The Spaces Between Us Read online

  * * *

  My plan starts after supper. I wash the dishes and wipe the counters and sweep the floor until the kitchen has never been so immaculate. After that I go upstairs and read for a while, from Mlle. O’Shea’s anthology. I love Baudelaire, but now I’m getting into the twentieth century. My new favorite is by Jacques Prévert, called “Barbara.”

  Rapelle-toi Barbara

  Il pleuvait sans cesse sur Brest ce jour-là.

  It’s about a woman he sees crossing the street in the rain. He hears her lover call her name, a man that has taken shelter under a porch, and Barbara runs into his arms. She’s beautiful and happy with the rain on her face, but in between when that happens and when he remembers it in the poem, the war comes and takes everything away and changes what everything means, even rain. It really gets to me.

  Eventually, I can hear my family assemble downstairs in the family room, and they’ve started a game of Uno. Usually at this juncture, I would lock myself in and read for the rest of the night, but step two of my plan is to take a deep breath, go downstairs, and watch them play cards. So that’s what I do. They ignore me.

  “Any objections if I sleep outside tonight?” I ask, casually, after a while. “Aaron said I could use his old sleeping bag.”

  My mother looks guarded. “Outside … where?”

  “On the front lawn. You know how my bedroom heats up on these hot nights.”

  Mom looks at Scot, but Scot’s face is a black hole. She looks at her watch. “It’s kind of early for bed, isn’t it?” she asks.

  “Mom.” Nora yanks on her sleeve. “It’s your turn.”

  “I’m not going to bed now,” I explain in a reasonable, even, and unexcited tone of voice. “I just mean for when I do go to bed.” Scot doesn’t say a word. He looks like he’s going to have a problem no matter what happens.

  “Well.” My mother uses her Christian, sweet-but-firm voice. “In that case, why don’t you sit down and join us?” I don’t want to be here. Nobody else wants me here. But without commands coming down from the general, a mere lieutenant needs to cover her ass. Just because I failed Western Civ doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything about history. As long as she’s making me unhappy, she must be doing something right. So I sit down and join them. Scot deals. We look at our cards. Nobody talks. We play through a hand. I put down my first wild card, call it green, and then watch Scot have to pick up about twenty cards, getting angrier with each one. Three more cards, and I win the hand.

  “Daddy,” Nora says, “Serena made us a swimming pool today. I thought we were going to have a swimming pool at our house. When are you going to make us a swimming pool?”

  Scot puts his cards down, gets up, and leaves the room without comment.

  “Where’s Daddy going?” asks Zack.

  “It was a swimming hole, not a pool,” I explain to my mother’s furious face. “In the stream in back of Grimshaw’s.”

  Scot turns around and comes back in the room. “She took our kids where today?” he shouts at my mother.

  “I’ve taken them to the Grimshaws’ before,” I say. “It’s no big deal.”

  “Do you know how they make their money?” Scot shouts at my mother.

  “I don’t think it’s so bad,” says my mother. “It’s almost legal.”

  “Oh, that’s great.” Scot lifts both hands in the air. “Just great. Almost legal, the principal says. You heard it here.” Scot turns in the doorway and points at me. “I don’t want my kids hanging out at that place anymore. It’s dangerous.”

  I start to laugh. “Dangerous?” I say to my mother. “That’s really ridiculous.”

  “Serena fixed their car today!” Zack yells.

  “Yeah!” chimes in Nora. “She fixed their car! Then we went swimming in their swimming pool!”

  “I know those people,” Scot says between clenched teeth. “They don’t have enough pride to bend over and pick up their own trash.”

  “You can’t just say that about them!” I say to Scot.

  “Melody’s different,” my mother pleads with Scot. “I really pray for that girl. And I’d like to think it’s having some effect.”

  “I think,” he says quietly, ignoring my mother, “in my own house, I can say whatever I want.”

  “No, you can’t,” I yell back. “You can’t just talk trash about people.”

  Nora and then Zack start to cry. Scot sticks his chin out at me. “If it’s true, I sure can.”

  “You want to know what people say about you, then?”

  He is right in my face. “Okay,” he says. “Tell me.”

