"People won't put on the jackets,"
Rosamund told the clerk.
"We have gobs, and nobody will wear them,
because they make you look fat."
She puffed out her cheeks and drew up
her shoulders to show the boy the effect of the bulky life
jackets.
In response, he laughed and flopped his arms up and down.
He can't control himself, Franny thought,
and felt some sympathy for the boy, and despised him a little,
too.
Poor thing, looking silly, meaning to look cool.
She understood that.
So, OK, the clerk said, let me check in back.
We don't do that, Franny.
We don't.
Do.
That.
As she applied the Pure Pearl, Rosamund
inserted the lipstick between her lips,
then rubbed the stick back and forth.
This extravagant method soon wore all of her lipsticks
to an hourglass shape that broke in half.
Still, Rosamund had read in a magazine
column that someone famous--
Brigitte Bardot?-- applied her lipstick in this way,
and Rosamund put great stock in the advice of such columns.
Knox gelatin made a girl's nails drop-dead glamorous.
A cap full of baby oil in the bath left you silky-smooth.
Just the day before, Rosamund had said to Franny,
"Now here's something great I read in that dating column.
You're out in the car with a boy, and he gets fresh, OK?
So, you just press your finger to his chin,
and you say, very sweet, no need to be nasty,
shall I drive us home now, or will you?"
[LAUGHTER]
Franny had been thrilled that Rosamund
shared such wisdom with her, and so did not point out
that it belonged to a predictable world,
not the surprising one in which, say,
just the Saturday before, standing in her friend
Christy Strawberry's dock garage, Franny
had found herself perfectly willing
to let a 15-year-old by the name of Bob Prehaskey
press his tongue into her mouth.
Also, Franny did not really want Rosamund
to know that she and Franny did not live
in precisely the same world.
Maybe, if Franny did not acknowledge
the menacing, oyster-colored clouds above her own head,
she could edge into that kingdom where
Rosamund held her face tilted up to always sunny skies.
"You like turquoise?" the Marina clerk
called from the back room.
"They're either turquoise or orange."
"Oh, turquoise, please," Rosamund said.
The honking in front of the Marina picked up again.
A crowd of pedestrians--
two women with strollers, a group of teenagers, little kids
being shepherded by adults--
had now worked up the nerve to cross the intersection
of the four-way.
In winter, on Sundays, there were
times when the Wahls drove the five miles into town
from their own house on the far side of the lake
without encountering a single car.
But in July any day of the week, a trip
in turned up flocks of cars with out-of-town plates.
Shopping at the supermarket could involve parking a block
or more from the store.
And if you drove through town in the evening,
you were bound to see the moth-pale flicker
of little kids in light pajamas that play on the cots
that their parents had set out on the porches and side
yards of crowded rental cottages.
One of that pack of people who now crossed
the lakeside intersection was a clowning
blond-haired boy, shirtless, teenaged,
bright orange flip-flops on his feet.
Franny wanted to see his face.
Was he handsome?
But the boy held his bare arms high,
as if to shield himself from the driver's fury.
And oh, it was only Tim Gleason, the local boy Rosamund
had chosen to be her summer buddy.
Tim Gleason had graduated from the high school,
the Catholic high school, that spring,
then met Rosamund at Lintz, the gift shop where
both held summer jobs.
An attractive boy, Franny supposed,
though Rosamund's buddies did not have to be attractive.
Tim Gleason had silky blond hair, lime-green eyes.
His skin, however, looked a little raw, didn't it?
Puckered from some sort of face scrub
he had used too zealously.
Franny started to raise a hand to wave, then lowered it.
Risky to let Tim Gleason think she dared presume,
that he was her friend as well as Rosamund's.
"There must be some mistake, though.
I mean, the check must have gotten lost in the mail
or something," Rosamund said.
Franny glanced back at the counter.
Rosamund was no longer speaking to the clerk,
but to an older man, his face drawn, apologetic.
"You tell your dad to come in, Miss Wahl," the man said.
"We'll be more than happy to let you charge again,
once he takes care of his end.
Your granddad was always one of my favorite people."
The man smoothed his hands across what was clearly
some sort of ledger, thin hands with wiry black hairs
on the backs and fingers.
Class ring.
If Franny's father had been there,
he would have made them laugh at that man, his flush cheeks,
the ring with the big red stone.
An honest-to-God graduate of Rinky Dink High, her father
would have said.
Something like that.
Eyes wide with fury, Rosamund strode toward Franny.
"What an ass!"
she whispered.
[LAUGHTER]
"Dad's check must have gotten lost in the mail or something,
so that ass is saying the account's overdue,
and we can't charge."
Franny raised and lowered her chin,
serenely, she thought, to acknowledge that she
had heard what Rosamund said.
