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Kylie's aunt Gillian has been sharing her bedroom for the past two weeks, which is how Kylie knows that Gillian sleeps like a little girl, hidden under a heavy quilt even though the temperature has been in the nineties ever since she arrived, as if she's brought some of the Southwest she loves so well along with her in the trunk of her car. They've fixed the place the way two roommates would, everything right down the middle, except that Gillian needs extra closet space and she's asked Kylie to do a tiny bit of redecoration. The black baby blanket that has always been kept at the foot of Kylie's bed is now folded and stored in a box down in the basement, along with the chessboard that Gillian said occupied way too much space. The black soap the aunts send as a present every year has been taken out of the soapdish and has been replaced with a bar of clear, rose-scented soap from France.
Gillian has very particular likes and dislikes and an opinion about everything. She sleeps a lot, she borrows things without asking, and she makes great brownies with M&M's stirred into the batter. She's beautiful and she laughs about a thousand times more than Kylie's mother does, and Kylie wants to be exactly like her. She follows Gillian around and studies her and is thinking of chopping off all her hair, if she has the guts, that is. Were Kylie to be granted a single wish, it would be to wake and discover that her mouse-brown hair has miraculously become the same glorious blond that Gillian is lucky enough to have, like hay left out in the sun or pieces of gold.
What makes Gillian even more wonderful is that she and Antonia don't get along. Given time enough, they may grow to despise each other. Last week, Gillian borrowed Antonia's short black skirt to wear to the Fourth of July block party, spilled a Diet Coke on it accidentally, then told Antonia she was intolerant when she dared to complain. Now Antonia has asked their mother if she can put a lock on her closet door. She has informed Kylie that their aunt is a nothing, a loser, a pathetic creature.
Gillian has taken a job at the Hamburger Shack on the Turnpike, where all the teenage boys have fallen madly in love with her, ordering cheeseburgers they don't want and gallons of ginger ale and Coke just to be near her.
"Work is what people have to do in order to have the bucks to party," Gillian announced last night, an attitude that has already hindered her plan of heading out to California, since she is drawn to shopping malls—shoe stores in particular tend to call out to her—and can't seem to save a cent.
That evening they were having hot dogs made out of tofu and some sort of bean that is supposed to be good for you, even though it tastes, in Kylie's opinion, like the tires of a truck. Sally refuses to have meat, fish, or fowl at their table in spite of her daughters' complaints. She has to close her eyes when she walks past the packaged chicken legs in the market, and still she's always reminded of the dove the aunts used for their most serious love charm.
"Tell that to a brain surgeon," Sally had responded to her sister's remark about the limited worth of work. "Tell that to a nuclear physicist or a poet."
"Okay." Gillian was still smoking, although she made new plans to quit every morning, and was well aware that the smoke drove everyone but Kylie crazy. She puffed quickly, as though that would lessen anyone's distaste. "Go on and find me a poet or a physicist. Are there any in this neighborhood?"
Kylie was pleased by this putdown of their formless suburb, a place with no beginning and no end, but with plenty of gossips. Everyone is always giving her friend Gideon a hard time, even more so now that he's shaved his head. He said he didn't give a damn and insisted that most of their neighbors had minds as small as weasels', but lately he got flustered when anyone spoke to him directly, and when they walked alongside the Turnpike and a car horn honked he sometimes jumped, as though somehow he'd been insulted.
People were looking to talk, for any reason. Anything different or slightly unusual would do. Already, most people on their street had discussed the fact that Gillian did not wear the top half of her bathing suit when she sunbathed in the backyard. They all knew exactly what the tattoo on her wrist looked like, and that she'd had at least a six-pack at the block party—maybe even more—and then had gone and turned Ed Borelli down flat when he asked her out, even though he was the vice-principal and her sister's boss as well. The Owenses' neighbor Linda Bennett refused to have the optometrist she was dating come to her house to collect her before darkness fell, that's how nervous she was about having someone who looked like Gillian living right next door. Everyone agreed that Sally's sister was confusing. There were times when you'd meet her at the grocery, and she'd insist you come on over and let her play around with her tarot cards for you, and other times when you'd say hello to her on the street only to have her look right through you, as if she were a million miles away, say in a place like Tucson, where life was a lot more interesting.
As far as Kylie was concerned, Gillian had the ability to make any place interesting; even a dump like their block could look sparkly in the right kind of light. The lilacs had gone absolutely wild since Gillian's arrival, as though paying homage to her beauty and her grace, and had spilled out from the backyard into the front, a purple bower hanging over the fence and the driveway. Lilacs were not supposed to bloom in July, that was a simple botanical fact, at least it had been until now. Girls in the neighborhood had begun to whisper that if you kissed the boy you loved beneath the Owenses' lilacs he'd be yours forever, whether he wanted to be or not. The State University, in Stony Brook, had sent two botanists to study the bud formations of these amazing plants going mad out of season, growing taller and more lush with every passing hour. Sally had refused to let the botanists into the yard; she had sprayed them with the garden hose to make them go away, but occasionally the scientists would park across from the driveway, mooning over the specimens they couldn't get to, debating whether it was ethical to run across the lawn with some gardening shears and take whatever they wanted.
Somehow, the lilacs have affected everyone. Late last night, Kylie woke and heard crying. She got out of bed and went to her window. There, beside the lilacs, was her aunt Gillian, in tears. Kylie watched for a while, until Gillian wiped her eyes dry and took a cigarette out of her pocket. As she crept back to bed, Kylie felt certain that someday she, too, would be crying in a garden at midnight, unlike her mother, who was always in bed by eleven and who didn't seem to have anything in her life that was even worth crying about. Kylie wondered if her mother had ever cried for their father, or if perhaps the moment of his death was when she'd lost the ability to weep.
Out in the yard, night after night, Gillian was still crying over Jimmy. She just couldn't seem to stop herself, even now. She, who had vowed never to let passion control her, had been hooked but good. She'd been trying to muster the courage and the nerve to walk out the door for so long, almost this whole year. She had written Jimmy's name on a piece of paper and burned it on the first Friday of every month when there was a quarter moon, to try to rid herself of her desire for him. But that didn't help her to stop wanting him. After more than twenty years of flirtations and fucking around and refusing to ever commit, she had to go and fall in love with someone like him, someone so bad that on the day they moved their furniture into their rented house in Tucson, the mice had all fled, because even the field mice had more sense than she did.
Now that he's dead, Jimmy seems much sweeter. Gillian keeps remembering how scorching his kisses were, and the memory alone can turn her inside out. He could burn her up alive; he could do it in a minute flat, and that's not easy to forget. She's been hoping that the damn lilacs will stop blooming, because the scent filters through the house and all along the block, and sometimes she swears she can even smell it at the Hamburger Shack, a good half-mile down the Turnpike. People in the neighborhood are all excited about the lilacs—there's already been a photograph on the front page of Newsday— but the cloying smell is driving Gillian nuts. It's getting into her clothes and her hair, and maybe that's why she's been smoking so much, to replace that lilac scent with one that's dirtier and more filled with fire.
She can't stop thinking about how Jimmy used to keep his eyes open when he kissed her—it shocked her to realize he was watching her. A man who doesn't close his eyes, even for a kiss, is a man who wants to keep control at all times. Jimmy's eyes had cold little flecks in the center, and each time she kissed him Gillian wondered if what she was doing wasn't a little like making a pact with the devil. That's what it felt like sometimes, especially when she'd see a woman who could be herself out in public without fearing that her husband or boyfriend would snap at her. "I told you not to park there," some woman would say to her husband outside a movie theater or a flea market, and those words would move Gillian to tears. How wonderful to say whatever you wanted without having to go over it in your mind, again and again, to make certain it wouldn't set him off.
She'll give herself credit for fighting the best battle she could against what she simply couldn't defeat on her own. She tried everything to stop Jimmy from drinking, the old cures as well as the new. Owl eggs, scrambled and disguised with Tabasco sauce and hot pepper as huevos rancheros. Garlic left under his pillow. A paste of sunflower seeds in his cereal. Hiding the bottles, suggesting AA, daring to pick a fight with him, when she knew she couldn't win. She had even tried the aunts' particular favorite of waiting until he was good and plastered, then slipping a tiny live minnow into his bottle of bourbon. The fish's gills stopped dead the instant the poor thing hit the liquor, and Gillian had been racked with guilt about it, but Jimmy hadn't even noticed anything amiss. He drank that minnow in one big gulp, without even blinking, then was violently ill for the rest of the evening, although afterward his taste for alcohol seemed to have doubled. That was when she got the idea for the nightshade, which seemed such a modest plan at the time, just a little something to take the edge off and get him to sleep before he got good and drunk.
When she sits beside the lilacs at night, Gillian is trying to decide whether or not she feels as if she's committed murder. Well, she doesn't. There was no intent and no premeditation. If Gillian could take it all back, she would, although she'd change a few things while she was at it. She actually feels more friendly toward Jimmy than she has in ages; there's a closeness and a tenderness that sure weren't there before. She doesn't want to leave him all alone in the cold earth. She wants to be near and tell him about her day and hear the jokes he used to tell when he was in a good mood. He hated lawyers, since none had ever saved him from serving jail time, and he collected attorney jokes. He had a million of them, and nothing could stop him from telling one when he had a mind to. Just before they'd pulled into the rest area in New Jersey, Jimmy had asked her what was brown and black and looked good on a lawyer. "A rottweiler," he'd told her. He seemed so happy at that moment, as if he'd had his whole life ahead of him. "Think about it," he'd said. "You get it?"