  “Serena,” says my mother, getting in between us. “Go upstairs to your room, right now.”

  “If we’re being so free with what we’ve heard other people say,” I tell him over her shoulder. “I hear things, too, you know, if we’re passing rumors around. That’s what you’re doing. Talk about trash.”

  Scot rushes toward me with his fists clenched, and for a second I actually think he might punch me. “Go ahead, then,” he says quietly. “Say it.”

  “Scot,” my mother says behind him. “You are reasoning with a teenager. You won’t win.”

  He spins toward her. Now he gets in her face. “Oh,” he says, “I won’t win, will I? And why is that? Because you’re all so educated and I’m just a guy who works with his hands?” Now he’s shouting at her, the dog is barking, and both kids are screaming in earnest. “Every day, I face my problems, even the ones I didn’t create. I face another guy’s problems who was too weak to hack it. I’m not as smart as him, I’m too dumb to kill myself. I just get up, every day, to keep a roof over his kids’ heads. It’s all on me.”

  Now my mother has started to cry, too. “Sweetheart,” she says, holding out her hands in supplication. “Please don’t do this. Please.”

  “No,” he shouts. “Let’s say it all. Let’s get it all out.” Scot keeps going. “She’s so smart, and all we hear from her, all year long, is about how stupid everybody else is, her teachers, how stupid they are, how stupid the town is, my town—this is my town,” he shouts again, jabbing his thumbnail into his chest, “and I have to listen to this, and now she’s too smart to pass her dumb classes, and how does that make you look, Dr. Pentz, with your PhD? Like the laughingstock of the whole Valley, that’s how! You think the school board is gonna hire you now?”

  “Sweetheart, I really don’t think—”

  “You think they’re gonna hire you now?” he repeats. “I wouldn’t. You want to raise the standards for the whole town, but your own daughter—” He stops abruptly. “People are known by the company they keep, and that’s all I’m gonna say.” He leaves and slams the door. Zack and Nora run at my mother and cling to her leg and cry.

  “It’s okay,” she says to them, with a hand on each of their heads. “Daddy’s just having some feelings.”

  Then Scot comes back. “I don’t want her watching my kids anymore,” he yells. “Maybe you don’t care about your kids, but I care about mine. From now on, hire a babysitter, and make sure it’s somebody who’s smart enough to keep them safe.” Then he leaves again. We stand there, hear him slam the door again, start his BMW, and drive away, probably to meet Nanci Lee at the Crossways Tavern.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I protest to my mother. “It’s not dangerous at the Grimshaws’. And they’re not trash, either. They’re my friends.”

  “Serena,” my mother says, rubbing her forehead, “do you think you can speak to Scot without a sneer in your voice?”

  “Well, do you think it’s right, what he said about them? It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Just go,” she says. “Just go away.”

  “So can I sleep outside tonight?”

  She gets up and starts to leave the room with Zack and Nora. “I don’t care where you sleep.”

  “Fine,” I mutter. “If you don’t care where I sleep, maybe I’ll sleep with the football team.”

  It comes out a little l
ouder than I intend. She turns around and stares at me. “Get out,” she says. “Get out of my sight right now.”

  So I get out. I take Aaron’s sleeping bag outside and lurk by the gates of Versailles and watch the fireflies blink while I wait for Ruby to pick me up. As for the scene that just happened, it doesn’t even bear thinking about. They need a babysitter, and they can’t afford to pay anyone. I’ll just tell Nora and Zack that instead of having a swimming hole, they now have a secret swimming hole. The fact that Scot now works from home complicates things, but I’ll figure something out. It’s not like the guy’s a genius. My sister’s analysis is that when the woman makes more money than the man, the man has to make up for it by swaggering around and threatening everybody and yelling a lot. Allegra says Scot’s affair with Nanci Lee is his way of equalizing the difference in intelligence and power between him and Mom. As far as staying away from the Grimshaws’, I can’t say anything about it to Grimshaw. It will take her less than one second to guess why I’ve been forbidden to bring Zack and Nora over to play. She’s very sensitive that way.

  Eventually, Ruby’s truck rolls up and stops. Only his parking lights are on.

  “Melody’s there already,” he reports when I get in. “She went down with Dale and Lisa.”

