All the summers in betwe.., p.16
All the Summers In Between, page 16
For the first time since she arrived, Thea and Margot were alone. Lifting her pencil from the notebook where she tracked which albums sold last week and which ones they needed to reorder, Thea didn’t look up from the lined pages as she said, “You were right about what you said.” She paused, sensing that Margot had rested her elbows on the counter, listening in Thea’s direction. “I’m sorry for getting so mad and saying those things about your parents and your money and everything… but have you ever looked back and realized that the one thing that made you so mad is also the thing you actually needed to hear?”
Margot nodded. “All the time, and I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t talk about things I know nothing about.” Earlier Margot had dropped her suede shoulder bag in the wooden milk crate they used for storage behind the counter. She lifted the purse out and searched through the insides. She pulled out a black velvet jewelry box, popping it open and pulling out a pair of delicate gold chains. From each one hung a matching round locket the size of a nickel, two hummingbirds engraved in black on the front. “This one is for you.”
“Really?” Thea was a little uncomfortable at the thought of her giving her something that looked so expensive, and yet she still lifted her hair on Margot’s insistence so she could clasp it around her neck. “Where did you even get these?”
“We can put pictures of us inside, see?” Margot popped open the locket after putting the other one on herself, and sure enough, there was a place for a teeny picture. “My grandmother gave me the set years ago—it was her and her sister’s—and one day when I was little, I was crying about not having a sister, and she said that sometimes friends get so close they can feel like sisters. That I could give the other one to my best friend someday, but I never really had one before.”
The locket felt heavy—it must be real gold, Thea thought—and she didn’t want Margot to feel she had to buy back her friendship. But she felt closer to her than ever.
Thea unhooked the necklace and placed it back into Margot’s hand. “We are like sisters, yes, but I can’t possibly take one of your family’s precious heirlooms. Save this for your daughter, and maybe even her friend someday.”
“You know what we should do?” Margot put a hand to her hip, her excitement for whatever idea she had in her head making her shoulder wriggle to an invisible beat. “We should wear them now, and then when we have little girls, they can be best friends too. We’ll pass them on, two friends creating two more friends.”
Thea imagined the little girls she and Margot had once been, the big girls they had become, and how they might someday have little girls of their own. The thought of all these little girls growing up made her dewy-eyed. So did the idea that she and Margot would find their way forward together. The chain was silken in her fingers as Margot handed it back to her.
“You’re right,” Thea said, repositioning it around her neck. She smiled. “We have to take the perfect pictures for these.”
Margot cheered. “Let’s get really decked out. Go to the salon and get our hair done up.”
Once again everything was right.
* * *
After work that night, Thea planned to visit the cemetery. With all the big thoughts she’d been having lately, she wanted to sit at her mother’s grave and tell her everything. Thea had prepared earlier that morning like she was meeting up with a friend, packing herself a peanut butter sandwich and a Yoo-Hoo to eat if she got hungry, a small bouquet of her mother’s favorite garden roses, and one of her beloved books to read aloud.
The cemetery was a thirty-minute walk from the record shop, a fifteen-minute bike ride, and when Margot packed up for the night beside Thea, she’d offered to give her a ride. Driving there saved Thea the trouble of bicycling on the main road. “I appreciate it, thank you,” she’d said.
“You always visit alone?” Margot said once they were in the Mercedes. She steered the car down Cedar Street. “You don’t bring your sister or anyone?”
“Typically, I like to go myself.” Thea saw the church’s white gothic spire coming into view. “Then I can speak directly to her.”
Margot parked the car in the paved lot, turning off the ignition. “I’ll wait for you here.”
Making sure that the flowers weren’t getting crushed in her bag, Thea said, “No, really, I may be a while. You should go home.”
Margot leaned back against the headrest, waving her off with a smile. “It’s too far for you to walk back later. Besides, I’m happy to wait. I can’t imagine this gets any easier.”