Sometimes, when Gillian sits on the grass and closes her eyes, she could swear Jimmy is beside her. She can almost sense him reaching for her, the way he used to when he was drunk and mad and wanted to hit her or fuck her—she never quite knew which it would be until the very last moment. But as soon as he'd start to twist that silver ring on his finger, she knew she'd better watch out. When he feels too substantial out in the yard, and Gillian begins thinking about the way things used to be—really—Jimmy's presence doesn't feel friendly anymore. When that happens, Gillian runs inside and locks the back door and looks at the lilacs from behind the safety of the glass. He used to scare her pretty good; he used to make her do things she wouldn't even say aloud.
Truthfully, she's glad that she's been sharing a room with her niece; she's scared to sleep alone, so she's happy to make the trade-off of not having much privacy. This morning, for example, when Gillian opens her eyes, Kylie is already sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at her. It's only seven o'clock, and Gillian doesn't have to report to work until lunchtime. She groans and pulls the quilt over her head.
"I'm thirteen," Kylie says with surprise, as though she herself were mystified that this has happened to her. It's the one thing she's wanted her whole life long, and now she's actually got it.
Gillian immediately sits up in bed and hugs her niece. She remembers exactly what a surprise it was to grow up, how disturbing and thrilling it was, how all-of-a-sudden.
"I feel different," Kylie whispers.
"Of course you do," Gillian says. "You are."
Her niece has been confiding in her more and more, maybe because they share a room and can whisper to each other, late at night, after the lights are out. Gillian is touched by the way Kylie studies her, as though she were a textbook on how to be a woman. She can't remember anybody ever looking up to her before, and the experience is intoxicating and puzzling at the same time.
"Happy birthday," Gillian announces. "It will be the best one yet."
The scent of those damn lilacs has mixed in with the breakfast Sally is already cooking in the kitchen. But there's coffee, too, so Gillian crawls out of bed and gathers the clothes she left scattered on the floor last night. ,
"Wait till later," Gillian tells her niece. "When you get your present from me, you'll be completely transformed. One hundred and fifty percent. People will see you on the street and they'll flip."
In honor of Kylie's birthday, Sally has fixed pancakes and fresh orange juice and fruit salad topped with coconut and raisins. Earlier in the morning, before the birds were awake, she went out to the rear of the yard and cut some of the lilacs, which she's arranged in a crystal vase. The flowers seem to glow, as if each petal emitted a plum-colored ray of light. They're hypnotizing, if you look too long. Sally sat at the table staring at them, and before she knew it she had tears in her eyes and her first batch of pancakes had burned on the griddle.
Last night, Sally dreamed the ground beneath the lilacs turned red as blood, and the grass made a crying sound when the wind rose. She dreamed that the swans that haunt her on restless nights were pulling out their white feathers, one by one; they were building a nest large enough for a man. Sally awoke to find that her sheets were damp with sweat; her forehead felt as though it had been locked in a vise. But that was nothing compared to the night before, when she dreamed there was a dead man here at her table, and he wasn't pleased with what she'd served him for dinner, which was vegetarian lasagna. With one fierce breath he blew every dish off the table; in an instant there was broken china everywhere, a sharp and savage carpet, strewn across the floor.
She's been dreaming about Jimmy so much, seeing his cold, clear eyes, that sometimes she can't think of anything else. She's carrying this guy around with her, when she never even knew him in the first place, and it just doesn't seem fair. The awful thing is, her relationship with this dead man is deeper than anything she's had with any other man in the past ten years, and that's frightening.
This morning Sally isn't certain if she's shaky from her dreams of Jimmy, or if it's the coffee she's already had that's affecting her, or if it's simply because her baby has now turned thirteen. It may be the potency of all three factors combined. Well, thirteen is still young, it doesn't mean Kylie is all grown. At least that's what Sally's telling herself. But when Kylie and Gillian come in for breakfast, their arms looped around each other, Sally bursts into tears. There's one factor she forgot to figure into her anxiety equation, and that's jealousy.
"Well, good morning to you, too," Gillian says.
"Happy birthday," Sally says to Kylie, but she sounds downright gloomy.
"Emphasis on the 'happy'," Gillian reminds Sally as she pours herself a huge cup of coffee.
Gillian spies her reflection in the toaster; this is not a good hour for her. She smooths out the skin near her eyes. From now on she will not get out of bed until nine or ten at the earliest, although sometime after noon would be preferable.
Sally hands Kylie a small box, wrapped with pink ribbon. Sally has been especially careful, monitoring her grocery spending and avoiding restaurants in order to afford this gold heart on a chain. She can't help but notice that before Kylie allows herself a reaction, she looks over at Gillian.
"Nice." Gillian nods. "Real gold?" she asks.
Sally can feel something hot and red begin to move across her chest and her throat. What if Gillian had said the locket was a piece of junk; what would Kylie have done then?
"Thanks, Mom," Kylie says. "It's really nice."
"Which is amazing, since your mom usually has no taste when it comes to jewelry. But this is really good." Gillian holds the chain up to her neck and lets the heart dangle above her breasts. Kylie has begun to pile pancakes onto a plate. "You're going to eat those?" Gillian asks. "All those carbohydrates?"
"She's thirteen. A pancake won't kill her." Sally would like to strangle her sister. "She's much too young to be thinking about carbohydrates."
"Fine," Gillian says. "She can think about it when she's thirty. After it's too late."
Kylie goes for the fruit salad. Unless Sally is mistaken, she's wearing Gillian's blue pencil streaked beneath her eyes. Kylie carefully scoops two measly spoonfuls of fruit into a bowl and takes teeny, tiny bites, even though she's nearly six feet tall and weighs only a hundred and eighteen pounds.
Gillian takes a bowl of fruit for herself. "Come by the Hamburger Shack at six. That will give us some time before dinner."
"Great," Kylie says.
Sally's back is way up. "Time for what?"
"Nothing," Kylie says, sullen as a full-fledged teenager.
"Girl talk." Gillian shrugs. "Hey," she says, reaching into the pocket of her jeans. "I almost forgot."
Gillian brings forth a silver bracelet that she picked up in a pawnshop east of Tucson for only twelve bucks, in spite of the impressive chunk of turquoise in its center. Someone must have been down-and-out to give this up so easily. She must have had no luck left at all.
"Oh, my gosh," Kylie says when Gillian hands her the bracelet. "It's totally fabulous. I'll never take it off."
"I need to see you outside," Sally informs Gillian.
Sally's face is flushed to the hairline, and she's twisted into jealous knots, but Gillian doesn't notice anything is wrong. She slowly refills her coffee cup, adds half-and-half, then ambles into the yard after Sally.
"I want you to butt out," Sally says. "Do you understand what I'm saying? Is it getting through to you?"
It rained last night and the grass is squishy and filled with worms. Neither of the sisters is wearing shoes, but it's too late to turn back and go into the house.
"Don't yell at me," Gillian says. "I can't take it. I'll flip out, Sally. I'm way too fragile for this."
"I'm not yelling. All right? I'm just simply stating that Kylie is my daughter."
"Do you think I'm not aware of that?" Gillian sounds icy now, except for the tremble in her voice, which gives her away.
In Sally's opinion, Gillian really is fragile, that's the awful part. Or at least she thinks she is, and that's pretty much the same damn thing.
"Maybe you think I'm a bad influence," Gillian says now. "Maybe that's what this is all about."
The tremble is getting worse. Gillian sounds the way she used to when they had to walk home from school late in November. It would already be dark and Sally would wait for her, so she wouldn't get lost, the way she did once in kindergarten. That time she wandered off and the aunts didn't find her until past midnight, sitting on a bench outside the shuttered library, crying so hard she couldn't catch her breath.
"Look," Sally says. "I don't want to fight with you."
"Yes, you do." Gillian is gulping her coffee. Sally is only now noticing how thin her sister is. "Everything I do is wrong. You think I don't know that? I've screwed up my entire existence, and everyone who's close to me gets screwed right along with me."
"Oh, come on. Don't."
Sally means to say something about culpability, as well as all the men Gillian has screwed throughout the years, but she shuts up when Gillian sinks to the grass and begins to cry. Gillian's eyelids always turn blue when she cries, which makes her seem breakable and lost and even more beautiful than usual. Sally crouches down beside her.
"I don't think you're screwed up," Sally tells her sister. A white lie doesn't count if you cross your fingers behind your back, or if you tell it so that someone you love will stop crying.
"Ha." Gillian's voice breaks in two, like a hard piece of sugar.
"I'm really happy that you're here." This is not an outright lie. No one knows you like a person with whom you've shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.
"Oh, yeah, right." Gillian blows her nose on the sleeve of her white blouse. Antonia's blouse, actually, which she borrowed yesterday, and which, because it fits her so well, Gillian has already begun to consider her own.
