“You’re getting your own apartment? How will you pay the rent?”
Three’s Company
sprang to mind. Tammy lived under the mistaken impression apartments were only for people in cities. Their town was short and fat with one-level houses, the two-storey high school a bizarre phenomenon on the flat line of horizon. Tammy and Sam had made plans to move to the city together and get an apartment one day. Tammy wanted to move to Chicago, because it was close to Milwaukee, but bigger. She felt they would be most like Laverne and Shirley there. Sam wanted to move to Los Angeles. She liked the name. Movie stars lived there and she thought they should date actors so that they could “get discovered.”
On the south side of South Wakefield, Joyce pointed out a plain white house with baby blue shutters. Smurfette-sized, the structure barely surpassed the Lanes’ garage. The grass was taller than the tiny porch. Parked on either side of its rusted railing were two black cauldrons bubbling with dry red geraniums. Beside the driveway, a lawn jockey held an empty lantern aloft. There was bird crap on his shoulder, a white splatter against his bright red jacket. A clown-lipped smile permanently creased his faded black face. Tammy bet he hated having to stand out in front of that place all day. It looked nothing like An Apartment.
“So there’s no buzzer?” Tammy asked.
Joyce laughed. “There’s a stairway around back. Up to the attic. That’s my part of the house.”
Now that she’d pointed it out, Tammy could see one round window up next to the roof, right in the middle like a small Cyclops eye. With little blue shutters on either side.
“You don’t have the whole thing?”
“No, I
don’t have the whole thing.”
Joyce’s head did a nasty little dance on her shoulders. “Mrs. Fields lives downstairs. She’s, like, sixty-five or something, so I can’t have parties. But she’s charging next to nothing.” Joyce worked at Jorge’s Pizza, but she still had another year of high school.
“Is your Mom going to give you money to take care of Sam?”
Joyce hooted. She put the car in Drive. “Are you kidding? If she left Sam with me, by the end of the summer she’d be smoking and going out with college guys. I can
not
even be trusted with myself.”
When Tammy looked over at Sam, she gazed out the window, peering at the houses as if it was L.A. and she might spot the home of someone famous, like Matt Dillon. The unrolled window tossed Sam’s hair around her face so Tammy couldn’t see her expression.
“When are you moving?”
“A couple weeks,” Sam answered, without looking.
Joyce turned the radio up and began to sing along to the Cars’ “Good Times Roll.”
On the bridge between the south and north sides, Tammy spotted a green Volkswagen Beetle coming toward them.
“Punch Buggy!” She leaned into the front seat and landed one on Sam’s shoulder.
“Ow!” Sam yelled, whipping her head around. Freckles stood out like little flecks of blood on her vitreous face. “It’s not my fault,” she hissed, and Tammy could see immediately she’d been crying silently. “Mom says I can come back in the fall for school if I don’t mind bussing in.” Sam reached around herself to rub the bruise that Tammy knew would come.
Tammy nodded and nodded, as if it would make Sam’s statement come true.
Above the pool, the sounds lingered, amplified between the fixtures. Tammy lifted herself out backward, plopped her wet butt on the concrete edge.
She watched as Sam passed into the shallow end and came up about fifteen feet short. Her red ponytail spread out like a thick round hood on her shoulders. She snapped her goggles up into her hair. Sam liked butterfly stroke best because, she said, you didn’t have to put your face in the water. She coughed. Water lapped around her pelvis. Her hips were like handles beneath the gradient green to mint-green spandex. In her bathing suit, Sam was all angles, white elbows and collarbone. Under the water, her thighs were twice as white, even though Tammy knew they were covered in sandy freckles. Sam wrapped one hand around her ribs. The other trailed behind in the water like a kite-tail as she waded toward the ledge where Tammy sat waiting. Even coughing, Samantha was graceful. Tammy didn’t know if it was a trick of the bleach, but an hour into the lesson, the lights overhead always seemed to take on small white and blue halos. She tipped her head back and stared up at them as Sam climbed onto the deck. The combination of frailty and boldness made Tammy squishy with affection, as though she had swallowed too much water.
