The Last Romantics(28)

One month after withdrawing from college, Caroline was settled in the braided hammock strung between two sturdy aspens in the backyard when Nathan brought her the phone.

“Call your mother,” he directed. “I can’t keep lying to her.”

Caroline accepted the phone but did not dial. She lay back and watched a white butterfly flounce from one droopy daisy to the next.

Perhaps, Caroline thought, Noni would remember her own pregnancies. The backaches, the troubled sleep, the brain that flitted and flew from one subject to the next while beneath it all droned the urgent soundtrack of one small heartbeat. How could Caroline concentrate? How could she possibly fit in among a bunch of adolescents who partied all weekend and believed a seventeenth-century bee worthy of discussion? People who thought only of themselves? Caroline was beyond all that; already she existed beyond herself. Caroline’s thoughts and ambitions extended wider, broader, further into a peopled future, the branching limbs of family expanding above and beyond, with herself at the center, the powerful, nurturing trunk.

The butterfly flapped out of sight, and Caroline picked up the phone and dialed her mother.

“Oh, Caroline,” Noni said after Caroline had explained. “You are not a tree! You are twenty-one years old.”

“But I know what I want. I don’t need a degree to do it.”

“But what you want might change. That’s all I’m saying. Prepare for the future.” Noni paused. “Have you talked to Renee about this?”

“No.” Caroline felt the familiar prickling of resentment. “I don’t need to talk to Renee. It’s one semester, Noni. I can always go back.”

“But you won’t.”

“How do you know that?” Caroline asked.

“I know,” Noni answered. “I just know you won’t do it.”

And Caroline, who considered herself to be good-natured and easygoing, an optimist with a sunny disposition, became enraged. Without another word she hung up the heavy, cordless phone and threw it down to the ground. Caroline was breathing heavily, hotly. She placed a hand on her chest and leaned back into the hammock. It was unseasonably humid, even for Kentucky, and today Caroline wore only a pair of Nathan’s boxer shorts and an old bikini top that allowed a clear view of her bare belly. As her breath raced, she felt beads of sweat accumulate on her upper lip, at her temples, and across the taut skin of her stomach.

“Baby,” she said to her belly, “sometimes your Noni is rude and mean. Sometimes she’s a bitch. But she loves us. Really she does. She loves us the same as the others.”

Caroline closed her eyes and drifted into a strange half sleep where she dreamed that she was hitting a tree over and over again with her fists. The tree of course did not respond; the tree simply stood there impassive, resolute as any tree, which only spurred Caroline to punch harder, kick and scream, anything to provoke a response, but all she managed were fists and feet that were sore and bloody.

Then she woke up. The phone was ringing, ringing, ringing. Renee’s number appeared on the screen. For one long minute, Caroline opened and closed her hands, thinking of the dream and her sore knuckles. She was still angry at Noni, who had always demanded so much of her children, so much, and yet refused to recognize Caroline’s genuine efforts. Noni believed so fervently in the lessons of her own experience that she could not envision a scenario where they might fail to apply. Had Noni ever loved her husband the way she, Caroline, loved Nathan Duffy? Doubtful. Had Noni ever chosen her life the way Caroline has chosen hers? Absolutely not. Noni’s life had been poured over her head like a bucket of milk.

The phone continued to ring, but Caroline still did not answer. She knew already the purpose of Renee’s call: Noni had asked Renee to persuade Caroline to stay in school, to hew her life more closely to the marvel that was Renee’s. Caroline and Renee could have this particular discussion next week or next month or next Christmas, or they could have it now. Caroline picked up the phone.

“Caro,” said Renee. She was crying.

“I’ve decided,” Caroline said in a rush. “You can’t talk me out of it.”

“What?” Renee paused. “No—it’s Joe.”

“Joe?” Caroline sat up, and the sudden movement of her ungainly weight upset the hammock. For a moment she teetered, and then she tilted out, landing heavily on all fours, her stomach grazing the grass. She grabbed for the phone. “What’s the matter with Joe?”

As Renee explained, Caroline moved herself slowly to a sitting position. She’d scraped her knee, but she did not wipe away the blood that ran down her leg.

Joe, Renee told her, was in trouble. There had been a fraternity party at Alden College with an overabundance of vodka punch, various illegal drugs, and some three hundred undergraduates. Two dozen people were taken to the ER. One girl had nearly died. Joe was one of the party organizers, Renee told Caroline, and so the dean was coming down hard on him. He was off the baseball team. He might even be expelled.

“Noni can’t know about this,” said Renee, and there was an old desperation in her voice that Caroline hadn’t heard in many years. “I’m supposed to meet with some people at the college later today, but I’ve got exams. I’m supposed to be studying for the boards.”

“Oh, Renee, I’ll help,” Caroline said, and she remembered her dream about beating the tree. She’d assumed the tree was Noni, but perhaps instead it was Joe. No matter the disruptions that swirled around him, he remained the same: imperturbable, stubborn, oblivious to the sky and earth and rain that nurtured him every day.