The Accidentals Page 9

  I knew I would find Daniel clean and fresh and pretty, just sitting there, as if he were waiting for something interesting to happen, something new. Since the weather had turned warm, I’d been spying on him with my mother’s bird-watching binoculars, and although I could only make out his shape behind the screen, I had come to think of him as an actual bird, with that kind of lightness and intentionality, as if he’d been washed clean of the world he and I lived in, a world of in or out, you go or you stay. Sitting there on his porch in his splashy getups, he looked temporary, poised for flight.

  I knew his Sunday afternoon routine inside and out. Around three, after Sunday dinner and a short nap, the Bakers—including Daniel’s sister, Melinda—went for a ride. Sometimes Daniel went with them, but mostly he stayed behind and did his porch sitting. The three other Bakers were usually gone about two hours. Daniel seemed to have a sense of their imminent return and would vanish into the interior of the house about fifteen minutes before the family’s gray Chrysler swept majestically up Palm Street and slowed to take the turn into the Baker driveway.

  The rest of the week he did ordinary things in ordinary boy clothes. He threw the football with his dad, got the newspaper from the curb each morning, roughhoused with the Bakers’ giant collie, Lion. So I thought of Daniel’s porch sitting as not so much aberrant as somehow extra, a loose end of himself that required expression. He was artistic, that was it; he had imagination, and who could fault a boy for that?

  This particular Sunday, about half an hour after the Bakers had pulled out of their driveway, I put on my pedal pushers and crop top, careful not to let them drag the floor, which was as usual dusty, then peered out the dining room window to make sure Daniel had stayed home.

  I could only make out his shadow—I knew him most intimately by the tilt of his head—and, yes, there he was.

  I stood at the window a while longer, staring across the street while I thought about what to do next, what to say. I was afraid, but felt an irresistible draw, as if I were the tide and Daniel the shore. Was this feeling of inevitability biology or was it love?

  I walked out the door casually, as if I were just going out into the front yard where June, ever the struggling student, sat in the old tree swing reciting the countries of western Europe and their capitals, occasionally cheating by peeking at the notecards I’d prepared for her. Dad was listening to her and correcting her mistakes as he clipped his boxwoods.

  Neither of them noticed as I made my way across the street, the pavement sending heat waves up through my flip-flops. I lurched toward the Bakers’ house on my tiptoes, which gave me the appearance of being about to launch myself into flight. When I reached Daniel’s front lawn, I didn’t look in his direction as I skirted the piles Lion had deposited and Lion himself, who was lying belly up in the sun, though I knew Daniel would be observing me from behind the screen. In this suddenly miserable moment, I could see myself in his eyes, purple from the neck down, my hair slipping down my back, flat and frizzy from the humidity.

  I must have looked a bit shifty, like someone about to commit an act of petty theft.

  As I drew closer, I moved more purposefully, as if I were going to borrow some eggs or sugar from Mrs. Baker, as if I didn’t know Daniel’s mother wasn’t at home. Letting my flip-flops flop perceptibly now, I pushed my way through the bee-buzzing nandina bush that partly blocked the Bakers’ side porch from the street. I walked up to the screen door and knocked twice. I peered through the screen, but it was rusty and thick with dust. My bottom lip brushed it, leaving the taste of rust in my mouth. I could see only Daniel’s shape in the chair, the lankiness of it, his lovely boyishness.

  I tapped on the door, softly, as if he might be asleep.

  He sat there, still as a post. He reminded me of a blue heron I’d seen on the side of the road in a patch of cattails, hunched and watchful.

  I knocked again, louder. “Daniel, let me in. It’s hot out here.”

  He shifted a bit. Instead of letting me in, though, he glided in one smooth motion, partly bent over as if he were suffering from stomach cramps, to the inside doorway and disappeared into the house carrying a pair of lady’s pumps in his hand.

  I stood there, mule-like, my eyes downcast. It was 3:30 in the afternoon by then. The day was warm for April and I was in direct sun, feeling a bit faint. Sweat collected in my scalp and began to run down the sides of my face and into my eyes.

