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He kissed her. “Because I’m a gentleman. I can’t trust myself to be one too much longer.”
“Maybe I don’t want you to trust yourself,” she said boldly, letting her hormones do the talking.
“Oh, Lena.” He sounded as though he were partly underwater. He wasn’t looking at her as though he wanted to go anywhere.
He kissed her more and then broke away. “There are a few things I want to do with you very badly.”
She nodded.
“You haven’t done … these things before, have you?” he asked.
She shook her head. Suddenly she was worried he thought she was inept.
“All the more reason,” he said. “We have to be slow. Make it count.”
She was touched by his honor. She knew he was right. “I want to do those things too. Sometime.”
He held her and squeezed her so hard she had to stifle a shout. “We have time. We’ll do all of those things millions of times, and I will be the happiest person in the world.”
They kissed and kissed more until finally she had to let him go. She wanted to gobble up her whole future in this one night.
“I have to leave tomorrow morning,” he told her.
Her eyes instantly filled with tears.
“I’ll come back, though. Don’t worry. How could I stay away? I’ll come back next weekend. Would that be all right?”
“I don’t know if I can wait,” she said, her throat aching.
He smiled and held her for one last minute. “Any place at any time. If you are thinking of me, you can be sure that I am thinking of you.”
Billy practically accosted Bridget on her way to the hardware store, where she was going to buy parts to fix Greta’s refrigerator door. She was now paying her seventy-five dollars a week to Greta and was busy vanquishing every disobedient thing on the property—the weeds in the lawn, the wobbly coffee table, the peeling paint at the back of the house. Bridget was in her running clothes, her hair was stuffed into a scarf, and her mood was giddy because she’d been thinking about Lena.
“You didn’t come to practice on Thursday,” he said.
Bridget just stared at him. “And?”
“Usually you come.”
“I do have one or two other things to think about,” she said.
Billy looked offended. “Like what?”
She prepared to look offended right back, but then he laughed. His laugh was just as choky and full as it had been when he was seven. She loved the sound of it. She laughed too.
“Hey, can I buy you a milk shake or something?” he asked her.
He wasn’t flirting, but he was genuinely friendly. “Okay.”
They crossed the street and sat down at an outside table in the shade. He ordered a mint-chip shake and she got a lemonade.
“You know what?”
“What?” she asked.
“You look familiar.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. Where are you from?”
“Washington, D.C.,” she answered.
“Why’d you come all the way down here?”
“I used to come here when I was a little kid,” she explained, wanting him to ask more.
But he didn’t ask more. He didn’t even listen to the last part of what she said, because at that moment, two girls stopped by on their way down the sidewalk. One was a busty brunette and the other a small blonde wearing very small, very low pants. Bridget recognized the girls from the soccer field. They smiled and flirted with Billy while Bridget retied her shoes.
“Sorry about that,” Billy said when they were gone. “I had a crush on that girl for a year.”
Bridget felt sad. She remembered when she herself had been the girl boys had crushes on, not the one they talked to about them. “Which one?” she asked.
“Lisa, the blonde,” he said. “I’m a sucker for blondes,” he added.
Instinctively she touched her skunky hair packed in its bandana. The drinks came.
“So how do you know so much about soccer?” he asked.
“I used to play,” she said. She held the straw between her teeth.
“Were you any good?” he asked.
“I was all right,” she said around the straw.
He nodded. “You’ll be at the game Saturday, right?”
She shrugged, just to punish him.
“You gotta be there!” He looked worried. “The whole team will freak if you’re not there!”
She smiled, enjoying herself. He didn’t have a crush on her, but this wasn’t so bad. “Oh, all right.”
“Krista’s taking her mom to brunch at Roxie’s,” Carmen explained to her mother over toaster waffles. Both Al and Lydia had arrived the evening before to make peace with Krista and take her home.
Christina smiled. It was a ghost of a smile, really, but downright mirthful compared to her expression of the last few weeks. Roxie’s, notable for its clientele of drag queens, stood at the edge of Adams Morgan. Krista had heard about it from Tibby with wide, fascinated eyes. Carmen was actually pretty pleased with her protégée. Krista was going down, but not without a fight.
“Al too?”
“No, it’s a mother-daughter day. Krista’s going home with them tomorrow.”
Her mother nodded thoughtfully. “I like Krista.”
