Argument, Summa Cum Laude

In honor of the more than ten friends who graduated college this past weekend comes a slightly different piece of flash fiction. Conversation inspired by them, location inspired by my cousin's wedding rehearsal dinner. I find it interesting and a good exercise to write from two perspectives - neither of which particularly hold. It's a good way to keep one's mind broad - to try to write convincingly from a side that doesn't have you fully convinced. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it!

Argument, Summa Cum Laude

by Rachel Heffington

From this angle the girl who had escaped to the shrubbery as I had – presumably to quit the hot crush of the crowded party room – appeared to be my height or a little taller. Instinctively, I glanced down at her feet. She wore shoes with a small heel. Were she barefoot, I would have the edge in height and this pleased me. I am not a man who can spare many inches to the advantage of others.

I stepped off the moss-grown walk onto the gravel circle, gave it a deliberate crunch under my heel. She turned, startled, then smiled. Dusk bloomed around her, blending the edges of her gray dress softly into the drawing night.

I raised a hand in greeting toward this charcoal-sketch of a stranger and wandered to fountain in the center of the gravel circle. No water in the fountain. Nor had there been for some time if the collection of cigarette ashes and dead leaves were an indication. I took careful note of these things in an effort to ignore the presence of the girl. I'd gone to the shrubbery to be alone, of course, and wished to remain that way. But soon the smallness, the ridiculousness of we two sharing the same neat-lawned, hedged-about patch of yard without speaking bore down on me.

“Rather a crowd in there, huh?” I ventured.

She, who had drawn off a few paces, turned to me. “Yes, well, graduations are a thing worth celebrating, I suppose.”

I drew a cigar from my pocket. “Do you mind?”

She shrugged. “Only if the wind turns my direction.”

Cigar clenched between my teeth, I cupped my hands and touched a match to its end. This business done, I drew on it and considered the girl. “You a graduate of the grand old Class of '39?”

She smiled a funny smile. Almost an angry smile. “I'm not.”

“Ah, so you're a student then?”

Another smile tinged with a diluted shade of fury. “Actually, no. I'm not a student at all. I don't learn anything. Never.” She hugged herself with a petulant toss of her head. “I've actually given up learning. Stupid to learn anything these days.” Her hair, cut in a blunt-edged bob, sat sharply dark against her heart-shaped face. Defiance incarnate and a dimple in her chin.

I smoked hard, processing what she had said and whether it was strictly sarcasm or whether she might, on the outside chance, believe her own words.

“If you're not a student or a graduate,” I finally asked, “do you mind me asking why you are here?”

She scoffed. “Oh, so it's only graduates or students who may attend the ceremony of a good friend?”

“Look, if you think that's what I meant...”

“Isn't it what you meant?”

“I only meant – ”

“Yes, what did you mean? You'd think a student would have enough brains to know there must be a motive behind asking a question. Now speak plain or I'll go inside. I'd much rather not be bothered by impertinent young men just now, if it's all the same to you.”

She made my mind whirl with the rapidity of her insults. How we'd gone from demure, dusk-sketched dryad to seething shrew in a few sentences bewildered me. Where'd it gone off? A fellow would never have done it. I wished madly for the seclusion I'd left the party to seek. This was why I referred gals to my older and younger brothers. This was why I'd made it into manhood without so much as a second date with any one of them. Women were such complex creatures.

Heaven-sent, I'm sure.

Beautiful, undoubtedly.

Perfection in human form.

But not something you wanted to go trawling through just for fun, you know. They were much too apt to land on you, claws out.

“Forgive me, ma'am,” I said with a cold, polite bow. I flicked my cigar into the empty fountain and watched it smolder against the skeleton of a maple leaf. “It was not my intention to offend.”

“And who offers his apologies?”

Her distinctly different tone of voice jerked my gaze to her laughing face. She'd dropped the shawl somewhat from her shoulders which were now bare to the purple evening. Proud, aristocratic shoulders as if the dignity of the world – and its riches – belonged to her.

“Don't you have a name?” she asked.

Blood rush to the tips of my ears, turning them scarlet. “Alexander Britton.”

“Madeleine Vincent.”

How small her hand felt in my big paw! Yet her grip was stronger than many fellows' and the eyes that fastened on mine were a sensible, affable blue. Not forget-me-not or violet or gray blue. Just blue, tending toward green at the outer rim.

“You're Vince's sister?” I asked, trying to reconcile she of the gray dress with Roland Vincent, currently up to his crumpled necktie in a bottle of bourbon.

“His cousin, actually. And yes, I'm here because he got it into his head to try for a tightly-rolled piece of paper which will henceforth allow him to think himself cleverer than the rest of the family.”

“College hater, I take it?”

“Not particularly.”

Somehow, in that way peculiar to strangers in a strange place, we came together and started walking; we had now reached the far edge of the gravel circle and had to turn back or cross the lawn to go on. Unhesitating, she stepped onto the grass and we sauntered through the hedge via an arched opening. Beyond the hedge lay a damp, meadow-like acre. We made in the general direction of an enormous, many-limbed oak growing in the left corner, nearest the party-house. Madeleine sat on an board-swing hanging from the tree branch unfurling like an elephant's trunk from the tree's heart.

“What's your game?” she asked, suddenly.

I cleared my throat. “I'm fair at baseball.”

“I meant now, here. Why are you talking to me?”

“Because one of you is much less terrifying to my nerves than three hundred of them.” I jerked my head toward the house as a torrent of raucous voices poured out an open window.

“And why don't you walk on, alone?” she asked.

“Why didn't you?”

“And ignore someone speaking to me?” she marveled.

“Women have done harsher things in the name of privacy.”

She sat on that swing without swinging at all, which seemed equal parts nonsensical and practical. I think it would have spoiled the effect if she'd gone cavorting through the sky. Madeleine Vincent seemed, above all, to relish her composure and balanced her girlhood (could she be older than nineteen?) with the carriage of a Parisienne.

“I suppose you're getting a degree?” she asked.

I nodded. “My second, actually.”

“Ughhhh.” A shiver.

“You do yourself no credit acting like an idiot,” I cautioned. “I'm sorry to use the term, but you don't even sound like a thinking adult when you speak that way. If you so despise the educational system, you might keep that opinion to yourself. If you choose to spout it for all the world to hear, be prepared to be laughed at.”

She chewed her bottom lip.

“There is nothing,” I said, waxing hot as I familiarized myself with the subject, “more laughable than an uneducated person beating the educated man over the head with her lack of education. There are forms to be observed in lodging complaints against the system. I'd be happy to instruct you in them if you so choose.”

“Look at him! I've made the little toffee-nose angry!” she wobbled on the swing, settling herself into it with a dangerous glint in her eyes.

“I only intend to help.” Whatever slight interest her svelte figure had brightened in me when I first saw her faded now to a weary sensation of having to calm a petulant child before she set off the hue and cry.

“Is Vince...is he all right?” she asked at length.

I shrugged. “Not the worst in the lot.”

She looked off toward the house. “He drinks too much.”

“Not more than most.”

“He doesn't study,” she said, pinning me with those blue eyes.

“Not many do.”

“He doesn't apply himself at all, does he?”

I stuffed my hands in my pockets. “We-ellll...not terribly much. But nobody does.”

“And he skips classes often.”

“Everyone skips classes, Miss Vincent. It's part of survival.”

“But he still graduates? Acting like that he still graduates!”

Somewhere I recognized I'd lost another battle. “Look, it's not like that.”

