buy beer. I felt exhilarated as the electric doors slid open
in front of us. We had gotten away with something. I bumped Felice with
my hip. She bounced off, right into the drug store.

"Shit." I was not in the mood to look at makeup. I never wore it except
when I could get Felice to put it on for me. She always spent hours
poring over Cosmo and Vogue and Glamour, so she was an expert. She had
very informed fingers. If I caught her in the right mood, she would pull
my hair back and slide her cool hands up my cheeks, telling me when to
pucker, when to blink. She used pads and brushes that left color in
small, stiff strokes. She was trying to get me to take an interest.

But she wasn't heading into Rexall now for the sake of my development. I
usually had to get her drunk and wheedle for an hour before she would
agree to do my face. I thought she must want a specific little beige
bottle of something, so I followed her inside.

She was looking at hair dyes. "Felice! You wouldn't!" Her thick black
hair wouldn't take henna. It rolled right off like water on tar.

She picked up a box and examined the picture. "Actually, I wouldn't mind
being a blonde, but that's not what I came in here for. I'm just
stalling. I'm going to buy a Playgirl. "

12

I stared at the shelf full of smiling models with variations on blonde,
lustrous hair. "You are? You mean you're really going to do it?"

Felice compared honey to platinum. "Yeah. Don't you want me to?"

I watched her hold the boxes up next to her face. "Of course, yeah. I
just can't believe you've really got the nerve."

She put the boxes back and jiggled the shopping bag against her hip, so
I could hear the beer slosh in the cans. "We're on a roll." She laughed.
The clerk looked up.

Felice had the gift of instant matter-of-factness. "Okay, now."

I took the Safeway sack. "I'll wait outside."

She grabbed one of my belt loops and towed me along behind her to the
magazine rack. She picked up a copy of Cosmo. We knew Playgirl was kept
under the counter. We'd noticed it before.

The clerk was putting prices on nail polish with a label gun. She was
fat and wore a loose blue smock. Her hair was either "Moon Mist" or
"White Sands."

Felice slapped the Cosmo down on the counter, the cover girl's slick
nipples glaring. She used her most arrogant tone. "This and a Playgirl."

The clerk reached behind her and brought a copy back without looking up.
She rang up the total, then her eyes flicked at me. I wanted to smile,
but that seemed like a risk.

"That's four dollars." The clerk slid the magazines into a bag and
counted out the change. I wondered who r weighed more, her or me.

"Thank you," said Felice, and we made our escape.

13

WE DROVE UP to Tuckers Park. Its reputation as a hangout drew us as much
as the fact that it was full of secluded places to park. We sat in the
car and read the fantasies aloud to each other. The featured penises
were called "lollipops" and "joysticks." We speculated about which were
circumcised and which weren't. We didn't know how to tell the
difference. Felice told me her cousin Mickey had tried oral sex once and
thrown up. We drank the beer and ate the sour cream and Doritos as we
flipped through the magazines. We got vaguely drunk as it got dark. We
each had to get home in time to eat supper with the folks, but Felice
wanted to climb some rocks first. She was interested in geology. I
didn't really want to leave the warm car, but she gave me her sweater
and said she didn't care if I stretched it out wearing it, so we walked
a little way down the steep slope to the first boulder.

"Limestone," said Felice, "that's the bedrock around here."

Felice had discovered her love of geology while doing a report on strip
mining for a science class a couple of years back. She had picked the
topic because of the soft-eyed deer that were featured in the oil
company's commercials grazing on restored drilling sites, but she had
gotten sidetracked by rocks.

She liked to touch them. Some rocks had sharp curves like the models in
Cosmo. Some were porous and rough. Rocks were their own history, she
said. She could tell if a rock was formed by fire or water or pressure
just by holding it in her hand. Rocks were impartial and pretty much
stayed put. Besides, there would be jobs for a petroleum geologist.

14

We scrambled onto the boulder and looked out over the pines. I picked at
a gray growth in a crack.

"That's lichen. It takes years and years to grow. Don't pull it up."
Felice's tone was sharp, but I had already broken it off.

"I didn't know." I shivered and scooted over closer to Felice. Pebbles
bounced off under my foot. "I wish we had some pot."

We heard an owl. Felice shrugged. "Char," she said, "tell me something
good."

"Like what?" I dropped the lichen into her lap.

She picked it up. "I don't know. I just want to hear something real good."

I slapped at a mosquito. "You're floating in chocolate

syrup."

"That's disgusting. Too sticky." Felice looked out over the dark tops of
the pines, toward another big boulder that was spray-painted with the
word SUCK in blue.

I liked wearing her sweater, even though it didn't fit at all. It
smelled like Felice. I got inspired. "Okay, you're in a mountain
clearing. There's a lot of tiny flowers and grass. You're wearing a
white lace dress. A stream is running,

E: almost singing nearby. You bite a plum."

Felice stuck out her lip. "No food. Nothing fattening."

"All right, so you walk to the stream and take a sip of water, and it's
cold on your tongue. It's also sweet, it's juicy like water from a plum,
only it's cal-free." I had goosebumps on my arms, but I was starting to
enjoy the spring chill.

Felice drummed the heels of her black Adidas on the rock. "Listen, am I
by myself here? Isn't there anybody else around?"

"There will be. You hear someone coming through the forest-rustling
noises." I reached down and stirred up

15

some pine needles that had gathered in a depression in the boulder. They
crackled.

Felice gave me an indulgent look. "Who is it?"

I said the first thing that came into my head. "It's me. I've got a
white dress, too."

"You?" Felice looked at me, surprised.

"Me. We go barefoot in the water and sing Donna Summer songs, and the
wind blows our skirts, and we're beautiful." The dark was coming on.

She took up the story. "It's sunny. We're drinking wine."

I nodded. "We laugh so hard we have to lean on each other, and we still
fall down on the grass."

The wind picked up. Felice's hair blew back. "I do a dance," she said.

"You look strong. There's so much sun." My own hair was tickling my
forehead.

'That sounds nice," Felice said as she rubbed the bit of lichen between
her fingers, "but I'm getting cold. Let's go home."

SATURDAY, FELICE AND I had a double date at the Forever Drive-In. Mrs.
Ventura insisted on helping me hot-comb my hair before we went out.
Felice was spending an extra long time in the bathroom.

"You're very lucky, Charlotte. Some girls don't have legs." Mrs. Ventura
flicked her finger at the fat under my chin. "You should be glad to be
seeing this boy. He's not so ugly."

He was, though, ugly right through to his heart.

His name was Tim. He wasn't sweet or cute, but he sure was available.
That was good enough for me. We were at the tail end of our romance, my
first, which consisted of me picking him up from his job at the shoe store

16

and going for take-out fried chicken. He liked extra packets of catsup.
He was eight years older than me, but he lived with his mother and
always wanted to park and make out. We'd toss the bucket with the greasy
napkins and the chicken bones into the back so we could embrace across
the emergency brake. He was stiff-lipped and abrupt. It was hard to get
home without catsup stains on my blouse.

Still, I liked the idea of having a boyfriend and I liked being touched,
at least the parts of me he did touch. He acted as if my belly was a
vast no-man's-land, which he avoided at all costs, no matter how awkward
that made his grab for my breasts.

We broke up when he made a play for Felice. She told me about it, of
course. I asked him what was going on, and he said I wasn't attractive
enough to be faithful to. Just like that. I left him off at the shoe
store that afternoon with a messy sense of relief. No more chicken
filling the Pinto with the smell of grease. He had hurt me, but that was
how I had expected things to work out, more or less.

BUT THAT WAS later. I was still seeing Tim when we went to the drive-in
that night. He had brought me a little gift, some queen-sized anklet
nylons that he had lifted from work. Felice was with Mark, a
freckle-faced over-achiever from school.

Felice was good with men. She flirted. She dated. She joked with the guy
who pumped her gas, getting out of the car to lean on the hood and pop
her gum. She went through guys fast, but her recklessness had a
conservative edge. She drew the line.

Mark was following her around like a puppy, fetching big cups of Tab and
Eskimo Pies from the concession stand, but I could tell he wouldn't
last. For one thing, he

17

couldn't dance. Felice fidgeted all through the first feature, a cop
action-comedy. She had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the big
chase scene, so we took the long walk, threading through the parked cars
to the dark line of doorless stalls where almost no one cared to linger,
but Felice needed to do her lips and check her face in the small yellow
mirror. I leaned on the browned sink, wondering if I had enough need and
nerve to use one of those exposed toilets.

"My mother's been reading my mail again," Felice said as she tried to
get the rusty faucet to work. "She slapped me when I called her a bitch."

"Felice, that's awful." I stared at her face in the mirror. She was
smearing liquid foundation on her cheeks. "Are you okay?" I asked.

She shrugged and got out her mascara. "That's nothing. She set my
blanket on fire once when I was a kid. On my bed. Burned a big hole in
the mattress." Her lashes were getting thicker and blacker with every
stroke. "I wasn't in the bed at the time."

Her eyes came out perfect. Felice had everything under control. Even the
faucet started to work.

"You must have been really scared." My stomach always hurt when I was
upset, and it was twisting inside of me now. I wanted to ask Felice why
she had never told me about the fire, but that made me feel stuck on
myself, so I said, "Why did she do it?"

Felice was tucking everything back into her disco bag. "I loved the
blanket," she told me, putting the cap back on her lip gloss. "Mama said
it was a bad habit."

The movie was over by the time we got back to the car, and another
feature was about to come on. Mark must have climbed into the back seat
while we were gone to share the last beer with Tim, because they were
back there asleep, the two of them, snuggled against opposite

sides of the car. Their mouths were identical, innocent O's, and they
were both snorting softly as they slept.

Felice and I decided not to disturb them, so we unhooked the speaker
from the window and carried it to the front of the car. We climbed up
onto the hood, leaned back against the windshield, and cried our way
through The Other Side of the Mountain out in the open night.

I GOT IT from Felice, my attraction for rocks. I fell in love with the
word. It made me think of rock of ages, and rock and roll. It made me
think of myself as a little girl lying in bed with my eyes closed, not
moving at all, concentrating on rocking the bed, moving it in my mind. I
was trying to get that swaying motion like a boat on the water, or a
rocking horse, rocking myself to sleep, keeping at it until I felt my
brain was swishing back and forth in my skull. I still did this
sometimes, when I got home late from a night with Felice, too agitated
to sleep.

I woke one morning with a buzz in my heart. I wanted to call Felice, but
I knew better than to try that before eleven on a Saturday. I kicked off
my blankets, stuck my feet in the air, and did the bicycle for five
minutes. It was supposed to firm thighs. We did it every Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday in P.E. I watched my thighs as I did it. They
shook. I pinched one. Definitely not firm. I switched on the radio.
Balmy. Unseasonable. Highs near seventy. It had been a hot spring. I put
on my swimsuit and looked in the mirror. It was too small, but I found
it kind of sexy. I wished there was someone who would appreciate me in
it. Felice would tell me to burn it if she saw it. I picked up a handful
of rocks from the night-stand. I didn't know their names. Felice would
know-obsidian, feldspar, shale. She had a magnifying glass and a
hardness chart. Something about whether a rock would

19

scratch glass. It didn't matter. One crystal had a sharp edge, and I
pulled it down my arm. It scratched me lightly.

It was 11:10 a.m. I daubed my arm with a Kleenex and called Felice.

"Felice."

"What?" Her voice was hoarse. She had started to smoke cigarettes, but
only at parties.

"I woke up this morning with a buzz in my heart. Now it's moved to my
stomach."

"A what?"

"My stomach is buzzing."

"Does it hurt?"

"It's crashing in there."

"Are you nauseous?"

"No, everything's kind of pulsing."

"Oh," said Felice. "That's just sex."

It wasn't just sex, though. I think it was life.

"FELICE." "YEAH?"

"DO YOU WANT TO SPEND THE NIGHT AT MY house?" I was sitting crosslegged
on the floor in her living room.

Felice was practicing a step in the reflection from the big window. She
did a twirl and grabbed my shoulder to steady herself.

"God, I'm about as graceful as a cow in heat." She ran her fingers
through her thick black hair.

I took a long drag on the pipe. "We could look at the stars. Use my
mom's binoculars. See the moons of Jupiter," I said in a high, tight voice.

Felice tried the step again. This time it was perfect. She slid her
hands down her body as a last touch, like the Pointer Sisters when they
sang "Slow Hand."

Chapter

Three

2021

"The Man with the X-Ray Eyes is on the late show. We could make nachos
and watch it." I exhaled nice and slow.

"What about your parents?" Felice was still holding her pose.

"We'd be in the basement. They wouldn't bug us."

She danced around me to reach for the pipe. "You mean the moons of
Jupiter are in your basement?"

She squatted down and blew smoke into my mouth. That was called a
shotgun. I coughed. "Char. You're wasting it. Here, have some water."

My eyes were running. I could never smoke pot with the smooth elegance I
felt when I first picked up the pipe. "Do you want to sleep over or not?"

"Do you have good hot water? I have to have a hot shower in the
morning." She took another toke on the pipe, but couldn't get it to draw.

"Of course, we have great hot water." I poked the butt of a match into
the ashes. Felice had never stayed over at my house when we were little.
Her mother wouldn't let her sleep away from home.

She put her hand over the ashtray just when I was going to dump the
pipe. "I think there's still a couple of hits left in there. All right.
I'll come."

I balanced the pipe on the ashtray, careful that it didn't spill. "You
will? That's great. It'll be fun. We'll tell ghost stories."

"I don't know any ghost stories." She made a ghoulish face, all droopy
lips and teeth.

I started rolling up the baggie with the rest of the pot. "Do you want
any more?" She shook her head. "Me neither. I have to get home before
Mom gets off work. I'll see you tonight."

22

SHE SHOWED UP with a very full overnight case hanging from her shoulder
and a sleeping bag beside her on the front step.

"Felice, you didn't need to bring that." I eyed the sleeping bag.
"There's a double fold-out couch in the basement, right in front of the
television." I had been making up the couch when the doorbell rang and
had two pillows clutched in front of me.

Felice adjusted the strap on her overnight case and picked up the
sleeping bag. "It's thermo-down fill. Good for temperatures of 30°F and
below."

I motioned her inside and pulled the front door shut against the soft
May night. "But it's warm. I've been sleeping naked every night." I
whispered that last part, so Mom wouldn't hear me from the kitchen.

"Please, spare me," she said, making a face. She dropped the sleeping
bag at the top of the stairs and gave it a nudge to send it bumping to
the basement. "I borrowed that bag for this occasion and I intend to use
it."

I threw both pillows down after it. "Maybe we can use it as a comforter
to cover the couch."

Felice looked at me doubtfully. "Maybe."

"The basement floor is cold and hard." I gave her overnight case a
little push to start it swinging from her shoulder.

"Careful. My blow dryer is in there."

We went downstairs.

"Girls," Mom called after us. "Dinner will be ready in about fifteen
minutes. Would you like to come up and help me set the table?" We could
barely hear her over the sound of popping grease.

"All right, all right. Give us a minute." I wanted to try to be nice to
Mom in front of Felice. "We'll be right up."

23

"I brought the pot," Felice whispered. "Do you want to get high before
supper?"

"She might smell it."

"Over all of those frying onions? I hate onions."

"I told her. She's cooking some of the meat separately for you."

"Good. I was afraid I wasn't going to be able to eat it. Are we going to
get high or not?"

"It'll have to be quick."

"I know. I know." Felice was already getting out the baggie.

"Okay, how about in the bathroom? We can open the window and put a towel
down across the bottom of the door." The whole idea made me tense.

Felice touched my arm. "Don't be so paranoid, Char. Come on."

We were red-faced and giggling at dinner, but the family was in a good
mood so no one noticed. Mom had made hamburgers since I had a guest. She
figured every-one loved hamburgers. It was true, too. Felice ate the
whole thing, even her bun. Mom let me have a bun since it was Saturday
night and all, but she herself stuck to eating a bare patty with one
tablespoon of catsup and a celery stick. Jeff and Dad both had two
burgers each, of course, with Fritos. Felice and I grabbed some chips,
too. We were having a reckless night.

Felice told me that she liked looking at my family around the table,
holding our burgers with both hands, peering over them at each other
with our matching blue eyes. Mom and I were fat, Dad and Jeff were thin.
Dad and I had brown hair. Jeff and Mom were blond. We all ate fast, and
Felice said we all smelled like the same soap. We used Dial.

After dinner, Mom and Dad went to a movie with the Gerbers from across
the street. Jeff took off with his

friends. Felice had brought some of her records, so we went down to the
basement and turned the stereo up loud. We practiced a few steps
together until her favorite song came on. Then I sat on the arm of the
couch and watched her as she danced on the slippery tile. She lip
synced, moving her mouth, humming, sometimes coming in on a high note,
pulling it out of herself. She closed her eyes. I thought she moved like
a star, all success and real joy. She sang through the rest of the
album. Sometimes she forgot the words, but she didn't seem to need them
as much as the beat and the habit, the reassurance that this verse came
after this version of the chorus, that this time the singer gave a long
sigh after "love" and before "you." The sigh was the song. It made me
shiver. I thought it held the weight of all of Felice's ambitions and
desires, but she didn't freeze there. She did a long slow shimmy that
ended with her crouched down to the tiles, then she kicked out her feet
and dropped for the end of the song.

I clapped from the arm of the couch. "A star is born."

Felice jumped up and grabbed my hand. "Let's work on our dance steps."
She put on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I loved the record, but I
wouldn't buy it because I was too embarrassed about the pictures on the
album cover: hands on Janet's bra-cupped breasts and men in makeup might
tell Mom something, if she saw it. Mom didn't usually pay much attention
to records, though. She believed in books. She sat on the couch and
breathed them in, sort of the way Felice breathed songs.

We danced through three more records before going outside to look at the
stars. I could hear the hiss of a neighbor's sprinkler. The Big Dipper
was easy to find, but that was as far as we got. I picked out a
brightness that I decided was Jupiter, but I couldn't focus enough to
find the moons.

25

We gave up and went back inside. It was getting late. Mom and Dad came
in and called down the stairs, "Good-night, girls. Be sure you get
enough sleep." The Man with the X-Ray Eyes opened with a creepy shot of
eyeballs with full roots bobbing in a jar. We decided that it was too
gross to waste our time on, so we played a game of Scrabble. I won with
triple points for the "z" in "zen."

Felice went into the bathroom to take out her contacts. I could hear her
splashing water and humming. I called through the door, "Are you still
sleeping on the floor?"

She opened the door. "What?" She was wearing blue-striped PJ s that
looked like long underwear, only flashier. I had changed into my
sleeping t-shirt and clean under-pants.

"Do you still want to roll your bag out on the floor, or should we use
it as a comforter on the bed?" I felt odd, as if I were making a big
deal out of something I'd be better off not mentioning.

"I'll use it on the bed," she said, smoothly, shortly. "But I'm not
sleepy yet."

"You're not?" I was, but I wanted to savor every minute of the night
more than I wanted to sleep.

"No." She came out of the bathroom with a bunch of little bottles and
Vogue magazine. Did she look at the Before pictures once she had
stripped her face? Did the glossy pages have special cleansing powers,
like news-papers on car windows? I didn't ask.

"Maybe I'll read a while," she said.

"Me, too." So we unfolded the couch bed and stretched out on top of the
blankets with the sleeping bag unzipped and thrown across for warmth. It
was always cool in the basement, even in summer. I got out my copy of
Wuthering Heights, but I kept letting it rest to look over Felice's
shoulder at the bright ads full of thin, wild

26

women. I admired the red mouths, the aura of sexiness and wealth. Felice
paid close attention to the specific bits of clothing: shoes with
straps; big, flat buttons; skirts slit to the hip.

"I could never walk down the streets of this town in that, but her hair
is cute." Our faces were close over the pages. She poked her finger into
one of the snarls in my own long, brown hair. "You should try to get
yours under control."

I loved my hair. It was one of my secret vanities. Sometimes at night I
would spread it out on my pillow. That felt like something only a beauty
was supposed to do. But I could sneak into the sensual on its soft
waves. Sometimes I chewed it. I worked the snarls with my fingers,
trying to loosen the tiny knots, but I just combed over the top of them
when I went out into the world. They felt hidden enough against my neck.
Mom bought me barrettes and pony tail ties, but I only pulled it back if
I felt very pious, like at church or on a date. My glasses kept it out
of my eyes most of the time.

Felice was one for radical changes of style, from little fringes to
smooth buns to short perms. She had mentioned my hair problem to me before.

I gave her the answer I always gave. "Would you fix it for me?"

She was looking at a page where the model in the sparse macrame swimsuit
had her hair slicked back into a pompadour. Felice stretched out a
little more on the bed. "I'm too tired."

I flipped to an ad. "Oh, come on. Here's your chance. Before/After."

She rolled onto her side. "Please, Char. If I had a chance to
Before/After anyone, it would be me."

I kicked off the sleeping bag. "Really, Felice. I could get Mom's sewing
scissors. She keeps them down here."

27

She sat up. "God, no. No scissors. I can't handle the responsibility.
You've been growing that hair for years."

"I've had it cut before. At my grandmother's in Iowa when I was in the
fourth grade. Remember?" I went into an all-out wheedle. "Come on,
Felice. Please."

She groaned. "Enough, enough." She grabbed my chin and looked me full in
the face. "Okay, I'll see what I can do."

My stomach dropped. "You sure you're not too tired?" I wanted the
attention, but I also liked being able to drop my hair around my face.
It did something powerful for me, even if I wasn't sure what.

"What's the problem? A minute ago you were begging me to do it. Where
are the scissors?" Her tone was brisk.

"I just meant a new style. I didn't mean you actually had to cut it." I
couldn't believe I had gotten myself into this.

Felice sighed. "Make up your mind. You've got exactly three seconds
before I forget the whole thing and go to sleep annoyed."

"That's quite a threat." I was stalling. "Haven't you ever had second
thoughts?"

"One thousand one, one thousand two..."

"All right, I have an idea. Why don't you French braid it? That will get
it under control, and I can think about whether I really want to lose it
altogether."

Felice made a face. "Braiding is boring." She poked the snarl again.
"Still, it would help. And if you pay attention, you can learn how to do
it yourself."

I held my head under the bathroom faucet. She gave me a shampoo and
creme rinse. We sat on the bed in front of an old movie about a woman
with an incurable disease who had no way of knowing when it would strike
again. Felice combed out the snarls. The star had decided to go ahead
and take a chance on love by the time Felice

28

i

was satisfied. Felice divided the hair into even strands and began to braid.

I felt the pull at my roots as she wove a little more into her pattern
with every crossed strand. I closed my eyes and leaned back against her,
but she said that made it too hard to work, so I sat up straight as she
knelt behind me. I felt her breath. Her fingers brushed my neck. Every
now and then she took my face in her hands and held my head straight.
She needed to be sure that the braids were even. She smelled like pot
and straw-berry shampoo. I could hear the brush of flannel as she moved.
Her knees rested against the soft spread of my back. My face was being
tugged out into the air.

She finished. There was a sofa-and-loveseat commercial on. She put down
the comb and leaned across me to get a look from the front. I felt my
face turning red. She put her arms around me, and we kissed. It was
soft. Our tongues touched. I heard the heroine saying, "Oh, John, this
is the rest of my life."

We both started laughing at the same time. I hugged her, then let her go
so she could untangle her legs. I was sitting on the comb. She stroked
my neck. I moved my hand over her flannel sides. The credits were
rolling on the small screen. She was playing with my braids.

I got up to turn the television off. When I came back to the bed,
everything had changed.

Felice was wrapping the sleeping bag around her, zip-ping it up as she
went. I sat close to her and touched the arm that was still out there
doing the zipping. She was staring intently at a place where the nylon
had snagged in the teeth, working it back and forth.

"Felice."

"Huh?"

I didn't know what to say. "Are you cold? We've got extra blankets."

29

She freed the snag and pulled in her arm. "No, I'm fine. Just sleepy."

I knew I couldn't sleep. "Look, Felice, can we talk about this for a
minute?" I pulled on the drawstring of her bag.

"Cut it out. That makes it tighter."

"Sorry." I stopped.

"It's all right." She turned her blue cocoon back to me. "So, can we talk?"

"Talk about what?" I had heard her voice this flat before, when she was
telling her mother she was going out.

"About, about all this." I shook my head a little and the braids swung
back and forth.

"They look very nice," she said into the mattress. "Felice, talk to me."
I found her shoulder through the nylon.

She looked up. "Don't press me, Char. You're always pressing me."

She was right. I had kind of forced her into doing my hair. I always
begged favors out of her like that. Well, if this was what a favor felt
like, I could do without it. I looked down at my paunch pushing up under
my t-shirt as I sat crosslegged on the blankets.

I felt bitter and stupid. Felice had been feeling sorry for me, and it
had gone too far.

"Char. Char." She sounded urgent in her bag. "Let's just go to sleep,
okay? I'm sorry. I just don't want to talk about anything."

I turned out the light. "Okay." I got under the covers and curled tight,
pressing my forehead into the hard arm of the couch. I cried into the
upholstry for a while before giving in to sleep to pass the night.

30

WE WOKE IN the morning to the rattle of the dish-washer in the kitchen
upstairs. Felice had a grumpy morning squint to her eyes. It was strange
to get this kind of look at her.

"God, I need coffee," she said, sitting up in her sleeping bag.

I yawned. We got dressed and went up for breakfast, but I had coolness
in my heart. Last night had also iced up my brain stem. My problems felt
that easy to locate, although there were other things hidden, solid and
motionless in the general freeze.

I was reading the back of the Fruit Loops box. Felice pulled a piece of
paper out of her disco purse and studied it as she ate dry toast.

"What's that?" I asked, fishing in my bowl for Fruit Loops.

Felice was removing her crusts. "A hardness chart. We can go try to
identify rocks in the mountains tomorrow."

"You know I'm lousy at identification. I just like rocks."

She took a sip of Tang. "You have to be able to tell sandstone from
basalt before you can say anything else about them."

I slurped some sugary milk from my spoon. "I'm still trying to figure
out whether I'm animal, vegetable, or mineral, myself."

Felice put down her chart. "It's too early in the morning for quests."

Jeff wandered in wearing sweatpants and a tight white t-shirt. He sat
down at the table with his box of Life and said, "Hi, girls."

His eyes were puffed up from whatever he had been doing the night
before, and he smelled sweaty from his

31

morning run. He picked up his spoon and flipped some cereal at me, but
it missed me by a mile.

"Grow up," said Felice, but she was giving him a grin.

Mom came in wearing her green velour robe. "Oh, good, I wanted to be
sure you kids were eating breakfast. Charlotte, those braids are very
becoming. You must have lost some weight yesterday. Does anybody want
grapefruit? There's some on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator." She
wasn't eating anything herself.

"No, thanks."

"No, thanks." Jeff kept reading the funnies over Felice's shoulder while
we were eating. I felt sick.

Felice packed up her stuff. I helped her get it all out to her car, then
stood next to her window as she settled the sleeping bag and the
overnight case into the back seat.

"Thanks for coming." I rubbed something squashed from her windshield
with my sleeve. It smeared, and my sweatshirt came back dirty.

Felice fastened her seatbelt. "Yeah. It was fun."

I tried to wipe my sleeve on my jeans. "God, wasn't that one dying
starlet movie stupid." I was looking at the stain.

Felice switched the radio on. "Just awful," she said. Then she drove away.

I pushed a strand of hair behind one ear. My braids were already
starting to come loose.

MOM CAME INTO my room that afternoon. She knocked on my door and opened
it at the same time. I was sitting on my bed with the small pile of
rocks from my nightstand. They were gathered in a sunken place in the
mattress, and I was rolling them around there under my palm.

32

Mom gave me a nervous smile. "Hi: What are you doing?"

"Reinventing the wheel. Could you please wait until I say `Come in'
before you walk into my room? There's no point in knocking if you don't
wait." I didn't like the expression on my face, even from the inside.

