Lavinia Gulden sat in a desk on Wednesday, November 8, and listened while Melanie Quail read aloud this old news (it had already spread through the grapevine) at the first after-school meeting of the Junior Red Cross League. Melanie, Myrtis French, and Candy Armstrong had only formed the league, Lavinia thought, so they could wear white nurse’s caps and starched arm bands while making a big fuss about themselves, but Lavinia had joined because you had to belong to at least three clubs to make the dean’s list.
“Well, we’re damsels,” Melanie said. “Maybe we should take young Clare Price his homework.” The white hair on her arms, a fine blond airy meadow, stood up in the shaft of sunlight. If she had not been so pretty, people would have remarked more on the excess of hair. That was Lavinia’s opinion.
“Maybe I could give him some oranges,” Candy offered. Candy’s father had a grove full of them, but it was late for Valencias and early for navels and, besides, the crops were so valuable now, after the hail and hard freeze, that Lavinia doubted very much that Candy would get away with free ones.
“I have to go right by there on my way home,” Lavinia said. “I could take his books to him.”
For a moment they all turned to her, as if surprised that she was still in the room.
“Well, I doubt he needs you to take his books,” Candy said. Why did her trim rectangular teeth seem to make what she said irrefutable? “His sister’s the home ec teacher,” Candy added.
Lavinia lifted her chin and tried to stop blushing. “I thought Melanie just suggested we take his homework.”
Candy, Melanie, and Myrtis regarded her, and she looked back as steadily as she could. They sometimes asked to borrow her Latin and English notes because they didn’t pay attention in class, and they pretended to be nice to her when they bought things on credit in her father’s IGA, but they didn’t really like her.
“Are you sweet on him?” Candy asked, giving Lavinia a slow, condescending blink. “I think Lavinia’s sweet on Clare, girls. I spy with my little eye a Clare-catcher.”
Lavinia looked at Candy’s rouged cheeks (or was that Candy’s natural skin color, the color rouge aspired to be?) and shrugged.
“Why not let Lavinia take him her extra-tidy notes,” Melanie said to Candy. “He’s too Kansackian for us, anyhow.”
Her way of saying, Let’s leave him for the sappy girl from Iowa.
Myrtis said, “He’s a demon in trig, though. And I heard he won a bet reciting ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ beginning to end.” And then when Candy and Melanie stared at her, Myrtis said, “It’s probably not true, though.”
Lavinia bet it was true, based on what she’d seen of Clare Price in Latin class, but didn’t say so.
They talked about making centerpieces for Miss Price’s wedding luncheon, which was going to be held at the Practice House, and about how to make some kind of present for each grammar school child (which even Lavinia had to admit was charitable) and when the meeting was at last over, Lavinia was free. She walked to the school office, then to Clare’s homeroom desk, and then to the street.
Fallbrook was practically chartreuse when you squinted. The rain and hail had been followed by a sudden heat spell, which was normal in winter, but Lavinia still wasn’t used to it. A rain would fall, cold and fitful, and then a dry Santa Ana wind would rattle the windows all night, sweeping every drop of moisture from the air and every foggy hollow from the ground. The Sleeping Indian would turn from brown to violet and the empty lots in town would fill with meadows of yellow sour grass. The sky became a vast blue kiln. Lavinia often had the feeling, as she walked slowly down Ivy Street, that she had moved to another country when they left Iowa three years before.
The road from the high school led to her father’s store, where she worked every empty, sun-filled afternoon.
When she walked by the windows of the IGA, her reflection rippled and she thought of Clare Price lying in a bed with his shattered leg. She felt the weight of her books in the canvas bag, and the naked, smooth motion of her own unbroken body. As soon as she walked in the store, her mother stood up behind the counter and started to untie her apron. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d be late? I have to mail something before the post office closes.”
“I’m sorry,” Lavinia said. “There was a meeting. Innyhoo . . . want me to mail it for you?”
Her mother didn’t even consider it. “No, if I don’t get a breath of fresh air, I’ll scream.”
Alone behind the cash register, behind the long wooden counter that she liked to stroke with her fingertips, Lavinia opened her Latin book, but thought about Clare Price instead. She liked in particular to think of him doing chin-ups in his gym uniform, lifting himself over and over. Veni. She had seen him doing that one day, on her way past the gymnasium, and she’d counted to forty before he stopped and turned. Vidi. Clare’s brown hair combed neatly flat, his smooth, alert face, his light brown eyes, and his muscled arms distracted her in Latin and English. It was what she waited for, when she was in charge of the store: the tinkling of the bell at the door and the sight of his bare forearms, the possible brush of fingers as she handed him sugar or flour or coffee beans for the café. Vici.
She began to walk down the aisles, thinking of Candy’s offer to take oranges to Clare. The store wasn’t big, and the shelves were unevenly stocked because ranch people and even those with gardens in town were trying to live on their own canning. Bliss Coffee, Post Toasties, Blue Rose Rice, Cloverbloom Butter. She chose a box of White King granulated soap. There seemed to be a lot of that. Asparagus tips in a square tin because she had wanted to open it and see if they were lying in there like people in a bed. A box of powdered sugar because you could always use sugar in a café. Then she selected a package of Christmas candy that she had secretly hoped, but not expected, to find under their own tree. She hid the packages in her school bag and tucked them under the counter.
“The Red Cross League nominated me to visit Clare Price,” Lavinia said when her mother returned and started dusting jars of jam. “I have to take him the lecture notes.”
Her mother raised her eyebrows. “My Lavinia? The one who scorns all girls’ clubs?”
“I still do. But I have to be in three clubs for the dean’s list.”
“So you joined a boy-visiting club. Velly interesting.” Her stupid Charlie Chan voice. But there were no customers and little to do, so she let Lavinia go.
The day’s last light shone on the queen palm tree across the street. Through the window of the Sleeping Indian Café, she could see Mrs. Price serving coffee to Dr. Quigley. She stopped in front of the glass door and felt idiotic. She couldn’t go into the room of a boy if he was alone, and he was going to be alone if his mother was serving coffee and his sister was still at school. The teachers always stayed late, it seemed like. Mrs. Price in her odd getup, black dress and white apron, saw Lavinia and waved, so there was no other choice: she had to go in.
“Hi, dear,” Ellie said.
“Hi, Mrs. Price,” Lavinia said. “How are you?”