The Last Romantics(19)

I set up the game there on the floor of the hall, and we played, sitting cross-legged, facing each other. I ate a salami sandwich. Joe drank two glasses of milk and remained on the phone. He gave the conversation only the barest attention. D9. F10. A13. With each coordinate he placed his hand on the mouthpiece.

“You sank my battleship,” he told me.

“Yee-haw!” I whooped loudly.

Joe frowned and told the girl he needed to go. Feminine protest erupted on the other end. I could hear the tone but not the words: pout, cajoling, Joooooe. I widened my eyes and twirled an index finger at my forehead. Cuckoo, I signaled to Joe. You and all these stupid girls. I vowed then never to be like them, frivolous and weak-willed, with their glossy lips and padded bras, speaking for hours to a boy who only pretended to listen.

Joe kept my gaze. “Holly—” he said into the phone, but she kept interrupting him.

“I’m—”

“Listen—”

“Wait—”

And then he simply hung up.

“Your turn,” I said.

As we continued the game, Joe jiggled a knee, tapped an index finger against the floor, squinted and frowned. Back then some part of Joe was always in motion. A leg, a finger, a crack of the neck, a roll of the shoulders. He was still growing, his bones lengthening, skin expanding, his whole person surging forward into a bright unknown. Joe’s vitality seeped out of him, uncontainable. I felt it all the time.

“Fiona,” he said as we were clearing away the pieces of the game. He had won, but barely.

“What?”

“I’m glad you’re my little sister.”

I shrugged. “It’s not like I have a choice,” I replied, but I felt my big, hot heart spreading through my chest like a starfish, like a many-fingered creature that had finally found its treasure. “Noni wouldn’t let you trade me in anyhow.”

“True,” Joe said, and he grinned back at me, a faint milk mustache still clinging to the delicate blond hairs of his upper lip. He looked beautiful and sated and spent.

*

And then, in a heartbeat, with a rattle of Caroline’s armful of bracelets, the squeak of Renee’s running shoes, the funny hiccup of Joe’s laugh, my siblings were leaving home.

—cold, lonesome, lone, together, mother, brother, sister, other—

Picture the day: late summer in New England, humid and close, the lawn thick as shag from Noni’s tending. A day when we would have been at the pond. The year was 1992, and eighteen-year-old Joe was piling suitcases and plastic crates, a secondhand microwave, four pillows, three baseball bats, a life-size cardboard cutout of Bill and Ted into Noni’s Volvo station wagon.

“Do you really need the cardboard thing?” Noni asked, squinting into the sun. Dog-day cicadas whined with a high-pitched keen, a cyclical sound so pervasive you didn’t even notice it until it was all you noticed, and then, at that very moment, the sound began to fade.

“Yes,” Joe said solemnly. He was sweaty, wearing blue nylon shorts and a purple-and-green Mavericks tee. “I need them. I’m pretty sure it was on that list they sent. Books, sheets, Bill and Ted . . .”

“Okay, okay,” said Noni. “Bring Bill and Ted. But don’t blame me if your new roommate asks to switch.” She winked at Joe and slid the poster into the back of the car.

All morning Noni had pranced around like a golden retriever. Alden College! Our mother had won the parental college lottery: not Ivy League but close, with a full financial-aid package. Given Joe’s mediocre grades, no one thought he had a shot at a school like Alden, but Coach Marty knew the baseball coach. Alden needed a freshman center fielder, and Joe Skinner was it.

“Joe, don’t take Bill!” I called from my seat on the front lawn. “I love him!” For the first hour of packing, I had helped, sort of, but the tolerable morning temperature had given way so quickly to a sludgy, heavy heat that I’d declared myself overwhelmed and found a place in the shade. “Just cut Ted off,” I called. “Take Ted, but leave Bill.”

My childhood baby fat had not melted away as we all (or at least I) had assumed it would. That summer I was fifteen years old, alarmingly pudgy from puberty and Coke and frosted doughnuts and a general aversion to physical effort. For three long months, I’d moped around the house, reading too much sexed-up Updike and working a stinky, mindless job at a burger place in Bexley that paid me eight dollars an hour to cut tomatoes and onions and lift buns off the grill before they burned. I felt a persistent exhaustion brought on by the act of pushing my body through the days. My knees ached, my back ached, my fingers stank, my friends all annoyed me. I had no desire to grow older; I was already old enough.

I had started work on a dandelion chain when Nathan Duffy’s dented old VW pulled up to the house. The passenger door opened with a rattle, and out tumbled Caroline in a short flowery dress, her waist-length dirty-blond hair falling like a cape behind her.

“I’m so glad you guys haven’t left!” Caroline called to Joe. “I thought we’d missed saying good-bye.” She scanned the lawn. “Where’s Renee?”

I pointed: Renee was sitting on the bumper of the rented U-Haul, the U-Haul she’d packed up the night before with everything she’d need for her first year of medical school at Boston University. A fine sheen of sweat covered her tan limbs, legs in micro running shorts. Her arms were crossed against her stomach, her long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail that bobbed slightly as she tapped her foot. Renee, impatience personified.