Chapter Fifteen

MRS. HENDERSON WAS A big blonde polar bear of a woman. When they got off the bus she was leaning against her Buick, smiling. “Hi, you guys.”

She shook Charlie’s hand, then said screw it and gave him a hug. She had Paula’s eyes and a weak chin; semicircles of rouge were smeared over the age avalanches of her cheeks. Paula had said she used to be a real looker, but then came divorce, and now the ultraclean blue jeans of middle age contained her formidable caboose.

“You sit in back, Charlie, where there’s more room. I’m making Paula’s favorite for dinner tonight, Chicken Paprikash. Hope that’s okay. So. What’s the gossip, you two? You mind if we stop by Simple Pleasures? I bought this beautiful blouse, but it doesn’t fit. Miss Cipriano was asking about you, Paula. So, Charlie, your parents live in New York City? My husband used to take me. Mr. Asshole. We’d always go to the Russian Tea Room. Will you look: this new girl did my nails, but she was rushing, and now look at them.”

Charlie sat in the back, the Frucor poster by his side. They took River Road, stopping at a landing where Paula had learned to swim. Above the river were green hills with huge old Tudor homes and, below, the boathouses that belonged to them.

Charlie didn’t like the superior attitude of the homes, glaring down on his middle-class girl who probably had to trespass in order to learn to swim.

“She was a real good swimmer,” Mrs. Henderson narrated from the car window. “Her coach said she could’ve swimmed in college, but she never practiced. She was afraid she’d swim better than this boy she liked.”

“Mom, that’s simply not true.”

“The things boys do to get a girl, and the things girls do to keep a boy,” said Mrs. Henderson.

“What’s Simple Pleasures?” asked Charlie.

“It’s the cutest store,” said Mrs. Henderson. “I have to say, Charlie, I’m happy to see Paula with a boy her age who wears a nice suit jacket.”

“Mom wasn’t such a Tommy fan.”

They stopped at several stores just like Simple Pleasures. Grand Designs. Elegant Lawns. The stores were new to Charlie. Creaky with old wood. Set pieces for a western, with hitching posts and weathervanes. Everyone knew the Hendersons. Everyone was a version of Mrs. Henderson, broadcasting their own incessant radio station about their life. The chatter was comforting. It reminded him of when Angelina would get on a roll, complaining about Jimmy Carter wearing jeans in the White House, complaining about the price of 1979 milk.

“Did Paula tell you the Chicken Paprikash story?” asked Mrs. Henderson.

“Mom became pen pals with an inmate—”

“Death row, Charlie.”

“A death row guy who would send her recipes, and the chicken dish—”

“Chicken Paprikash, Paula.”

“The Chicken Paprikash was the last recipe he wrote her before they executed him.”

“Poor guy,” said Mrs. Henderson.

“Dad used to call it electrocuted chicken.”

“Mr. Asshole.”

Mrs. Henderson had set Charlie up in the study, on a foldout couch by a window that looked out on a hummingbird feeder, but Paula insisted that he sleep above the garage on a bed whose top sheet was populated by a collection of grasshoppers dressed in tails for a grasshopper wedding.

“Suit yourself, Paula,” said Mrs. Henderson. “That room doesn’t have any pictures and whatnot. It’s so sterile up there. We always had plans to make it into an arts and crafts room. But you know what happens to all those plans, don’t you, Charlie?”

“They go away?”

“Exactamundo.”

*

“Your mom’s great,” said Charlie. “So real.”

“As opposed to what?” Paula asked, removing the grasshoppers from the bed. On every surface there were lace doilies under teacups or miniature animals.

“What’s the deal with the flag outside the front door?”

“The garden flag? It’s a garden flag. My mom bought a set a while back. She’s supposed to change them every season, but I think the one that’s there has been there since I was in high school.”

“I like stuff like that. I mean, I’ve never really seen things like that.”

“Well, we have lots of stuff like that here.”

“And the stone bunnies and turtles all over the yard.”

“You’re easily impressed, Charlie Green.”

“I could spend a year on this grasshopper bed, reading old TV Weeks and watching the hummingbirds. I’d learn more about life than any college could teach me.”

“Oh, no,” said Paula. “You’re going back to school after the weekend. Someone should have a college degree.”

