Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories Page 13

  It wasn’t as if Jacey lacked gifts of her own. Her singing voice was a confident, husky alto that never strayed from key. At the junior follies, she performed the anthem “Strawberry Wine” with so much solitude and longing that the gym teacher, a white-haired gargoyle who’d never expressed a single sentiment besides “Muscles work by shortening,” had had to dab away tears. So what? You didn’t hear Jacey going on about how all of Manhattan or Nashville would be aching for her soon. No, she planned to plow on to a career in pharmacy or physical therapy, maybe sing a little around the house if she found a husband who could play a good guitar. Where Maya had been chosen to flit high above life’s brambles, Jacey was not ashamed to be the honest little boulder, rolling bluntly through the thorns.

  Though this would probably be the last summer interlude the cousins would share, Maya had shown insultingly little interest in spending time with Jacey. Here were things Maya had so far declined to do with her cousin: go ice skating at the mall, see a movie, attend a secret beer party two neighborhoods over, shop, and watch the volunteer fire department light a derelict house on fire and hose it out. Maya seemed to regard all the attractions of greater Charlotte as tiresome backwoods dullness—this from someone whose hometown consisted of railroad tracks, two dozen hicks and craftsfolk, and some dogs. What could you do with a person like that? You could not say another nice word to her until she left for dance school on Monday, which is what Jacey resolved to do as she made her way downstairs.

  In the sun-warmed closeness of the room, Jacey sprawled across the daybed. The toasted, musty scent of the quilt was pleasant in her nose. Jacey decided she would be happy in this spot until her father arrived that evening and took her out to dinner. Every two weeks, he drove up to see her from where he lived with his wife in Southern Pines. Jacey was still recovering from the half decade of seething hostility she’d felt toward her father after her parents’ divorce. During the worst of their difficulties, two years ago, Jacey had tried to stab her shy father with a nail file. This news had gotten out, and to this day Jacey’s extended relatives viewed her as the family’s embarrassing lunatic, bound for a life of poverty and disgrace, though Jacey was a responsible student and had made the A/B honor roll four semesters straight. There wouldn’t be any more violence with her father. Hate is tiring when the fun wears out, and she lacked the energy for it now. Anyway, her father really hadn’t done anything wrong except marry a tall, raucous woman whose stirrup pants matched her army-general bearing. Jacey looked forward to seeing her father tonight. She hoped to persuade him to take her to Crawdaddy’s Restaurant, so she could have the Cajun Chicken Littles that she liked.

  Jacey clicked the television on. It showed golf, golf, Mama’s Family, and the program Wild America. The host Marty Stouffer was busy at his habit of laying bare hands on something horrid and fascinating from nature—today, a heap of freshly discarded velvet from an elk’s horns. Veins were in the stuff. It looked like carpet from a murder site.

  “Look at you, little cozy,” Maya said when she entered the sunroom at a quarter of twelve. She was dressed in her latest style, a gauzy swoon of scarves and shawls in the mode of Stevie Nicks. In one hand she held a handkerchief, in the other a box of Vantages. Maya smoked openly. No one gave her trouble about it because in her profession a cigarette was seen as something like a vitamin. Maya yawned and began to twist her hair into a knot. It hung thick past her waist, and she complained about it often, usually declaring in the same breath how she planned to donate it to a company that made wigs for cancer patients. Really, it was a small miracle that Maya had not caught fire with all her gossamer swaddlings and surplus moral hair wafting near the embers of her cigarettes.

  “There’s a dead bird in my bed,” Jacey said, not taking her eyes off the screen.

  Maya looked quizzical. “What’s that, code for something?”

  “For a dead bird in my bed.”

  “Seriously? Right now?”

  “Yep.”

  “What kind of bird?”

  “Nasty,” said Jacey. “An ugly wet little baby.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Nope,” said Jacey.

  “Why not?”

  “Scopes is locked in there with it, is why. I’m not letting him out until he eats it.”

  “Aren’t you clever,” said Maya.

  “Compared to what?” said Jacey.

  Maya looked discomfited. She gave an awkward rear-throat chortle. Jacey thought with some glee that Maya was already feeling the sting of her indifference. As if seized by a sudden chill, Maya launched into a piping suite of sneezes. “Excuse me,” she said. “Something around here is really giving me the snuffles.”