“Isn't it?” Madeleine shook her head and the sharp black bob swept her chin. “That's what I hate. A person might work his whole life. A person might read every book he could get his hands on. A person might splay himself wide open for the sake of self-improvement but if he didn't go to college and get a cap and tassels and a piece of paper that says he's spent four years of his life skipping classes and boozing himself, the world won't take him seriously.”

I stared, slack-jawed at her. “You little minx! It isn't like that at all. Most students work very hard for their degrees.”

“You just say most people don't apply themselves.”

“That was hyperbole.”

“You are hyperbole.” Madeleine breathed very fast and a certain expression flitted across her face as if she realized the flawed logic in her comment.

“You want to misunderstand me,” I said. “You do your very best to misinterpret what I mean.”

“Oh, just shut up, Mr. Alexander Britton.”

It was the first time she had used my name and again that curious self-consciousness filtered into her eyes. She banished it and the hardness returned.

“I'm not interested in discussing it further. Look, we're here to congratulate my cousin and his friends and...and you for achieving what you all set out to achieve. I don't have to admire your pretension to congratulate you, do I? Basic civility allows me to recognize that four years devoted to any pursuit are, at any rate, four years of devotion.” She stood and the swing banged against the back of her knees. She took both my hands in hers. “Congratulations, Mr. Britton. Use your education well. Now leave me, please. I'm not ready to go in just yet.”

Nor was I but the grand oak stooped over us, forbidding me to stay. A keen wind riffled through the hedge-leaves and I shivered. “You're not cold?”

“No.” She sat on the swing again.

“Well.” I squinted at the party-house, pretending to concentrate on something, though I barely noticed at what I was squinting. Anything to avoid her gaze. “Goodbye, then.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Britton.”

“Will I see you later – at the party?”

She squared her chin. “I think not. I don't belong among those people. I'll only have this conversation with every other person in that room.” Great weariness weighted her voice to a murmur. “I don't think I have perspective to spare.”

Listening to her, I felt myself becoming more and more depressed. I didn't want her to despise me and the fifty-eight other people in the house behind, but I could not see her angle.

I sighed. “Goodbye.”

“So you said. Please go away now. I'm tired.”

I did as she commanded and once inside the hot, over-crowded house a feeling of great moroseness fell upon me. Even the Manhattan a friend shoved in my hand couldn't cheer me. I wandered to the back of the house where the clamor seemed loudest.

“Hey, Vince.”

He didn't hear me over the shrill chatter of three girls in thin dresses wearing stolen graduation caps. I waved him down instead and Vince, red in the face and shouting with laughter, squeezed through the crowd to my side.

“Alex, enjoying yourself?”

“Fine party. Fine,” I lied.

“Great! Never seen a crowd happier to be done with it all. To hell with studying! To hell with finals!” Vince raised a brimming shot filled by one of the girls, and the people nearest commended his toast with a rowdy cheer.

I licked my dry lips and tugged on his sleeve. “Met your cousin in the garden.”

“Oh, fine girl,” he yelled. “Bit dramatic, but fine.”

“Funny bird, seems to me,” I confided.

Vince's roving eyes settled briefly on me with a look of extreme amusement. “One of the funniest. Has funny ideas about society. Pretends to think college is bull.”

“Yes. She, umm...said so.”

He laughed rather harder than necessary at this. “Look at your face! Bet she told you she despises being kissed and she'd never travel abroad, not even if someone else paid for it three times over. Little Maddy. Silly girl, but sweet when she's in the mood.”

“Does she mean any of it?”

The three girls crowded once again around Vince; I could barely see his polished head above the other party-goers.

“What?” he roared.

“Does your cousin really mean it – about kissing and college and travel and all?”

“Ha!” he laughed, and even though I couldn't see him for all the arms embracing him, his intoxicated voice rose above the clamor: “Girl doesn't mean a word of it! She tried for ten colleges and they all turned her down. Silly little pigeon. Likes to spit in their eye, now, every chance she gets.”

So that was it. The irrational anger and the defiance and the childlike shame. I looked down at my hand and realized I had rolled my cocktail napkin like a diploma. I tapped it against my palm a few times, smiling. Then, still smiling, I tossed it away and stalked back outside.

With any luck, there'd still be a furious, blue-eyed girl sitting on the old board swing.

"Eu de Lil" - A Partially True Telling Of Things

Hello, Friends!
    Many of you saw the April Fool's prank I played on social media the other day. To pull that off, I walked up to a random stranger in a coffee shop and asked him to take an engagement selfie with me so I could prank some of my friends on April Fool's Day. He obliged, and I spent all of April Fool's in the highest of good humors. This event collided with having finished another J.D. Salinger book and begun yet another. I returned this evening to that coffee shop and sat down to write a short story. The piece of fiction which came out of that writing session is this: my partially-autobiographical thank-you to J.D. Salinger and that coffee-shop stranger. Enjoy!

"Eau de Lil"

by Rachel Heffington

I knew something was adrift when she changed her perfume. Her scent had always been an interesting and none-too-common Pandora's box affair of verbena, rose, lily-of-the-valley, and sandalwood. No chemist had every compounded that scent. Lillian had made it herself out of the ends of castaway bottles of more respectable perfumes, in my opinion. I had always been able to tell when my sister was home, though I never called for her. It was quite enough of a certainty to force the unyielding lock of our front door to open, to shove in the heavy wooden doors, and smell that eau de Lil.

I tossed my keys into the ugly pottery bowl on the credenza. “What's the deal?” There was a new smell of citrus and spice. It was complex. It was seductive. For a crazed moment I panicked that I had somehow entered the wrong flat in our brownstone and a half-clothed French woman would come sauntering out of her bathroom to behold me, the intruder. What a Frenchwoman would be up to in our neighborhood of Ghent was beyond me.

But no other family would suffer that hideous hand-thrown pottery crater to remain in the public line of vision. It possessed, according to family legend, the indentation of a famous potters thumb – a sometime friend of our father's before he'd quite the artistic circle for academics – and therefore the horrible thing was left quite out of the reach of those of us less discerning. I had often wished Abe, our oldest brother, would smash it in one of his drunken brawls, but did he? He hadn't the decency, I suspected. Scar the furniture, beat the stuffing out of mother's sofa. Crash half the heirloom china under one of your weighty fists but don't, by heaven, do anything merciful to the Benini Bowl. You will likely understand my position. It is a firmly held belief of mine that every family possesses its variety of Benini Bowl.

“Lil? Lillian, where the deuces are you, you overgrown kitty-cat?”

Not even the use of her familiar and much-despised nickname brought a response from my sister. I wandered down the hall to the doorway of Lillian's room and here paused. In our childhood we used to have sort of Company Meetings, so to speak, in Lil's room. We would sprawl on her queen bed which, at that time, seemed massive, and discuss the world at large. Abe and I enjoyed relatively unusual welcome from our sister; but for all these memories, I had yet to ever enter the Abode of Lillian without the strict permission and approval of its inhabitant. Today was no different.

“Lil?” My adolescent vocal changes had never thoroughly come to and end and at nineteen, I was quite the same sort of graceful parrot-throated boy I had been five years ago. I knocked two knuckles against the door-frame and leaned halfway in.

There was Lillian, not crying her eyes out as you might expect, or asleep, but sprawled across the width of her bed with her heels kicking in the air as if she were a mere girl of thirteen, not ten years past that forgiving age.

“What the heck, Lillian? Why the funny smell?”

She turned her head to give me a withering gaze. “Oh, do shut up, Sassparilla.”

My name was Samuel, but people seemed incapable of remembering that particular fact about yours truly. All sorts referred to me by this name which name had come about due to my uncommon devotion to sarsaparilla the full duration of my childhood.

