The Nix(91)

“It will be,” Faye says. “All those things.”

“Yeah. I guess,” Margaret says. She smothers her cigarette in the soil. “But I don’t know what I want to do. With my life.”

“Me neither,” says Faye.

“Really? You?”

“Yeah. I have no idea.”

“I thought you were going to college.”

“Maybe. Probably not. My mom doesn’t want me to. Neither does Henry.”

“Oh,” says Margaret. “Oh, I see.”

“Maybe I’ll put it off a year or two. Wait for things to calm down.”

“That might be smart.”

“I might stay here a while longer.”

“I don’t know what I want,” says Margaret. “I guess I want Jules?”

“Of course.”

“Jules is great, I guess. I mean, he’s really really great.”

“He’s so great.”

“He is, isn’t he?”

“Yes!”

“Okay,” she says. “Okay, thanks.” And she stands, brushes off the dirt, and looks at Faye. “Hey, look, I’m sorry for being weird.”

“It’s fine,” Faye says.

“Please don’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t.”

“I don’t think other people would understand.”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

And Margaret nods and begins to leave when suddenly she stops, turns back to Faye. “Would you like to come over this weekend?”

“Come over where?”

“My house, dummy. Come have dinner with us.”

“Your house?”

“Saturday night. It’s my father’s birthday. We’re having a surprise party for him. I want you to come!”

“Me?”

“Yeah. If you’re going to stay in town after graduation, don’t you think we should be friends?”

“Oh, okay, sure,” says Faye. “Sure. That’d be swell.”

“Great!” says Margaret. “Don’t tell anyone. It’s a surprise.” She smiles and struts away, rounds the corner, and disappears.

Faye leans back against the wall again and realizes the orchestra is going full tilt. She hadn’t noticed. A big torso of sound, a big crescendo. She is overcome by Margaret’s invitation. What a victory. What a shock. She listens to the orchestra and feels vast. She finds that music muffled through a wall makes her more aware of the physicality of it, that when she can’t hear the music exactly she can still sense it, the vibrations, like waves. That buzz. The wall she presses her face to makes it a different kind of experience. No longer music but a crossing over of the senses. She is aware of the friction needed for music, the striking and stroking of string, wood, leather. Near the end of the piece, especially. When, louder, she can feel the bigger notes. Not abstract, but a quaking, like a touch. And the feeling moves down her throat, a great pulse of noise now, a banging inside. It hums her.

Beyond everything else, she loves this: how swiftly things can strike her—music, people, life—how quickly they can surprise her, all of a sudden, like a punch.





6


SOMETIMES SPRING SEEMS to happen all at once. Trees bloom, the first green shoots curl out of rain-muddy cornfields, things are renewing, beginning, and for certain members of the graduating class, this is a time of hope and optimism: Commencement approaches, and the girls—those with steady boyfriends, those who daydream about weddings and gardens and toddlers—begin talking about soul mates, how they can feel it, destiny, the ineluctable hand of fate, how they just know. Soft adoring eyes and a quiver in their pulse—Faye feels sorry for them, then sometimes sorry for herself. She seems to lack some essential romance in her life. To Faye it all seems so arbitrary, love. All happenstance. As easily one thing as another, as easily one man as another.

Take Henry.

Why, of all men, Henry?

The two of them sit on the riverbank one night throwing stones into the water, picking at the sand, nervously attempting wit and conversation, and this is what she’s thinking: Why am I here with him?

Simple. Because Peggy Watson started a dumb rumor last autumn.

Peggy had come galloping to Faye after home ec all smiles and high drama. “I know a secret,” she said, then teased Faye the rest of the day, slipping her a note in trigonometry: I know something you don’t know.

“It’s a good one,” she said at lunch. “Grade-A juicy. Something to write home about.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s better if you wait,” she said. “Till after school. You’ll want to be sitting down.”

Peggy Watson, vague friend since the third grade, house down the street, same bus ride home, the closest thing Faye has to a “best friend.” When they were children they played this game where they used all the crayons in the box and whole pads of paper to write “I Love You” in different colors, scripts, and designs. It was Peggy’s idea. She couldn’t stop. It never got old for her. Peggy’s favorite was a picture of a heart with I Love You written in a circle around it. “A circle, so no beginning and no end,” she said. “Get it? It keeps going? Forever!”