--did not want to fish for crappies and bullheads,
to make loom pot holders or drive go-karts
or play miniature golf or endless games of Michigan Rummy
and Monopoly.
To crew on the sailboat of the girl from down the beach.
No.
And quick, now, she stepped from the curb
and between two cars moving up Lakeside.
And there was no time to quake at the honks
and shouts at the drivers.
Just time to try to look cool and stay alive.
From the other side of the street,
she turned to wave to Rosamund, who shook her head
but grinned just as she had the night she found Kristy
Strawberry and Franny smoking on the second story window
ledge of Franny's room.
An admiring smile.
Maybe Rosamund had heard that shout from a passing car,
"Hey, buttercup!"
which might have been meant for Franny because
of her yellow shorts and shirt.
Peg had told Franny she should change before going to town
but Rosamund said, "Oh, she's fine, Mom."
And now Franny was glad, glad, so glad
she had to hold her face down to conceal her smile
as she joined the line in front of the Dairy Queen.
Oh, that song that poured from the Dairy Queen speakers--
it took her by the shoulders.
It shoved her and her broken heart out
into the cold, dark night.
Oh, both delicious and terrible.
Though who had broken her heart?
Who?
Misty-eyed she surveyed the Dairy Queen patrons:
the poor acne-pitted girl behind the service window.
At the back of the stand, the chubby owner
shuffled around with a bucket and mop,
a cinnamon-colored dachshund underfoot.
A sweet thing.
Could that Buttercup really have been meant for Franny?
Sometimes it seemed to Franny that she did look pretty.
But the next moment she might pass by a mirror
and out would leave a creature so
queer she might have been one of the Picasso ladies
from the art books at the home of her piano teacher.
Not just limbs akimbo but nose and eyes too.
Her face a primitive mask from which speech would surely
issue in foghorn blasts, bovine bellows.
"What can I get you?" asked the girl
behind the DQ's tiny screen window.
"Three medium cones, please."
Surely ordering Tim Gleason a cone
was the polite thing to do.
And if he rejected his, fine.
She'd pitch it in the trash can, no big deal.
No hurt feelings here, man.
An odd boy, Tim.
Sometimes, he was like a fish in the shallows.
Holding so still you did not see him.
Then, as if he did not want to be completely forgotten,
he would make a leap.
Show himself.
Franny would have liked to have asked Martie
what she thought of the boy, and of Rosamund's friendship
with him.
But Martie could be a whirlpool that
sucked your words into her spin until your words were
no longer your own--
they were just fuel for some dark momentum
that Martie seemed to require to know that she existed.
While the DQ girl made up the cones,
Franny and watched Mike Zanias, owner of the Top Hat Club,
cross the drive between his club's brick building
and the Marina.
Mike Zanias and Rosamund called out to each other,
and Franny knew, any moment now, Zanias would give Rosamund
a hug that lifted her off the ground.
There.
The Wahls had eaten Sunday buffets,
prime rib, moussaka, Greek chicken,
at the Top Hat for as long as Franny could remember.
Her father left his law offices each noon for lunch
at the place.
Still, Franny could not help wondering how Tim Gleason felt
about that hug.
Mike Zanias might be a family friend,
but Rosamund and Martie both spoke of how charming
they found his blue eyes and the brows
that met in an ashen smudge.
The silver streaks in his dark blond curls.
The way he dressed in sandals and boat neck sweaters.
In addition, lately, Mike Zanias often
drove out to the Wahl house after dinner.
And while Rick Wahl mixed him a drink,
Zanias invariably would shout up the stairs,
"Hey, Roz, come on down and tell us the news of the American
Youth!"
Something like that.
Then Rosamund would wind up perched
on the arm of whatever chair Zanias sat in.
And though she did not drink, she sometimes
drizzled a bit of the man's bourbon
onto a scoop of ice cream.
And later, as if there were nothing extraordinary about it,
he would take her to The Top Hat to listen to the combo that
played there in the evenings.
Tim Gleason stared at the lake while Mike Zanias
talked to Rosamund.
Poor Tim worked hard to appear detached, cool.
But even from across the street, Franny
could see the way bright lines of tension
tweaked the corners of his mouth, his jaw.
"I do worry, Roz, that people might misunderstand
your friendship with Mike," so Peg
had said over a recent dinner.
But Rosamund had just laughed and squeezed her mother's hand.
"You're so innocent, Ma.
Everybody in Pynch knows Mike has
a thing going on with that sleaze who
sings with the combo.