  “Lisa’s back?”

  “Yeah. She just came back tonight. The kids were happier to see her than she was to see them.”

  We head down into the Valley, stopping to buy beer and pick up three of Ruby’s friends, who all cram in front of the pickup with him. I stretch out in back with the Rottweilers and watch the stars go by over my head. I think about what Scot said about my father. He died when I was so young that I don’t have any memory of him at all. If I ever ask anything about him, it’s like it’s none of my business and I should stop being so nosy and be grateful for what I have.

  By the time we arrive, the party is raging. It’s in a deep, ferny gorge above Colchis where tiny feathery waterfalls spill down steps of black shale into the same stream that winds in back of Grimshaw’s house. A huge bonfire licks at the sky. A bunch of guys with their shirts tied around their heads are watching the fire. Some guys from the football team throw a car seat on the fire, and a column of sparks rises about thirty feet in the air, twisting around itself. Ruby puts a can of beer in my hands and then dissolves into the shadows. I crack it, take the first sip, and wander off in search of Grimshaw. The firelight makes people’s faces strange and their shadows lurch against the trees. Cars keep pulling in, and their headlights illuminate more clumps of people leaning against cars and drinking. I thread through them. The gorge is the melting pot of Colchis. All the discrete, mildly antagonistic lifestyles—rednecks, jocks, stoners, even Christians—are like one-celled organisms whose membranes become permeable at parties to beer and drugs and sexually transmitted diseases. Nobody talks to me, though.

  This year’s valedictorian is standing on the roof of a pickup truck parked next to the fire. Allegra was salutatorian. He holds a bottle up and watches the fire through the glass. He tips it back, and as he starts to guzzle, a bunch of guys jump into the bed of the pickup and start rocking it. The crowd starts to clap in unison. “Chug, chug, chug,” they chant as the guys in the bed keep rocking the truck. He empties the bottle, throws it into the flames, and holds both arms up in victory. I turn away to keep looking for my friend. If I don’t find her, there is no point in my being here.

  Headlights snap on, illuminating Claudette Mizerak and Angel Ciaramitaro, sitting right in front of me on the hood of a pickup truck. They’re passing a bottle of wine back and forth. We freeze when we see each other, like we know we don’t like each other but we can’t really remember why. Then the headlights snap off and leave us in darkness again.

  “Slut,” one of them says.

  “Bitch,” I say back, and keep going.

  * * *

  It takes me a while to find Grimshaw, or rather, her shoes, because that’s what I see first, placed neatly side by side next to the passenger door of the ugliest car on the planet, the ultimate in losermobiles, a metallic gold mid-’80s Corvette. A small knot of older guys, last year’s football players, are standing in front of it. The passenger-side window is open about three inches. I knock on the side of the car.

  “Bee-yootiful,” I exclaim. “What an echo!” From the murky depths of the car, I hear her giggle. “It’s Serena!” I hear her say. “She found us!” On the other side of the car, Mike Lyle gets out, slams the door, and lumbers off into the shadows. The window comes down, and a lit cigarette comes out in Grimshaw’s hand. A menthol.

  “No thanks.” I give it back. “When I want more fiberglass in my diet, I’ll chew on the insulation. Move over.” I open the door and squeeze into the passenger seat with her. The car smells of sweat and cologne and cigarette smoke and beer.

  “How old is that guy, anyway?” I whisper. “He’s not very friendly.”

  “He says he knows your mom. He was in her English class back in the day. Schnapps?”

  “Ew. Liquefied grasshopper guts.”

  “He likes it,” she says. “Take off your shoes, too. He doesn’t want to mess up the car.”

  “You better make sure he doesn’t have a stroke. These old guys are kinda fragile, you know.”

  She blows a smoke ring and admires it as she turns up the radio. “He says he knows a lot of people where I can get a job.”

  The door opens. Mike Lyle is back, shoving the front of his shirt into his pants. He gets in on the other side of Grimshaw. It’s impressive how quickly and easily such a big guy can fit into such a small space. He leans forward and stares at me.

  “Corvettes don’t rust,” he announces.

