Alexandra the Great
I spent five hours with Casey the next day, and seven the next, and as the long summer days ran on it became easier to count the hours we were not together.
She proved to be a quick study on the kayak but I still sat in back, where I could take over if things got dicey. She liked to go fast. We’d be floating along, lazy and destinationless, and she’d shout, “Let’s do warp speed!” and we’d fly, enjoying a windblown rush for a minute until we inevitably knocked paddles and collapsed into laughter.
I showed her my favorite spots on the lake. The flat, sunny rock at Meriwether Point, where I’d always picnicked alone, and shady little Jade Cove, where tiny fish tickled your ankles and there was a downed pine tree that made a good, bouncy diving board.
One day I took her to Clark Beach on the North shore. We ate cheese-and-sourdough sandwiches and drowsed in the sun, and it would have been another perfect day if I wasn’t slightly on edge, worrying that Pauline Knowland and her pack of blow-dried minions would show up. I hadn’t taken Casey anywhere so public before. But Pauline didn’t come. She spent most of her summer afternoons at the mall or at Pinecrest Lake Beach, where there was more action. Action was in short supply around Coeur-de-Lune.
Sitting behind Casey in the kayak day after day, I got to know the pattern of freckles on her shoulders. She didn’t brush her hair before we met by her dock each morning so the back rose up in a snarled mat, revealing the flipped-up size tag of her purple bathing suit.
Freckles on pink skin, a tangle of red hair, an upside-down Jantzen Swimwear size six label: these are the strongest visual memories of that summer before high school.
I had a journal my dad gave me when I was seven, a puffy pink thing with A Girl’s First Diary on the cover in gold script. I hid it inside a hollowed-out copy of Silas Marner on my bottom bookshelf, and concealed the key in a mint tin in my third-best church purse.
I wasn’t a dedicated diary writer. My entries were sloppy and I sometimes went weeks without turning the key in the little gold lock. But on June 13, seven days after I met Casey, I wrote:
A summer friend. Ariel. She’s...disarming.
TGTBT
Disarming. (One of my PSAT words.) TGTBT. Too good to be true.
The acronym—such an obvious attempt to sound like other fourteen-year-olds—wasn’t the most pathetic part. It’s that I was afraid she’d vanish if I wrote her real name.
It’s not that I didn’t think she liked me. I knew she did. I made her laugh, not polite laughs but snorty diaphragm laughs. I didn’t talk much about my life at school, but my family was safe material. I told her how my dad and I once secretly replaced the gritty homemade apricot fruit leather in my mother’s charity care packages with Snickers bars. How he always saluted me if we met in the upstairs hallway, because of my vaguely military cargo shorts.
“You’d like my dad,” I said.
We were swimming in Jade Cove, floating on our backs, Casey in her purple one-piece, me in my loose black T-shirt and underwear, once again pretending I’d forgotten to bring a suit. I’d carefully rolled up my shorts in a towel and set the bundle on a rock, far from the water.
Disarming. She had disarmed me. I rarely separated myself from the charm I kept in my pocket, but for her I did. I wasn’t ready to tell her about it, though.
“Would he like me?” Casey said, eyes closed, arching her back to stay afloat so her stomach made a little purple island. The skin on her nose was bright pink, and the freckles there merged closer every day.
“Definitely.”
“Hey. Why do you always wear them?”
“Hmm?”
“Your cargos. I’ve never seen you in anything else. Not that I mind.”
“I just like them. The pockets are good for collecting things. Hey, I have oatmeal cookies in my backpack. Are you hungry?” I splashed over to the beach.
* * *
Two weeks into summer we still hadn’t met each other’s parents. We rendezvoused at Casey’s dock every morning and stayed on the water all day.
I said my mother got on my nerves and Casey accepted this. She kept me out of her house, too, telling me her mom wanted to fix the place up before inviting me over.
“She’s dying to meet you, though,” she said. “She just wants to get the house done first. She was mad you saw it before it was finished.”
“Does this mother of yours really exist?” I teased. I could tease her by then.
“She’s in some kind of retro homemaking phase. Yesterday she drove all the way to Twaine Harte for an antique firewood holder. I just hope she puts up my bedroom curtains before she gets bored with antiquing and moves on to rock climbing or whatever.”
Casey scattered crumbs like this about her mother all the time. I stored them up, greedy for more. I was as fascinated by her fond, indulgent tone of voice as I was by the composite picture they created of this person I hadn’t met yet.
On June 26 I wrote in my diary:
Ariel’s mother—Alexandra Shepherd
Only 36.
+ Once a card dealer in Reno.
+ Makes lots of $ off her art. Scandalous art?
+ Let her boyfriends sleep over til Casey asked her not to.
= Exact opposite of Ingrid Christie
* * *
One afternoon in late June, as I was showing Casey how to make a hard stop-turn in the kayak, I got an official nickname, too.
“Slow down, Pocahontas, I didn’t quite get that,” she said.