Mom decided not to take it personally this time. "All right. I'm sorry."
She sat down next to me on the bed. The rocks shifted toward her weight.
"I just wanted to know if you wanted to go swimming with me. It's part
of the diet."

"Right now?"

"Yes. I just have to get my swimsuit on."

"Okay." I couldn't read or talk. Swimming might help, if I could survive
the locker room.

I was ready before she had changed and found her keys. We both wore our
suits under our street clothes. The suits were the same tank style, mine
black, hers navy blue.

In the car on the drive to the gym, she said, "You look tired." She was
talking to the rearview mirror.

I answered her cheek. "Yeah, we stayed up late." "Did you find the moons
of Jupiter?"

"Sure. It was really something." I lied out of habit, and because I
wasn't sure about anything that had happened last night. When in doubt,
make it sound nice.

"That's great. What did they look like?" She pulled into the parking lot.

"They were very small, dark circles passing in front of the light from
the planet."

"Really? They were dark?" She got out. "Maybe you can show me sometime."

I grabbed the towels and the shampoo. "Sure. Any

q:

time."

tIn the locker room, Mom and I were like two dark balloons at a skinny
girls' parade. They watched us with

33

covert looks, suspicious of themselves, suspicious that some part of our
bodies might suggest some part of theirs. We armed ourselves with the
small white towels that we had been handed at the desk and proceeded to
the pool.

I swam one length, then stopped and looked across at Mom. There were not
many people in the pool, so we each had taken a lane of our own. She
looked sort of silly, dog paddling in her bulky white cap. I didn't want
to think about how I looked. I pushed off and swam back across. A man
dove in, and he was soon on my heels, so I didn't pause at the wall that
lap, but pushed off right away. I rushed through the next length,
wondering why I hadn't stopped and moved aside to let him get in front
of me at the other end. I hurried to the wall and let him pass. I looked
over at Mom again. She looked completely absorbed, and her cap was
slipping forward onto her face. She never put her head in. She was like
a very young duck, surprised to feel at home in the water.

The Beach Boys were playing over the intercom. "Fun fun fun" echoed in
my head, three funs for each stroke. The guy I had let pass before was
trying to lap me again. I paused a moment to let him by, feeling very
big and in his way. I wanted to keep my rhythm, so I kicked off again
right behind him. I was irritated at having to keep adjusting my pace
around him, but I also felt safe, covered and held by the water. I
slipped into thinking about Felice. That burned some, like chlorine in
my eyes. It made me feel loose and tight at the same time, like my body
in the suit. Felice swam the same way she danced, for pleasure and
speed. I thought of her skittering like a waterbug across the pond we
had found in a remote part of Tuckers Park. She liked to move as much as
she could, until she reached some kind of clear, empty exhaustion.

34

She always wanted to keep walking through the forest instead of standing
like I did, facing trees and light.

"I'm more vegetable than animal," I thought. I rolled over on my back to
float like a wet, black log.

This time Mr. Speedo splashed water in my face as he passed me, so when
I reached the wall, I floated into the corner, and decided to wait a few
rounds out.

Mom was alone in her lane. It might have been thinking about Felice that
let me notice how good Mom looked in the water, but once I finally saw
her beauty, it seemed ordinary and familiar. Mom seemed to wake up in
the water. She was so loose and white, buoyed up by her fat. She could
rest at the surface and make little dips with her hands and feet. I knew
she was happy in the pool in a way she wouldn't be in a pond. She liked
knowing where the edges were. I watched her bump against the floats
strung along the blue rope that marked her lane.

Mr. Afternoon Olympics, finally finished, climbed out of the pool, his
own personal shag carpet dripping from his chest. I tugged my swimsuit
down and started another slow lap, keeping my head in, waiting as long
as I could to come up for breath, staring into the sharp blue bottom of
the pool.

When we got out, I handed Mom her towel. "You looked good in there."

She winced. "I'm surprised that you're willing to be seen with me."

We moved quickly out of the yellow-green light, pulling our towels as
far as they would go around our waists.

35

Chapter

Four

I DROVE TO FELICE'S THE NEXT DAY TO PICK her up so we could go to the
mountains. It was a warm spring afternoon. The sunshine was pale as a
lemon drop. All the lawns along her street were coming into their first
tender green. There was a big hole in Felice's front yard. Her father
had tried to plant a tree, but it died. The hole was very brown in the
middle of all that green.

I knocked on the heavy wooden front door, but there was no answer. I
knocked again, then turned the knob and stuck my head in, calling hello.
I heard voices coming from the kitchen, so I stepped into the hallway. I
heard Mrs. Ventura shouting. I stood still.

r '"Stop it, Mama. Leave me alone." Felice sounded much younger than
usual and a little afraid.

Her mother got louder. "You won't care when I'm dead."

37

I turned back to the door and opened it softly, then stepped outside and
started ringing the bell. I had to lean on it hard and long before
anyone answered. Felice came to the, door with a dark stain on her
shirt, reeking of lemon ammonia. I stared at her.

"Hi, Char." She seemed calm, if a little annoyed. "I was helping Mama
clean, and she spilled stuff on me. I have to change. I'll just be a
minute."

Felice held the door open. I stayed where I was. I wanted her to whisper
something nasty about her mother the bitch. "Well, come on in," she said.

"I'll wait here." I sat down on the step. "It's so nice out." I was
scared to see Mrs. Ventura furious and scared to see her calm. It was
weird enough to watch Felice wearing her most ordinary face, with just a
small chip of anger in her eye. She went back inside.

Some early bees were working Mrs. Peterson's flowers. One was stumbling
around and around in the grass near a petunia. I could hear the water
running in the house.

Felice came back out, and we drove into the mountains. She was nervous
on the narrow, winding road. I didn't say anything about her mother. The
Pinto set its own pace, which was slow. Jeeps kept passing us on the
hairpin curves. Felice was trying to count back to Precambrian times in
the layers of rock in the cliff that rose on one side of us. The other
side was a sheer drop to the river. I started singing old Girl Scout
songs, but Felice had never been a scout, so we did everything we knew
from Jesus Christ, Superstar instead.

We parked at a wide spot on the river that was just a gentle slope down
from the road. There were a couple of picnic tables, and the current
seemed slow enough for wading. The sun was so fresh I could smell it. It
smelled like Felice.

38

r

We waded across the cold river, climbed out, and started to hike. Felice
bent down. I looked at her back. She picked up a dust-colored rock,
saying that the dust itself was millions of specks of this very rock. It
made me queasy to think of something that hard ground down until it was
scattered and soft. I scrounged up a palmful of dirt, which I knew was a
thin coating over the layers of limestone and granite. The dirt felt dry
and light and had a sharp, almost salt smell that rock didn't have.

I held out my hand to Felice. "Here, smell the dirt."

She took a pinch and held it near her nose. "That might be the
actinomycetes. They're kind of like a fungus. They break down the rock.
Maybe they smell." She opened her fingers and lost her pinch. "You're
getting it all over your face," she said to me.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand. It felt gritty. I imagined
small bits of rock slipping into me through my pores, into my veins, so
that the dust started to circulate, spreading through me like oxygen,
riding my blood. It had to happen all the time. Inorganic things came
into me with my air, with my food, through my skin, and lived my life. I
must be mineral, I thought, playing my game.

Felice tasted her rock. "Granite," she said.

We both looked down. I saw trampled grass, dust, a six-pack plastic. She
saw something else.

"No, gneiss," she said, rubbing the chunk with her nail. "Let's look for
something pure."

She walked staring at the ground, sometimes crouching and scratching,
until we came to an outcropping of boulders. Felice started to climb
without even stopping for breath. I tried to follow, scrambling up,
squeezing through tight places that were easy for her, willing my arms
to lift the rest of me up over a ledge. She stayed ahead, kicking gravel
down, even though she kept

39

ri

stopping to peer into cracks. I liked the climbing, the air, the cold
rock against my legs. I just didn't like the pace. But Felice kept
moving, chipping off specimens, putting them

in baggies, and making labels for them. She had an I

alertness all over her, a kind of listening tilt, as if the stones
should speak.

I reached up to grab a handhold, and a lump of rock came off under the
pressure of my fingers. I wobbled a little but kept my footing. I looked
at the rock. It was shiny. I called to Felice. She turned around and
held up her hands, so I tossed it up to her. It was a sloppy throw. I
gasped as she reached to catch it, but she was stable as always. She
scratched it with her thumbnail, sending a small shower of gold flakes
down on my head.

"Pyrite," she called. "Fool's gold." She dropped it into the pocket of
her shorts, already bulging, and turned to continue to climb.

I started back down. It was enough. I banged up my bare legs a little
more, then found a flat place a little way from the base of the
boulders, where I could lie in the sun listening to the river and
watching Felice climb.

Her blue t-shirt stood out against the pink rock, but it dulled when she
was outlined against the brighter blue of the sky. Felice gathered rocks
like they were stars. She knew that there were so many of them that
she'd never have one of each, but she could group them, arrange them in
ground-level constellations, and find her direction by the mountain
piles of them in the west. Felice wasn't after the myths that usually
went with constellations, though. She wanted to get a grip on the facts.
That was hard since even the stars were constantly moving, and there was
a tumult of magma under the earth's thin crust.

If I hadn't heard it, I never would have guessed Felice had just had a
fight with her mother. She didn't seem

40

i

upset. She just kept working: compiling data and makingfield
observations. I admired that detachment in her,even though it scared me
a little. I watched her on thexs;t' boulders, hefting a stone in her
palm, trying its weight. I

E ,

saw her take aim at the trunk of a tree. A bird flew out of a hole in
the bark with a rush of wings, disturbed by the thud.

THERE'S ALWAYS A Pizza Hut in any small mountain town, so we stopped and
drank watery beer from red plastic pitchers in Grantler on the way home.
I complained because Ponderosa Steak House and K-Mart had turned me down
for summer jobs. Felice squared her shoulders to make fun of two men in
business suits knocking off a large pepperoni across the room. They gave
her a couple of measuring looks, and when we ordered another pitcher, I
got the feeling that they were keeping track. I thought that they were
only looking at Felice without taking notice of me at all, but I was wrong.

Felice's face was flushed with beer and sun. Her knees kept bumping mine
under the table. She dug a quarter out of her pocket to play a Blondie
song on the table jukebox. I poured her another beer. She emptied the
rocks out of her pockets onto the table, looking for more change.

She was talking fast. "It's about checking things out, Char. You
establish a premise, then you try to find out if it's true.,,

Y,I cocked my head at her. "So, how do you find out?" She blew into the
foam. "You gather data." She sipped. "You explore facts."

I cleaned out my fingernail with a fork. "You're so cautious."

41

Her face got very still, although she laughed when she said, "You think
so? I feel kind of wild. Like I wouldn't mind going home with a
businessman tonight. I could tell Mama I was sleeping over at your house."

I started tapping the rim of my glass with the fork. "What if she calls?"

Felice laughed again. "Tell her to go burn some of my clothes or
something." She reached over and took my fork. "Don't. Anyway, I'm just
talking. We haven't even met those guys."

The beer hit me. I told Felice I had to pee and walked up toward the
counter where the bathrooms were. I felt like I was walking through an
avalanche zone.

I was. One of the business suit men, the older, stiffer one, passed me
in the narrow hall to the bathroom with his briefcase under his arm. He
stopped and let a slow smile work his mouth.

"Pig ass," he muttered, much too close to my ear. "Fat one. Fatso. Fat
ass." His voice was cool and soft.

I stood frozen for a moment, then tried the door to the women's room. It
was locked. "Pig ass." He grinned. "Hey, fatty." He was blocking my way
out of the hall. I wanted to knock him over and kick his face in. I had
on sensible shoes. His identifying bones would crack.

The door to the women's room opened and the woman who had been working
behind the counter came out. She must have heard at least his last
couple of words, but she had a polite, neutral look on her face. I
ducked into the bathroom behind her and locked the door, breathing hard.
I sat on the toilet and put both hands flat on the walls. The
businessman and his friend were gone by the time I came out.

Felice had put another quarter in the table jukebox, and sat listening
to the music and fingering her rocks.

42

She was singing under her breath, "Sweeeet, sweet, sweet," along with
the song.

I sat down and picked up my mug of beer.

"That'll be flat by now," she said, nodding at the beer.

r1y~

"Your eyes look red."

"One of those business guys started calling me names." I took a sip
anyway. She was right-flat.

Felice put her cool hand out and covered my hot one on the table.
"Stupid shit. What kind of names?"

I shrugged, not looking at her, but glad she had touched me. "The usual.
Fat."

"Oh." She took the glass out of my other hand and leaned toward me. I
was conscious of my stomach pressing against the table on my side of the
booth. I started to cry. She reached across the table and took off my
glasses, then wiped my cheeks with a paper napkin. I shuddered. She
rubbed the back of her hand across my soft chin. I was shaking, but she
was the one who dropped the glass.

Beer splattered everywhere. "I'm sorry, Char," she said. We mopped it
up. The glass cracked clean and kept its shape, but I couldn't trust it
to drink from after that.

ON THE DRIVE home, Felice said, "I've been thinking about my mother."

I was still cloudy-headed and a little nauseous, trying to concentrate
on steering, but I managed a nod.

Felice said something else that I missed, then she tugged on the hem of
my shorts. I took my foot off the gas and turned to look at her. She was
making a point.

"Char, I want us to be stable. I want you to be my best friend, right
out of `Laverne and Shirley'. " I snorted, but she persisted. "Promise."

43

I looked back at the road and gave in. "Of course, yeah, you know I care
about you," I said. I knew what I was promising. I moved my leg away
from her hand.

Then Felice told me that she was going to stay with her cousin Mickey
and Mickey's husband Rick in New Mexico for the summer. She said that
she could get restaurant work there, for sure, and she wanted to get a
good look at some geological structures-mesas and buttes and dormant
volcanoes.

I didn't know I was furious until I had driven all the way down from the
mountains and dropped Felice off at her house. After she shut her front
door, I slammed my fist into the turn signal. It lit up green on the
dashboard. I hit it again, and the switch snapped off. I threw it out of
the window as hard as I could. It landed in Mrs. Peter-son's garden,
right in the middle of her petunias.

I had to give hand signals the rest of the way home.

A FEW DAYS later Mom was cleaning up after the dog in the backyard. I
was following her around holding a grocery sack for her to dump the
turds into when I said, "Felice is going to New Mexico for the summer."

Mom was swift and efficient with her metal scoop. "What does Felice's
mother think about that?"

I just opened my mouth and told her what I figured. It felt odd. "She
thinks Felice is trying to get away from her."

The dog was watching us from a corner of the yard, looking sheepish.

"That's what happens when girls are seventeen," said Mom.

There was a crash. The dog had knocked over the trash. He did it out of
embarrassment at having so much attention paid to his messes, I thought.

44

Chapter

Five

ON THE FIRST DAY OF MY SUMMER JOB, I found myself mopping up eggs and
cake from the floor of the nursing home, trying not to stain my new
uniform. Felice was gone.

My hands had been sweaty when I filled out the application and I hadn't
been able to remember the address of my elementary school, but the
nursing home had given me the job anyway. They paid four dollars an
hour, which was fifty cents more than Taco Bell was paying that summer.
Mom bought me two white polyester pantsuits and some soft-soled shoes.

I was a nurse's aide. I was supposed to lift people and dress them and
bathe them and feed them. It sounded hard, but I figured I could give
them my four dollars' worth.

I drove to work along the same route that Felice and I had cruised so
many times that spring, down Moody

45

Boulevard past the Lucky U Motel and Jack in the Box. I thought of her
as I pulled into the parking lot, but then I thought about her almost
all of the time. She'd been gone two weeks, and I hadn't heard a word.

Another aide named Perez was assigned to train me my first day. She was
calm and friendly, and she rode her linen cart down the hall like it was
a skate board. I had to trot to keep up, nervous about banging into
somebody's wheelchair. She made her beds like she wore her uniform:
crisp and tight. I spent fifteen minutes on one bed, trying to get the
corners of the sheet to square off right. Perez came over and finished
it for me. "You'll get it," she said, tucking back a wisp of hair that
had fallen out of her braid. "Why don't you finish these last two rooms
by yourself, then meet me at lunch."

As I walked down the long hall to the cafeteria, I could hear the
clatter of dishes and smell steamed meat. I pushed open the big double
doors and looked around for Perez. I was standing next to the dish
window where folks brought their trays after they finished eating. There
were old people clustered around every table and lined up along the
walls with trays on their wheelchairs. The meal was meatloaf, corn,
white bread, and yellow cake with pink frosting. I was supposed to feed
it to people, but I couldn't imagine how I was going to reach across the
gap between me and a stranger and put a spoon in their mouth. Perez had
to teach me. I felt worse than I did at school lunch when I had no one
to sit with.

Finally, I spotted Perez sitting on the edge of a table, her uniform
looking impossibly elegant even at this distance. She was leaning over a
black-haired woman in a wheelchair, speaking earnestly into her ear.
They both laughed. Perez gestured with a spoon above the woman's plate,
but nobody at that table seemed to be eating. The

46

r

woman jerked her head toward the spoon, and Perez put it down.

Another patient, a woman with gray hair, pulled away from their table.
She was waving a slice of bread speared on a fork in front of her. I
couldn't really see her face, but I noticed how strong her hands were,
and how fast she was moving across the floor. She wheeled up to the dish
window and said, "May I have this toasted?" Her voice was high and sweet.

I noticed the woman Perez had been talking with coming across the floor,
too. The kitchen aide, up to her elbows in greasy dishwater, said, "No,
we don't do toast."

"Toast," the bread woman said again. She practically sang it. "I want
this toasted!"

"No," said the aide impatiently, turning away, so the bread woman drove
her chair at the counter, bent her head, and butted the pan of dishwater
onto the floor. The aide jumped back from the slap of water. Before I
could think how to react, Perez's friend pushed past me, straight into
the swinging doors of the kitchen. She stopped, propping the doors open
with her chair. She was right beside me, so I got a good look at her
stiff red face and her blue eyes, one of which stared out across the
crowd and one of which seemed to slide over me.

She yelled something in a low rough voice. I couldn't quite understand
her, but I thought she said something about a salad bar. She scooped up
her lump of meatloaf from her chair tray and held it in the air. Her
whole arm seemed to vibrate. I stood there staring at her shaking arm
and her curled red fist holding the brown meat, then watched her sling
it to the floor. I stepped back. It slid across the tiles into the
kitchen right to the feet of the approaching head cook. The bread woman
swung her fork and threw the bread after it. Old women were surging into
the kitchen, and I backed away from the door.

47

.

I felt as if I was watching a late-night movie. Every-where I looked I
saw something strange. A woman in a i

blue-flowered house dress punched a hole in a bag of flour with her
cane, dusting herself with white. The cook was struggling with the bread
woman for possession of a loaf, and I stared at their hands: long skinny
fingers and big knuckles with the skin stretched tight across them

III

versus short sturdy hands shiny with cooking burns across their backs.
The meatloaf woman was at a counter cracking eggs with her elbows. Next
to her, a middle-aged woman with caramel-colored skin and violet shoes
rolled her chair over squares of cake. Old women were knocking huge pots
of gravy from the stove to the floor. There were bursts of light, as if
flashbulbs were going off, but I couldn't tell who was taking pictures.
I looked back into the cafeteria and saw Perez laughing. She tossed a
hot-dog bun at me, but it bounced off my knee. Men in their shirt
sleeves came in from the offices and stood on the edge of the crowd with
their arms crossed. A bald one carried a Burger King bag. The cook was
trying to get aides to start wheeling folks away. She grabbed my arm and
pushed me out toward the tables. "Get them back to their rooms," she said.

I walked up to a man who had his head down on the table. His neck was
wrinkled in hundreds of tiny folds, and his pink scalp shone through his
soft, white hair. He was sleeping through the riot. I lifted his
shoulders to help him sit up in his chair, and his eyelids fluttered,
but he didn't open them. The woman sitting next to him was taking food
off his tray and hiding it in her lap. "Mt. Pier-son never eats a bite,"
she told me, folding a napkin over her thighs. I wheeled Mr. Pierson
back to the wing and left him, breathing gently, next to a bed.

Perez had been mustered to wheel folks away, too. I never saw anyone
walk so slow as she did on her way to

48

get the woman with the violet shoes who was crushing cakes. Perez
offered a courtly bow and wiped pink frosting off the wheels with a
napkin. The woman gave her a smile so bright that the meatloaf woman
turned and stared at the two of them.

Later, I caught up with Perez, who was standing out-

, side of the room where she had left Violet Shoes, listening to the
slow song that was coming from inside. She burst out laughing when she
saw the look on my face. "Don't worry, chica, it's not like this every
day." She called over my shoulder. "Hey, Peg, here's someone who needs a
little education."

Peg turned out to be the meatloaf woman, her long

, black hair white with flour, gravy splashed up the legs of her sweat
pants. She headed her chair for Perez and stopped just short of running
her over. "Can you believe it?" Her voice was low and rough, but if I
concentrated I could understand her. "I never imagined anything so good.
There was a reporter there, you know."

w,

Perez gave her a small punch on the arm. "Yeah, taking pictures. I
noticed. It was really something, Peg. I just hope there's not too much
trouble over it. Here, let me

jy.give Char one of those flyers, then I'll take the rest and get rid of
them for you."

Peg looked at me and nodded, so Perez reached for the stack of paper
that was jammed under the cushion of Peg's chair. She gave me one and
folded the rest into the pocket of her tunic. Her uniform was still
immaculate.

Peg turned her chair into the doorway of Violet Shoes' room. The record
player was crooning something tender. I recognized Sam Cooke from my
dad's stack of old records. With a mock romantic sigh, Perez handed me a
mop. "Ginny's room, where it's always the fifties." She gave me a little
push in the direction of the cafeteria. "You'd better help clean up." I
set off in that direction,

49

but I stopped before I'd gone very far to read the flyer. It was a call
to action:

Tired of gray meat and white bread?Tired of vegetables so over-cooked
theypuddle on your plate?Tired of warm orange juice and cold coffee,of
tasteless meals with no choice aboutwhat you're eating or how it's
prepared?Let the people in charge know we want somecontrol over what we
eat.Demand a salad bar.TIME FOR A FOOD STRIKE.

BOYCOTT LUNCH...

The next day there was an article on page one of the Moody paper, with a
big photo of Mr. Pierson sleeping with his head on the table, while a
hunk of meatloaf flew past. I considered the caption: "Oldsters protest
food at nursing home."

Mom read sections of the article aloud to me over breakfast. They quoted
a Mrs. Eugenia Cribbs as saying, "I think they planned a peaceful
protest that got out of hand. I don't approve of the method, but I do
not think a salad bar is too much to ask."

Mom lowered the paper and looked at me. "She's got a point. Every Furr's
Cafeteria has one."

I nodded and reached into the cupboard for some Carnation Instant
Breakfast. As I was stirring the powder into the milk, the doorbell
rang. Mom went to answer it, and I had to look twice, because for a
moment I thought that her beige sandals were leaving smudges of Velveeta
on the floor, as if she had been stomping the cheese. But the dog walked
out behind her without licking her foot-prints, so they must have just
been puddles of light.

50

AFTER THE FOOD fight, word went out that the front office wanted the
names of the people who had been involved. Everyone knew Peg was already
at the top of the list. There would have been trouble, except that the
newspaper article brought a small blizzard of phone calls, some crates
of lettuce, and some uncomfortable attention from the Board of Health.
The bald Mr. John Jonas from the front office actually appeared on the
wing. He met with Peg, Ginny, and Mrs. Eugenia Cribbs, who turned out to
be the woman I had seen puncturing sacks of flour. They became the Food
Committee.

"What about the woman who spilled the dishwater?" I asked Perez. "Looked
to me like she started the whole thing.,"

Perez patted my cheek. "Oh, you haven't met Iris yet, have you? Nobody
has meetings with Iris." I found out later that Iris was riot-furious
all the time.

The committee achieved a salad bar, complete with sunflower seeds and
three kinds of dressing. Peg was ecstatic and took to writing regular
letters to the editor about conditions in the home. She got letters
back, too. I saw them on her bedside table.

I noticed the letters because Peg didn't have anybody who came in from
outside. There was only one picture on her bedside table: a group shot
of a bunch of firemen with a dark-haired woman doing a showgirl kick in
fire-men's boots. Her roommate Mabel's side of the room was covered with
old photographs in big gilt frames. Peg found her friends on the wing.

She spent a lot of time in Ginny's room, taking notes with a pencil
strapped to her wrist. She was writing an expose of the nursing home.
Ginny had framed prints on her walls. She even had her own sheets and a
red comforter, which meant that she had to have people from

51

uu~[ outside do her laundry because the nursing home wouldn't. Her
sisters came in for it, most often a thin elegant woman named Lilah.
Lilah would stride up the hall bringing Ginny a pair of emerald green
sandals from her

jhusband's shoe factory and stride away with a bag of Ginny's dirty clothes.

Sometimes Lilah's little boy came with her, carrying a

I~Irecord album he had picked out himself from the oldies

H~ bin. Ginny would give him some change from a bag she kept tucked into
the seat of her chair, and he would run to the common room to get a
Pepsi for his mother and an orange drink for himself from the machine.
He was twitchy, and Ginny liked to keep him busy, so he wouldn't pull
leaves off her plants or spill orange soda out the window.

WHEN I GOT home from work one night, there was a letter from Felice:

Dear Char,

Got a job in a truckstop. Hot dishwater in the backroom, and my face is
breaking out from so much pop and grease. Still, I have days off to get
out into the hills. I think about you when I'm driving. I drive a lot.
My car window arm is sunburnt. There's a small dormant volcano nearby,
and a bigger one about four hours from here that I'd like to go to
sometime. This little neighborhood volcano was serious when she went
off. She changed everything for the plants and animals and people around
here. It's a pumice world. One big breast hill. Tourists drive up it to
picnic, if they feel like going so far off the highway.

52

Mostly it's local people. Kids from Mesquite High circle the rim, might
as well be you and me. I haven't met anybody, but I hear their radios
when they roll their windows down. Last night I had off work, so I
parked by the side of the road and walked around the top. I kept trying
to find the big bear in the sky, but all I could get was the dipper.
Looked down into the crater and saw soft darkness. Made me want to go
down and sit at the center and eat some Saltines, so I could say I've
been there. Be good.

love,

Felice

I wondered where she got hot pink ink way out there. I cranked open my
bedroom window and leaned against the screen, then I took out the screen
altogether to let the night air in.

53

Chapter

Six

PEG'S ROOMMATE MABEL WAS A TINY, PINK-skinned woman with hair that fell
to her shoulders in waves of gray and white. She was friends with both
Ginny and Peg. Mabel could walk, but she had to take it slow. Peg and
Ginny and Mabel would often sit in the hall together drinking coffee and
gathering incidents for Peg's book about the nursing home.

"The aides are skipping baths again," Mabel might call out, shaking her
head, and I'd have a voice besides my own conscience reminding me to
bathe Mr. Pierson.

"Ummhmm, and did you hear Shelley screaming over dinner?" Ginny might
say, leaning back in her wheel-chair. "You just have to spend a little
time with her and she'll eat fine, but that damn girl was cramming food
in her mouth like she was stuffing a turkey."

"I'll write it up tonight." Peg had sounded thick and strange to me
until I stopped being so distracted by the

55

strangeness that I couldn't hear the sense. She always made sense.

MAB E L WE NT I NTO the hospital one week with the flu and came out
talking about Billy. No one had ever heard of Billy before. He was on
his way home, Mabel said. He'd be back any time now, and everybody had
to leave room for Billy.

At first Peg and Ginny sat with Mabel in the hall as usual, Mabel
talking about Billy, and Peg taking notes with a new urgency, writing
down everything Mabel said and when she said it. But gradually Peg
stopped listening and talking to Mabel at all. She took to drinking her
coffee in the room they shared while Mabel was settled out in the hall.