“But what will you do?”

“Get a job serving beer to guys who have known me since I was twelve.”

“I don’t want to leave you to that. Classes don’t start till Wednesday anyway. Maybe we could have a long weekend?”

“Maybe,” she said. At that instant, she felt hollow, and wished Charlie were elsewhere so she could cry. She heard her mother’s garden flag flapping in the weekday afternoons of her future, the phone ringing and going unanswered, Charlie from outside a classroom. She’d boyfriended him too quickly. A way out would be to take him into town and get drunk. She’d run into a half-dozen exes, some of whom still interested her, but only when she was a little wasted in New Hope. Any other place in the world, she’d never consider them.

Charlie was different—the type of boy you marry for his genes and soul. For his brown eyes that would always glow with love. For now, though, she wanted a shot of tequila, and needed him to just be her drinking buddy. Maybe score a joint from an ex and smoke it with both the ex and Charlie, sitting on the river rocks, both boys wanting her, while she’d only want to know the secrets of the river, its ancient turtles and unruffled swans.

“Do you want to go to Martine’s with me?” she asked. “It’s a really cute little bar I used to work at. It used to be part of an old salt mine. I feel like getting a beer or something. Sometimes being home can be depressing.”

*

Gary, a perennially shirtless ex-boyfriend of Paula’s, made huge sculptures out of found metal and had recently sold one to Andy Warhol, according to the New Hope Free Press, the area’s free newspaper that seemed to be in everyone’s hands at Martine’s. There, on the front page, was a photo of shirtless Gary standing next to Warhol and his small, shocked eyes. After reading the news for herself, Paula hugged Gary long and hard.

“I always knew you’d be famous,” she told him.

Bushy underarms, hairless otherwise, and feminine, pointy nipples: Gary smelled like sweat. To Charlie, he smelled like the Paris metro in the summer. North Africans sans deodorant. Italians sans deodorant. The heroic melting pot of the metro; there was a depth to the sweat that suggested soil, rather than cities.

“So how do you know Paula?” Charlie asked Gary, while Paula went upstairs with Martine to speak about a job.

“We go way back,” Gary said, downing a tequila.

The bar had a good fireplace smell, even in the summer. Something briny. Must be the old salt. Despite Gary’s brooding, half-naked presence, Charlie could see himself making Martine’s a mainstay. The bartender, apparently another ex but a more manageable one than Gary, sang along to the Smiths.

“You know, I actually might like the Smiths,” said Charlie to the bartender. He’d avoided them because John had said a girl would bolt if she snooped out a Smiths CD in your collection. She might as well find makeup in your medicine chest, he’d said. But tonight, in this sleepy little bar, where beer cost a dollar and he could sometimes hear Paula’s voice upstairs, he felt unabashed about what he did and did not like.

Gary made a face. “Smiths were good for only one year.”

“Bull,” said the bartender.

“Nineteen eighty-five,” said Gary. “That was their year. Paula and I used to listen to them on my boom box. Winter of ’85. Great winter in front of the Franklin stove. That’s when the Smiths were good. In front of that stove. What’s your name, again?”

“Charlie.”

“Charlie. Right. She likes simple things, Charlie.”

“I know,” he said, annoyed with the world of ex-boyfriends.

“Hey,” said Gary. “None of my business anymore. Just be careful with that girl. She can change your life.”

“I hope she does.”

“I mean, she can mess it up. Haven’t felt like myself since she left me. Hell, I haven’t worn a shirt since she left me.”

Gary put a small felt pouch in Charlie’s hand. “Give this to her. She said she wanted a J.”

“Panic on the streets of London,” the Smiths bartender sang. “Panic on the streets of Birmingham.”

“Hang the DJ,” said Gary, smiling. “Ah, maybe the Smiths are more than just 1985 after all. Night, folks.” He was barefoot as well. Only a pair of splattered painter’s pants separated him from nudity.

“What was Gary saying about Paula?” asked the Smiths bartender.

“That she could mess up your life,” said Charlie.

“Yeah, I guess I could see that; she’s so freaking smart. We only dated for, like, three days, but I knew she was way too smart for me. Just wish I’d been into the Smiths back then.”