Two middle-aged women pushed into the restroom when I was at the tail end of cleaning up—in fact, practically just about taking a shower in the sink. With the heat index, it was pushing a hundred and ten. I’d had to pedal along a busy road for most of the way, so to really get an idea of how I looked, add a few cups of dust and grit to a bucket of sweat and pour that over the image of me in your head. By the time I finished washing, the sink looked like somebody had scrubbed a pig in it. I finished off my transformation by putting on Mom’s old blue-and-white polka-dot dress, the one Dani said made me look older, and rubbing my neck with a perfume sample out of that month’s Vogue. The women turned their fancy hats and pinched little frowns on me. As I stumbled out, the first one nearly knocked me into the wall with her breasts, which were so big and mushed together, they looked like a single, jumbo-size loaf of Wonder bread set up there above her bellybutton.
Clamped down on the head of the second woman was a hat with a fake flower bed glued to the brim. This fancy bit of headgear resembled a natural history exhibit I’d once seen on a field trip to the state park museum. All it needed was a stuffed owl. She clucked her tongue and, after a last headshake in my direction, said, “Gary told me he was overjoyed to see my mama. Overjoyed. But he can’t fool me. I know that man like the back of my hand. He is up to something. Mark my words.”
“You got to watch them every second, Carrie.” The big-bosomed lady’s voice boomed inside the tiled room.
And then the door banged shut.
I’ve wondered often about that word—overjoyed. People say it a lot, but it usually doesn’t make sense the way they use it. If you overdo something, then it most often means you’ve done it too much, like overeating, which can keep you up all night groaning and clutching your belly or send you racing to the toilet. Does a big, greedy gobbling of joy give a person some other variety of indigestion? Joy lives mainly in the head, right? So then it stands to reason a day of overjoying will end in a night of headaches and sinus trouble. Since joy is a feeling that generally escapes me, it’s a rare day I get the opportunity for joying of any kind, much less overjoying. I suspect the term that best applies to my usual state is underjoyed. The day I met Logan for the first time I was afraid to hope for anything as extravagant as joy. I wished I had real breasts instead of these two little hen’s eggs with match-head nipples. I wished Dani’d been there in the bathroom to help me with the makeup. All I wanted was to avoid embarrassing myself. If I could manage that, it would be a good day. Joy could wait for later.
The gardens were almost empty, so it was hard to keep a lookout for Logan without him seeing me do it. The last time I’d been here was almost five years earlier, with my Sunday school class. I couldn’t think of any easy place for us to meet before I took him back to the little nook at the south end of the garden to talk, so I told him to wait for me at the gate. He said he’d wear a red shirt.
I sat on a bench about a hundred feet from the entrance. Across the goldfish pond, three solemn men in dark suits talked quietly. Every once in a while I’d hear one of them quote something with a scripture sound to it. Thees and thous and the like. It was a quarter after four and I was sweating again, even though I was in the shade. The gnats found me right away and launched an invasion into my ears and up my nose. I sang peppy radio songs in my head and tried to think of nothing. School started in a matter of days, but I couldn’t quite make myself believe it. Sitting there, waiting to meet up with a soldier I might later even kiss (fingers crossed), made the idea of high school as distant and unreal to me as a family sitcom from the eighties rerun on cable. Metter High School seemed like some other world that didn’t have anything to do with what was happening to me now.
At four-thirty, Logan showed. I’d about given up. He was shorter than I imagined, and wiry like the boys on the track team. I’d pictured him with a military buzz cut, but his hair came down below his ears. The only thing I didn’t like was a mole on his cheek that looked like John Boy’s from The Waltons. My mom liked to watch The Waltons on cable, and whenever John Boy’s mole came on the screen, it always made me leave the room. The one on Logan’s cheek wasn’t quite as big, but you definitely noticed it. He held a blue box in his hand wrapped with a white ribbon. Something went suddenly wrong with my inner organs, and I thought I might have to make a dash to the restroom, but I didn’t.
I kept walking toward him until he saw me and waved. We were still too far apart to say anything and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I forgot what I usually did with my hands when I walked. Did I usually swing my arms or hold them by my sides? I couldn’t keep looking him in the eye that long. I waved and looked down. My face felt like melting wax.