"Seriously," Sally insists. "I want you to be here. I want you to stay. Only, from now on, think before you act."
"Understood," Gillian says.
The sisters embrace and get up off the grass. They mean to go inside the house, but their gaze is caught by the hedge of lilacs.
"That's one thing I don't want to think about," Gillian whispers.
"We just have to put it out of our minds," Sally says.
"Right," Gillian agrees, as if she could stop thinking about him.
The lilacs have grown as high as the telephone wires, with blooms so abundant some of the branches have begun to bow toward the ground.
"He was never even here," Sally says. She would probably sound more sure of herself if it weren't for all those bad dreams she keeps having and the line of earth beneath her fingernails that refuses to come clean. This, plus the fact that she can't stop thinking about the way he stared up at her from that hole in the ground.
"Jimmy who?" Gillian says brightly, even though the bruises he left on her arms are still there, like little shadows.
Sally goes inside, to wake Antonia and wash the breakfast dishes, but Gillian stays where she is for a while. She tilts her head back and closes her pale eyes against the sun, and thinks about how crazy love can be. That is how she is, standing barefoot in the grass, with the salt mark of tears left on her cheeks, and a funny sort of smile on her face, when the biology teacher from the high school unlatches the back gate so he can come around and give Sally the notice about the meeting in the cafeteria on Saturday night. He never gets beyond the gate, however—he's stuck there on the path as soon as he sees Gillian, and from then on whenever he smells lilacs he'll think about this moment. How the bees were circling above him, how purple the ink on the leaflets he's been distributing suddenly seemed, how he realized, all at once, just how beautiful a woman can be.
ALL OF THE TEENAGE BOYS down at the Hamburger Shack say, "No onions," when Gillian takes their orders. Ketchup is fine, as are mustard and relish. Pickles on the side are all right as well. But when you're in love, when you're so fixated you can't even blink, you don't want onions, and it's not to ensure that your kiss will stay sweet. Onions wake you up, they rattle you and snap right through you and tell you to get real. Go find someone who will love you back. Go out and dance all night, then walk through the dark, hand in hand, and forget about whoever it is who's driving you mad.
Those boys at the counter are too dreamy and young to do anything but drool as they watch Gillian. And, to her credit, Gillian is especially kind to them, even when Ephraim, the cook, suggests she kick them out. She understands that theirs might just be the last hearts she will break. When you're thirty-six and tired, when you've been living in places where the temperature rises to a hundred and ten and the air is so dry you have to use gallons of moisturizer, when you've been smacked around, late at night, by a man who loves bourbon, you start to realize that everything is limited, including your own appeal. You begin to look at young boys with tenderness, since they know so little and think they know so much. You watch teenage girls and feel shivers up and down your arms—those poor creatures don't know the first thing about time or agony or the price they're going to have to pay for just about everything.
And so Gillian has decided that she will come to her niece's rescue. She will be Kylie's mentor as she leaves childhood behind. Gillian has never felt this attached to a kid before; to be honest, she's never even known any, and she's certainly never been interested in anyone else's future or fate. But Kylie brings out some strange instinct to protect and to guide. There are times when Gillian has found herself thinking that if she had had a daughter, she would have wanted her to be like Kylie. Only a little more bold and daring. A bit more like Gillian herself.
Although she is usually late, on the evening of her niece's birthday Gillian has everything ready before Kylie arrives at the Hamburger Shack; she's even spoken to Ephraim about leaving early so they can get to Del Vecchio's for the birthday dinner on time. But first, there is the matter of Gillian's other present, the one that will count for a great deal more than the turquoise bracelet. This present will take a good two hours and will, like most things Gillian is involved with, also make a big mess.
Kylie, who's wearing cutoffs and an old Knicks T-shirt, obediently follows Gillian into the ladies' room, although she hasn't the faintest idea of what's about to transpire. She's wearing the bracelet Gillian gave her, as well as the locket her mother saved for for so long; she has a weird sensation in her legs. She wishes she had time to run around the block once or twice; maybe then she wouldn't feel as if she were about to burn up or shatter.
Gillian turns on the (light and locks the door and reaches under the sink for a paper bag. "The secret ingredients," she tells Kylie, as she takes out a pair of scissors, a bottle of shampoo, and a package of bleach. "What do you say?" she asks when Kylie comes to stand beside her. "Want to find out how beautiful you really are?"
Kylie knows her mother will kill her. She'll ground her for the rest of her life and take away her privileges—no movies on weekends, no radio, no TV. Worse, her mom will get that awful look of disappointment on her face—See what has happened , that's what her expression will say. After I've worked so hard to support you and Antonia and bring you up right .
"Sure," Kylie says, easily, as if her heart weren't going a hundred miles an hour. "Let's do it," she tells her aunt, as if her whole life weren't about to completely flip-flop.
It takes a long time to do almost anything worthwhile to someone's hair, even longer for a change as radical as this, and so Sally and Antonia and Gideon Barnes wait for nearly an hour in a booth at Del Vecchio's, drinking diet Cokes and fuming.
"I missed soccer practice for this," Gideon says mournfully.
"Oh, who cares," Antonia says.
Antonia has been working at the ice cream parlor all day and she has a pain in her right shoulder from all the scooping she's done. She doesn't even feel like herself this evening, although she has no idea of who else she might be. She hasn't been asked out on a date for weeks. All of a sudden the boys who were so crazy for her seem to be interested either in younger girls—who may not be as pretty as Antonia but who can be impressed by the slightest thing, a stupid award from the computer club or a trophy from the swim team, and go all googly-eyed if a boy pays them the teeniest little compliment—or in an older woman, like her aunt Gillian, who's had so many more sexual experiences than a girl Antonia's age that a high school boy could get hard just by trying to guess what she could teach him in bed.
This summer has not been working out as Antonia hoped. She can already tell that tonight is another totally lost cause. Her mother hurried her so they could be on time for this dinner, and Antonia was in such a rush that she grabbed her clothes from her dresser drawer without looking. And now, what she thought was a black T-shirt has turned out to be a horrible olive-green thing she ordinarily wouldn't be caught dead in. Usually the waiters here wink at Antonia and bring her extra baskets of rolls and garlic bread. This evening not one of them has even noticed she's alive, except for a creepy busboy who asked if she wanted a ginger ale or a Coke.
"This is so typical of Aunt Gillian," she tells her mother when they've been waiting for what seems like an eternity. "It's so inconsiderate."
Sally, who is not completely sure that Gillian wouldn't encourage Kylie to hop a freight train or hitchhike to Virginia Beach for no particular reason other than a good time, has been drinking wine, something she rarely does.
"Well, to hell with them both," she says now.
"Mother!" Antonia says, shocked.
"Let's order," Sally suggests to Gideon. "Let's get two pepperoni pizzas."
"You don't eat meat," Antonia reminds her.
"Then I'll have another glass of Chianti," Sally says. "And some stuffed mushrooms. Maybe some pasta."
Antonia turns to signal the waiter but immediately turns back. Her cheeks are flushed and she's broken into a sweat. Her biology teacher, Mr. Frye, is at one of the small tables in the back, having a beer and discussing the virtues of eggplant rollatini with the waiter. Antonia is crazy about Mr. Frye. He is so brilliant that Antonia considered flunking Biology I just so she could take it again, until she found out he'd be teaching Biology II in the fall. It doesn't matter that he's way too old for her; he's so incredibly handsome that if all the guys in the senior class were rolled up together and tied with a big bow they still wouldn't come close. Mr. Frye goes running every day at dusk and always circles the reservoir on the far side of the high school three times. Antonia tries to make certain to be there just as the sun is going down, but he never seems to notice her. He never even waves.
Naturally she has to meet up with him on the one evening when she hasn't bothered with makeup and is wearing this horrible olive-green thing, which, she now realizes, doesn't belong to her. She's ludicrous. Even that stupid Gideon Barnes is staring at her shirt.
"What are you staring at?" Antonia asks so savagely that Gideon pulls his head back, as if he expected to be smacked. "What is your problem?" she cries when Gideon continues to stare. God, she can't stand him. He looks like a pigeon when he blinks, and he often makes a weird sound in his throat, as though he's about to spit.
"I think that's my shirt," Gideon says apologetically, and in fact, it is. He got it on a trip to St. Croix last Christmas, and left it at the Owens house last week, which is how it got thrown in with the wash. Antonia would be completely and utterly mortified to know that I'M A VIRGIN is printed across her back in black letters.
Sally calls for a waiter and orders two pizzas—plain, no pepperoni—three orders of stuffed mushrooms, an order of crostini, some garlic bread, and two insalatas.
"Great," Gideon says, since he's starving as usual. "By the way," he tells Antonia, "you don't have to give me the shirt back until tomorrow."
"Gee, thanks." Antonia can't take much more of this. "Like I wanted it in the first place."