I would not, however, be put out by this indignity. “Hey, Lillian?”

“Yeah?” She was scribbling something in her journal.

“Why are you wearing a new perfume?”

She didn't answer.

“Did you run out?”

No reply.

“Did you lose the bottle?”

Still no answer. Lillian was never short on words. Her new reluctance to speak haunted me. I crossed into the room and felt the sacred seal break. I'm not sure it really happened, but it seemed to me that Lillian's shoulders stiffened when I silently passed the threshold. I'm not sure. But her heels came down. She suddenly seemed very much twenty-three again. Still, if I'd gone through the trouble of coming this far, it was only the dignified thing to see it through. In one wild moment of courage, I plopped onto the bed beside Lillian. I even shoved her left elbow over to try to see what she was writing. Didn't get very far, but that didn't bother me. I had Lillian's attention now. She had really noticed me. She capped her pen and positioned her chin on her arms.

“Sassparilla, you know something?”

“What?” Her window was open and the smell of baking pizza twirled into the room from the pizzeria down the street. I was suddenly inexpressibly hungry. Starving in fact.

“You need a haircut,” she said.

“I need food. What's up, Lillian?” I asked again. “I know something happened to you.”

“Okay.” Lillian sat upright and started picking at her cuticles. “Something did happen.”

I almost gave tongue to my satisfaction at being right, but I didn't want to shut down the confessional factory. I made the most encouraging, “Go on. Please do,” face in my repertoire and waited.

Lillian continued picking at the beds of her nails with a funny smile. It was a smile I saw infrequently. A smile that meant something – and this was rare – had gone well beyond Lillian's powerful imagination. The first occasion had been when she'd got free lipstick from a beauty counter at a drugstore just for happening to be the five-hundredth customer that day. Another time she had successfully sneaked into a stranger's wedding reception at a fancy hotel, signed the guest-book, and taken away a piece of cake while I watched from a service elevator. The third time the smile had lasted a full week and had, according to reports, much to do with the acquaintance of one Robert Cavendish. The Robert Cavendish affair had died down pretty rapidly and it had been months, come to think of it, since I'd seen that smile.

And now here it was, devilishly red and amused. Finished picking the right hand, Lillian began on the cuticles of her left. Her nails needed re-painting, I noticed. Lillian hated the whole process of nail-painting but she did it religiously every Friday night. It was Thursday. The manicure had survived the week about on-average.

“You remember the new bank on Llewellyn?”

“Which new one?” I brought up my mental file of our wedge of Norfolk and considered each bank in my knowledge.

“The one on Llewellyn!”

“Ah – hate to tell ya, Lil, but it's not new. Been open three years at least.”

“New to me.”

“Everything's new to you.”

“I like to be impressed,” Lillian replied with an arch smile. “It's quite satisfying.”

“You're crazy.”

Lillian's eyes suddenly became serious. She nodded. “I know. I am. Totally nuts.”

Here we came, creeping closer to the disclosure of whatever secret was eating at Lillian, doing things to her...changing her perfume. I deepened the “Please, do,” face and rolled over on my back.

“Well,” her voice felt for the edge of the topic like when you're at the beach in springtime and you're quite certain the ocean's still frigid but you feel compelled to put your foot in anyway. “I was at the bank and...you know tomorrow's April Fool's?”

I wriggled. I'd forgot. And I needed a good prank to pull on dumb old Abe for not smashing the Bellini Bowl. “Uh, yeah.”

“Yeah.” Lillian had finished picking her nails. Now she started on peak of her top lip – a nervous habit leftover from a traumatic teething period during toddlerhood. “Well, I thought what a joke it'd be to pretend I was engaged. You know, just for the heck of it.”

“Who pretends they're engaged for the heck of it?” I asked.

Lillian shrugged. “I don't know. I told you I was crazy.”

“What'd you do? Propose to a stranger?”

“Noooooo...” Lillian quit picking at her lip. “You know my Polaroid camera?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I thought I'd get somebody to take a photo with me. I had my class ring in my pocketbook – just got it cleaned at the jeweler's. So what I figured is, if I could get some man to take a picture with me...”

“What man?” I put in.

“I don't know. Some man.”

“Lillian – you didn't.”

“Of course I did!” My sister glared at me, then the smile came back. She shrugged. Picked at her lip again. “I mean, nobody would believe me unless there was photographic proof. You can't prank people by telling them anything. Everyone's a doubting Thomas in these progressive days. I needed a picture so what I did is – ”

I sat up and shook my head. “You're absolutely crazy.”

“Didn't I agree? Now shut up, Sassparilla, or I won't finish telling you.”

I hated people who didn't finish telling things. “What'd you do? Pick the handsomest one?”

That smile came back. “Well look, if I'm going to fake a fiance, why not choose someone I'd actually marry, for heaven's sake? I mean, you can't just pull this trick a few times. It's a one-shot game, Sass. You're done, you're done.”

“I get it, Lillian. Don't have to convince me!”

She settled back down on the bed and hugged herself. I thought how she looked thirteen again. Funny how a person can go back and forth ten years like that.

“Well,” she said. “I had a guy all picked out. A teller. You know. I'd gotten used to him, sorta. I went through the scenario at least five times in my head and had it all worked out. And then...well, I started thinking about how it would would be if I went through all the trouble of asking him and he wouldn't pose with me and how embarrassed I'd feel, and then I saw his eyes.”

“What was wrong with his eyes?” She had me curious now.

Lillian shook her head. “No sense of humor. Not a twinkle of a sense of humor. He was awfully nice-looking. Just my style. But I bet there wasn't an atom in his body that'd let him laugh at me, let alone allow him to stoop to taking a photo with a strange girl. I mean, don't get me wrong. He was terribly nice-looking. Probably smart too. But I bet he wouldn't laugh even if Harpo Marx came in there.”

“I wouldn't laugh if Harpo Marx came over to me,” I said.

My sister made an exasperated sound. “Yeah but you don't like comedy. You're just like That Man, Sassparilla, darling. You're very intellectual.”

I didn't much like how that sounded when Lillian said it like that. I didn't much like what I'd heard of That Man, as she called him, and being told I was just like him wasn't my idea of a clear compliment. I said so. Lillian said that I was being sensitive. I said, would she just hurry up and finish her story so I could go get a snack. She said I was free to go. I said if she didn't finish, I wouldn't make Bananas Foster. She loves my Bananas Foster and, because she's the most awful cook in the world, her hands were tied.

Lillian bounced on the bed, so I bounced too. We bounced together, she and I, and she might've even looked a couple months younger than thirteen at this point.

“Well, I'd just about screwed my courage to the sticking point. I was going to do it, by Holyrood. I'd loitered forever, filled out deposit slips with false names, reapplied lipstick, put on this new perfume sample rolling around in the bottom of my pocket-book – ”

“AHA!” I squawked, rather more violently than necessary.

“My word, Sassparilla!”

I blushed. “It's just, you were finally getting to the perfume.”

She ruffled. “And I'll go on getting to it if you'd just shut up for five seconds.”

“Okay. I'm shutting up. I'm shutting up.”

“Anyway, just as soon as I'd gotten myself all ready and riled, do you know what happened? He up and left. He left! A teller! As if he had permission to leave right as I got brave. I'd got used to him, you know. It had taken an hour to get that far. And he left.”

“Wasn't there a – ”

“Sassparilla Martin. Shut up. I looked for another man but I didn't like their noses.”

“Their noses...”

“I'm not particular about much but when it comes to noses, I have standards.” This wasn't news to me – Lillian had a very nice nose herself and wanted to be sure her children got it. “They were handsome enough and stylish enough and men enough in the place but they just didn't have a good nose on them.”

