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| CEREMONIES: continued |
| 12.06.05 (12:21 pm) [edit] |
I do get my pages done. I am--with the help of my friends--up to snuff. We will stay up late; we need to work on the newspaper. We are wired and on Vivarin and I’m starting to feel good again. I feel like things mean something here. I don’t feel like a little brother anymore. I suddenly understand my addiction to the yearbook and the paper and school and my addiction to being Jayson Laujinesse. None of us will make it home tonight, that is apparent. We will wake up in our clothes like losers and go to class and do it all over again…
THE FIRST TIME JAYSON BATHES is Wednesday night. The hot water on him feels so good. He feels like he can rest, like he has earned the right to rest. He leaves the bathroom, towel wrapped around him, and goes to his room to get dressed in the old soft jeans and tee shirt, the black turtleneck. It’s chilly tonight. Downstairs the door opens. He can hear Anne who is coming to take him away.
“You look so tired,” Anne tells him when she comes into his room.
“The yearbook’s coming along excellently,” Jayson tells his cousin.
“Anne I can’t wait till it’s out. I can’t wait till you see it. It’s gonna look so great.”
They walk the half mile through College Heights to the O’Muil house on Bernard Street. Everything is so quiet that for a while Jayson can hear the silence. And then he hears the real night. It’s not quiet at all. Dogs bark and cats meow. Cicadas start singing and crickets get ready to chirrup. The train whistles are in the background, and cars pass by. On far away Aramy Street where Isaac lives, the sound of traffic is unending.
“You think it’s stupid don’t you?” Jayson says suddenly.
“What?” Anne looks genuinely shocked.
“The yearbook. You think it doesn’t mean anything.”
Anne doesn’t talk for a while. Jayson loves his cousin. They bicker a lot but she’s not evil. She’s good, really good. She says the right things. She says: “Do you know something?”
Jayson waits for her to say something.
“I would die before I, A.--went on yearbook committee or B--joined the band. But I love both. I love flipping through my yearbooks. I could do it for hours sometimes. Read the little messages people write, the way I forgot people felt about me.”
Suddenly Anne wraps an arm around her cousin as they come up the hill where Bayonne intersects with Bernard.
“People always think that important things have to be really big, and really serious,” Anne says. “But what’s it matter if you just enjoy them?”
And then she smacks him on the back of the head.
“....I WILL NEVER.... BE HUNGRY... AGAIN!” And then the score to Gone With the Wind swelled up as the camera zoomed away from the outline of Scarlett O’Hara and Part One of the movie came to an end.
“Time to the get the second tape,” Jinny said, getting up.
“But not until the music for the intermission is over,” Isaac said.
“Are you serious?” Cecile looked at him.
Isaac looked a little injured as he stood up and turned on the light.
“Yes. Yes I was. I thought we were going to do it just like we were at the movies.”
“Well, I say let the music run.” Jinny told them. “I need to take a piss. And you,” she told Anne, “could make some more popcorn.”
Beside Jayson, Anne said, “Excellent idea,” and was up.
“I never thought it would be possible for any Black man to say this,” Efrem confided in Jayson, “but Scarlett O’Hara is my new hero.”
As Efrem began quoting in a southern accent, “As God is my witness, I won’t let the Yankees lick me....”
“Everyone’s got a Scarlett in ‘em,” Cecile said. “Just waiting for the right tragedy.”
“What about you?” Jayson looked at her.
“I hope I’ve already had my tragedy,” she said blandly.
There was a knock at the door. Anne came out from the kitchen where the bag of microwave popcorn was beginning to pop, but then the door opened and Cecile betrayed herself by shouting, “Ryan!” Jinny, came downstairs commenting, “It’s just like Ashley coming back to Melanie!”
“Only Melanie owned slaves and Cecile would have been OUCH!--” Isaac turned to Efrem who had just pinched him.
“Aw, hey gang!” Ryan sounded incredibly tired. Jinny was next in line to hug him.
“I’m sorry we missed it,” Jinny said. “Oh, my God--you look so tired.” she pulled back, surveying him. The intermission music played on.
“You do look rough.”
“Thanks, Ef!” Ryan tried to laugh tiredly. “I’ve been on the road three days.”
“Next time take me,” Anne demanded.
“No, next time, take me,” Jayson faced his brother now. The two looked at each other and everything stood still.
“You had school,” Ryan told him. He was smacking his gum.
That was that, then.
“I’m glad you’re home, Ry,” said Jayson.
“I’m glad to be back.” They embraced quickly, then separated before sentiment could set in. Time resumed and Cecile cried, “Well thank God the intermission’s done. Time for tape two.”
When Aaron Weaver gots off the phone he told his son, who was coming into the kitchen from down the hall, “That was your Aunt Louisa. She’ll be in tomorrow evening.”
“Wonderful,” Isaac looked up from the sheet he’d been studying.
“You have to be nice to her.”
“Of course,” Isaac said. “I always am.”
Aaron cocked his head.
“Oh, by the way,” Isaac added, “Sandy Perizzi called. You should call her.”
“Oh.”
“You know,” Isaac said as his father’s foot hit the step, “I invited her to the wedding.”
“You wha?”
“You needed a date.”
“I don’t--”
“Well, you do if you’re going be at my wedding.I’m not having my father come like some sad old bachelor.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“You’re welcome a lot. You’re only forty-five, Dad. You’ve still got it. You just don’t want to work it.”
Aaron Weaver looked at his impertinent son with a half smile and a raised eyebrow.
“Besides, I like Sandy Perizzi. And she likes you and I think you like her.”
“You just want me to marry her so that I’ll have to be a Catholic too.”
“Yes, Dad that was foremost in my mind. Plus you haven’t dated anyone since mom died.”
“Yes I have.”
“No, Dad, you’ve slept with a lot of women is what you’ve done.”
Aaron raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t suppose there’s anything taboo with you,” he said to his son. “Something you might not say to your old man.”
Isaac shook his head, “Not today, sir. And you are going with Sandy Perizzi to the wedding. That’s an order.”
Aaron turned around, muttering as he headed down the stairs, “I have dated.”
“You said that to your dad!”
“Yeah, well,” Isaac shrugged as Efrem signaled to Trisha, and the waitress approached.
“Man, let me bum a cigarette,” Ryan held out a palm, still chuckling.
“Sure thing. I’ll be glad when you’ve stopped quitting. Then you can buy your own,” Isaac pushed them across the booth. Out of nowhere, Ryan cuffed his little brother on the head and winked at Jayson.
“What’ll it be?” Trisha says.
“Are you coming to my wedding on Saturday?”said Isaac.
Trisha looked amazed.
“Nothing should amaze you anymore,” Efrem told her.
“This is...”
“Well if you’re repulsed by the whole idea then just say no,” Isaac shot a pillar of smoke out of his mouth.
“No, I’m just surprised.”
“Even if I didn’t like you. It would be pretty shitty to plot out my wedding in front of you for six months and then not give you an invite.”
The waitress was so beside herself she forgot to take their order, which Isaac pointed out. Chicken Feast, All American Burger, Reuben, Big Fish Platter.
“It’s just a wedding.” Isaac told her. “Your invitation should be in your mailbox when you get home.”
“How--?”
“Come you didn’t get an invitation earlier?” Isaac guessed. “We just started sending them out. I know,” he said. “I’m slipshod.”
“No,” Trisha waved that away, sticking the notepad in her apron. “How’d you get my address?”
“Ef--” Isaac pointed to his quiet friend, who was paying too much attention to the dessert card, “He looked it up. Didn’t you, Ef? The guy’s a marvel.”
Trisha bent down, kissed Efrem on the cheek, and then vanished.
“Well, well,” Efrem murmured.
“You are a marvel, Ef. That was a great idea,” Isaac said. “If you were my slave. I’d free you.”
Efrem screwed up his face.
“I’ve still got Gone With the Wind on the brain.”
“Well, in that case,” Efrem returned, “If you were in Auchwitz, I’d make sure--”
“Hey! Hey!”
“Tit for tat.”
JINNY
IF MY COUSIN IDA HADN’T been there that summer who knows what would have happened? It would have taken more than Cecile to bring me out of my closet. My TJ Max closet. High school ended. It was the first time I had felt cute... ever. Sometimes I felt desirable. With Isaac. But I never felt cute, and I was sure I would never be desirable to anyone else.
My mother didn’t approve of it. You think that your mother is going to be the one to want you to look like a woman, especially after you’ve been looking like a lard ass for all those years.
I can hear Cecile saying, “You’re too hard on yourself. That’s your problem. You don’t see anything cute about you. How will anybody else?”
And that summer when Cecile and I came back from the mall with Sara and Amanda, I remember Ida telling my father to put a sock in it.
“I think everyone’s mad because for the first time you can see Virginia’s pretty.”
My cousin Ida, our cousin, is my father’s first cousin. He married late and is younger than Ida. Ida married pretty young and so she has grandchildren around Anne’s age. Some of them are pretty much like Anne. We never see them even though they live in Ohio too, on the Indiana border. A long time ago Ida came to go to school here, at Saint Clare’s in fact, and she hated it. She had never really lived here and thought she’d find a nice downhome Irish Catholic family. But, as she told me later on, when she came to live with my grandfather, her uncle, he proved to be a big snob. No one ever treated her well and she left. My great grandmother put her sons into school, but one of her daughters didn’t have time for school or decency and that was Ida’s mother who shot out kid after kid to a different father. Ida’s world was not nearly as polished as the one we lived in. Years later I’m sure she’s got more money than us and she’s definitely got more class, but there is something stuffy about our part of the family. She says we’re not really Irish anymore. She says we’ve gotten Anglo-Saxon.