  I look at Grimshaw, and I can’t help it, I burst out laughing. It just seems so silly to me, that a grown man would care what anyone says about his car. Then I realize he doesn’t have a sense of humor about his car, or me, or maybe anything.

  Grimshaw stares straight ahead of her. “Mike, Serena,” she says. “Serena, Mike.”

  “Mike.” I extend my hand to him. “Mike, I’m charmed.”

  He doesn’t take my hand. “You think you’re pretty funny, don’t you?” he asks. In the darkness, all I can see are the dull reflections of his eyes. The glowing end of Grimshaw’s cigarette flares up between our noses as she sucks down the last inch. Then headlights swing through the car and stop, and for a split second, Mike Lyle and I make eye contact. Although I wasn’t expecting to see warm pools of affection, I’m taken aback by the paleness of his eyes. The blue of them is so light there’s something empty-looking about them. I lean in closer to get a better look.

  Then Mike says a bad word. He gets out and slams the door so hard it rocks the car. Mike walks into the light of the headlights. He’s not that tall, but his shoulders are wide. Somebody holds a beer out for him. He drains it, and then he holds the can out and with a series of flexes, grunts, and grimaces, crushes it into a ball with one hand while the other two watch. Then he tosses it off into the dark distance.

  I look at her and roll my eyes. “That was for your benefit.” She doesn’t answer. I watch her light a second cigarette off the first one. “What are you smoking so much for? Are you nervous or something?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What do you see in that guy, anyway?”

  “It’s what he sees in me,” she replies.

  “And what’s that?”

  “A future.”

  I wait for her to explain, but she doesn’t. “I don’t get it.”

  “You wouldn’t.” She exhales a long blast of smoke. “You and Mike might get along if—I mean—can’t you ever take a day off?”

  “A day off what?”

  “Isn’t there ever a day when you get up and say, ‘I’m not going to say anything sarcastic today until at least noon’?”

  “Well, what did you go and tell him I thought his car was rusty for?” I demand.

  “That was a mistake,” she sighs. “I was telling him abo
ut you, trying to explain that most of the time you’re not trying to be mean, you just want people to like you. Everything’s an act with you, a show. Most people don’t know that.”

  “Well, do me a favor and don’t blow my cover.”

  “Let’s just get out of here,” she says. “I’m getting cold.” I open the door and hand Grimshaw her shoes. I take off my sweater and give that to her, too.

  “Take it,” I tell her. “I’m too hot.”

  When we get to the bonfire, Grimshaw breaks into the circle surrounding it. She’s still holding the bottle of schnapps, and she tips it up to take a sip.

  “Nice swallow,” a male voice says from far back. A smattering of female laughter breaks out. Grimshaw’s face just twists up in a defiant smile, and she takes another sip from the bottle.

  “Why don’t you just get pregnant and stay home?” a female voice mutters near me. I don’t know if it was loud enough for Grimshaw to hear. She could have anyone’s boyfriend here, and often has, but she wouldn’t like it if I heard that, so I leave the scene before it becomes an issue. And since Grimshaw’s relationship with Mike Lyle seems destined to last at least a couple more hours, I should start exploring possibilities for a ride home. I still have to babysit tomorrow, so it would be good if I showed up for breakfast. I wander the outskirts of the party, through necking couples, heaps of beer cans, and people comatose in cars, but find nobody within six degrees of separation of either Grimshaw or me.

  When my eyes adjust to the light, I pick my way down to the stream, take off my shoes, and find a flat rock that’s big enough to sit cross-legged on. I mull over Grimshaw’s comment about Mike Lyle. It’s not what she sees in him, it’s what he sees in her. So does she see anything in him? Does she look straight through him at his car? And what does he see in her, anyway? What other guys see, or something else? I don’t know why I bother trying to solve her riddles, though. I always search for meaning in everything she says, until I find out she’s just quoting old songs. Still, Mike Lyle is different from the others. She’s gone out with other older guys, but this one’s more determined, somehow. He’s not bad-looking, I suppose, in an older-guy sort of way. He has a trim goatee, shiny black hair, the Corvette, of course, instead of a brain, and arms like the branches of an oak tree. If it’ll really make her happy, I can try to be nice to him. But I don’t have to like him.