The story seemed to be drawing to a climaxless close. Her teller left and she hadn't been crazy enough to ask a stranger for a photograph in the bank. All this seemed a relief to me, though it was a little too bad for her, you know. With her impressed little smirk and sparkling eyes.

“I was furious with myself, Sassparilla.” She kicked her bedroom slipper across the room. “How would you feel if you'd stuck around a whole darn hour getting your courage up and the thing you were hunting just skipped town?”

“I'd feel relieved Fate had got me out of an embarrassing position I'd never put myself in to begin with.”

She sighed. “Well, I actually stomped my foot I was so crazy mad. And then I saw him.”

“Whom?”

“Listen to the educated young owl.” Lillian shook back her brown hair, smiling. “I saw another man. With blue eyes.”

“Adequate nose?”

“Very adequate. He was tall and broad-shouldered. Not quite what I'd call my style, but attractive all the same. And he had good teeth! Do you know, Sass, how hard it is to find a man with a nice smile?”

“Do I have a nice smile?”

“Don't flatter yourself, darling. You know your teeth are crooked. Oh, don't look at me like that! It isn't your fault you lost your retainer on vacation.”

I mentally cursed Abe, who had thrown my retainer into Lake Champlain three Augusts ago. My teeth were a sore point with me. “So you saw this man.”

“Yes, I saw him and I don't know what came over me. I felt perfectly calm and cool and collected and I just slipped that ring on and took my Polaroid camera out of my pocketbook and marched right up to him. He had one of those faces that looked ready for a laugh. He might never teach at Harvard, but he certainly would know a joke when he saw one.

'Excuse me,' I said, smiling my brightest. 'I realize this is a strange request, but I wondered if you might be willing to help a girl out with pulling an April Fool's trick on a friend?'

He sort of smiled.

Then I said, 'All I need is a snapshot of you and me and this ring.' And I held up my left hand with my class ring. The guy was really grinning now, like he thought it was the best idea he'd heard all day. Never-mind I was a total stranger in a bank lobby and I'd just asked for his photograph. He just sort of grinned at me, put his arm out to embrace me, and said,

'Let's do it!'” Lillian leaned back on her hands and laughed. That's another thing I liked about her. She never giggled or tittered, for heaven's sake.

I let out an appreciative whistle, just for her. “I hate to say this, Kitty-Cat, but your brain is one in a million. Even if you are certifiably nuts. Who'd you get to take the photo?”

“That's just it! This fellow was kind enough to flag down the bank manager. We took our photo and I thanked him and that was that. He even waited around till I'd shaken it to see if it came out all right.”

“Did it?”

That smile again. Lillian turned, reached into her journal, and brought out a fresh Polaroid. There was my sister all right: womanly and vivacious, smiling so hard you worried her face might shatter with gladness. Her class ring shone on her left hand which she held up between herself and the strange man. To tell you the truth, a big lump formed in my throat when I looked at the picture. She looked so happy. Like it was real. Like she'd actually got engaged to a man she really loved. He looked happy too. Thrilled, in fact. Funny thing is, they looked like a couple of kids. Lillian wasn't even twelve in that photo. She looked hardly eleven. The lump bobbed in my throat. I worked around it to say,

“Wow, that's nice, Lil. Picked a good one.” I quickly put the Polaroid photo face-down on the bedspread. I couldn't stand to look at it anymore. “What was his name?”

She shrugged and picked up the photo, cradling it in her palm. “Funny thing is, I was so excited to have been that brave, I forgot to introduce myself.”

“Lillian.”

“Well?”

I couldn't take it any more. I stood up and plunged my hands into my pockets. “Do you see your face in that picture?”

“What's wrong with it?”

My stomach growled like three caged lions. “Look at it! You're grinning like he actually proposed or something!”

“I was over the moon!” she said defensively. “All a person needs is one wild, crazy moment of bravery to touch off unspeakably interesting things. And after failing to nab the first guy, I was doubly satisfied with myself.”

“You're too easily pleased.”

She rolled her eyes. “What was I supposed to do? Ask him to the movies? He was a good sport, darling, but I'm no femme fatale. I don't ask men for Polaroids just to lure them in.”

“I know you don't. That's just the trouble with you.”

“The trouble with me?”

“Yeah! You're too darned nice. You're too genuine for anyone. You ought to try ulterior motives sometime, Lillian Martin. They're good for things like catching men. They're good for getting what you want in life. You act like yourself, you act normal, you're not going to get anywhere. That's the matter with you, Kitty-Cat. You're too apt to think the best of people, or act all the way like yourself. You've got to go into the world arms akimbo or it'll never make space for you. That's what I think.” I flapped my elbows, fists still in my pockets. “Gotta try some complexity. Some duplicity for gosh sake.”

Lillian's face went quiet. She still had the Polaroid in her hand and traced the man's features absently with one fingertip. “I don't believe that, Samuel.”

My blood positively clinked with ice cubes. I couldn't remember the last time she'd looked that old. She looked almost ancient. Probably nearly thirty. Neither could I remember the last time she'd used my real name.

I breathed heavily through my nose. “You gonna see him again?”

She shrugged. “Probably not.”

“Think he'd remember you if you saw him again?”

Another shrug.

Because she didn't, I said what I knew my sister was thinking: “Probably not.”

I sneaked another look at the snapshot. The tonnage of senseless joy in that photo killed me. I took a deep breath. The unfamiliar, new smell of her perfume did nothing to dissipate that blockage in my throat.

“Hey, Lil?” I squeaked.

“Yeah?”

I cleared my throat. “Why're you still wearing that perfume?”

I didn't expect her to answer and she didn't. She just stood up and retrieved her bedroom slipper, came back to the bed, and jammed it on.

“Why not use the old stuff?” I pressed. “You've never changed it up before. You make such a thing of having a 'signature scent,' you know. It's not like you to start wearing something new.”

Of course she didn't say anything. She just sat there looking embarrassingly thirteen. But despite it all that rare, fortified smile drifted back onto her face. I almost didn't want to look at her. She was such a ridiculous, hopeful little thing sitting there smiling like that when we both knew the joke was up. My stomach roared again. Gosh, I loved Lillian.

I stalked to her bedroom door, then wheeled about. “You two look great together. I'm just saying.” I took a step into the hall, then poked my head back in. “And he's a damned fool if he doesn't realize a once in a lifetime girl when he sees her.”

“Don't swear, Sassparilla.”

“Sorry, but I'm only saying...”

Lillian started to pick at her lip again but I watched her age rack back up: fifteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty-three. “Hey, Sass?”

“Yeah?”

She looked pretty much back to normal now. “The perfume.”

“Yeah.”

“How else is he supposed to recognize me? I'm just saying, maybe...” Pink, pink color ran into Lillian's face and that smile beamed in full strength. “...maybe the scent...maybe it'll trigger memory. You know, if we ever meet again.”

I just looked at her, marveling. Then I smacked the door frame with the flat of my palm and stalked off into the kitchen. I had Bananas Foster to make for a girl who damn well deserved them.

Weaver Birds Aren't My Area of Expertise

Just a bit of writing I did for fun. I feel like I hit my best stride when writing fiction for children, even though I've never pursued that avenue farther than "just for fun." I've been pecking away at this the past few days as the mood strikes me and I figured I would share it with you to help you, in turn, pass the time. Happy Monday, darlings!

An Untitled Story (With Birds)

by Rachel Heffington

“The world, my dear, is very full of things you shouldn't touch.” Miss Crust's voice curled back on itself, purring. She pulled her crotchety old fingers through Maribelle's hair.

