We Run the Tides(6)
Faith’s house is decorated with Laura Ashley patterns—tiny pastel flowers on white curtains, tiny pastel flowers on tablecloths, tiny pastel flowers everywhere. The house is clearly bigger than their home in Connecticut was because their furniture can’t fill all the spaces. And so it’s the kind of house that has a couch in one room, a desk in another. I know Maria Fabiola isn’t getting the full tour because Faith’s parents are home. The full tour includes the stack of Playboys her dad keeps in a shoebox in his closet, along with a gun—“the gun’s just to scare burglars,” according to Faith. The full tour includes the piles of pathetic diaries her mother keeps under her side of the bed. Each page lists what she’s eaten on a particular day and rates her intake as good or bad. The diaries never detail anything else about her days besides her food consumption.
Without the prolonged stop in her parents’ bedroom, the tour doesn’t last very long. After five minutes we end up back in the kitchen and start making popcorn. I look around—suddenly Maria Fabiola isn’t with us. Faith’s mom asks if we want to run to the corner store to buy Virgina Slims. She often sends Faith to the store with money and a note giving her permission to buy cigarettes. “Not on my birthday!” Faith yells. Her mom picks up her stained purse with its long fraying strap and leaves to get them herself. We don’t end up eating the popcorn because it’s burnt.
A cool saltwater breeze enters the house and we follow it through the open back door and into the garden. Faith’s father is outside in the dim light having a drink. He’s sitting on a short white bench that I realize is a swing. It’s the kind of swing that you see in musicals or plays set in the South. Seated next to him on the swing is Maria Fabiola.
“Let’s ride the elevator,” Faith calls out.
“I’m speaking with your friend, Faith,” her father says.
“It only fits three anyway,” Faith says, with an accusatory glance at Maria Fabiola. Then Julia and I follow Faith inside. The walls of the elevator are decorated with long ribbons that have been stapled at the top and the bottom. There’s an assortment of colors like those at Baskin Robbins: strawberry, pistachio, banana, and mandarin. “The previous owner decorated it like this,” Faith explains, though it’s evident that the frivolity of fluttering ribbons is antithetical to her mother’s entire being, which might be why we had to wait until she left to enter the elevator. We ride up and down and up and down the four stories of the house until I feel claustrophobic. When I get out on the bottom floor, Maria Fabiola is coming in from the garden, wearing an expression I can’t decipher.
“How was the elevator ride?” she asks, in a condescending voice.
“Honestly,” I say, looking at her, “I feel kind of sick.”
Faith’s mother returns home, and the four of us girls seclude ourselves in Faith’s room, also covered in little flowers. Her books (few in number, and young for our grade) are too neatly aligned between white bookends that are meant to resemble owls but look more like melted moons. On her floor is a circular shag rug, and we run our fingers through its long, cloud-colored fibers like we’re stroking blades of grass in heaven.
We study Faith’s yearbooks from her school in Darien, Connecticut. In particular, we study the boys who were her classmates and the boys who were a year above her and rate them on a scale of one to four stars. We ask Faith about the cuter ones—are they funny? What music do they like? Do they play lacrosse?—as though her answers will help determine whether or not they are worthy of a crush. This is how it is for us at an all-girls’ school in Sea Cliff—the objects of our affection are either projected on a movie screen or else encapsulated by a square-inch photo from a yearbook in Connecticut. After an hour of flipping through the yearbook, each of us exclaiming “Mine!” when we see a boy we like, Faith aggressively shuts the yearbook and returns it to the shelf, next to the strange, sad owl.
When Faith’s mother tells us it’s time to go to bed, we change for sleep. Faith removes a Laura Ashley nightgown from a hanger in her closet, then closes the closet door so she can change in privacy. Julia turns her back to the rest of us and slips on an ice-skating T-shirt with silver sequins on the skate’s blades. She keeps her bra on when she sleeps because she thinks this will help ensure her breasts are perky when she’s older. I turn to a different corner and remove my off-white bra and pull on dark blue pajama bottoms and a Hello Kitty T-shirt that I hope everyone will know I’m wearing ironically. When I turn back around I see Maria Fabiola lifting her shirt up above her chest. She hasn’t bothered to hide her body. Over the summer she’s grown full breasts that look like great scoops of ice cream. I see Julia trying not to stare. I try not to stare. Maria Fabiola pulls on a thin hot pink T-shirt that’s tight across the chest. It depicts two angels, one blond and one dark-haired, wearing sunglasses. I have permission, I figure, to study her chest when trying to read the word written in cursive beneath the cherub’s faces: “Fiorucci.”
We unroll our sleeping bags on the rug, each of us trying to position our bags next to Maria Fabiola. We stay up talking about The Breakfast Club and deciding which one of us would date which boy. Then we giggle until Faith’s father roars at us to be quiet. “Don’t you forget about me,” we repeat to each other in whispers until, like candles being extinguished one at a time, each of us drops into sleep.