Sometimes the thunderclouds gather overhead, and sometimes your haughty cat refuses its food, and sometimes you are partially scalped in a moonlit quarry. Such things are a matter of chance and hazard.
Rosebush, whose lack of interest in the hair made everyone forget it at once, unzipped her teddy-bear backpack to reveal what she had been struggling to carry: six tall silver cans of beer connected at the tops with plastic rings. She set the cans on the ground before us, stepped back, and presented them with an expansive gesture of her arms.
“Behold,” she said. “My brother stole it from the grocery store, and then I stole it from him.”
“It’s double stolen,” said Adelaide, crouching down in front of the beer and running her finger in a delicate circle along the top edge of one of the cans. She was fairylike, always, in her movements. “It’s still cold,” she added.
“It’s iced,” explained Rosebush. “We have to drink it before it gets skunked.”
So she passed around the cans to the other girls. I took one but found it difficult to open, so Polly opened it for me.
“Where’s one for me?” Florabel said.
“You don’t get one,” said her older sister.
“Cheers, queers,” Rosebush said, raising hers.
Everyone drank. I lifted mine in imitation of drinking, but I didn’t let much get into my mouth. Just enough to wet my lips and tongue. The taste was awful, like moldy carbonated weed milk. The other girls crinkled their noses as well.
Rosebush lectured us.
“You have to drink it fast,” she said. “Hold your nose if you need to.”
“I’m going to enjoy mine throughout the afternoon,” said Sue.
“Me too,” said Adelaide.
“Suit yourselves,” Rosebush said and shrugged.
We sat on the stones, holding our cool cans of beer. I stopped pretending to drink from the can, because nobody seemed to be paying attention to whether I was or not. Instead I put my fingers in the icy trickle of water running down out of the hills.
At one point the conversation turned to boys, and Rosebush brought up Petey Meechum.
“We nearly kissed the other day after school,” she announced.
“What’s nearly?” asked Sue.
“Nearly,” Rosebush repeated in a tone that suggested any further calls for clarification were forbidden.
“He once told me I had pretty hands,” said Adelaide, then she held them up for the benefit of any admirers.
“Anyway,” Rosebush went on, irritated, “Petey Meechum is the kind of boy who puts girls into one of two categories. You’re either a potential lover or you’re a permanent friend.”
At the words “permanent friend,” her gaze landed on Polly and me. Polly looked down, submissive. I made my face blank, like cinder block.
“How can you tell the difference?” Adelaide asked.
Rosebush seemed about to attack, but then she shrugged it off, as would a predator that grows bored with easy prey.
“Believe me,” she said, “when you’re nearly kissed by him, you can tell.”
Then she addressed me amicably.
“On a related topic, do you know who I heard was actually interested in you, Lumen?”
“Who?” I asked miserably.
“Roy Ruggle,” said Rosebush.
“Blackhat Roy?”
“He’s only got eight toes,” Polly contributed. It was well known that Blackhat Roy had exploded two toes off his right foot when he was trying to modify a Roman candle with a pair of pliers two years before.
“But he’s dark,” said Rosebush, “like Lumen. And he’s more her height. Also, he never goes to church, and neither does Lumen. You know, I sit right next to Petey in church. He tells me about his grandmother who died. Did he ever tell you about her, Lumen? You can tell by the way he talks about her he knows about pain. To endure suffering—it’s the most romantic thing of all, don’t you think?”
*
To endure suffering. I wonder how much people really endure. They talk about heartbreak, and they turn their faces away. But heartbreak is really the least of it, a splinter in the skin. Hearts mend. Most tragedy is overcome with prideful righteousness. The tear on the cheek, like a pretty little insect, wending its way over your jaw, down your sensitive neck, under your collar.
I wonder how much suffering my husband has endured. Or Janet Peterson, with her dry, overcooked lamb. They are easily horrified, easily disgusted. They turn their heads away from the simplest and most mundane adversity.
On the other hand, to be bound by your own fate, to feel the eager lashes of a grinning world all up and down your nerve endings. To bleed—to make others bleed. To know there is no end of things. To become something that you can never unbecome. There are in the world sufferings that are not stage pieces but rather whole lives.
Rosebush Lincoln. I was shut to her that day.
Yet those words of hers, even now, recall to me the lovely, hungry smell of autumn leaves.
*
Just as Rosebush Lincoln was extolling the virtues of endured suffering, there was a sound in the trees above the quarry, and we all gazed up to find a boy on the verge—as though we had conjured boyness with our witchy voices and manifested a puerile sprite from the morning dew itself.
“It’s Hondy,” said Rosebush. “He must’ve followed me all the way from town.”
Hondy Pilt held the handles of his bicycle and stared down at us in his misty and bloated way. He said nothing. Hondy Pilt rarely spoke, and his eyes never looked at you exactly—instead they looked right over your shoulder, which made you feel that you were just some insufficient forgery of your real self and that your real self was invisible, somewhere behind you.
So Rosebush invited him to join us, and for the next hour she forced him to drink beer and she put wildflowers in his hair and she told him to sit a certain way so that she could use his bulky body to prop up her own and gaze at the clouds above.