“Roy, will you choose some music?” Mom calls through the screen door. “You know I never pick the right tunes.”
“You got it, baby.”
I watch Roy trot over and start to fiddle with the knobs. He’ll probably break it, he’s so non-mechanically inclined, and that plus his temper is a lethal combo. Mom says I need to learn how to give Roy a chance, but how can I when he is such a ferocious composite of literary villains—Captain Bligh’s weather-beaten face, Captain Queeg’s beady eyes and Colonel Pyncheon’s iron will, to name a few.
I can’t imagine that my father was in any way similar to Roy, but I’ll never know. Dad fell off a ladder and died of a broken neck when I was four. My memories of him are pretty vague, and are based mostly on times when he carried me—the giddy, sway-backed perspective from up on his shoulders or the safer hip-straddle, my nose buried in the cottony smell of his T-shirt. Aside from being my best mode of transportation, David Morse left me almost no impression, though I guess in the big picture, it’s better not to remember too much, since then there’s less to miss.
After dinner, Mom and Roy exchange the deck chairs for the bedroom, leaving me a sink full of dirty dishes. Tidying the kitchen is always my job, but tonight it seems unfair, not only since I didn’t get any steak but because our dishwasher broke last month, so I have to clean everything by hand.
Plus the air conditioner has decided to take the day off. I shove open the kitchen window.
What is it about the thin, slappy noise of water that makes a person feel so alone?
From the far back of the house, Mom laughs. I close my eyes and imagine Los Angeles, and how one day I will live in the middle of my life instead of wedged off to the side of it. In L.A., I’ll have my own exactly right friends—not a confusing, jittery Roy in the bunch.
Suddenly I picture the lifeguard girl standing on a tropical green lawn, wearing a cherry red sundress, holding a chocolate martini and looking so L.A. perfect, so absolutely and flawlessly lifted out of my sunshine-splattered future that it seems to be a sign that my future can start whenever I want it to, if I want it badly enough. And right then, I feel it, aha, yes! I need to become friends with this girl as soon as I can! Yes! Of course I do!
No matter what she might have to say about it.
I Make the Acquaintance of Starla
THE NEXT MORNING, Judith tells me she’ll be taking Lainie to work.
“You won’t be bored without me, will you, Irene?” Lainie asks, clambering into the car once Judith pulls up to the house to drop me off. “You can use my bed for a nap if you get tired.”
“Thanks, Lainie. You know I’d never nap on the job.” I say this very loud so Judith hears.
As soon as they’re gone and Evan and I have made ourselves bug-eyed from morning television, he asks, “If we go to Larkin’s today, you think the hot lifeguard’ll be there?”
“Probably.”
Evan drops off the recliner and attempts a few push-ups. When he stands, his face is all crazy red. “How old do I look for my age? Do I look older than going-on-twelve?”
“Honestly?”
He frowns. “I guess.”
“No, but you’re a significant percentage cuter than Zaps.”
This seems good enough for him. And so we’re out the door ten minutes later, although nine of them are spent dealing with an upchucking Poundcake.
“Mom says he has separation anxiety,” Evan informs me. “She says dogs are smarter than people, and they know when you’re planning to leave.”
“How’s that smarter than people?”
Evan ignores me and rubs Poundcake under his slobbering chin. “Good boy,” he says. “We’ll be back soon. You just hang in there, guy.”
The lifeguard girl is sitting in her chair like she’d never left it, except that today she is wearing a yellow racer-back swim-suit. Mom has always told me that yellow is “my” color, but seeing the lifeguard girl looking so perfect, I decide I’ll never get near yellow again. It also makes me slightly grouchy with Mom, as if she’s been duping me.
Thankfully today I’m wearing my best summer outfit, which is a composite of Whitney’s greatest hits cast-offs. Over my own navy bathing suit, I’m in threadbare, low-waist tennis shorts, a striped tennis shirt with the logo ripped off, and sun-faded blue tennis sneakers.
“There’s your girlfriend,” I say to Evan when I realize that Evan is staring at her, too.
He looks sheepish, and then zooms off in search of Zaps.