  I waited, but he didn’t come back out. What a humbug this was proving to be! I tugged at the screen door, expecting it to be locked, but it wasn’t, so I found myself suddenly on the porch and then pushing (I couldn’t believe I was doing this, it was almost like breaking in) the door to the inside of the house. The door swung open to a large hall with a living room on the left and a dining room on the right and stairs that led straight up. The house seemed for the first time very grand. The curtains in both front rooms, cut from a heavy reddish fabric, maybe velvet, were drawn. One thin ray of sun spliced the gleaming oak floors.

  I peered through the darkness. “Daniel?”

  My voice sounded shrill and strange. There was no answer; the house seemed coldly empty. Then suddenly a door upstairs burst open and here he came, bounding down the stairs, in shorts and sneakers and a white undershirt, looking, if you didn’t notice the smear of lipstick and pinch marks on each earlobe where his sister’s bobs had been, for all the world like a regular boy.

  “Hey.” He looked at me straight on, full speed ahead, regular boy style. “What’s going on?” he asked breezily as if it were not unusual for me to appear, looking, in fact, quite desperately hot, in his front hall.

  “Where’d you go?” It was the only thing I could think of to say, so astonished I was, not so much by his change of clothes as by the transformation in his demeanor.

  “I was hot,” he said, “needed to change from church. You want a Nehi?”

  OVER TIME, JUST a few weeks, we became boyfriend and girlfriend. When I told Dad, he had a fit. It was not as if he hadn’t tried to raise me right. Sure, there’d been rough spots after my mother had died. But overall, he’d done all the correct things: firm discipline, a stable home, disaster preparedness. Raising two girls alone was a hard row for a man to hoe, but he’d done his best.

  “I’m not Mama’s gumbo,” I told him. “I’m not going to turn out the way you want just because you put in all the right things and stir the pot.”

  When I defied my father and took possession of Daniel’s class ring, buying a gold chain with my allowance and hanging the ring around my neck for the whole wide world to see, Dad said, “That boy doesn’t need a girlfriend. He’s his own girlfriend.” He took to calling Daniel Danielle. He forbade me to wear the ring. I responded by hiding it under my blouse until after I left the house.

  Across the street, Mr. Baker was thrilled over our blossoming romance. Over the years, he had become increasingly alarmed at his son’s lack of enthusiasm for boyish things, though he did them perfunctorily (Daniel was an obedient, yielding kind of boy). Mr. Baker had long ago signed him up for Boy Scouts, in fact going to the extreme of becoming a troop leader himself. He then cajoled poor Daniel through dozens of badges—everything except cooking, which Mr. Baker said was the last thing Daniel needed—and then on to try for Eagle Scout. Daniel finally rebelled when he had to spend a night by himself in the swamp. He staggered out the next morning covered in bug bites and leeches, and politely but firmly told his father, who had taken off work that morning to pick him up at the side of the road where he’d dropped him off, that he was done with scouting, which made Mr. B want to wring his son’s neck. When I came into the picture, the Bakers, especially the Mr., rejoiced.

  Daniel’s sister, Melinda of the stolen outfits, was a senior by then and on her way to Mississippi State College for Women to become a teacher. Melinda collared me one night at a community center dance and led me outside. I gave her a big smile, thinking this was going to be a sisterly chat. Then she started in: She knew mor
e about Daniel than anyone else; she knew, for example, that he read her beauty mags and sometimes tore out the pages, and not for the purposes you’d expect from a boy Daniel’s age. She could see some of the hair styles reflected in his ducktail or a stray spit curl that on occasion appeared incongruously on his forehead as if a bird had splattered it there. Personal things had gone missing from her dresser drawers, and over time she learned to look for them in Daniel’s room. She knew he used his allowance for hairspray and kept hidden in a shoe box at the back of his closet a wide patent leather belt, a pair of stockings, and a garter belt to hold them up. In sum, I should find someone else to go steady with. Someone more suitable.

  Then she put a gentle hand on my shoulder as if she were anointing me in some mysterious way. “It’s not you. It’s him. He’s not what you think.”