Sam stretched out full-length on the tiles behind Tammy, put her head down on crossed arms until her breathing regulated. On the deck in front of her, her goggles lay like the unseeing white outlines of a second set of eyes. Two more of their group were underwater swimming the lap now. They looked like blobs of gelatin.
If it were ever quiet here,
Tammy thought, rubbing a hand across her eyes,
I would hear the lights humming.
Three more days of laps, then they would begin mouth-to-mouth. Tammy could only rub her eyes and hope Samantha wouldn’t leave her to do it with someone else.
In the dressing room, Tammy held the towel around her, shifted it down to her hips once she had her T-shirt on.
“Hurry up!” Samantha hissed. “My mom’s waiting outside.”
Tammy tucked one end in at the waist, sat down on the bench. Underpants were difficult. They always twisted halfway up her leg, wet skin and cotton not a winning combination.
Sam zipped up her gym bag, went and took a quick look out the change room door.
Tammy stood, pulled underwear past her knees before she felt the towel loosen and slip. She made a mad grab at it.
“Don’t be such a prude.” Sam snatched it away completely, exposing the perverse crimped black swatch between Tammy’s legs.
Two girls from the Lifesaving Two group looked over and laughed behind their fingers.
Tammy yanked up her useless Fruit of the Loom, followed by her shorts. She pulled her tube socks up as high as they would go. After being wet, the hairs looked darker, and stuck to her calves at odd angles. As she followed Sam out, floor tiles flashed past.
On her knees before the instructor and a semicircle of ten other girls and boys, Tammy tipped the victim’s head back and reached inside the mouth to clear the passage. The moisture stayed on her finger. Samantha had three freckles at the bottom left corner of her mouth. They formed the triangle where Tammy focused as she leaned over a closed-eyed half-drowned Sam. One hand was positioned under Sam’s neck, the other cautiously clamped Sam’s nostrils shut. Tammy kept her eyes open, leaned forward, placed her lips all the way over Sam’s. She blew, firm, puffing up Sam’s cheeks, Sam’s mouth slack, but sticking to hers nonetheless. Sam smelled sweet and astringent — strawberry jam and chlorine. Her body was warm, the baby hairs on her neck, damp. Tammy’s own air gushed back at her as she took her mouth away. It puckered out of Sam’s body in an exhalation — warmer coming back than going in. Tammy crooked her head and counted, watched Sam’s diaphragm for signs of breathing. She sealed her mouth to Sam’s again, and blew.
When Sam came back to life they traded places. Tammy felt the heat arching above her. Sam’s face poised over hers. Tammy visualized three distinct freckles. She let the sounds float to her from far away, wavering, otherworldly. Sam’s fingers burrowed under Tammy’s ponytail, coaxed her throat upward.
“Hey, you, in the blue bathing suit — call an ambulance!” she yelled for help as they’d been taught. Tammy had forgotten. One finger thrust between Tammy’s lips, pushed her tongue down. Sam pressed her lips deliberately around the perimeter of Tammy’s, melding. She let out a heavy gust. It rode past Tammy’s teeth, hitting the back of her mouth like something solid. Tammy let her body bloat with Sam’s breath.
When they had both returned to life, the week was over.
In the girls’ room, Tammy pressed the towel across her crotch and struggled into her shirt quickly, so that no one would see that her nipples were like cold, clay-coloured pepperonis on her chubby chest. She fastened her bra around her waist and shimmied it up underneath the shirt. Sam leaned over in her T-shirt and underwear. A white terry-cloth towel rubbed up and down the damp length of her fiery hair. Her bum thrust out, two bony nubs under the white cotton. A sprinkle of green and yellow daisies across the material. Two unrestrained points jutted beneath the yellow T-shirt. A strange lick of fire passed under Tammy’s towel from her forehead down her neck and farther — down the backs of her arms and legs, stopping someplace in the middle for just a second. Tammy struggled quickly into her underpants, elastic tangling and untangling. She stepped into the legs of her shorts and let the towel fall on the floor at her feet. The wet weight of it was like rock.
