Court of the Myrtles (7 page)

“No,” I say, stopping in my tracks. This old woman always manages to outsmart me. Has a line for everything. “No, I hadn't.”

“Or maybe the whales are in Granada.”

“There aren't whales in the middle of Spain.”

Alice just looks at me. “You sure about that?”

“Oh, I get it,” I say. “Make the best of it all. Anything is possible. Make it be whatever I want it to be. Kind of like making lemon meringue pie out of lemons, right?”

“Whales, lemons, it's all the same. Unless they're in a pie. You've got to go and find it. Live it. Live it for Rosie, if you must. That will help demolish your guilt.” She casts her eyes down toward the front seat of my car. “Can I have a piece?”

“Huh?”

“Candy. In that tin.”

“No, it's not candy,” I say, opening the door and shoving the Peter Rabbit tin down to the carpeted floor as though I'm ashamed of it. “It's nothing.”

“I don't believe you.”

The summer I turned fifteen we had fifteen straight days of rain. Bored from endless romance novels and the required summer reading of Margaret Mitchell's
Gone With the Wind
, I decided to experiment with make-up. I wanted to transform my green eyes into something as smoldering as the lash-batting Scarlett O'Hara. Locking myself in the bathroom, I removed the retainer that secured my front teeth, pulled my hair back into a tight ponytail, and rummaged through my mom's make-up case until I came up with a mascara stick called “blackest black.” I brought the wand unsteadily to my lid and found that my lashes certainly batted, but not in a way that might suggest Rhett Butler just walked into the room.

Settling on some globs of midnight liner, I drew lines under and over my eyes and stood back to admire the mess. What stared back from the mirror was something sure to impress only one person: Alice Cooper. My hand reached for the tissue box grabbing one Kleenex after another, dabbing them into a container of Noxzema before wiping my face back to clean. When the red swelling finally subsided, I headed for the front door. Galloping down the cement landing of our entryway past the graffiti about who to reach “for a good time,” with one swift push of the metal door I was outside. “Free to be!” I could hear my mom's words, and now I understood them. I was going to be just me.

Julia waited on the street corner in her midriff shirt, her chunky-white belly hanging over the waistline of her bellbottom denims. She swung her arm around the pole of the broken street lamp, humming the lyrics to “We're an American Band”—Grand Funk Railroad. Young women from the wrong side of the projects shared a nearby bench, dangling cheap red stilettos off their blistered heels, waiting for some John that never showed up at the bus stop. They weren't bad girls, just girls trying to score a buck, some love and cigarettes.

“Can I bum a smoke?” asked one with charcoal-smudged eyes and fake eyelashes. I longed to ask if she wanted to borrow my Noxzema. But Julia said no, because we didn't smoke. Hell, we were frightened to even
buy
a pack of cigarettes since my mom found the Newport Lights in my panty drawer. She dragged me to the tub's edge, forcing me to inhale the
entire
pack until I vomited. “Bet you'll never do
that
again,” she had said. And she was right.

The project girls would high-five us down a straight row—our version of a receiving line—as Julia and I passed by them on our way to the convenience store.. Sometimes they got up and followed. I felt like the Pied Piper with my entourage behind because we were never afraid of those girls, Julia and me, despite being the only white girls in the neighborhood. Maybe it was because Rosie was now managing the downtown shelter, advocating for financial assistance in helping young mothers place their babies. And it was my mom that drew me to the convenient store in the first place, knowing that any moment she'd emerge with a box of popsicles for her shelter family. I saw her clipping coupons this morning. Affording the popsicles was one thing; getting them to the
office freezer before they melted from the two buses and the one train it took her to get to work was another.

