The Nix(92)

After school that day Peggy was ecstatic, exhilarated with big rumors and alarming news: “There’s a boy who likes you!”

“No there’s not,” Faye said.

“There is. Most definitely. I have it on good authority.”

“Who told you?”

“Lips are sealed,” Peggy said. “I swore up and down.”

“Who’s the boy?”

“He’s a boy in our class.”

“Which one?”

“Guess!”

“I am not guessing.”

“Do it! Guess!”

“Tell me.”

But Faye didn’t really want to know. She didn’t want the hassle. She was single, kept to herself, perfectly happy with that tableau. Why couldn’t people just leave her alone?

“Okay,” Peggy said. “Fine. No guessing. No games. I’ll blurt it all out. Hope you’re ready.”

“I am,” Faye said, and she waited, and Peggy waited, savoring it, staring at Faye, full of mischief, and Faye suffered through the big theatrical pause until she could no longer bear it. “Damn it, Peggy!”

“Okay, okay,” she said. “It’s Henry! Henry Anderson! He likes you!”

Henry. Faye didn’t know what she was expecting, but she was not expecting that. Henry? She’d never even considered him before. He was barely a presence in her thoughts.

“Henry,” Faye said.

“Yes,” Peggy said. “Henry. It’s destiny. You two are destined. You wouldn’t even have to change your last name!”

“I would too! Andresen, Anderson, they’re different.”

“Still,” Peggy said, “he’s pretty cute.”

Faye went home and locked herself in her room. Seriously considered, for the first time, having a boyfriend. Sat on her bed. Didn’t sleep much. Cried a little. Decided by the next morning that, strangely, she actually cared for Henry a great deal. Had convinced herself that she’d always liked his looks. His sturdy linebacker physique. His quiet manner. Maybe she’d liked him all this time. At school he seemed different now—more pink, alive, handsome. What she didn’t know was that Peggy had done the same thing to him. Harassed him all day with hints about a certain girl who liked him. Revealed later that it was Faye. He came to school that day and saw Faye and couldn’t understand why he’d never noticed how beautiful she was. How elegant and simple. What fierce eyes hid behind those big round glasses.

They began dating shortly thereafter.

Love is like this, Faye thinks now. We love people because they love us. It’s narcissistic. It’s best to be perfectly clear about this and not let abstractions like fate and destiny muddle the issue. Peggy, after all, could have picked any boy in the school.

This is what’s racing through her mind tonight on the riverbank, where Henry has brought her so he can, she believes, apologize. He’s been timid ever since that night at the playground. The incident after the prom. They talk about it, but obliquely. They don’t say anything specific. “I’m sorry about…you know,” he says, and she feels bad for him, the way he slumps over when addressing the subject. He’s been irritatingly contrite and penitent. Carrying her book bag home, walking a step behind her, head down, buying more flowers and candy. Sometimes, in fits of self-pity, he’ll say things like “God I’m so stupid!” Or he’ll ask her to go to the movies and before she can accept he’ll say something like “If you still want be my girl, that is.”

It’s all arbitrary. Had Faye attended a different school. Had her parents moved away. Had Peggy been sick that day. Had she chosen a different boy. And on and on. A thousand permutations, a million possibilities, and almost all of them kept Faye from sitting here in the sand with Henry.

He is a cauldron of nerves tonight, clenching and unclenching his hands, picking at the dirt, throwing rocks into the water. She sips a Coca-Cola out of the bottle and waits. He had planned it this far, getting Faye alone, here, on the riverbank. Now he doesn’t know what to do. He wobbles back and forth in the sand, swats at something in front of his face, sits there hard and tense like a nervous horse. It irritates her, his torment. She drinks her Coke.

The river smells of fish tonight—a damp and funky stench like spoiled milk and ammonia—and Faye thinks about this one time she was out with her father on his boat. He was showing her how to fish. This was important to him. He had grown up a fisherman. When he was a kid, that was his job. But she had no taste for it. She couldn’t even hook the worm without crying—how it coiled around her finger and brown goo came spurting out as she pierced the skin.

Henry reminds her of that worm right now: ready to pop.

They stare at the river, and the blue flame of the nitrogen plant, the moon, the light breaking on the water and scattering. A bottle bobs ten yards out. A bug whizzes by her face. Waves come ashore in their rhythmic way, and the longer they sit here in silence the more it seems to Faye like the river is breathing—how it contracts and expands, rushes in and rushes out, water caressing rocks as it pulls away.

Finally Henry turns to her and speaks. “Hey, listen, I want to ask you something.”

“Okay.”

“But…I don’t know if I can,” he says. “If I can ask you this.”