“Ow!” Maribelle yowled. She didn't think Miss Crust pulled her hair on purpose, but she certainly didn't not pull it on purpose. That was the point on which Maribelle took issue with her nurse.

“Is it my fault if you got half a jar of molasses stuck in it? Your hair's more tangled than a weaver-bird's nest.”

Maribelle wouldn't know. Weaver birds weren't her area of expertise, though they were her father's and Miss Crust's. Her father and Miss Crust were very well-known ornithologists – bird people. They were the sort of important people other important people came to if they had questions about puffin migration (“Do puffins migrate?”) or parrot-speech (“Just how many words can the average parrot learn in its lifetime?”) or the habits of displaced bluebirds. How Miss Crust went from studying birds to untangling Maribelle's hair, Maribelle didn't know. She wasn't quite sure where her father had picked up Miss Crust. Miss Crust just had always been. Maribelle couldn't remember a time when Miss Crust hadn't been part of life at 34 Bleaking Street. In her earliest memories there was sunlight, plenty of dust-motes swirling glitter-like through the beams, and Miss Crust. Funny enough, there was never a memory of a mother. Just Miss Crust, Assisting. She was very good at Assistance – Assisting Father with bird-work and Maribelle with tangled hair and grammar-work and stains on the fronts of her dresses. Sometimes Maribelle thought she might like to do with a bit less Assistance. Maybe only on Tuesdays, because Tuesdays generally weren't the best day of the week. Miss Crust could be on-call the rest of the time and only Assist when Maribelle really wanted her.

“What happened to my mother?” Maribelle asked suddenly. Miss Crust's finger twitched through Maribelle's hair, not in a surprised way but in a “Dear heavens, this again?” way.

“Died,” Miss Crust answered.

“From what?” Of course she knew – galloping consumption – but it was needful to hear it again, just to remind her that there had been a mother once upon a time. It bothered Maribelle sometimes, how often she nearly forgot most kids had two parents.

Here it came -

“Galloping consumption,” Miss Crust said.

There it was.

“Now you,” she pulled Maribelle upright off the stool and smacked her bottom, “get downstairs. Your father wants to speak with you before he leaves.”

Glad to be free of the dreadful hairbrush, Maribelle skibbled out the nursery door and wandered down their great big staircase, pausing on her favorite steps as she went. Her favorite steps were as follows:

twentieth,

sixteenth,

eighth.

The reasons why were these:

The twentieth was the step at the landing with a peculiar, round window looking out onto a bit of scrappy yard and a trashcan that always had a cat of some color turned upside down, fishing for something inside it.

The sixteenth step was exactly halfway which, as anyone can tell you, is a special place.

And the eighth step was the step whereupon Maribelle's front teeth had been knocked out when she tripped on it two years ago. There had been no other six year old girls missing both their front teeth that year so though it had given her a bit of lisp, Maribelle thought the distinction quite worth the trouble of pronouncing “stork,” “sausage,” and other like words.

Maribelle tromped into Father's study without knocking. She never knocked, on principle. People seemed to stop doing interesting things when you knocked first. It was much more gratifying to throw open a door and see someone look like they'd seen a ghost. Maybe you'd see where they hid those scrumptious chocolates, or maybe you'd hear things they wouldn't otherwise have told a little girl. And Maribelle did very much like to know. Knowing was probably the thing she liked most in the world, besides maybe chocolate ice cream and splashing in puddles barefoot when she ought to have worn boots.

Father sat at his desk, balding head between his bird-claw hands. He looked up as she came in. Pale gray daylight flashed at her off the little round lenses of his glasses.

“Hi,” Maribelle offered.

“Oh. Hello, Maribelle.”

“Miss Crust said you wanted me?”

Father perked up a little and ran his fingers through his hair. Two grayish-black puffs of it stuck out on either side of his head and made him look like a ruffled owl. The top of his head was utterly bald. “Just so, my dearling.”

When he put out his hand, she walked to him and settled her little palm in his bigger one. Hot. Dry. Shaky. That was Father's hand. Not liking to keep hers there very long, Maribelle gave Father a quick smile and put her hand in her pocket where he wouldn't think to ask for it again.

“Been studyin' birds?” she inquired.

“Oh, hrm. Birds, birds. Is there anything like birds in the world?” Father's lenses flashed again and his smile was a little less hampered than usual. He did so like birds.

Maribelle wanted to help him in any way she could to not seem so picked-over and trembly. “Well, Miss Crust says there was a sort of dinosaur way back in the dinosaur-days that flew like a bird.” It mightn't help much but Father might find it interesting, and that would at least distract him from whatever it was he worried over.

“Oh, ha!” Father chortled. “Ha! Ha!”

Like a jay, Maribelle thought. Crisp and short and unaccustomed. She liked to think of Father as all sorts of birds. He laughed like a jay and looked like an owl. He walked like a heron and spoke like a wren in terse, tentative chirps. She liked to watch him and he liked to watch birds. It helped to pass the time in the few months of the year when they weren't bopping around the Congo or Peru or someplace.

Maybe Next Time: Flash Fiction Offering

This week, between hectic days at work, I wrote a short little flash-fiction. I had  thoughts of sending it off into the wide world someplace and seeing if it would catch thirty dollars in some magazine, and then I realized ain't nobody got time fo' that before Thanksgiving, so instead I'm letting you read it. This was a fun exercise in an unusual (for me) POV. And if you're wondering, though the events are fictionalized, the tone and certain facts are definitely autobiographical. This is, in short, how it feels to walk downtown as Rachel Heffington. Ciao, ciao.

///

Here’s the problem with being idealistic:

You always hope. Always. And when things don’t turn out your way, it’s almost pitiful how faithfully you smile and shrug. “Maybe next time.”

And your Experience says, “Yeah. Sure.”

And your Idealism says, “Yeah, sure!”

So this is why you find yourself (having locked your keys in your car by accident in a downtown parking garage) instead of cursing, thinking, “Hey, an inconvenience is just an adventure wrongly considered, right?” This is why you smile expectantly at the next car that passes, hoping they will notice your predicament.

They don’t.

Maybe next time.

You’ve got your purse, though, and your outfit is a power-house itself and there is a Place to Be, so let’s not allow imprisoned keys to set the afternoon counter-clockwise. You shove off the side of your car and swing your purse higher up your shoulder, headed toward the North stairs. The strap catches and dumps the contents of your purse’s outer pocket into the center lane of the parking garage. A BMW purrs up the ramp. It’s either dive for your Yves St. Laurent lipstick or let him run it into a woebegone, cinnamon-colored smear on the second-level ramp.

With the skill of a gold-medalling gymnast, you dart into the path of the oncoming Beemer, grab for the lipstick, and tumble to the other side. The driver blares his horn and throws his hands up, voicing everyone’s disbelief:

“What the heck, woman?”

Or some curried variation of the phrase.

 The horn-blast pierces back on itself as you check: all limbs accounted for. You go, girl. High-heels intact and everything. You smile and wave at the car’s taillights and reach the North stairs unaccosted.

Take the two flights down.

Exit on the quiet side of the street.

There’s a light mist in town. It isn’t exactly coming down thick enough to warrant the umbrella you left in the (locked) car, but it’s going to settle in a fine mesh on your hair, pulling it into damp, clinging tendrils. You had wanted to look especially polished. Well, you lost that one.

Two businessmen round the corner as you approach. You notice the vintage make of the taller one’s briefcase, the slim cut of his suit, the way his pocket-square matches his eyes. The broad set of his shoulders hunched against the vaguely-chill damp; his good hair and supremely wonderful beard. But it’s the compact, razor-burnt member of the pair who gives you a preoccupied smile. You return the expression, knowing full well his heart wasn’t in it. Still, a smile from a stranger is valuable, even though you might have been a mildly pleasant stocks-report for all the meaning in it.

