Cameron has spent a lot of time with Rosemary during these weeks, to the point where his mom even said, “Give her a break before you smother her.” Molly knows nothing beyond Rosemary’s name. Every time Cameron imagines introducing them, he imagines his mother’s reaction (shock? horror?) at seeing the face that just walked through her door. It’s best that mother and son keep their romantic adventures private from each other.
Now, with Molly off on an all-day hike, Rosemary sits at Cameron’s desk and types her
Hamlet
essay (the role of Ophelia blah, blah, blah) on his computer. When she’s finished, Cameron reads over her shoulder, intoxicated by the coconut smell of her shampoo, the feel of her hair against his cheek, and pronounces the essay excellent. She sends it to the printer; they kiss while the ink head whirs back and forth, paper coming out at the speed of a growing plant.
Their dates so far have ended with some heavy making out…
In movie theaters, where they can usually hold out until the film is over – they saw most of
Romancing The Stone
but not much of
Splash
.
In his car, where the windows fog up so thickly he sometimes has to take her home with his head leaning out the driver’s side.
Each time, she holds her hair aside with one hand so it won’t end up in their mouths, while her other hand cups his cheek. She makes little noises like mouse hiccups when they really get into it. His hand migrates from her knee to her thigh to her chest.
He wants her to put her hand on him, inside his pants. He needs that moment.
He arrives home from these dates each time with hot pink lips, as if he’s applied something with
strawberry
in its name.
The night in his car when she unhooks her bra – his jeans seemingly five agonizing sizes too small – is the night she whispers, “Take me to your house.”
He wills every light to turn green, figuring they have at least two hours of his house being empty. Rosemary holds his free hand in both of hers the whole drive, occasionally bringing it to her mouth and kissing his knuckles.
The radio reminds them over and over that video killed the radio star.
They finally get there and, while he finds it more than a little difficult to stand up, not to mention walk, he leads her as fast as he can to the front door. Too many lights left on yet again.
“Cam?” his mom’s voice comes from the kitchen. He dies a little inside. She had a date tonight! She’d been getting ready when he left! The guy’s name was Jonathan!
Molly sits at the kitchen table, in one of her sparkly short dresses, makeup tracks down over her cheekbones. Cameron knows what’s happened without even asking, because he’s seen it before: the date went poorly, the guy was an asshole, or she’s generally feeling sorry for herself. He hates her right then for doing it tonight. Why can’t she be stronger?
He turns and pulls Rosemary out behind him. He backs out of the driveway in such a rage that his tire goes up over the Vanzants’ curb.
Once again they stand on her front porch. “Sorry,” Cameron tells her, and he can hear the bitterness in his own voice.
“It’s fine.” She takes both his hands in hers. “We’ll see each other again, I suspect.”
“Thank you,” he whispers between kisses, not even sure what he’s thanking her for. So many choices. Finally she goes inside and he sits down in his car – too hard, given the condition of his groin – and lets out a yell on the quiet street.
He intended to drive around long enough to give his mom a chance to take her sleeping pill and pass out, but when he gets home she’s still sitting. He readies himself for one of two things: either a scolding about how rude he is, or a pronouncement about the crappiness of all men everywhere.
Instead she says, “Your grandmother had a stroke.”
He sits at the table with her and listens. She has to fly to Florida in the morning; she doesn’t know how long she’ll be gone. While he certainly feels sad, while he certainly loves his grandmother (in the way one loves a relative they usually only see once a year), a small percentage of his attention is dedicated to the fact that he will have the house to himself, and what good can come from that.
* * *
Cameron has always loved the airport. When he was a kid, on those occasions where they flew to California instead of drove, his dad would take him to the big glass cases by baggage claim. Lining the shelves inside was the most wondrous fleet of tiny airplanes any kid would ever see: passenger planes, military jets, and some behemoths that looked like they could fly to Venus and back. This is what inspired their model building, their quest to recreate the display in Cameron’s room. Bryce was so lucky to have a pilot for a dad.