“You all are the whitest people I’ve ever met,” she says, taking out a cigarette. “You might as well be Episcopalians!”
I think she’s right about that. She doesn’t come often, but when she does there are presents for me and Anne, whom she loves, and nothing but derision for my father and his siblings... Who, I’m not too fond of myself.
So that summer she convinced them that I was pretty and they were jealous, and she helped convince me.
“If you ever get tired of this one horse town,” Ida told me. “You can come down to my one horse town. We’ve got a great school down there.”
So Ida is one of those people who’s helped me to feel beautiful through the years. There are too many people who will make you feel ugly, and we spend too much time thinking about them. What they say, how angry we get. I don’t think about Ida enough. Or Amanda and Sara, who I haven’t seen in a long while, hardly saw in high school. Or Cecile who was with me all the way.
The summer I met Isaac, my first and really my only boyfriend, the love of my life, ra, ra, ra, was also the summer that a doctor told me I was fat. And I was. But I cried. And what’s more, he called me morbidly obese. Do you know what that does to a girl? And my mother railed and said, “You are not obese, Virginia.” But she would also say, “Why don’t you not have seconds, honey,” when I’d reach for more roast beef at dinner.
The truth was that I wasn’t morbidly obese, and Efrem said it to me. He said, “If you just forget about it the weight’ll go. That’s what I’ve heard. If you’re always thinking about how fat you are and how you can’t eat you’ll eat. If you just eat when you’re hungry, no problem. If everytime you get hungry, you make yourself aware that you’re about to eat... no problem. You just need to pay attention to your mouth and no attention to everyone elses.”
This was such good advice that I forgot it. I mean I forgot I was doing it. The second bit of advice came a long time later and helped me realize that because I wasn’t skinny didn’t mean I was fat. It was a long time before I realized that some women were big and bigboned and that was all there was to it. Up until then every girl I’d met who called herself big boned I could look at and realize was really fat as hell. I’d encountered very few actual big boned women so it took me awhile to realize I was one. What Isaac got was not a fatty. What he got was a frump.
But he was a frump too. Hell, we were frumpy together that whole summer. We were frumpy when we hung out with Cecile. We were frumpy at the movies. We were frumpy at home. We were frumpy making out. And we knew it. We were hopelessly frumpy in our own world of frumption which is why I think sex came so early. At the technical end it came late, but in actuality we were rolling around almost instantaneously. If we’d been pretty, I don’t think this would have happened. But we didn’t live in the world of pretty people. We lived in the Frumpy Kingdom. And in Frumpyland we could do what we wanted because both of us were pretty sure that no one else was going to do it with us.
But that hadn’t happened the day that I was crying over the phone to Cecile, either forgetting or just not caring that she was a year beneath me.
“Isaac’s going to the public school. He’s going to Whitman.”
“Then why don’t you go to Whitman with him?”
“I can’t. My parents are making me go to Little Flower!”
“Girl, tell them Little Flower’s twelve hundred a year and Whitman’s free. It’s that easy. You better put your foot down.”
Well, I put my foot down and my father said that Whitman wasn’t in our district anyway. Rogers was--which I did not want to go to. I was bowled over to realize that the cut off line for the Whitman district was the other side of my street.
My Aunt came into the picture now.
“It’s love, isn’t it?” she said.
“What?”
“You’ve got a crush on a boy, don’t you?”
“Well that, and I don’t want any more Catholic school.”
My Aunt nodded. “I can’t blame you for that,” she said. “Well, I’ll tell you what. You can live here. I mean, for the records. This will be your address.”
“What?”
“This is the Whitman district,” Aunt Catherine told me.
And so it was settled.
I came over to the bookstore and told Isaac. It never occured to me that I’d be cramping his style by going to his high school. Of course at thirteen Isaac didn’t have any style to cramp.
We were so emotional. It was just like Romeo and Juliet, the Franco Zefirelli version. Isaac closed the store and we went up to his room and we just kept fooling around until we were both thrilled as hell and naked on his bed and then I had my first orgasm. I saw Isaac naked for the first time. I was seen naked for the first time. I knew what it was like to hold a human body between my left and right hands, feel it shudder and come. We lay on our backs, and then turned to each other and went to sleep.
Frumpyland!
JAYSON
Friday night Jinny’s cousin Ida cames. I see the way she and Pierce talk to each other and think, they’re like me and Anne, a little bit. Ida’s the earthy one. She is fed up with Pierce’s pretension, but they’re family. She’s hardly ever lived in Rhodes, but her blood is here and so she knows all the Irish families, the Brennans that my mom and Aunt Maureen come out of. She never waits to malign the Brennans, and the Laujinesses, which she says aren’t even Irish. So the whole time she’s going on about old times and old families I think she won’t have anything good at all to say about me or Ryan.
“Good looking, though,” she says. “The both of you. One thing you couldn’t do is call the Laujinesses ugly. I just hope you all aren’t bastards.”
“Oh, Ida!” this from Uncle Pierce. Only I don’t think he’s as embarassed as he pretends, and I remember hearing from Aunt Maureen how he was never good enough for the Brennans or the Laujinesses.
Even worse--or better--than Ida is her granddaughter she’s brought with her. And her granddaughter’s sort of boyfriend. All I can think of is the word wild when I see them and they smell like thunderstorms. They’re so electric and God, they make me seem so pale; bland. Her name is Tina and she laughs and smiles and smokes she runs right for Jinny and Anne. She has Anne’s build but is darker than Anne with long hair, tea colored, She looks nothing like her, but you can tell the two of them are what my grandmother would call “birds of a feather.” They just start talking the same language.
And the guy with her, who should be moody, who looks like a much edgier version of me or Ryan, who’s name is Luke, is right there laughing and joking and handing out Lucky Strikes and Isaac forgets himself and gagging cries, “Fuck! These are strong!”
“I know,” Luke is very pleased.
Tina and Luke are going to Europe in September. They’ve spent their whole lives down south in Jamnia. Luke was homeless. Neither one of them ever cared about good grades. Tina’s an actress which is where she and Jinny hit it off, and she’s not worried about good universities or impressing people. She just keeps on blowing out smoke and laughing and smacking Luke’s thigh and saying, “Fuck it! Just fuck it!” The two of them are so free! I want to be like that so bad. I just want to go down to Jamnia and drink some of that water and go crazy.
“Isaac and Efrem are musicians,” Anne says by way of a hint and she looks at her cousin’s guitar.
Tina gives Isaac a look that just makes him start barking with laughter and then she murmurs, “Sounds like we might have to have a jam session? Whaddo you say, Music Man? After the hitchin’, tomorrow?”
“Hitching,” Jinny comments, “like we’re a bunch of goddamned horses.”
Saturday afternoon finds them in two sections of Saint Antonin’s, the women in the practice room for the choir, the men in the sacristy. Efrem, once again a surprise, brings out a bottle of Wild Turkey and shot glasses. Tina’s Luke is with them, along with Sean Wallace, Efrem’s best friend from childhood, the color of unfinished wood, curly haired and four eyed.
“This? After the bachelor party?” Isaac says, looking like he just got slapped in the face.
“Hair of the dog,” says Efrem, putting out the glasses and pouring hooch into them.
“One for me too?” Jayson notices.
“Today, you are a man!” Efrem proclaims like a rabbi.
“Oh, that reminds me,” Isaac said, “I have to wear a yarmulke.”
“What?” Ryan looks at him with a crooked smile.
“My Aunt Louisa talked me into it.”
“Is she that serious?”
“About me wearing a yarmulke or about being Jewish?” Isaac says.
“Both I guess.”
Isaac looks at Ryan a little ticked off, “She only goes to Temple on Yom Kippur, but damnit, she’s serious about me being a good Jew. Even if I’m Catholic now.”
“Hair of the dog,” Efrem says again, and he is the first to do his shot.
My eyes burn. I want to cry. But I don’t gag. I won’t. My mouth is burning, but I’m holding my own. It’s Sean who coughs.
“You’ve been away from the bottle too long,” Efrem notes.
“She wanted me to wear a tallith too,” Isaac says.
“A huh?” Ryan looks at Efrem for explanation.
It’s Luke who says, “It’s a Jewish prayer shawl.”
“That is so stupid,” Isaac declares.
“It’s cool. Do it,” Tina is saying as she pulls at the back of Jinny’s dress. “Then you all get to smash the bowl too? I wonder what the priest’ll think of all this Jewishness.”
“Well, hell, Jesus was a Jew,” Cecile said, straightening Jinny’s veil and tucking back a bit of her hair that had escaped the bun.
Jinny comments: “Maybe Isaac’ll make the water into wine.”
“Hey,” Anne notes, tucking a sprig of baby’s breath into the veil, “If you can wear white anything’s possible.”
Jinny’s eyebrows fly up and Anne smirks.
“Relax. Mom and Aunt Catherine are in the next room and if you’re a virgin I’m the Flying Nun.”
“Um,” Tina comments. “Bowl smashing, wine making and flying nuns. All at one wedding. I’m glad I came.”
A WEDDING WAS A WEDDING. There wasn’t much to be said except for that at this wedding everyone thought the groom was as handsome as the bride was beautiful. Louisa coaxed Isaac into wearing his tallith and the white yarmulke with its blue patterned border was perched on his head. Jinny was all in white and when Isaac lifted her veil and kissed her, they held hands lightly and with a look of grim determination, cracked the bowl beneath their feet.