Hurry now. Skitter around the corner, past your favorite restaurant, scents of anise, cumin, coriander, Chinese five-spice, and teriyaki wrapping exotic hands around your stomach. You flip the collar of your trench against the mist and hunger, wishing again for a real, live Burberry and a festive meal with friends.

You slowly pass your soul-mate store, tempting you with blank cards and paper for perfectly wrapping a yet-to-be-purchased gift for a yet-to-be-discovered Someone…dinner party invitations; placemats; card-cases; ink; cranberry-colored tassels. What you would do with a tassel doesn’t matter. You want one. You’ll find a use for it.

You wait for a string of fancy sports cars to finish their intricate four-way stop-sign dance and then hazard your chances getting across the intersection. After all, you don’t want to end up a woebegone, cinnamon-colored smear in the pavement. Plenty of people are gathered around the fountains in the Town Square as you flit by. You know you shouldn’t really stare at the couple having their date in the table at that picture- window, but you can’t help a quick peek. Bad news: they look up at you. The man laughs. His date narrows her eyes. Oh well. You cross again at the haberdashery store with its emblem of the Golden Fleece. Yeah, you’d need the corner market on the entire Golden Fleece trade to afford anything in there, but someday. Someday.

Despite that Place to Be, you pause to view the model in the show-window and your hand automatically slides up this side of the glass to touch his cashmere sweater, to fix his tie, to rest your palm on his chest and inhale the scent of his cologne. Some shop-girl with civil eyes and devastating cheekbones steps into the case and fixes the tie for you. So he, also, belongs to someone else.

They all do.

Maybe next time.

You duck against the mist that has somehow become a rain and press on through more businessmen in tailored suits, more women thinner, chicer, more successful in their careers  than you, skirt a few hopefuls dancing hip-hop to a beat straining from a rattled boom-box. A smile for them all. They don’t notice. Not most of them. But that’s okay. Smiles are cheap currency.

At last you’ve arrived. The sign ahead shines bleary-eyed against the rain and you hush into the simple, glass-fronted shop. Here, it is warm and dry. The others inside blink up against the dampness you brought. Laughter swells inside as you wring out your ruined hair and feel your heart pushing eagerly against your breast-bone. Adventure. Adventure. Adventure, it beats.

“You’re late,” the others say in their several, silent ways.

You laugh and whisper to no one, to everyone, “What’s new?”

“Meet any dashing strangers this week?” a girl asks from the far side of her earl grey latte. In the foam is drawn a plumy feather.

“Not a one.”

She sips her drink. Pewter daylight pings off her French manicure. “Pity.”

“Uh, yeah.”

You order a chai tea latte made with whole milk instead of water and wait as the new barista draws the foam. Will he make a string of hearts or a leaf or the latte-cat you’ve waited for your entire coffee-drinking life? He sloshes the cup across the bar and you catch it, scalding-hot against your palms.

“Thanks.” Then you see he didn’t know how to make the art, or didn’t bother to. Your foam is looking spectacularly like, well, foam…with a careless brown blob in the center. No leaf, no feather, no hearts. Definitely no cat.

Your heart settles into its everyday promise:. Maybe next time.

Carefully, so as not the spoil the art-that-wasn’t, you carry your latte to the corner booth. The booth that’s always empty every Thursday afternoon around four; the time you come. In you slide, down you slip, and even though it’ll come off on the cup’s rim, you swipe on some of the rescued lipstick. You never can tell when you’ll meet with an adventure.

Suddenly, the door jangles open and a swath of damp air matches itself against the back of your neck. Confident steps stride to the counter. The little hairs on your arms stand up tall. Something big just came through that door. You lift your coffee and sip, rotating just enough to watch the newcomer without it appearing to be your sole mission. Italian-looking shoes. Slim-fit, navy slacks. A trench-coat, belt knotted behind. A trilby, for lawd’s sake.

Adventure, adventure, adventure.

He orders black coffee, extra hot, takes one hand out of his pocket and pays for it. As he waits for the coffee, he surveys the crowd in the shop, like he’s a regular and they’re the newcomers, drumming the fingers of his right hand on the polished cherry bar. Polished till it gleams almost as dark as his hair.

Bluffing, you think. You’ve never seen him here on a Thursday at four.

As if he heard that thought, his gaze roves to you. The eyes crinkle and a grin –the best kind of grin—quirks at the corners of his mouth and finally cracks wide open, for you. He gives a two-fingered salute and you contemplate the consequence of trying to vanish into your latte.

“Black coffee, extra hot, for Grady?” bawls the barista.

He grins again, murmurs thanks, and sips his coffee. You decide it should be illegal for anyone’s jaw to do what his jaw just did. And just at the point when you’re beginning to wonder whether he’s a doctor or a lawyer (we can probably rule out Indian chief), he slides into the booth across from you, plunks down his coffee cup, and says:

“Mind if I sit here? Everywhere else is taken.”

You peer around the shop. Gosh, it’s true. You’re thankful for the decision to add lipstick and deftly rub off the evidence from the edge of your for-here mug. But before you have a chance to say anything even mildly intelligent, he takes his other hand from his pocket and clasps both around the mug.

“Chilly out there, isn’t it?” he remarks. Tiny drops of silver cling to his lapels, his shoulders, even his finely-etched face.

You nod, your heart a tiny, startled lump of chilliness itself.

“Didn’t expect it to start pouring like that.” He taps the fingers of his left hand against the mug, wedding ring clinking fatefully, as he stares out at the rain.

So he, also, belongs to someone else.

They all do.

And just like that, your heart begins to chug again, pulling itself back on the tracks, steaming along through life to the rail-song, Adventure, adventure, adventure. Somehow you make small-talk and he finishes his coffee and you finish your latte and he leaves and nothing is different than any other time in your young, long life except that maybe you’ll put him in a book someplace.

For a second, you thought it had happened.

You’re a little ashamed of having thought it was happening. Wryly, you notice how you’ve been knotting your hands in your lap, biting your bottom lip. You stop all that. There’s always someday.

Probably someday an adventure will come your way and the dashing stranger won’t be married and maybe you’ll buy a coat and you’ll find a twenty in the outside pocket and perhaps Diane von Furstenburg will start making dresses in a size fourteen and maybe, you know, someone will give you an inheritance or you’ll go on a road-trip and end up by mistake in a town called Accident. It happens, you know.

You grab your purse, slide out of the booth, and return the lipstick-stained mug to the dish-rack. You wave goodbye to the girl with the foamy feather and step back into the rain, smiling again at the people who don’t notice.

Maybe next time.

And at any rate, there’s still the matter of what to do about your keys.

Flash Fiction: Swing It

As promised, some very-semi-autobiographical flash fiction which I hope you enjoy with your Friday morning! And I do mean "I hope you enjoy it" because I am late to work for its sake. Hurray and all that. P.S. If you ever get the chance, PLEASE learn East Coast Swing. It's the bee's knees. That's all.

\

"Swing It"

By Rachel Heffington

In response to its infernal ringing, Willoughby lifted the receiver of his desk-telephone and grunted into it: H’lo? Willoughby Colbert’s office.”

“Take me dancing and make me forget there was ever a man named Christopher Markham.” The person on the other end of the phone-line drew a few reedy breaths, then laughed a little off-center.

Willoughby rocked back in his chair and peered at the yellowing calendar on the wall. Yep, still 1944. “Sal, that you?”