  My shoulder twitched involuntarily under her cloying hand. Inside, Tony Bennett was belting out, “Take my hand, I’m a stranger in paradise,” which made my heart swell. Oh, I was no fool; I knew I was tracking my way through a strange land without a map, an island—that was it—just for the two of us, marooned as we were in a sea of dos and don’ts. Poor Daniel!

  And now this hand, this busybody hand! I flung it aside in a gesture so vehement that anyone watching from a distance would have thought I’d struck the older girl.

  Something in me rose up against Melinda’s officiousness. “Mind your own business, Melinda,” I said. “Go find your own sweetheart. If you can.”

  Melinda gasped. She was as plain as her brother was beautiful; finding a sweetheart was not going to be easy. “He’s a homo, Grace. He steals my clothes,” she burst forth. Then she gasped as if this were much more than she’d intended to say, and ran back into the community center.

  I stood out under the stars. Tony Bennett was singing the stanza about there being a danger in Paradise, and I took his admonition under advisement and examined the evidence. I knew very little about homos, and had no idea where or how I’d acquired the meager bit of information I had, which was, in a nutshell, men who liked men and acted like women. But, I reasoned, this couldn’t possibly be true about Daniel because, quite simply, and why couldn’t Melinda see this, he liked me. How then could he be a homo? So what that he dressed up sometimes? That’s why I loved him so, because he wasn’t any old gum-chewing, pimple-faced, stinky boy. He was something else altogether: he glittered.

  AS MATTERS PROGRESSED, we did the ordinary things young couples do. When I turned fifteen and went to high school, we held hands in the hall between classes, walked home from school together, went to dances and ball games, parked on dirt roads, went to drive-in movies, kissed and groped, this latter initiated by me. I would have gone further, but every time I reached for him, I was met by an odd twist of the pelvis, a demurral, which, in the heat of the moment, I took not so much as a rejection but a certain shyness on his part. I walked around in a desperate state; I could taste him on my tongue. Would you think me odd if I said I craved his touch in the same way I still craved my mother’s? It was what I missed most: the way she had of fussing over me and June, examining our nails, licking her finger and picking the sleep out of our eyes, pulling up our arms and sniffing our armpits before we left for school in the morning.

  Dad responded by setting down restrictions: I had to be home directly after school unless there was a club meeting or band practice and no visits to the Bakers’ house unless an adult was present. Unchaperoned dates were forbidden, I was barely fifteen, for crying out loud. Despite these obstacles, I lurched blindly forward, meeting Daniel at parties, persuading him to sneak out of those parties when all he wanted was to dance.

  All of it seemed to exhaust him. Here I was, not drop-dead gorgeous like my mother but sort of pretty (from the side), nice hair and good teeth—what more could a healthy American boy want? But he acted as if there were something both excessive and lacking about me. I suspected he liked me better when he wasn’t with me than when he was. He must have felt a certain amount of desperation too; he knew I was the road he needed to travel. His father’s anxieties, which played out over everything from the way the poor boy cut his meat to how he walked down the street, must have fueled whatever flickering flame he was capable of mustering in response to my three-alarm blaze. He did have an escape route; after next year he was going to State to be an engineer like his dad. Though engineering wasn’t exactly his cup of tea, he was eager to be off, out from under his father’s thumb.

  Now, as I look back, I think it must have been shame that drove him into my eager arms. Perhaps he loved his garters, the tender, even pressure of the hose on his inner thighs, the tautness of the black patent belt; but he knew they were wrong, wrong, wrong. Maybe he was mortified to feel the sudden heft of his shorts in the locker room in a way he’d never felt it under my ministrations. When it got warm, he went to his afternoon classes smelling like mayonnaise because he never took a shower after track.

  Time went on. The week before I turned sixteen, June got it in her head to bake a coconut cake for my birthday. When I came trudging home from school that dark rainy afternoon of my birthday, there June’s cake sat like an overblown magnolia on its cut-glass pedestal in the front window. When June opened the door, it seemed to me as if she were the mother and I a child again. The candles were already lit and June and Dad sang to me.