  Jacey flipped the channels through the whole loop and came back to Stouffer, still handling that awful velvet. “Hold your breath, I guess.”

  “Mm-kay,” said Maya. “So you just left it there? The bird?”

  “Yup.”

  “I’ll throw it out for you, if you want. I don’t mind dead stuff.”

  “Scopes is on the case,” Jacey said. In the face of Maya’s sudden gentleness, now Jacey felt small and childish. “Hey, you hungry?”

  Maya said she’d love a bite of something, and Jacey went into the kitchen to whip up a large gourmet brunch for two. She forked cheddar cheese into some eggs, and with a butter knife, she pried a gray cube steak from the rink of ice tray sloshings at the bottom of the freezer. She threw that in the pan with a clang and goosed the flame until the meat bent and smoked. Then she doused it with a pour of red wine from an open jug.

  “Oh, my God,” Maya groaned over her plate, though the piece of beef she had accepted was no larger than a domino. “Jace, this is literally the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.”

  “Plenty left,” Jacey said around a juicy mouthful.

  “Ooh, better not,” said Maya, which Jacey would have taken as an insult had Maya not winningly disclosed that as much as she loved red meat, it tended to strand her on the commode. Jacey finished the steak in good cheer while Maya rounded out her brunch with cashew butter spread thin across an oaten shingle, foods she’d packed down specially from the hills.

  For three quarters of an hour the girls lay on the daybed in companionable style, talking of the habits of their mothers, both single ladies, and of the failings of their fathers and their fathers’ wives. They talked of rock and roll, shampoo, and of a terrific new brand of wine cooler for sale at your better stores. Then Maya glanced at the brass pocket watch she was affecting these days. She said, “Ah, suck. Jace, do you think Aunt June would care if I called Charleston? I need to. I can leave her some bucks.”

  “Who’s in Charleston?”

  “Oh, this guy Doug”—a fellow model, Maya explained, with whom she’d been photographed last spring in a seaside embrace, an advertisement for the Big Stick Surf Shop in Myrtle Beach. Maya reached into the Guatemalan bag that was always close at hand, and produced a photograph of a tanned young man with a cowrie shell necklace standing on a beach. Teeth so white and even they looked false, eyes large and liquid as a mule’s beneath dark and tousled salt-stiff hair. He was a person of such beauty that Jacey had to check the back of the photo to be sure it wasn’t a clipping from a magazine.

  “This is your boyfriend?” Jacey said.

  “In his opinion,” Maya said. “He’s been up to see me a few times. He wants to take me to Burning Man in August. He’s always talking about how you can get married in Nevada when you’re sixteen. I can’t say how many times I’ve told him no, but he keeps not getting the message on purpose. He’s really kind of a pest.”

  Jacey was still gripping the photo. “Shit, Maya. There’s people out there who’d cut off their foot to get with somebody that looks like this.”

  “Fine but poor, dumb Doug,” Maya said with a sigh. “The other day, I was telling him about how I want to do the Peace Corps in Suriname, and he asked if there were any tigers left in Africa.”

  In Jacey’s opinion, Maya
herself was guilty of some idiocy here. You did not low-rate a racing stallion because its command of French was poor. But Jacey kept her mouth shut because she didn’t know where Suriname was, either. If she had to guess, she’d have said it had something to do with the Vietnam War.

  Maya cut her eyes at Jacey. “But actually, that’s not why I need to ditch him. There’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a secret. You gotta swear you won’t tell.”

  “Sure,” said Jacey.

  “Not anyone. Not even what’s-her-name, Dana.”

  “We’re not friends anymore.”

  “Don’t even put it in your diary. If Aunt June finds out, I am so seriously fucked.”

  “Shit, I won’t already. Would you just tell me?”

  The secret was this: Maya had been intriguing with Robert Pettigrew, an assistant director at the Governor’s School of the Performing Arts, where Maya was heading next week. She’d met Pettigrew at a statewide competition in Lenoir the previous spring. They had been corresponding, and his letters had confirmed that he was a sincere and caring person who, despite their age difference, was, Maya said, “totally in touch with my world.”

  “How old?”

  “He just turned thirty-five,” said Maya.

  “Jesus Christ! Did you say thirty-five?” yelled Jacey.