“She’s sweet. She’s all right.” Carmen tore off half a waffle and stuffed it in her mouth. “Are you coming tonight?” she asked after she’d chewed and swallowed.
Her mother’s face settled back into its look of distant forbearance. “I guess I am.”
As every couple had an identity in marriage, they also had one in divorce. Carmen’s parents practiced “amicable divorce.” This meant that when Al and Lydia arranged to have dinner at a restaurant with Carmen, Al was bound to invite Christina to come along to meet his newer-model wife, and Christina was bound to accept.
“You okay about meeting Lydia?”
Christina considered this, sucking on her empty fork. “Yes.”
“Yes?” Her mother was stoic. Her mother was brave. Carmen was maybe adopted.
Christina looked like she was about to say more, but she stopped herself. “Yes.”
These weeks, they stayed on the surface together. Carmen wanted a million things from her mother, but she was afraid to press. She deserved nothing.
She had certainly eaten and slept, although she couldn’t remember exactly what or when.
Tibby had lost track of time and space and even going to the bathroom. There was a lot of video to go through, especially after she had called Mrs. Graffman and asked for a few tapes from their collection. She needed to be absolutely scrupulous about saving all her original material, and every stage of her edit took deep concentration.
In the course of her work, she’d discovered pretty quickly that the stuff she’d shot for her actual documentary last summer was worthless. The beautiful things were hanging around the edges. They were the outtakes and the overhangs—Bailey setting up shots or breaking them down, Bailey’s careful tinkering with the boom.
Tibby also loved the parts when Bailey’s eye was behind the camera. Bailey had a remarkably patient style. Unlike Tibby, she wasn’t in a hurry to muscle everything into the shape of a story. She didn’t goad her subjects into saying what she wanted them to say.
The one part that Tibby had purposely filmed that was any good was her interview with Bailey. Bailey sat in the chair by the window, as luminous as an angel, the Traveling Pants bagging at her feet. There was even a shot of lumpy, sleeping Mimi in the mix. Tibby was mesmerized by Bailey’s brave, straight-on face, her peeking-out soul, no matter how many times she watched.
Today she was working on the soundtrack. It was easy, really, because she was just going to play Beethoven straight through. But as she listened, the music wasn’t having exactly the effect she wanted.
She put her head back. She was dizzy. She’d been u
p for a lot of hours. The end-of-summer festival was less than four days away.
The quality she loved about the music involved Brian whistling to it. Somehow, in her sleep-deprived mania, this struck her as art. It wasn’t Kafka and explosions at Pizza Hut. It was the rise and fall of Brian’s whistle.
He made the world to be a grassy road Before her wandering feet.
—W. B. Yeats
It had been a summer of awkward meals. Carmen sat between Lydia and Krista. Christina sat between Al and Paul.
Carmen so dreaded the long, miserable silences they were sure to endure, she’d actually prepared a few topics for discussion:
Summer movies
Sequels-a good idea or inherently problematic?
Popcorn-what exactly is that buttery mess? (Make room for Christina to cite stunning calorie facts.)
Sunscreen (Throw a bone to the mothers.)
SPF-what’s it all really mean?
Worst sunburn ever? (Appear to leave up for grabs. Let Al win with oft-told story of sailing in the Bahamas.)
Ozone. (Allow all to be in agreement over liking it. Not liking holes in it.)
Air travel-has it gotten worse? (Allow adults to go on and on as needed.)
(If situation grows desperate.) Israel/Palestine.
But strangely, the paper stayed in her pocket. She listened quietly as the conversation made its own brave start: Lydia described Roxie’s and surprised Carmen by being able to laugh about it. Lydia laughing made Christina laugh too. It was a small and rosy miracle.
Then Krista told about getting lost for three hours and twenty-two minutes on the D.C. subway. That immediately launched Al into a long, educational summary of the various colors and lines and junctions of the Washington, D.C., mass transit system. He even whipped out his map for illustration.
Then somehow or other, that led to the story of how Al and Christina got lost the night they brought brand-new baby Carmen home from the hospital. Carmen knew the story well, and she usually hated hearing it because the punch lines were always Carmen crying or Carmen spitting up. But tonight she listened raptly as her parents traded back and forth narrating the different parts of the story, being funny and amicable. Lydia laughed and winced appreciatively. Al held Lydia’s hand on top of the table, to let her know it was okay, he loved her better now.