I thought he would shake my hand when we met, but he hugged me instead. It surprised me, but I liked it. All of my inner organs really went into overdrive then, churning and squirming and making dangerous noises. I wanted to say something clever or funny, but my head was an empty egg. I felt all thin shell.
“Hey,” he said. “Sorry I’m late.”
“Okay,” I said, immediately thinking, Why did I say that? What the hell does that mean? Okay? Dani would laugh if she heard me. He must think I’m retarded and I’ve only said one word!
“You want to walk around?”
“Okay.” It was all I seemed able to say right then. Maybe if I concentrated really hard, I could add one more word to my vocabulary. Like sure or great.
He took my hand, which probably felt like pickled pig’s knuckles, and we walked along the outer path. The flies buzzed very loud at that moment, and although the sky was the color of skim milk, the sun shone so brightly I could barely see. He talked. He said I looked better than he imagined, older. He liked my hair and my polka-dot dress. He told me he’d had some problems leaving the base. Literally five minutes before he planned to leave, his asshole sergeant assigned him to do something really big that afternoon. I can’t remember what. See, Logan’s presence took up so much of my attention I could barely hear what he said. I do remember he asked me if I listened to the Shins a lot. For a long moment, I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
He hummed a song.
“Oh,” I said after a moment, “right, yeah, the band. I only really know the songs from that movie soundtrack. My friend plays it a lot. I do like the creepy caring song, though.”
Logan laughed.
A bus of nursery school kids unloaded at the visitor center and the gardens filled up with screaming children. It seemed oddly late in the afternoon for them to be there. Everything in the garden suddenly felt bigger and louder and brighter than normal. My voice warbled when I talked. I told him I liked his red shirt, but I hadn’t really looked at it. His eyes changed color when we left the slanting afternoon light and walked in the shadows under the trees. He had very white teeth. His lips were thick but not too thick. Full, I think is the word. He said a lot of things. Things I can’t remember now. I could barely concentrate on walking. I forgot how to do the most basic things, like breathe and talk. We circled the garden three or four times before he gave me the package. By then I’d forgotten he had anything with him at all. The package was small, about half the size of a CD case but thicker, and it felt light when he put it in my hands.
“What’s this?” I said. The package made me even more nervous than I was before.
“Open it.” He smiled and his teeth looked very bright in the sunlight, like polished bits of stone.
I took off the paper carefully, peeling the tape back instead of tearing it, as though I meant to reuse it and not just chuck it in a trash bin like I did. This was something that irritated me to no end when my mom did it, and there I was doing it too. The box inside had a gold foil sticker that said, LEVY’S JEWELRY, in raised, bumpy letters. He watched my face very closely and this made it even harder for me to use my hands like a normal human. Lying inside on a mattress of white velvet was a thin gold bracelet with a charm shaped like a puppy.
“See these little loops?” He pointed with his pinkie, as though the gold was so delicate a larger finger might wreck it. “You can add more charms later on if you feel like it. I didn’t know what kind of animals you liked. This guy’s smiling, which I thought was pretty good. The penguin looked mad or …” Logan seemed to run out of words there. He smiled an apology. Without even thinking, I grabbed his wrist and squeezed it once before realizing and yanking away.
“Thank you,” I said. My tongue seemed to fill up my entire mouth and spill out over my lips. At least that’s how it felt. I could hardly get the words out around it.
He took the bracelet and draped it over my wrist. It was hard not to shake as he fixed the clasp. I made a fist to keep my fingers together, but my hand still trembled. In the bright sunlight, the bracelet looked like a squirt of burning lighter fluid on my wrist. Once he got the bracelet on, he leaned over and kissed the inside of my wrist. It surprised me so much I almost pulled my arm away again. A couple of little boys ran past us yelling, chased by a girl in pink shorts waving a branch as long as she was. Logan gave me a serious look and took my face in his hands and kissed me on the lips. He didn’t open his mouth when he did it. He just pressed his lips against mine, like a kiss in a black-and-white movie. Logan had a nice, soapy smell. But hiding right beneath was something spicy and sharp that reminded me of nutmeg. It was the kind of smell to fill your belly with raw blue swirls of electric current. And his lips left behind a clean, mint taste.
“I know it ain’t much,” he said, holding my wrist with both hands and tapping the bracelet with his thumbs, “but I wanted to bring you something.”