  Maya’s face grew cold and dark. She went for her cigarettes. “Forget it. Stupid to tell you.”

  “Look, Maya, I’m not gonna nark you out, but it’s just, I mean, thirty-five.”

  “Judge me, I don’t give two shits,” Maya said curtly. “It’s between me and Robert, and as far as I’m concerned, everyone else can cram it. Age is just a label. Our thing is, we’re both old souls.”

  “Guess not.”

  Maya sighed. “I love him, Jacey.”

  There was no responding to this remark. Jacey’s own father was merely thirty-seven.

  “He just unlocks these rooms inside me,” Maya was saying. “It’s like he knows things about me that I don’t even know myself.”

  In private revulsion, Jacey clenched her teeth so that an upper canine screeched against a lower. “God, well have you, I mean did you-all . . .” Jacey could not find a term appropriate for when a young girl is groaned on by a thirty-five-year-old lieutenant of the arts.

  “Have we been lovers?”

  Been lovers—the eyeteeth screeched again. Who said that? It called up an image of those two at it beneath a flowering arbor while swans watched. “Did you?” Jacey said.

  “Robert wants to wait until Thanksgiving, until I turn sixteen.”

  “Wait for good, is my advice. I think you’re insane to give up on Doug.” Jacey was gazing at the photo, smoothing the hair with her finger. “Suriname. I’d take him if he couldn’t find the earth on a globe.”

  Maya giggled into her teacup with a bubbling grotto sound. “Well, you’re welcome to him, Jace. I can hardly stand to talk to him on the phone. After with Robert? Seeing how it can be? Even talking to Doug makes me feel so incredibly alone. When he talks, it’s just sound. It’s like the noise in a seashell.”

  “See, I love that sound! It’s relaxing!”

  “Then you guys would make a nice pair.”

  “Yeah, except he’d never like me,” Jacey said.

  “Trust me, Jacey, he’d be lucky to get you.”

  “Sure he would.”

  “Why not? You’re beautiful. You’re hot. I’d pay a million dollars to have your eyes and your sweet freckles. Believe me, you’d be selling yourself short. He wouldn’t even get your jokes. You’d be instantly bored.”

  “That would not happen,” said Jacey.

  “You do the road trip with him, then. Four days with Doug will send me off the deep end. It really will.”

  “I’d go in one second.”

  Maya laughed her trilling laugh. “Fantastic. You’d be bailing me out in a major way.”

  “No, I’m serious!” said Jacey, now sitting cross-legged and straight-backed on the sofa bed, nearly quaking with interest. “I’m there.”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t swallow your tongue. Anyway, I really do need to call him. You don’t think Aunt June would mind?”

  Jacey felt a little dizzy. “Hell, no!” she said, and ran off to fetch the cordless phone.

  Maya looked a little put out that Jacey hovered so near while she dialed up Charleston. But Jacey, who was temporarily insane with fantasies of coasting through Nevada buttes in the car of Doug, the mule-eyed cowrie man, was not about to leave. She wanted to see what wiles and arts Maya would use to bring this thing about. Let him down easy, and then slip him Jacey as a substitute when the moment was perfect, that was the trick—like the moment in Indiana Jones when Jones swipes the golden idol off the weight-sensitive dais and swaps it so deftly for the bag of sand. A delicate maneuver, one that only someone like Maya with her grown-up, alien grace had the gifts for pulling off.

  To her disappointment, Jacey could just barely make out the sandy rasping of Doug’s voice in the receiver. She wished she’d thought to listen in from the extension in her room. Wisely, Maya did not launch straight into talk of Jacey but first lulled him with some chitchat. She talked about a chigger bite on her knee. Then she had some words to say about someone unknown to Jacey named DJ Now-and-Later. Then Maya started discussing the photo shoot for a Belk Leggett holiday mailer. By now Jacey was thinking it was probably time to get down to brass tacks on the issue of her trip to Burning Man. But the chatter wound on through another seven (probably expensive) minutes of friendly nonsense before Maya finally said, “I told you, Forgetful Jones, I’m not at home. I’m down near Charlotte, staying with Aunt June and my cousin Jacey.”

  Hearing her name, Jacey felt an exhilarating terror that Maya was going to put the phone into her hand. What could she say to such a man? Wild-eyed, she shook her head at Maya, who returned a bothered look and went on talking. Though Maya was more the expert in these matters, Jacey felt she could use some coaching at this point. She tapped Maya’s knee. “What is it?” Maya whispered.