She dares to look over her shoulder. Mr. Frye is watching the ceiling fan as though it were the most fascinating thing on earth. Antonia assumes this has to do with some sort of scientific study of speed or light, but in fact it's directly related to the experiences of Ben Frye's youth, when he went out to San Francisco to visit a friend and stayed for nearly ten years, during which time he worked for a rather well-known maker of LSD. Such was his introduction to science. It is also the reason why there are times when he has to slow the world down. That's when he stops and stares, at things like ceiling fans and raindrops on window glass. That's when he wonders what on earth he's been doing with his life.
Now, as he watches the fan spin around, he is thinking about the woman he saw earlier that day, in Sally Owens's backyard. He backed off, the way he always does, but it won't happen a second time. If he ever sees her again he's going to go right up to her and ask her to marry him, that's what he'll do. He's sick of letting fate roll right past him. For years, he's been a lot like this restaurant fan, spinning around and getting noplace. What, when it comes right down to it, is the difference between him and a mayfly, which lives a whole damned adult existence in twenty-four hours? The way Ben sees it, he's just about passing by hour nineteen right now, given the statistics for a man's longevity. If five more hours is what he's got left, he might as well live, he might as well say to hell with it and, for once, just go out and do as he pleases.
Ben Frye is considering all this, as well as deciding whether or not to order a cappuccino, since it will mean he'll be up half the night, when Gillian walks through the door. She's wearing Antonia's best white shirt and a pair of old blue jeans and she has the most beautiful smile on her face. Her smile could knock a dove right out of a tree. It could turn a grown man's head so completely he might spill his beer and never even notice that a pool was spreading across the tablecloth and onto the floor.
"Get ready," Gillian says, as she approaches the booth where three very unhappy customers with low blood sugar and no patience left whatsoever are waiting.
"We've been ready for forty-five minutes," Sally tells her sister. "If you have got an excuse, it better be a good one."
"Don't you see?" Gillian says.
"We see you don't think of anyone but yourself," Antonia says.
"Oh, really?" Gillian says. "Well, you sure would know about such things. You would know better than anyone."
"Holy shit," Gideon Barnes says.
At this moment he has forgotten his empty, growling stomach. He no longer cares that his legs are cramping from being squooshed into this booth for so long. Someone who looks a lot like Kylie is walking toward them, only this person is a knockout. This person has short blond hair and is thin, not in the way that storks are but in the style of women who can make you fall in love with them even when you've known them for what seems like forever though you aren't much more than a kid yourself.
"Holy fucking shit," Gideon says as this person gets closer. It is indeed Kylie. It must be, because when she grins Gideon can see the tooth she chipped last summer when she dove for the ball during soccer practice.
As soon as she notices the way they're all staring at her, open-mouthed, like goldfish whose bowl she's just been dropped into, Kylie feels something tingly which resembles embarrassment, or perhaps it's regret. She slides into the booth next to Gideon.
"I'm famished," she says. "Are we having pizza?"
Antonia has to take a drink of water, and still she feels as though she might faint. Something horrible has happened. Something has changed so intensely that the world doesn't even seem to be spinning on the same axis anymore. Antonia can feel herself fade in the yellow lighting of Del Vecchio's; she is already becoming Kylie Owens's sister, the one with the too-red hair who works down at the ice cream parlor and has fallen arches and a bad shoulder that prevents her from playing tennis or pulling her own weight.
"Well, isn't anybody going to say anything?" Gillian asks. "Isn't anyone going to say, 'Kylie! You look incredible! You're gorgeous! Happy birthday'?"
"How could you do this?" Sally stands up to face her sister. She may have been drinking Chianti for nearly an hour, but she's sober now. "Did you ever think of asking my permission? Did you ever think she might be too young to start dyeing her hair and wearing makeup and doing whatever the hell else will lead her on the same dreadful path you've been on your whole life? Did you ever think that I don't want her to be like you, and if you had any brains you wouldn't want that for her either, especially considering what you just went through, and you know exactly what I mean." By now Sally is hysterical, and she's not about to keep her voice down. "How could you?" she asks. "How dare you!" she cries.
"Don't get so upset." This is definitely not the reaction Gillian expected. Applause, maybe. A pat on the back. But not this sort of indictment. "We can put a brown tint over it, if it's such a big deal."
"It is a big deal." Sally is having trouble breathing. She looks at the girl in the booth who is Kylie, or who used to be Kylie, and feels that she's been hooked through her heart. She breathes in through her nose and out through her mouth, just as they taught her in Lamaze class so long ago. "Robbing someone of her youth and innocence, I'd call that major. I'd say it's a big deal."
"Mother," Antonia pleads.
Antonia has never experienced humiliation quite like this before. Mr. Frye is watching them as though their family is putting on a play. And he's not the only one. There's probably not another conversation going on in the entire restaurant. The better to hear the Owenses. The better to watch the sideshow.
"Can we just eat?" Antonia begs.
The waiter has brought over their order, which he tentatively places on the table. Kylie is doing her best to ignore the adults. She imagined her mother would be mad, but this reaction is in a whole other dimension.
"Aren't you starving?" she whispers to Gideon. Kylie expects Gideon to be the one sane person at the table, but as soon as she sees the expression on his face, she knows it's not food he's thinking of. "What's wrong with you?" she asks.
"It's you," he says, and it sounds like an accusation. "You're all different."
"I am not," Kylie says. "It's just my hair."
"No," Gideon says. The shock is wearing off, and he feels that a theft has been committed. Where is his teammate and friend? "You're just not the same. How could you be so stupid?"
"Go to hell," Kylie says, hurt beyond belief.
"Fine," Gideon shoots back. "Do you mind letting me out so I can get there?"
Kylie moves so Gideon can slide out of the booth. "You are an idiot," she tells him as he leaves, and she sounds so cool she amazes herself. Even Antonia is looking at her with something resembling respect.
"Is that how you treat your best friend?" Sally asks Kylie. "Do you see what you've done?" she says to Gillian.
"He is an idiot," Gillian says. "Who leaves a party before it's even happened?"
"It has happened," Sally says. "Don't you see? It's over." She searches through her purse for her wallet, then throws some cash on the table to pay for the uneaten food. Kylie has already grabbed a piece of pizza, which she quickly drops when she sees how grim her mother looks. "Let's go," Sally tells her girls.
It takes Ben Frye this long to realize that he has another chance. Sally and her girls have gotten up and Gillian is alone at the table. Ben walks over casually, just like a man whose blood hasn't heated up to a dangerous degree.
"Hey, Sally," he says. "How are you doing?"
Ben is one of the few teachers who treat Sally like an equal, even though she's only a secretary. Not everyone is so kind—Paula Goodings, the math teacher, orders Sally about, convinced she is some drone behind the desk, available to do errands for anyone who wanders by. Ben and Sally have known each other for years and considered dating when Ben first was hired at the high school, before deciding what they both really could use was a friend. Since then, they have often had lunch together and are allies at school meetings; they like to go out and drink beer and gossip about the faculty and the staff.
"I'm doing really poorly," Sally tells him now before she notices that he's moved on without waiting for an answer. "Since you're asking," she adds.
"Hi," Antonia says to Ben Frye as he walks past her. Brilliant, but it's the best she can do at the moment.
Ben smiles at her blankly, but he keeps right on going, until he's at the table where Gillian is staring at the uneaten food.
"Is there something wrong with your order?" Ben asks her. "Is there anything I can do?"
Gillian looks up at him. There are tears falling from her clear gray eyes. Ben takes a step toward her. He is so gone, he couldn't come back if he wanted to.
"There's nothing wrong," Sally assures him as she collects her girls and begins to troop toward the door.
If Sally's heart weren't so closed up at the moment, she'd feel sorry for Ben. She'd pity him. Ben has already sat down across from Gillian. He's taken the matches out of her hand—which has that damn tremor again—and is lighting her cigarette. As Sally leads her girls out of the restaurant, she believes she hears him say, "Please don't cry," to her sister. She may even hear him say, "Marry me. We can do it tonight." Or maybe she's just imagining that's what he's said, since she knows that's where he's headed. Every man who's ever looked at Gillian the way Ben is looking right now has made a proposal of one sort or another.
Well, the way Sally sees it, Ben Frye is a grown man, he can take care of himself, or, at the very least, he can try. Her girls are another matter entirely. Sally's not about to let Gillian arrive out of nowhere, with three divorces and a dead body in her recent history, to start playing around with her daughters' welfare. Girls like Kylie and Antonia are just too vulnerable; they get broken in two by cruel words alone, they're easily made to believe they're not good enough. Just seeing the back of Kylie's neck as they walk through the parking lot makes Sally want to weep. But she doesn't. And, what's more, she won't.
"My hair's not that bad," Kylie says once they're in the Honda. "I don't see what's so horrible about what we did." She's sitting alone in the backseat and she feels so weird. There's no space for her legs at all, and in order to fit she has to fold herself up. She almost feels as if she could leap out of the car and walk away. She could start a new life and never look back again.
"Maybe if you think about it, you will," Sally tells her. "You have more sense than your aunt, so you have a better chance of understanding your mistake. Think it over."
That's what Kylie does, and what it all adds up to is spite. Nobody wants her to be happy, except for Gillian. Nobody gives a damn.
They drive home in silence, but after they've pulled into the driveway and are walking toward the front door, Antonia can no longer hold her tongue. "You look so tacky," she whispers to Kylie. "And you know what the worst part is?" She draws this out, as though she were about to utter a curse. "You look like her."