Plunk,
against the tile. Samantha turned and smiled over her shoulder.
“You’re quick today,” Sam said. The elastic on her shorts snapped as she pulled them on. “Let’s go.” She stuck her toes through the loops of her yellow flip-flops.
Tammy knew her only option come Monday would be to do it with Colleen, the last girl their age left in the group. A quiet, coke-bottle-eyeglassed girl from the Catholic school across town, she was also a redhead, but smelled like peanut butter and potato chips.
The only thing Tammy could do now was grab her stuff off the floor and concentrate very closely on the backs of Sam’s heels rising off the foam bottoms of the flip-flops as she led the way out of the change room. Her heels were wrinkled pink, and one had a small white spot on it, as if it were about to peel.
PLAYER 1
The field stretched before Chris, immense and impenetrable. In a moment, the green would be broken into rows by their yellow-slicker bodies. J.P. wore a garbage bag over his T-shirt and shorts. Even Chris had given in, resigned himself to the afternoon heat before it happened; under his plastic sheath, he wore shorts for the first time since grade seven. His spare leg hair mocked him. He miserably watched his peeled-potato knees descend the bus steps. Mud instantly embraced his running shoes. With an ecstatic
squish,
it fastened itself around his feet. The stench of wet corn welded to his nostrils the second he hit the ground. The smell of it made him queasy as cheap rye.
For $3.25 an hour, farm work was the only option available to the enterprising South Wakefield fourteen-year-old. The boys fanned out, each taking a row, corn tassels opening paper cuts in their palms as they yanked them from stalks. The leaves submersed Chris’s skin in 7 a.m. dew. By two o’clock, he’d be sunburnt dry.
Pretend it’s Dig Dug
, he told himself, shoes heavier by the moment.
In Dig Dug there are no patterns laid out for you. You’re just a person underground with a shovel, making tunnels, moving dirt out of the way.
“Lane,” a ferric voice cut through the leaves.
Chris halted, glanced behind him, down his row. Nothing. He knocked his shoes together. A melon wedge of mud tossed aside.
J.P.’s brother emerged from the folds of the field, a red bandana flaming above his green garbage sack, outlaw-style over his nose and mouth. He wore aviator glasses to prevent slicing his eyes on the sandpaper edges of the plants. In the dim, mirrored lenses, Chris watched two miniature versions of himself waiting.
Marc wasn’t their crew leader. Only the farm kids wound up as crew leaders. Marc was a trailer, the hall-cop position of the field. A. J. Mitchum had obviously tossed him aside on a skid. But the ruined body of a fifth-hand Barracuda sat on cinder blocks in the Breton driveway, in permanent pause mode until Marc earned its restoration in dollars and cents. His personal deadline: September. The six-foot-tall cornstalks surrounding them were a testament to Marc’s desire for a senior year on wheels. He held aloft a fistful of green whips, the pull that Chris had missed.
“Are you blind?” Opening his hand, the tassels dropped in a pile on the earth. He walked over them, their leaf-blonde bodies milled into mud. Marc turned, climbed through the cornstalks into another unsuspecting detassler’s row.
Fygars are underground dragons that breathe fire, even through what you might think of as a solid wall of dirt,
Chris told himself.
But you can drop rocks on them. When Fygars come for you, their eyes float like white outlines before they magically appear in your path. Your shovel doubles as a pump you use to blow them up like puffer fish, until they deflate and die.
Chris began pulling tassels again, the
pop pop pop
as the green wicks exited the stalks.
The corn crew lounged in the dirt, drink boxes and white bread sandwiches between them. A sun-demolished Chocodile oozed in its wrap, and Reuben laughed, pounded his fist upon it. The chocolate sponge envelope farted its creamy contents out onto the ground.
“It’s not far to Doyle’s from where the bus drops us,” J.P. said, reaching into his pocket. “I got five bucks. What’ve you got?”
Reuben abandoned the smeared cellophane, dug in his pocket. He came up with a fistful of change. Dean had a dollar. Pinky had two, and everyone exchanged impressed looks, because Pinky hadn’t joined them in anything since This Donna had happened.