But she always snuck a few out of the box for those tough project girls who, upon seeing the box-tab ripped open, suddenly lost their edge, becoming the needy little girls they once had been. Mom would say, “Girls, there's one for everyone—plenty of orange, so don't just take the cherry and grape. Try a lime.” And then before you knew it, and probably because the bus was late, Mom had enough time to convince every last one of those girls to wipe the cheap rouge from their face, put on their sneakers and join her at the shelter for a free lunch. “Bologna sandwich and a Sprite if you help out with call-ins?” she'd coax them, sounding like some game show host with the option of what might lie behind door number three. And then there was mopping the corridors and dusting the book shelves, which everybody wanted to do because it meant popping a 45 on the old turntable and dancing their chores away. Of course the real motive was to get these girls off the streets, to teach them “to learn self-esteem and to make choices with confidence,” she'd say, while they nodded their heads over their straws poked in their Sprite cans.

I'd often catch my mom peeking around the corner with a sly grin to see the girls jumping from the desks to the chairs, using broom sticks for microphones, gyrating their hips to the Isley Brother's and singing along to “It's Your Thing.” Self-confidence was instilled as if by accident, a by-product of chores and fooling around. Sometimes I'd feel a twinge of jealousy, not wanting to share my mom with all these girls. But I realized that making less fortunate girls feel better about themselves made her feel better about herself and that in turn made me feel better about myself. Anytime the girls would start their day with us, she'd begin by giving each one a hug and a long line of praise. If a girl could
read for the first time, my mother would say, “You're so smart, you'll be the first woman president!” If she could sing, Mom would say, “You're going to go all the way to the Grammys!” They clung to her words, those girls, just as I did.

If that wasn't enough, Mom practically adopted my best pal, Julia. Julia was only ten when her father went to jail for shooting the Santa Claus at the Jordan Marsh department store because he wouldn't promise to deliver the dollhouse Julia's dad couldn't afford anyway. When Santa made Julia cry, her father pulled out a gun. Santa didn't die from the gunshot wound, but still, giving Santa a heart attack didn't go down well with the Little Helpers…

After that, Julia's mother went M.I.A., usually drunk at some local bar over by the subway at Forest Hills Station. It
sounded
glamorous, “Forest Hills Station,” but it was actually the filthiest and most depressing subway line—the orange line—cutting through the armpit of Boston's inner city.

Julia latched onto us right through her training bra phase and then her first kiss. She remained faithful to me, always content to be back-up singer, walking one step behind, even now as we headed up the hill past the school basketball court. We could hear distant singing. It was Crosby, Stills & Nash's version of “Southern Man,” sounding muffled from the speakers, as if they were in front of a stadium audience.

We followed the music up the hill like the Three Wise Men following the star to Bethlehem, except baby Jesus turned out to be a dude with long black hair and a set of drumsticks that he tapped gently on his cymbal. We squatted outside the basement window in order to peek inside, the shadow on the screen making it difficult to make out
the face below of Charlie, the drummer, gazing up at us. He was a little bit older, seventeen, but he was smoking hot.

After two weeks of waiting outside that basement during June's longest heat wave in history, the keyboard player finally swung open the bulkhead door and said, “You wanna come in and jam?” As though we
hadn't
been doing that all along?

We descended those plank-like steps into cooler air where a lone microphone stood in the center of the floor. The guys didn't even ask my name. They didn't care. Apparently their girl singer from the nearby town of Milton had been sent off to summer camp and I was all they had to pinch-hit. Mom couldn't afford to send me to summer camp, and Julia's mom spent all the money she had on booze, but these boys could afford instruments. “You ready?” Charlie winked. I smiled at him, nodded, exhaled, and then tapped the microphone, the way I'd seen Stevie Nicks do it at a concert on TV. The band nodded so I tapped again but a little louder, and the echoing vibration startled me.

When I blurted out the first line of a Fleetwood Mac song, Julia gave me a double thumbs-up from where she sat on the big speaker that reverberated under her butt. This was a far cry from the silly singing we did with my mom in our living room but maybe those silly routines were finally paying off. Maybe this was my destiny: a singer in a band in Charlie's basement.

In August the band went on what they called a “road trip,” which really meant that their parents said “get a real job,” so my career was over. I was officially an unemployed singer.

