Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking Page 5

  One night when I was drawing he came into the kitchen and stood squinting at me in the bright lamplight. “Haven’t you had that nightgown an awfully long time?” he said.

  “I guess so,” I said, pulling my feet under it, though I wasn’t cold. In fact I’d had it nearly ten years; the hem, which had once touched the floor, was almost as high as my knees. It was one of the softest things I owned. I’d had to rip open the collar to make it bigger, so it wouldn’t strangle me when I twisted around in the middle of the night, and the arms hung open at the elbows. I lifted the sketch pad to my chest and I saw his eyes drop quickly to the floor.

  “Julie’s always saying I should go clothes shopping,” I said.

  “Well, you ought to, then,” he said abruptly, turning away.

  I looked after him, watching his slippers go up the stairs, and then back at the hand I had begun to draw, nothing now but a meaningless shaded line. When had I grown too big for my nightgown? I went to the bathroom to look at myself in the mirror. My long legs stuck out of the bottom of my nightgown like an oversize doll’s, my breasts showed beneath the tear at the neck.

  At the end of the summer I decided to visit Mr. Blackwell and show him the drawings I’d done. I left the dory at the dock and went down the road to his neat house. His curtains were drawn, and all I could see from the road was the position of the dishwashing soap, like the silhouette of a woman, behind the kitchen curtains. The house next door had a mattress leaning against the side of it, and I thought about how he would have preferred that they took it away. He had lined his small wooden porch with flower boxes, full of pink and blue primrose, totally unlike the tall lilies he’d planted in front of our porch.

  I knocked, but his truck was gone, and it was obvious he was still at work. I stood there, not sure what I was going to say to him anyway. The flowers and strange shadowy hands and fists inside my sketchbook were not the sort of thing we’d ever talked about. He’d know all the flowers, of course, the Indian names and the English ones; he’d even know my hands. He probably knew how tall I’d grown, and even that my father had been drinking again, and that I’d gone ahead making him supper as if nothing had happened. I turned away, ashamed. Maybe he didn’t want to see things like my drawings. It would probably bother him anyway that I’d been staring at things so long.

  Julie and Donna were applying to college, and I’d told them as soon as the year began that I wasn’t going to. Julie’s father gave them his car to drive to Bangor twice a week for a course to improve their scores on the admissions tests. I knew Mr. Blackwell would have wanted me to apply, and might have kept track of things like tests, but my father didn’t know about them and it was easy enough for me not to bring him the mail from school.

  A few weeks into the year a boy from our class, Eric Holmes, had a party and Julie and Donna insisted I go. We all went over to Julie’s house the afternoon of the party and they cut my hair up to my shoulders and dressed me up in one of Julie’s dresses. Julie drove us over there and I was giddy with my new hair and my strange outfit, and happy to be included. For the first few hours neither of them seemed to mind my following them around, but soon they both disappeared purposely into the shadowy light of the bonfire, where Ted, the older boy Julie was dating, was passing around a joint. Eric Holmes appeared by my side and asked me if I was feeling alright. We ended up walking out onto the pier together, and he told me my hair looked pretty. He said he could see me going across the channel every morning from his house. Finally he kissed me, and I kissed him back.

  I didn’t mind it, and was just beginning to get used to his tongue when he leaned back and asked me softly what it was like not having a mother, as if he were asking to undo my bra.

  “I don’t know,” I said, confused. “What’s it like not being a girl?”

  “No, really,” he said, laughing.

  I looked at him. “I have a father,” I said.

  “I’m just asking,” he said, trying to get his soft voice back.

  I moved to go. He looked disappointed, but I saw him glance over at the beach, where a few people had begun to cluster around the bonfire, before he asked me where I was going. I heard Julie laugh, saw her profile in the firelight as someone offered her the joint. I left him there and walked back toward the house.

