What I Thought Was True(4)

“No flying until you’re in your suit,” Grandpa says. Em skids to a halt in front of him, patiently allowing Grandpa Ben to strip off his shirt and shorts and wrestle the pajamas on. Then he cuddles next to me on Myrtle as Grandpa fires up a Fred Astaire DVD.

Our living room’s so small it barely accommodates the enormous plasma-screen TV Grandpa won last year at a bingo tournament at church. I’m pretty sure he cheated. The state-of-the-art screen always looks so out of place on the wall between a cedar-wood crucifix and the wedding picture of my grandmother. She’s uncharacteristically serious in black and white, with the bud vase underneath that Grandpa never forgets to fill every day. It’s a big picture, one of those ones where the eyes seem to follow you.

I can never meet hers.

Lush, romantic music fills the room, along with Fred Astaire’s cracked tenor voice.

“Where Ginger?” Emory asks, pointing at the screen.

Grandpa Ben’s put on Funny Face, which has Audrey Hepburn, not Ginger Rogers.

“She’ll be here in a minute,” Grandpa tells him, his usual answer, waiting for Emory to love the music and the dancing so much that he doesn’t care who does it.



Em chews his lip, and his foot begins twitching back and forth.

My eight-year-old brother is not autistic. He’s not anything they’ve mapped genetically. He’s just Emory. No diagnosis, no chart, no map at all. Some hard things come easy to him, and some basic things he struggles with. I wrap my arms around his waist, his skinny ribs, rest my chin on his shoulder, feeling his dark flyaway hair lift to tickle my cheek, inhaling his sun-warm, little-boy scent. “This is the one with the funny song, remember? The sunny funny-face song?”

At last Em settles, snuggled with his favorite stuffed animal, Hideout the stuffed hermit crab, in his arms. Grandpa Ben won him at some fair when Emory was two, and he’s been Em’s favorite ever since.

I nudge aside Fabio, go outside to the front steps, because I just can’t watch Audrey Hepburn being waifish and wistful.

At nearly five eleven, nobody, no matter how nearsighted, will ever say I’m waifish.

Squinting out over the island, over the roofs of the low, split-level houses across from ours—Hoop’s squat gray ranch, Pam’s dirty shingled white house, Viv’s pale green house with the redwood shutters that don’t match—I can just barely catch the dazzle of the end-of-day sun off the water. I lean back on my elbows, shut my eyes and take a deep breath of the warm, briny air.

Which reeks.

My eyes pop open. A pair of my cousin’s workout sneakers are inches from my nose. Yuck. Eau de sweaty eighteen-year-old boy. I elbow them off the porch, onto the grass.



The screen door bangs open. Mom slides down next to me, a carton of ice cream in one hand, spoon in the other. “Want some? I’ll even get you your own spoon.”

“Nah, I’m fine.” I offer a smile. Pretty sure she doesn’t buy it. “That your appetizer, Mom?”

“Ice cream,” she says. “Appetizer, main course, dessert. So flexible.”

She digs around for the chunks of peanut butter ripple, and then pauses to brush my hair back from my forehead. “Anything we need to talk about? You’ve been quiet the past day or so.”

It’s ironic. Mom spends most of her spare time reading romance novels about people who take their clothes off a lot.

She explained the facts of life to a stunned and horrified Nic and me by demonstrating with a Barbie and a G.I. Joe. She took me to the gynecologist for the Pill when I was fifteen—“It’s good for your complexion,” she insisted, when I sputtered that it wasn’t necessary, “and your future.” We can talk about physi-cal stuff—she’s made sure of that—but only in the abstract . . .

Now I want to rest my head onto her soft, freckled shoulder and tell her everything about the boys in the car. But I don’t want her knowing that anyone sees me like that.

That I’ve given anyone a reason.

“I’m fine,” I repeat. She spoons up more ice cream, face absorbed. After a moment, Fabio noses his way through the screen door, staggers up to Mom, and sets his chin on her thigh, rolling his eyes at her beseechingly.

“Don’t,” I tell her. Though I know she will. Sure enough, Mom scrapes out a chunk, tapping the spoon on the deck.



Fabio drops his inches-from-death act and slurps it up, then resumes his hopeful post, drooling on Mom’s leg.

After a while, she says, “Maybe you could walk down to the Ellingtons’”—she wags the spoon toward Low Road—“say hiya to Mrs. E.”

“Wait. What? Like a job interview? Now?” I look down at my fraying cut-offs and T-shirt, back at Mom. Then I run inside and come back with my familiar green-and-pink mascara tube.

I unscrew it, flicking the wand rapidly over my eyelashes.

“You don’t need that,” Mom says for the millionth time, nonetheless handing me her spoon so I can check for smudges in the reflection. “No. I pretty much told her you’d take the job. It’s a good one. But I don’t know how many other people already know about it. And such good pay. Just get there, ground floor, remind her who you are. She’s always liked you.”

This is why, three minutes later, I’m toeing on my flip-flops when Grandpa Ben hurries out, his shock of curly white hair tousled. “Gwen! Take this! Tell Mrs. E. they are from Bennie para a rosa da ilha, for the Rose of the Island. Mando lagostas e amor. I send her lobsters and love.”