Thea clicked shut the car door. She had the sense that she’d pulled on her comfiest sweater. What Thea hadn’t told Margot about going to the cemetery was that sometimes it made her feel lonelier. That standing at a grave and talking to the memory of her mother was a comfort only until she remembered that she was actually talking to a patch of scrub grass. “Okay, thanks.”
Thea hurried past the tidy graves, wanting to get out of Margot’s view, a little embarrassed at the emotions welling up inside her. She hated letting people see her cry, and tears came rather swiftly on these visits. When Thea spied the familiar small square headstone under the extended branches of a pretty oak, on came the usual mixture of relief and disappointment that the headstone was actually there. Sometimes she fantasized that she’d get here and find an empty spot where they’d buried her, her mother waiting at home.
“Hi Mommy,” Thea said, plopping down to her knees, then adjusting her position to get comfortable. She brushed the grass bits and pollen off the cool stone, her fingers feeling the indents in the granite where her mother’s name had been etched. Dale was still paying the headstone off monthly, seven-dollar installments he dutifully dropped off to the nice priest at the first of the month. “I’m sorry that I didn’t come see you these last two weeks. Remember that friend I told you about? Margot. She’s keeping me busy, actually. I think you would like her. She’s dramatic, a theater type like you. Anyway, I’m sorry.”
A voice popped into Thea’s head. Her mother’s, the one she’d use when she rubbed circles on Thea’s back. It’s okay to take time away from me, sweetheart.
Tears pricked at the corners of Thea’s eyes. She pulled the small bouquet she’d brought from her sack purse and rested it against the front of the granite. The birds chirped in the tree overhead; somewhere there was the distant rumble of a car.
“I underlined that passage you love,” Thea said, holding up A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for her mother to see. She opened to the page that she’d marked:
“ ‘Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm… Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.’ ”
As Thea read it, her mind slipped off to her mother’s happy face when she’d handed her a Christmas gift she was excited for. When her mother twirled her in the kitchen to a song on the radio. When she’d crossed her eyebrows at Thea’s disappointing math score. She would take her mother’s anger over losing her any day.
Thea closed the novel, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist, looking about to see if anyone was near her, but the graveyard rarely had other visitors in the evenings. She wondered if most people organized their grief into a checklist, shedding their feelings first thing in the morning. Thea missed her mother when she woke up, too, but the evenings were equally hard, those times when she was away from home and remembered the situation she was returning to. Thea was about to tell her mother that she was sorry that she’d started daydreaming about leaving East Hampton. She didn’t really want to go far, but it was becoming harder for her imagine a life here. In Dale’s house.
Then she’d heard something, the snap of a twig. Thea shot up to see who was there, and it was Margot. She hurried to crouch down beside Thea, handing her a handkerchief, and giving her a look that asked: Is this okay? When Thea nodded, Margot sat cross-legged beside her. They remained quiet for a few moments holding hands, until Margot asked Thea if she could say something to her mother. “Of course,” Thea said, pulling her hand back into her lap.
“Hello, Mrs. Hayes. Reenie, right? That’s what Thea said everyone called you.” Margot looked down at the ground, where she began pulling at the grass. “My name is Margot, and I just want to say that you have a wonderful daughter. But you know that, you raised her.”
Thea smiled through the tremble in her jaw, and when Margot continued, she felt a flutter of appreciation. Margot had come to comfort her, but she was also speaking to her mother like she was here in the flesh. Thea felt a warming in her heart.
“Honestly, Mrs. Hayes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a daughter love her mother like Thea loves you, and I want you to know that I’ll watch over her for you. I won’t let her be sad like this forever.”
Thea smoothed the front of her shorts. “I’m not sad all the time, Mommy. Just sometimes.”
The friends smiled at each other then, a spaciousness spreading inside Thea’s center. It was her turn to talk. She had to tell her mother what she’d come to say.