Ginny still took coffee from the tray I brought around and would offer a
cup to Mabel, who always said, "Oh yes, please," but then she'd sit
there and let it get cold without taking a sip. She said she didn't like
to start until Billy was there.

Peg couldn't stand it. I overheard her talking with Ginny about it one
afternoon when I was in Peg's bath-room emptying her leg bag. I was
rinsing it out and half listening to a talk show Peg had on about
whether or not it was right for a woman to get a job and leave her young
children at a day-care center. The experts were saying it would
permanently harm a child when I heard a bang, followed by Ginny's voice,
and knew that she had run her chair into the door on the way into the room.

Those minor collisions happened all the time, and Ginny didn't even stop
to catch her breath. "Peg," she said, "we miss taking coffee with you."

56

Peg's answer was jerky and hard to understand. "We who? Maybe you miss
me, but Mabel has no idea if I'm there or not."

Ginny sounded tired. "Mabel does know. She knows, and she doesn't like
how you're treating her. Neither do I. The wandering isn't her fault."

Peg's voice started out low, but by the time she finished speaking, it
was as near to shouting as she could come. "Whose fault is it, then?
It's not like she had a stroke or something. She gave up on us and she's
living in some reality of her own, where all that matters is that
goddamn Billy."

I turned the water on in the bathroom to remind Peg that I was there.

Ginny knocked the coffee off the tray on her chair, startled by the
sudden sound. "Shit! Who's that?" I came out with a washcloth to wipe
the coffee up.

"Sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to listen."

Ginny broke her usual rule of being sweet to the aides. "Just leave
that. We're talking."

Peg dropped her hand toward her leg. "Sorry, Ginny. She's got to put my
leg bag back on."

I brought the bag in from the bathroom and tried my best imitation nurse
smile. "This will just take a second."

Peg smiled back. "Take your time. Just don't get my leg hairs caught in
the Velcro."

I laughed nervously and was careful with the strap. I had the feeling
that Peg was stalling Ginny, who was wearing her red slippers that made
me think of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. In another mood I might have
asked her which way to the yellow brick road, but she was rubbing her
cheek against her shoulder, messing up her makeup, so I knew she was upset.

I stood up. "Finished. I'll see you two later."

57

Peg gave me a soft "Bye." I shut the door on my way out, although I knew
that would never last. The nurses liked the doors open so they could
hear anything going on inside. I took Mabel's coffee from her tray as
she sat in the hall. She said, "Is Billy home yet?"

GINNY AND PEG must have gotten something talked out, because Peg eased
up on Mabel. The three of them drank their coffee together once in a
while, but things were never really the same. Mabel spent most of her
afternoons sitting in the courtyard or scrubbing the walls with a paper
towel. The hardest times, though, were the nights when Mabel couldn't
sleep, when she lay in bed and said, "Please, God, let me die," over and
over. Peg was a light sleeper with few dreams. She had "let me die"
soaking into her with her own growing tiredness.

I would hear it when I came in to check Mabel's bed and empty Peg's bag.
Mabel would stop while I was moving about the room, but as I walked out
the door, I could hear her start up again, "Please, God, let me die."

"Get me up," said Peg into the gray light as I passed her bed one bad night.

"I can't, Peg, I just don't have time." It was true. I had to hurry or
I'd never get all of the beds checked before my break.

Peg seemed to swell under her sheets. "Get me out of this bed." So I let
the bedrails down, and she sat in the common room watching TV.

I went to sit with her when I finally did take my break. Tom Snyder was
on. Peg was looking through her note-book, turning the pages with her
fists. I could have stuck my own fist in my mouth after I said it, but I
came right out and asked her, "Peg, do you miss your fingers?"

58

She gave me the look of a woman who has had a hard night. The gaze of
her wandering eye slid across my cheek. "Don't be stupid, they're right
here."

I always found myself saying things to Peg I would usually keep to
myself. I argued. "But you can't use them."

Peg wasn't arguing. She was slumping, bone tired, her feet slipped off
the foot rests. I think she was too worn out to get annoyed. "Char, I
used to think you paid attention. I use them."

I watched her stiff face, and plunged on. "But isn't there anything you
miss?"

Peg's voice was even more quiet than usual. "There's a lot I miss. I
miss going out easy, just slipping on my boots on impulse and stepping
out the door. I miss walking out on fools. I miss being on time. I miss
having money to burn and picking someone up on a three-day weekend with
my folks out of town." She made a noise in her throat. "I'm a fireman's
daughter. Did you know that? Have you noticed that picture on my bedside
table? That's me and my dad, with his whole squad. One of the guys
wanted to marry me, but I wasn't interested in taking anyone else on.
Now there's Ginny and her beautiful shoes." I touched her arm. She
looked at me sharp. "You know, an orderly got fired for making out with
Hannah Schneider. Hannah told me she was kissing him back."

I felt embarrassed. "That's awful." I wished she hadn't told me that at
this particular moment.

"Yeah, Hannah said it wasn't such a great kiss, but it was better than
nothing." Peg looked back up at the screen. "Listen, I'm trying to watch
a show here."

I stood up. "Yeah, I'm off soon. Good night."

Peg asked permission from the front office to set up her typewriter in
the common room but was denied. It would be too disruptive for the other
patients, Mr. Jonas

59

felt. So Ginny, who was paying extra not to have a room-mate, let Peg
set it up in her room, next to the unused bed. Peg had to listen to
"Cupid" play over and over, but she said it helped her concentrate.

ONE NIGHT I worked the late shift, subbing for Kiley, who was at a
wedding and had promised to smuggle out tastes of magnificence for me.
The halls looked big and empty, shed of their afternoon caginess. I
finished a round of bed checks and was going to join Peg and Ginny in
the common room where they were watching TV. I heard silence from
Mabel's bed as I passed, except for a low buzz that might have been a
snore or a purr. I felt like a tired animal myself, padding home in my
soft-soled shoes. All I wanted was a Pepsi and a semi-padded chair: a
small break. Perez was lying down in a spare bed where Mrs. Merker had
died a few days ago. She and Mrs. Merker had gotten along great. They
used to sing religious songs together as Perez put her to bed. Perez had
given me a sample as she slid off her shoes and lay down, cracked heels
showing through her nylon socks. "Ellen Merker wouldn't mind one bit."

It really was okay. I was awake, the beds had beenchecked, and everyone
was either asleep or staringawake, as was their nightly habit. Iris's
restraints wereuntangled and secure, which would last at least an
hour.The quietness suggested night, even though the lightswere bright in
the hall. I stopped in the door of the com-mon room. Peg had her
stronger arm resting on the armof Ginny's chair. Ginny's hands were both
in her lap, butshe was turned, as if to get a better look at the screen,
soher shoulder, soft and bare in her sleeveless blouse, wastouching
Peg's, or so close to touching that I had to call itthat in the wide,
empty space of the common room. Dan

60

the Furniture Man was screeching, "It's a sale!" Peg said something I
couldn't catch, then Ed started in with "Nurse, nurse, nurse," and I
turned back up the hall, although I knew he wouldn't be able to tell me
what he wanted when I got to his bed.

I WROTE BACK to Felice, but it was hard. I could for-get her at work,
where I was surrounded by people who were different from anyone I had
ever expected to meet, but anytime I was on my own, she would come
floating up. Missing her was a background to everything I did, and it
was uncomfortable to bring it enough to the front to write her.

Dear Felice:

How are you doing? Things are boring here without you. All I do is work.
The nursing home's not too bad, although one girl who started the same
time I did has another job at Dunkin' Donuts already. Said she'd rather
smell sugar than shit. She was the one who walked around with the tape
player blasting "Only the Good Die Young." Please. I just hope nobody
really does die near me. I don't think about that much.

It's all starting to seem normal, even Mabel, who's always scrubbing the
walls with a Kleenex and waiting for a ghost named Billy. Her roommate
is a much younger woman. Peg. I like her a lot. Other aides warned me
about her, said she was picky, but she just knows what she wants. She
organized a food protest that turned into a riot.

61

Peg has a friend named Ginny who plays the Temptations and Sam Cooke all
day long.

!'.{J II'I I leave the arm off the turntable, so the music keeps coming
even if nobody shows up to change the record. She has beautiful shoes:

ILblack loafers, blue spike heels, violet pumps.Even her chair has red
wheels. Her brother-

IIIin-law owns a shoe factory. I had expected

"i I!Ieveryone here to be at least half dead, so I amsurprised at all
this life.

1 II "h l Oh, Felice, I wish I could really talk to you. My dance moves
are getting rusty, too. I need some practice with you. Hope the rocks
are splitting open like sliced apples at your feet so that you can see
their hearts. Write soon.

{{f;IILove,

Char

I dug out some tinsel left over from Christmas and stuck it in the
envelope to make the letter exciting. I could hear Mom in the kitchen,
humming "Heard It Through the Grapevine" along with the radio. I
wondered why I had written so much about Ginny when it was Peg I was
getting close to, but I couldn't find any words to give Peg's
slow-voiced stubborness and wandering eye to Felice. I licked the
envelope and decided to keep most of Peg to myself.

EUGENIA CRIBBS WAS a substantial woman. She was shorter than me but
weighed more. Every night she would wait in her usual pink, fuzzy
slippers and flower-print cotton robe for an aide to put her to bed. The
robe

62

snapped up the front like almost all of Eugenia's clothes. Arthritis had
ruined her fingers for buttons. The exception to her snaps-only policy
was her long-line bra, which she needed an aide to unhook.

"Hi, honey," said Eugenia one night when I arrived. She tilted her head
so she could look at me through the magnifying part of her bifocals.
"Running late tonight?"

Eugenia was one of the alert patients. "Sorry to keep you waiting," I
said briskly. "We're short-staffed." Her eyes looked big as superballs
as I peered back at her through the wrong side of her lenses.

"Well, let's get at it." Eugenia started unsnapping her robe and telling
me things, reminding me to hang three washcloths on her bedrail and to
leave a pair of clean underwear folded under her pillow and her
eyeglasses case where she could reach it. Eugenia was fussy. She kept a
basket full of rhinestone necklaces, jewelled lipstick cases, and big
satin-covered earrings on her bed-side table, next to a sign that said D
O N OT TO U C H , but I reached in and rattled them with my fingers when
she wasn't looking, and they threw off colored glints of light.

Eugenia stood up for a moment so that I could slip off her robe, then
sat back down and leaned forward so I could unhook her bra. It was a
formidable garment, with underwired cups and many hooks. It was shiny
white against her flour-white skin. Eugenia groaned as I worked. I
opened the hooks, releasing the light smell of sweat and powder. Her
back spread and bloomed into unexpected freckles and red fold-lines
exposed after being pressed against themselves all day. I slipped into a
rhythm working the hooks that made me remember how Mom used to call me
into her bedroom to fasten her into her long-line bra. When she went any
place fancy, she felt the need of extra support. It was the same rhythm
of tug and hook, only in reverse, until Mom was packed in for

63

the night. Then she'd put on her shimmering slip, soft-draped yellow
dress, and textured green high heels. She had been erect and breathless.

Now I moved around in front of Eugenia to slip the straps off her
shoulders. I leaned down to pull the big-necked nightgown over her head.
When I stepped back, she looked up at me and said, "Sugar, you've got on
the wrong kind of bra."

"What?" I folded my arms across my chest.

Eugenia pointed her magnifying lenses straight at my breasts. "No use
trying to hide. You're spilling out of the cups."

I couldn't believe she'd been looking at my underwear while I'd been
dreaming over hers. I unfolded my arms to tug on a shoulder strap,
blushing. Eugenia pushed her glasses higher up on her nose. "It's a fact
of life. Some people have humps on their backs. You and I have big
boobs." I didn't want to, but I looked down at her breasts, so large and
obvious now that they were loose under her nightgown. Eugenia pointed to
redirect my attention to the garment I had just hung over the rail of
the bed to air out. "That's very good for figure control," she said.

I looked at her fat, powdered face with her giant eyes and white hair
falling in waves around her cheeks. She gazed back at me with an
expression of interest and goodwill so intense that I had to look away.
I tugged on my bra strap through my tunic again. I couldn't think of
anything to say.

Eugenia stood without my help and seated herself on the bed. Her
nightgown fell around her in filmy folds. "It's worth it," she said, "to
keep up a good front."

She reached out and gave my belly a tweak with a very small smile on her
face.

64

I WENT BACK to the mountains by myself. I brought a six-pack to drink
but ended up leaving it on the floor of the back seat, untouched. The
Pinto dragged itself around the curves. I sang out the open window, "And
I've had so many men before in very many ways. He's just one more." I
was feeling melancholy and experienced. It was Thursday, my day off, so
there was no one else parked next to the picnic tables. I had on the
cheap rubber thongs I was wearing everywhere I didn't have to wear white
that summer. I stubbed my toe the moment I stepped out of the car. My
big toenail tore. "Gneiss," I said, looking at the nondescript rock. At
least it hadn't been a piece of glass from the shattered bottle near the
Pinto's rear tire. I thought about what it would take to get Peg out
here. Not much, really, just widening the path and getting rid of the
really big rocks. Her chair could handle the rest, as long as the grade
wasn't too steep.

Someone would have to drive her up, though, and I danced away from that,
skipping up the trail. It felt good to move fast just then.

65

Chapter

Seven

IRIS, THE BREAD WOMAN, LOOKED DANGEROUS. Her nose was gone, eaten down
to raw holes by some disease. I never tried to find out what. Her
fingers were thin and strong. She would grab at my clothes when I came
in to change the beds. She was always restrained, tied to the bed so she
couldn't reach me, but her reputation for meanness meant that her sheets
weren't changed quite every day. To change them while she was in bed, I
had to roll her on one side, bunch the dirty sheets close to her back,
spread out the clean ones, then roll her over the hump onto her other
side. Most patients were as light and easy to roll as dry logs. Some
even helped. Iris fought.

I almost always did change her bed, though. I would touch her lightly,
asking where it hurt the least, and watch her skin tear anyway under my
hands. One day she was quiet, so I leaned down and stroked her cheek.

67

Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Right away I was afraid I would
catch something. WhatBlood brought Iris to mind. I rubbed my bare toes
onWidth1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897had eaten her nose away? She opened her
eyelids. Theythe tar shingles of the roof. I hadn't known that
anyoneWidth1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897were transparent. I didn't think they kept
out much light.could be down to such a fragile layer of skin and
clamor-Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897llll

She looked up and said, "Cancer." She could have meanting bones and
still keep such strength in her. Not manyWidth1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897me
and my white uniform pantsuit.of the patients had the energy for fury. I
imagined Ins inWidth1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897A uuIf Iris was up in her chair, she had
to be tied to thea plush hat and a sharp suit with padded
shoulders,Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897railing, or she'd be hitting people in the
hall. Even tied tostepping briskly up a stretch of white marble steps in
theWidth1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897PI ithe rail, she'd make a swipe at
someone and end upofficial Washington sun. There would be clusters of
menWidth1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897I,I~l

1111hanging there, dangling by her restraints. On the Fourthin dark
business clothes climbing, too, but they couldn'tWidth1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897of
July, the nurse told me to put some underwear on Iris.keep up with Iris.
Even then her bones carved a place forWidth1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897her
face in the air. She didn't recognize dream time-sheWidth1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Important people were coming to visit her.
They hadn'tread the rules of government late into the night. SheWidth1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897come by the end of my shift, but the nurse
had hearddidn't need memory. She had reference books. She hadWidth1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897that
Iris used to be a big Washington lawyer.

That night when I went home, Iout the ladder

gotandred fingernails. Newspaper reporters had called themWidth1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897talons. One of the men in dark clothes was
at her heels.Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897climbed up on the low roof of our house to
watch the fire-His white cuffs and collar caught the brightness of
theWidth1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897works. The air was cool on my bare legs,
and I sat withsun. Even in black strap heels, her thin legs carried
herWidth1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897my arms crossed over my knees. There were
a few faintrso precisely that her straight skirt didn't stir. She
hadWidth1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897wheels of light in the sky toward the
mountains, but Ipapers, important papers, in a leather case.Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897mostly just listened to the toy noises of
the sparklers,She reached the top of the steps. The man with theWidth1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897fountains, and cherry bombs going off all
over the neigh-white cuffs bounded up after her. She turned and
lookedWidth1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897borhood. I remembered Felice and me as
little girls on theout over the city. He breathed hard and took out a
beau-Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897fifth of July, going to all
the gutters and yards, picking uptiful crisp handkerchief to wipe his
brow.Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897burnt-out bottle rockets. We had been sure
we could use"I don't care much for this case," she said, leaningWidth1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897them
for something good, if we just found enough ofinto the view.Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897them.
When we had two grocery sacks full, we glued"It's not our business to
care for them. He was bluff-Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897them on
cardboard in a great sunburst circle, little cylin-ing toughness. "It's
our business to win them."Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897ders of powder and burnt fuses facing in,
stick stems out.The other men were striding by them now, noddingWidth1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897It
was a great sign for a clubhouse, so we made up a clubhello, calling her
name, patting his back, stepping overWidth1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897to go
with it. The initiation ceremony was letting layerthe threshold through
the big double doors. A womanWidth1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897after layer of glue dry on our palms until
we could stick apassed, smelling of lilac. A client, thought Iris. She
couldWidth1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897needle in and not feel a thing. Felice
told me about bloodtell by the wide eyes.Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897brothers, how they cut themselves and
mixed their blood,The woman turned back at the threshold and
lookedWidth1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897but we decided that we would do the
opposite: we woulddirectly at Iris. Her cheeks were flushed with the
exertionWidth1 Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897stick ourselves and not bleed.of the
climb. Her wide eyes were black.Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width68976869Width1
Width3Width7349Width3Width6897"My dear," she said from the doorway, "how
do you breathe up here?"

Iris felt triumphant. She knows I belong, she thought. Her reply was
cordial. "It's like flying. Just something you get used to."

The client fingered her ring. "I like being earthbound myself."

The strain of being ignored stretched the man's voice when he spoke.
"Iris isn't afraid of planes. She's not afraid of anything."

The two women lifted eyebrows at each other. "He's wrong, of course,"
said the client.

"Of course," answered Iris as she moved toward the door.

I WATCHED A high one flare three colors into the sky. It took a long
time to fade, and others went off while its smoke was still hanging in
the air. I shivered. I was playing with Iris's life, as if she had to
have an old sin of too much pride or too much success to make her earn
her present furious pain. What did I know about it? Maybe her uncle just
reached for her face too many times, crying, "Got your nose!" sticking
his own thumb out of his fist and wiggling it at her until she got the
metaphor. His thumb was her nose. Her skinny body was my job. What else
could it be? I climbed down the ladder and went into the house.

The next day at work, Iris called me from her room, "Come here,
sweetheart." When I came, she grabbed the chain around my neck where the
keys to the wing hung. She twisted the chain and pulled. I struggled
with her a minute before jerking it loose. Nothing hurt. Iris just
shrank back against the pillow. I wore my keys inside my shirt after that.

70

I DREAMED FELICE all summer. It seemed odd that no one saw her but me.
Even Mom, who noticed from fifty paces if I spilled a drop of juice on
my blouse, didn't catch a glimpse. But I found myself clearing off the
passenger seat for Felice every time I got into the Pinto. I'd sit at
the long traffic lights on my way to work, playing her name over and
over in my head, working up a nice haze of distraction. I'd see her flat
like a photo, leaning over me the night she braided my hair, then I'd
push the picture, trying to give it a shape that would pass for life.
She'd blanch and fade, and I'd find myself making a left turn into the
nursing home parking lot. The daydream got me there, got me a lot of
places that summer.

I tried to keep Felice real by saying her name. I told people I was
missing her, but "missing my friend," even "missing my best friend,"
sounded too hollow and light. Mom just looked at me over the mixing bowl
and nodded. Mr. Pierson didn't even nod, of course.

Things were slow on the wing one day. It was after lunch, long before
supper, and I had almost finished the beds. Perez was doing baths.
Eugenia and Ed and Shelley were drowsing in their chairs, heads dropping
to their chests, faces soft. Mabel was washing the wall with a brown
paper towel, and it was as if she drew all of the energy in the wing
into the dry circles she was rubbing on the plaster. It was very hot. I
pushed my cart into Ginny's room. Martha and the Vandellas were spinning
on the record player, but only Peg was there, bent over the pad on her
lap, writing. She wore a red cotton shirt, and it was a long time before
she looked up.

"Where's Ginny? I asked, getting busy with the sheets. I was always a
little edgy alone with Peg, which confused me, since I liked her a lot.
Maybe it was the way

71

Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782one of her eyes had a way of
separating its gaze from theI took Peg's hand and rested it on my lap.
Her fingersWidth1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782other and wandering to odd angles of the
room. Now itwere folded against her palm, but I could get to the
nails.Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782glanced off my hip while the rest of Peg
looked me in theHer skin was red and soft. I began to clip.Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782face."Felice, my friend Felice," I said,
"is gone for the sum-Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782"She's in the hospital for tests," Peg
said with a toughmer." I noticed a spattering of freckles on Peg's
innerWidth1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782little jerk of her shoulders. She looked
sad. I made tightwrist. "I miss her a lot."Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782corners with the blanket and watched Peg
take a sip ofPeg made a noise like the one I'd just made. "Mmmm.Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782IIIcoffee. She drank through a crazy straw
someone hadI hate it when Ginny is gone for even a day." Her nailsWidth1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782~Igiven her, clear plastic that did
loop-d-loops before it gotwere falling in white wisps onto the blanket.
I brushedWidth1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782from the cup to her mouth.them together in
a little pile.Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782IPeg noticed my glance. "Watching coffee
take those"I hope Ginny is all right." Ginny's name carriedWidth1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782I'loops always makes me think of blood
vessels and intes-echoes of Felice when I said it. I concentrated on
cuttingWidth1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782I'tines," she said, pulling away from the
straw.an even curve on Peg's index finger: no sharp edges, notWidth1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782I
watched the coffee, thinking it looked a bit grisly astoo close to the
quick.Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782it drained back into her cup. "I can see
it.""I don't like missing her," said Peg. I felt myself nod.Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Peg
took another sip. I put th

the gPdirty sheets in the"It's too complicated. I keep things simple,
and she's gotWidth1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782hamper. "Ginny's been in a lot of pain,"
said Peg.these frilly curtains."Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782I sat
down on the bed I had just made. "Mmmm. I'mI kept listening to the sharp
click of the clippers. IWidth1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782sorry."heard a crackle in Peg's voice like
the sound cellophaneWidth1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782"You get used to a certain amount of it-"
she thrustmakes when it's pulled off a package. She was about toWidth1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782her
shoulders against the air again-"but it wears youunwrap something for
me. I held the warm weight of herWidth1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782out."hand lightly.Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782"Some
mountains form by thrust." I was changing the"Shiny shoes," said Peg,
"doo-wop music, bladderWidth1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782subject. I'd been mooning over one of
Felice's letters onspasms, five sisters, an ex-husband. The
works."Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782break, and geology was on my mind. "Others
form byI checked for smoothness with my thumb. I wanted toWidth1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782erosion or block faulting."tell Peg
something private about Felice to hear if ourWidth1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Peg
knocked the straw away from her face with heroverlapping voices sounded
as important as just Peg'sWidth1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782chin. "Really?"did, but I couldn't think
of what to say.Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782"I've got this friend named Felice," I
said, swinging my"Felice's mother hurts her." As soon as I said it,
IWidth1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782feet. "She likes rocks."knew that I'd gone
too far. I started working on Peg'sWidth1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782"Yeah?" Peg swung to look at me with her
abrupt,other hand.

°Peg did something with her eyebrows. "That's a cryingWidth1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782wall-eyed sharpness.Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782I
picked up a fingernail clipper from her bedsideshame."Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782table. "You want me to do this for you?
I've got time."Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782"Okay."Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width6782Width1
Width3Width7099Width3Width67827273Width1 Width3Width7099Width3Width6782I
felt queasy. Felice wouldn't like me talking about VIIIher family behind
her back, and I had missed the heart of what I wanted Peg to know about
Felice.

This hand was as warm and still as the other, and I had a sudden
uncomfortable urge to press it against my thigh, to try to get a message
out that way. I shook the feeling off and opened my mouth. Another
Felice quotation came out. "There are rocks at the bottom of the Grand
Canyon over a billion years old."

Peg's wandering eye circled up a beam of light from the window. She gave
one of her shrugs. "Is this some kind of code?"

I finished Peg's hand and placed it back on the arm of the chair. I
noticed sweat dripping down her forehead and reached into the pocket of
my tunic for a clean washrag. I got up off the bed and leaned over to
wipe her face. I had moved closer, but I felt safer, as if we were
settling back into place. I answered her. "It's geology."

Peg took a sip of cold coffee through her straw. I glanced into the hall
and saw Ginny being pushed past the door, looking tired and drawn.

"I'll take her," I called to the pimply boy clenching the handgrips.

"How are you?" I asked Ginny, on duty.

"Hospitals kill me," she said. I nodded, wheeled her in next to Peg, and
left. I didn't look back to see if they rubbed arms or not.

74

Chapter

Eight

PEOPLE GOT TENSE BEFORE MEALS AT THE nursing home, especially when it
was too hot to eat. One night the pressure felt higher than usual as I
wheeled the cartful of trays in from the kitchen. It was like the
feeling I got sitting down to supper at home without having brushed my
hair, waiting for Dad to let me have it. Except at this job, I was Dad,
or at least Mom, trying to shove spoons into a few mouths and keep a lid
on the family pot.

Perez was going from room to room feeding the slow people and setting up
trays for those like Ginny, who could make it clear when they didn't
feel like eating with the group. I had everybody else gathered at one
end of the dining hall. I started passing out trays, cutting food, and
opening cartons of milk. I had to keep pushing my hair back out of my
eyes. Mr. Pierson was sitting stock-still,

75

staring over his plate at the wall. Mabel sat beside him, cutting up her
meat and slipping it into the carton she held between her legs. She
saved her meals for Billy. Whenever I caught her eye, she'd take a bite
herself. She gave Mr. Pierson's hand a pat every now and then. "There,"
she'd say. When she finished emptying her plate, she started on his.

All of us could hear Iris cussing at Perez down the hall. Ed and Judith
and Violet were waiting for their dinners, seated at the table, making
comments about Shelley's appetite and Iris's language. Everyone was
sweating. My bangs were sticking to my forehead, and my eyes stung. I
made a quick circuit to take the foil off of everyone's juice. I offered
a spoonful of corn to Shelley, which she swallowed, giving me a
crooked-tooth grin. She took another bite, in a good mood. I rescued a
bit of Mr. Pierson's dinner and offered it to him. He opened his mouth
and shut it with the meat on his tongue.

I gave his shoulder a squeeze. My palm left a damp spot on the cloth.
"Come on, Mr. Pierson, chew a little."

Mabel leaned forward. "Oh, please do. Please chew."

I tapped her plate with my finger. "Right, Mabel. Don't you think you
should eat a little more of your own dinner?"

She rearranged her skirt so that it covered the carton. "No, thank you.
I'm waiting for Billy." I could see her blood moving up closer to her
skin. She was so thin. I started to insist, but Eugenia needed help
cutting her meat, and so did Peg. Their food was getting cold while we
all sweated.

"Nurse! Nurse!" Eugenia was tired of waiting. Shelley threw her spoon.
Mabel was trying to get Mr. Pierson to drink so she could have the
carton. Milk dribbled down the outside of his mouth, but he swallowed as
he tippedit to his lips. I picked up the spoon, gave Shelley another
bite of corn, then started slicing for Eugenia.

Eugenia got a look of fierce concentration on her face as she picked up
her fork. The liver spots on her hands trembled and danced. "Very slow
service around here," she whispered loudly to Ed. He swallowed, nodded,
and dipped up another heap of applesauce.

