Mike only had a motorcycle, but he’d borrowed a car from a friend. He drove slowly to make it last, kept looking at Sils, who sat next to him in the front seat, kept asking her questions like “How’d you get so beautiful?” To which she’d say, “Give me a break,” and then laugh. I sat wordlessly in the back, looking out the window, watching the night trees and the darkened houses float by like boats.
Mike pulled down to the end of her street, right up into the entrance to the cemetery, and I got out and waited. I walked away from the car, to let them kiss. I had a lot of patience, I felt, for certain kinds of things. I hopped the low fence and roamed around the edge of the cemetery a little, but when I looked back, they were still in the car, kissing, so I walked farther out. I looked for little Estherina Foster’s grave, and then sat there with her in the dark. I listened for a voice that might be hers, some whisper or peep, but there was nothing. I fiddled with a long-stemmed plastic rose that had gotten mashed there in the dirt. I brushed the mud off it, and bounced it around, tracing words in the air — my name, Sils’s name, Estherina’s name. I couldn’t think of other names. I wrote Happy Birthday, Fuck You, and Peace. Then I tossed the flower away, into the shadows. How silent the world was at night, the unbudded trees etched eerily into the sky, the branches reaching as if for something to hold and eat — perhaps the dead and candied stars! The ground was cold, thatched with leaves; the nearby swamp had begun unthawing its sewagey smells. In the moonlight the sky seemed wild, bright, and marbled like the sea. People alone, trapped, country people, all looked at the sky, I knew. It was the way out somehow, that sky, but it was also the steady, changeless witness to the after and before of one’s decisions — it witnessed all the deaths that took people away to other worlds — and so people had a tendency to talk to it. I turned away, sitting there, hugging my legs, pulling my jacket close. I plucked my earrings off and stuck them in my pocket, the cool air strangely still and mushroomy. I wondered whether I would ever be in love with a boy. Would I? Why not? Why not? Right then and there I vowed and dared and bet that sky and the trees — I swore on Estherina Foster’s grave — that I would. But it wouldn’t be a boy like Mike. Nobody like that. It would be a boy very far away — and I would go there someday and find him. He would just be there. And I would love him. And he would love me. And we would simply be there together, loving like that, in that place, wherever it was. I had a whole life ahead. I had patience and faith and a headful of songs.
“Where’ve you been?” asked Sils. She and Mike were now out of the car but leaning against it sexily.
“For a walk.”
Mike turned toward Sils. “I should get this car back.”
“Bye,” she said.
He kissed her again, in front of me. “I’ll phone you tomorrow,” he said. He got in the car and did a three-point turn — I’d been learning those at school, in Driver’s Ed — and then he zoomed away.
In the kitchen we fixed a quick, late-night breakfast: saltines and hot chocolate made from Bosco. We dipped the crackers in the hot chocolate and let them get soggy and float there, like gunk in a pond.
“Once in third grade,” said Sils, “I didn’t want to go to school, so I chewed up a bunch of saltines, kept them in my mouth and went upstairs, groaning, and spat them at my mother’s feet.”
“So attractive!” I said, and we giggled in an exhausted way.
“It worked.” She was dreamy-eyed, drowning the crackers in her cup with a spoon.
“Ingenious,” I said. I hoped she would glance up from her drink, look at me, say more. But she didn’t.
Later, sprawled on top of the covers on her bed, which was a mattress on the floor of her room, Sils let out a long, satisfied sigh. At the foot, in the dim light of the little lamp she kept on when I was there, I lay curled in a sleeping bag and looked at her, beginning with her toes: the rubbery blue nexus of veins on top of her feet, the tendons splayed like the bones of a fan, the discolored sheen of the nails shimmery and vague as mother-of-pearl. The nuts and bolts of her were always interesting. She saw me looking.
“You’ve got wild toes,” I said.
She yanked one foot toward her chest. “Did I ever show you these?”
“What?”
She examined her foot studiously. “In my toenails you can see Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin.”
“What are you talking about?” I pushed deeper into the sleeping bag and pretended to laugh at her.
“I’m serious,” she said. “You can see their faces.” She lowered her foot. “I’ll show you tomorrow.” She sighed again, thinking of Mike, I was sure. “Thanks, Berie,” she said.
“For what?”
“For whatever.” Then she fell completely to sleep, and in the low light for a while I watched my own shadow against the wall, a lumpy mountain range thrusting up peaks and crashing them again to avalanche and rubble, in a long, long restlessness that finally preceded sleep.
Often when I went over to Sils’s house, she would have the side door unlocked and a salad or a cottage cheese sandwich waiting for me on the kitchen counter. A salad! A cottage cheese sandwich! How odd in memory to conjure it, the dressed cucumbers and celery assembled as if by a wife for her husband; or the sandwich, sweet and sloppy with mayonnaise. I would take it, eat it, then go upstairs to her room and sit next to her, strum the guitar with her, singing harmony to folk songs like “Geordie” or “The Water Is Wide I Cannot Get O’er,” feeling myself a goner in the minor-seven chords, their sad irresolution stirring in me something lost and heartbroken, though how could that be, I was only fifteen. Still, something deeply sad had been born buried in me, stirring occasionally inside like a creature moving in sleep. Often I found myself concentrating on the frog painting, entering it with my eye, as if it were perhaps a dreamy illustration from a real-life fairy tale, or a secret passageway into another secret passageway. A joke into a secret joke into a secret. When we were younger, Sils and I had always looked for caves together, or some small undiscovered duck pond with ducks. We’d go to the Grand Union and cheer on the lobsters who had managed to break free of their rubber bands. We’d build a half-tent out of three open umbrellas and we’d get underneath it and play cards. We’d walk miles to the county dump to see the bears. By the time we were twelve, we’d bike to the head shop and buy wisteria incense. Or we’d go downtown to the Orpheum, say we were sixteen and see an R-rated movie, occasionally a foreign one, which would mesmerize and perplex us. We’d eat Junior Mints and popcorn — each candy a sweet pillow on the tongue; each popped corn as big and complicated as a catalpa bloom. On a dare we might even drink the blueberry punch, which was the color of Windex and shot up the sides of the Jet-Spray cooler like some wonder of nature; no one else in our town had ever drunk it. That’s what the man behind the counter always said. We would wash it down with water from the lobby fountain. Then we would sit in the dark, on the left, to watch the movie from an angle, eyes peeled for flesh. At thirteen, we would hang out at W. T. Grant’s, buying bras and ice-cream sundaes, and trying on men’s sweaters, the bottoms of which, when we wore them at school, stretched out shapelessly, the hem warped and hanging around by our knees: that was the look we wanted. At fourteen, we would claim to be sleeping over at each other’s house, and then we’d stay out all night, go to the railroad tracks, and from old mayonnaise jars drink liquor collected from our parents’ own supply. Then we’d sleep in the family station wagon in the driveway, wake early, get donuts at Donna’s Donuts at dawn when both the raised and glazed ones were still warm.