“Mommy, please don’t think I’m leaving you or Dale or Cara when I say this.” Here, her voice wavered, but she pushed on. “I’m going to keep saving my money, and I’m probably going to leave home. I think that I may still have some dreams deep down inside me somewhere, and I think they have to do with drawing. I won’t really be happy until I figure out what they are.”
Her voice trailed off into the quiet, and the friends sat in the grass with their knees pulled in, their bodies breathing in the gentle breeze that ruffled the trees. They picked at the grass some more in the quiet.
The bright light began to fade, the blue sky turning white. It smelled of rain. Margot stood up, putting her hand out for Thea to put in hers. She pulled Thea up.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Hayes,” Margot told the gravestone. “Don’t worry about her one bit. Once I care for someone, I never give up on them.”
Thea blew her mother a kiss, unable to say the words, “Goodbye, Mommy,” and they began the walk to the parking lot leaning on each other.
“It’s true, you know,” Margot said. “I’m here if you ever want to talk about her more, even if you want to share a memory of her or call me and just say you’re having a shitty day.”
There was that comforting sweater again. It made Thea smile. “There was this one time…,” she began.
Thea told her story after story that night as they drove home to Thea’s house, and even after they’d parked in her driveway, Margot had turned off the car and listened, laughing at the right places, frowning at the frustrating ones.
“I would have liked to have known her,” Margot eventually said, rubbing her eyes and yawning. It was midnight.
“I would have liked that,” Thea said. That night, for the first time in a long time, Thea slept soundly.
Chapter Fourteen
Before long, the store was packed with customers. They’d already had several people come in looking for the “All You Need is Love” single that arrived earlier that week, and all ten copies were already gone, except for the one that Jay set aside for Thea. They had been playing the song on repeat and the store was abuzz, a few lifeguards popping in to see what came in since last weekend, a woman from the summer colony with a trio of children in tow asking after a Temptations record.
By four in the afternoon the store quieted enough that Thea could get to a stack of albums that needed shelving. Some days passed by in a blink, and this was one of them. She wished Margot would help her, but she was engaged in a long conversation with a customer about everything that a recent Time magazine cover story on “The Hippies” got wrong.
“They talk about us like we’re from another planet,” said a preppy-looking kid wearing boat shoes; he was certainly not a hippy, Thea thought.
Margot nodded along with them. “Exactly. Why is it so far out to suggest that we all hold hands with our friends and neighbors in a national show of peace? Think of the love we’d all feel.”
Well, “feel” being relative considering half the people would probably be on some kind of psychedelic drug, Thea snickered. Shelly said she tried LSD once and it hadn’t been the best experience. Psychedelics had never interested Thea anyway. Why complicate an already complicated life?
“Excuse me.”
A man’s voice addressed her, and when Thea turned around, it was him.
Felix. His short brown curls were windblown, and he’d tied his yellow windbreaker around his waist, his leather backpack hanging open and bulging with books.
“Hello,” she said, and her nerves made her swallow hard. Just treat him like any other customer, she reminded herself while straightening her blouse. “Can I help you locate a band?”
He glanced over her shoulder where she had just dropped the Jimi Hendrix Experience back into place. “Have you listened to it? I’ve never heard anyone play electric like him.”
She smiled, trying to impress him by passing on a piece of rock trivia that Jay taught her. “Do you know that Hendrix lived with the Isley Brothers when he was first starting out?”
Felix didn’t seem surprised. Instead, he broke into the Twist, singing the Isley Brothers’ hit “Twist and Shout.” He looked like an utter goofball, and then he noticed that she wasn’t really giggling, so he stopped, his cheeks pinker than she’d ever seen them. “Now here’s one for you. Do you know the Isley Brothers didn’t even write ‘Twist and Shout’?”
She shook her head no, grinning. “Really? Who did, then?”
“Songwriter extraordinaire Bert Berns,” Felix said, a dimple forming in his cheek. “He based it on Ritchie Valens’s ‘La Bamba.’ Can’t you hear the similarities?”