I felt slow, slow and hot and responsible for too many lives. I gave
Shelley a spoonful of gravy and dropped half of it onto her bib. I was
rushing her. The front of Mr. Pierson's shirt was soaked with milk.
Shelley was getting cranky because I kept forgetting to give her time to
swallow. "Here, Shelley, have some more. Open up, sweetie. That's good,
that's a good girl." Shelley was maybe nine-teen, a couple of years
older than me, but she was so bent and soft and guileless, she seemed
like a baby.

I cut the meat smaller, gave her another bite, then moved Peg's straw.
"Is that all right? Good?"

There were no windows. My polyester uniform held the sweat, kept it next
to me, as I fed. Eugenia's fork did the polka to her face. Shelley shook
her walker. I mopped up Mr. Pierson, sweating and trying not to be too
present.

Peg leaned forward to speak, faint and slow. "Char," she said. I had to
stop to listen. "Mary had a little lamb."

"What?" I stepped closer.

"The doctor fainted." She sat back in her chair, pleased with her joke.

I stood there holding a milk-soaked bib, dripping sweat, trying to
understand, but when I finally got it, I laughed and Peg laughed and
Shelley beat her spoon on her tray. I propped open the fire door to let
a breeze in while we finished the meal.

7677

Width1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662than yesterday, but possible. All
in preparation for theWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662first question of every morning.Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662MOM
WAS COOKING when I got up the next morning.Mom reached for her meal
chart and her recipe bookWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662She was making yogurt and cottage cheese
diet salad, lis-to write down what she had eaten yesterday and to
planWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
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guest was awhat we would all eat next week. A wisp of celery
floatedWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
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men, theirfrom the corner of her mouth and landed smack in theWidth1
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Width3Width7258Width3Width6662hobbies, and their fears. The host said,
"Tell the truth.middle of the piece of extra material that she had
sewnWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662This is for girls who want to pick up
guys, right?"into her dress to cover the cleft between her breasts.
ItWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662The guest laughed. "Are you single?"worked
with her bra to create a shelf effect.Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Mom
switched over to the jazz station. "Good morn-She brushed the celery off
with a little flourish of herWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662ing," she said. "Did you lose any weight
this morning?"hand, then said, "Ahem," nodding toward my own chest.
IWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662I leaned on the refrigerator door,
deciding whether Ihad dribbled catsup on my t-shirt. As usual, crumbs
thatWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662wanted breakfast or lunch.
"Yep. Half a pound."ended up on other people's laps landed on my
breasts.Width1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Mom was squeezing lemon juice into the
low-calFamily heritage.Width1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662yogurt. "Oh, honey, that's great." She
sprinkled some"Oops." I walked over to the sink and dabbed at myWidth1
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Width3Width7258Width3Width6662rBacos into the salad, and some into her
hand to feed toshirt with a sponge. "Maybe I need a bib, like some of
theWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662the dog.folks at work."Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662"Here, Ralphie, that'll look better on you
than it"Try a little dish soap," said Mom. "How is work?"Width1
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on me.' She mixed the cottage cheese in with theink it

I held m3' t-shirt away from my skin and shooWidth1
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Width3Width7258Width3Width6662yogurt and offered me a bite.back and
forth, hoping it would dry. "It wears me out.Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662"Your
cheeks really do look thinner. You can have thisThey need to hire more
aides."Width1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662for lunch, if you like."Mom was rereading
her recipe for Cheesy HamburgerWidth1
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from theFie. "Hmm. Maybe we could have this for supper with LiteWidth1
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crust. You be sweet to those patients,Width1
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put plastic wrap over the rest of the salad andCharlotte. Think of
Gram."Width1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662sat down at the table with a celery stick.
"Not as well asI thought of my grandmother. She loved to put on
herWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
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anything, either."magnifying glasses that made her eyes look the size
ofWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662I was introducing cottage
cheese-Baco-yogurt to agiant jawbreakers, get in her Buick, and drive
the wide,Width1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662pool of catsup. "At least you held
steady."long roads with the cruise control set for eighty-five
milesWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662per hour. She would go out to the Ladybird
Mall to do aWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Mom sighed, leaning on her elbows. "I
know. It's justlittle shopping. Gram told me once she'd take the shot-

"Width1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
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her mouth if any-Width1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662knew

I knew how she felt. I had lost half a pound by stand-onegun

"

mentioned a home to her."Width1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
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the pointerWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
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gradually returningWidth1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662Width1
Width3Width7258Width3Width6662~Imy weight to my feet until it stopped
someplace better'Width1 Width3Width7258Width3Width6662

7879

Width1 Width3Width365Width3Width7147Width3Width6696Mom wrote "Instant
Breakfast" on her shopping list.was boiling on the stove behind her, and
she was defrost-Width1
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she keeps driving like sheing a hunk of ground meat on another burner,
stoppingWidth1 Width3Width365Width3Width7147Width3Width6696Width1
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and then to scrape the gray softened meat off the fro-Width1
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and got tough. It madezen core. She had a toothpick in her mouth to keep
herWidth1 Width3Width365Width3Width7147Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width7512Width3Width66961,Ime wonder about her childhood with Gram
and Daddyfrom tasting while she cooked. She took it out to speak.Width1
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Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696!Frank, who had died when I
was seven. All his name"We didn't think about it that much, honey," she
said,Width1 Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
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jars of grass withtugging my shirt down where it kept riding up over
myWidth1 Width3Width7512Width3Width6696Width1
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~shwasher, it strucktight young belly. "Moody had good schools this
houseWidth1 Width3Width7512Width3Width6696Width1
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suburbs, not like me. I'dhad a window over the sink for me, and it
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young, on a horse, with those fam-edge of any trouble, like that
integration we got into inWidth1
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Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696ily breasts pushing out
fringe on a fancy cowgirl shirt,Oklahoma. We could afford to live here,
and it seemedWidth1 Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696and the family thighs
spreading wide and strong againstlike a good place for you to grow
up."Width1 Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696the shining brown saddle.
Mom wasn't born to the sub-Mom started to tuck the tag back into the
neck of myWidth1 Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696urbs, but she had studied
home economics underliningt inte

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Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696the parts about the four
basic food groups and family life.said. I had had a day off from school
when Martin LutherWidth1
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old textbooks on the top shelfKing Jr. was killed.Width1
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Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696behind a stack of Reader's
Digest Condensed Classics.~Mom put her toothpick back in her mouth.
"Mmm,Width1 Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696One passage marked in blue
ink noted that in marriageshe said. She started pushing peels into the
garbageWidth1 Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
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but it wasn't everything,disposal. "Charlotte, I was raised thinking it
was my dutyWidth1 Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Mom had married my daddy,
had Jeff and me, andto be nice to black people. It wasn't until we lived
in Okla-Width1 Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696III,

taken on Moody as if it fit her like her favorite girdle. Shehoma that
it occurred to me that some of them might notWidth1
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Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696did mention the tight spaces
between the houses, but shecare to be nice back. Mom glanced out the
window intoWidth1 Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696took the dog to the park a
lot, where she found wildour yard. "The grass needs cutting." She
flipped on theWidth1 Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696asparagus, and once she saw
a fox.disposal. It growled. "It's best to stay out of all that."Width1
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Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Iwanted to ask her what she
would really do if Gram

Ygettinggrating

I wasdown to the nub of the cheese,Width1
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Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696got sick, but it didn't seem
like a question with anthe tips of my fingers a bit.Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696answer. Bring her here to
Moody if she could travel this"Careful, Char. That's enough cheese." Mom
scoopedWidth1 Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696far, I guessed. I didn't
like to think of Gram here with justit onto a paper towel and put it on
the kitchen scale toWidth1
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Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696a driveway to park in and no
place she wanted to go.weigh it. "Three ounces. That's plenty for you
and me.Width1 Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696I remembered myself as a
nine-Year-old in a stretchedDid you lose any weight today?"Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696turtle top, walking into the
kitchen to ask Mom why she"Yes, a pound." I was a cool liar, even
then.Width1 Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696and Daddy had picked this
place to live in. I had beenMom smiled around her toothpick. "Good girl.
EveryWidth1 Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696reading Jack London and
dreaming of the Yukon. She hadlittle bit helps."Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696handed me the cheese grater.
She was peeling potatoesWidth1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696Width1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width66961into the sink in her slow,
thorough way. A big pot of waterWidth1
Width3Width437Width3Width7075Width3Width6696

8081

I KEPT NOTICING the motion of time that summer. It was the opposite of
the motion of rocks, which seemed to sit solidly in one place but were
really always shifting. Most of the people at the nursing home seemed to
trip in and out of time past, dream time, meal time. A few, like Peg,
chose the austerities of the present. Someone like Mr. Pierson, though,
seemed to have passed out of the motion of time altogether to join the
slow dance of the rocks.

Mr. Pierson kept silence. He didn't even speak with his eyes or his soft
pink skin or his bones. He slept with his knees approaching his chin,
curled up like something younger than a child. I asked Perez why no one
used his first name, which was Joseph, and she handed me a pile of clean
sheets, still warm from the laundry cart. "He's a mannerly man," she
said. "He always had a fine bearing." Perez spoke politely to Mr.
Pierson during the course of her work and had been known to favor him
with a hymn in the shower room, so I knew she held him in high regard.

So did I, although I couldn't say why. He was almost shiny-not in the
way Ginny was shiny, with fine sweaters and a wide-awake light-but in a
soft way, like a lump of gypsum. He reminded me of different things,
depending on whether I was pushing him or lifting him or giving him a
glance as I rushed past in the hall. He was another like Iris, who
somehow suggested his own history to me, as Iris had, without offering
evidence of being anything except fully absorbed in his tucked-up quiet.

He had very little hair, which we combed sideways. His scalp was quietly
flaking away, as was the skin on his shoulders and arms. He would open
his lips to accept

82

food if I held a spoon to his mouth, but he ate mechanically, as if he
were having a thought that could not be interrupted because it was so
strong.

I looked at him with interest, partly because I could. I could stare at
him as long as I wanted, and he wouldn't look away or tell me I was
rude. He wouldn't curse me like Iris, or stare me down like Peg. He
would just keep sitting bent and still.

I had a dream of Mr. Pierson as a gardener, tapping tiny seeds from a
white pack. Everything was in close-up, as if I were a camera left
filming on the ground. They were celery seeds, and they fell more
lightly than pepper from a mill. He blew down to cover them with a puff
of earth. His knuckles were big, and one finger had a pale stripe, as if
he usually wore a ring, but it was gone. In my dream, I knew he'd lost
it in the garden. His sleeves were rolled up, and his forearms were
veiny and hairy and brown from the sun. His hands were so big, I could
see the white half-moons on his fingernails, one thumb gone black from a
bruise. Then I heard the shovel in the dirt, saw the red-brown curve of
it as he loosened the soil. I saw his muddy boot press the shovel. I
panned up and pulled back until he went from being a giant hand and a
giant shoe to a weathered man standing among the beds, with seedlings
coming up unnaturally fast. Bib lettuce sprouted, red lettuce, slim
onions, tiny celery spikes, fuzzy-stemmed tomatoes, broccoli looking the
same as collards in the first leafing, then reaching up with their
specific true leaves, all growing in fast slow motion, like a Disney
nature short, while Mr. Pierson pulled out his shovel and stuck it in a
bucket of clean sand. He pulled a parsnip that had wintered over out of
the dirt, swung it over his head and threw it-hard as David threw the
rock at Goliath in the Bible-square into the heart of the gar-den. The
plants parted to let it land, and the dirt around

83

the parsnip started whirling and flaking into the air. Mr. Pierson
coughed into the yellow bandana he pulled from the pocket of his
overalls. The seedlings stopped growing before any had fruited, about
shin high, green and thick. The whirling dust became rain. The plants
were drinking, and Mr. Pierson bent his head back to the sky. The wind
blew off his cap. I wasn't a camera, but a root, and I drank.

I got out of bed to get some tap water from the bath-room. The dog was
grinding his teeth on the threshold of my bedroom door. As I curled
under the sheet again, hot and half awake, the dream changed. Mr.
Pierson was driving his old truck down the road with his dog. He
stopped, got out, and began walking and singing at the top of his lungs.
The dog ran ahead, then pulled up short, looking back as if to call him.
Mr. Pierson changed the words of his song, singing, "Yes, my burry
furred friend, I'll be with you in the end." The dog jumped up, as high
as the man's arm, knowing better than to put his muddy feet on the
overalls. The tree frogs sang, too, after the man and the dog had
passed. Mr. Pierson picked up a rock. Pumice. He thought of his
daughter, the scientist, in Iceland standing on the still warm ash of a
ten-year-old field of volcanic rock.

I rolled over and wadded up my pillow under my cheek. I wasn't convinced
by the pumice or the scientist, so I pushed myself into an emptier sleep.

The next evening I wheeled Mr. Pierson into his room. I didn't flick the
switch because there was enough glare from the hall light. The other bed
was empty; his room-mate was in the hospital. There was nothing on Mr.
Pierson's nightstand but his false teeth in their case. The morning aide
hadn't bothered with them when she had gotten him up. I lifted him to
his feet, and we pivoted. Then I lowered him so that he was sitting on
the edge of

84

the bed. He was light. I kept a hand on his shoulder to steady him as I
pulled his nightshirt out from where it lay folded under his pillow. I
took off his shirt, tugged off his pants, then slipped his nightshirt
over his shoulders. The skin over his collarbone flaked a little under
my fingers. I reached under his thighs and swung his legs up onto the
mattress. He curled his knees up to his chin in a slow/fast motion like
the seedlings in my dream. I pulled up the bedrail and stood looking at
him. I had just put a man to bed.

Of course, I had put men and women to bed every night since I'd gotten
this job. Before that, I'd been putting little boys and little girls to
bed in a long chain of babysitting jobs from the time I was eleven. By
now, it should have been as familiar as pulling weeds or making French
toast, but in this temporarily private room with the light from the hall
casting shadows on the floor tiles, I was suddenly shocked with my
power. I reached down and tucked the sheet in around his neck. He didn't
stir. A vein made a ridge in his forehead. "I'm just seventeen," I
thought. "How come they trust me with this?"

I bent down full of experimentation and tenderness to gather Mr. Pierson
into my arms and give him a kiss full on the mouth.

He pressed his lips to mine and put his arms around me. They felt
strong. He said something that was almost a word in my ear.

I stood there holding him, moved. Then I let him down on the pillow, and
his eyes slipped shut. It wasn't until I got off work that night and was
driving home through the black, wet streets that I felt guilt. I knew my
kiss was not for who he actually was. His hug had nothing to do with me,
since he'd never even looked me in the face, but I hoped it was okay,
this once, to short-cut like that to warmth.

85

I stayed gentle with Mr. Pierson within professional limits after that.
He stayed silent, curled in his one deep thought.

Chapter

Nine

I HELPED MABEL OFF WITH HER HOUSEDRESS and onto the shower chair. She
sat elegantly and waved her hand at me, as if she had just been ushered
to the best seat in a very fine house. "Thank you, dear. You may go now."

"Sorry, Mabel, I've got to stick around for this." I turned on the
nozzle, directing the water at the floor for a moment. "You tell me if
it's too cold," I said, pointing the hose at her legs.

She sighed. "Puffballs are out today."

I soaped her and rinsed her while she talked about Billy on the farm,
the chickens in the yard, and the greening woods. I half listened, the
rest of me absorbed in furtive fascination with her body. The skin of
her hips settled and spread over the shower seat. She had a light, shiny
scar on her belly. I lifted the patient weight of one

87

breast to wash under it. Her veins showed blue through her skin. She was
talking garden now: the last battered collards and brussel sprouts that
had clung on through the winter, the new early peas, mulching the
asparagus with hay and getting dirty up to her elbows in black soil and
dug-in vetch.

I was working lather into the kinked gray hairs under her arms, thinking
I should offer to let her hold the soap and make herself as clean as she
wanted, but I had so many beds to change before dinner that I didn't
even try. Instead, I reached for the scant towel to start drying her off.

I had to keep tugging on the back of my tunic, which was riding up as I
bent over Mabel. The folds of my back were slippery with steam and
sweat. A familiar fact hit me as strange: bodies are secret. Once on
vacation I'd seen little girls running with their shirts off in a hot
Texas park, but Mom said no when I wanted to jump through the
sprinklers, too. I'd seen pictures in a house where I used to babysit,
in a magazine, stuck in a basket next to the toilet. The women were
slick as rubber, one shade, and smooth all over. Their sanded cantaloupe
breasts had hard nipples that stuck out like the knotted ends of
balloons in silhouette. Everything else about their bodies was as
stretched and hard as the chests and bellies of the boys in summer who
took off their shirts to play kickball in the street. Hard as Ted from
down the street, who would stop in on a night game of hide-and-seek to
take Felice to the little shed out back. Sometimes Felice would come out
kicking and threatening Ted with a kerosene can. Other times she'd come
out held tight, tight under his arm. He would squeeze her shoulder, then
put both arms around her and lift her into the air. I was too fat to be
lifted, never thought of trying to lift her myself, but now I held out
clean underpants for Mabel to

88

step into, then raised her with one arm firm under her shoulder, tugging
the waistband up around her waist. I pulled her housedress back on over
her head, and fastened it up to where her member-of-society neckline tan
was outlined in dark moles and rimmed with purplish white. I took her by
the arm, and we walked down the hall with Mabel still talking country,
talking Billy walking out to the marsh to look for fiddleheads way too
early in the spring.

I HAD THE next day off. It was Saturday, Dad put his country-and-western
78s on the hi-fi, and we all did chores while they dropped. Jeff worked
in the yard. I cleaned the bathroom to Tennessee Ernie Ford and Kay
Starr, who had the feed-'em-in the-morning, change-'em,
feed-'em-in-the-evening blues. I could hear my father in the .kitchen
slamming the cupboard doors because he couldn't find the bowl he wanted
to make pancakes in, and Mom being sorry for being such a mess.

The front bathroom was pink. It had double sinks and triple medicine
cabinets that were half full of aspirin and Band-Aids, rubbing alcohol
and Jeff's new razors. I took Windex to the mirrored doors to wipe out
the white flecks of toothpaste and soapy water. I cleaned the counters
with Dow Bathroom Cleanser. I felt lavish smearing all that foam over
the smooth sinks and smothering the faint grit in the shower stall. I
was also uneasy, something to do with Dow and Vietnam. I wasn't sure
what the connection was, but I thought I might have heard that there was
one. I was relieved to go on to the Johnny Mop.

I dipped the blue scrubber into the toilet and thought about Mabel
carrying water. I could see her as a dirty-necked girl in a loose smock,
already with sloping

89

shoulders and long skinny arms, hauling water from the well every day.
The bucket handles cut into her palms, but there was no fudging, because
there had to be water for drinking and cooking and washing up and
keeping the garden alive in the heat. Mabel picked flowers on the way to
the well, but all her strength had to go to the water on the way back to
the kitchen. If she tripped over a root in the path, she had scraped
knees and the walk back to the well. The water in the well looked
mysterious, not trickling clear like in a stream, more like standing
water in a ditch where frogs laid their jelly bowls full of eggs.

Mabel would sit on the edge of the well, dangling her legs inside
against the moss, knowing her mama was waiting to hand her the rake.

I finished up by emptying the pink wastebasket and shaking out the throw
rugs, hearing Ray Charles hit the words hard, doing "Crying Time."

I opened the sliding glass door and went out back to lean on the
toolshed and read Felice's letter again.

Dear Char:

Been smoking up back here by the dumpster on my breaks, but Tony, the
guy with the pot, didn't come in today. I hope he's not quitting. He
took me to White Sands. I bought some swan sunglasses at the gas station
on the drive down. I'll send you a snapshot. The sand really blazed. It
was too hot to stand on, but we could run down the dunes. The only other
cars on the road were army jeeps-guess they test rockets out there. Wild
to be in a place that's piles and piles of just one thing. It's mostly
crushed gypsum, with a little quartz mixed in. Guess that's

90

what a beach must be like, only with water, too. Next stop California (I
wish). There was a strange little lake where nothing lives, except white
beetles.

The job's okay. Tony's sweet. Mickey and Kenny and Rick are annoying,
but we're getting along. Hope you're all right. Be good.

love,

Felice

I got the clippers from the toolshed and started trimming the tall grass
along the fence, mad that Felice was picking up boy trash again. I could
see her in the desert, drinking up the white sand with her skin. I could
see her at the Mobil station, posing in front of the red-winged horse on
the sign, squinting through her plastic sun-glasses and waiting for him
to click, or maybe she got the attendant to take a picture of them both;
maybe he bought himself a pair with little pistols on the corners where
hers had swans. How was she ever going to learn anything about landforms
with some dumb pothead hanging around, leeching her time? I hit
chainlink with the clippers and had to pull out a tough length of grass
by hand. It wasn't that I didn't want her to have a life. It was just
that her trip to White Sands had to be an overnight, and I suspected
that she wasn't being consistent with her position on casual sex. We'd
discussed it in depth. I'd said I thought it was fine, healthy even, to
have fun whenever you could. Felice hadn't been so sure. She'd said she
didn't want to waste any time. I'd maintained that as long as you
enjoyed it, nothing could be a waste of time, but why the hell was
Felice throwing herself after this Tony when she could be applying
herself, testing the ash con-tent of the soil, even digging for goddamn
gold.

91

Felice had sent me gypsum dust in a little string pouch stuck into the
bottom of the envelope with the letter. It was strange and shiny, a very
fine, soft sand. Gypsum is low on the hardness chart. I sprinkled a
pinch of it around my neck, for magic, then felt gritty. When I finished
clipping the fenceline, I went in to take a shower.

The chrome was still gleaming, and there was that sharp chemical smell
that I'd grown up with as clean, but Jeff had been in to wash his hands,
so there were dirty suds lingering in the sink. I ran the water to send
them on down the drain. Daddy's records were still spinning: "One Mint
Julep" sounded jazzy and scratched.

I stepped into the shower stall and shut the clear glass door. The water
spilled over me. My skin drank it in for one full minute. Then, because
it was summer and water was rationed, I turned off both faucets at once.
I was bare and damp. I reached for the soap. It was a new bar, big. I
turned it in my palms, working up suds. I spread them down one side of
my body and up the other, until my legs, my breasts, the folds of my
sides, and the trough of my back were all coated with white. Everything
felt loose and soft under my hands, except for my tough feet. I turned
the water on again and leaned back so the soap didn't wash into my eyes.
When I had rinsed clean, I stood in the shower another minute, just
letting the water run to waste.

I turned to the corner of the stall and made a small cave. The walls of
the cave were my body and the pink tile. The water was outside, beating
on my back. I hunched my shoulders and slipped both hands, palms up,
under my hanging belly. I lifted my paunch, measuring the fat. Every
time I took a shower I checked how many fingers, or what fraction of a
finger, was still visible as I peered down over my breasts and the
gradual slope of my belly before it dropped off abruptly just above the

92

first outcropping of pubic hair. Now that my belly over-lapped my hands
altogether, I tried to figure how far it stuck out past the sighting
point. It was the strangest moment of any ordinary day, standing there
using both hands to hold a piece of me that wasn't supposed to exist,
wishing it gone. I shut off the water and pushed open the clouded glass
door to reach for a towel.

93

Chapter

Ten

FELICE SENT ME ROCKS. SHE MAILED THEM in small boxes and padded
envelopes, writing "F. Ventura" in bold fuschia letters as the return
address. I had just walked in the door, jangling my keys and thinking
that I was sick of the smell of myself in my white polyester tunic, but
feeling too lazy to wash it again, when I saw a package on the coffee
table, waiting for me.

Mom and Dad were in their bedroom watching TV, neglecting the big color
console in the living room in favor of stretching out on their bed in
their bathrobes, watching "McMillan and Wife." They had a happy marriage.

Mom called hello down the hall. I knew if she heard me walk into the
kitchen, she'd probably come out to keep an eye on me, so I yelled hello
back and unwrapped the package standing right there, all pulse and
clumsy fingers. Even with nobody watching, I was a little

95

embarrassed to be so excited. It meant more than a rock usually would.

I had tried putting all the rocks Felice sent in an egg carton with
labels, so they would pass for a hobby, but it turned out that I was
much happier scattering them or piling them in heaps. I liked touching
them a lot more than I cared about writing down their names. I was
learning their names, though. Felice had sent me rhodenite, chrysocolla,
plume agate, apatized jasper, and petrified wood. She would always
enclose a scrap of paper giving the name of the rock and the place she
found it: Plume Agate, Chacra Mesa. Sometimes she stuck in a letter.
Once she mailed a piece of glass that was lavender from lying eighty
years in the sun. The letter she sent with this package read:

Dear Char:

Just got back from a run, took a shower, and felt like writing you. Been
running a lot, burning off fat. Feels good. I do it mornings on Highway
35. There's not much shoulder, but not many cars go by. This morning,
though, a cop car came up next to me and slowed down. I tried to run
faster, but the guy kept driving right at my pace, staring at me through
his dark glasses. Finally he went on by. It was weird.

Another thing happened on my run this morning-I found this rock. I
looked it up in my Geology Pocket Crammer. Think it's chalcedony. Says
here it's a beautiful quartz material with a red, waxy luster, chiefly
found filling or lining cracks and cavities in igneous rock. Maybe they
cracked open a vein of it when they built the road.

96

I'm sending it to you. Hope' things are going okay. Write soon.

Love,

Felice

I carried the letter and the chalcedony with me into the bathroom. It
was a small pinkish-red wedge of rock. When I held it up to the light, I
could see through the edges. The color almost pulsed, like the red you
see when you close your eyes in bright sun. I took off my tunic and ran
cold water over my wrists to help me cool off.

I set the chalcedony on the nightstand next to my alarm clock and looked
at it before I fell asleep. The rest of the rocks from Felice were
heaped around it. Some spilled over onto the floor, but none of them
were lost.

THAT LITTLE PIECE of chalcedony was in my pocket at work the next day
when Peg and Ginny and I decided to have dinner together. I wasn't quite
sure how it happened. It was breaking a taboo, something like tickling
the usher at the movies when he held out his hand to take your ticket.
Not too serious, but not proper. It wasn't the first time aides and
patients had crossed the line, of course. Everyone knew the story about
John the orderly kissing Hannah Schneider.

With Peg and Ginny and me, it was only dinner. It was a long July
evening, so we ate in the courtyard after I finished my shift. I went
out and bought watermelon and pizza. Ginny contributed tomatoes from her
windowsill plants. Peg got full bowls from the salad bar, and we pulled
out the rusty lettuce and the pithiest radishes to feed to the birds.
The grackles snatched the food that spilled from Peg's plate as she ate.
Her hands were shaking quite a lot that night. She wore a loose t-shirt and

97

embarrassed to be so excited. It meant more than a rock usually would.

I had tried putting all the rocks Felice sent in an egg carton with
labels, so they would pass for a hobby, but it turned out that I was
much happier scattering them or piling them in heaps. I liked touching
them a lot more than I cared about writing down their names. I was
learning their names, though. Felice had sent me rhodenite, chrysocolla,
plume agate, apatized jasper, and petrified wood. She would always
enclose a scrap of paper giving the name of the rock and the place she
found it: Plume Agate, Chacra Mesa. Sometimes she stuck in a letter.
Once she mailed a piece of glass that was lavender from lying eighty
years in the sun. The letter she sent with this package read:

Dear Char:

Just got back from a run, took a shower, and felt like writing you. Been
running a lot, burning off fat. Feels good. I do it mornings on Highway
35. There's not much shoulder, but not many cars go by. This morning,
though, a cop car came up next to me and slowed down. I tried to run
faster, but the guy kept driving right at my pace, staring at me through
his dark glasses. Finally he went on by. It was weird.

Another thing happened on my run this morning-I found this rock. I
looked it up in my Geology Pocket Crammer. Think it's chalcedony. Says
here it's a beautiful quartz material with a red, waxy luster, chiefly
found filling or lining cracks and cavities in igneous rock. Maybe they
cracked open a vein of it when they built the road.

96

I'm sending it to you. Hope' things are going okay. Write soon.