Kylie's eyes sting, but she's not afraid to talk back to her sister. Why should she be? Antonia looks oddly pale tonight, and her hair has turned dry, a bundle of blood-colored straw caught up in barrettes. She's not so pretty. She's not as superior as she's always pretended.
Gillian has very particular likes and dislikes and an opinion about everything. She sleeps a lot, she borrows things without asking, and she makes great brownies with M&M's stirred into the batter. She's beautiful and she laughs about a thousand times more than Kylie's mother does, and Kylie wants to be exactly like her. She follows Gillian around and studies her and is thinking of chopping off all her hair, if she has the guts, that is. Were Kylie to be granted a single wish, it would be to wake and discover that her mouse-brown hair has miraculously become the same glorious blond that Gillian is lucky enough to have, like hay left out in the sun or pieces of gold.
What makes Gillian even more wonderful is that she and Antonia don't get along. Given time enough, they may grow to despise each other. Last week, Gillian borrowed Antonia's short black skirt to wear to the Fourth of July block party, spilled a Diet Coke on it accidentally, then told Antonia she was intolerant when she dared to complain. Now Antonia has asked their mother if she can put a lock on her closet door. She has informed Kylie that their aunt is a nothing, a loser, a pathetic creature.
Gillian has taken a job at the Hamburger Shack on the Turnpike, where all the teenage boys have fallen madly in love with her, ordering cheeseburgers they don't want and gallons of ginger ale and Coke just to be near her.
"Work is what people have to do in order to have the bucks to party," Gillian announced last night, an attitude that has already hindered her plan of heading out to California, since she is drawn to shopping malls—shoe stores in particular tend to call out to her—and can't seem to save a cent.
That evening they were having hot dogs made out of tofu and some sort of bean that is supposed to be good for you, even though it tastes, in Kylie's opinion, like the tires of a truck. Sally refuses to have meat, fish, or fowl at their table in spite of her daughters' complaints. She has to close her eyes when she walks past the packaged chicken legs in the market, and still she's always reminded of the dove the aunts used for their most serious love charm.
"Tell that to a brain surgeon," Sally had responded to her sister's remark about the limited worth of work. "Tell that to a nuclear physicist or a poet."
"Okay." Gillian was still smoking, although she made new plans to quit every morning, and was well aware that the smoke drove everyone but Kylie crazy. She puffed quickly, as though that would lessen anyone's distaste. "Go on and find me a poet or a physicist. Are there any in this neighborhood?"
Kylie was pleased by this putdown of their formless suburb, a place with no beginning and no end, but with plenty of gossips. Everyone is always giving her friend Gideon a hard time, even more so now that he's shaved his head. He said he didn't give a damn and insisted that most of their neighbors had minds as small as weasels', but lately he got flustered when anyone spoke to him directly, and when they walked alongside the Turnpike and a car horn honked he sometimes jumped, as though somehow he'd been insulted.
People were looking to talk, for any reason. Anything different or slightly unusual would do. Already, most people on their street had discussed the fact that Gillian did not wear the top half of her bathing suit when she sunbathed in the backyard. They all knew exactly what the tattoo on her wrist looked like, and that she'd had at least a six-pack at the block party—maybe even more—and then had gone and turned Ed Borelli down flat when he asked her out, even though he was the vice-principal and her sister's boss as well. The Owenses' neighbor Linda Bennett refused to have the optometrist she was dating come to her house to collect her before darkness fell, that's how nervous she was about having someone who looked like Gillian living right next door. Everyone agreed that Sally's sister was confusing. There were times when you'd meet her at the grocery, and she'd insist you come on over and let her play around with her tarot cards for you, and other times when you'd say hello to her on the street only to have her look right through you, as if she were a million miles away, say in a place like Tucson, where life was a lot more interesting.
As far as Kylie was concerned, Gillian had the ability to make any place interesting; even a dump like their block could look sparkly in the right kind of light. The lilacs had gone absolutely wild since Gillian's arrival, as though paying homage to her beauty and her grace, and had spilled out from the backyard into the front, a purple bower hanging over the fence and the driveway. Lilacs were not supposed to bloom in July, that was a simple botanical fact, at least it had been until now. Girls in the neighborhood had begun to whisper that if you kissed the boy you loved beneath the Owenses' lilacs he'd be yours forever, whether he wanted to be or not. The State University, in Stony Brook, had sent two botanists to study the bud formations of these amazing plants going mad out of season, growing taller and more lush with every passing hour. Sally had refused to let the botanists into the yard; she had sprayed them with the garden hose to make them go away, but occasionally the scientists would park across from the driveway, mooning over the specimens they couldn't get to, debating whether it was ethical to run across the lawn with some gardening shears and take whatever they wanted.
Somehow, the lilacs have affected everyone. Late last night, Kylie woke and heard crying. She got out of bed and went to her window. There, beside the lilacs, was her aunt Gillian, in tears. Kylie watched for a while, until Gillian wiped her eyes dry and took a cigarette out of her pocket. As she crept back to bed, Kylie felt certain that someday she, too, would be crying in a garden at midnight, unlike her mother, who was always in bed by eleven and who didn't seem to have anything in her life that was even worth crying about. Kylie wondered if her mother had ever cried for their father, or if perhaps the moment of his death was when she'd lost the ability to weep.
Out in the yard, night after night, Gillian was still crying over Jimmy. She just couldn't seem to stop herself, even now. She, who had vowed never to let passion control her, had been hooked but good. She'd been trying to muster the courage and the nerve to walk out the door for so long, almost this whole year. She had written Jimmy's name on a piece of paper and burned it on the first Friday of every month when there was a quarter moon, to try to rid herself of her desire for him. But that didn't help her to stop wanting him. After more than twenty years of flirtations and fucking around and refusing to ever commit, she had to go and fall in love with someone like him, someone so bad that on the day they moved their furniture into their rented house in Tucson, the mice had all fled, because even the field mice had more sense than she did.
Now that he's dead, Jimmy seems much sweeter. Gillian keeps remembering how scorching his kisses were, and the memory alone can turn her inside out. He could burn her up alive; he could do it in a minute flat, and that's not easy to forget. She's been hoping that the damn lilacs will stop blooming, because the scent filters through the house and all along the block, and sometimes she swears she can even smell it at the Hamburger Shack, a good half-mile down the Turnpike. People in the neighborhood are all excited about the lilacs—there's already been a photograph on the front page of Newsday— but the cloying smell is driving Gillian nuts. It's getting into her clothes and her hair, and maybe that's why she's been smoking so much, to replace that lilac scent with one that's dirtier and more filled with fire.
She can't stop thinking about how Jimmy used to keep his eyes open when he kissed her—it shocked her to realize he was watching her. A man who doesn't close his eyes, even for a kiss, is a man who wants to keep control at all times. Jimmy's eyes had cold little flecks in the center, and each time she kissed him Gillian wondered if what she was doing wasn't a little like making a pact with the devil. That's what it felt like sometimes, especially when she'd see a woman who could be herself out in public without fearing that her husband or boyfriend would snap at her. "I told you not to park there," some woman would say to her husband outside a movie theater or a flea market, and those words would move Gillian to tears. How wonderful to say whatever you wanted without having to go over it in your mind, again and again, to make certain it wouldn't set him off.
She'll give herself credit for fighting the best battle she could against what she simply couldn't defeat on her own. She tried everything to stop Jimmy from drinking, the old cures as well as the new. Owl eggs, scrambled and disguised with Tabasco sauce and hot pepper as huevos rancheros. Garlic left under his pillow. A paste of sunflower seeds in his cereal. Hiding the bottles, suggesting AA, daring to pick a fight with him, when she knew she couldn't win. She had even tried the aunts' particular favorite of waiting until he was good and plastered, then slipping a tiny live minnow into his bottle of bourbon. The fish's gills stopped dead the instant the poor thing hit the liquor, and Gillian had been racked with guilt about it, but Jimmy hadn't even noticed anything amiss. He drank that minnow in one big gulp, without even blinking, then was violently ill for the rest of the evening, although afterward his taste for alcohol seemed to have doubled. That was when she got the idea for the nightshade, which seemed such a modest plan at the time, just a little something to take the edge off and get him to sleep before he got good and drunk.
When she sits beside the lilacs at night, Gillian is trying to decide whether or not she feels as if she's committed murder. Well, she doesn't. There was no intent and no premeditation. If Gillian could take it all back, she would, although she'd change a few things while she was at it. She actually feels more friendly toward Jimmy than she has in ages; there's a closeness and a tenderness that sure weren't there before. She doesn't want to leave him all alone in the cold earth. She wants to be near and tell him about her day and hear the jokes he used to tell when he was in a good mood. He hated lawyers, since none had ever saved him from serving jail time, and he collected attorney jokes. He had a million of them, and nothing could stop him from telling one when he had a mind to. Just before they'd pulled into the rest area in New Jersey, Jimmy had asked her what was brown and black and looked good on a lawyer. "A rottweiler," he'd told her. He seemed so happy at that moment, as if he'd had his whole life ahead of him. "Think about it," he'd said. "You get it?"