Pocahontas. The four syllables were a sweet drumbeat in my head for the rest of the day. Casey had sort of called me Pocahontas the first day we met. But this was different. I’d never been given a nickname by a friend.
When I left her dock a few hours later, she sat on the edge to see me off, legs dangling over the silvery-gray wood. I was late for dinner and was already paddling hard when she called out, feet now churning the water, “I almost forgot, come early tomorrow. My mom wants you for breakfast.”
I showed off my stop-turn. “Really?”
“The house is done so she wants to meet you. Nine, okay?”
I hadn’t planned to say it out loud. I was giddy from the day, the breakfast invite, and my diary name for Casey just slipped out at the last second. “Okay. Goodbye, Ariel.”
But when I felt myself saying it I got shy, and her nickname came out so soft it got lost crossing the water.
“What?”
I gathered my courage and repeated it, louder this time. “I said, goodbye, Ariel.”
She stilled her legs and tilted her head, considering. Then she grinned, kicking out a high, rainbowed arc. “I love that.”
As I started to paddle away again, Casey pulled the Disney figurine off the nail by her legs and waved it.
“Twins,” she yelled. Then she set it on her shoulder and made a goofball face.
I smiled all the way home.
But in my diary that night, I wrote:
65 days til school. Wish there were zeros at the end. Infinite zeros. 00000000000000000000
Before I slipped the diary back inside Silas Marner, I filled in the string of zeros, making each oval into a sad face.
It’s not that I thought she’d instantly transform on September 2. Change into someone cruel, from a fourteen-year-old who could still make dumb jokes about Disney princesses into a sneering wannabe grown-up like some of the high school girls I’d observed. I knew she was better than that.
It’s just that she didn’t know what a machine school could be. I’d already been processed through the machine, because our town was so small sixth through twelfth were in the same building complex, the high school separated only by a covered walkway. My reputation as Sister Christian had already traveled down that walkway, I was sure of it.
And the machine had decided that I didn’t deserve a friend.
I had this fantasy that Casey would say she wasn’t going to CDL High after all, that her mother would have an overnight religious conversion and send her to the Catholic girls’ school four towns over. It would solve everything, and it wasn’t completely ridiculous. I knew all about her mom’s impulsive nature. If I scattered some pamphlets about St. Bridget’s and maybe some enticing religious icons on her futon, I could probably make Catholicism her next obsession.
But even if I could pull it off, judging by what Casey had told me, her mother would end her fling with the Lord long before first-day registration.
Casey was definitely bound for CDL High.
It was bad enough, worrying about the time limit on Casey’s friendship. Then I met Alex.
* * *
The morning of the breakfast, I wore my hair loose, and though I wasn’t willing to alter my Ziploc-inside-cargos arrangement on my bottom half, I went fancier on top, with a light blue peasant blouse. It was the one nice shirt I owned that was sufficiently baggy.
Halfway across the lake I could see them waiting for me on their dock. Both of them short, with bare legs. Both with sun glinting off their red hair.
But as I got closer I could spot the differences between them. Casey’s hair was shoulder length and bone straight; her mother’s fell in spirals past the waist of her cutoffs. Casey was sturdy and slightly bowlegged, giving the impression that she was firmly planted on the ground. Her mother, though no taller, was fine-boned. All jumpy vertical lines. Alexandra was like Casey, made with more care. And though she was thirty-six, she could have passed for a college girl.
She reminded me of one of the redheads in my European art book, a full-page print I’d tried (unsuccessfully) to copy. Not the woozy Klimt lover, who looked like she’d been folded to pack in a trunk. I liked this painting better: a modern Russian oil of a young auburn-haired dancer surrounded by chaotic brushstrokes, her eyes defiant, her arms so fluttery they seemed to disturb her painted background. That’s what Alexandra was like.
“Need help?” Alexandra darted across the dock as I tied up. To Casey she asked, wringing her hands, “Does she need help?”
“She’s fine, Mom. Laura’s a pro.”
I climbed up the ladder, self-conscious under her steady gaze. When I tried to shake her hand she pulled me in for a hug, speaking close to my ear. “Alexandra Shepherd, but call me Alex, of course.”
My dad’s version of a hug was one palm rapping me on the back like I was choking on a chicken bone, and my mother limited her displays of affection to awkward shoulder pats.
This was a full-body squeeze, and the force of it, coming from someone so little, unnerved me. When she finally let go she didn’t really let go. She only leaned back, still so close I could count the freckles on her nose. She didn’t have as many as Casey.
“Laura,” she said, cupping my jaw in both warm hands.
“Mom.”
“Oh, I’m just excited. Your first friend in the new town. I’m sorry, Laura.”
“It’s okay.”
It wasn’t exactly okay, though. I didn’t know where to look. She still had both hands under my chin and her gray eyes were darting and circling, scanning my features.
“Careful, Laura, she wants you to sit for her. When she analyzes someone’s face like that, she’s making plans. And it sucks, believe me.”
“You caught me.” Alex dropped her hands and stepped back. “Laura, you’re welcome here anytime.”
