Lisey's Story(37)

After that she hadn't wanted the slice of cheesecake she'd brought home from the restaurant for dessert, and she certainly hadn't wanted to go to any Ingmar Bergman movie...but she had wanted Scott. Yes. Because over the last couple of months, and especially over the last four or five weeks, she's come to depend on Scott in a funny way. Maybe it's corny -  probably - but there's a feeling of safety when he puts his arms around her that wasn't there with any of her other guys; what she felt with and for most of them was either impatience or wariness. (Sometimes fleeting lust.) But there is kindness in Scott, and from the first she felt interest coming from him - interest in her -

that she could hardly believe, because he's so much smarter and so talented. (To Lisey, the kindness means more than either.) But she does believe it. And he speaks a language she grasped greedily from the beginning. Not the language of the Debushers, but one she knows very well, just the same - it's as if she's been speaking it in dreams. But what good is talk, and a special language, if there's no one to talk to? Someone to cry to, even? That's what she needed tonight. She's never told him about her crazy f**ked-up family - oh, pardon me, that's crazy smucked-up family, in Scott-talk - but she meant to tonight. Felt she had to or explode from pure misery. So of course he picked tonight of all nights not to show up. As she waited she tried to tell herself that Scott certainly didn't know she'd just had the world's worst fight with her bitch of an older sister, but as six became seven became eight, do I hear nine, come nine, someone gimme nine, as she picked at the cheesecake a little more and then threw it away because she was just too smucking...no, too f**king mad to eat it, we got nine, anybody gimme ten, I got ten o'clock and still no '73 Ford with one flickery headlight pulling up in front of her North Main Street apartment, she became angrier still, can anybody gimme furious. She was sitting in front of the TV with a barely tasted glass of wine beside her and an unwatched nature program before her by the time her anger passed over into a state of fury, and that was also when she became positive that Scott would not stand her up completely. He would make the scene, as the saying was. In hopes of getting his end wet. Another one of Scott's catches from the word-pool where we all go down to cast our nets, and how charming it was! How charming they all were! There was also getting your ashes hauled, dipping your wick, making the beast with two backs, choogling, and the very elegant ripping off a piece. How very Never-NeverLand they all were, and as she sat there listening for the sound of her particular Lost Boy's '73 Ford Fairlane - you couldn't miss that throaty burble, there was a hole in the muffler or something - she thought of Darla saying, Do what you want, you always do. Yes, and here she was, little Lisey, queen of the world, doing what she wanted, sitting in this cruddy apartment, waiting for her boyfriend who'd turn up drunk as well as late - but still wanting a piece because they all wanted that, it was even a joke, Hey waitress, bring me the Sheepherder's Special, a cup of cumoffee and a piece of ewe. Here she was, sitting in a lumpy thrift-shop chair with her feet aching at one end and her head throbbing at the other, while on the TV -

snowy, because the K-mart rabbit-ears brought in smuck-all for reception - she was watching a hyena eat a dead gopher. Lisey Debusher, queen of the world, leading the glamorous life.

And yet as the hands of the clock crept past ten, had she not also felt a kind of low, crabby happiness creeping in? Now, looking anxiously down the shadowed lawn, Lisey thinks the answer is yes. Knows the answer is yes. Because sitting there with her headache and a glass of harsh red wine, watching the hyena dine on the gopher while the narrator intoned, "The predator knows he may not eat so well again for many days,"

Lisey was pretty sure she loved him and knew things that could hurt him. That he loved her too? Was that one of them?

Yes, but in this matter his love for her was secondary. What mattered here was how she saw him: dead level. His other friends saw his talent, and were dazzled by it. She saw how he sometimes struggled to meet the eyes of strangers. She understood that, underneath all his smart (and sometimes brilliant) talk, in spite of his two published novels, she could hurt him badly, if she wanted to. He was, in her Dad's words, cruising for a bruising. Had been his whole charmed smucking - no, check that - his whole charmed f**king life. Tonight the charm would break. And who would break it? She would.

Little Lisey.

She had turned off the TV, gone into the kitchen with her glass of wine, and poured it down the sink. She no longer wanted it. It now tasted sour in her mouth as well as harsh. You're turning it sour, she thought. That's how pissed-off you are. She didn't doubt it. There's an old radio placed precariously on the window-ledge over the sink, an old Philco with a cracked case. It had been Dandy's; he kept it out in the barn and listened to it while he was a-choring. It's the only thing of his Lisey still has, and she keeps it in the window because it's the only place where it will pick up local stations. Jodotha gave it to him one Christmas, and it was secondhand even then, but when it was unwrapped and he saw what it was, he grinned until it seemed his face would crack and how he thanked her!

Over and over! It was ever Jodi who was his favorite, and it was Jodi who sat at the dinner-table one Sunday and announced to her parents - hell, announced to all of them -

that she was pregnant and the boy who'd gotten her that way had run off to enlist in the Navy. She wanted to know if maybe Aunt Cynthia over in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, could take her in until the baby was put out for adoption - that was how Jodi said it, as though it were an old china cabinet at a yard sale. Her news had been greeted by an unaccustomed silence at the dinner-table. For one of the few times in Lisey's memory -