  “Look, just say I’m funny,” Jacey said.

  “What?”

  Jacey swallowed.

  “Just tell him I’m funny and hot.”

  Maya nodded. “Yeah, Doug? Hey, I’ve got a message from my cousin. Yeah. She wants me to tell you she’s funny and hot.” Jacey felt an urge to barf.

  “Of course she does, dummy.” Maya cupped her palm over the receiver. “He says to tell you ’preesh.”

  Jacey gaped at her cousin for a moment. Quitting the sunroom, she had to try hard not to break into a run.

  Up in Jacey’s bedroom, Scopes the cat had done nothing with the bird. He was hunched beside it on the pillow, settling in for an all-day gloat. Jacey scowled out her window. Her pulse drummed in her cheeks. She wished she had something valuable to smash. She heard Maya hang up on Charleston, and her breathing slowed a little. Then Jacey picked up the phone and called Leander Buttons at his parents’ home.

  Jacey had necked with Buttons ten days earlier. It had sort of been an accident, and Jacey’s plan was not to talk to him until school started in the fall, if then. Leander wasn’t much more than five feet tall. He was known behind his back as “Little Buttons,” and sometimes to his face. He’d been homeschooled until eighth grade. A boy of mixed interests, he was good on the trombone and was also aspiring to be a burnout. His crowds included both the doofs of the marching band and those lesser hippies who kicked the Hacky Sack on the farthest circle of the school’s doper scene. Little Buttons’s hygiene was poor. His eyes watered, and he so often had a piece of food in the corner of his mouth that you wondered if he kept it in a bedside saucer overnight and donned it in the morning. One time at lunch, his friends took a set of clippers to his head, and the resulting ball of hair was a marvel of filth, full of so much natural grease that it held its form when kicked about the Hacky ring.

  But there had been mitigating circumstances for Ja
cey to get close to him the other night uptown. That evening, Jacey had climbed high into the magnolia tree overreaching the New Life Church with her best friend, Eileen Gutch. They’d drunk three bottles apiece of Little Kings Cream Ale before a rough, hot rain began to fall. The weather sent Gutch running home. With two hours until her mother picked her up, Jacey was alone, woozy and heart-swollen in the downtown, wandering wet streets that gleamed as you would have them gleam in the sweet summer film of your life.

  Down by the parking deck, she saw Little Buttons stagger from a shrub. They were not friends, but they had shared homeroom and English class two years in a row. His shirt was mulchy, and he had a red dome on his forehead. He explained he’d just now bashed it on something during a bout of “The Elevator,” also known as “The Charlotte Classic,” in which you hyperventilated and your friend rammed you on the sternum so that you fainted for a low-rent high. Leander’s partner in the Classic had also vanished when the weather came. So in an act of beery tenderness and rainy-night desire, Jacey took Leander’s hand in hers and led him to the planetarium. Not to the main theater, where you had to pay four dollars to watch the star machine throw the constellations—but to an old, free place, the Copernican Orrery on the forgotten second floor. Here, when you mashed a green lozenge on the wall, the lights dimmed, hidden gears in the ceiling thunked and squealed, and for five minutes the planets of the solar system, portrayed by foam balls spray-painted Day-Glo colors, lurched around a yellow party bulb that was the sun.

  She and Buttons lay in there an hour and a half and mashed the lozenge eighteen times. The necking got fairly grave, but nothing irreparable took place. At one point, Little Buttons quit his exertions to ask if Jacey was a virgin, a question she had no exact answer for. The story was this: Last summer, at a coeducational overnight camp in Tennessee, she wound up in a tent with a boy from New Jersey, also thirteen at the time. He went at her. His wooing was a literal impersonation of the ardent French skunk, Pepé Le Pew. Miraculously, this had resulted in both Jacey’s first real kiss and her first mostly nude movements with a boy. For technical reasons, she had not wholly “given up the rock,” as Eileen Gutch liked to describe the act. If she had to put a figure on it, Jacey supposed she’d given up the rock by about forty percent. So there in the orrery, she whispered “Not really” to Little Buttons, who was so stirred by this news that he began to breathe as though another Charlotte Classic was at hand.