Sometimes, when Gillian sits on the grass and closes her eyes, she could swear Jimmy is beside her. She can almost sense him reaching for her, the way he used to when he was drunk and mad and wanted to hit her or fuck her—she never quite knew which it would be until the very last moment. But as soon as he'd start to twist that silver ring on his finger, she knew she'd better watch out. When he feels too substantial out in the yard, and Gillian begins thinking about the way things used to be—really—Jimmy's presence doesn't feel friendly anymore. When that happens, Gillian runs inside and locks the back door and looks at the lilacs from behind the safety of the glass. He used to scare her pretty good; he used to make her do things she wouldn't even say aloud.
Truthfully, she's glad that she's been sharing a room with her niece; she's scared to sleep alone, so she's happy to make the trade-off of not having much privacy. This morning, for example, when Gillian opens her eyes, Kylie is already sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at her. It's only seven o'clock, and Gillian doesn't have to report to work until lunchtime. She groans and pulls the quilt over her head.
"I'm thirteen," Kylie says with surprise, as though she herself were mystified that this has happened to her. It's the one thing she's wanted her whole life long, and now she's actually got it.
Gillian immediately sits up in bed and hugs her niece. She remembers exactly what a surprise it was to grow up, how disturbing and thrilling it was, how all-of-a-sudden.
"I feel different," Kylie whispers.
"Of course you do," Gillian says. "You are."
Her niece has been confiding in her more and more, maybe because they share a room and can whisper to each other, late at night, after the lights are out. Gillian is touched by the way Kylie studies her, as though she were a textbook on how to be a woman. She can't remember anybody ever looking up to her before, and the experience is intoxicating and puzzling at the same time.
"Happy birthday," Gillian announces. "It will be the best one yet."
The scent of those damn lilacs has mixed in with the breakfast Sally is already cooking in the kitchen. But there's coffee, too, so Gillian crawls out of bed and gathers the clothes she left scattered on the floor last night. ,
"Wait till later," Gillian tells her niece. "When you get your present from me, you'll be completely transformed. One hundred and fifty percent. People will see you on the street and they'll flip."
In honor of Kylie's birthday, Sally has fixed pancakes and fresh orange juice and fruit salad topped with coconut and raisins. Earlier in the morning, before the birds were awake, she went out to the rear of the yard and cut some of the lilacs, which she's arranged in a crystal vase. The flowers seem to glow, as if each petal emitted a plum-colored ray of light. They're hypnotizing, if you look too long. Sally sat at the table staring at them, and before she knew it she had tears in her eyes and her first batch of pancakes had burned on the griddle.
Last night, Sally dreamed the ground beneath the lilacs turned red as blood, and the grass made a crying sound when the wind rose. She dreamed that the swans that haunt her on restless nights were pulling out their white feathers, one by one; they were building a nest large enough for a man. Sally awoke to find that her sheets were damp with sweat; her forehead felt as though it had been locked in a vise. But that was nothing compared to the night before, when she dreamed there was a dead man here at her table, and he wasn't pleased with what she'd served him for dinner, which was vegetarian lasagna. With one fierce breath he blew every dish off the table; in an instant there was broken china everywhere, a sharp and savage carpet, strewn across the floor.
She's been dreaming about Jimmy so much, seeing his cold, clear eyes, that sometimes she can't think of anything else. She's carrying this guy around with her, when she never even knew him in the first place, and it just doesn't seem fair. The awful thing is, her relationship with this dead man is deeper than anything she's had with any other man in the past ten years, and that's frightening.
This morning Sally isn't certain if she's shaky from her dreams of Jimmy, or if it's the coffee she's already had that's affecting her, or if it's simply because her baby has now turned thirteen. It may be the potency of all three factors combined. Well, thirteen is still young, it doesn't mean Kylie is all grown. At least that's what Sally's telling herself. But when Kylie and Gillian come in for breakfast, their arms looped around each other, Sally bursts into tears. There's one factor she forgot to figure into her anxiety equation, and that's jealousy.
"Well, good morning to you, too," Gillian says.
"Happy birthday," Sally says to Kylie, but she sounds downright gloomy.
"Emphasis on the 'happy'," Gillian reminds Sally as she pours herself a huge cup of coffee.
Gillian spies her reflection in the toaster; this is not a good hour for her. She smooths out the skin near her eyes. From now on she will not get out of bed until nine or ten at the earliest, although sometime after noon would be preferable.
Sally hands Kylie a small box, wrapped with pink ribbon. Sally has been especially careful, monitoring her grocery spending and avoiding restaurants in order to afford this gold heart on a chain. She can't help but notice that before Kylie allows herself a reaction, she looks over at Gillian.
"Nice." Gillian nods. "Real gold?" she asks.
Sally can feel something hot and red begin to move across her chest and her throat. What if Gillian had said the locket was a piece of junk; what would Kylie have done then?
"Thanks, Mom," Kylie says. "It's really nice."
"Which is amazing, since your mom usually has no taste when it comes to jewelry. But this is really good." Gillian holds the chain up to her neck and lets the heart dangle above her breasts. Kylie has begun to pile pancakes onto a plate. "You're going to eat those?" Gillian asks. "All those carbohydrates?"
"She's thirteen. A pancake won't kill her." Sally would like to strangle her sister. "She's much too young to be thinking about carbohydrates."
"Fine," Gillian says. "She can think about it when she's thirty. After it's too late."
Kylie goes for the fruit salad. Unless Sally is mistaken, she's wearing Gillian's blue pencil streaked beneath her eyes. Kylie carefully scoops two measly spoonfuls of fruit into a bowl and takes teeny, tiny bites, even though she's nearly six feet tall and weighs only a hundred and eighteen pounds.
Gillian takes a bowl of fruit for herself. "Come by the Hamburger Shack at six. That will give us some time before dinner."
"Great," Kylie says.
Sally's back is way up. "Time for what?"
"Nothing," Kylie says, sullen as a full-fledged teenager.
"Girl talk." Gillian shrugs. "Hey," she says, reaching into the pocket of her jeans. "I almost forgot."
Gillian brings forth a silver bracelet that she picked up in a pawnshop east of Tucson for only twelve bucks, in spite of the impressive chunk of turquoise in its center. Someone must have been down-and-out to give this up so easily. She must have had no luck left at all.
"Oh, my gosh," Kylie says when Gillian hands her the bracelet. "It's totally fabulous. I'll never take it off."
"I need to see you outside," Sally informs Gillian.
Sally's face is flushed to the hairline, and she's twisted into jealous knots, but Gillian doesn't notice anything is wrong. She slowly refills her coffee cup, adds half-and-half, then ambles into the yard after Sally.
"I want you to butt out," Sally says. "Do you understand what I'm saying? Is it getting through to you?"
It rained last night and the grass is squishy and filled with worms. Neither of the sisters is wearing shoes, but it's too late to turn back and go into the house.
"Don't yell at me," Gillian says. "I can't take it. I'll flip out, Sally. I'm way too fragile for this."
"I'm not yelling. All right? I'm just simply stating that Kylie is my daughter."
"Do you think I'm not aware of that?" Gillian sounds icy now, except for the tremble in her voice, which gives her away.
In Sally's opinion, Gillian really is fragile, that's the awful part. Or at least she thinks she is, and that's pretty much the same damn thing.
"Maybe you think I'm a bad influence," Gillian says now. "Maybe that's what this is all about."
The tremble is getting worse. Gillian sounds the way she used to when they had to walk home from school late in November. It would already be dark and Sally would wait for her, so she wouldn't get lost, the way she did once in kindergarten. That time she wandered off and the aunts didn't find her until past midnight, sitting on a bench outside the shuttered library, crying so hard she couldn't catch her breath.
"Look," Sally says. "I don't want to fight with you."
"Yes, you do." Gillian is gulping her coffee. Sally is only now noticing how thin her sister is. "Everything I do is wrong. You think I don't know that? I've screwed up my entire existence, and everyone who's close to me gets screwed right along with me."
"Oh, come on. Don't."
Sally means to say something about culpability, as well as all the men Gillian has screwed throughout the years, but she shuts up when Gillian sinks to the grass and begins to cry. Gillian's eyelids always turn blue when she cries, which makes her seem breakable and lost and even more beautiful than usual. Sally crouches down beside her.
"I don't think you're screwed up," Sally tells her sister. A white lie doesn't count if you cross your fingers behind your back, or if you tell it so that someone you love will stop crying.
"Ha." Gillian's voice breaks in two, like a hard piece of sugar.
"I'm really happy that you're here." This is not an outright lie. No one knows you like a person with whom you've shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.
"Oh, yeah, right." Gillian blows her nose on the sleeve of her white blouse. Antonia's blouse, actually, which she borrowed yesterday, and which, because it fits her so well, Gillian has already begun to consider her own.
"Seriously," Sally insists. "I want you to be here. I want you to stay. Only, from now on, think before you act."
"Understood," Gillian says.
The sisters embrace and get up off the grass. They mean to go inside the house, but their gaze is caught by the hedge of lilacs.
"That's one thing I don't want to think about," Gillian whispers.