And then there was singing and laughing and crying and Isaac kept on saying he had something in his eyes and everyone was surrounding Jinny and him. Aaron Weaver was crying beside Sandy Perizzi and trying not to and Jayson looked over and saw that Anne, of all people, was sitting next to Aunt Maureen and Ida and Tina and all of these indomitable women were blubbering into their handkerchiefs.
Cecile Turner did not cry. The crowd seemed to always push her and Efrem nearer so that they did not have to fight to be close to Isaac and Jinny. Cecile only whispered something in Jinny’s ear, and then her best friend went white.
“What?” Isaac looked at his... wife?... Laughing.
“She said, ‘How’s it feel to be Mrs. Weaver?’”
“Oh my God!” Isaac laughed, but it sounded almost like he was going to cry. “You’re my wife now! You’re Virginia Weaver!”
The reception was held in the basement of the church. All of Isaac’s relatives converged on him at once, then giving all the hugs and kisses and insults they had in them, they fell upon the Catholic girl he’d married. After a while, Jinny looked up from where she sat beside Aunt Louisa and said, “Where’s Isaac?” And then she looked around. “Where’s Efrem?”
Jayson, who had been talking to Luke, got up and threaded his way to the crowd and into the bathroom. He did not know who was comforting whom but Isaac and Efrem were crying and hugging each other and then they both looked over and saw him and, just like that, swept him into their embrace.
“We need to get drunk,” Efrem decided. “We need to get really drunk.”
And Jayson felt so good. He felt like it was his day, him included in this moment.
When Jinny threw the bouquet, her cousin Tina caught it and she stood looking at Luke. Her grandmother stood looking at both of them.
“Martina Madeary,” said Tina. “What a cute monogram that would be!”
The room cleared for Jinny to sit in the chair and stretch out her legs so Isaac could remove the garter. On his knees suddenly Isaac searched the room with a look in his green eyes that dared the crowd. Then he turned around and stuck his head under his bride’s dress removing the garter with his teeth to the wild applause of the crowd, the stricken look of his Aunt Louisa, and Aaron Weaver clapping an embarassed hand to his face. But it was Aaron who caught the belt and Sandy Perizzi kissed him and then the father and the son looked at each other across the room and Aaron turned scarlet.
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| Ceremonies: Part One |
| 11.27.05 (4:01 pm) [edit] |
"Are they making you go to the graduation too?" Aunt Maureen points her drumstick at me.
"Um hum," I tell her.
"Don't point your drumstick," Uncle Pierce reprimands her, and Dad tells me:
"And don't say um hum," at the table. He says "um hum" like a real idiot, to imply that I'm a real idiot for saying it.
"I'll point what I like," says Aunt Maureen. "And, Gus, when I'm
speaking to you, then you can decide to say Um hum or not, but I was speaking to your son."
I love Aunt Maureen. She just doesn't care. I've heard that when she married Uncle Pierce, his cousin Ida said, "She's just what this branch of the family needs." So they've always gotten along real well together.
Aunt Maureen is tall and fiery headed, and one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen. She's what you called big boned too, and she wears lots of amber and laughs loudly.
She is unlike my mother, her sister, and she has never liked my father.
"Isn't one graduatuon enough? And Jayson's got school and all," Aunt Maureen says.
"Now, Maureen, why don't you stay out of other people's business?" says Uncle Pierce.
"If it's under my roof it's my business," she declares and Isaac, peeling the skin off of a chicken breast, stops to look at Jinny, who looks at him. Both of them exchange a look I can't guess at.
"I don't have to defend my choices to my sister," My mother says, suddenly on her guard. She is the prettier one, I guess. She's less intense looking. Aunt Maureen is stunning, but mother is pale with auburn hair and soft eyes, and she is thin and has bird features. She is where we get our "prettiness" from.
"That's true. You don't," Maureen says, bringing the subject to an end.
But then she adds: "You may have to defend them to your children, one day, though. Right girls?" she looks to Anne and to Jinny, who are taken by surprise.
"Mom..." Jinny sounds embarrassed.
"I haven't fucked you kids up too much, I hope?" Aunt Maureen goes on.
Anne, right there with her mother says, "Only a little."
Uncle Pierce shakes his head.
Jinny and Cecile are going over to the Walkers tonight to tailor the wedding gown because this is something Aunt Maureen cannot do, and Efrem and Isaac are on the couch while Anne is curled up in the window pretending to read a book, and I'm pretending to watchTV.
"It just will not be the same anymore," Efrem is saying.
"What?"
"In two weeks you'll be a married man. None of the old stuff. We'll all be grown ups. Well, you all will be grown-ups, and then Cecile'll marry... Ryan. Can you imagine that?"
Efrem says to me, "I'll be your brother-in-law."
God Almighty, I never thought that I would be related to Isaac and Efrem!
Just as soon as the thought's brought up, Efrem takes it away, going on, "No more drinking till dawn, and four-in-a-bed slumber parties. Youth..." he made a shooting noise, "Out the window."
Isaac just looked at Ef for a long time, and then took a pillow and hit him in the face.
"Sometimes you're such a moron," he said.
I got up to go to the kitchen, and heard Aunt Maureen talking to Jinny. Cecile was saying nothing, though she was there.
"See," Aunt Maureen was saying, "Cile said it first. They're a bunch of vampires. The one thing I said I would never do is sacrifice my kids...
“And I'll tell you what I don't want is to see Jayson turn out like Ryan."
I stopped, wanting to turn around. And then I just came into the kitchen. I had to look squarely at my Aunt. I said, "What's wrong with my brother?"
Anyone else would have turned away, but Maureen O'Muil looked squarely at me and said, "Ryan's unhappy. I'd rather have a stupid child, and an ugly child than one who couldn't be happy."
There is school tomorrow, getting on the plane and flying to Colorado on Thursday, school again, the wedding next weekend, a whole parade of things through May. No rest now. It doesn't matter. It’s senior year. I don't want to pay too much attention anyway. I am tired of school and the uniforms and the fake friendships and the having to be... I don't know who. I'm tired of knowing too much.
Anne and I ride out bikes all over town. Neither one of us has our license yet and Anne doesn’t much like the idea of driving anyway. I like to feel the wind in my hair. I like to feel the wind drag it back when Anne and I race through Bernard and all the streets of College Heights until we get to Route 6, and then we bullet west to the Tasty Freeze, propping out bikes against the little stand. She's eating her Neapolitan. I love my sherbet.
I rehearse everything Aunt Maureen said as she cleaned the kitchen, without apology, but without pride. About her father, my grandfather, William Brennan, a half Episcopalian she called him, from old Ulster stock on one side--which is supposed to mean something to me, and Anne has to explain it all later--he had been a fellow at St. Clare's, and even known the Mc.Cleiss family.
Depending on how one talked about him he could be a pretty impressive person, but to Maureen he was just a bastard.
"Do you know he loved me the most?" she said. "Looking back I see it now. He was proud that his first born was this big cow of a girl, and a scholastic. But he was one of those who liked to sacrifice his kids on the altar of his ego. He didn't want me marrying Pierce. He didn't see what Pierce would be, just that he was a struggling student and lowborn. Lowborn! God, we're in America. It was the seventies, and here he is talking about lowborn. Never underestimate how stratified and classified a little minority can be. Irish Catholics in Rhodes! You knew who was in and who was out!
"Now Laujinesse was in. Gus had money. That's all I'll say. And looks because he was a looker, and he was so like Father!" Aunt Maureen did not call him Dad or Daddy.
"And Father was never kind to Catherine. Catherine was never enough. The only right thing Catherine did was dump Patty O'Flaherty--yes, there is actually a Patty O'Flaherty--and marry Gus. And...." she added, "have Laujinesse babies."
I am dipping my spoon into the sherbet. It is raspberry, my favorite flavor. Anne is not going to make me talk until I am ready to. I am thinking how you are born with a mother and a father and think they are gods. There words are dictum. And then, as you grow older you wonder how wise your gods are, how just, how fair. And then in one moment your aunt or your grandma or something comes up and starts talking about your mother, your Great Mother as if she's not a goddess at all, but only someone's silly baby sister; about your All Powerful Father as if he's just a worrisome brother-in-law or a disappointment of a son-in-law. And for that moment, listening to your other kin malign your parents, there is a relief as everything you suspected (and feared) turns out to be true.
Finally I turn to Anne and say, "Be like Ryan. Do this like your brother. Or... You can't do that sport, your brother always does that. And now.... He must not turn out like his brother! I am so sick," I sigh, "of having to live in my brother's shadow."
Here is a day at Saint Jude College Preparatory Men’s High School. First there is the getting ready for it. Unlike Anne who embraces nature and rolls around in the grass like a hippie, I keep my windows closed a lot of the year and make sure to shut them every night before I go to sleep. I’ve always had this fear that I just don’t know who’s going to come through them when I’m passed out. And I usually pass out. More on that later.
So when I get up a seven, the room smells bad. It smells closed up and like dirty socks and I don’t know what, even though I’m not a dirty person. Now that I’m an only child I hop in the shower right away, and out, and go through my closet and pull out a shirt, some pants, a tie, a jacket, some underwear, I don’t look because I found a way--a long time ago--to make sure that whatever my hand went to would color coordinate with whatever else it went to. It’s a boring system, and takes a long time to explain and it would just make me sound like a dork. So don’t worry about it.
I have shaved in the shower with the aid of a little mirror and now I am splashing on the aftershave, and moussing my hair, which takes longer than anything else. Downstairs Mom is usually cooking breakfast. When she doesn’t there is fruit and juice, yogurt and cereal on the table. Dad is there sipping coffee, going through the newspaper and looking angry. This is the only way I can describe it. He always looks angry. I used to think it was me. And then I thought that something happened to him a long time ago, long before I was born or Ryan was born. Now I think it happened to him in the womb.
