When I came in, only Stella and Sean and James would say hello. I got to know the other boys slowly: chubby Benny, whose eyes were so sunken they looked like bruised thumbprints in his face. Sullen Frank, who stuttered darkly. Eric, a good friend of James’s, a small kid with a brush cut who I knew from his visits to the library to take out books on sports. When Eric walked, he did not move the upper half of his body at all — passing by the circulation desk, he looked as if he were on wheels. He also could not speak in words, but offered nervous polite sounds — not the rude grunting noise other nontalking boys used, just pure open vowels.
“Hello, Eric,” I said.
“Ah,” said Eric.
“How’s school?”
“Oh,” Eric said, halfway between good and I don’t know yet.
And from across the room, Stella would call out, “Hi, Miss Cort!” I’d give her a jaunty, uncaring wave. She could break Frank’s heart, and Benny’s and Eric’s, but mine was safe.
Or mostly; sometimes even I was charmed. She was the object of so many glances, stares, careful appraisals, compliments, that when she looked at you it was as if she reflected all that dazzling attention upon you. She did it without talking: she looked at you directly, a small touch of cynicism to her smile. It was the cynicism, strangely, that made it appear she was paying attention; it made you feel like her co-conspirator.
James started asking me about my car.
“I can fit, right?” he said.
“Yes. Sure.”
“You wouldn’t mind giving me a ride somewhere?”
“Say the word. Where do you want to go?”
“I dunno.”
“We could take it to the shoe store, you know.”
He made a face. “I was thinking somewhere closer. The beach, maybe.”
“Okay.”
“And maybe I could bring a friend.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sure.”
“Another person could fit, right? In the backseat? A small person?”
I smiled. “Yes,” I said. “A small person could. Eric?”
“No. Stella maybe.”
“Stella would fit,” I said, as if I’d just measured the backseat for Stella’s measurements.
“So. You wouldn’t mind? Like maybe Sunday, when you weren’t working.”
“James,” said I, the chaperone, unwitting and unwilling cupid, “of course not.”
So I did a little research, asked about beaches. I even bought the fixings for a picnic lunch. James himself could not have been as nervous as I was; the whole week felt like one terrible endless day without break, with Sunday, twilight, promised at the end, Stella ascendant.
Except they took a walk together that Friday, the last Friday of the school year, and Stella told James — who, she said, was her best friend in the world — this: that Sean had proposed, and she had accepted, and that in two months they would move together to Virginia, where Sean would work for his uncle and Stella would, despite everything, finish high school. In Virginia, in some small town, she would be the prettiest housewife in the twelfth grade, and Sean the only husband at the senior prom.
I was afraid that he’d stop walking, now that Stella was planning for her wedding. But he didn’t; he walked by himself. I got used to seeing him at a distance. No, that wasn’t true — I was used to that already. Was it because of his size that I was so unused to putting myself in the frame? Did I think I wouldn’t fit?
No. That was how I always saw myself, that is, how I didn’t see myself. I have felt out-of-frame all my life. At best, even as I say this, I am the court painter who, after years of painting the royal family, can no longer resist slipping a bit of herself in the frame. Look, there’s Peggy, her forearm, the toe of her shoe, her frozen unrecognizable face in a swollen mirror on the farthest wall of the room. It doesn’t matter who I am looking at: they are royalty, compared to me.
James was the only one who ever drew me in at all. In the evenings when we talked, after the teenagers had gone off and there was room, he was the one who made me feel looked at instead of just looking.
Now James walked alone. James with his cane went down the street, stopped at the end. James inspected the bay from the town pier. James browsed in no stores, endured no conversation, took out not a single book from my library. He returned to the cottage, where the boys were sometimes already waiting outside.
And three weeks later he came in to see me at work, holding a cream envelope with a card inside. “I’d like to go to Stella’s wedding,” he said. “I asked; you’re invited too, if you’ll drive me.”
I smiled at the poor bargain of that invitation. But I agreed.
I had never wanted to be one of those girls in love with boys who would not have me. Unrequited love — plain desperate aboveboard boy-chasing — turned you into a salesperson, and what you were selling was something he didn’t want, couldn’t use, would never miss. Unrequited love was deciding to be useless, and I could never abide uselessness.
Neither could James. He understood. In such situations, you do one of two things — you either walk away and deny yourself, or you do sneaky things to get what you need. You attend weddings, you go for walks. You say, yes. Yes, you’re my best friend, too.
Stella Ascendant
We drove up Route 6A to Wellfleet. Late June light flattens and brightens Cape Cod into a postcard. All reds seem like the same red: the flung-back shutters on the identical cottages that line the road; the lassos of neon that spell Motel; a red-bottomed buoy that has washed up on the beach; a sign that promises lobster with a picture of a lobster. All blues the same, sky, convertibles, James’s eyes. The sand, gold where the wind has combed it; his hair, the same. The seagull in front of a cloud, the cloud, his oxford cloth shirt, all three washed just enough for a hint of gray.
And me and my big black car and what felt, increasingly, like my big black heart, as unwieldy and peculiar as my car. Maybe as hard, too: that car could have crumpled anything with its unstoppable, undentable bumper. Reserved, Caroline had said, and despite my best intentions, she was right: my torso an unorganized cabinet of secrets I was saving for a later date. They knocked into each other, they bruised and then calloused.
I’d pictured us driving along, talking, perhaps listening to the radio to music that James dialed up. Which shows you I hadn’t thought it through: in the car I couldn’t see James or his hair and eyes that matched the passing scenery. That they matched is something I know now; I might not have realized it then. He sat in the backseat and had rolled down the back window; every now and then he’d say something I couldn’t hear (my window was rolled down, too), and I’d turn my head and, at the same time, by accident, the wheel; the car would swerve. “LATER!” James would yell as I straightened the car and blushed at the cars that honked at us. We did this three times.
“I have four left wheels,” I said to James, but he couldn’t hear me.
We drove up to the church early. It took James a while to disentangle himself from the Nash. It seemed obvious to enter from the front, but how to exit was less clear.
“Here we are,” I said.
“Good Luck Cottages,” said James. “We passed those a while back.”
“I saw them. Run-down places. Probably Luck is the only good thing they can promise.”
When I’d heard the service would be in a Catholic church, I’d imagined something like Our Lady’s, which was down the street from my girlhood home. I’d snuck inside one afternoon; it was as spindly and impossible and arched as a split pepper. Even though all eyes in the paintings looked away from me — they were trained toward Jesus, or up toward God — I’d felt accused and frightened.