I spread out the towels and take out
Jane Eyre
so that I can watch the lifeguard girl more discreetly. Plain Jane wears her hair in a meek little bun, but now that her rich boss, Mr. Rochester, is throwing himself a party, a few fancier hairstyles have turned up. The party takes its time getting going, and eventually the noonday heat is ablaze on my skin. So when the lifeguard girl breaks for a swim, it’s easy enough to justify that this is exactly what I want to do, too.
She plows into the water like she’s off to war. I plunge in to catch up.
“Hi,” I say, too loud, with a big parade-float wave.
She ripples her fingers.
“I’m the babysitter from the other day,” I explain, “when you saved that boy’s life?”
“He was faking,” she answers. “Kids do that.” She snaps off her ponytail elastic and arches back to dunk her hair. When she comes up, it looks longer, sleek past her chin.
“The other thing I meant to ask that day was—I wanted to know if I could make a sketch of your hair.” Then I add, so she doesn’t think I’m too Humbert-y, “For this project I’m doing. My mom owns a hair salon. Style to Go, on Esplanade?”
The girl gives me a look like I might be a creep, anyway. “No, thanks.”
I take a huge breath and sink underwater, pushing off from the rocks to swim away from her and out to the dock. Yuck, maybe I am a creep.
When I get to the dock, I’m winded, and I realize I forgot to put on sunblock. The day feels full of wrong turns, and as I make my embarrassed swim back to the bank, the sun beating welts into my shoulders, I take care not to look at the lifeguard girl, who is now standing in the shallow water, chatting with a couple of moms.
Evan has already attacked our pack lunch and absconded with both sandwiches, leaving me a handful of peanut-butter celeries that have turned drooly-rubbery. I eat them and decide that even if this whole day is worthless, I’ll compensate by asking Judith to drop me off in town so that I can buy some chocolate-pudding frosting, which Whitney and I like to eat plain from the can.
Back inside my book, Blanche Ingram is moving in on Mr. Rochester. Blanche is cuter than Jane, hair-wise, but I know Mr. R will eventually succumb to Jane’s mousy charms because the author sketch shows Charlotte Brontë with a hairdo that is sympathetically similar to Jane Eyre’s.
I wonder if Sister Soledad realizes that she’s recommended back-to-back obsessive love stories, and if this has anything to do with Sister’s own vows to Jesus.
A shadow falls over me. I look up.
“Hi.”
“Changed my mind,” says the girl, “about the hair.” She sits down on the beach towel.
“Oh,” I say. “Great.”
“Since I’m bored.”
I reach for my notebook. I have no idea where the lifeguard girl’s head belongs. Not in the regular section. That’s reserved for the Heroines. But not in the
I.W.I.,
either. On impulse, I open to a blank page near the end. I will put her all by herself.
“Will this take long?” She makes a haughty face as if she poses for pictures all the time.
“No.”
“I’m off duty for half an hour.” She points to her
Off Duty
shingle that hangs off the back of the chair. “On lunch.”
“I only need a few minutes. Name?” I’m all business, my pen uncapped and hovering. The corners of my eyes are on watch for the threat of Evan.
“Starla Malloy.”
There are names and there are fake names, and this name falls into the second category. Starla! Please. But I’m not in a position to call her bluff. I do a quick sketch. Her hair is on the frizzy end of the curly spectrum. Nothing special. It’s not her hair that makes Starla amazing.
I try to look appropriately modest when I show her the finished result, but it’s an exceptionally good sketch. I’ve caught the angle of her jaw and the sweep of her hairline. Starla barely looks. Instead, she holds out her hand. “Ten smacks.”
“What?”
“Payment. For being your hair model, duh.”
“I don’t have ten dollars.”
“Then you can bring it tomorrow.”
I scrutinize her. Starla stares right back. Her eyes are a deep, caramel brown, thickly lashed. She is not joking, and I’m shocked to the core that she thinks I should pay for her sketch. “What if I show you the book instead?”
She shrugs. I hand over my notebook, violating my own rule.
“So what is this?” She flips through like it’s a chore. “Who are all these ladies?”
“They’re from books. They’re a collection of the hairstyles of Great Women in Literature.”
“Wow.”