Cameron pulls up to the curb and takes his mom’s suitcase from the trunk. The airport is deserted under an early concrete sky. She hugs him, then takes his face in her hands. He waits for the final instructions, the ones she’d accidentally left off the list on the kitchen counter, but she just nods as a skycap comes toward them.
Brenda Marshall, her clarinet case in one hand and a limp carnation like a banana peel in the other, opens Pandora’s box and releases the Seven Evil Words on Bryce: “I like you as a friend, but…”
And with that, Bryce officially gives up on women.
“Can you give me a ride to the post office this afternoon?” Claire asks Bryce on their drive to school. Inside her backpack is a manila envelope awaiting stamps.
“Why?”
“I have to mail something.”
“No duh. What is it?”
“C’mon, can’t you just drive me?”
“That’s the price for a ride.”
“Fine, I’m entering a photography contest. That one they’ve been advertising in the paper.”
The words sound strange coming out of her mouth, because by speaking them aloud she’s made the whole thing real. When Mr. Duran mentioned it in class, when he hung the flyer on his door, she tuned it all out. When he invited her to come after school so they could review her portfolio, she decided to humor him.
He flipped through the pictures: the hanging lightbulb in Bryce’s room, Ricky’s scar, the dead rabbit, the black widow spider in the garage, a math worksheet floating in a puddle of rainwater. She left out one of her best compositions: the guys gathered in Buzzed Head’s garage, well framed and lit, with the smoke from the bong providing a haze over the whole scene. Like a photo of a dream.
“This one,” he said, pointing to the picture of Meredith from the day she got her braces off. In the black and white world, she looks down to her left, hands crossed in her lap, charcoal clouds over her head like dark thoughts in a cartoon.
“Don’t you get your picture printed in the newspaper if you win?” Bryce asks. “That’s pretty sweet.”
Claire replies, “I’m not gonna win – I’m only doing it so my teacher will quit bugging me. So anyways, can I get a ride?”
By the time they meet in the parking lot later, she’s coming down off her high from the day and doesn’t have any more pills to keep it going. What she does have is a raging appetite. Some days it’s hard to keep track of whether she ate lunch or not.
“I have to make one stop on the way home,” Bryce says as they pull out of the post office parking lot.
“Is it the stupid comic book store?”
The customers at Tales of Wonder today are all guys with big stomachs; one of them has the biggest white-tipped pimple Claire has ever seen, like it could erupt on its own any second. Claire wants to look and not look at the same time. Gross. Why doesn’t he take an idea from all the superheroes and wear a mask?
She circles the store while Bryce talks to the old hippie at the counter, with his gray beard and bandanna. Everywhere she looks, more of the same: racks of comics, boxes of comics, T-shirts on the walls.
“Starfire is frickin’ hot” floats out of someone’s mouth.
Then she finds something called
Amazing Fantasy
, with a big monster named Tim Boo Ba on the cover. The monster is tall and looks to be made out of orange clay; he reminds Claire of this weird guy Tim from middle school, who had the same kind of body and always wore Toughskin pants.
But even though the cover says 12 cents, the comic is in a plastic bag with a $20 price tag on it! Claire waits for the fat wheezy guy to pass by her – seriously, who gets wheezy just shopping in a store? – and then slips it under her shirt. Anyplace that tries to rip people off with those prices deserves to be ripped off itself.
She joins Bryce at the counter, where he’s buying three copies of the same issue of
Secret Wars
. He sees the look on her face and says, “It’s gonna be valuable. Number one’s always are.”
Claire holds Bryce’s bag in the car. “Don’t open those,” he tells her. “They have to be in mint condition.”
The issue under her shirt is stiff, a corner of the cardboard backing poking into her ribs.
“You could sell them someday, get a lot of money,” he says.
“Chyeah, right. Like you’d let me sell your comics.”
“I meant if I wasn’t around anymore.”
“When you’re away at college?”
Bryce passes a lumbering city bus. “I’m just saying, you can sell them if you need money. Wherever I am.”
She turns on the car radio, he turns it right off.
“You’re a pretty cool sister, Claire. I know we don’t always get along but, yeah, I’m glad we’re related.”
“Ok, now you’re creeping me out.”