Charlie was the first to find a job. He became a lifeguard at the public pool in Roslindale Square. He also asked me “Do you wanna go steady?” and when I said “Yes”
he'd sneak Julia and me into the pool for free. I was forever worried about my tan lines and he was always worried about his burning shoulders, though the worse the burn, the cooler it was. For Charlie, it was true love. For me, it was just a free month at the city pool.

With September came the end of summer romance. Charlie protested his undying love for me at the Grey Hound bus terminal. He was being sent to a New Hampshire boarding school for his senior year. “You'll write me, right?” were his last words. I looked him up and down before sarcastically answering, “No.” Then I just glanced down at my half-bitten fingernails, extending them for closer examination, before turning to go. I didn't turn back, not a once, but Julia did. She just shrugged her shoulders at him after noticing his drooping, puppy dog eyes. Later that night, Julia told me Charlie never stopped looking back at me, all the while waving limply with one hand, his duffle bag in the other. Truth was, I was just embarrassed that a boy would like me that long.

But it was about ten before ten that night—I remember because I was setting my clock for my first day of school—when word broke about Charlie in the neighborhood. He had decided to hitchhike instead of taking that bus. And when the evening rain moved in, so did the fog. On a long stretch of highway in New Hampshire, an oncoming vehicle didn't see Charlie near the guardrail. His body was tossed twenty feet into the air, landing face down in a puddle. Killed instantly.

I was devastated, not just by the news, but also by the way I last spoke to him. I had been afraid he would forget about me and not come back from boarding school. Or worse, return with a new girlfriend. Now I was living with the guilt of knowing I couldn't
take back my behavior. Not at Christmas. Not ever. My mom always told me to be nice to everybody because it may be the last time you see them. My mom was right.

At his funeral, aisle side of the second pew, I realized the same Catholic Church used for Charlie's First Holy Communion was one used for his funeral. And that the same church used for his funeral should have been used for his wedding. This was my first funeral and it would forever affect my thoughts of church aisles and walking down them.

Especially when it came to Eddy.

Around the time Joy turned fifteen, she miraculously stopped being invisible. Maybe because there was no hiding her size twelve figure or maybe because her face was covered in pimples—the latest explosion on the tip of her nose magnified by her mother's compact mirror she stared into from behind the locked bathroom door. Rummaging through her mother's cosmetics, Joy came upon an ivory cover-up stick that she hoped would work its magic.

But on the outside of the bathroom…

“C'mon! Hurry up lard ass!” her brother screamed from the other side of the door. “Stop hogging the bathroom! I'm gonna piss my pants!”

“Why should I?” demanded Joy as she looked through various pencil sticks and came upon a blue one. Joy was sure the cobalt shade would draw attention to her eyes, her one positive feature. Even Georgey always complimented her eyes from where he sat in front of her in third period Earth Science.

Joy pulled open the door to her brother on the other side, hands in position to quickly bolt the door back shut if needed. Startled by her unexpected emergence, he just
stood there. “I said I'm. Not. Ready. Yet!” She slammed the door again, catching the lock before he could shimmy the handle. His pounding increased to kicking. But she didn't care. She'd spent her childhood being jealous of her brothers who had time with a father she barely ever knew. She could read the transparent expressions on people's faces, the one that said “That poor chubby thing lost her father.”

Alice now had time for a hobby, thanks to her policeman's pension, and her gratitude showed up in the yellow roses that reached for the sun on the new brick walkway. A four-foot path of Astilbe swayed its feathery-pink flumes in the breeze where Joy's wooden swing once hung on the branch of the old oak tree, now sitting on a dusty garage shelf next to a can of turpentine.

Alice walked the length of the yard, meticulously plucking dandelions like some Mandrill monkey picking bugs from its baby's belly. Her passion had become her obsession. Alice had won second place in the Summer Petal Contest that appeared page twenty of
House & Garden
. It was for her “Mozart,” a hybrid musk rose, simple to grow but a real “looker.” Her petite climbing roses came in third place for their “bouncy touch.” Alice had built a trellis up the side of the wooden fence where the sunshine cast rays on their perfect velvet petals.