Love,

Felice

I carried the letter and the chalcedony with me into the bathroom. It
was a small pinkish-red wedge of rock. When I held it up to the light, I
could see through the edges. The color almost pulsed, like the red you
see when you close your eyes in bright sun. I took off my tunic and ran
cold water over my wrists to help me cool off.

I set the chalcedony on the nightstand next to my alarm clock and looked
at it before I fell asleep. The rest of the rocks from Felice were
heaped around it. Some spilled over onto the floor, but none of them
were lost.

THAT LITTLE PIECE of chalcedony was in my pocket at work the next day
when Peg and Ginny and I decided to have dinner together. I wasn't quite
sure how it happened. It was breaking a taboo, something like tickling
the usher at the movies when he held out his hand to take your ticket.
Not too serious, but not proper. It wasn't the first time aides and
patients had crossed the line, of course. Everyone knew the story about
John the orderly kissing Hannah Schneider.

With Peg and Ginny and me, it was only dinner. It was a long July
evening, so we ate in the courtyard after I finished my shift. I went
out and bought watermelon and pizza. Ginny contributed tomatoes from her
windowsill plants. Peg got full bowls from the salad bar, and we pulled
out the rusty lettuce and the pithiest radishes to feed to the birds.
The grackles snatched the food that spilled from Peg's plate as she ate.
Her hands were shaking quite a lot that night. She wore a loose t-shirt and

97

jean cutoffs. Ginny had on a floaty green shawl, with a pattern of roses
threaded through it, over a cotton tank top. I could see the strong
muscles in her shoulders and the slack parts of her arms that she
couldn't use. I had done her nails that afternoon, so they glinted in
the soft evening light. For a minute the color looked like the color of
chalcedony, even though I knew the label on the bottle said "Magenta Dream."

Ginny's sister Lilah had come about a week ago and stayed for hours
putting Ginny's hair in corn rows for coolness and pride. Ginny told me
that the pattern made her a princess, then beckoned me over. She reached
up and used her knuckles to push back some loose hair which had escaped
from my own regulation pony tail. She had a light touch. I flushed and
felt flattered.

We sat in the evening breeze, eating and talking about horoscopes,
movies, Iris's past mysteries and present temper. "Still getting
acquainted with pain," said Ginny, and they aren't hitting it off."

"Nobody hits it off with pain," said Peg, taking a big, sloppy bite of
pizza.

I put the watermelon on the stone bench and carved into it with a knife.
Ginny was busy talking. "I'll never forget my first day here," she said,
drawing the shawl up around her bare shoulders. "I was straight out of
the hospital, and before that, two years of living with my family,
sitting in front of soap operas, watching Mama talk with my sisters on
the phone." Ginny jiggled her plate, and the pizza crusts rattled
against each other. "One thing about Mama, she makes the world's best
biscuits, all hot and flaky under gravy. I never get anything like that
around here."

"Yeah," Peg said, "but those biscuits wouldn't still be hot by the time
you managed to get one to your mouth."

98

They laughed. I could almost see their slowness unfolding between them.

The breeze was moving in Peg's hair. "You were probably missing that
husband of yours the whole time you were at home," she said. I pulled
out the knife and the watermelon opened with a snapping sound.

Ginny handed me her plate. "There were a lot of gaps in my life. I was
used to spark." Peg nodded like she was hearing something she already
knew. Ginny looked at me. "I had applied for public housing and found
out there was no way I'd get a spot while I was living at home. People
coming out of institutions get priority, and nobody else ever gets in.
So when I got sick, I decided to come here and get on the waiting list
for an apartment."

I was cutting small, dripping chunks of melon for Peg, flicking the
seeds out with the edge of the knife. "And you've been here for years?."
I licked my fingers. They were slick and sweet.

"The list is years long." Peg snorted. "It's a disgrace. I'm on it,
too." She went after the melon with a fork, frowning in concentration.
"I remember you coming in, Ginny, a tomato plant in your lap, surrounded
by serious sisters and their laughing children. Every one of them was
trying to keep a hand on you as you wheeled down the hall."

I cut a firm red piece out of the heart for Ginny. She was sitting with
a very straight back. "Lilah took one look around and said, `Not enough
color in this place.' I had to tell her for the fifty-third time that it
was only a temporary arrangement."

I gave Peg another piece with rind. "Then what happened?"

Ginny was speaking softly. "They checked me in, unpacked and set up the
room the way I wanted it, with

99

my plants at the window and my fringed lamp next to the bed. We all
cried with the door shut, then my family left.

"At dinner that night I sat next to a black-haired, red-faced woman who
smiled and said, 'Could I ask the spelling of your nameT

"I spelled it for her, none too friendly, and she wrote it down. She
said she wanted to feature me in her memoirs. Cool as a cucumber." Ginny
leaned toward Peg in the present. "Bold as brass."

Everything looked lovely to me. There was a summer dusk light on both of
their faces. Peg skidded a hunk of melon off her tray into Ginny's lap,
laughing. Ginny bent and ate it with no hands, straight from the rind.

THE NEXT MORNING was Sunday. I woke up feeling religious for a change,
so I put on my pink dress and went with Mom to the early service. I
didn't stay to help her with Sunday School, but came home to get dinner
on the table. Mom went to church to hang out with the two- and three-
and four-year-olds. She clapped hands with them and sang small songs.
Sometimes she would bring whipping cream and let them make butter. She
told them Bible stories that turned out to be about sharing or helping
mother at home.

I didn't like kids. For me, church was a social challenge. This morning
my church friend Marcie whispered to me that I had white stuff on my
mouth. In the cramped ladies room mirror, I found out that it was excess
tooth-paste from brushing my teeth so extravagantly before I had come to
worship. I couldn't think why Mom had let me out of the house like that,
unless she had her mind on playtime ahead.

I walked in our front door after church feeling depressed. The sun was
pouring in the big front

100

windows, making bright splashes on the green carpet. Dust was sparking
and floating like chipped-off bits of light. No one else was home. Dad
had gone to the late service and would be coming back with Mom in a
couple of hours. Jeff was having his usual red-eyed weekend someplace
else. I put the roast on to cook with potatoes and carrots and wandered
back into the living room, kicking off my good shoes.

I went to the record rack and pulled out a couple of Dad's old LPs. I
went jazz instead of country. Ella Fitzgerald. Jonah Jones.

Ella came on singing "Night in Tunisia." I liked the velvet in her voice
behind the album's scratch. It moved me more than disco, except when I
was with Felice. I did a few steps of the hard part of the dance she'd
tried to teach me, but I couldn't really move. My clothes were too tight.

I walked down the hall to my room to take off my Sunday best. The pink
dress made me feel almost pretty, but the pantyhose were awful. I was
packed into them like meat in a sausage casing. They were queen-size,
but the waistband caught under my stomach and the crotch only came
halfway up my thighs. I tore the hose on my toenails taking them off. I
pulled my dress and slip over my head, unhooked my bra, and stepped out
of my underwear. I felt a shiver of self-consciousness, but it was a
relief to be naked. Ella was singing, "Now you push the middle valve
down, the music goes round and round, and it come out here." I picked up
a handful of Felice's rocks from my nightstand and rolled them between
my palms. Agate, jasper, gypsum, chalcedony, quartz, others. Slowly, I
started moving to the music, still holding the rocks. The windows
worried me. I imagined how flabby and ridiculous I'd look if someone
peered in. I

101

paused, but then I shook my shoulders and danced down the hall to the
living room in a burst of defiance.

I did disco dance steps to the rest of Ella Fitzgerald. When Jonah Jones
dropped, I stood in the spill of sun-light, grinding my hips to the
trumpet. I started hiding rocks all over my body. I stuck quartz and
gypsum under my breasts, then added chalcedony to the left one. Plenty
of room, and they stayed up. I tucked a small, rough lump of pumice
under the fold of my belly. I put agate and jasper and feldspar in the
layers of my sides. I stopped swaying and went into a shimmy. The agate
fell out and bounced off my hip onto the floor. The rocks rubbed against
me, feeling cool, but I was working up a sweat. I imagined smuggling
jewels or drugs in my fat. It was almost exotic, not just a ruby in the
navel, but quartz under the breasts, gypsum in the side pockets, pumice
in the paunch place. I felt wicked and dreamy. I closed my eyes, still
rolling with the music. My mind rippled out to Ginny and Peg.

I kept dancing, thinking, Oh Ginny, oh Ginny, oh Peg, oh, dropping rocks
all around me to the music of the muted trumpet. Ginny kisses Peg. I
know she does. She must. They do. I know it. I've seen them rubbing
arms. That's for real. They lean forward in their chairs and they kiss.
It's reliable. They wheel their chairs away from the hallway into
Ginny's room, with Elvis loving me tender and a soft lamp shutting out
the harsh overheads. It's got to happen.

I couldn't believe it.

I rolled my hips in the other direction and lost the pumice. They really
kiss? How do they kiss? Who can lean forward enough? Perez must help.
She gives Peg a hand onto Ginny's bed, raises the rails, shuts the door.
Or they have a foam pad somebody spreads out on the floor so they can
roll around without getting hurt. Or

102

maybe they go swimming on disability day at the YMCA pool and touch
weightlessly, fighting chlorine and crowds instead of gravity. It's not
just kissing. Maybe they do it sitting up, reaching under each other's
clothes, tender. Or Peg rolls to Ginny's room at night, finds her way to
the bed, and leans her face on the edge of the mattress. Her breasts
press against the tight hospital corners of the sheet. Ginny braces
herself on her elbows and moves on Peg's soft fist, rubbing. They are
both silent because of the people sleeping all around them. Ginny and
her body travel far, but she doesn't come. She's afraid to, because it
might bring bladder spasms. Peg's face is intent as she lets her arm
fall back into her lap. Ginny makes a slow turn on the bed, until she
can kiss Peg's breasts through her shirt. Ginny unbuttons it with her teeth.

I barge in with plans for helping them, rescuing them. The trumpet was
playing in spurts, higher and higher. I would risk my job. I would let
Peg sleep with Ginny. Pretty crowded for two big women in a single bed,
especially since they need pillows under their legs and to be turned in
the night. Okay, I would push the beds together, since there was an
extra in Ginny's room. They could have a makeshift double. I'd work it
out so that Perez and I would have the night shift. Perez wouldn't tell,
and nobody else needed to know. Mabel might notice that there was no Peg
sleeping in their room, but Mabel wouldn't talk. Peg and Ginny would be
so grateful. I'd be a hero. Humanitarian aid to the handicapped. Maybe
someday they'd give me a plaque.

And what about getting fired? Well, I was quitting to go back to high
school anyway in September. I didn't like to think about that, but it
made losing this job not such a big deal. I'd hate to leave in disgrace,
though. I'd be in big trouble, what would my mother say? And what about
leaving, anyway; what would happen when I left? Maybe

103

1 Perez would do it then, but who could she be working with that she
could count on not to squeal? Perez needed this job. Getting caught
would be worse for her.

The record was over. I could smell the roast. Mom and Dad would be home
soon. I had to stop and get dressed, but I closed my eyes and rolled my
hips a minute longer, still dropping rocks and willing myself to risk my
summer job for the secret part of the dream: the part where I got to
slip in between Ginny and Peg in the railed bed and gather some of the
warmth.

104

Chapter

Eleven

MOM ANSWERED THE PHONE. I WAS IN THE kitchen making lunch, and my hands
were sticky with peanut butter and honey. She called up to me from the
basement where she was doing laundry, "Char-lotte. It's Felice."

Her voice gave me a shiver, as if I was about to do something dangerous.
I picked up the phone.

"Hi," said Felice. "This is going to be short."

I didn't know whether to be excited or disappointed, so I went for
reserved. "OK," I said, wiping honey from the receiver with my sleeve.

We talked for an hour. Felice had a lot of stories to hint at, and I had
a few myself. She screamed when I told her about Frank in Room 303 with
the baby picture of himself he loved to show off to the aides, the one
where his private part looked like a good length of garden hose.

105

I wanted to tell her about the food fight, and about Virgil, who had his
legs cut off and tattoos on both stumps, but Mom came up from the
basement to start peeling oranges for ambrosia, so I was reduced to
grunts, uh-huhs, and you knows.

Then Felice said, "When are you coming out here? It would be fun to see
you."

I said, "Next weekend."

She laughed. "Good."

"Really? You want me to come?"

"Yeah," said Felice. "Come."

Just like that, I was planning a trip. Felice had asked me to come. It
made me feel like anything was possible. As soon as I got off the phone,
I asked Mom if I could borrow the Pinto.

She was pouring shredded coconut from a bag into a white bowl. "To see
Felice? That's an awfully long drive. Isn't she coming back in a few weeks?"

I whined. "Yeah, but I've been working all summer. I need a break. And
I've never been to New Mexico."

She offered me a piece of orange. "Maybe your brother would go with you."

That was the last thing I needed. "Jeff already has plans for next weekend."

Mom hesitated, then said, "All right, Charlotte. You may borrow the car.
Just be sure to call me when you get there. I trust you to be careful."
I hugged her and opened the package of miniature marshmallows for her to
stir into the fruit.

After that, it was easy. I collected on a summer of favors to get Friday
to Monday off work. I skimmed through my short week. Mom packed me a
lunch for the drive. It was a bologna sandwich in a baggie with mustard
and only one slice of bread, along with some celery sticks and an apple.
I looked at it when she handed it to

106

me, and it jerked me right back into childhood. Felice used to split her
Ding Dongs with me, since I never had sweets. I gave Mom a hug and
carried the bag outside to finish cleaning the car.

I had already vacuumed it out, emptied the little wastebasket that
straddled the hump, and taken Armor-all to the vinyl, so now I put the
lunch bag down on the passenger seat, and went around to the front of
the car to check the oil. Then I slammed the hood and got in on the

i.

driver's side.

"Goodbye." Mom was leaning from the door. "Be careful." She stepped out
onto the sidewalk to see me off.

"Bye," I said. I waved my lunch bag at her. Then I pulled away from the
curb. I glanced in the rearview mirror as she turned to say something to
the dog.

I went decently slow through the neighborhood streets, but it wasn't far
to the highway. Felice and I got on it here when we were heading
downtown to cruise. I pulled onto the entrance ramp. It had a sharp
curve that Felice said always tempted her to quit steering and let the
car drift straight off the edge of the overpass. I thought of that every
time I took the curve, trying the over-the-brink idea out on myself, but
I didn't get it. Staying on the road felt good to me.

I loved to drive on the highway. It was so different from wading through
the traffic lights on Moody Boulevard on the way to work, the ones timed
to make you stop, then stop, then stop again. I liked fifty-five, felt
strange and powerful at sixty, and didn't mind going seventy-five to
pass. I loved the glove compartment and the map light and the stick
shift. The only thing I didn't like was the seat belt, so I let it slip
harmlessly down into the crack in the seat.

I was already past Castle Rock, making good time, feeling anonymous. It
felt great. Everything out the

107

window was moving. I watched the gray asphalt shoulder go wavery at the
edges in the heat. I looked into cars as I passed them. I saw pillows
jammed up against the window, tired kids making their troll dolls wave
from the back seat. I blew them a kiss, then looked back at the road.
Goodbye all that. I wished I could stick both feet out the window and
keep one on the gas at the same time.

The Pinto got a vibration going over forty-five, but I turned the radio
up and ignored it. I had the spectrum to choose from-pop to rock to
light classical to talk-but I went country western.

Satin sheets to lie on Satin pillows to cry on Still, I'm not happy
Don't you see...

I hung on to the image: satin pillows, satin sheets. God, what all was
possible in life? I even liked the market report, listening to the price
of sugar beets and soy beans and trying to guess what was growing in the
fields I was passing.

In Trinidad, I pulled into a Sinclair station to gas up. I picked up my
lunch bag and carried it with me into the rest room. I wasn't sure what
I had in mind. I unlocked the door with a key attached to a huge hunk of
plastic that had "LADIES" on it in raised gold letters. I balanced the
lunch bag on the edge of the chipped white sink. It immediately slipped
down under the dripping faucet. I succumbed to impulse and twisted both
handles to turn the water on full blast. The brown bag got darker and
started to disintegrate. The baggie with the celery floated. The baggie
with the sandwich filled with water and sank. It became awful to look
at, so I turned off the water and

108

let the sink drain. I scooped out the food with a brown paper towel and
dropped it into the trash can. I saved the apple, though, rinsing it
carefully before I scrubbed the sink with pink liquid soap from the
dispenser. I finished my business, returned the key, paid, and,
curiously light-headed, hit the road.

Driving felt like flying. I poured myself a Dixie cup full of ice water
from the thermos at my feet. The radio was crackling, but

My D-I-V-O-R-C-E becomes final today

blew on through the static. I went straight up Raton Pass. The Pinto's
engine was pulling and straining. As far as I was concerned, though, we
had left the ground. I was far from home. I was on my own. I had a shiny
red apple on the seat next to me. The radio kept at it:

I turned out to be

the only hell my mama ever raised

Once the Pinto and I made it over the pass, we left other cars in the
dust. They would appear in tight clumps of three or four together, and I
would work my way into the lead. I stopped waving at the children and
started noticing the women. Most were on the passenger side, so I saw
more of their hairdos than their faces. One woman in a town car with a
pink sweater and a bald driver-husband was in the act of turning to
speak with her backseat children, and our eyes met. Her face seemed to
startle then soften as we looked at each other, then she

109

said something into the side of her husband's neck, and he turned to
stare at me. I hit the gas.

Something had gotten into me. It must have been white-line fever. Even
the apple on the seat beside me looked heightened, redder than any apple
I had ever seen, special. I didn't feel like eating it, but I was
starting to get hungry.

The next little town, Maxwell, had a peeling-paint restaurant right off
the highway, so I pulled into the parking lot. I tried to remember if I
had ever eaten at a restaurant by myself before, and the answer was no,
not a sit-down dinner. I combed my hair in the rearview mirror and
decided that I'd leave the waitress an extra dollar if she called me
honey. I might even say that her dress was pretty or that she was
pretty. My heart stopped pounding as soon as I saw her, because she was
younger than me, maybe fifteen, and a blonde. She looked a lot like my
ninth-grade locker partner. She was beaming, leaning over a booth, and
talking to a woman in her six-ties. It turned out the older woman was
her grandmother, and the waitress was showing her off to the woman
behind the cash register, who had "Louise" embroidered over her pocket.
The grandmother got up to help clear the table, and she made a crack
about keeping the tip. The waitress turned to Louise. "Isn't she a
riot?" She meant it. The two of them were gloating over each other.
Louise was swatting flies and drinking tea.

The waitress came over to take my order after her grandmother left. She
called me Ma'am. I noticed the Waist Watcher's beef patty and cottage
cheese special, but I didn't feel my usual urge to scrunch up my
shoulders when I asked for barbecued chicken and a baked potato with
sour cream and butter. I just said it, and she wrote it down and brought
it to me with a tossed salad. I thought of how much Peg would enjoy this
meal. The

110

waitress and Louise settled themselves on stools on opposite sides of
the counter.

I ate my dinner. It was good. It wasn't until I stood up to walk to the
restroom that I began to get an inkling of what was happening. It was a
little like walking out into a dark night from a bright room; at first I
was disoriented, but by the time I reached for the faucet in the
restroom, I had a grasp on it. I washed my face in the sink and looked
in the mirror. I wasn't dieting. I nodded. I wasn't. The walls were pink
plaster. There was graffiti knifed into the wooden stalls, all names and
hearts. Louise was mentioned. I thought maybe I was having a revelation,
which didn't seem like something I could saunter out and mention to the
waitress when she brought me the bill. I couldn't drop a revelation as
small talk to Louise when I tossed a penny mint on the counter to add to
my bill. Or maybe I could, maybe I should tell people with just that
casualness, but I thought I'd better start with someone I knew. So I
left Louise and the waitress talking about the cook, who was practically
a shut-in, and got back on the road.

It still felt good to be in the car. I felt safe and completely alone.
The highway narrowed to two lanes, and I got a warm glow thinking about
how I didn't have a station wagon full of family with me: Jeff wasn't
rapping me on the head with his knuckles; Mom wasn't glancing over her
shoulder to be sure I had my seatbelt fastened; I was in the driver's
seat. My eyes were tired, but there weren't many cars coming at me. The
big trucks crossed the solid yellow line to pass. I turned off the air
conditioning and rolled down the windows. I didn't have to think about
myself or any new truths. I could keep my eyes on the road and let the
night air brush across the flat land and on over me.

111

Chapter

Twelve

I KEPT DRIVING, FINALLY TIRED. I THOUGHT of pulling into a rest stop for
a nap, but I didn't want to wake up with my face drooling on the vinyl.
I wanted to get there. I was at the town limits before I realized that I
hadn't spent any time on the trip dreaming of Felice. It gave me a
guilty start, and I was suddenly wide awake, craning to read street
signs and trying to figure out my directions in the faint map light.

I was coming in at the end of the long summer dusk. A gray light was
bringing out the shadows of the houses as I passed. I stopped in front
of a small two-story house with a cactus planter next to the front steps
and spiky yucca lining the walk. I got out of the car, pushed my hair
out of my eyes, and stood there blinking. Kids in the next yard were
playing a wild game of swinging statue, the bigger ones throwing the
smaller ones across the thin

113

lawn. I carried my backpack up the steps and knocked on the frame of the
latched screen door. Nobody came, so I called, "Hello?" No answer. I
raised my voice. "Hello, is anybody home?" I could see a full ashtray
next to the brown couch, but still nobody came. I laid my head back and
screamed, "Felice!"

The neighbor kids stopped throwing each other around and looked at me in
dead silence. Through the silence I heard a rustling, then Felice came
running around from the back of the house. She jumped over an abandoned
big wheel scooter and threw her arms around me. Lord, she felt good. She
pulled back and pointed out her tan and the muscles in her legs. I
laughed at how proud she was of them there in the half dark. We hugged
again before we walked up the front steps into the house.

We looked at each other under the hall light. She had on a yellow tank
top and her hair had lightened in the sun. For a minute, I missed
scabby-kneed Felice, who had the seven-year-old courage to be friends
with me when I was a teacher's pet who had trouble getting my clothes on
right-side-out.

She took my backpack and tossed it onto the couch. It jostled the
ashtray, causing a small cloud of silver ash to rise. "Let's go
dancing," she said.

I didn't say I was exhausted. I said, "Is there some-place we can get in?"

"We can try." Felice took me out to the patio and introduced me to her
cousin Mickey, who was sitting in a lawn chair drinking a Schlitz and
watching her son kick a blow-up wading pool across the yard.

Mickey gave me a big smile and said, "That's Kenny doing soccer
practice. He's nine. You'll meet my husband Rick later, when he gets off
work. Did Felice show you where to find sheets and towels?" I noticed
that I could see her ribs through her bodysuit.

114

Felice picked up her own can of Schlitz from the painted metal table.
"Mickey, she just got here. We're going out."

Kenny lofted the wading pool high in the air, obviously aiming for
Felice's head, but she stuck out her arm and punched it away. "Cut it
out," she said mildly.

I looked up at the moon, still arriving. The stars were easing into
brightness. I found the Big Dipper and tried to get my bearings. Wet
plastic slapped me in the face. Kenny had scored with the wading pool.

Mickey threw her cigarette pack at the kid, but it fell short. Kenny was
giggling and racing around the clothes-line. "Excuse me," said Mickey,
"but I guess somebody needs to be rescued from hysteria. You girls have
fun."

Felice changed into a pair of jeans and a white shirt. I put on jeans,
too, and a big pink blouse, which I left unbuttoned two buttons lower
than Mom would have found decent. I knew I might be too tired to have
fun, but I was already in a daze as if I'd had three or four beers, so
it might work out. If we made it into the bar, of course. Felice had
extracted Mickey's expired learner's permit from her. It didn't have a
picture, but it said I was twenty-seven and weighed 120 pounds. Felice
thought it might slide by. The other problem was that she was using
Mickey's current driver's license, so we had to go in separately and
just hope that they didn't notice we both had the same name and address.

I was amazed when it worked. Felice went in first, grinned at the
doorman, and didn't get carded. I sat in the car in the parking lot for
about ten minutes before braving the door myself. I already had my hand
on my I D, and I sort of thrust it at the guy when he looked at me. He
pulled out his flashlight to read it. "Bring something better next
time," he said, handing it back.

115

We were in. The lights were dim, the carpet was red, and the only table
in the place was taken by three loud cowboys and a woman in a black
velvet vest. Everyone else was either at the bar or leaning against a
rail watching the dancers. The music sounded electronic and strange to
me. I'd lost touch with the hot dance songs while Felice had been gone.
I looked around for her, finally spotting her on the dance floor. Her
white shirt reflected red, then blue, then violet as the lighting
changed, and she was doing a fast version of the dance steps we had
worked on in her living room all last spring. The guy she was dancing
with had blond hair, black jeans, and a sense of rhythm that left me in
the dust. They were smooth; they'd done this before. I hoped she would
quit after just one song. I bought myself a beer and circled the dance
floor a couple of times, looking for a place to lean, feeling huge. I
finally wedged myself into a spot on the rail next to one of the
enormous speakers, with good views of both Felice and the door. The song
was laced with police whistles, and every time one sounded, I kept
thinking the place was getting busted and the underaged drinkers would
be hauled off to jail. So I kept one eye on the door as I stood there
soaking up cigarette smoke, watching the men operate, and watching
Felice do the part where they held hands and turned back to back. She
spun out, and he caught her with his arm around her waist. They got all
excited that they'd done it right and smiled at each other.

When the song was done, Felice looked around for me. She waved, said
goodbye to her partner, and came over. She said she'd seen him here
before, and leaned up close to take of sip of my drink. "Mmm, that
tastes good," she said, and she was off to buy herself one. I gave her
money to get me another beer, too. The speaker was too loud for much
thinking, but I did manage to wish that

116

we'd gone someplace quieter where we could talk. Felice was one for
action, though. I leaned and waited. She came back red-faced and excited
after four or five songs. She was trying to tell me what some guy had
said to her on the way to the bar, how she'd had to duck into the
women's room to get rid of him, but I couldn't hear what she was saying.
We settled into leaning and staring at the dancers until Donna Summer
came on. "Bad Girls." That was a song I could get behind. Felice jumped
up and put her arm on my shoulder. She wanted me to dance with her. I
was trying to decide if I could be that exposed in this crowd, when Mr.
Black Jeans came up behind her and took hold of her elbow. She nodded at
him, smiled at me, and was back out on the floor, looking elegant and wild.

I went to the bar to buy myself a screwdriver. I drank it fast, got my
hand stamped by the door man, and went out to the parking lot to throw
up. I rinsed my mouth with water from my car thermos. The building
thumped with amplified bass. I leaned on the Pinto and cried. This had
happened before on nights out with Felice. Discos made me sad.

Felice and I never did dance together, but we did talk a little on the
ride home. She told me about her job-how she stood in the back of the
restaurant scraping bean pots and lard buckets. "It's so hot back
there," she said. "I almost never wear makeup anymore because it would
sweat right off." The job had its good points, though: she got to drink
all the pop she wanted, this guy Tony told jokes and gave her joints,
and sometimes he reached around her from behind while she was doing
dishes. One night he sprayed her with the black hose they used to rinse
the vegetables, and they had a big water fight.

"Don't look so worried, Char," she said, rolling down the car window.
"It's just a work thing." By the time we got home, we were so tired that
I put on my sleeping t-shirt

117

and dropped into Felice's double bed without feeling much tension, and
she crawled in beside me without taking off her make-up or taking a
shower. We slept.

I WOKE BEFORE Felice, feeling unreasonably happy. My head was aching,
but it was morning and I was hungry. That made me smile. I hadn't told
Felice about my new state of grace. State of grace. I laughed into the
pillow. I knew it wasn't safe to talk to Felice about not dieting,
because I'd seen the pudgy picture of herself up on the refrigerator and
the cottage cheese and grapefruit on the shelves. Still, I was feeling
good, so I hugged the pillow and imagined getting up and cooking
breakfast for Felice. I'd do it quietly, right there in her cousin's
strange kitchen.