Believe me, whenever I go to the club, she comes by to paw Mike,
so people can see he's hers.
Peg had seemed surprised by this,
and asked Franny's father, "Is that right?"
And Brick had looked up from picking at his dinner
to say, he guessed so, honey.
He guessed Roz meant that brunette with the green goop
all over her eyes.
So Rosamund was not in love with Mike Zanias.
But maybe she was a little in love
with the Florida guy, Turner Haskin.
"Hey, look who we found," Rosamund
called, as Franny returned with her triangle of ice cream
cones.
Should she have gotten a fourth cone, perhaps?
One for Mike Zanias?
As if he were a grave courtier, Mike Zanias
bowed toward Franny.
She smiled but felt grateful that the cones in her hands
prevented the possibility of a hug.
It seemed to Franny that like herself, Zanias
is now considered her too big for hugs.
It was awkward, however, to stop doing something
you had done for years, especially when he
and Rosemund kept it up.
"Hey, Roz," Tim Gleason jerked his head
toward the Marina dock.
"You want me to gas the boat?"
Rosamund grimaced, perhaps in memory of the conversation
with the Marina clerk.
"We'll stop at Moore's later," she said.
Then with a wink at Franny, she took two of the ice cream cones
and presented one to Mike Zanias.
"Farewell gift?" she said.
"Why, thank you, ma'am.
Mike Zanias gave the cone and amused inspection
and raised it high in the air like a standard
and hummed a bit of vaguely martial music, while Rosamund
and Frannie and Tim Gleason made their way down the now
empty dock.
Was it possible that Franny had seen Mike Zanias's singer
girlfriend at some time and not known it?
Rosamund had called her a sleaze,
which probably meant that Mike Zanias had sex with the singer.
Maybe he'd even told Rosamund so.
This was not impossible.
In June, while Rosamund set about unpacking her suitcase,
she had revealed startling news to Franny.
After Rosamund's dates, when the University took her back
to her dormitory, they regularly went out for sex
with town girls.
"But if you like a boy, and he likes you,
how can you stand the thought of him kissing somebody else?"
Franny had asked.
"Oh, honey, that's the way it works, is all," Rosamund said.
"It doesn't mean anything."
To Rosamund it did not mean anything but to Franny it did.
Just like it meant something to her
when the boys at her junior high asked a girl, "Are you
a good girl?
Or are you a nice girl?"
One answer was right and one was wrong
and a large part of the point of the question
seemed to be to make a girl indite herself by the answer.
A girl was supposed to remember that the correct response was,
"I'm a nice girl," because a nice girl goes out, comes
home, and goes to bed, while a good girl goes out,
goes to bed, and comes home.
Or maybe it was the other way around.
On principle, Franny refused to remember the correct response.
Nice and good, it was all stupid.
People wanted to say vile things about girls.
Just that winter, at one of the high school basketball games,
a freckly boy Franny did not even know
had sidled up to her as she made her way
to the refreshment stand.
"You're Martie Wahl's sister, aren't you?" he asked.
And Franny had turned, smiling, before that boy went on to say,
"My sister says your sister's a whore."
He was smiling when Franny slapped his face,
a mess of cheese curls mortared between his teeth.
And he continued to smile as he said,
"I was telling you so you wouldn't turn out like her
but I guess it's too late, huh?"
Franny has never told anyone that story.
For one thing, she knew that plenty of people
believed that if a person were called a name,
the name was deserved.
To complicate matters further, the only other person Franny
had ever heard call Martie a whore was her father.
And why was whore the ultimate insult
applied to girls who were clearly not whores.
Surely, her father knew that Martie was not a whore.
Franny knew.
Still, had Martie been a whore and that boy
from the basketball game called her so from spite,
Franny would have slapped him just the same.
She stuck her hand over the side of the big boat,
and the speed fanned the lake water cold and hard
against her fingers.
Just the same.
There were plenty of people who would
think Franny were a whore if they knew that she had allowed
handsome Bob Brahaski to stick his tongue in her mouth, which
meant she could not ask anyone for advice on the kiss.
Certainly not her mother, who had sent Bob home immediately
the day she came into the yard while Franny pitched grapes
across the picnic table and into the boy's mouth.
"I don't know what you're up to," Peg had cried out,
"but it looks awful."
She certainly could not ask Joan Harbot and Christy Strawberry,
who spoke of sexual matters as if on the verge of nausea.
So-and-so let so-and-so French her, feel her up on top
or down below.