I get to school on time. My first class is Advanced Physics. I am with some of the Boys for this class. There are roughly twenty of the Boys, but really it means the eight of us working on newspaper and the yearbook. It means, in specific, me and Scott Nelligant, whom we call Scooter, David Raymand-- Rammer, Chris Arends, Jeff Shwimmer and Derek Kirk. We all write, we all read a lot of stuff over most peoples’ heads. We all are in honors classes, and we all like good music and talking about important stuff.
Here is the place to interject that Anne would say we all think we’re smart, all we all read a lot of stuff that’s really over our heads. We think we like good music and we wouldn’t know anything important if it fell on us. Once Anne and some girlfriends of hers came to a dance at Saint Jude’s and she met the Boys. She tells me about Scooter, the guy who will probably be valedictorian:
“He’d be cute if he wasn’t such a goddamn moron.”
I don’t know how I feel when Anne says things like this because when she says them they sit in the back of my head and it’s like I pull away from myself and hear myself talking or hear one of the Boys talking and I go--we really are morons. I shut that voice out though, because these are the friends I have, the people like me and whatever they may or may not be, we’re good.
There a lot of people who are no good and going nowhere fast, and then there are just the hopeless dorks and pariahs. But none of us is a pariah. We sort of run the place, and it’s senior year and everything. You could hardly wish for anything more, and we’re all going places when we graduate.
After Physics there is morality which tells us all about sex. Only three years too late. And then we have homeroom. After that there is study hall. Not a one of the Five Boys is in my study hall. But Will Parker is. Of course there is really no talking, so it doesn’t matter. And then after this is computer applications, and lunch, which we hold in the newspaper room feeling like really big men, and laughing at each other’s idiosyncrasies. A lot of the time we exchange stories about our older brothers. This is what we all have in common, except for Scooter, who is an older brother. Someone is casting a shadow over us. All of our older brothers were big athletes. They did that for us and left us academia. The only exception is Derek Kirk’s brother, who was a chess champ, a quiz bowl master and valedictorian.
The end of the day is my favorite part. That’s when we have Advanced History of the Modern World, and I have my art class. All the Boys are in Modern World, and then in Art there is Nelson Landers, who is Black, and who is a world unto himself who, in four years, I have never met and wish I knew him and know that I won’t.
And then, when school is out, After-school begins. We will work on finishing up the yearbook all night, and when we are not working on that then the paper and when not that, quizzing each other for classes, and when that’s done we might go to Rammer’s house for a very late dinner, and this is the life that Mom wants me to interrupt to go to Ryan’s precious graduation. I do not keep a planner because if I did I would scream and faint. I will not get to bed until one in the morning, at least, and I know that in my day there is not one unscheduled moment.
Wednesday night we do not go to Rammer’s house, we stay in the newspaper room in the north wing of the school, on the third floor. Everyone has agreed, graciously, to split up my share of the work while I’m in Colorado.
“I’ll be back Sunday night, I promise,” I say and Scooter laughs. “You’re not gonna want to get off an airplane and swing over here on Sunday.”
“Yes, I will,” I tell him. And I mean it. I can already feel how tired I’ll be of Colorado and my family and I haven’t even got there yet. Ryan’s coming home a few days after we leave. My parents volunteered to stay and help him pack--which meant they volunteered me. He said no. Thank God.
There is a lull in the work and the constant conversation. Scooter is wheeling around the room in his chair, and then he stops too and yawns. It is so quiet for a while that all we can hear is the humming of the computers and the humming gets louder and louder. To me, at least.
Finally Derek says, “Do any of you guys ever worry? You know. About after school. About what we’re gonna do?”
No one responds until Rammer, who is a shoe in for Yale of all things tells us, “I’m really not worried at all about what I’m doing in the future. But sometimes I get worried if what I’m doing now actually matters.”
And then it’s as if someone has said what we all wanted to say, only we didn’t know we wanted to say it. And I feel myself taking this huge breath. None of us looks at each other. I feel like we should say something. Make some sort of pact. But what?
2.
Ryan drives us all around Boulder. By us I mean me and him. Mom and Dad stay at the hotel and Ryan is telling me how beautiful everything is. And it is. I’ve only been Out West once, when Ryan started college five years ago. The university is so huge. There’s so much sun and the sky is so blue.
“You’re not going here?” he says.
“No, I decided on Saint Clare’s.”
Though I had looked at Mc.Cleiss too. We go out for pizza. My brother’s at the end of his college experience, and I’m at the start of mine, or rather before the start. I tell him I had thought about Mc.Cleiss.
“Why didn’t you go?” Ryan asks me. “It can’t be since it’s too close,” he reasons, “Since you’re going to St. Clare’s and all.”
“It’s because I’m supposed to want to go,” I tell him. “It’s because Mc.Cleiss is a good school, and I’m supposed to want to go to a big impressive school and compete and work hard. It’s such an opportunity and I’m supposed to go in for a big opportunity like that. The way Rammer’s going to Harvard. Or Yale.”
“Did he get accepted yet?”
I shrug. Bored. “I don’t know, but he will.”
“He’ll just be a number,” Ryan says. “You got the right idea, Jay. At Saint Clare people actually party and have friends and all that stuff. Folks are close. At a place like Mc.Cleiss everyone carries a cell phone, and you have to pencil in breathing.”
I laugh at that.
“I’m serious.” Ryan tells me. “ You almost have to do it here.”
“I know you’re serious,” I tell him. “It’s just that I never hear you say things like that is all. What are you gonna do when you get back home?”
At once, I’m sorry I asked. I was just saying it to say something.
“Fucked if I know,” Ryan tells me honestly. And I looked at him. We’ve got the same ready to wear user friendly face. His eyes are green and sort of slanted where mine are blue and the same way. I never look at my big brother, and don’t look at him too long now. I sort of steal a glance at him taking a pull on his Coca-Cola and then file the image away. The same hair as mine that curls at the tips and almost needs cutting, only it’s Anne and Jinny’s color, that copper color. I don’t really know Ry that well. I’ve sort of been made in his image. Or either he was the pre-image of me. Five years separate us, the same number of years separating Anne and Jinny. But they really are sisters. I mean they act like it, know each other.
“Maybe if you’d stayed in Rhodes I’d know you better,” I say suddenly.
He looks shocked.
“It just slipped out.” Now I can’t look at him. I play around with my pizza crust.
He knows just the way to save the awkwardness.
“You gonna eat your crust?” he says. Without looking at him--only now I know I’ve never really looked at him--I dump the crust from the greasy paper plate onto his.
“Much obliged,” Ryan says.
Neither one of us brings up what I said, but all of Friday Ryan spends very little time with Mom and Dad and a lot of time introducing me to all of his friends and taking me to parties, throwing his arm around me, “This is my little brother....” And I don’t know how it feels. I really am his little brother. I’m smaller than Ryan. I’m thinner. He’s not fat, but he’s just built, and I’m a little scrawny. Ryan is hardly ever home except in the summer, and only sometimes. I’m not used to being a little brother and I don’t know how I like it. And Ryan is looking at me, proud, and it’s not that I don’t like it. Just… It’s strange.
I am glad about going to Colorado, about the weekend when so much happens. It’s all so ordinary, but I have a feeling that its like watching a movie with subliminal messages and I’ll be thinking about this weekend for a long time and learning all sorts of things that happened to me, and maybe to Ryan, that I didn’t understand at the time.
Graduation is ordinary. In fact it sucks. There’s nothing grand about any graduation ceremony, really, but at least at Saint Clare’s you could see everyone and everybody seemed to know everybody else. Here people are just ground out like I-don’t-know-what. Ryan’s name is called out fairly quickly. He looks like everyone else. I think, hell, we could have stayed in Ohio for this. I think, hell, he could have come home a week early for this. And then suddenly I am struck numb, right there in the stadium, in the sunlight. And I am thinking nothing.... Except that I feel really icy cold.
NOTHING IS FLAT HERE. Here, Ryan needs the Cherokee that Mom and Dad bought him for graduation. You’re always going up and down. Mountains are everywhere. The sky feels so high. I know that doesn’t make any sense, and if you haven’t been to Colorado then... you wouldn’t understand. The sky feels especially high. Everything feels high. I can barely breathe here. I can’t imagine what it would have been like moving here after graduation.
We didn’t fly here. Because of the Cherokee. For a few days there was the debate about would Mom fly alone and me and Dad bring the Cherokee or would I fly alone, then in the end it just made more sense to drive here and fly back.
Graduation wasn’t anything special. It was so many people. I kept feeling like if I hadn’t come no one would have missed anything, and the whole time I was resentful. The whole time I was certain that I was missing something back home. I was really. There were only a few weeks left of school.
After the graduation, when I’m in Ryan’s aparment and Mom and Dad have gone out to look around, Ryan starts talking to me.
"Ey, Jayson. I thought I'd run this past you before I asked Mom and Dad. What if they flew back and then you drove back to Ohio with me?"
And then I do the dumbest thing I can, that I regret as soon as I say it. I tell him: "I can't. I have school and everything."
The light goes from his face, and I feel suddenly angry.
"You're right," Ryan says. "I forgot all about that. I can't just pull you out of school. You're not Anne."
And then I feel like I've been slapped, though I don't know why. I don't know for a long time. I'm two thousand feet in the air zooming across the country when it all comes together.
Anne would have said yes. Anne wouldn't think yearbook and newspaper and two days of classes weren’t that important. She wouldn't be in a hurry to get back to her life and hang out with the Boys and work until one in the morning. No, and it wouldn't take Anne until she was up in the air flying east to realize this.