  Rebecca Hemmings was crying on the porch. She peered at me, her makeup streaked down her face, hardly recognizable. She’d done something to her hair; it hung around her face in strange separated curls. I sat down beside her, thinking how ridiculous we both looked, hoping to be transformed by the one social event we had decided not to resist.

  “What are you doing?” she sniffed.

  “I don’t know.” I pulled the dress Julie had given me over my knees. “I wish I’d never come.”

  “Why don’t you go home?” Rebecca dabbed at her eyes with the bottom of her skirt.

  “I was going to wait for Julie.” I looked down at the beach, sighing, but feeling braver next to Rebecca’s despair. “But maybe I’ll walk.”

  “I should go with you,” Rebecca said, as if she were punishing herself.

  A wave of laughter rose from the crowded bonfire. No one was left inside the house, and the music blared across the lawn toward the dark bay.

  Rebecca stood up. “Let’s go,” she said.

  Her skirt, I noticed as we headed for the driveway, had ruffles on the bottom, and they matched the ruffles at her shoulders—the whole outfit was pale blue, almost white. She was walking as if she was tired of wearing it.

  “You look nice,” I said.

  “Thanks.” She stopped when we got to the paved road to take off her sandals, and in bare feet her stride matched mine. She’d been on the track team; I’d seen her once in a uniform after school, getting picked up by her mother.

  “I saw your drawing,” she said, “that they put up in the library.”

  I felt her eyes on me. We got out of the way of a car that came from the party, and the headlights blazed on her skirt. Someone hollered something out the window at us as the car screeched down the road.

  “Are you applying to college?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, watching the taillights wink out down the road. The darkness pressed on my skin in a comforting way. I could still hear the noise of the party behind us, but the trees lining the road were dark and indifferent. Great Neck was where the summer people lived, and the houses twinkled at the ends of their long driveways, nearly out of sight.

  “I want to go to MIT,” she said when I didn’t ask. She swung her sandals wide, as if she was cheering herself up. “Julie’s applying, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, remembering now how Rebecca had been good at math, better than most of the boys.

  Suddenly she stopped and grabbed my arm. “What’s that?” she whispered.

  Her hand felt warm, almost hot, against my cool skin; she kept it there, holding tight. “A fox,” I said. It stopped, perfectly still, to look at the two of us, its ears perked up high, its eyes glistening. The white of its chest flashed as it started for the woods with an easy skulk, leaving us, standing as still as it had been, to watch it go.

  “Is it dangerous?” Rebecca asked.

  “No,” I said, as she let go of my arm, wondering what she would have done if I’d said yes. But then the fox had seemed so dignified, so coolly indifferent—she would have known, I thought, that I was lying. Her skirt glowed in the dark and I watched it moving as she walked, her broad feet now unsure on the pavement. It seemed like she was staying closer; it was exciting, this feeling that I knew more than she did. I felt glad for all the foxes out there hunting, and found myself hoping that another one might skulk across our path. At one point an owl hooted loudly from the woods and I looked at Rebecca expectantly, but she didn’t notice; she sniffed again and I remembered how she had been crying before.

  “Were you kissing Eric Holmes on the dock?” she asked.

  “No,” I lied.

  She kept her eyes straight ahead. I
’d known I was going to kiss him as soon as we’d walked toward the pier; there wasn’t much else to do.

  “It’s okay if you were,” Rebecca said, her eyes liquidy, tucking one of her strange curls behind her ear. “He kissed Julie last weekend.”

  “Julie Peabody?” My voice sounded loud and sharp.

  Rebecca tucked the curl behind her ear again. “I bet she never told Ted.”

  Eric Holmes? I thought indignantly. He wasn’t even handsome. “Are you sure?” I said.

  Rebecca nodded, staring gloomily. I was beginning to feel foolish for having suggested that we walk; we were still miles from town, and it would probably be light by the time we got there.

  “Maybe we should try to get a ride,” I said, “from the next car that goes by.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  I looked over at her. “Do you think I should apply to college?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, surprised. “My dad said he’d pay for it if they don’t give me a big enough scholarship. My brother probably won’t go, though. He hates school.”