Peg Wahl, Miss Johnson County of 1940, had trained all three
of her daughters by example and knuckles
in the back to maintain a ramrod perfect posture at all times.
And Franny had found that sometimes,
in tandem with the posture, she could
execute an impeccable pivot away from distress.
She could look, oh, as if she'd never even intended
to make a purchase when the lady in the hosiery department
at Drew's announced, "I'm sorry, Miss,
but that account is delinquent."
If her father happened to drink too much over Sunday dinner
at the Top Hat club, Franny could slowly
rise from the table and walk to the powder room,
and stay there until it was time to go home.
"Here comes Timmy Gleason," Rosamund
pointed out the window.
"He called me before we left.
I'm taking him skiing later."
Rosamund glanced toward the register.
The clerk now stood with back turned,
straightening a row of oars.
His stiff movements hinted that he felt embarrassed
for Rosamund, or himself, or both.
"How humiliating!"
Rosamund whispered.
But Franny fixed her own attention on Tim Gleason.
Did he check his approaching reflection
in the big Marina window?
The self-conscious philip of arrangement he gave to his hair
suggested he had yet to spot Rosamund beyond the glass.
"Anyone can see Tim's crazy about you," Franny whispered.
"But it won't be fun if I see," Rosamund said, then
gave Franny a hug and smile.
"Tim's cute, but you wait.
If Turner Haskin comes to visit me this summer,
every girl in Pynch will fall in love with him."
Rosamund raised the back of her hand to her mouth
as she laughed.
She had once explained to Franny how
she had lived with this gesture from a British movie star,
for both its look of elegance and the fact that it concealed
a gray mark left on her right canine by orthodontia.
"And no doubt," Rosamund fluffed her bright hair
with her fingertips, "our crazy sister
will be the first to throw herself at Turner's feet."
The idea of Martie falling for a college friend of Rosamund's
did not strike Franny as particularly funny,
but she still smarted from Rosamund's remark on the dock--
"We don't do that, Franny"--
and so she laughed along at the image of Martie head
over heels for someone named Turner Haskin.
She followed Rosamund out the Marina door.
She looked at the lake while Rosamund and Tim
Gleason talked.
"I want just one bite of Dairy Queen," Rosamund said.
"So, if I get a cone, will you eat it, Tim?"
Tim Gleason shook a teasing finger at Rosamund.
"Just one bite?
I know you.
I'll hold the cone, but you'll eat it."
"Meanie!"
Rosamund said, but then her laugh
lightened the word, which rose like a bubble, a toy.
And when she looked out over the top of her sunglasses,
Franny recognized the deft parody of the starlet
in the old poster for Lolita.
Tim Gleason laughed at that, too.
Franny's own perverse set of scruples,
or self-consciousness, vanity, whatever it was,
prevented her from buying sunglasses.
Horror at the possibility that someone
might imagine that she, Franny Wahl,
imagined herself resembling any sort of celebrity.
So it was that she had to squint as she looked out
at the glittering lake.
What kind of name was Turner Haskin, anyway?
Beyond a moored houseboat, a sea sailed past.
The crewmen stood on the leeboards,
and even Franny knew that this would not
be necessary if the skipper would let out more sheet.
It would not be good if Martie fell in love with this Turner
Haskin, and Martie did fall in love with some regularity.
The last heartbreak had come via an ROTC member
from Des Moines, funny, handsome in his uniform.
That boyfriend possessed a handful of tricks
with which to entertain a little sister.
He could blow smoke rings through smoke rings,
open his Zippo lighter with a swipe
down the leg of his pants, and then on the upswipe,
strike the thing to flame.
As good as a brother, Franny thought the ROTC member,
until he wrote a lengthy letter to Brick and Peg
to let them know that he would not be
seeing their daughter anymore.
He was sorry to say so, but since starting college
that fall, Martie had begun to swear
and smoke and drink, and generally
behave in unladylike manner.
[LAUGHTER]
"Read this!"
Brick had rattled the boy's blue stationery in Franny's face.
"Read this, and see what nice boys think of crude behavior."
[LAUGHTER]
Peg shook and cried over the letter,
but it only made Franny hate the ROTC boy for betraying Martie
so.
Were those little kids sailing past on the sunfish
going to tip over?
They half wanted to, you could tell,
but now a frightened mother shrilled from the Marina dock,
"You kids keep that boat upright, or else!"
What time would that evening's party
begin, Tim Gleason asked Rosamund,
and would there be a keg, or should Tim bring beer?
And could some of his buddies come by, too?
While Tim and Rosamund chatted on,
Franny pressed her bare toes into the fat slugs of tar
that someone had used to fill a seam where the sidewalk slumped
away from the Marina wall.
This summer, Franny often did not
know what to do with herself.
She knew only that she did not want
to do what she had done in summers past.