It's just Ryan. It's just my brother, but I feel the way I would if the girl I had a crush on suddenly told me she was free, and I didn't pick up on it until it was way too late. I feel like I've missed something really big. I could have become friends with my brother. I could have... something could have happened. I'm so mad. I'm so frustrated. This cabin is so small, the air is so still. We could be driving across the country.
Scooter says, “You could have just stayed home.”
It’s about eleven o’clock, and I am completely useless.
“We told you we’d handle stuff for you,” Derek tells me.
I am determined to be useful. I smack myself in the face and wheel over to the coffeepot.
“I’m going to make some more coffee. I’m going to finish these pages before I go to bed.”
I get up and go down the hall to clean out the coffee maker, and get a new sack of coffee. When I get back Scooter is looking at me, the bib of his baseball cap hiding all of his face. I can see he has a weird smile though.
“What?” I say, surprised that I sound so pissed off.
“What’s with you, man?” he says. “What happened in Colorado?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Was it that bad?”
I get ready to say something rude. I can hear the coffee percolating. Now Derek is looking at me too. I catch my breath and say, “It was good. It was great. But... it could have been better and it would have been better and something went wrong and I don’t really get it right now.” And I have no intention of telling any of them that I could be in Colorado right now and we would have started on the road in the morning, and I could have been back Thursday. They’d all tell me how stupid I was for not staying. But I also know that none of them would have done anything different in my place. That’s why we’re all friends.
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| The Happy Time: Conclusion |
| 11.10.05 (4:26 pm) [edit] |
THE MORNING LIGHT WAS BLUE-GREY in Ryan Laujinesse's room the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Cecile's arm was over his back, her hand splayed across his chest. He kissed it and said:
"This makes me not want to go back to Colorado."
He lay on his back, and Cecile turned around to look down on him.
"I am hungry," he said. "Man cannot live on ice cream and popcorn alone."
"We'll get dressed and wake up Isaac and Jinny," Cecile said. "Then we can pick up Efrem."
"And go to I-Hop?"
"Or Wallace's or something like that," Cecile said climbing out of bed. "Shake a leg, sleepy head."
They dressed without turning on the light, and then Cecile said, "Peek out of your door to see if your mom and dad are up."
"They aren't," Ryan said.
"Peek," Cecile insisted.
Ryan grinned and shrugged, unlocked his bedroom door and looked up and down the hall dramatically and then, closing the door, stated, "Returned from reconnaissance mission. Mother and father negative."
"Good, I don't want Catherine Laujinesse giving me dirty looks and your daddy licking his lips every time they see me from now on."
Ryan swatted her ass.
"I bet you think that turns me on," Cecile said in a voice that said it did not.
"Can I brush my teeth?"
"Brush 'em at Isaac's. I don't want anyone to wake up and find me here."
"You make it sound like you're a hooker... Or like I'm an embarrassment."
“Ryan, do you want anyone to find me here?"
"I'm going to get my toothbrush," Ryan told her, then added, heading out of the room: "But to tell you the truth, I'm not sure I give a fuck, Cile."
Since he looked a little upset, she told him, "You gave quite a fuck last night."
Ryan immediately turned red, and his head disappeared with the rest of his body down the hallway.
They felt like they were both in high school. Light was just beginning to come into the sky when they parked on Aramy in front of the Weavers, and ran around the side of the store to the weedy backyard. Ryan grabbed Cecile's wrist and she said, "What?"
"Com' on," he hissed and pulled her to the gravelly alley. They began scooping up pebbles and then came back through the fence.
"Which one is Isaac's window?" Ryan said.
And Cecile pointed to the darkened one right above them, at the right corner of the back of the blue wooden former general store.
Ryan began tossing pebbles at the window and hissing, "Weaver! Weaver!"
Cecile looked at him, and then he said, "Your turn, you gotta join in too."
So she did, and in time, when the window opened and the skinny, bare torsoed form of Isaac Weaver had to duck the last pebble, he frowned, stuck out his bottom lip and then disappeared, and this time came back with his glasses, yawning as he surveyed them.
"Open the door!" Ryan said. "Let us in."
"Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin if you do that shit again," Isaac said. But he disappeared from the window, and then Cecile murmured, "Alliteration, approbation and contumnation."
"And fornication," Ryan added.
She looked at him.
"It does rhyme," he said.
Now the back door was opening, and Isaac's housecoat was on.
"You look like hell," Cecile told him.
"I'm sorry, I was only sleeping at seven in the morning. I won't do it again."
"Well, as long as you learned your lesson."
"Hey, man are you gonna leave us out here or let us in?" Ryan said.
"I'm thinking about it," Isaac told him, propped against his back door. But he cocked his head. The two of them came into the back of the house, and headed up the stairs into the kitchen before him.
"Hey, I bet we could cook," Ryan was saying. "We wouldn't even have to worry about driving anywhere. We can cook."
"I'd rather sleep," Isaac said.
"You can sleep in hell," Cecile told him.
"Wha?"
Cecile shrugged and said, "It's what my grandmother used to say when I didn't want to go to church on Sunday. She used to live with us."
"Where is she now?" said Ryan.
Cecile cocked her head and grinned, "Sleeping in hell."
Isaac refrained from scratching his crotch, and said, "Shouldn't we get Ef?"
"Oh, hell, Efrem's the one that tried to make us double date," Cecile said. "Let him stay in bed."
"I see it worked," Isaac looked from one to the other.
"Don't be crude," Cecile told him. "Where's your woman?"
"In my bed. Where I should be." Isaac yawned. "I'll wake her up so she can share in my misery."
"Wedded bliss," Ryan commented, and smiled.
After breakfast, when the house was still filled with the smell of bacon, biscuits from a can, burnt food and eggs, they came to an agreement. Jinny and Ryan, who hated kitchen work because of some strange familial gene could change the bed sheets, and clean up Isaac's room, though Cecile said that she didn't know why a man would rather pick up another man's room instead of washing his skillet. Ryan had always cleaned anything but a kitchen. Even at his dirtiest, most macho period in high school, his room and every room in the Laujinesse house was immaculate. His weakness was housework.
In Isaac's bedroom, with a window open to look over the yard and the next block where the last leaves were falling from brown branches, Ryan on one end of the bed sheet and Jinny on the other spread out the bedsheet.
"So, you and Cecile?" Jinny said. "Again?"
Ryan shrugged as best he could.
"Is it real this time?"
"I don't know," he mumbled.
Jinny handed him the quilt that went under the comforter, and looked at her cousin directly.
"Do you want it to be real?"
Ryan frowned at her.
"I didn’t know the question was so hard. You've been courting her since high school."
Ryan and Jinny spread out the comforter. He was straightening the edges.
"I always wanted it to be real," he said in a quiet voice. "I think it's cause I'm white."
"That you want it to be real?"
"No," Ryan looked at her impatiently. "That she doesn't. Or that we never have anything besides..."
"The occasional lay."
"Thank you for putting it so gently."
"You're welcome," Jinny said. "Now hand me those pillows. And honestly," she said as Ryan handed them to her, "if you didn't always get it on right before you left..."
"I'm never here," Ryan told her.
"I know, and that's a low risk relationship. Isaac is always here! He's always here when he smells good to me and he's sexy to me, and he's doing the most amazing stuff in bed--which I know is more than you wanted to hear--he's here. And when he's moody and his breath is bad, and all we do is lay in bed and sleep cause we're too tired for anything else he's here. And that makes it real. You and Cecile. It's like, hey honey, before I leave can I break a piece off."
"Virginia!" Ryan never used her real name.
Jinny went on picking up the room.
"Look, Ry, I'm not saying that's what it is. But that's what it looks like, probably feels like. There are plenty of guys in Rhodes who would all love to date Cecile, or fuck Cecile and, frankly, have done both. I love the girl. I love you. But she's loose as diarrhea and you're not that much better, so.... You better look for something more than a one night stand to cement your relationship. If you want one."
Ryan stood in the middle of the room with his arms wrapped around his chest, looking cute and helpless. He blew out his cheeks and then said, "There's no one else, you know? Cecile's got her pick of Rhodes, and in the whole state of Colorado there's no one else I'm interested in."
"You ever tell her you love her?"
Ryan shook his head.
"Not even in bed? Not even when you all are...?"
"I...I'm not that kind of guy that says everything in bed. I want to do some things, say some things. I want to shout it out or murmur it, but I get afraid, you know? Of how she'll react."
"Well," Jinny said, shrugging. "That's a problem.
Ryan laughed suddenly.
"What?" Jinny looked annoyed.
"You really have been with Cecile a long time.'
Jinny still didn't get it. Nor did she feel obliged to.
JAYSON
I was lying awake listening to the radio once when I heard the story of some Cuban baseball player who was contracted to play for the Yankees--I think--starting at a million dollars. He turned it down because he said that he already had a nice bed, and what the hell would he do with a million dollars? Get a better bed? He loved home. I thought-- I prided myself on it--that I was better than Rhodes. In fact, I've long held the belief that I am better than my entire family. It's in the Laujinesse blood and some of our cousins down south say it's in Brennan blood, my mother's famil, to be stuck up. I think we are. I was taught to be stuck up. My brother, Ryan, comes home in a few days from living the good life in Colorado, getting quality education Out West. He'll be coming back burnt out as hell because basically Mom and Dad drummed it into his head that he shouldn't stay here. Here was fine and good for Jinny too, but not their Ryan.
And I suppose not their Jayson.