  “So do I,” I said.

  She looked at me. “Why?”

  I shrugged. “I like being alone,” I said, though I had managed to be alone plenty in school. In fact I didn’t like school because it was difficult; I wasn’t good at it, though my father thought I was better than everybody else. I didn’t like to study for tests, and I never did well at math. I knew I’d do terribly on the college admissions test, and he would only be disappointed.

  “Are there any bears out here?” she finally said.

  “Not any who would be interested in us,” I answered. I heard another owl. “That’s an owl,” I said.

  “I know that.” She glanced at me and I caught a hint of a smile.

  I took a deep breath. I could smell the sun that had been lying in the woods all day, drifting up through the cool air. It hadn’t been that exciting, pressing my lips against Eric Holmes’s, but I was glad I’d done it. Rebecca Hemmings was quiet. I wanted to reach out and touch her arm like she had touched mine, but I was one step away. I moved to catch up and a pair of headlights struck us from down the road.

  Julie stopped her mother’s station wagon beside us and put her head out the window like a train conductor. “You guys need a ride?” she yelled drunkenly.

  “Who is it?” I heard Donna asking from the back. Rebecca had stopped in the shadows, just behind me. I could see Eric Holmes in the passenger seat shoving at the boy next to him.

  “Quit it,” Julie said to him, giggling.

  Rebecca stood rigidly, one arm at her side, the other across her chest, and stared at Eric through the window. She had wiped away the streaks of mascara on her cheeks, but the black around her eyes and her strange hairdo made her look spooked.

  “Do you want to go?” I asked her.

  She tore her eyes away from the car just long enough to give me an impatient look, as if my hesitation might have already lost us the offer.

  “You coming?” Julie said, turning her attention back to me.

  “Rebecca is,” I said.

  “Get in front!” the boy sitting next to Eric Holmes yelled.

  Rebecca started around the front of the car without even looking back at me, her eyes shining, one arm still awkwardly pressed to her side.

  “We can fit you both,” Julie said, distracted, as someone squealed in the back.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “It’s nice out here.” I leaned down to wave at Rebecca, sliding in next to the two boys. “See you,” I said. But Rebecca was busy with her skirt and the door.

  “See you,” Julie said merrily.

  A few other cars honked as they went by, after she drove off, and I gave them a hearty wave so they could see that I was enjoying myself. I already felt my new sandals giving me blisters; I took them off and tried to go a little faster. There was almost no moon, but the sky had lightened a little between the trees above the road. I heard another owl, and hooted back in response, the way Mr. Blackwell had once taught me, but there was no answer. “That’s an owl,” I pictured myself saying, and shame filled me doubly, so that suddenly I had the urge to run. I didn’t stop until I got to the edge of town, where there was a path down through the woods to the dock, and I could go back to pretending my father was waiting up for me at home.

  8

  The day of the college admissions test it was raining, and I put on my boots and foul-weather gear and drove across the water to take the bus from school. The dock was practically empty—it was late in the season for fishing, and the few boats that were there were gloomy and still. I walked up onto the road with my hood on, watching my rubber boots on the pavement, and then instead of going directly up the hill toward school I took a path through the woods. It was muddy but I thought I might see a deer; I had seen a doe on my way through a few days before. The trunks of the trees were wet, the thick roots uneven under my feet. The rain let up as I was walking, and I stopped and looked around. I stood there listening to the heavy drops left over, falling one by one from where they had collected in the leaves. I stayed perfectly still. Sometimes I could hear only the drops and sometimes I could hear a car on the road and I would think it was the bus going by. I would try not to listen.

  When at last I made my way back out I knew the bus was gone. Things in the town were more awake, I heard other cars. I went across the road and made my way down along the shore, where it was still too foggy to see more than a few feet out into the water. I wasn’t walking toward McMann’s and hadn’t meant to go there, but it was low tide, and I came around the point before I knew it, stepping from rock to rock and coming around through the brush where I needed to, until I saw it, suspended out over the pier.