"We just have to put it out of our minds," Sally says.
"Right," Gillian agrees, as if she could stop thinking about him.
The lilacs have grown as high as the telephone wires, with blooms so abundant some of the branches have begun to bow toward the ground.
"He was never even here," Sally says. She would probably sound more sure of herself if it weren't for all those bad dreams she keeps having and the line of earth beneath her fingernails that refuses to come clean. This, plus the fact that she can't stop thinking about the way he stared up at her from that hole in the ground.
"Jimmy who?" Gillian says brightly, even though the bruises he left on her arms are still there, like little shadows.
Sally goes inside, to wake Antonia and wash the breakfast dishes, but Gillian stays where she is for a while. She tilts her head back and closes her pale eyes against the sun, and thinks about how crazy love can be. That is how she is, standing barefoot in the grass, with the salt mark of tears left on her cheeks, and a funny sort of smile on her face, when the biology teacher from the high school unlatches the back gate so he can come around and give Sally the notice about the meeting in the cafeteria on Saturday night. He never gets beyond the gate, however—he's stuck there on the path as soon as he sees Gillian, and from then on whenever he smells lilacs he'll think about this moment. How the bees were circling above him, how purple the ink on the leaflets he's been distributing suddenly seemed, how he realized, all at once, just how beautiful a woman can be.
ALL OF THE TEENAGE BOYS down at the Hamburger Shack say, "No onions," when Gillian takes their orders. Ketchup is fine, as are mustard and relish. Pickles on the side are all right as well. But when you're in love, when you're so fixated you can't even blink, you don't want onions, and it's not to ensure that your kiss will stay sweet. Onions wake you up, they rattle you and snap right through you and tell you to get real. Go find someone who will love you back. Go out and dance all night, then walk through the dark, hand in hand, and forget about whoever it is who's driving you mad.
Those boys at the counter are too dreamy and young to do anything but drool as they watch Gillian. And, to her credit, Gillian is especially kind to them, even when Ephraim, the cook, suggests she kick them out. She understands that theirs might just be the last hearts she will break. When you're thirty-six and tired, when you've been living in places where the temperature rises to a hundred and ten and the air is so dry you have to use gallons of moisturizer, when you've been smacked around, late at night, by a man who loves bourbon, you start to realize that everything is limited, including your own appeal. You begin to look at young boys with tenderness, since they know so little and think they know so much. You watch teenage girls and feel shivers up and down your arms—those poor creatures don't know the first thing about time or agony or the price they're going to have to pay for just about everything.
And so Gillian has decided that she will come to her niece's rescue. She will be Kylie's mentor as she leaves childhood behind. Gillian has never felt this attached to a kid before; to be honest, she's never even known any, and she's certainly never been interested in anyone else's future or fate. But Kylie brings out some strange instinct to protect and to guide. There are times when Gillian has found herself thinking that if she had had a daughter, she would have wanted her to be like Kylie. Only a little more bold and daring. A bit more like Gillian herself.
Although she is usually late, on the evening of her niece's birthday Gillian has everything ready before Kylie arrives at the Hamburger Shack; she's even spoken to Ephraim about leaving early so they can get to Del Vecchio's for the birthday dinner on time. But first, there is the matter of Gillian's other present, the one that will count for a great deal more than the turquoise bracelet. This present will take a good two hours and will, like most things Gillian is involved with, also make a big mess.
Kylie, who's wearing cutoffs and an old Knicks T-shirt, obediently follows Gillian into the ladies' room, although she hasn't the faintest idea of what's about to transpire. She's wearing the bracelet Gillian gave her, as well as the locket her mother saved for for so long; she has a weird sensation in her legs. She wishes she had time to run around the block once or twice; maybe then she wouldn't feel as if she were about to burn up or shatter.
Gillian turns on the (light and locks the door and reaches under the sink for a paper bag. "The secret ingredients," she tells Kylie, as she takes out a pair of scissors, a bottle of shampoo, and a package of bleach. "What do you say?" she asks when Kylie comes to stand beside her. "Want to find out how beautiful you really are?"
Kylie knows her mother will kill her. She'll ground her for the rest of her life and take away her privileges—no movies on weekends, no radio, no TV. Worse, her mom will get that awful look of disappointment on her face—See what has happened , that's what her expression will say. After I've worked so hard to support you and Antonia and bring you up right .
"Sure," Kylie says, easily, as if her heart weren't going a hundred miles an hour. "Let's do it," she tells her aunt, as if her whole life weren't about to completely flip-flop.
It takes a long time to do almost anything worthwhile to someone's hair, even longer for a change as radical as this, and so Sally and Antonia and Gideon Barnes wait for nearly an hour in a booth at Del Vecchio's, drinking diet Cokes and fuming.
"I missed soccer practice for this," Gideon says mournfully.
"Oh, who cares," Antonia says.
Antonia has been working at the ice cream parlor all day and she has a pain in her right shoulder from all the scooping she's done. She doesn't even feel like herself this evening, although she has no idea of who else she might be. She hasn't been asked out on a date for weeks. All of a sudden the boys who were so crazy for her seem to be interested either in younger girls—who may not be as pretty as Antonia but who can be impressed by the slightest thing, a stupid award from the computer club or a trophy from the swim team, and go all googly-eyed if a boy pays them the teeniest little compliment—or in an older woman, like her aunt Gillian, who's had so many more sexual experiences than a girl Antonia's age that a high school boy could get hard just by trying to guess what she could teach him in bed.
This summer has not been working out as Antonia hoped. She can already tell that tonight is another totally lost cause. Her mother hurried her so they could be on time for this dinner, and Antonia was in such a rush that she grabbed her clothes from her dresser drawer without looking. And now, what she thought was a black T-shirt has turned out to be a horrible olive-green thing she ordinarily wouldn't be caught dead in. Usually the waiters here wink at Antonia and bring her extra baskets of rolls and garlic bread. This evening not one of them has even noticed she's alive, except for a creepy busboy who asked if she wanted a ginger ale or a Coke.
"This is so typical of Aunt Gillian," she tells her mother when they've been waiting for what seems like an eternity. "It's so inconsiderate."
Sally, who is not completely sure that Gillian wouldn't encourage Kylie to hop a freight train or hitchhike to Virginia Beach for no particular reason other than a good time, has been drinking wine, something she rarely does.
"Well, to hell with them both," she says now.
"Mother!" Antonia says, shocked.
"Let's order," Sally suggests to Gideon. "Let's get two pepperoni pizzas."
"You don't eat meat," Antonia reminds her.
"Then I'll have another glass of Chianti," Sally says. "And some stuffed mushrooms. Maybe some pasta."
Antonia turns to signal the waiter but immediately turns back. Her cheeks are flushed and she's broken into a sweat. Her biology teacher, Mr. Frye, is at one of the small tables in the back, having a beer and discussing the virtues of eggplant rollatini with the waiter. Antonia is crazy about Mr. Frye. He is so brilliant that Antonia considered flunking Biology I just so she could take it again, until she found out he'd be teaching Biology II in the fall. It doesn't matter that he's way too old for her; he's so incredibly handsome that if all the guys in the senior class were rolled up together and tied with a big bow they still wouldn't come close. Mr. Frye goes running every day at dusk and always circles the reservoir on the far side of the high school three times. Antonia tries to make certain to be there just as the sun is going down, but he never seems to notice her. He never even waves.
Naturally she has to meet up with him on the one evening when she hasn't bothered with makeup and is wearing this horrible olive-green thing, which, she now realizes, doesn't belong to her. She's ludicrous. Even that stupid Gideon Barnes is staring at her shirt.
"What are you staring at?" Antonia asks so savagely that Gideon pulls his head back, as if he expected to be smacked. "What is your problem?" she cries when Gideon continues to stare. God, she can't stand him. He looks like a pigeon when he blinks, and he often makes a weird sound in his throat, as though he's about to spit.
"I think that's my shirt," Gideon says apologetically, and in fact, it is. He got it on a trip to St. Croix last Christmas, and left it at the Owens house last week, which is how it got thrown in with the wash. Antonia would be completely and utterly mortified to know that I'M A VIRGIN is printed across her back in black letters.
Sally calls for a waiter and orders two pizzas—plain, no pepperoni—three orders of stuffed mushrooms, an order of crostini, some garlic bread, and two insalatas.
"Great," Gideon says, since he's starving as usual. "By the way," he tells Antonia, "you don't have to give me the shirt back until tomorrow."
"Gee, thanks." Antonia can't take much more of this. "Like I wanted it in the first place."
She dares to look over her shoulder. Mr. Frye is watching the ceiling fan as though it were the most fascinating thing on earth. Antonia assumes this has to do with some sort of scientific study of speed or light, but in fact it's directly related to the experiences of Ben Frye's youth, when he went out to San Francisco to visit a friend and stayed for nearly ten years, during which time he worked for a rather well-known maker of LSD. Such was his introduction to science. It is also the reason why there are times when he has to slow the world down. That's when he stops and stares, at things like ceiling fans and raindrops on window glass. That's when he wonders what on earth he's been doing with his life.