Let me tell you something. If you tell a kid he's ugly for a very long time he'll believe it, and if you tell a kid he's pretty, the same thing. But one day the same thing happens. I'm sure of it. Whatever you've been saying has the effect of just getting on the kid’s nerves. It's their limitation, and then it drives them crazy and makes them resentful. Maybe one day he or she picks up a photograph and wonders exactly where this ugliness or prettiness lies.
I have been told over and over again that I am handsome and too good for Rhodes and that I will go far and that I am brighter than other boys and better and I don't know if that's true or not, but I know it hasn't done anything for me. I do know that I don't necessarily want to go anywhere or fly very high. That's what I know. I want to stay home for a while. I want to be an under-achiever. I WANT TO SHOP AT WAL MART! My God, what the hell is wrong with that?
The grown-ups are gone, and when I am thinking that I realize that, technically, we're all grown ups. In a few days Isaac will marry my cousin Jinny. He's twenty-four, and so is she and so are Efrem and Cecile. Anne and I are eighteen now, grown up enough--though I don't feel it. Cecile is twenty-three, and she is in the kitchen with Jinny.
Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah,
Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah...
I forgot how the rest of it goes....
bows, bows, bows!
Us, the guys, and Anne, an honorary guy, are sitting zazen in the carpeted living room of my aunt and uncle's house on Bernard. Zazen, lotus position, meditation, right hand under left, eyes half closed, hopefully with a smile on your face. You are to find a point of meditation on the floor. You should have a mat. If you are a Buddhist, but we are Catholics and this is not a meditation hall so we are in a circle. Isaac and Efrem do this kind of stuff all the time which has always made me think they are the coolest guys on the planet. They just don't care what anyone thinks, and they're always bursting out with something metaphysical. So even though you're supposed to be meditating on a spot on the floor, and counting breaths, I am not good at either and watch Efrem and Isaac. They make me calm. I could watch them forever. They look like Black Buddha and Jew Buddha, same expression, same smile, same glasses almost and I think, "They get It" whatever It is. They have never thought they were better than anyone else or been compelled to prove it or burnt themselves out being badasses. This is them, Isaac and Efrem, Efrem and Isaac, meditating, looking like two halves of the same cookie, both of them wildly different and yet I don't know two guys more like each other.
I would not admit, for so many reasons, that Anne is the same way, that I admire her. She is the closest thing I have to a little sister and to an evil genius. We are two months apart, me being born two months earlier. I admit that she is much smarter than me. At one time I would have said she had more intuition, and meant that I ran intellectual circles around her, but I know that's not true. Her grades were never that good because she never studied that hard. But she's a professor's daughter who has a whole library in her house to go through. And she has.
When we were real young and I was in Little League she would read the encyclopedia for fun. It was an old World Book with cream covers, speckled with gold and impressive paintings and pictures. When she was twelve, her parents traded it in for a current one. She was so excited until she saw it didn't have the same pictures. It wasn't as nice as the one from the 1950's.
"But it's current," Jinny told her trying to impress all the power of that one word on Anne.
"But I wanted to read about Socrates and Pericles and History," Anne told her. "And nothing's changed about them in the last thirty years."
Anne was--Anne is--an ancient history fanatic, and a Bible whiz. She used to wrap herself in red and pink blankets, and put on Passion Plays and Jesus stories. She'd be all of the characters. Perhaps the strangest thing I will ever see is my cousin Anne as the Sinful Woman, wiping up her own feet with her hair, and telling herself, "Go and sin no more."
And then she found ancient history, and though she called Pericles Peraculs, and screwed up some of the names, she loved Athens. When we were ten she spent the whole summer in a toga. Years later when I told her--to be nasty--that women weren't allowed to come out of doors and men did everything in Athens she said that it was because the men were all homos--which turned out to be right. And then she said that if she'd been alive back then she would have just been a prostitute cause they could probably go anywhere. And then I found out she was right about that too.
"Not a common hooker either," she'd gone on with her plans. "But a kept woman. A rich woman."
"You're not that pretty," I told her, coldly. That was the worst thing for a Laujinesse. But Anne isn't a Laujinesse, and she said, "I know." then broke out into a smile.
"But I've got personality, and that means I can make people think I'm pretty."
In my house being good looking was what mattered, being a heartbreaker, and a talented one was important, knowing how to swagger in front of guys and make them listen to your every word mattered, and knowing how to make a girl swoon was what mattered too. Coolness matters. And coolness means that everyone knows you are cool. When you go to the O'Muil house it doesn't matter. It's supposed to be girls who have to ber beautiful, and guys who don't care, but in our family it's different. Jinny and Anne never seemed to care, and never seemed to be anything special to look at.
"When they need to be beautiful," I heard my aunt say to my mom one day, "They will be."
And then one day I looked up, and Jinny was a bombshell, and Isaac had cleaned himself up. Jinny was hanging from his shoulder. And now I look and Anne is something I can't describe. Not pretty. She's someone a guy would stop for on the street, though.
She could make you buy her a drink, my dad would say.
I don't know what I could make someone do. I swear I am so tired now and I'm only eighteen. I can't imagine a whole life stretching out ahead. I can't imagine competing and jockeying for attention, and playing alpha male anymore. It's starting to get to me. Actually, I think seeing what it did to Ryan is starting to get to me. Right now, sitting on the living room floor with my cousin and Isaac and Efrem, breathing is enough.
FOR THOSE DAYS BEFORE THE wedding the O'Muil house and the Laujinesse house are in an uproar, the Weaver bookstore, not so much. None of Isaac's mother's family will be attending. All of the Weavers, mostly non-practicing Jews--will be there. Some are a little amused to see Isaac getting married at St.Antonin's. There are a few, however, who have been through this before themselves. Married Catholics, married Methodists, an occasional Scientoligist. Had to keep families happy. They know how it is.
Efrem and Cecile's graduation is not a big deal for the households, but it is for Mrs.Walker and all of their friends. So Jayson and Anne are there along with Jinny and Isaac. When Jayson looks for who is family, the only person present for Efrem or Cecile is Mrs.Walker, who isn't even Cecile's blood, but if you ask who is present for them the truth is they have more friends, more loved ones than probably anyone else. They are covered in hugs and kisses and made the belles of the whole ball. Everyone talks to them, all hang on their words. Except, Jayson notices, clapping his hands at some random announcement from the valedictorian, Ryan is not here.
While the graduation party is being held in St. Agnes hall, Jayson and Anne sneak outside and roam the campus.
"It's pretty in spring," Jayson says.
"It's pretty all the time. Wanna see the lake?"
Anne guides him through the red brick halls, past the thick grassed quads. The whole place is wrapped in trees, hidden from anything else. They climb a hill and pass through a screen of trees and Jayson takes in his breath.
"Oh my God, this is beautiful," he says. "It's better than anything they've got at Mc.Cleiss."
"You bet it is," Anne nods appreciatively and smooths the folds of her dress, daring to sit down in the grass. Jason, in his black trousers and white shirt sits beside her.
"The lake looks like a mirror, doesn't it?" Anne says. "The trees all in the water, and the sky looking right back up at itself."
Jayson says nothing. He just nods and Anne points to their right.
"See past those trees? That's the nun's cemetery. Where they used to bury the nuns... When they had them."
"The way you talk," Jayson said, "you should be going here in September and not me."
"Oh, I think I am," Anne said.
"But you said--"
"I know what I said," Anne knew Jayson was talking about her being a nun. For the last year she’d had a sort of convent fever that began with watch-ing over and over again the first half of The Sound of Music or The Song of Bernadette and ended in her attempt to digest whole the works of Saint Teresa of Avila.
“I know what I said,” Anne repeated, “and I haven't even chickened out like most people. I just haven't seen what I like, and I get this feeling I won't see it by looking for it. I know what I want to be even if I don't have a name for it. And I know where I want to be." Anne tampted the ground around them:
"Here."
"We'll be together!" Jayson emoted.
His cousin turns him a look and he goes red. He knows he's given himself away. Jayson Laujinesse does not get excited, especially about his Anne.
He sighs, as if it doesn't matter that this jig or any other is up.
"I was never like you," he says.
"Really?" Anne's voice is devoid of sarcasm as she lies down in the grass beside her cousin.
Jayson presses on, tearing a little bit of grass from the earth and
threading it through his fingers.
"You always saw the world and you were always into nature and sunsets and I don't think I've ever paid attention to the world. Not in my whole life. I've paid a lot of attention to things and books and culture and me... a lot of attention to me, and to thoughts about the world. You know: theories. But I never paid attention to IT."
He looked down at Anne: "Does this make any sense?"
"A little," she said.
"It's like... I'm always concerned about why are we here and not just the fact that," he copied Anne and hit the ground, "we are here. I'm always going on about how it's useless or life is pointless or either it does have a point and la la la, but never about the fact that regardless if our being here means anything we are here... so enjoy it. Live in it."
"You sound like Isaac," Anne told Jayson, grinning up at him.
"I sound like you," Jayson accused.
"I'm corrupting you. Making you earthy and shit."
"I think you're trying to make me spiritual."
"I don't know there's any difference between one and the other," Anne said.
"But why am I like... I am?"
Anne said, "Cerebral?"
Jayson checked in his mental dictionary to see if this was the right word and then he said, "Yeah, that's it."
Anne sat up now and shrugged. She pronounced, "It's because you're a man."
That night the phone rang in the Walker household and Cecile picked up, sure that it would be for her.
"Hi, you!" Ryan sounded like he was trying to sound happy.
"Ryan!"
"How was everything?"
"It was great. It was wonderful. My God, what do I do next? Took me long enough to graduate. I just want to sleep for five years and celebrate that."