  McMann’s was too far out on the road between Yvesport and Pleasant Point for anyone from town to go there much. It didn’t have food, but I’d heard it was busy year-round with the truckers who drove in from Canada and the sailors and crews from the container ships. When I opened the door I was too afraid to look around; I went straight in and took a stool at the bar, hanging my jacket over the stool beside me. Two old men with beers were hunched at the other end of the bar, watching a game show on television. The bartender, a woman, was watching with them, and she turned around and came reluctantly toward me.

  “Coffee?” she said. She wasn’t much older than I, but she seemed to feel she was. I felt conscious suddenly of the thick wool cardigan I had worn for the test, my big rubber boots over my jeans. I wished at least I had taken my hair out of the braid it had been glued into by the rain.

  I cleared my throat. “Do you have any whiskey?” I asked, unable to make my voice sound anything but polite.

  She glanced up at me, and for an instant I thought she might refuse, but she turned away to reach for a glass. “On the rocks?” she said coolly.

  She put a few cubes in the glass with her bare hand and poured the whiskey on top. She had a tattoo on one arm—a heart with something in it—that showed beneath her shirt sleeve. “Four dollars,” she said without a smile when she put the drink in front of me. She was wearing dark eyeliner, which made her face look even skinnier than it was. Her hair was black and pulled into a stringy ponytail. She had two silver hoops in one of her ears, and her T-shirt was tucked into a wide belt with a large silver buckle studded with turquoise—the kind they sold at the Wampanoag Trading Post, where they had the stuffed moose.

  She went back to watching the television and I took a sip of my drink. It gave me a strange warm shiver. I recognized one of the old men, Bobby Newlin, whose wife had died three winters ago. They were watching a game show on television, where the contestants tried to spell a phrase on a big board. I got it when they put the R’s up with the E’s: ALTERNATIVE ROUTES. I tried to think when I’d gotten so afraid of tests; when I’d first started school they had been easy, and I’d thought my father was right that I was better at them than the other kids. I took a bigger sip of my drink, felt my stomach turn and then settle.


  Bobby Newlin left and the man who stayed behind ordered a beer. The bartender gave it to him and then went over to the pool table to have a cigarette, pacing a little. I couldn’t tell if she was bored or anxious. It was strange I’d never seen her before. I would have remembered her, I thought—she was the kind of girl who didn’t make friends easily. She was pretty in a fierce sort of way, like she was angry. I wanted to talk to her. I had tried to go slow on my drink but it was finished.

  Two more men came in, crew from the port with the name of a shipping company across the backs of their jackets. “Busy today?” one of them said, joking, as they dumped their jackets in a familiar way onto a chair near the pool table.

  She smiled, making her way back behind the bar with her lit cigarette. They glanced at me, leaned on the bar with their heavy arms, took in the bartender, and then took their beers over to the pool table.

  I wanted another drink. Before I could say anything the bartender came around to sit on one of the bar stools and watch the men play, pulling an ashtray close. I didn’t want to leave my stool and let any of them see my rubber boots—which, it occurred to me, were a ridiculous thing to wear, even to a test. I took a sip of the melted ice water, realizing I was thirsty, and watched as the two men prepared for their game, putting the shiny pool balls onto the felt, rubbing blue chalk on the ends of their cues.

  One of them had his head closely shaved and the other was wearing a baseball cap. They didn’t talk to each other, but they were comfortable together, like brothers—or maybe, I thought, like all men are when they have something to concentrate on, like my father and Mr. Blackwell, cooking. One of them broke the triangle of tightly packed balls with a loud crack and they both patrolled the table, considering their next moves.

  The bartender sighed. “You need another?” she said, turning to me. When I nodded she got reluctantly to her feet. “I’m supposed to be done with my shift now,” she said to no one in particular.