I'd find a pan to bake some biscuits. I'd use a dusted glass to roll
them out if Mickey didn't have a jelly jar, then I'd cut the dough into
thin, perfect circles. I'd lift them, white and powdery, onto the pan,
bake them in a hot oven until I could pull them out light and fragrant,
and pile them in a basket with a blue checkered cloth. I'd slit a few
and touch them with butter that would be melted when Felice stumbled in,
drawn out of bed by the warm smell. I'd have honey and apple jelly
already by her plate, each with a spoon waiting to dip in and daub on
her choice of sweetness. I'd pour her a tall, cold glass of orange juice
as she sat down, and slip eggs scrambled with milk and cheese and sage,
and sprinkled with bits of green pepper, onto her plate. There would be
peaches in a white bowl in the middle of the table. Even before she was
fully awake, her mouth would be caught with biscuit and honey, and
light, hot eggs, opening to flavors she would have been afraid to ask
for, things so good that she would look at me and be amazed that I had
made them.

118

And in that simple moment of her pleasure, I, my mother's daughter,
would set my own plate at the table. I would heap it full of eggs, and
three biscuits, two with honey, one with jelly. I would take smooth
gulps of milk. I would split a peach with her, pulling it, wet and
sweet, off the pit. I would look at Felice with juice dripping from my
lips, and I would say, "It's good." She would nod with her mouth full,
her own lips sticky with honey and biscuit crumbs. She would swallow and
take a sip from her glass before she reached across the table to cover
my hand with hers. "Very good."

I giggled so hard that I slobbered on the pillowcase. "Young Betty
Crocker." Felice rolled over onto her side, her flat, abrupt back to me.
I felt her irritation at my noises, but I couldn't help laughing again.
I was delighted with myself at that moment, big, sloppy body, bar
breath, and all. The sun was hitting my thighs. They were out from under
the rumpled sheet, and I looked at them, wide and white and loose in the
sunlight. I patted them as if they were large, friendly dogs.

I'd had enough hallucinations for one morning, so I got out of bed.
Felice put the pillow over her head and curled up in a tight ball,
distinctly like someone who didn't want to be told good morning. I
pulled on my jeans and wandered out to the kitchen, where Mickey and
Kenny were reading the backs of cereal boxes. Mickey offered me some
unfrosted strawberry Pop Tarts. I laughed and popped them into the
toaster to warm.

Felice came out, eventually, wet from the shower and not hungry. I
hadn't seen her eat a meal since I'd arrived. She wrestled the paper
away from Kenny and checked the movie listings. Nothing exciting was
happening in town that day, so we decided to go camping. We borrowed a
red tent, a sleeping bag, a pot, and a bunch of blankets from Mickey.
She helped us dump everything into the back of

119

the Pinto. Felice showed me the way to the supermarket, where we bought
peanut butter, bread, Doritos, hot chocolate mix, and matches, along
with the traditional grocery store six-pack of beer. I added apples and
a block of cheese.

"Listen to this," said Felice as we stood in the express line.
"`New-born baby threatens Mom with gun. Doctor hands over wallet.'" She
was reading aloud from a tabloid with a picture of Cher on the cover.

"`I was driven to crime by labor pains,' confesses tot," I improvised
over her shoulder.

There was no trouble at the cash register over the six-pack. Felice had
a bottle of peppermint schnapps that she had lifted from Mickey's liquor
cabinet, and I had some pot, so we were all set.

I let Felice drive as we headed south. She didn't want to have to do any
map reading, and I never liked driving as much when Felice was with me.
She was always bouncing all over the radio dial, opening beers, and
taking off sweaters. It distracted me.

We drove for hours, singing all of our old cruising songs. "Delta Dawn"
had never sounded so melancholy and harmonious. I trailed my hand out
the window, making small motions to follow the outlines of the telephone
poles and the mountains in the distance. Sometimes my hand ran flat
across the desert for a while. We tried singing, "What's the Buzz," but
that was all we knew of the words, so we dragged out "Last Dance," "I
Love the Night Life," and "Weekend Lover" before we settled into
drinking our beers and reliving the night I had drunk myself sick at the
drive-in on bottled tequila sunrises. Felice and Tim had had to carry me
into the house and dump me in bed, then they had gone out to Sambo's.
That was when Tim had made his move on Felice. That story made me too
queasy to be good car

120

talk, so I brought up the time Felice had dropped her quartz key chain
out of the car window on Moody Boulevard. We had pulled over and made
dashes between the cars to look for it. Felice had found it just as the
cops pulled up, but we didn't get arrested. We just explained.

We finally broke open the Doritos, and Felice pointed across the flat,
sagebrush plain to a breast-shaped peak all alone against the horizon.
"That's got to be a volcano," she said. "I think these fields are
pumice. That's why not much grows here. Not enough soil has built up.
The rock is too new. Look at the map."

It took me a while to figure out where we were, but she was right. Mount
Estrella, extinct volcano. There was a state campground at the top.
About halfway up Mt. Estrella we drove through a camping area packed
with RVs and families. We continued past it on an unmarked, rutted dirt
road that Felice insisted would take us to the top. It was slow going,
even before it began to rain. She turned on the windshield wipers. I
started to panic.

"Felice, this road isn't going anywhere." I fastened my seatbelt.

Felice cracked her window to let a little air into the car. Rain blew
in. "Where do you think I could turn around?" The trees were tight on
one side of us, and a river had cut a deep gulley on the other. She was
right. The only thing we could do was get to where ever the road was going.

It ended at another campsite, empty except for us. Felice parked the
Pinto next to a picnic table, and we sat in the car for a minute looking
out through the wind-shield at the trees leaning in the rain. They were
tall, skinny firs, and they bent and shook and creaked against each
other. We ate some more Doritos. I tried to launch into "Bridge Over
Troubled Waters," but it wasn't really in

121

our repertoire. Felice turned around and started rummaging in the back seat.

"We better set up the tent," she said.

I looked at the rain bouncing off the red-stained wood of the picnic
table. "Couldn't we wait until it stops?"

She had the bag with the tent in her lap. "It might be dark by then."

We put on our jackets and got out of the car. The rain was alternating
between driving sheets and a fine mist. We got to work. Felice had put
this tent up before, so it didn't take us long to get it raised and
staked down. Then I ran with the sleeping bag and blankets from the car
to the tent, kneeling in the tent door to spread them out, blocking the
rain with my back. When I went back for the food and the backpacks,
Felice had pulled my snowdrift shovel out from under the seat.

"We have to dig a trench around the tent so the rain has someplace to
drain," she said, her face dripping.

That didn't sound like anything I would have expected Felice to know.
"Where did you hear that?"

She pushed the blade into the ground with her tennis shoe. "White
Sands," she said, and I realized it had to have come from Tony.

There was only one shovel, so I went and sat in the car. I didn't want
to get the inside of the tent all wet, but I felt cramped and close in
the Pinto. Felice worked steadily, and I could see the muscles in her
back tightening as she lifted each shovelful of dirt. She looked
strangely fragile to me as she dug. After a while I went out and took
the shovel. She went to the car and came back without her wet jacket, in
just her t-shirt and shorts. The ground was heavy, and it stuck to the
shovel. I only hit one rock. It was big and flat. Felice got into the
trench and pushed from below, while I pried from above.

122

After we lifted it out, the rock left a hole much deeper than the rest
of the trench. Felice smoothed the edges of the hole with her hands,
filling it in so the water wouldn't stop there. I finished the trench.
When I looked through the mist at the Pinto, it looked odd, almost like
an artifact from another time. I remembered that Mom used to tell me a
storm was a giant rolling a wheelbarrow full of potatoes across the sky.
The lightning was sparks from its wheels, and thunder was potatoes
falling from the cart.

I slogged over to where Felice was working. She looked at me. "You're
filthy."

I huddled down knee to knee with her and drew her initials in the mud on
her thigh. "You're worse."

She scooped up a handful of dirt and slung it at me. It hit my stomach
where it hung over the snap of my jeans. I took a step back and tripped
over the shovel. I almost fell, but grabbed a tree and hung on,
splattering Felice with more mud in the process. She reached to give me
a hand, and we both lost our footing, so we were sitting there laughing
and spitting dirt and water when the late afternoon sun came out.

Things warmed and dried out fast in the sharp sun. Felice wanted to
follow a footpath to the very top of the volcano, but I needed to wash.
So she headed up, and I walked down to a wide place in the river. The
water was very cold, full of new rain and snowmelt runoff. I gasped when
I stuck my foot in, but it quickly went numb, so I took off my jeans and
my shirt and waded into the river in my underpants, in case anyone came.
I shivered and bent to splash the sides of my calves and scrub the dirt
off of my hands and arms. The bite of the cold softened enough that I
lay down in the current, holding onto a rock, with my legs floating out
from under me, and my hair spread out on the current. I floated there,
with the cold water playing over me, looking up over the tops of

123

Width1 Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495the trees at the
sudden blue sky and the frankly sinkingThe fire was burning low, and I
was getting cold. TheWidth1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495sun. The implications of
nightfall set in, and I pulled mystars were cracking the sky. We threw
dirt on the fire andWidth1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495feet back in under me and
stood up to walk to the bank,crawled into the tent.Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495all clumsy with cold. Felice
was sitting next to myWe wrapped ourselves in blankets and huddledWidth1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495clothes, watching me, one
hand trailing in the water andtogether under the sleeping bag. I turned
on the flash-Width1 Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495a hunk of obsidian balancing
on her knee.light and filled the pipe again. The air smelled
slightlyWidth1 Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495"Volcanic glass," she said
as she handed me my t-musty, as if the tent had been damp the last time
it hadWidth1 Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495shirt. She leaned to rinse
her face in the river while Ibeen folded up. The dirt was soft under the
ground cloth.Width1 Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495dried
and dressed.The moon was shining through the skin of the tent, andWidth1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495it lit the bones and shadows
of Felice's face with a filteredWidth1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495We gathered wood to make a
fire. It caught just as weWidth1
Width3Width6240Width3Width187Width3Width6495Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682lost the sun. We tried toasting cheese
sandwiches onred light.

She was pulling on some long underwear under theWidth1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682sticks, but they dropped their cheese and
burnt. We usedblanket, but she kept her jacket on, too. "It's
freezing,"Width1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Mickey's pot to heat up water for hot
chocolate mixedshe said, and took a long hit from the pipe. I noticed
howWidth1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682with peppermint schnapps. I told
Felice about the giantred her hands were as she held it. I could hear
the river,Width1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682who makes the storms, and she told me that
lava canand a stubborn crackling from the smothered fire.Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682flow
up from a fissure in a cornfield with an explosion"Now, wait," I said,
sitting on my own hands to warmWidth1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682that
can be heard several hundred miles away. Some-them, "there are three
kinds of rocks, right? Igneous, andWidth1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682times
volcanic ash shoots up to a height of thirty miles,what else?"Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682and
the ash in the air reddens the sunset all around the"Sedimentary and
metamorphic." Felice flopped downWidth1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682world.on her stomach and rested her chin
on her hunk ofWidth1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682She said volcanoes erupt at places of
weakness in theobsidian. "All kinds of rocks. Chalk, flint, chert,
marl,Width1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682earth's crust. I put some pot in the pipe
and lit it whileoolites, peat, coal, limestone." She took a drag on
theWidth1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682she tried to explain how the highs and
lows of the earth'spipe after every rock, so limestone came out with a
cloudWidth1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682surface are in equilibrium, even though
mountains areof smoke and coughs.Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682constantly eroding and dumping soil into
the low places.I took the pipe out of her hand and relit it. It
tastedWidth1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682We kept passing the pipe. I didn't quite
follow, but I likedharsh, almost gone. "Would you know all of those
rocks ifWidth1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682to think of everything shifting, mountains
crumblingyou saw them?"Width1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682down into valleys, which cracked open to
spill out newFelice sipped her cold hot chocolate. "Sure, I'd knowWidth1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682rock
to become another mountain. A volcano changesthem. If I didn't know them
by looking, I'd smell them,Width1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682everything. It makes a new landscape,
complete with lavataste them, check their color and luster. Try to
breakWidth1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682rivers that crust over hard and black and
shiny as glass.them-that's called cleavage. Scratch them with a
penny.Width1 Width3Width6240Width3Width6682Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682I took another sip of chocolate, but it
made my stomachThen I could figure it out."Width1
Width3Width6240Width3Width6682remember the night before, so I decided to
stick to pot. When Vesuvius went off, Pompeii was buried in ash within
thirty hours.

124125

I put the pipe down in the lid from the peanut butter jar. Felice picked
it up, dumped the ash, and started filling it again, all without sitting up.

I watched her fingers work and started imagining them held curled and
tight together, like Peg's. It was like identifying rocks, I thought. I
could tell Felice from Peg by her hands. I got dreamy thinking about the
qualities that identified my friends. Smell was easy-Felice smelled of
opium oil, Peg smelled of new sweat when I was close, lifting her. Ginny
smelled of Chantilly perfume. Maybe Peg tasted salty. Ginny tasted like
lipstick, cakey, Felice tasted like peppermint and chocolate tonight.
Color, color. Peg was red and flushed. Ginny was caramel. Felice was
light toast brown, china white underneath. I said their qualities of
luster out loud: "Peg shines, Ginny shines, Felice shines."

"What?" Felice had the pipe going again. She had scooted right up next
to me to offer it.

"What kind of rock do you think I am?" I took the pipe, put a hand on
her back, and rubbed her jacket up and down.

She put her head down and closed her eyes. "I don't know."

I went on to trying to figure out cleavage, which seemed abstract. How
would they break? I decided Peg broke in chunks, each piece big enough
to be a rock in itself. There was more to cleavage, though: Peg had
small, down-looking breasts. Ginny broke into crystals. Her breasts were
large and loose. Felice held out against breaking: maybe she was like
lava and had to harden to crack. I looked at the one breast I could see
from where I was sitting. It was squashed into the floor of the tent,
since she was lying on it, but I knew it was small, and generally
pointed up.

126

"Earth calling Char," said Felice. I got embarrassed, and Felice started
talking about living with Mickey, Rick and Kenny-how Rick always had to
work double shifts at the store, and how Mickey listened through the
wall with a glass dipped in water whenever Rick went into the bedroom
and shut the door to talk on the phone. While Felice was talking, we
edged closer and closer together. I leaned my head down to hers to keep
the pipe lit. Felice started rolling the obsidian up and down on her
legs under her palm, then it slipped off between us, where our thighs
were touching. She reached for it, and then we were kissing. She did
taste like chocolate and pepper-mint. Her hands were tangled up in my
hair, and the zipper of her jacket was digging into my skin where my
sweater had ridden up. I reached out to pull the sleeping bag tight
around us. Felice pushed her hands up under my shirt. They were warm. I
wasn't cold at all anymore. I heard the rain start up again, hitting the
tent, and smelled wet dirt. Felice took her jacket and sweater off. I
wrapped my arms around her and just held on.

When she unfastened my jeans and inched the tight zipper down, I lifted
my hips to help her. She pulled off my jeans and my underpants, stroking
me as she went. I held my breath when her hand touched my belly ledge,
as if it could stop everything, but she just moved on down my legs,
careful not to leave my clothes hanging around my ankles. Then she
followed her hands back up the soft insides of my thighs. I felt one
finger circling with her dancer's rhythm, tracing the length of the
folded place; then the finger lifted, went lightly to the top, and
traced my edges again. The finger slid a little, wet now. I could feel
her concentration through everything else I was feeling. She put both
hands on the outer folds and held them apart. I heard her pull in a deep
quick breath, as before a wonder, and say, "Chalcedony."

127

I didn't hear what else she whispered as she lowered her face to me, but
she shaped my heart forever by releasing that one word. I knew it then.

128

Chapter

Thirteen

I WAS COLD WHEN I WOKE UP. AIR WAS SLIPPING in under the edges of the
sleeping bag. The rain flap was up, and I could see the white-gray sky
through the door screen. Felice was gone.

I lay curled up tight against the morning until I had to get up to pee.
By then, the sky was blue. As soon as I crawled out of the tent, I saw a
rock on the picnic table, holding down a slip of white paper. It was a
largish, brownish rock, with some odd knobs and a shiny place. The note
had nothing to do with the rock, though. It said:

Char

Gone running. Took the left fork. Meet me at the bottom.

Love,

Felice

129

I folded up the paper and put it in the pocket of my jeans. I went and
squatted under a Douglas fir, then came back and sat down on the picnic
table bench. I thought about starting a fire to heat water for hot
chocolate, but remembered that it would be dangerous to leave anything
burning. I went to the tent and found the pea-nut butter jar with its
ashy lid, scooped out a fingerful of peanut butter, and sucked it down
to the nut bits, which I swallowed as a group. I kicked dirt over the
black wood of last night's fire, just to be safe, and got in the car to
go after Felice. I put the knobby rock on the floor of the backseat as a
keepsake.

I looked wild in the rearview mirror. My hair was snarled with leaves
and sticks, I had a smear of ash across my forehead, my glasses were
dirty, and I thought maybe my lips had changed shape. I bared my teeth
at myself, then turned on the engine, not displeased with the effect.
All those years of braces had paid off.

I hadn't even noticed the left fork of the road. It split off just below
the entrance to our campsite, and looked steeper and even more rocky
than the one we had driven up. I hoped it didn't get any worse. The
Pinto shook and thumped over gullies and ridges that testified to last
night's storm, as well as years of runoff from the spring snowmelt.

I was mad that Felice had left me to go running. She should have stayed
with me, so we could drowse into the morning side of last night. As it
was, I would have to see her from far away, doing something I couldn't
understand-running down a mountain. The distance made me feel bereft,
but I figured the feeling was temporary.

I was jolted with every rut. I looked out the window. The trees were
impassive. They belonged together. Felice had told me that their pine
cones didn't open until there was a forest fire, and new seed was
needed. The heat

130

triggered it. Otherwise, the trees stood calmly undertaking their
chemistry, making sugar from water and air, bending green needles in the
breeze, allowing birds and squirrels to take vulgar animal liberties.

The wheels of the Pinto hesitated over a deep hole, but we made it
without getting stuck. The ground began to level, and the trees were
thinning. As I rounded a curve, the desert opened out flat in front of me.

I could see Felice. She looked like a pop-up greeting card against the
flat blue sky. The land had quickly for-gotten trees. It was all sage
and outcroppings of black pumice. Felice was the only thing moving in
the morning heat.

The Pinto stopped rattling and bucking. The surface of the road had
changed, and I was driving on a wide, smooth black ribbon that stretched
out in front of me as far as the eye could see. It shimmered in the sun.
It looked new, which seemed odd, since there was no other sign of
people, not even telephone poles.

I was getting closer to Felice. She was running slow, stretching her
legs. She looked like she could go on for-ever like the road. I almost
wished she would, so I could keep driving behind her at just this
distance, watching her in the sharpening sun. I kept getting closer,
though. She had pulled her hair back into a ponytail that barely shook
as she ran, her stride was so smooth.

I saw her stumble. At first, I thought she was bendingdown to pick up a
rock on the road, but I felt a tremor. Thesilver thermos on the floor of
the front seat bounced upand hit me on the knee. Cracks opened in the
asphaltbefore me, as if something were pushing up from insidethe ground.
I looked back at the mountain in the rearviewmirror. There was no smoke,
nothing but calm and trees.Felice had gotten up and was running toward
me.She was moving fast now, her face red with effort and

131

fear. I noticed again how beautiful she was, before I gathered myself
enough to hit the gas. When I reached her, I slammed on the brakes and
opened the door. She scram-bled in, gasping for breath. I spun the car
around and started back onto the narrow dirt road that a moment ago had
been wobbling like a board bridge in the wind.

Felice picked up the thermos, tilted her head back, and drank. The
ground had stopped trembling, but her hands were shaking. So were mine.
I split my attention between watching her throat move and getting us
back up the mountain. They seemed of equal importance.

"Fasten your seatbelt," I said. Felice buckled up. I looked in the
rearview mirror again, this time back at the road. It was still black
and shining, with new cracks that left jagged gaps along its smooth
endless line.

We made it back over the rutted road to the camp, saying very little,
despite having just witnessed an unidentified earthshaking event. We
decided it might have been a volcano, or it might have been an
earthquake, but Felice held that either one was highly unlikely, given
the thousands of years of geological quiet in the region.

"There would be some kind of warning," she insisted, fussing with the
radio, which only crackled.

"Maybe this is the warning," I said, pulling up next to the picnic table
and tent. We stuffed the sleeping bag and the blankets in the Pinto, and
took down the tent in a hurry, to be on the safe side. I gathered up all
of the trash and beer cans and Mickey's aluminum pan, which was
blackened from the fire. Felice started to fill in the trench, so we
could leave the place as we had found it, but I didn't think we had time
for that. I took the shovel from her hand and slipped my arms around her
inside her jacket. She leaned into me and stroked my hair. I turned my
face to kiss her, but we were stiff-lipped and

132

nervous, so we just held each other for a minute, then got into the
Pinto and took the other fork down. I drove.

Felice didn't protest when I took the Pinto as fast as it would go
around the steep curves. I slowed down when we got to the lower
campsite. It was completely deserted, with no sign of all the kids and
RVs that had been there the afternoon before.

"I guess everybody got off to an early start," I said. I looked at the
dashboard clock. It was still before noon.

"Maybe they felt the tremor and got out of here faster than us," said
Felice.

Finally, we came to a sign that said, "Leaving Mt. Estrella State Park.
Come Again." It had said, "Entering Mt. Estrella State Park. Welcome" on
the other side. There was a chain pulled across the road that hadn't
been there when we'd come in. A rusty metal sign hung from it that said,
"Closed for the Season," which seemed odd in August. Felice got out of
the car and unhooked the chain from the post of the Come Again/Welcome
sign so I could drive through, then refastened it and got back into the
Pinto, saying, "This is creepy."

She started messing with the radio again. She found a light rock, a hard
rock, and a talk station where the topic was mean family fights over
wills, but there was no mention of any kind of geological occurrence,
not even when the light rock station took a newsbreak to talk about the
indictment against the governor's press secretary. We drove for what
seemed like forever before we passed a couple of low-slung houses with
laundry on the line and a car in the drive. We saw a farmer on a tractor
circling a field, and he gave us a wave. We waved back and started
giggling out of pure silly relief to see another person, even if he was
mounted on a big machine several low barbed wire fences away from us.

133

A few miles farther on, we ran into a roadblock. The army men were all
set up with signs and barricades and jeeps and sunglasses and a couple
of big trucks parked off to the side of the road. We spotted them from a
long way off, and I told Felice to hide the pot. She said she had no
idea where it was, so I had to settle for lost instead of hidden. I also
wanted her to be sure that the top of the trash bag was folded over so
that they couldn't look inside and see the empty beer cans and
peppermint schnapps bottle, but Felice refused to do a lot of turning
around in the seat and rummaging. We approached the roadblock with
something less than the warm, peace-time smile that the guy gave me as
he motioned me to pull over.

He leaned on the door of the car as I rolled down the window. "Hi," he
said, motioning his chin toward the mound of stuff in the back seat.
"Been camping?"

"Yes, sir," I answered, hoping Felice wouldn't snicker.

The soldier nodded his big red chin and his sun-glasses at me, and
asked, "Where?"

"Mt. Estrella," said Felice, warming up a smile of her own. "Why, what's
happening?"

The soldier didn't warm, and he didn't cool. He just beckoned his buddy
over and asked, "Were you aware that the campground was closed?"

I was surprised that he was aware of it. "It was open when we got there
yesterday afternoon, sir, but we saw the sign when we left this morning."

The buddy bent down behind the first guy and listened. Red Chin leaned
closer to my face. "And you weren't informed that the campground was
closing?" The buddy had pulled out a clipboard and was checking a list.

"No girls in a Pinto listed," he said.

"We were camping by ourselves," said Felice. "Up near the top. Nobody
told us anything."

134

Red Chin asked for my license and Felice's ID, while the buddy walked
around the Pinto and made a note of the plate number. We sat and waited
while Red Chin went over to confer with a group of men sitting in the
shade of one of the big trucks, and waited some more while he got into
the cab of the truck and talked on a two-way radio. That was when I
noticed that most of the jeeps and trucks were parked in a side road,
next to an "Off Limits" sign that had a permanent look to it. I looked
past the line of guys and barricades and vehicles, my eyes following the
road a long distance, and I noticed how very black and shiny and
new-looking it was. I nudged Felice. She got annoyed and said, "What?"
just as Red Chin returned.

He reactivated his peace-time smile and handed us back our licenses.
"Well, that's all fine. I hope you girls didn't have any trouble last
night. Did the cold keep you

up?"

I turned the key and started the engine. "We slept just fine."

He kept his hand on the door. "Strange weather we're having. There was a
lot of thunder this morning. Hear it?"

I hoped he wouldn't notice that Felice had slipped her hand onto my seat
so that it rested against the side of my leg as she answered, "We slept
in late. We didn't hear a thing."

He nodded and stepped back, saying, "You girls go on home now. Drive
careful."

We waved goodbye, and I left my window down as we drove off. "See that
road out there?" I asked Felice. "Isn't that just like the one where you
were running?"

She squinted her eyes, then moved her hand full onto my thigh as she
nodded yes. We'd already decided that the tremor must have been some
sort of army thing when the helicopters buzzed by.

135

THE DAY WAS almost gone by the time we got back to Mickey's house.
Mickey was watching a baseball game on Tv. Kenny was building a
structure of toothpicks and Elmer's glue on a record cover at her feet.
Toothpicks were scattered everywhere.

I dropped an armful of blankets onto a chair. "What are you making,
Kenny?" I figured he owed me some small talk to make up for kicking a
wading pool at my head.

He joined two intricate wooden webs with a precise white spot of glue.
He didn't look up. "A sports super-dome."

"Don't mind him," said Mickey. "He's been playing soccer all day, and
he's exhausted."

Felice brought in an armload of stuff to go back to the kitchen.
"Mickey," she said, "we were bombed."

I was surprised that we were going to tell Mickey about it, but as long
as we were, I wanted to get the facts straight.

"The ground shook. The army had a roadblock. Maybe it was a bomb."

Mickey glanced back at the Tv screen as somebody got a hit. "Oh, where
did you go? Mt. Estrella?"

She knew all about it. The army did tests out there that were supposed
to be secret, but Mickey had talked to a guy she'd met in line at the
bank. He was stationed at Fort Estrella and had money to burn. According
to him, they were setting off bombs underground.

I saw the muscles in Felice's face tighten when Mickey said that. I
think it was the idea of hidden minerals being blasted to powder that
upset her the most. She dumped the blankets off the chair onto the floor
and stomped into the kitchen. She rattled some dishes in

136

there, stomped out again, and started picking up the blankets and
folding them into perfect squares.

Mickey patted the cushion of the couch, inviting me to sit down beside
her. I noticed that her red nail polish looked a little chewed. We
decided later that Mickey was lonely, because once she started talking,
it was as if she couldn't stop.

I sat there trying to return to reality, watching Felice subdue the
blankets, while Mickey turned down the sound on the game and told us how
Felice's mother-Mickey called her Ida-used to take them ice skating when
Felice was four and Mickey was almost fourteen. "Most of the mothers who
came to the rink didn't skate. They sat in the warming house drinking
awful coffee from styrofoam cups. But Ida got herself out on the ice,"
she said.

Kenny's breathing rose behind Mickey's voice. He had fallen asleep on
the floor. Mickey bent to cover him with the afghan from the back of the
couch. A faint whiff of potato chips floated up from his open mouth.