"Cile, I'm so sorry."
"About--oh, you couldn't come. Don't be sorry about that."
"I wanted to come."
"You can't skip your own graduation."
"I wanted to. I'm sick of Colorado. I wanted to leave real bad. I told my parents and they were like, don't you dare. And so I didn't dare. They'll get to have their moment of fun with me yet. They'll get to sit there proud and watch me walk across the stage. But Cile... I would have rather got to be proud and watched you walk across your stage."
Cecile cocked her head over the phone, not liking the sound of sadness in Ryan's voice.
"I tell you what?" she said, making her voice as light as possible. "When you get here, we'll go to Saint Clare's, and I'll put on my gown and march across the stage in the Little Theatre. We'll just redo the whole thing for you. How's that?"
"All this and Jinny and Isaac's wedding in two weeks. I can hardly wait."
"Of course you can't."
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| THE HAPPY TIME |
| 11.08.05 (10:19 am) [edit] |
JINNY O’MUIL, RYAN LAUJINESSE
AND
JAYSON LAUJINESSE
I am looking for the happy time in my life but there doesn't seem to have been one.
It took me five years to graduate from the University of Colorado. That was more than enough time to get my degree in English and Engineering--a crazy ambition--and decide what I wanted from the world. Now it is a few days to the Big Day, and I am terrified. Fucking terrified.
I wrote that down just now.
I am not a writer. I have never been a writer. I like other people's writings, and I was late to that. I was in college, a sophomore before I realized I liked books. I was reading Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory and that did it for me for some reason. I don't know why.
Then it was the other books. All the Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse and shit I could never read again probably. Here I was with all these fucking feelings and here someone had found a way to speak exactly what was going on in me. I felt like a bottle had been opened. I mean a Coke bottle, or a champagne bottle. Even though I don't really like champagne.
Anyway…
So I guess that was the happy time.
Not at parties, not so much at clubs, not messing with girls. Basketball used to be the happy time. I won't lie; a basketball scholarship was a happy time. Being popular was a happy time. Being liked was a happy time. But… there must be something else I'm talking about, something deeper than happy.
I think when I'm talking about a happy time I'm thinking of something that, when I feel bad, when I am afraid, I can take it out and look at it and remembering it, feeling it, I'll know that everything will be alright, that it all counts for something. That's the deep happiness, and that happiness only came when I was reading.
I need that happiness now, and something told me the way to… not get it back, but to make up for it, to compensate, was to write, and not read this time around.
I am twenty-three year old graduate. I feel like twenty-three years was certainly long enough to come out with a game plan, and I've got no plan.
I feel a little bit like a failure.
I feel old.
I grow old
I grow old
I shall wear my trousers rolled
Gotta love the Prufrock.
If… If…
If I had thought about this when I first got scared, when the first grain of fear was in me. First kernel. See, I don't know if it's a grain or a kernel, and I'm turning into a self conscious writer. Someone who says, "the sky was grey, pewter, steely. It was stormy."
But last year, when I lay in my own bed, back home in Ohio with someone sleeping beside me, I did feel alone. And I did feel a kernel of something...
LAST THANKSGIVING...
THE DOOR OPENED WITHOUT CEREMONY or permission and Jayson Laujinesse swung in followed by:
"Ryan," Cecile pronounced from the chair directly facing the front door of the O'Muil house.
Whatever he'd been about to say, he stopped when he looked at Cecile.
"Cecile Turner. Is that you?"
"It'ssure in the hell not anybody else,"
"No," Ryan said, remembering her mouth."I certainly isn't it."
The Laujinesses only made attractive, successful sons though it was easy to forget Jayson was either when he was being a pain in the ass. But not when he was beside his older brother. Ryan was reheaded, Jayson blond. Both were sharp nosed, clear featured, fine boned with sweeping green eyes, hair in wavy burnished wings. No, the Laujinesse brothers had never been ordinary. Their mother wouldn’t stand for it.
"Cousins," Ryan said warmly. "Ef. Isaac!" He hugged them all as he spoke their names. Ryan’s down ski jacket smelled of the cold outside.
"You're in the family," Ryan said.
"Yeah," Isaac nodded. He had just given Jinny the engagement ring the other night.
"Damn, I hoped you'd get away from the nuthouse. And Jinny--" he looked right at his cousin, "You look great."
Jinny took it in stride, smiling. Some people change over the years. There was no explaining when it happened. Somewhere along the way Ryan Laujinesse had turned into a good person who had sincere words. Every time her cousin came home, Jinny wondered what this guy had done with the creep she'd grown up with. He couldn't have killed him. This Ryan Laujinesse was far too nice for murder.
JINNY
"HEY, LUMPY OATMEAL, OUT OF THE WAY!"
As far as Ryan was concerned my name was Lumpy and the whole Oatmeal thing came out of the fact that when I was young I could never say O'Muil. I always said, Oatmeal, which seems like a harder name to me now than my true one. My family was the Oatmeals. Anne was the same, but with me there was that cute little first name, Lumpy that went so well with Oatmeal. So even after the lumps were gone the Oatmeal remained. Isaac still calls me Jinny Oatmeal. I'm sure he'll do it even after we're married.
Ryan could always be counted on to say the bad thing. My mother and his mother were pregnant at the same time twice, with different results in gender. When I was twelve and in the seventh grade, and Anne and Jayson had just come to Saint Antonin's as first graders, I was rounder and more awkward than ever. Ryan, grew up pretty and mean.
Children are mean, but that's not all there is to it. I think we’d all be mean if we were allowed to go on unchecked. Hardship and experience checks us. Being overweight, being abandoned by parents, knowing we've hurt someone, this can check a child. Usually it is not the parents who check children. They can't help it, parents can't really see what's going on in the world below where kids play. And I love my Aunt Catherine, but she was so proud of having a beautiful child. Everyone thought Ryan was beautiful and talented and its not that telling a child these things gives him a big head... That's bullshit. It's that telling yourself these things about your child gives you a blind eye and then you can't see how in need of discipline he is.
So Ryan started off with the occasional mean snippet. I remember him being pretty nice up until about third grade. But meanness grows, and give meanness an inch and it will take a mile, a league. It’ll gobble up everything. By seventh grade Ryan Laujinesse was the meanest boy I knew. His tes-tosterone was in overdrive. He was tall with that abundance of just the right length red gold hair, and the Catholic school pants that are innocent enough when a grown up sees them, but to a girl of thirteen are totally dangerous in how much those snug navy trousers can show.
Almost as erotic as Isaac claims the short little plaid skirts we wore were.
There ought to be a law against all the sex in the Church.
But I'm off my point...
Maybe off my rocker.
Anyway….
The day he was telling me to move out of the way was the day he and his friends decided to play baseball, not on the fields between Saint Antonin's and the boy's high school, Saint Jude, but on the blacktop between the school, the church, the convent and the kiddie playground. So wherever he chose to be was in his way, and if you were in it... you'd better get out.
"Hey Lumps, didn't I tell you to move?"
There were a few chuckles.
"Lumps!” Like it was the best joke they’d ever heard. And maybe it was. All those Catholic boys in their blue trousers and sky blue Izod Lacotts murmuring at me. Probably the reason I gravitated toward a Jew.
"Did you hear that, Efrem?" a new voice started, and then I turned around.
Efrem and Cecile, one in glasses, the other in pigtails were standing behind me.
"If my very own family talked to me that way," Cecile continued, "I wouldn't think they were much of a family."
Ryan sneered at her: "Who do you think you are?"
Efrem, who never bothered to speak to anyone really, put a hand on Cecile's shoulder and said, "She is my sister."
Cecile said, "I am the one who can put a foot up your ass."
"Oh, you're talking--" but this was Catholic school; you didn't know who was patrolling the playground, so he got up in Cecile's face and mouthed, "shit."
"That, I am not, and before you get in my face, you might want to ask yourself--Can you whoop my ass?"
Then, and here Efrem should never have forgiven her, she added, "Our ass."
To Efrem's credit, he didn't back away from being included in the possible debacle.
Ryan looked at me and then at Cecile and Efrem, then he looked around at his friends.
"Let it go," Kevin Nelson said, "Chill, Ryan."
"Let's go out to the field," Ryan said turning around.
"Yeah, where you should have been in the first place," Cecile shouted, folding her arms over her chest.
"Cecile," Efrem murmured, and she shut up.
He and Kevin looked at each other and shared a small smile. That was when I learned that they must have been friends. Sort of.
I am a sophomore at Whitman. Sara and Amanda are at Little Flower and Cecile is there too, because she doesn't live in the Whitman district. She's a freshman. My junior year is the year that things fall apart. It is a long complicated story involving the fact that Cecile is really no blood relation to Efrem at all. Efrem’s mother took her in years ago. Cecile’s real mother, I’ve never met her, pays for her school, and won’t let Mrs. Walker help. Not even when Mrs. Walker can pay and she can’t. Cecile ends up having to leave Little Flower.
"I'm not really too broken up about it." Cecile admits. "Let me ask Mr. Weaver if I can use his address and I'll transfer to Whitman."
"It's so out of your way," I tell her, though I'm happy as hell that we're going to school together.
"So is Little Flower," Cecile shrugs.
My junior year, her sophomore year, my best friend and my boyfriend, and I'm not pretty or popular but I'm pretty happy. Whitman's gone down hill in the last few years. Gun checks and all that crap, but then it was cool. At least in my memory. Even the fact that Ryan leaves Saint Jude's so he can play basketball at Whitman doesn't make it so bad.