“And who the deuce else would it be?”

Then it was Salamanca Deathridge, calling him up at nine PM on a Tuesday night after two and a half years of friendly silence. Already, Willoughby felt the buzzing warmth speed into his blood. Sal’s voice, homelike, smoothed glossy paint over all the cracks worn into his soul by the last thirty-two months.

“Rizzio’s?” he drawled.

“9:25. I’m taking a taxi. And I won’t pray before I get in.”

The sharp click on the other end of the line told Willoughby that Sal considered the appointment made: he’d show up, because he always did.  This eternal availability might’ve been because he was one of the only single men not kicking Hitler’s butt in France right now, but Willoughby preferred to think she favored his friendship over those  tributaries which ran dry. He knew exactly which troublesome grey umbrella Sal walked under tonight: the daring, wild, implacable mood of a woman who’d been spurned by someone or another. And he knew exactly how to sooth her, as he had so many times. Sal might go two years without speaking  to him, might not even remember there was such a guy as Willoughby Colbert in New York City, but get her in a pinch and she’d remember soon enough. Adorably predictable in that way. Kinda kid-like. She knew where to come for the real stuff.

Willoughby took his feet off the desk, spun his hat in an uncharacteristically flamboyant gesture, and walked, whistling, out the door, taking care to lock it behind him.

I don’t know why I care. Why do I care? I don’t. I don’t care.

“You got troubles, lady?”

Sal, too depressed to bother with activity, answered the cabby’s question with a non-committal “Mmmfh.”

“It’s just, you’re not looking quite yourself.”

This comment coming from a cab-driver she’d never met in her life caused Sal a momentary flicker of interest. She took her chin out of her hand and moved glazy eyes to the cabby’s potato-shaped face. “What’s that?”

He jerked his head over one shoulder, switched lanes, and jutted his chin. “Your lipstick’s coming off.”

Sal whipped out a compact mirror and saw, to her concern, the man had made an accurate observation. A vibrant red ring around her lips, a non-committal pink between.

“You know, I don’t know why I care.”

“About the lipstick?”

“People.”

“So don’t,” the cabby advised helpfully.

Sal fished deeper in the little net clutch and extracted a tube of lipstick which she proceeded to apply. “Drama!” She flourished the tube. “ Everyone has to have their little pouch of drama, which wouldn’t be so bad if it could be rationed out or something. They ration everything else, you know. Why not drama?”

“Hear, hear!” the cabby pounded the edge of his steering wheel and pulled alongside the curb in front of a small dance-club. “Hey, lady.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know what you’re trying not to care about, but get this: it probably won’t matter tomorrow morning.”

Actually, it probably would matter tomorrow morning. Especially because he’d said that just now, in that absurdly cheerful manner of his. Sal manipulated a sulky smile onto her newly-rouged lips and handed in a fifty-cent coin. “Keep the change.”

“It won’t matter!” the cabby yowled after her as Sal slipped past a group of businessmen headed uptown. “Tomorrow, it won’t matter.”

Sal waved her net bag without turning around and barged through the door into Rizzio’s. A well-groomed attendant took her light wrap and asked if she waited for a companion.

“Seen a long-legged loser come in recently?”

The waiter answered that, if she referred, perhaps, to the gentleman sitting at the bar just there, then perhaps miss would like him to go apprise him of her arrival?

“Thanks.”

The attendant glistened off and Sal watched the old play of familiar figures: the immaculate waiter clearing his throat at Willoughby’s side, Willoughby, thoroughly absorbed in a cup of coffee, not hearing him. The waiter trying again, Willoughby coming-to with a jolt, the soft lights of the bar gleaming on his head of unabashedly good hair. The crinkle-eyed smile was followed up, as always, by the whole six foot-five of Willoughby Colbert extending itself to full running-trim as he found her and came forward.

“Salamanca Deathridge. Two years have done you no harm.”

“And if I’m allowed to hope that you’ve done no harm to anyone in two years, I think we must render ourselves satisfied.”

Willoughby’s eyes ran over her face again and again and she knew he saw straight through the confident lipstick. That was why she came.

“Let’s dance.”

Sal proffered her small, manicured hand and let it rest in Willoughby’s big, empty one. He put his other hand firmly in the small of her back and steered her to the floor where a black jazz band played one of her favorite songs. She couldn’t remember the name of it right now, or any of the words, but let her body sway to the rhythm. She’d missed this. Why had it been two and a half years? No wonder she felt thin and frail and half-starved.

“So who’s Christopher Markham and when can I do the honor of punching him for you?”

They’d gone away for a few minutes, and now all of Sal’s troubles came galloping back to stampede across her mind and leave her exhausted again. She wilted a little against Willoughby’s supporting arm and shook her head. “He’s Dorcas’ sweetheart.”

“Dorcas Bowman?”

“Yep.”

“I thought she was with Donny.”

“She broke that off eighteen months ago.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t have known.”

Was it just her, or did Willoughby sound a little defensive right there? She thought she’d better wake him up a bit. “I was thinking, I ought to throw a little party for all of the old set: Dorcas, Annie, Ben, Frankie, Martin, Priscilla. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“If any of the old set is still this side of the Atlantic.”

Definitely defensive this time. Sal wilted a little further as she realized, barring she and Dorcas and Priscilla, who were nurses in a hospital here, all the old set had signed up for the war in their different capacities. All except Willoughby, who’d been excluded on the ridiculous grounds of asthma or something and now worked in the ad business.

“It’s okay, Sal,” Willoughby was saying now. “Somebody’s gotta stick around to paint Uncle Sam’s picture. ‘We Want You.’ It’s only those he doesn’t want who get the honor of making him look welcoming. I know his best angle. He says I’m his favorite portrait-painter.”

“I didn’t mean to pinch a sore spot, Wills.”

“Aw, I know, kiddo.”

He spun her gently out and brought her back, but it was an empty gesture, she felt. No pizazz in it. And this music was too slow. How was a girl supposed to cheer up if the band kept playing sentimental ballads?

“So what has Dorcas’s boyfriend done to peeve you?”

Christopher Markham of the excellent nose and devastating profile  stalked into Sal’s mind. She gave him a mental kick in the pants as the band wrapped up one piece and started into “Swinging on a Star.” Willoughby’s hands gripped hers a little tighter and she leaned back into his tension.

“Christopher Markham,” she said, “Is a great big bad egg. He’s ridiculously handsome and Dorcas is absolutely ga-ga over him. She’s never home. We make all these plans to meet for dinner and she always forgets.” Maybe it was childish of her to feel cut out, but it wasn’t like Dorcas ever made any effort to keep things up. And they were roommates for heaven’s sake. “Chris is eternally taking her to the theatre, or the USO show, or out dancing. And when she is home, it’s nothing but, ‘Christopher this,’ or ‘Christopher that.’ I swear, Wills, I could tear that man’s eyes out with my fingernails.”

Willoughby cut off Sal’s bad humor by snapping her into a spin and dip. She came up laughing and not half as angry at Dorcas as she ought to be.

“A mule is an animal with long funny ears, kicks up at anything he hears.” Willoughby sang in his shameless way, a little oblivious as to tempo, but thoroughly good-natured. “His back is brawny but his brain is weak, he’s just plain stupid with a stubborn streak.” He wiggled his eyebrows at her to make her laugh, and tossed her to one side, then the other, gripping her close and flinging her away.