"It was something to see," Mickey said to Felice. "Ida would take your
hand and skate out to dead center where the figure skaters worked on
their jumps. She would arrange her scarf into a circle on the ice, then
lift you into the middle of it and let you dance. You were cute, all
eyes and red wool, sliding on your double runners and laughing. Ida
would skate around the small circle of her scarf, waving her hands and
wiggling with you, and even the fancy skaters would stop glaring for the
pure joy you had in each other. The two of you had eyes for nobody else,
so I got to do whatever I wanted most of the time."

Mickey looked at Felice, who was shaking out the sleeping bag. Her arms
were making swift, sharp motions in the air and her face was shining in
the light from the Tv.

137

"You remind me of your mother," Mickey said.

Felice raised one eyebrow and scowled. She thrummed her fingers against
the wood of the coffee table. Her nails made a loud clicking sound.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she told Mickey.

Mickey and I laughed from the couch. It was a good impersonation.

Felice went back to folding blankets and Mickey kept talking. I couldn't
concentrate on her story because every move Felice made seemed to gather
all of the light in the room to her, and watching the lines of her arms
made me shiver. While Mickey told about being good at the grape-vine,
her legs going in and out, in and out, leaving a pattern on the ice like
hourglasses stacked one on top of the other, I could feel Felice's warm
weight on me again. I watched Felice put a stack of blankets on the
shelf, her hands disappearing in the folds of wool and nylon. Mickey
remembered the boys in their smooth black skates, taking the corners
hockey style. I tried to imagine what it meant that Felice and her
mother had looked at each other with joy in their eyes.

Mickey touched my elbow for attention. "One time I sat with the guy who
ran the popcorn machine in his silver Plymouth. Ida came looking for me
on her bare blades on the asphalt, and when she found me with his hand
in my shirt, she hauled off and started kicking his tires as hard as she
could with her skate."

Felice, her arms still in the linen closet, rolled her eyes, but it
wasn't funny. Mickey reached out with her foot and rubbed sleeping
Kenny's back with her toes. "I took off running and hitchhiked home. I
felt bad later that I hadn't taken you with me, Felice, because when Ida
got that mad, she spread it around."

Felice said, "I don't remember any of that."

138

Mickey took a long drag on her cigarette. "Ida didn't speak to me for
months." She got up from the couch and bent to shake Kenny's shoulder.
He mumbled and stood without seeming to wake up. His eyes were barely
open, and he had toothpicks in his hair. Mickey brushed them off, and
said, "It was a hundred years ago." She took Kenny's hand and led him
upstairs to go to bed.

Felice pulled me up off the couch. "We should do something," she said.

I felt dread-please, god, not a disco. "I don't have any money left," I
told her.

She slid open the door to the patio. "Let's go outside."

We sat on the grass. The big moon gave me shadows to watch. Felice was
restless. My eye caught on the line of her shin, sharp and shining in
the dark. I touched her hand, and she let me, but when I bent to kiss
her, she said, "Not here," jerking her head back toward the house. I
looked up, and sure enough, there was Kenny's tow head peeping over the
sill of a second story window with an Incredible Hulk decal on the glass.

Felice leaned and whispered to me again about Mickey's wet-rimmed glass
that she pressed to bedroom walls. I didn't think Mickey was as
interested in us as she was in Rick's private phone calls, but Felice
was not persuaded. She rubbed her heels back and forth in the grass
until she had cleared two small round pits down to dirt. I rolled onto
my back and gazed at the moon. It was waning, but I still felt intensity
in the light. Felice started bombarding me with bits of grass. I sat up.

"Stop it," I said. "I'm allergic."

Felice threw a whole handful of grass into the air. It looked to me as
if she were aiming at the moon. Most of it fell back in her face. She
shook it off.

"We should do something," she said again.

I blew a piece of grass off her cheek. "Like what?"

139

"Sabotage," she said. "Defuse the bombs."

I flopped back down on the ground again. "We're not going to do that."

She crossed her, arms tightly on her chest. I could see that she was
serious. "Why not?"

I had plenty of reasons. "Because they have guns. Besides, it's too far
away, and we would have no idea what to do. And I'd be too scared."

I looked at Felice's moonshadow nodding her head. "All right," she said,
"something close." I snorted. She put her warm hand on my head. Her
shadow arm looked like a stem that connected her to me.

We decided to target a neighborhood cop. Felice didn't have anything
against this particular guy, except that he looked at her hard when she
ran on the highway, but he was as close as I was willing to go to the
armed forces. As it was, I was miserable while we talked about it. I was
even more miserable once we were walking to the street where Felice knew
he lived, with a bag full of ornamental gravel we had scooped up from
around the neighbor's bushes. It wasn't much past ten o'clock, but no
one was out on the streets. We walked past a yard where the sprinkler
was going, and I nudged Felice.

"Remember sneaking into Mrs. Peterson's garden to eat the morning-glories?"

Felice nodded, intent on the job at hand. "We were young," she said.

We left the sound of the sprinkler behind and turned a corner into
another silent street. I could see the outline of the squad car in the
moonlight. Jeff had a Matchbox car just like it when he was a kid, down
to the little red light on the top. We stood on the corner, peering at
the house where the squad car was parked. My hands were shaking. "I
can't believe I'm about to become a vandal," I whispered.

140

"One light on," Felice said. "Probably the bedroom. Let's go." She
walked calmly down the sidewalk toward the car, swinging the bag of
gravel a little as she moved. I tried to match her pace, increasingly
overwhelmed with the worry that neighbors glancing out of their windows
would be able to identify me later by my fat silhouette. And I'd never
be able to run as fast as Felice to get away. She didn't really need my
help, so what was I doing here? We stopped beside the hedge bordering
the cop's yard and squatted down, shielded from the window. Felice
shifted the gravel into one corner to use as a spout. The crackle of the
brown paper sounded like gunshot to me. She gave my hand a squeeze.
"Keep watch," she whispered. She crossed the driveway in the beam from
the window, then knelt in the shadow of the car. I saw her open the gas
tank and raise the bag to pour the gravel into the tank. It made a
strange, soft sound, like rice being poured into a pot to boil.

I was getting fuller and fuller where I crouched, too, fighting
queasiness and excitement, until I had to stand up to give the feelings
more room. I must have rustled the bushes, because a dog in the cop's
house started barking. Felice pulled the bag to her chest and froze
there, kneeling next to the rear tire. A hall light went on, and the
front door swung open. I heard the thud as a big, black labrador threw
himself at the screen door. A woman in a velvety red bathrobe stood
behind the screen, looking out across the yard. The dog bared his teeth,
barking loud enough to wake the neighbors. The woman put her hand on his
head, talking softly. She gave the yard one last look before shutting
the door. I thought that my mother would probably like her. I hadn't
dared look at Felice while the door was open, but she was stock-still in
the same kneeling position. She didn't move until the light went out in
the hall, then she reached for

141

the handle of the passenger door which opened miraculously, just like
the ones on Jeffs Matchbox car, except this one gave a loud creak. I was
horrified-what was she doing now? She ducked her head into the car for a
moment, then scrambled back to the hedge, keeping well below the line of
sight from the window. She stood beside me, breathing hard. When we
looked at each other, I knew we had to get moving, because I could
barely control my sudden desire to laugh.

We didn't run until we were out of sight of the house. I caught up with
Felice when she stopped to dump the rest of the white gravel at the bush
where we'd gotten it. She waited until we were safely in her bedroom
before she reached into the pocket of her shorts to show me the pair of
mirrored sunglasses she'd stolen off the dash.

She put them on and gave me her best Clint East-wood profile. 'The
revenge of the earth," she muttered.

I laughed until she hissed, "Shhhhh. Mickey." I couldn't come down from
the tension, but Felice was ready to crash. I lay in her bed with my
heart pounding, holding the edge of her pillowcase, feeling both freed
and caught. She had been breathing even and slow for a long time when
she reached back and pulled my arm around her, so that when I finally
slept, I was holding her close.

FELICE HAD TO be at work by eleven, and we woke up at ten-thirty, so she
was in a rush. There was no time for talk. She turned Donna Summer up
loud on the stereo and went to take a shower.

I shook the pine needles out of my shorts, pulled a clean t-shirt and
some muddy socks out of my backpack, and I was ready to go. I made the
bed, guestlike, and carried my pack into the living room. Kenny was
watching cartoons and eating Quisp.

142

I spoke to the back of his soccer team shirt. "Where's your mom?"

"Work," he answered, still staring at Scooby-Doo.

I went to the kitchen to help myself to another pair of Pop Tarts. While
they were in the toaster, I looked at the pudgy picture of Felice on the
refrigerator door. It made me nervous, so I kissed my finger and touched
her little film face. That didn't settle me much. I opened the door and
got out some milk.

I went back to the bedroom after I'd eaten. Felice had pulled her hair
into a tight bun, but tendrils were escaping over her forehead already.
She was tugging a skimpy black top with spaghetti straps over her head.

I leaned on the door frame. "You get to wear that to work?"

She started throwing clothes around, looking for her purse. "I wear
whatever I want. I work in the back."

She found the purse and took a step toward me and the door. I touched
her arm. Suddenly, Kenny pushed around me and landed a kick in a pile of
clothes on the floor. "You're such a slob," he said.

Felice put her palm around his blond head and pushed him all the way
back into the living room. She slung her purse over her shoulder,
looking at me. "I've got to go," she said.

We stepped out into sunlight that hazed our eyes, it was so bright. I
blinked to get my sight back, and the first thing I saw was a couple of
little girls in the yard next door. They were scooping dust into red
plastic tea cups and offering the cups to each other.

"Why, thank you, Missy, for the wonderful tea," said the one with a frog
on her sweatshirt.

"You're welcome, Missy," said the other one, "thank you. " They dumped
the dirt all over each other's laps.

143

Felice fished her big quartz key chain out of her purse. That was a
shock. I had been assuming that I was going to drive her to work. I
heard a rattle and turned around. Kenny was pressing his nose against
the front door screen, so it looked broad and flat and white. The little
girls saw him, too, and elaborately got up and moved all of their stuff,
sitting down again with their backs toward him. I glanced back at Kenny.
He seemed implacable, and his tongue had joined his nose flat against
the screen. "Bye," I said to him.

His face sort of wagged. I thought it was a nod. Felice added, "Stay out
of my bedroom."

Kenny disappeared. The little girls were busily stuffing a red teapot
with handfuls of dry grass that they pulled out of the lawn with great
effort. "You driving?" I asked Felice.

"Of course, that's how I always get to work." She took a step toward the
white Valiant at the curb.

"Whose car?" I stood my ground. We were sharing the sidewalk, about two
feet apart.

Felice took another step, splaying the keys on her ring and sticking one
between each of her fingers, as we'd been told to do in Health for
self-defense. "It's Mickey's, but she lets me use it. She carpools."

From the sky, something fell between us on the hot sidewalk. Splat. It
was a water balloon. Kenny's head was sticking out of a second-story
window with filmy pink curtains. The bathroom. "Creep!" yelled Felice.

The little girls looked up, tense and expectant. They knew the next
balloon would be meant for them. "Let's get out of here," said Felice.
The little girls were gathering rocks in their cups. I could hear water
running from the faucet in the bathroom. Felice and I ran for our cars.

I followed her when she pulled out. We hadn't really said goodbye. I
wished we had CBs, so I could radio over

144

and make sure that it was okay for me to drive with her to the restaurant.

She drove slowly through the broad streets. I was distracted, staring at
yucca blooming in the yards, not really paying attention to where I was
going. She took a right, and my stomach clenched, because we were
driving past the cop's house. The patrol car was still sitting there,
looking flawless and inviolable, but it hadn't moved. Felice beeped her
horn and gave me a thumbs up.

My heart hit my forehead. I wasn't cut out for life on the wrong side of
the law. I pulled onto the left side of the road and passed Felice,
flooring it into the first side street, just to get away from the scene
of the crime. I had to make a U-turn and skulk at the corner, waiting
for Felice so I'd know where to go. It was a short wait, but of course I
had to pull out behind her back onto the street I'd just escaped. Felice
shook her head at me, a few more tendrils of hair falling onto her neck.
I kept my eyes on her the rest of the way to the restaurant, watching
the slight shifts of her shoulders and the little flashes of white as
her hands slid in and out of my line of vision on the steering wheel. I
tried to see her as clearly as I could, so I could miss a true picture
of her, but it was hard to make her out through all that window glass.

When we got to the cafe, Felice pulled around back and I followed. She
parked next to a big, black, shiny pickup with a Grateful Dead decal in
the window. There wasn't a space for the Pinto, so I stayed in the car.
Felice jumped out and ran back to me, her purse swinging from her
shoulder. She leaned into the Pinto's open window.

"I'm glad you came," she said.

Her mascara had globbed up, leaving a small blue lump in the corner of
her eye. I dabbed it away with my fingertip. She didn't blink. "This is
hard," I said.

145

She nodded. Her lip trembled and her cheeks swelled up. She looked a lot
more like herself at ten than a woman with a job she'd better not be
late to. She pushed the wisps of hair from her bun back behind her ears
and put her hand on my neck. My skin got hot where she was touching me.

"I'm going to miss you, Char."

I leaned my face against her hand. "Just until school starts. It's only
a couple more weeks."

She started to cry. I reached up and hugged her as best I could,
pressing against the inside of the door. Our foreheads touched, then she
kissed me. I heard the back door of the cafe open. Felice pulled away.

"Bye," she whispered. "Stay out of jail."

Even this early in the day, heat was pumping out from the kitchen
through the open door. A tall, hairy-armed guy came out, holding a
plastic trash bag. It had to be Tony.

He was looking right at us, but nothing on his face marked that he'd
seen us kissing. He didn't seem to see me at all. To tell the truth, I
didn't get him into such great focus, either. Mostly I saw the trash
bag, which was gold-colored and bulging. He tossed it into the dumpster
and gave a twisty whistle through his teeth at Felice.

She walked into the kitchen without glancing his way. He reached out and
tugged at her bun as she passed. He must have pulled pretty hard,
because half of it unwrapped and fell down her neck. I expected Felice
to turn around and slug him, but she just disappeared through the door.
He followed, then I heard her laugh.

I switched the radio on and backed out. It took me the best part of an
hour to find the on-ramp to the high-way. I was so tired on the drive
home that I barely saw the view. I just drove, hot, straight, flat out.
My mind was numb, but my body was thinking. I'd reach to signal a

146

I

lane change, and all along my arm, the skin would be remembering her
hand on it, light and warm. As I was driving over the pass, the fir
trees shook, and for an instant I was afraid for the ground beneath me.
I thought I felt it crumbling away beneath the road, but it was only the
wind.

147

Chapter

Fourteen

MY FIRST DAY BACK AT WORK AFTER THE LONG weekend, I knew that the
nursing home was not where I wanted to be. Smells hit me as soon as I
walked in the front door: ammonia and stale, overburdened air. My
uniform made me sweat and itch more than ever. It reminded me of the
spookhouse at the amusement park Felice and I had gone to at least
twenty times last summer; the jolts were too familiar to be exciting. I
didn't want the vague smiles I got from the women in their chairs in the
hall. I told myself that they smiled that way at everyone. The halls
seemed quite a bit sparser than usual. I stopped Kiley, who was wheeling
a cart of bed linen from room to room, and asked her where everyone was.

"Oh, there's one of those Girl Scout sing-alongs in the cafeteria," she
said. "Your whole wing was rounded up for it."

149

I went to the door of the wing and peered through the little window. All
I saw was a nurse I didn't know signing things at the nurse's station. I
stood a moment at the window, watching nothing happening, then I bent
down to get my key on its neckchain into the lock.

I checked in with the nurse, and she told me to go on over to the
cafeteria to help wheel folks back from the sing-along. As I walked down
the long, nearly empty hall, I heard the echoes of my soft-soled shoes
and the voices coming from behind the cafeteria double doors. The
singing seemed like a loud noise being muffled, so I was surprised when
I pushed through the doors, because they really weren't making much
sound at all. The room was packed, with tables full of women in loose
dresses and buttondown sweaters, and wheelchairs wedged in between the
tables and lined up along the walls. Most of the aides were gathered
near the kitchen doors. Some of them were actually in the kitchen,
talking and semi-sneaking a smoke. I gave them a wave and went to lean
on the back of Mabel's chair. I saw Ginny, but I avoided her eye. I
didn't feel like talking to anybody, and Ginny might ask how my trip
was. I didn't see Peg at all, but that was no surprise. She didn't sing,
especially not hymns.

There were only nine or ten Girl Scouts, and none of them seemed to have
much of a bent for music. They were wrapping up "Onward Christian
Soldiers" with the help of a few willing women close to the front, but
they seemed about to drop the cross of Jesus as they struggled with the
last few notes. The leader must have decided to go ahead and let it
drop, because after smiling over her shoulder to acknowledge the
spattering of applause, she whispered something to the girls, raised her
arms, and they dove into a popular song of fifty or sixty years ago:

150

Come away with me, Lucile In my merry Oldsmobile

They did okay with the first couple of lines, in a ragged, child-choir
way, but when they got to the third line, Iris started to sing. She was
near the back of the room, tied into her chair, and her voice was loud
and high.

Down the road of life we'll fly Automobubbling, you and I

The girls must have found Iris a little scary, because their voices
faded away almost entirely. It didn't matter, though, because Iris had
found the pitch and was going strong.

To the church we'll swiftly steal

Mabel started to sing, too; so did Ed. I looked at Ginny again. She
wasn't singing-the song wasn't from a time of hers-but she was swaying a
little, listening.

Then our wedding bells will peal

The women at the tables in front who had been going at it with the hymns
opened up again, and their momentum carried the song into a repetition
of the chorus. Nobody seemed to know a verse. If the Girl Scouts had
practiced one, they weren't about to impose it at this point.

You can go as far as you like with me

In my merry Oldsmobile.

151

I was floating on the voices, seeing Iris in her thirties, waltzing
through a Washington party. All the diplomats were letting their hair
down, and Iris was laughing and making faces over her partner's shoulder
to her friend with the violet eyes in the crowd, but suddenly my mind
stopped floating on the imagined past and settled into my head, at home.
I had been coming into my body all summer, and as I leaned there
listening, I arrived.

I felt warm, as if I were starting to glow. I was very aware of myself,
as usual-aware of being young, of being fat, of having the use of my
legs and hands, but for once I didn't have to slip those useful hands
secretly under the elastic of my white uniform pants to feel my belly
and confirm what size it was. I knew it from the inside, because all of
a sudden I seemed to go out to the edge of my skin.

It was weird. My arm brushed against the leather of Mabel's chair, and I
prickled. The hair in each pore stood on end. I felt goosebumps rising
all up my legs, on my back, on my scalp, too. I was vibrating, as if the
air around me were tracing my form so I could locate myself exactly, as
if my blood were doing the same thing inside. I could feel my muscles
pulling against each other to hold me to my bones. I felt my stretching
lungs, and my uterus tucked in me like a fist in a glove. I completely
understood what kind of animal I was.

Just when the feeling was becoming so intense as to be painful, I saw
the cafeteria walls start to throb. The song was still going, and most
everyone was singing. I'd lost the words into a crackling liquid sound
that didn't seem to have much to do with the motion of their mouths.
Everyone looked bright, lit from within. The gray-skinned people were
shining gray, and the folks who weren't singing were moving their eyes
or had their lids folded down as if to sleep. We were all separate, but as

152

much as we contained ourselves, we spilled out, too, out into the air
and the song and the walls.

"My god," I thought, "this is only a summer job."

Most of the Girl Scouts had degenerated into giggling behind their hands
and pointing, except for one little pink-cheeked blonde who was still
singing as loud as she could, way off key. I figured she had to be the
scout leader's daughter. The leader's eyes were dewy with tears when the
song was finally done, and she gave her little blonde a hug, leading her
out by the hand to talk with some of the folks. I had to get out of
there. I flipped the locks off the wheels of Mabel's chair and backed
her up.

"Just a minute," she was saying, "just a minute."

I felt mean, but I had to stop and ask her what the problem was.

"I don't know," she said, irritated. "Just a minute."

"I haven't got all day, Mabel. You want to talk to the kids, is that
it?" I was confused at the sound of my voice, which was coarse and
irritated when I felt transformed.

Mabel looked at her hands for a moment, then back at me, her eyes a
startling blue. "Just a minute," she said with cold fury, so I locked
her wheels again and left her sitting there until she was almost the last.

The other folks settled back into their ordinary selves, decently
separate from me, but I stayed aware of Mabel and myself as intensely
connected and alive. Every time I looked over at her glaring at me from
her chair, it gave me a jolt, so I had to make her wait.

After I finally left Mabel next to her bed, I went out to the main lobby
and leaned on the wall. I knew it wouldn't look right for an aide to be
sitting in one of the big padded chairs they kept out there for show. I
didn't stay very long anyway, but stood up, tugging on the hem of my
tunic. I walked back through the lobby and down the hall

153

to the business offices, where I knocked on the bald man's door and gave
my two week's notice.

He nodded and looked mildly distressed, and asked me my name again.

School was starting in three weeks. It had been my plan all along to
quit in the fall. This had been nothing but a temporary thing, like
Felice washing dishes. I was finished with it. I told myself there
wasn't anything weird in the way I was ducking out.

That was the last day I paid attention to my job. For the next two
weeks, I was practically sleep-working. I was happy when I walked into
the nursing home. I was humming. The lawn had been cured into a brown
mat by the August sun, and I secretly believed that I had sucked all of
its green into me; I had that much tart juice.

Mom and I went to some shops to pick out a couple of cute outfits for
school. I had trouble finding things that fit, but it didn't matter. I
ended up with some tunics with elastic in the sleeves and big flowers
all over them. I imagined blooming in the halls at school, dripping
daisies down my back, morning-glories filling my arms, a black iris at
each ear. Felice and I would be a complete ecosystem-nobody would have
to water us. And all of the pretty girls in their autumn colors, in
their black and gold cheerleader skirts, in their wine sweaters and
crimson slacks, they could imitate fall leaves and fire until their pure
skins grew shiny with sweat and effort, and their boyfriends had to
bring each of them a diet Coke to keep them clogged and cool. I couldn't
care less what they did.

The days passed fast. I didn't tell anyone I was leaving, but some of
the aides caught on. Perez said something to me about making my escape,
but I just looked at her. I didn't want any kind of goodbye. Mostly, I
didn't think about leaving the nursing home at all. I just

154

put it out of my mind. But my body knew. My step got brisker. My hands,
which used to reach to change the padding on a bed as if they were
moving through pudding, now cut the air sharply; there was so much less
between them and the task to be done. I changed beds with scarcely a
thought for their corners, yet they were unwrinkled and firmly tucked.

I spoke cheerily to Ginny and Peg, but I didn't look into their eyes,
didn't follow their glances to read them, like I used to. I avoided Peg
as much as I could, because I was walking around wrapped in a rich,
dreamy feeling I called Felice, and my dream Felice got pierced by Peg's
one clear eye and glanced over by her clouded, sliding one. It was
uncomfortable.

Peg and Ginny were caught up in their own projects anyway. Peg was
getting letters almost every day, and they were following up on Ginny's
application for public housing, so they mostly just asked me to Xerox
forms for them and put stamps on envelopes. That was fine with me. I
didn't want Peg to penetrate my dream cloud any more than she did just
by looking at me, but there was another pressure in me, pushing me to
talk. Some nights, I would get a little wild wanting to get Peg alone in
the TV room and ask her what she knew about the love of women and
patience, and if there were certain things that were important to say,
and could two girls go out in high school, and did she think we'd ruin
our friendship? I wanted to know for sure if Peg was risking everything
with Ginny, if they really did meet each other straight on with their
bodies and their hearts, or if I was just looking at them funny because
I was funny. Was such a thing even possible? I knew it couldn't happen
completely, here in the nursing home, where everyone who bothered with
any kind of alertness knew the intimate habits of every-one else, and
the rules didn't allow a closed door.

155

I never found Peg alone when the questioning mood was on me, so I
slipped through the days dreaming Felice. Earlier in the summer, I'd
been clearing off the passenger seat in the Pinto for her every time I
got into the car. Now I didn't have to bother, because she was already
sitting down with me, inside me. I'd be cutting meat for Mabel and
feeling the way Felice had reached her arm around me and held me while
we slept. It seemed to make me safe. Or I'd be trying to give Iris a
sponge bath, and I'd be hearing Felice talking, tenderly telling me the
names of rocks, or I'd see her hand flicking the radio dial. I'd give
Shelley a sip of juice, and Felice would be kissing me through the open
car window again.

All of this daydreaming kept me calm as I went about my work. As the
days went by, though, a furtive excitement began to nag at me, and
rattle my composure. I began to look forward to leaving the nursing
home. I wanted out. It built in me like a secret. It was a secret. Just
ten working days, then nine, then five. On my last day, I let Mrs.
Eugenia Cribbs introduce me to the niceties of using clips to make waves
in her hair after a shampoo, a thing she trusted only to veteran aides.
I knew that next week she would have to show someone else, but I never
said a word. After my session with her, feeling a little uneasy, I
slipped into Mr. Pierson's room.

Mr. Pierson's health had been failing. He didn't sit up at all now but
stayed stiffly curled in his bed, and his skin was losing its pink.
Someone had left "Dialing for Dollars" on the TV in front of him. The
host was letting his studio phone ring, trying to give away the cash
jack-pot. I leaned over the bed, and said, "Mr. Pierson, I'm leaving."

He didn't stir. I stared at his thin, thin shoulders, watching for any
motion in the TV light. Nothing.

156

"I won't be coming back," I told him. I pulled down the blanket and
watched his chest. He had a white under-shirt on. I squatted down so I
could look across him horizontally, and I could see the sign of his
breath that way, a slight rise and fall, but enough to let me finish my
goodbye as if this was the only one that mattered.

I pulled his blanket back up and tucked it in around him. I rested my
hand on his cheek a moment. It was dry and papery, although the air in
the room felt damp.

"Sweet dreams." I turned off the Tv set as I left.

I was already in the parking lot, putting my key into the door of the
Pinto, when I heard my name. I swung around. Peg was sitting at the edge
of the curb in her chair. The sidewalk to the staff parking lot didn't
have any curb cuts, so that was as far as she could go. Her black hair
was loose around her shoulders. She said my name again. "Char." I had a
feeling that she'd be shouting if she could.

I walked back over to her, still holding the key. "Peg?"

Her mouth had small spots of white around it, as if she was straining
her muscles to say, or not say, some-thing. She hit reverse on her
chair, pulling back a few paces from the curb. I put my foot up on it
and leaned on my knee, trying to look relaxed.

"You're leaving," she said.

For a wild moment, I imagined that Mr. Pierson had told her. I nodded,
caught in the act. "Yeah, this is my last day."

"You didn't tell me." She was looking straight at me, but her left eye
kept sliding sideways, then jerking back.

I traced the edge of my car key with my thumbnail, trying to think of
something to say. I shrugged and lied, "I didn't tell anyone."

157

Peg stared at that shrug like it was an old horror movie that still gave
her the creeps. "You didn't even bother to say goodbye. Maybe it didn't
occur to you."

I let the key ring dangle from my little finger. "Peg, I didn't mean to
hurt your feelings. School's about to start."

She snorted. "Well, you'd better go study, then."

We stayed there at the edge of the curb looking at each other for
another minute. I think my eyes, both of them, started to slide around
before either of hers budged. I looked at her red hands curled in her
lap and lied again, "I don't know what I did to make you so mad."

She raised one of her hands and shook it in my face. "You don't have the
first idea of how to be a friend." Her arm dropped back in her lap, and
I could tell she was done. "You're a kid," she said. "Go on home."

I did.

158

Chapter

Fifteen

I FELT BAD ABOUT PEG, BUT I LET HER SLIP from my mind. I wasn't thinking
about anything except Felice and the start of school. On the first day
of classes, I got Mom to put my hair into a bun, and I wore one of my
new flower shirts. She shed a few tears over how grown-up I looked. I
told her not to pack me a lunch.