Ryan is instantly popular and I am instantly resentful. He's what I deal with at home and at home he's only my cousin so he can't be nasty. I left his King of the Schoolyard behind when I left Catholic school. But here he is.
He makes friends right away, easily. They're all coming down the hall. He's holding court. They're laughing their asses off, and he stops when he sees me and Cecile at my locker.
"Hey, Jinny," he says, as plain as if he hasn't always been nasty.
"Ryan," I say to him.
Then he looks at Cecile who is so pretty. All her black hair is curly and down her back, and her skin is caramel and flawless and her eyes are bright even though they're hard right now and Ryan says to her, "I remember you--" He jabs his finger at her and laughs.
"This girl," he turns and tells his friends, "once, back in Catholic school, when I wouldn't toe the line, she was gonna kick my ass!"
"That's Cile for you," said someone and they all laughed.
"Yeah," Ryan said, "I remember you."
"I remember you too," Cecile said, and there was no pleasure in her voice. Not that time.
I remember the day when she made Ryan toe the line, when she sent the boys off the blacktop and on their way. The boys are heading to the field, past the kiddie playground, and what sticks with me about that day is how for the first time I began to pick up on how it wasn't either-or, this and that in school. Or anywhere else. Efrem never talked to Kevin or most of the boys, but they were friends. Kevin hung out with Ryan. Almost followed him, but he could also tell him to chill out. Cecile was Efrem's sister, but not really... more of that later. And she was more than a sister. Ryan was my bitter enemy. But he was my blood...
JAYSON JOINED ANNE ON THE roof that Wednesday afternoon. He was wearing a blue hoodie and he brought her a red one.
"What are you doing out here?"
"I came to pester you,” Jayson told her. “Jinny said you were up here."
"I was looking at the leaves," Anne told her cousin. "You know they're almost gone."
"Christmas'll be here in a few weeks," Jayson sat down beside her.
"Let's get through Thanksgiving first."
"Your mom and my mom have already started cooking."
"I wonder who all'll be here."
"Cecile and Efrem?"
"No," Anne said. "They say eating white peoples cooking is like eating papier mache. It might be just the Immediates. Unless Ryan brings Cecile as a date."
"What?"
Anne pointed down below them.
"I was looking at the trees, but I've been looking at the two of them for a while. They've just been walking around. They came up the corner about ten minutes ago. I never knew two people could make Bernard such a long street."
"You think they'll hook up?"
"Not today," Anne said. "Weren't they together in high school?"
"I think they tried," Jayson shrugged. "Or something. Don't we have something better to do than snoop around in my brother's love life?"
"I don't," Anne said.
But there was no hearing what was going on below them on Bernard Street.
"You really like being out in Colorado?" Cecile was saying.
"Aw yeah," Ryan told her. "But it's not here. It's not home. I miss a lot of stuff."
"Like what?"
"Like," Ryan stopped and took in a breath to think. "The way you can see a horizon."
"What?"
"You can look out straight ahead of you for a long time here. Everything's flat."
"That's what they say," Cecile told him.
"No, I'm serious. Out west everywhere you look there's a mountain or a cliff to block your way. But sometimes it's great. You should come out sometime."
Cecile looked at him dubiously.
"What?" said Ryan.
"To see some mountains?"
"To see me, Cile," Ryan said.
Cecile’s face heated under her brown skin. "Oh."
Ryan wrapped an arm around her.
"Is that alright? Or will you rip it off?"
"Today, I'm feeling mellow. You'll probably go unmaimed."
"I'm so glad. You like Saint Clare?"
"I love Saint Clare!" Cecile told him, surprised at how serious she was.
"I never thought about going."
"Cause it's so small and it's the same place you've lived your whole life?" Cecile said.
"Yeah. I love being out in Colorado. I love the big school and everything. But I hate the struggle. I'm not saying you guys don't struggle. But it's like... You don't sweat it. You know? I miss friends. I miss home. I miss knowing what I wanted out of life."
"You graduate this May."
"Right," Ryan told her. "And then it's like now that I've left Ohio and I can't see coming back... Cile, this is my home, and I can't see coming back to it. And I don't know where else to go."
Cecile was quiet. They were approaching the house.
"That is a problem," she said, and then started laughing.
"What?" Ryan began to laugh too.
"That is the stupidest thing I could have said," she said, and kept laughing. "I gotta go. Ef needs his car back."
In parting Ryan held her hand and didn't let her go just yet.
"Mr. Laujinesse?"
"Come to dinner tomorrow night."
Cecile prepared to open her mouth.
"Despite your hatred for the insipidness of all cuisine Caucasian, please come."
Cecile nodded and said, "I'll try to swallow some of that so called macaroni for your sake."
"That's all I ask," Ryan told her.
Aunt Catherine asked, "Who would like to ask the blessing. How about you, Gus?" she turned to her husband.
Uncle Gus grumbled, and Catherine looked around for a volunteer. In turn everyone ducked his or her head. Isaac was about to make the excuse that he was Jewish, which meant nothing, when Anne said, "Well, if nobody else will, I will."
She put out her hands, "Let's hold hands."
"Oh, come on…" Jayson started.
"I said," Anne cleared her throat, "Let's... hold... hands."
"Merciful Father," she began, "we just want to thank you for your abundant gifts on this Thanksgiving, and we just want to praise you that we're all right here together and that you've seen us through another year safely. God, I just want to thank you for putting up with us when we don't appreciate your goodness, and when we don't want to put up with each other...."
"Like now," Jayson muttered under his breath, and Anne kicked her cousin under the table.
"Ow!"
".... And forgive us when we allow our tempers to get in the way of loving you. We ask all this through your Holy Spirit and in the name of your son Jesus Christ, Amen."
"Amen," they all said, and then Cecile added, "Anne, maybe you need to be a Baptist. Or at least a Black person."
"My spirit is Black," Anne stated.
"Your heart is black," muttered Jayson.
"I am so stuffed," Ryan said, patting his stomach and collapsing on the couch beside Isaac and Efrem. "Whaddo you say we all walk this off?"
"We should walk off the food," Isaac said, "and then go to the--"
"Ice Bucket," all three guys said at once.
"I swear that's what I miss about this place," Ryan said, running a hand through his hair.
Efrem noted: "It closes down for winter on Saturday."
When Jinny and Cecile came down the stairs Ryan ran the idea by them.
"Ice Bucket is right. It'll be cold as hell sitting outside," Cecile said.
"Good thing we have a car," Isaac reminded her.
"Let's go," Jinny, told Cecile, "You know how you'll be moaning about a Purple Cow around January, wishing the Ice Bucket was open."
"But right now it's November."
"Yeah, but you'll feel like hell knowing you could have gone one last time. Let's go get out coats."
"I've never been a fifth wheel," Efrem said. "I didn't even know they had them."
"What are you talking about," Ryan looked at him so uncomprehendingly, that Efrem didn't even pursue it.
"We better ask Anne and Jayson if they want to go," Jinny decided, going up the stairs.
"They better go in someone else's car," Cecile said, "Seven people in Ryan's Gulf? We're not clowns."
"Or Mexicans," added Efrem.
"I was trying to be PC," Cecile told him.
"We’re Black, we don’t have to be.”
Efrem drove Anne and Jayson because he was insistent on viewing Cecile and Ryan as a couple. Efrem was also the first to bail out of the evening, offering to drive Anne and Jayson home. Cecile eyed her brother for signs of fakery in his yawns, but they seemed real enough.
"Thanksgiving holiday is for sleep," he said, simply.
Jinny, Isaac, Cecile and Ryan sat in the night air, on the stone bench across the parking lot from the Ice Bucket, watching a few more people come and get their last cones and sundaes of the year. Then Isaac said, "It is cold. Cile, when you get finished with the Purple Cow twist, let's roll."
"Let's not go to bed yet," Ryan insisted. "What else can we do in Rhodes? Ef's a party pooper."
"We can go to the dollar show," Cecile said.
"What's playing?" Isaac said.
Jinny looked at her fiancé and said, "Who cares? It's for a dollar."
"They always clean up on popcorn and candy prices."
"But the popcorn is free refill," Jinny said. "That's why me and Cile always save the bags, put them in the refrigerator, and then use them over and over again."
"You do not!" Ryan cried.
Cecile explained, “The secret is to pay for your ticket, sit in the theatre for a few minutes before the movie begins, and then during the trailers, go out and get your stuff. They never say, ‘Hey, I didn’t see you buy the bag!’ We've had these same bags now for a year and a half.”
When Jinny and Isaac were dropped off on Aramy, and Ryan was driving with Cecile in the front seat he said, "I get the feeling people are conspiring against us."
"Or for us," she said.
"You want me to take you back home, or do you wanna come home with me?"
Conveniently there was a red light.
"Your parents--"
"Are fast asleep and so is Jayson," Ryan told her. "I'll drop you off at home in the morning. You can say no, and I'll understand."
Cecile kissed him quickly.
"You must have someone in Colorado," she said, sitting back and shaking her head. The light turned green. Ryan continued driving down Aramy.
"I don't have you.
“God, Cecile! We always almost have 'someone here' or 'someone back there.’ Who's the other guy? Why can't it ever work with us?" Ryan looked for a driveway and turned into it.
"What are we doing?"
"I'm turning around," Ryan said. "Your home's back that way."
"I thought we were going to your house," Cecile said.
Ryan looked at her and she leaned in and kissed him. The pressure of her lips grew firmer, and then he responded and they finally parted when he thought that if anyone was awake in the house they'd wonder why someone's Gulf was still in their driveway.
Cecile pointed up Aramy, the direction they'd been going.
"Your home is that way," she told him.
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