Starla’s
wow
is one shade too close to mean. She starts reading my copied description of Blanche Ingram’s hair. I can tell right off that she’s no reader, out loud or otherwise. “ ‘Rich raven ringlets, a crown of thick plaits behind, and in front the longest, the glossiest curls I ever saw.’ ” She lets out a snort that would give Mom some competition. “Granny hair,” she says.
“It’s a complicated style,” I acknowledge. “Not for beginners.”
She tosses the notebook so that it lands on my feet. “No offense, but if you think people are gonna start wearing their hair like any of those ladies, then you’ve got yourself the dumbest idea I ever heard in my whole life.”
“Any business that trades in pulchritude can be a lucrative franchise.”
From Starla’s expression, it’s obvious she is not onto the word
pulchritude,
and probably not
lucrative,
either. Which was my plan. When someone insults you, I have found that the best thing to do is to answer with a handful of jumbo vocabulary. I have practiced this technique on Roy, so I know that it works. It’s unsettling, and Starla’s look is unsettled. “Nerd!” she says. “Why’m I even dealing with you?” Suddenly she leans forward. “Touch my hair.”
I feel strange doing so, but I reach out and give her hair a little pat. It’s springier than I thought, and I immediately want to alter my sketch, although doing so basically admits I’ve made a mistake, which I wouldn’t want to acknowledge.
“My mom is half Shawnee, half Irish, and my dad is mostly Puerto Rican, with one quarter African American, so I’m multiracial.” Starla smiles as if she just won a bet against me. “What do you know about any hair that isn’t your own? What hair could you give me that would be better than what I’ve got?”
I roll my eyes, because I know everything about all hair. Then I pick up my book and start turning the pages. “Okay. There’s Tita in
Like Water for Chocolate.
There’s Karana in
Island of the Blue Dolphins . . .”
“Sorry, honey,” says Starla, standing up and stretching tall, arms above her head. “I’ve got my own thing going. And since
you
copied
my
style, I should get paid, right? Ten bucks, tomorrow. Or the next day, or whichever day I see you. I’m not in any hurry. But you owe me, and if you don’t make good on your debt, then I’ll have to write you up in my blog.”
With a final, sneery smile, she trots back to her chair. I watch her climb up and away. My heart feels like a bee landed inside it, beating and buzzing together. I roll onto my back and put
Jane Eyre
over my eyes so that Starla will think I have fallen into a nonchalant sleep. I want to hate her, but I guess I feel too unnerved—depressed, even. My first stab at a glamorous future has laughed me right back into reality. But who was I kidding? The Starlas of the world never become friends with the Irenes.
Affirmed and Reminded
Dear Irene,
Your note reached me right when I needed a laugh. Not that I am making light of your situation. I can empathize with your shock at being criticized—by a stranger, no less—for something you are proud of. It reminds me of when Father Donovan warned me that as a teacher I “set a messy example” and that I needed “to cross my
t’
s and dot my
i’
s.” It wasn’t a harsh reprimand, except that being a teacher is what I am and always will be most proud of, and I’ll never forget the thorny feelings his comments roused in me. Though I do think that if Father Donovan had known how deep his words had cut, he would not have used them.
Irene, I’m sure you still vividly recall last fall’s Golden Bookworm contest, when you beat the 34-book record by reading 51 books. Remember when you got up onstage to accept your prize of
Bartlett’s Quotations,
how one of your classmates called out an unkind remark? I watched you from the audience and knew your strength came from the knowledge that you had read every last book, and that your
Bartlett’s
had been earned with enthusiasm and honesty.
All to conclude, you can hold your own against this Starla. Hers might just be an unusual friendship. In my own life, for example, Sister Maria Martinez can be very impulsive, but she always provides a reliable surprise. Last Saturday, for example, she rented a van and drove a dozen of us into Atlantic City for a dinner theater of
Cabaret
. Such fun! Never would I have thought to do such a thing on my own!
That old chestnut “live and learn” is not so tired a cliché when it happens in life!
Warmly,
Sister Soledad
I Make an Impact
STARLA HURT MY feelings more than I could let on to Sister S., but after Sister’s e-mail, I decide to hunt down Starla’s blog on the web. The search word
Starla
brings up a rock band, a scraggly folksinging trio, several sites dedicated to numerology, astrology and aura-reading, and then, aha! Starla’s journal.