Somebody Else's Music(12)

I thought you were counting on Jimmy to take care of me, Liz almost said, but didn’t, because that was another whole can of worms and she had no intention of going there. They’d reached that odd T-intersection where going to the left led to some kind of industrial plant Liz had never actually understood. It called itself a sand company. She had no idea what a sand company did. She looked in its direction and saw that the big square funnels were still up. She had no way to know if they were running. When they were all growing up together, the girls who lived down that road were the ones they all officially labeled “Poor,” and then ignored, because everybody on earth knew that poor people were not as important as rich ones.

She turned to the right, past the houses with the low white rail fences that made her think of horses, although nobody had ever owned horses this close to town, at least since the advent of the automobile. The road sloped upward to yet another intersection. On both sides, there were large frame buildings painted white and gray, with blank windows, like college dormitories in New England. Surely there had to be changes here, somewhere. The old high school was being used for something else now, and a new high school had been built as part of an educational park back there in Plumtrees. The library was supposed to have a new wing. The problem was that it all looked exactly as she remembered it. She felt she could get out of the car right now and walk on out to Mullaney’s on Grandview Avenue or to the Sycamore farther down the road, and never miss a step or be confused by an uncertain landmark. This was Hollman as Brigadoon. It only woke up and came back to life when she was ready to visit it.

In the passenger seat, Mark put down his book again and reached out to take her hand. He flattened her fingers against his palm and pointed to them, silently, as if they were characters in a movie by a foreign director who believed in moments of significant pause.

Liz looked down at her own hand and saw that, somewhere between Plumtrees and here, she had bitten her fingernails so far down that the skin on her fingertips was split and bleeding.





2


Maris Coleman had been very careful about liquor since that day in New York that had ended so badly, and she was being especially careful about it now, in Hollman, because of the problem of the cars. Like most teenagers—and unlike Betsy—Maris had gotten her driver’s license as soon as she turned sixteen, but unlike people like Belinda and Emma and Chris, she hadn’t used it much in the years since. Vassar had been very picky about undergraduates with cars when she was there. It made more sense to stick close to campus when she wanted to go “out,” and cross the street to Pizza Town, where the drinks were larger and more impressive than any she’d ever seen since. Harvey Wallbangers. White Lightnings. They came in tall ice cream soda glasses, and there was some kind of contest going on that only the boys entered. Drink three and get the fourth one free, or maybe it was four and get the fifth one free—whatever it was, it was dangerous, because those drinks had three or four shots of liquor in them. One White Lightning made her head spin. Of course, she was better than Betsy, who, when she went to Pizza Town at all, nursed along a single rum and Coke or 7UP and Seven, all night, and looked as if she were hating even that. Maris had never understood what it was about Betsy and liquor. Even later, when they had met up together in New York and Betsy had been drinking a fair amount in the evenings, she had never seemed to like it, and she’d treated hangovers as catastrophes. Maris had always thought there was something—prissy—about somebody who pretended not to like liquor, something sour and stuck-up, and she had never believed that bit about how Betsy couldn’t stand to be hungover. A hangover was nothing. You could get rid of it in sixty seconds flat by spiking your morning coffee.

The other problem with cars was the years since Vassar, when Maris had been living in New York, where she neither kept a car nor wanted to. She hated to drive, and hated everything that went along with driving. She had never been very good at it, and was probably even worse now. She hadn’t been behind the wheel for longer than fifteen minutes in ten years. She didn’t have any automobile insurance. There was also the problem of the laws against “drunk driving,” which didn’t really mean driving drunk, but only driving when you’d had anything to drink at all. Maris knew that much from the public service announcements that played late into the night when she was watching PBS or MTV because she couldn’t sleep. In some places, police checked people who didn’t look drunk at all. It wouldn’t matter that Maris never showed her liquor, or even felt it, most of the time. She had been careful since that day in New York, but not because she believed for an instant that Debra knew what was going on. Debra thought she’d had food poisoning. It had been the talk of the office for days afterward, according to the reports she’d heard—she’d been at home, where Debra insisted she stay, “recuperating”—and the women from the office had trekked down to Greenwich Village every afternoon to bring her boxes of pastry and take-out specialty salads from the little hole-in-the-wall gourmet delicatessen where they always got their lunches. Maris had thought, more than once during that period, that that was as good as life could get. She had never had to go out except to go to the liquor store, and that was only at the end of her own block. The only thing she could think of that might have made it better was a change in location, say to somewhere in the Caribbean, but she wouldn’t have been able to afford that. It bothered her no end that Betsy got to go to the Caribbean all the time these days, even though she didn’t like the beach.