I drove the Pinto and got to school early. The halls were nearly empty,
the floors gleamed. For a moment I expected to smell ammonia, as if I
were back at the nursing home. I was hugging a heavy grocery sack under
one arm, holding up my schedule, and trying to find the number of the
locker Felice and I were going to share. Seniors were allowed to pick
their partners.

When I finally found the right number, the girl in the locker next to us
was already there. Her name was Beverly. I'd known her for years. They
used to call her Beaver

159

because of her teeth, and she cheated at tetherball by grabbing the
rope. She had streaked her hair over the summer and made the pompom
squad. "Hi," she said to me, in uniform.

"Hi." I hoped she'd be gone before Felice showed up. I was a little
disappointed that Felice wasn't waiting for me here, but it gave me time
to decorate the locker.

Beverly was hanging up a picture of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky, in
boxing trunks, all glistening with sweat. She taped it neatly to the
inside of the locker door, and glanced over to see what I was doing. I
was unrolling an equally glossy picture of a volcano, overflowing with
red hot lava. My picture was too big to fit inside the door. Beverly
loaned me her scissors so I could trim the edges.

"I guess you're into nature," she said, picking at a rough spot in her
nail polish with the tip of her pen.

Beverly spotted another clump of pompoms across the hall, and they
walked off in the direction of the cafeteria, practicing a cheer half
under their breaths. I waited until they were out of sight before I
opened the paper bag and scooped out handfuls of rocks. I'd brought
every single one that Felice had sent me over the summer. They
completely filled the second shelf. I left the top shelf for Felice's
books, and figured that I could use the space at the bottom of the
locker, if we wanted to leave the rocks on the other shelf for a while.
I arranged the small shiny ones in front and the big monumental ones
behind. They looked impressive. When I picked one up, I could almost
feel a heartbeat in my hand.

I shut the door so Felice would get the full effect when she got there.
Felice was almost never on time, but I'd hoped that we'd have a chance
to say hi or something before the first class. I'd sent her a couple of
careful letters, with just "love, Char" at the bottom, but I hadn't
heard from her at all. A river of kids was flowing past me

160

now, and I tossed out a few good-to-see'yous. I noticed that none of the
other girls had flowers on their shirts. The hall was filled with solid
sweaters and tweed jackets with elbow patches, but that didn't matter.
Where was Felice? I got the big-toothed comb out of my backpack and
worked on my bangs.

The warning bell rang. I gave up. I knew I would see her fifth period
because we were both taking a seniors-only geology class. It had an
overnight field trip to the Garden of the Gods in the spring.

The periods were short since this was a half day. The teachers looked
odd to me, excessively human, even though all they were doing was
passing out books and assigning seats. My English teacher's slip was
showing, and there were tears in her eyes already, on the first day of
school. I went back to the locker between every class, but there was no
sign of Felice. She didn't. show up for geology, either. I decided she
must be getting back from New Mexico a day or two late. Mr. Coolig, the
geology teacher, wore a baggy green jacket with pockets full of nuts,
which he ate in class. He was the only teacher who went ahead and
introduced a few concepts.

"Uniformitarianism is the belief that the present is the key to the
past. This is different from what people used to believe were great
catastrophes followed by the sudden creation of new types of life." He
cracked a pea-nut between his teeth, slipping the empty shell back into
his pocket. I'd heard that he sometimes threw the shells at kids who
were talking or sleeping in his class. I really tried to listen, so I
could catch Felice up on what she missed, but I got lost somewhere
between the Great Flood and the Scientific Method.

I saw Beverly at the locker again at the end of the day. I didn't need
to get anything out or leave anything there, but I opened it one more
time, just to be sure that Felice

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hadn't left a note. Beverly stared at the shelf full of rocks, but she
didn't comment. Instead she said, "Where's Felice Ventura this year?
You're friends with her, aren't you?"

I figured Beverly was just pruning her social skills, because she was
paying a lot more attention to spreading lotion on her legs than to me
trying to come up with an answer.

"I don't know. She must be around somewhere. I saw her this summer." I
watched Beverly bending over with her back to her locker, massaging her
calves with her palms. Rocky looked tough but vulnerable behind her. "Why??

Beverly had reached her ankles, and she was circling them with her
fingertips. She looked up at me. "She hasn't moved, has she? You want
some of this?" She offered me the pink purse-sized bottle of Jergens.

I got a shiver. "No," I said. "No, thanks. She hasn't moved. I don't
want any lotion." I shut my locker with a polite little click, turned,
and walked away. I thought if I didn't find out what was happening with
Felice within the next five minutes, my brain was going to burst. And I
was scared that I had been staring too hard at Beverly's legs, a
possibility that filled me with dread. I decided to call Felice from the
pay phone in the basement and put myself out of my misery.

I walked down the concrete steps to the basement. The school had been
built on the site of an old landfill, so the foundations were shifting
as the garbage beneath them shifted, and the walls in the basement were
cracking. I went into the girls' locker room where the phone was. The
swim team was getting ready to practice, pulling on suits and throwing
soap at each other. I dropped my dime and dialed Felice's number. I got
a busy signal. A bar of soap came sliding across the floor to my feet. I
gave it an awkward kick with the toe of my tennis shoe, then

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hunched over the booth to dial again. Busy. Felice must be back. She had
stayed at home, sick or hung over. The swim team was in the showers in
their suits. It was a rule: you had to rinse before you went into the
pool. I always wondered exactly what was supposed to be washed away that
chlorine couldn't kill. I tried again. Still busy. Felice wasn't hanging
up the phone. The team took the door to the pool, shivering and
giggling. I decided to drive by her house on my way home.

I hadn't counted on Mrs. Ventura being there, but her car was in the
drive. Usually she was still at work this time of day. I didn't want to
talk to her, but I couldn't tell if Felice was in the house or not. I
went around to the backyard and peered in the sliding glass door. Mrs.
Ventura was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and dialing the
phone. She would hold the receiver to her ear for a few seconds, then
hang up and dial again. I knew just by watching her fingers that I had
to get out of there. She looked up and saw me just as I was going round
the corner of the house and came out to the back porch, calling,
"Charlotte. Char. Come here." I pretended not to hear her and got into
the Pinto. She didn't come to the front door, but I think she kept
calling out the back, because as I pulled out I heard her shout
something about Felice.

I was still upset when I pulled into the carport and found the letter in
the mailbox. It said "IT. Ventura" in the corner of the envelope, just
as bold and fuschia as ever. I could see that it didn't have any kind of
rock with it; it was just one sheet of paper. I stood there on the front
step to read it. It said:

Dear Char:

I'm not coming back, not right away anyway. Mickey says I can stay here
and take

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care of Kenny in the afternoons while she's at her job. I enrolled at
this high school. It'll be good-I can establish residency for the state
university. They've got a great geology department.

I can't live with my mother anymore, Char. It would be stupid for me to
try, I just can't. Plus, there's this thing with Tony.

Write to me, all right? I'll be up there sometime, definitely for
Christmas. Don't be mad, even though you've got a right to be. I hadn't
decided yet when you were here, or I would have told you to your face.

They're not letting anyone near Mt. Estrella these days. Got the road
completely blocked off. For construction, they say. I read it in the
paper. The cop's got a new cruiser.

I miss you all the time, Char.

love,

Felice

I finished the letter, turned around, and got back into the Pinto. I
didn't want to go inside and have Mom ask how my day had been.

I drove into the foothills. The pines were shifting in front of the
unreal blue sky. At Tuckers Park I stopped and rested my head against
the steering wheel. My stomach was heaving as if I'd been mixing vodka
and cheap wine, but I hadn't had a drink since I'd seen Felice. Felice.
I opened the door to breathe in the cool air. I could see Felice leaning
out from a rock ledge above me, reaching to catch a piece of fool's
gold, only this time she falls. I sobbed. I watched her body spinning
and turning in the air. I barely managed to get out of the car so I
could throw up a few feet away.

164

For a long time, I leaned against a 'tree as the air chilled. I didn't
have any words or pictures in my head, just dead weight. The cracked
bark left sap on my face. Dark was coming on.

The sour taste in my mouth reminded me I needed to take care of my mess.
I covered the vomit with leaves and the coarsely ground rock that passed
for dirt here. I scraped up one last fistful of rock and threw it as
hard as I could at the Pinto, where it made pits and scratches in the paint.

I TOOK THE long way home, driving and crying. For a while I was lost in
a suburb that looked just like Moody, but wasn't. It was after eleven by
the time I pulled up in front of the house. A light was on in the living
room.

Mom looked at me when I walked in the door. I knew Dad would have been
in bed for at least an hour by now. Her eyes were red and puffy. A
paperback novel was open in her lap. I recognized a spy book about a
middle-aged woman who goes to work for the CIA. Mom had a cup of tea
next to her on the arm of the couch. Her heart was in the cup. I could
see it beating against the flo-thru tea bag. I squinted and waited for
it to go back to being just Lipton. She took a sip.

"Where have you been?" She pulled the dripping tea bag out of her cup
and set it on the saucer.

"I was at a late movie."

"Why didn't you call? You missed supper." Her stubby family fingers lay
across the pages of the book.

"I tried to call, but it was busy, then the phone was out of order at
the drive-in." I was too stupid-tired to talk with her. I could barely
stand there, leaning unsteadily on the back of the couch, but I couldn't
just walk past her to my room. Her velour robe had been zipped

165

crooked, and her face was flushed. For an instant she reminded me of
Peg. I sat down on the couch and tried to look my mother in the eye.

"I got a letter from Felice," I said. "She's not coming back."

"Oh, honey," said Mom, "that's too bad."

My arm was shaking as I leaned on the couch. She must have felt it. She
glanced down at her book. I watched a motion pass through her face. It
was like a picture in an anatomy book, where half of a woman's face is
peeled back layer by layer to teach about the fat and cartilage and bone
underneath. Something shifted in a lower layer. I saw folds like ripple
marks around her mouth.

She looked back up at me, gazing steadily. It occurred to me that I'd
assumed she'd been crying out of worry over me, but maybe something else
was wrong. I didn't have any way to ask her.

"I saved you a pork chop," said Mom. She reached up and squeezed my hand
where it rested on the couch. "Eat it if you're hungry, then go on to
bed." She handed me her cup and saucer. "Take this into the kitchen for
me, will you?"

I poured the cold tea into the sink, wondering what she hadn't said.

DAD LEFT FOR work before I got up in the morning, but he'd seen the
scratched-up paint on the Pinto and taken my car keys away for a month.
I was too numb to care. I rode the bus to school, wearing a loose gray
jumper every day. Classes were fine. I sat there watching the teacher's
mouth or looking at the roots of the hair of whoever was seated in front
of me. It was easy to follow the waves of kids from class to class, but
it was harder to

166

know what time it was in the mornings and after school. Reading was
difficult, but I was okay if there was some kind of worksheet or study
question in front of me. I could just pull something off the page and
write it down without having to interact with it much.

I never daydreamed anymore. I'd sit on the school lawn at lunchtime,
rigid with misery, but I wasn't looking at anything inside my head. I'd
look straight out at the small trees, the leaves, the dry brown grass,
every stem and blade sharp and clear. This wasn't in single trans-fixed
moments. It was constant. The focus of my life had changed. It had gone
to details. I walked out in traffic, watching the yellow gray of the
sky. The honking horns let me know there was a problem. I was best not
moving, but it didn't really matter.

Felice had been my best friend for most of my school life. Other girls
asked about her. She was fairly popular. I'd tell them that she'd moved
to New Mexico. Every time I said that, I felt like I was wading in one
of those intermit-tent streams I'd heard about in geology, the ones that
only exist during spring snowmelt. They were commonly found in the and
or semiarid parts of the western United States. I had dumped all of the
rocks from the locker back into another grocery bag and left them in a
corner of my room.

Afternoons, I stayed in bed. Sometimes I'd sleep, but mostly I'd lie
there watching the light from the window play over the plaster ceiling.
I'd set my alarm clock for five and be up sitting in the living room in
front of the television by the time Mom got home from work. I didn't
want her to worry.

Sometimes in bed I would drift into a light sleep, which, like my waking
life, was innocent of dreams. I think that was the state I was in when a
bomb went off in my head. I saw the flash and heard a thundering in my

167

ears, so I sat up. I didn't put my hand up to feel my skull. It didn't
matter if it were in pieces or not. I whispered to myself to be calm,
and soon enough, it stopped. I looked at the clock and saw that I had
overslept. I could hear Mom getting supper ready. I glanced at my quilt
to be sure that there were no bone fragments, then decided that I had to
do something to stay on good terms with my mind. I would go after Felice.

I got up and put on my jacket. I patted my pocket to be sure I had my
wallet. I walked down the hall. I looked at Mom standing in the kitchen,
the greasehood over the stove casting light back on her cheeks. Her eyes
were streaming. She'd been cutting onions. She smiled at me as I walked
by and motioned me toward her, but she didn't speak. I knew why. She'd
taught me that onion tears get worse if you open your mouth. It lets the
fumes in. It's best to finish the peeling and chopping as quickly and
silently as you can, or stop, if you must, to wash your hands and the
knife, but you must not touch your eyes and you must not talk.

I didn't stop or walk into the steaming kitchen where I could hear the
hamburger meat spitting and popping in the pan. "I'm late," I told her,
and walked out the front door. She followed me to the doorway, still
holding half an onion, but she never said a word.

Since I couldn't drive the car, I'd have to take a bus downtown to the
Greyhound station. I would have to walk up to the mall where the city
buses stopped. I stopped at a bank machine on the way and got out all it
would give me of my summer savings. I had to walk past the Jim Dandy
Fried Chicken place where Jeff had a part-time job. The walls of the
little building were big plate-glass windows, with a huge, grinning,
orange rooster painted on each one. I could see Jeff standing at the
counter in his orange uniform, tossing two wings and a breast into a

168

box for a woman in a white dress. I knew his skin was breaking out from
spending so much time in the greasy air drinking free Coke from the
machine, but from where I stood he looked perfect, like a commercial,
the warming lights on the chicken and fries casting a glow on him from
behind, like an electric halo. He patted the box of chicken and said
something that looked like, "You bet," as the customer handed him her cash.

I wanted to go in and exchange a couple of words with him, but I knew
we'd have to wisecrack, and I couldn't do that. So I rapped on the
window with a quarter. He looked up, and I waved at him through the legs
of the painted rooster. He gave me a nod and a stern look, in the
don'tdo-anything-to-besmirch-the-family-name manner he'd taken with me
lately. I nodded back and walked on.

I didn't want to run into my father on his way home from work, and he
got off at 6:25, so I had to catch the 6:10. 1 cut through Sears and
Wyatt's Cafeteria, hurrying out the back of the mall. I walked across
the big parking lot. It stretched like the desert . at the base of Mt.
Estrella, long and flat and black with white lines. There were clumps of
cars, but they didn't begin to fill the vastness. A cool September wind
was blowing across it, and the sky began to drizzle, but by the time I
got to the bus, the sun was back, washed and lightened by the rain. The
driver opened the door to let me sit inside while he finished his
sandwich. All of the cars shone, and the raindrops on the windows of the
bus sparked. I took this as a sign. Two women in high heels and skirts
knocked on the door, and the driver let them in and said hi. They both
had bags from Fashion Bar. I was looking at things sharply, and details
kept coming into focus. First it had been Jeff in the window under the
warming lights, then the shine of the wet cars and the bright colors on
the shoppers' faces. A few more people trickled in before the driver put his

169

newspaper down and started the bus. If I had been driving the Pinto, I
could have been at the Greyhound station by now. We stopped at the
corner of Weaver and Moody Boulevard, then got onto the highway, with no
more stops until we were downtown.

170

Chapter

Sixteen

WHEN I GOT OFF AT THE STATION, THE WIND blew right through me. Cars were
double-parked at the curb, and there was a big knot of people gathered
near where the buses sat with their engines running, ready to depart.
There was no line for tickets, though. The man behind the counter said I
had a forty-five-minute wait, give or take, so I sat down at one of the
chairs with tiny televisions on them. I put in a quarter for fifteen
minutes' worth of "Gilligan's Island," but my attention kept wandering
over the other people in the lobby.

There was a woman in a green plaid coat speaking in sign language to an
older man, who was smoking and nodding. There was a hippie in a
wheelchair at the candy machine, raising himself up to reach the coin
slot. He looked pissed off.

171

I thought about it and decided that it made sense that a lot of people
with disabilities would end up taking the bus, if they couldn't drive,
or if they didn't have money for a car. The guy in the wheelchair had
long hair in a ponytail, like Peg's, only his was blond. It made me
restless to remember Peg and the way I had left her, so I got up before
my quarter ran out and paced over to the crowd at the arrival/departure
doors. There were delays being announced over the loudspeaker, and a lot
of guys in uniform standing around. I had assumed that they were
busdrivers, but now I saw that they were cops. The wheelchairs were
thicker here than they were in the halls of the nursing home. Then I
noticed the signs: WE WILL RIDE and EQUAL ACCESS. It was a
demonstration. A woman with frizzy red hair and leg braces handed me a
pink flyer that started:

Tired of buses with no lifts and narrow doors?Tired of bus cornpanies
that will take our moneyonly if we travel with an able-bodied
companion?Tired of being treated like children?FIGHT BACK!NO BUSINESS AS
USUAL...

As I scanned the words, I thought, "This sure sounds like Peg." I
panicked-it sounded exactly like Peg. Even if she hadn't written it, she
might be here. I knew I was being silly, but I turned and walked as fast
as I decently could into the ladies room, to get out of sight of the
demonstration.

172

There was Peg, sitting squarely in front of the only non-pay toilet
stall, handing out flyers, wearing a fuzzy black sweater that I
recognized as one of Ginny's. She was giving a flyer to a gray-haired
woman in a pantsuit, talking slowly and patiently, as if she were
determined to be understood. I could see the glint in her eye.

My first thought was that she was dangerous. My next was an impulse to
go over and straighten up the messy pile of flyers in her lap. While I
was still hesitating in the door, she saw me. I was scared. She looked
more surprised. "Char," she said, "what are you doing here?"

I walked over to her, but I didn't bend to straighten the flyers. I
realized that I knew better than to do that. I shifted my backpack to my
other hand instead. "Going to get Felice."

I hadn't meant to phrase it that way. She looked at me quizzically, then
I watched her remember how angry she was with me. She looked down at her
lap. Someone had made her ponytail into a thick black braid. I wanted to
hear what she had been going to say. My stomach was in knots. I touched
her shoulder. "Peg, I'm sorry I walked out like that, without telling
you or Ginny or anyone."

Peg snorted, handing me one of her bright pink flyers. "I should have
expected it," she said.

The slow cut of her voice made my eyes tear up. I stared at the flyer
and blinked until I could look at her. I tried again. "I just couldn't
say anything." I was folding the flyer into smaller and smaller squares.
"It was stupid. I miss you."

Peg shifted in her chair, looking over my shoulder at the doorway. A
woman came in dragging a reluctant little boy by the hand. They both
looked alarmed and slightly fascinated when they saw Peg, but she leaned
way out to hand them a flyer. I had slipped mine into my back pocket.
The woman took the little boy to the sink and

173

started scrubbing his hands. Peg looked back at me. I couldn't read her
face.

"I can't talk about this now," she said. "I'm busy." She unlocked her
wheels.

I stepped out of her way, but I was still trying to talk. "Did you
organize all this? How did you get here from the home?"

Peg was driving her chair with her back to me, so I had to concentrate
to hear her. "Ginny finally got housing, so I moved in with her. No, I
didn't organize the protest. There's a group. We've been writing letters
ever since the food fight, and they helped us move." She bumped into the
wall as she took the narrow turn to get out of the door and stopped for
a moment. Behind me, the woman was saying over and over to her little
boy, "Stop it, Walter. Shut up. Stop it. I told you to stop," and there
were sharp little scuffling noises over the sound of running water.

Peg dug an old envelope out of the bag she kept wedged next to the arm
of her chair. "Here," she said, "that's our address. You can come talk
to me sometime." I moved to take the envelope from her, scared to open
my mouth. Peg put the chair in gear again, "Maybe later you can bring
Felice," she said as she headed toward the crowd.

I stuffed the envelope in my pocket, which was bulging with paper now.
My fingers brushed the stiff edge of my ticket. My heart was pounding. I
couldn't sort out the dizzy mix of shame and relief and anxiety, but I
felt like I was breathing hot ash, so I pushed my way through the
chanting crowd out one of the doors to the bus ports. I leaned against a
concrete post and breathed the cold, exhaust-filled air. I had a bus to
catch.

I scanned the row of buses, trying to spot mine. That was when I finally
understood why not a single departure

174

had been announced since I arrived. Every bus had a line of people
behind it, sitting in wheelchairs or on blankets on the asphalt. Some of
the buses were idling, causing the people behind them to be cloaked in
black fumes, but neither buses nor protesters showed any sign of moving.
Men in ties and suit coats the same silver as the buses were in a huddle
with the police. I found the bus with "Albuquerque" on the front, but it
was as hemmed in as the rest. I wasn't going anywhere for a while.

It was nearly dark when I saw Peg join a little clump behind a Chicago
bus. I looked around for Ginny and saw her sitting on the sidewalk in
front of Peg's bus, wearing a red corduroy jacket and singing into the
wind. Every now and then a hoarse chant or a song would start in one of
the lines behind the buses, or in the crowd in front of the doors, but
not many voices picked it up. I had the feeling that they had been at
this for hours. I couldn't believe that they would stay much longer.

I closed my eyes and huddled down against the post, trying to gather my
patience and my sense of purpose. Instead, my mind's eye saw Felice
getting on a bus, heading north. She is coming back to me, wearing her
jeans and a new plum-colored sweater and tweed jacket for the fall. She
looks perfect. She has a nylon bag packed with her summer things. She
isn't carrying any rocks, except her big quartz key chain, but she has a
folder full of geology notes and letters from me.

She has stayed up late the night before, drinking and saying goodbye to
Tony, so she takes a window seat and drowses through the ride. The bus
stops for gas at the truck stop where Louise works the cash register.
Felice doesn't get anything to eat, but she does go in to use the
bathroom. She buys a jack-a-lope postcard to send to Kenny. She gets
back on the bus. I bring her down the highway and over the pass quickly,
fluidly, the dreaming

175

and the traveling blending into one feeling. I pull her bus into the
very station where I am leaning on a post, waiting. The crowd parts like
water for this one bus. It stops, people get off, but I couldn't wish
that for her.

Felice sits in her seat, not anxious, not breathing, as still as I've
ever seen her, waiting for me to decide. It was my vision, but I
couldn't pull her off the bus simply because of the force of my need to
see her, strong as it was, because that meant pulling her to Moody, to
the locker next to Beverly's, her mother's fires, and Mr. Coolig in
geology class cracking his peanuts. Even in my dream Felice fought
coming back to all that.

I was about done with dreaming Felice. I knew her for real. We couldn't
go back to sneaking into bars so she could dance with the guys while I
watched. We'd even passed the slow, sweet point of dancing together in
the living room. We'd passed out of our child lives, but there wasn't
anyplace else for us to go, not yet. I was furious at her for leaving me
stranded in Moody, but I didn't have any other real bright ideas. This
thing with Tony was a slap in the face, though. She probably thought it
was necessary.

She is still sitting there motionless on the frozen bus. I was still
leaning on cold concrete. Then, I let her go. I sent her on. New folks
board, and the bus pulls out, but it doesn't keep heading north, and it
doesn't turn around. It takes an exit I'd never noticed before and
drives on a two-lane highway all the way to someplace where there are
houses made of pumice and Felice's new tweed jacket will keep her as
warm as she needs to be all winter long. The town is half-circled by
volcanoes, and each of its beaches has the distinct color of a different
rock ground by the sea.

176

THAT LEFT ME at the station. The bullhorns snapped me back into the
immediate world. The silver-coated bus men had disappeared, but the cops
had massed up and were moving in. The chanting had gotten louder, and
the folks behind the buses moved closer to each other. The ones that
could linked arms. There was a little flurry of people trying to snatch
blankets and call out to friends, then protesters were being grabbed and
shoved into the back of a police van. It had a ramp on it, all set up
for wheelchairs, but the cops went for people who were able-bodied
first. Somebody-I didn't know if it was a driver or a protester-climbed
into one of the buses and started honking the horn. I saw the frizzy
red-haired woman who had first handed me a flyer go limp with a cop's
arms under her shoulders. He dragged her into the van with her leg
braces bouncing on the ramp. I was shocked-I'd never seen anybody
arrested before. I looked for Peg. She was in the middle of a huddle of
cops.

Ginny was yelling from the front of the legal crowd on the sidewalk.
"Peg! Don't get yourself beat up! Show them where the damn switch is."

Peg called back something that didn't carry over the honking, but she
might have been reminding Ginny to water the plants. Ginny nodded, then
started to cry.

Two cops were on their knees by the wheels of Peg's chair, trying to
figure out how to make the thing move, and two were pushing and yanking
on the handles. For a moment I could see Peg's face; she looked like she
was cussing them out. Finally somebody found the right combination of
switches, and the chair lurched forward over the hand of one of the cops
on the ground, who gave out a screech.

177

The van was almost full by the time they got Peg up the ramp, and they
slammed the door shut after her. The van pulled out, and another one
backed in to take its place. Behind me in the station, a departure was
being announced on the loudspeaker. Protesters were chanting about the
people united, and I found myself yelling at the top of my lungs. I
looked over at Ginny-she was yelling, too, and holding hands with the
tall hippie from the candy machine. The woman behind her was stroking
her hair. The arrests had slowed down, and the cops were making a line
in front of the sidewalk crowd. A few passengers straggled out from the
station to get on one of the buses. It pulled out. We booed and surged
forward, but the cops held the line, and the bus was gone.

I was still standing behind my post, howling. Some of the protesters
gave me nervous glances. I must have sounded out of control. The honking
had stopped, and a tall young cop with a bullhorn was telling us to
disperse. I picked up my backpack and ran away from the crowd, too
stirred up to stand still anymore. I kicked over an ashtray on my way
through the lobby, slammed out the glass door, and ran down one of the
empty streets between the buildings. The wind was still high. I had a
hard time breathing as I ran, so I concentrated on pulling the air in
and letting it out. I could feel fury moving me, keeping me running,
until it started to leave me with my breath. I came to the big park
across from the state-house, and sat down on one of the benches, gasping
and wheezing. There were pigeons in front of me pecking the worn grass.
My mind was groping, trying to figure out what I should do next. I
started to feel embarrassed, as if I had borrowed somebody else's anger
because I couldn't come up with any of my own. I hadn't even checked
with Ginny to see if she needed anything. Still, something had changed
in me.

178

The pigeons were giving out little moans and cries. I found that
annoying, so I got up and started walking down the street. The haze in
my head gathered and cleared, then gathered again as I walked. Finally a
Moody bus came by, and I got on. I had to reach past the stiff Greyhound
ticket to find change for the fare.

When the bus got off the highway, it drove down Moody Boulevard. All
around me were the lighted houses of my neighborhood. I got off at the
mall and walked down the hill toward home. The shift had changed at Jim
Dandy, so I didn't see Jeff as I passed.

I told Mom I had been on a long walk. She said there was some supper
left. I wasn't hungry, though. I went into my room and took the screen
off the window so the wind could blow in. I put on my nightgown. I
pulled back the sheets on my bed. I found the grocery bag full of
Felice's rocks and dumped them onto the mattress. I got in with them and
pulled the blankets up to my chin. I felt around until I found the
little wedge of chalcedony and slipped it under my nightgown. It was
cold at first, but slowly warmed on my skin. I slept with it tucked
under one breast. My dreams were sharp.

179

Photo by Susan Wilson

Susan Stinson grew up in Colorado. Her fiction and poetry have appeared
in several anthologies and magazines, including Sinister Wisdom and The
Kenyon Review. She is also the author of Belly Songs: In Celebration of
Fat Women and Martha. Moody, a novel to be published by Spinsters Ink in
1995. She lives near Northampton, MA.

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