  As I gobbled down a piece of cake and quickly opened my gifts, a charm bracelet from my father and a charm in the shape of a star from June, my sister smiled and said, “Don’t you love the real coconut? I made Dad drive me all the way to Biloxi to get it at the Piggly Wiggly.”

  “It’s good and moist,” I said obligingly.

  She leaned over the table, a crumb on her upper lip. “I chopped it open with Dad’s ax and grated the whole thing, drippled the juice on the cake. That’s why it’s so moist.”

  “Thank you. It’s really good,” I murmured and then headed for my room to freshen up, eager to get over to Daniel’s so he could give me my birthday gift. I was hoping for a necklace, something delicate—a heart would be pretty—to rest in the hollow at the base of my neck.

  June followed me to my room. “How about a game of Chinese checkers? Dad’s doing the dishes tonight. Then maybe we can watch some TV. Dad will let us watch anything we want tonight.”

  “Sorry,” I said, picking up my hairbrush.

  Her face fell. “Daniel.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was thinking maybe you’d want to celebrate with us,” she said. “Birthdays are for family.”

  “I’ll be back after a while,” I said lightly. I was concentrating on my hair, which the rain had flattened. I tried tilting my head down and brushing upward.

  “When?”

  “Oh, June, lay off, will you? I’ll get back when I get back. You’ve got cake on your mouth.”

  Her face turned red and she swatted at her lip. “Happy damn birthday, then,” she said and stalked out.

  THE DAY AFTER my birthday something unexpected happened. A boy came to town. His name was George Genovese and his father was a bigwig at the mill. In Opelika, we’d never seen anybody quite like the Genoveses. They were Italian and from New York, which to us then seemed like the moon. George was just seventeen, a year younger than Daniel, but had skipped the third grade and was therefore placed in all of Daniel’s classes. Someone had to catch George up in school, and soon he was walking home with Daniel, crowding the sidewalk so that sometimes I had to walk on the grass, or, worse yet, behind the two of them, as if I were attending royalty. Daniel carried a stack of books in one hand and gestured broadly with the other. The two of them talked Cicero and formulas, tests and diagramming, the possibility of playing tennis at the country club, where George’s family had wrangled a membership. Art was their favorite class; they were sketching apples in a bowl on Daniel’s dining room table.

  “What’s the point of drawing a bunch of apples?” I asked them.

  “Mastering forms is the first step to becoming
a great artist,” they answered in unison, then grinned at each other.

  George played the piano, and Daniel wanted to learn. Being boys together, they laughed about Miss McDougall’s whiskers and Geraldine Ives’s big butt. They were in fact a matched set, about the same height, George’s deep olive skin with its plum tones the perfect foil to Daniel’s blondness.

  I tried to be generous; I’d worried that Daniel had few friends, that he seemed to put off other boys.

  Soon George was going everywhere with Daniel and me, becoming the chaperone my father had insisted on, Dad as seemingly relieved by George’s arrival on the scene as the Bakers had been by my march across the street that fateful Sunday a year ago. Now there was no parking or groping, no privacy. Sometimes, in fact, Daniel and George did things I wasn’t included in.

  “Where are you going?” I’d ask Daniel.

  “Nowhere special, just around, just hanging out,” he’d reply.

  Once, at a dance, I asked George to get another ride home so I could be alone with Daniel. I never had him to myself anymore, not even on the dance floor. George had an exotic flare, the girls flocked to him. He danced with this one and that, always next to Daniel and me. Sometimes for fast numbers the two boys would encourage us to dance together rather than in pairs; for slow numbers, they positioned me and the other girl so they could look at each other over our shoulders.

  George’s response to such a reasonable request was to gaze at me like a dog being kicked out of the house in the midst of a blizzard. He bit his top lip, one side of which had a razor-thin white scar that ran straight up to his nostril, resulting in a hint of a sneer. Sometimes I wanted to reach up and trace it with my finger. Once, I’d asked him where he got it and he’d said there was something wrong with his mouth when he was born; they’d had to fix it.

  Now he said, “I don’t know anybody to ask for a ride.”

  “Pick a girl, any girl.”