The joy of dancing – of being dragged through a musical kaleidoscope and making trails in the notes with their feet –began to intoxicate Sal. The new-fangled Latin dances were all dandy if you wanted something romantic, but for forgetting your woes, for forgetting everything but the easy presence of a good friend, there was nothing like swing. Willoughby was an excellent dancer – one of the best, in fact. Besides, she could always wear high-heels around him – the highest she wanted – without ever being taller than him. And this was a useful thing when you’re over-the-average tall for a girl.

“Still stewing over this Christopher Markham fiend?”

“Who’s Christopher Markham?”

“Atta girl. Any other men bothering you?”

“Men? A bother?”

“It’s been over two years. Can’t imagine a pretty, spunky thing like you’s been spending her time alone. You’re a nurse in a big hospital. Bet every soldier comes through your ward and leaves lovesick.”

“You’re a big tease.”

“I’m being one-hundred-percent honest, kiddo.”

Sal shrugged. “Maybe there’ve been a couple disturbances.”

“Major infractions?” Willoughby wrinkled his nose and laughed. “Anyone need a fist in the face?”

“That’s a little cruel when most of them have  Kraut metal in there already. No, no one needs your charming fist, but thanks.”

Willoughby quieted a little and shook his head seriously. “God knows I wish I had a chance.”

“To fight?”

“All these other fellas.” He spun her again. “And I don’t have even a fraction of a chance.”

She thought he meant a chance to fight. He probably did. Of course he could have meant something tenderer, but Sal was a sensible girl. She knew better than to ruin a perfect friendship by asking it if it wanted more. They danced closer to the band and, Sal imagined, made all the other couples jealous with their unaffected happiness.

“And you, Wills?”

He tilted his head down to look her in the eye. “What about me?”

“Girls?”

The gaze lifted. “Nah. Too busy.”

Sal could translate: “I can’t fight so I’m not worthy of any woman.” That’s what that meant. She backed them off the dance floor as the song finished and rested her hand with purpose on Willoughby’s arm. He flinched a little as if even that was too good for him but Sal stayed with him and felt his pulse under her touch.

“Wills, you are valuable.” She gave him one of her best, most encouraging smiles.

He laughed, as he always had, like it couldn’t be true but that he was glad she’d said something. “Hey, Sal?”

Another whole-hearted smile. “Yeah?”

“I think you’ve got some lipstick on your tooth.”

It didn’t bother Sal how she looked in Willoughby’s presence.  He was too familiar for that. All the same, blood shot to her face and shame – though she was unsure why – flooded to her fingertips. She growled savagely and swiped at her teeth.

“It’s probably because,” she protested, “I put it on in a dark cab with an impertinent driver looking on.”

Willoughby tossed his head, laughing the old laugh that forgot itself. “C’mon, goober. Let’s dance.”

He tugged her out to the floor and she followed, slipping past a young woman in evening dress who had stepped to the front of the band to sing. Willoughby looked back to smile at the girl appreciatively. Sal laughed in his face.

“What about her, Wills?”

His eyebrows shot up. “You’re not suggesting I pick up a chorus girl?”

“She’s an entertainer, and a looker to boot.”

“You’re horrible, Sal.”

She shrugged, pleased with herself. “I know.”

The band played a slow, bluesy tune and Willoughby’s arm fit easily around her waist. She was pleased for a slower pace and glad it wasn’t a waltz – her left arm always ached from reaching up over his Alpine shoulder. The room darkened and what lights there were focused on the singer, who smiled a little sadly and slipped into the first lines of a bittersweet, familiar tune.

“I can see no matter how near you’ll be you’ll never belong to me,” the girl sang. “But I can dream, can’t I?”

Her voice was devastating. Tears pinched the bridge of Sal’s nose, unreasonably she felt. Why the heck was she crying? What about? Nothing. Besides, Willoughby always hated that sort of thing.

He continued to lead well. Hadn’t seemed to notice her sudden depression. Bless the man’s obliviousness. Sal sorted through a stack of conversation-starters she might use to distract from this unwanted emotion. She could tease Willoughby again about the entertainer, or suggest he cut his hair differently, or admit to being as tired as she suddenly felt. If she employed the latter excuse, he’d take her gently to one of the cocktail tables lining the walls. He was that sort. A good sort.

“Can’t I pretend that I’m locked in the bend of your embrace?” the woman sang. “For dreams are just like wine and I am drunk with mine.”

Sal’s breath caught like a half-sob in her throat. Good heavens, woman. Collect yourself. Willoughby was humming along now. She felt his deep voice thrum against her palm which rested on his back, and at the next line he broke softly into song, keeping company with the entertainer:

His smile reached deep into his eyes, deprecating even the moment, apologizing for things that could not have been his fault.  “I’m aware my heart is a sad affair. There’s much delusion there but I can dream, can’t I?”

Smile. Say something flippant, but Willoughby spun three times and the opportunity dropped someplace on the floor between them. The bridge of Sal’s nose hurt worse than ever and now her throat was tangled up in the trouble, asking to air-drop an embarrassing cargo of tears.

“Can’t I adore you although we are oceans apart?” Willoughby would sing. “I can’t make you open your heart but I can dream, can’t I? Dream on, dream on…”

The song finished on a sorrowful note. People were applauding for the songstress and Sal joined blindly in. She wasn’t so far gone as to forget what a beautiful moment the silk-clad, sparkling girl had given her.  Then, before she’d had a chance to shirk the memory and let it fade, the band-leader grinned and jerked into “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.”

It jarred against her emotions like fingernails on old stone. Great. The Moment was now cemented in her heart forever by an incongruous set-list. No laughing it off now. As suddenly as Willoughby’s rich mood had dropped upon him it wisped away and he was his old, half-contrary self: a boy’s face and a man’s loyalty draped over six and a half feet of clumsy, good intentions.

“He’s in the army now blowin’ reveille, he’s the boogie-woogie bugle boy of Company B,” they sang together.

Willoughby bobbed his shoulders up and down like a simpleton. “They made him blow a bugle for his Uncle Sam. It really brought him down because he couldn’t jam…and now the company jumps when he plays reveille, he’s the boogie-woogie bugle boy of Company B.”

They finished with a deep dip and Willoughby half-dropped Sal. She squeaked and clung to his arms.

“Don’t drop me!”

Cackling, he lifted her back on her feet. “Just trying to shake that glum look off you. Shoot straight with me now, little Sal.” He tucked his chin and looked stern. “There’s a fella overseas, isn’t there?”

“Now what makes you think –”

They sauntered toward the bar. Willoughby motioned for two glasses of water. “Your face a minute ago. I can read faces.”

“Mmm.” She leaned against the counter. “You’d be a lot smarter if you learned to read books.”

“Ouch. What’s his name?”

“Whose?”

“The fellow.”

“Which fellow?”

“The one overseas.”

She sighed heavily. “Would it surprise you very much if I told you there isn’t one?”

“I’d be confused about your pouty-face.”

“Confusion is yours.”

Willoughby downed his water and viewed her a moment through the bottom of the glass. He set it down on the counter with a careless clack.

“Tell Dorcas I said hello.”

Sal jumped a little, then laughed. Dorcas with her sudden inability to remember any commitment, her protests when teased, her piled-on apologies, assurances of how sorry she was she’d left Sal – again – to her own company. Dorcas with her hideously perfect boyfriend.

“I hate this,” Sal admitted.

Willoughby flung an eyebrow upward. “What?”

“This annoying realization.”

“Which one?”

“That the cabby was right. It already doesn’t matter.”

And because Willoughby understood her so well, he didn’t immediately inquire what cabby. The twenty-piece band, the soundtrack of their incongruent lives, struck up another tune.

“You know what, Sal?” The wry brother-smile.

“What?”

“I say swing it.”

And really, put that way, his was the best logic in the world.