She’s even more creeped out when they turn into the cul-de-sac and see two men in short sleeve white shirts going door to door, currently at Steve and Bo’s.
“Oh no, it’s those weirdoes.” Bryce speeds up in front of their house, where he and Claire dash for the front door.
Claire sits in her room, looks at Tim Boo Ba, and listens to the doorbell chime. And chime again. She watches out her window – not trying to hide – as the men give up and walk next door to Cameron’s house. One of them looks up and sees her; she flips him off without knowing why.
On a warm Saturday morning, Bryce steps out back in his swimsuit to find his dad, shirtless, wearing plaid shorts, brown socks and loafers, digging in the dirt area away from the pool.
“What are you doing?” Bryce asks. He won’t be able to relax in the water with his dad’s grunting and low level swearing as background.
“Thought I’d get my old garden back up and running. Your mom wants tomatoes.” He punches the shovel into a patch of ground and yelps. “Look at that!”
From the break in the dirt, an explosion of brown horned toads – twenty, thirty, fifty, skittering in every direction. Under the fence, into the plants, into the stack of firewood. A few get to the edge of the pool and stop, confused, their sides puffing in and out like leather balloons.
“You kids used to call those ‘horny toads.’” His dad chuckles, taking a last look before resuming his dig. A few still stand frozen at the pool while others make their way along the water’s edge. Above them, a speck of a plane paints a white sky trail from right to left. His dad looks up, shields his eyes. “737,” he says.
Bryce relates the story about the Salvation Army truck parked in front of the Vanzants’ house the day before. Mr. Vanzant and two men in uniforms carried out box after box from the garage, enough stuff to open a store. “Are they moving?” Bryce asks.
“Search me. Maybe it’s all of Dakota’s things.”
“You think they’d just get rid of her like that?”
The shovel clangs against a hard patch of ground. “All I know is, I wish your mother would let me at some of the junk in
our
garage.”
“I heard that,” her voice says from the open kitchen window. “And if you’re so eager to get rid of junk, you can start with those ancient golf clubs!”
The jet trail dissipates, leaving only unscathed, perfect blue.
When the planting is done, Bryce can finally float in peace on the inflatable alligator, the hazy warmth coaxes him into a doze. What if the sun went supernova right now? How long would everyone on Earth have to react?
“Did you hear about the egg war tonight?” Bryce asks Cam, who floats face down on the monster inner tube later.
“That always means driving around town, wasting gas, until you find the secret spot,” Cam replies. “Then it’s not even worth the trouble.”
Bryce scoops a vibrating cicada off the surface of the water. “Geoff heard that some UNM sorority girls are going. Might be worth checking out.”
“I’m cooking dinner for Rosemary, so I can’t.”
Bryce says, “I don’t know if I’m going – it probably won’t be that fun anyway.” Who could’ve imagined the day when Bryce would be unsuccessfully trying to talk his friend into going to a event with college girls? “Let me know when you have an opening in your schedule and we can do something.”
“What d’you mean by that?” Cam asks.
“Nothing. Forget it.” Bryce paddles his alligator toward the shallow end.
“Look, I have a girlfriend now and – ”
“Really? You do? I didn’t notice she’s all you talk about anymore.”
“I would understand if I was in your place.”
“You wouldn’t have to understand ‘cause I would never ditch you.”
“Fine, you want me to leave?” Cam’s voice always so calm.
“Did I say that? Maybe I wanna hang out with you while we still can!”
“What does that mean?”
“It means… y’know, before we graduate. Forget it, I’ll go alone.”
They float at opposite ends. Bryce can’t tell Cam the truth, because he can’t imagine how his friend would look at him. One last horned toad waits on the far edge of the pool, as still as if carved from stone.
Cameron’s dinner date with Rosemary requires a good deal of planning.
He thinks about trying something new from his mom’s copy of
The Microwave Cookbook
– maybe the special bacon cheeseburgers with the bacon and cheese inside the patty – but then settles on a non-microwave recipe he knows by heart: Cornish game hens with Dijon mustard, mashed potatoes, and peas.