Some people pronounced my name Low-ra, and some people said Laah-ra, and neither was correct. It was just Laura, standard pronunciation.
Alex said it like there were three syllables, not two, adding a breathy cascade within the vowel. Lau-aura. She said it like a declaration, like I couldn’t possibly be anyone else, and like meeting me confirmed that I was just as wonderful as Casey had said.
“I’m starved and you’re freaking out my friend.” Casey was already running to the back door. She was barefoot, wearing her purple bathing suit, but she’d pulled on cutoffs for the occasion.
Alex didn’t speak as we walked up the path together, and as she held open the screen door, she watched me closely again, her eyes monitoring my face for a response as I took in the fixed-up house.
She’d transformed it. Newly white walls brightened up the long room and set off the blue of the lake and the green of the pines coming through the small, high windows and screen door. There were the antiques I’d heard about—a circular wooden table and chairs near the tiny kitchen, a deep armchair on a braided oval rug next to the fireplace, and a low yellow daybed had replaced the futon in one corner. But she hadn’t sanded away the marks in the floor from the old bunk beds, I was relieved to see.
“Like it, Laura?” she said, fidgeting with the hem of her white eyelet tank top.
“It’s perfect.”
“You did a good job, Mom,” Casey said from the kitchen table, a croissant hanging from her mouth. “Now can you two please stop being so freaking polite so we can eat?”
* * *
When Alex was in the kitchen slicing an almond pastry, Casey whispered across the small table, “I’ve never seen her so quiet. She must really want to paint you. Watch out.”
“I don’t mind.”
* * *
Alex was more relaxed each time I came over. She stopped saying my name more than the standard amount, and began to match Casey’s description. She did talk too much. She did launch from one hobby to another so fast it was hard to keep up.
And she did want to paint me. I chalked up her odd behavior on that first morning to the overwhelming impression I’d made as a potential subject, and I was flattered.
By midsummer we’d settled into a routine. Mornings I sat for sketches on the back porch, muscles aching, but happy to let Alex and Casey entertain me.
One hot day in late July Alex had me in a stiff-backed dining room chair with my hair in a tight bun. She said she was trying to capture something in my eyes. That I was “an old soul but tried to hide it,” and she hadn’t managed to draw this to her satisfaction.
“You have a... What is it, Case? What’s in her eyes that’s so hard for me to get right? That bit of sadness mixed with... I don’t know what.”
“That’s a neck cramp mixed with the desperate need to pee. I know the feeling well.” Casey was sprawled in the sun by my feet, a paperback of Peyton Place tented above her face.
She read a section aloud: a couple writhing around, monitoring the status of the man’s erection, panting out a play-by-play of their lovemaking.
When Casey wasn’t acting out Peyton Place, making me laugh until I broke form, Alex would lecture us on her latest bird. Her birding mania had abruptly replaced a brief heirloom tomato kick. She’d even invested in binoculars and a leather journal for recording her sightings. Casey and I knew as much about the yellow-headed blackbird as the local Audubon Society.
“Their scientific name is Xanthocephalus,” Alex said from behind her easel. “And the Tahoe basin has lost hundreds in the last ten years, isn’t that awful? Their call is so unusual. Like...a rusty gate opening over and over, and—”
“Oh, my God, Mom. You’re a rusty gate opening over and over. Give it a rest.”
Alex popped her head above her easel. She had her curls piled on top of her head, and a double pine needle had fallen onto it like a hair ornament. “Laura’s interested. Aren’t you, Laura?”
“Definitely.”
“She’s just being polite. Laura doesn’t give a shit about the Xanadu birds anymore and neither do I.”
“Xanthocephalus,” I said, laughing.
“Kiss-up,” Casey said.
“Dang it all, Case, you made me mess up.” Alex had the same laugh as Casey, full-throated and coppery. “Naughty girl.”
A few days later, Peyton Place and the yellow-headed blackbird were replaced by My Sweet Audrina and the dark-eyed junco bird. The material varied, but the two-woman show did not. Alex the flighty. Casey the sarcastic.
And me. I was the audience. Sometimes the egger-on or the mediator. They each tried to get me on their side, and I loved every second of this gentle tug-of-war.
After lunch Alex would wander upstairs to her studio—painting was the one constant in her day—and it became me and Casey again, kayaking and swimming and picnicking until dinner. They invited me for every meal, but I only stayed one out of five times, figuring that this amount would not push my mother over the edge.
I told my mother the Shepherds’ car was used and they couldn’t pry the anti-Christian fish off. She hmphed at me, not buying it but not forbidding me to see them, either.
By August I’d thrown myself into the Shepherd household completely. Without a flicker of loyalty to my own slow-moving, well-meaning, predictable parents.
I kayaked across the lake every chance I got. I spent the night almost every Saturday, ignoring my mother’s hmphs, her narrowed eyes.
On Sunday, I rushed over again as soon as I ditched my church clothes. Paddling hard, like I was racing backward across the river Styx, from the land of the dead to the land of the living.
I wished school would never start.