Now, as he watches the fan spin around, he is thinking about the woman he saw earlier that day, in Sally Owens's backyard. He backed off, the way he always does, but it won't happen a second time. If he ever sees her again he's going to go right up to her and ask her to marry him, that's what he'll do. He's sick of letting fate roll right past him. For years, he's been a lot like this restaurant fan, spinning around and getting noplace. What, when it comes right down to it, is the difference between him and a mayfly, which lives a whole damned adult existence in twenty-four hours? The way Ben sees it, he's just about passing by hour nineteen right now, given the statistics for a man's longevity. If five more hours is what he's got left, he might as well live, he might as well say to hell with it and, for once, just go out and do as he pleases.
Ben Frye is considering all this, as well as deciding whether or not to order a cappuccino, since it will mean he'll be up half the night, when Gillian walks through the door. She's wearing Antonia's best white shirt and a pair of old blue jeans and she has the most beautiful smile on her face. Her smile could knock a dove right out of a tree. It could turn a grown man's head so completely he might spill his beer and never even notice that a pool was spreading across the tablecloth and onto the floor.
"Get ready," Gillian says, as she approaches the booth where three very unhappy customers with low blood sugar and no patience left whatsoever are waiting.
"We've been ready for forty-five minutes," Sally tells her sister. "If you have got an excuse, it better be a good one."
"Don't you see?" Gillian says.
"We see you don't think of anyone but yourself," Antonia says.
"Oh, really?" Gillian says. "Well, you sure would know about such things. You would know better than anyone."
"Holy shit," Gideon Barnes says.
At this moment he has forgotten his empty, growling stomach. He no longer cares that his legs are cramping from being squooshed into this booth for so long. Someone who looks a lot like Kylie is walking toward them, only this person is a knockout. This person has short blond hair and is thin, not in the way that storks are but in the style of women who can make you fall in love with them even when you've known them for what seems like forever though you aren't much more than a kid yourself.
"Holy fucking shit," Gideon says as this person gets closer. It is indeed Kylie. It must be, because when she grins Gideon can see the tooth she chipped last summer when she dove for the ball during soccer practice.
As soon as she notices the way they're all staring at her, open-mouthed, like goldfish whose bowl she's just been dropped into, Kylie feels something tingly which resembles embarrassment, or perhaps it's regret. She slides into the booth next to Gideon.
"I'm famished," she says. "Are we having pizza?"
Antonia has to take a drink of water, and still she feels as though she might faint. Something horrible has happened. Something has changed so intensely that the world doesn't even seem to be spinning on the same axis anymore. Antonia can feel herself fade in the yellow lighting of Del Vecchio's; she is already becoming Kylie Owens's sister, the one with the too-red hair who works down at the ice cream parlor and has fallen arches and a bad shoulder that prevents her from playing tennis or pulling her own weight.
"Well, isn't anybody going to say anything?" Gillian asks. "Isn't anyone going to say, 'Kylie! You look incredible! You're gorgeous! Happy birthday'?"
"How could you do this?" Sally stands up to face her sister. She may have been drinking Chianti for nearly an hour, but she's sober now. "Did you ever think of asking my permission? Did you ever think she might be too young to start dyeing her hair and wearing makeup and doing whatever the hell else will lead her on the same dreadful path you've been on your whole life? Did you ever think that I don't want her to be like you, and if you had any brains you wouldn't want that for her either, especially considering what you just went through, and you know exactly what I mean." By now Sally is hysterical, and she's not about to keep her voice down. "How could you?" she asks. "How dare you!" she cries.
"Don't get so upset." This is definitely not the reaction Gillian expected. Applause, maybe. A pat on the back. But not this sort of indictment. "We can put a brown tint over it, if it's such a big deal."
"It is a big deal." Sally is having trouble breathing. She looks at the girl in the booth who is Kylie, or who used to be Kylie, and feels that she's been hooked through her heart. She breathes in through her nose and out through her mouth, just as they taught her in Lamaze class so long ago. "Robbing someone of her youth and innocence, I'd call that major. I'd say it's a big deal."
"Mother," Antonia pleads.
Antonia has never experienced humiliation quite like this before. Mr. Frye is watching them as though their family is putting on a play. And he's not the only one. There's probably not another conversation going on in the entire restaurant. The better to hear the Owenses. The better to watch the sideshow.
"Can we just eat?" Antonia begs.
The waiter has brought over their order, which he tentatively places on the table. Kylie is doing her best to ignore the adults. She imagined her mother would be mad, but this reaction is in a whole other dimension.
"Aren't you starving?" she whispers to Gideon. Kylie expects Gideon to be the one sane person at the table, but as soon as she sees the expression on his face, she knows it's not food he's thinking of. "What's wrong with you?" she asks.
"It's you," he says, and it sounds like an accusation. "You're all different."
"I am not," Kylie says. "It's just my hair."
"No," Gideon says. The shock is wearing off, and he feels that a theft has been committed. Where is his teammate and friend? "You're just not the same. How could you be so stupid?"
"Go to hell," Kylie says, hurt beyond belief.
"Fine," Gideon shoots back. "Do you mind letting me out so I can get there?"
Kylie moves so Gideon can slide out of the booth. "You are an idiot," she tells him as he leaves, and she sounds so cool she amazes herself. Even Antonia is looking at her with something resembling respect.
"Is that how you treat your best friend?" Sally asks Kylie. "Do you see what you've done?" she says to Gillian.
"He is an idiot," Gillian says. "Who leaves a party before it's even happened?"
"It has happened," Sally says. "Don't you see? It's over." She searches through her purse for her wallet, then throws some cash on the table to pay for the uneaten food. Kylie has already grabbed a piece of pizza, which she quickly drops when she sees how grim her mother looks. "Let's go," Sally tells her girls.
It takes Ben Frye this long to realize that he has another chance. Sally and her girls have gotten up and Gillian is alone at the table. Ben walks over casually, just like a man whose blood hasn't heated up to a dangerous degree.
"Hey, Sally," he says. "How are you doing?"
Ben is one of the few teachers who treat Sally like an equal, even though she's only a secretary. Not everyone is so kind—Paula Goodings, the math teacher, orders Sally about, convinced she is some drone behind the desk, available to do errands for anyone who wanders by. Ben and Sally have known each other for years and considered dating when Ben first was hired at the high school, before deciding what they both really could use was a friend. Since then, they have often had lunch together and are allies at school meetings; they like to go out and drink beer and gossip about the faculty and the staff.
"I'm doing really poorly," Sally tells him now before she notices that he's moved on without waiting for an answer. "Since you're asking," she adds.
"Hi," Antonia says to Ben Frye as he walks past her. Brilliant, but it's the best she can do at the moment.
Ben smiles at her blankly, but he keeps right on going, until he's at the table where Gillian is staring at the uneaten food.
"Is there something wrong with your order?" Ben asks her. "Is there anything I can do?"
Gillian looks up at him. There are tears falling from her clear gray eyes. Ben takes a step toward her. He is so gone, he couldn't come back if he wanted to.
"There's nothing wrong," Sally assures him as she collects her girls and begins to troop toward the door.
If Sally's heart weren't so closed up at the moment, she'd feel sorry for Ben. She'd pity him. Ben has already sat down across from Gillian. He's taken the matches out of her hand—which has that damn tremor again—and is lighting her cigarette. As Sally leads her girls out of the restaurant, she believes she hears him say, "Please don't cry," to her sister. She may even hear him say, "Marry me. We can do it tonight." Or maybe she's just imagining that's what he's said, since she knows that's where he's headed. Every man who's ever looked at Gillian the way Ben is looking right now has made a proposal of one sort or another.
Well, the way Sally sees it, Ben Frye is a grown man, he can take care of himself, or, at the very least, he can try. Her girls are another matter entirely. Sally's not about to let Gillian arrive out of nowhere, with three divorces and a dead body in her recent history, to start playing around with her daughters' welfare. Girls like Kylie and Antonia are just too vulnerable; they get broken in two by cruel words alone, they're easily made to believe they're not good enough. Just seeing the back of Kylie's neck as they walk through the parking lot makes Sally want to weep. But she doesn't. And, what's more, she won't.
"My hair's not that bad," Kylie says once they're in the Honda. "I don't see what's so horrible about what we did." She's sitting alone in the backseat and she feels so weird. There's no space for her legs at all, and in order to fit she has to fold herself up. She almost feels as if she could leap out of the car and walk away. She could start a new life and never look back again.
"Maybe if you think about it, you will," Sally tells her. "You have more sense than your aunt, so you have a better chance of understanding your mistake. Think it over."
That's what Kylie does, and what it all adds up to is spite. Nobody wants her to be happy, except for Gillian. Nobody gives a damn.
They drive home in silence, but after they've pulled into the driveway and are walking toward the front door, Antonia can no longer hold her tongue. "You look so tacky," she whispers to Kylie. "And you know what the worst part is?" She draws this out, as though she were about to utter a curse. "You look like her."
Kylie's eyes sting, but she's not afraid to talk back to her sister. Why should she be? Antonia looks oddly pale tonight, and her hair has turned dry, a bundle of blood-colored straw caught up in barrettes. She's not so pretty. She's not as superior as she's always pretended.