He goes to Albertson’s to get food and condoms (after discovering his old ones are all past the expiration date). What that means isn’t clear but he doesn’t want to run a live experiment and find out. He’s rounding the corner to the cash register when his cart collides with Mrs. Vanzant’s.
“Hello, neighbor,” she says from her towering height, a full three inches above him.
While they chitchat, he tries to slyly adjust the contents of his cart so the bright blue box of Trojans isn’t right on top. She glances down at his fumbling. Busted. He brings up the waiting-to-hear-from-colleges topic as an emergency distraction.
“I remember going through this time with Dakota,” she says. “I think my husband and I were on pins and needles more than she was.”
“Where did she end up again?” he asks, even though he knows already.
“Washington, for one semester. She came home at Christmas and announced she was dropping out. We always believed in letting her find her own path, so we… I only wish…”
A voice calls for a cleanup in dairy.
Mrs. Vanzant says, “Some people are better suited to school than others. I suspect you’ll do well.”
As they start moving their respective directions, she adds, “Cameron, in case you weren’t aware, I’ve moved out of the house.”
“Um, no, I wasn’t aware.” A piece of news that didn’t immediately travel via phone to every house on the street! A piece of news he got before his mom! Stop the presses.
“There’s no bitterness involved between Marcus and myself – please don’t think that.” She seems like she’s about to say more, but then doesn’t. They stand there until she puts them out of their misery with a “See you around. Take care.”
Back home, he first does a sweep of the house for any leftover wads of paper towel. He changes the sheets on his bed, shoves his mom’s clutter into the hall closet, and puts the pile of unopened mail in a kitchen drawer. He sets out two bottles of wine (unable to remember whether the white kind or the red kind is supposed to be served cold – this way one of them will be right).
It only takes fifteen minutes to pick an outfit. Five to iron the shirt (and almost burn it). Another ten to do a thorough job on his face with the electric razor. A splash of Old Spice and he’s good to go.
Then the anticipation is over and Rosemary is sitting across the table from him. “Did you know parents in Europe serve their children wine from a young age?” she asks as he pours both glasses up to the rim with red.
After dinner they watch
Remington Steele
in the den. He worries that she’s silently judging him, measuring him against the suave, European Mr. Steele. If he’d been able to watch the scene from outside his body, Cameron might have thought he was getting a glimpse into his potential future: them as a couple, relaxing on the couch with wine, TV, and each other. He would’ve liked the look of that future.
Then they’re kissing, half-vertical, half-horizontal on the couch. She says, “Let’s go to your room” and the problem is solved. He leaves the TV on behind them, something for which he’s repeatedly scolded his mom.
Then they’re on his bed, in the dark.
Then she undoes his pants.
Then eighteen years of waiting are over (so fast!).
Afterwards he surveys his room, everything painted in moonlight through the window. Maybe Bryce – no doubt driving around, trying to find the egg war – picked up the vibes of what went down, like how Obi-Wan Kenobi knew Alderaan had exploded.
Later, after she’s gone (European parents may be awesome, but they still have curfews), Cameron piles dishes in the sink and finishes his second glass of wine. He takes the mail out of the drawer, absentmindedly thumbs through it until he sees an envelope from University of California, Berkeley, addressed to him.
He knows what’s coming:
No thank you, but good luck in your future endeavors
. He chose the wrong essay to mail.
The phone rings. “Did I wake you?” his mom asks.
“No.”
“Grams had another stroke. She’s in the intensive care unit. I’m going to have to stay longer, make all the arrangements and ek cetera.” Some static on her end of the line. Not static – nose blowing.
“Everything’s fine here,” he says, like she asked, like that made anything better.
“All the oldies in the housing complex down here have been stocking up on batteries and canned food. In case the bomb drops, you know.”
Cameron is about to tell her about Mrs. Vanzant at the supermarket, but then:
“You know she’s so proud of you, right? She already has her plane ticket to come see your graduation.”
“I think she’ll be ok,” he pronounces, when in reality he doesn’t know what a stroke even is.
Cameron realizes he’s still holding the envelope when they hang up. He tears it open even though he doesn’t need more bad news tonight.
Congratulations.
The rest could be written in Greek.
The last of the wine burns when he swallows it.