“That’s funny, yes.” From across the shop, Thea felt Margot’s eyes on her, so much so that she was almost embarrassed to have this conversation out in the middle of the store. Margot would want details of what they talked about, even if Thea was already forgetting what she had been saying while she desperately tried to think of something else. She inhaled. “Anyway, what can I help you with?”
He hiked his backpack up onto his shoulder. “Did you get The Young Rascals’ record in today?”
“Not yet.” She sauntered toward the cashier’s desk, leaned over the counter, and pulled out a notebook where they wrote down orders. “You’re not the first person to ask, either. We should get it in next week. Come back Tuesday, and I’ll put it aside for you. What’s your name?”
“Felix Lind.” The backpack must be heavy—he kept lugging it up—and as Thea wrote his name neatly, one of the books inside tumbled out. Contemporary History of the 1950s. Thea reached to pick it up.
“I’m Thea,” she said, handing it back to him. “Okay, you’re officially in our secret notebook. Why are you carrying all those books around?”
“Research, for a book I’m writing,” he said, his cedarwood cologne a little too strong. Had he planned to talk to her today?
“You’re writing a book? About what?” Working hard to sound calm and collected, she spotted another customer enter the store, relieved when Margot rushed over to greet him.
Felix pushed his hands into the pockets of his slightly rumpled shorts. “It’s about people like us. You know, the regular folks.”
“Oh,” she said, feeling the color leave her cheeks. And what is that supposed to mean? “The regular folks?”
“It turns out even boring people like us have a story to tell.”
Did he really just call her boring? “Well, everyone has a story to tell, but that doesn’t mean it’s interesting,” she said, tempted to erase his name from the Young Rascals waitlist. Why would someone so pompous deserve to be first in line for anything?
Offering a curt goodbye, she didn’t stick around to measure his response. The nerve! Thea knew she may not look like a movie star, but she couldn’t help but feel offended that he lumped her into such a broad category, pinning her down as something so vanilla, so “regular.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him stuff his books into his knapsack and zip it up. Then he left the shop, and she let out a breath. At once, Thea hurried to the notebook where she wrote his order and erased it. The arrogance! To think she’d been daydreaming about going on a date with him.
At closing time, after Shelly and Jay locked up for the night, Thea fell into the passenger seat of Margot’s car; they somehow squeezed her bike into the trunk. It was too risky to ride home with the new Beatles single in her basket anyway, and Thea cradled it protectively by the sides on her lap, afraid it might scratch.
She studied the content expressions on Paul, John, Ringo, and George in the pictures on the album’s cover. They always seemed to be having so much fun. “We should do something different tonight,” she said.
Margot turned the key in the ignition: “You’re in a particularly good mood. Is this because of your conversation with Oh, Feel Me, Feel Me Felix?”
“Sort of,” Thea laughed. “But you’ve got it wrong.” Thea told Margot about the strange interaction they had, and Margot seemed immediately annoyed, too. It’s one thing Thea loved about her: she was quick to take Thea’s side.
“He’s writing a book? About the regular people? Who does he think he is, Hemingway?” Margot hit the gas. “We did see him at my house serving cocktails!”
Thea grabbed on to the door handle to steady herself as Margot raced her car through the back roads. “It’s like he thinks he’s better than me. ‘Regular people.’ What does that even mean?”
The wind blew back Margot’s hair. “It means he’s full of himself.”
“Anyway, maybe he will write a book worth reading, but it doesn’t matter because I’m not reading it.” It was payday, and Thea couldn’t wait to deposit the check in her purse into the savings account Dale had opened for her; the bank had refused Thea when she went in with her first paycheck months ago and the clerk had insisted she return with her father to co-sign. With this twenty-eight-dollar check, she’d have nearly two hundred dollars saved. By the end of the summer, she was hoping that account might offer her a chance at a fresh start. Wouldn’t it be swell if she could enroll in classes again? Maybe even art classes.
