He hadn’t even attended enough classes to be considered a student in them. Danny did go a few times in the beginning of the semester. He had even taken notes. Notes on how his English professor was single-handedly reviving the suspender; on the correlation between girls’ exposed underwear, tags lapping at the back of their jeans, and class participation. But he’d never established a clear pattern.
He had been that weird guy you’d see on the first day of class and never see again without knowing why. He would wash his hands for twenty minutes, picking each fingernail clean, before deciding that he was, in fact, too late to bother going to class.
His knees hurt from kneeling, but he didn’t want to stand, he didn’t want to appear at all confrontational. Dinner had drained him of all the fire he had. He had nothing left but wet coals smoking and hissing inside him. He wanted to set off the fireworks and run up the ramp, all the way to the porch and finish his gin and tonic next to his sisters.
“That’s disappointing, Dan.”
Tom stood up and walked to the edge of the float, looked out toward the town, toward the moored boats that would give feeble honks of their air horns, for the few fireworks set off. There was a darkness in his voice, just like their father. Rarely, only at times of true peril, had Danny heard it. Like when, at age nine, he took out the Whaler alone. When, in their hundred-year-old wooden house, he left a candle burning in his bedroom.
“Gwen’s right. We can’t make any decisions about the house right now,” Tom said. These disturbingly foreign words, “Gwen’s right,” made Danny nervous.
“Have you talked to the girls about this?”
“Not yet.” Danny heard Tom make a surprised humph.
“But you should know that money, it has to go to school. It’s earmarked. There isn’t much left. Maybe enough for now, but a few tuition increases from now? I don’t know. Think about that, Danny. Think about what it is that you truly need. What I think you need—”
Danny jabbed the bundle of rockets into the sand-filled can, lit them, and then grabbed Tom by the wrist, pushing his older brother up the ramp ahead of him. He couldn’t listen to any more. They ran up the path, Tom now pushing Danny ahead of him, up the steps, and onto the porch.
“Jesus, Danny, that’s how you blow off your hand or end up with a glass eye.”
Melissa came through the screen door. Tom stopped talking. She turned and shouted back into the house, “Hurry it up, ladies. The Wonder Twins couldn’t wait.”
Their finale was already bursting over the float. The fireworks squealed. Someone had cleared away his gin and tonic.
“Dan,” Tom said, “tomorrow we will make some phone calls.” Danny thanked God for bad cell reception and rotary phones.
EIGHT
LIBBY
July 5
After she washed the lunch dishes, Libby went up to her porch and found Gwen topless, basking like a bird, arms out, on a white towel. The glare from the towel and the white railings imprinted on Libby’s eyes, and with each blink, she saw the negative image of her sister’s silhouette. A white bird in a black sky. Libby took off her shirt and sat leaning against the house in her bra and shorts.
“Where is Miss Patricia?” Gwen asked, not moving or opening her eyes. Gwen was one of the few people who always rolled the r and gave the c the sibilance that the Spanish pronunciation required.
“She’s back in Boston,” Libby said. Her legs were perpendicular to Gwen’s; if Libby pointed her foot she could touch Gwen’s calf.
“Bibs, she can be here when we’re here. I love that lady.”
“I know. I’m just . . . Anyway, she had things to do.”
“You still think Tom doesn’t approve?” Gwen rolled onto her side and propped her head up on one elbow. “I hate to break it to you, but we all saw this coming. If anything, he’s just jealous that you can get a hotter chick than he can.”
“She always jokes that, in Segovia, she’s no one. But in Boston, she’s a goddess.” Patricia was all beauty and passion, not just for sex, but for everything. She was more like Gwen in that way, sumptuous and slow in her enjoyment of things: escargot, the swan boats, the curve of Libby’s stomach. Next to her, Libby felt clumsy and awkward, all slapping feet and pathetic breasts.
“She should be up here for family time,” said Gwen. “Next year, no excuses.”
Libby kicked softly at her sister’s leg as Gwen rolled over. Gwen shared a not-so-ample bosom with Libby, but on Gwen, Libby thought it looked svelte and trim and somehow more sexy. Maybe it was because Gwen never wore a bra—“What’s the point?”—and wore those tissuey tanks with dangerously wide armholes. Though today her breasts had a plump quality, not bigger exactly, but somehow more ample. Libby in slinky tops felt exposed, simultaneously slutty and unfeminine. Like a dyke. She kept her hair long to offset that impression. Still, she wondered if there wasn’t something in her skin that let everyone know, an undertone of cerulean or magenta.
Patricia was an administrator at the nursery school where Libby taught. At school Patricia was the only one in heels or tall boots and knit dresses or jeans tight enough to flood her heart with blood, like high-style compression hose. If Patricia was fire in the classic Spanish sense, Libby was water, boat, sea, breeze, house—in the WASP sense. Lesbian or not, Libby refused to even use the term. She didn’t call Patricia her girlfriend, but Gwen did. She didn’t call herself a lesbian, but Gwen did: “If you’ve only slept with women, you’re a lesbian.” There had been one man, though, a boyfriend of Gwen’s, which Libby, of course, never mentioned to her sister.
“Patricia wants to move in together,” said Libby as she picked up a pair of pine needles, joined at one end like delicate tweezers, and pulled them apart. She found the idea stifling. Her space, her home, her identity—all would become linked to someone else. Linked to someone so beautiful and loud people stared at her on the street, someone who inexplicably wore a bra to bed (actually there was a totally irrational explanation Libby preferred to ignore about a grandmother’s old wives’ tale and voluptuous Spanish flesh).
“Watch out, your excitement might be contagious,” said Gwen. “She’s smart and funny and she cooks. How bad could it be?”
“It’s just the accent,” Libby said. “She’s really not that clever.”
“Everyone is a sucker for an accent,” said Gwen.
Libby managed to see both ends of the spectrum simultaneously. Patricia was sophisticated and totally exasperating, and Libby was at once mesmerized and annoyed by her.
Gwen rolled a pinecone toward Libby; the porch was scattered with them, like beer cans on a public beach. The pinecone wobbled in an arc and stopped a foot short of Libby’s leg. They both closed their eyes and let the sun grow hot on their skin.