"I'm sorry, I couldn't wait. You were all so beautiful." Mrs. Van de Ven, jostled, backed away from the door, watching. Far-fetched hair, lots of hair, spectacularly flying free of popping hair bands, hair astonishingly clean and glassy. If she could touch it…
"Mother, please, we're all getting changed here."
"All right, all right, all right, all right," and she walked out to where the other parents were waiting with flowers.
Lisa said, "Everything looks like shit to me after my mother has seen it."
Marlene
After the Dance Concert, Marlene walked with Car and Astra and Mr. Dell to the corner. Astra was saying she was tired but happy to be out-of-doors in an unaccountably springlike spell — a spring snap — and she feeling springy, though she leaned against her father. Marlene could not look at him; once before she had been a stranger and now? At the corner the old cut opened: She was not going their way but east, as far east as the river, though she couldn't see it from where she lived. Marlene would have liked to have explained why she stole Astra's mail, but she was afraid. Part of the reason she stole the letters was to ward off being afraid, also curiosity, jealousy. What did Car do for Astra? And the hair clip? The hair clip was to be brought nearer to Astra. It was a comfort for Marlene to hold the barrette in her pocket, the way she might a bit of bone, to caress it and so find strength enough to talk.
A Daughter
"If it's not great sex, and it's not true love, then it's definitely worth my time because how else are you rife with passion and singing with hate all at once?"
Josh said, "Has anyone ever told you, you are a really scary girl?"
"All the time," Lisa said. "So are you interested?"
Siddons
Valentine's Day and Kitty's romantic life amounted to zilch, nada. "All I am doing is counting the days until AP physics is over, and Families in Distress — ha. Oedipus and his brood: our dysfunctional family of the week. I thought second-semester senior year was supposed to be fun." Sometimes Kitty wondered about the Ramsays. Miss Hodd had read the novel with them in junior year; it was one of the books in her elective on heroines. The Ramsays: Were they a family in distress or just a family?
Red sweaters, red tights, bows, bracelets, stick-on hearts, the red streaks of the middle school down the sixth-floor hall were as hectic as the drugstore's cheap displays. The sixth-grade girls had been on countdown since the first of the month, and now here it was Valentine's Day, and Anna Mazur, in pink, was putting an animal valentine on Tim Weeks's desk, this one a picture of a panting terrier with the message: Be my valentine, doggone it! His desk was already loaded with big cards from students, homemade some of them, stickers, doilies, pasted-on red hearts: I'm stuck on you! A rose, already blackened despite the plastic cap of water on its stem. Some Red Hots, some chocolate hearts, a bag of Twizzlers. Tim Weeks, ever the favorite. She had seen less and less of him since Astra Dell had come home from the hospital, but why did that surprise her when beyond visiting the sick girl, they had never had a date? A few weeks before, she had helped chaperone a sixth-grade outing through the Egyptian wing at the Metropolitan. She had kept her coat on, though it was damp from the walk in the light snow that fell through the elm awning along Fifth. "Bear squares" the girls called the paving stones and skipped, and Anna Mazur had walked behind with Tim Weeks — Mrs. Nicholson was at the head — and Anna admitted, "I've lived here three years now and have not once gone to the Whitney. Isn't that terrible?" He said it was and they had laughed when she admitted the same was true of the Egyptian wing. "I've never been. Don't tell the girls." She stood with him in front of the Fragmentary Head of a Queen in yellow jasper. "How sensuous she is." The wonder of it was the way the face was there in full even as they looked at just the mouth.
Her own mouth was a string of pins. He'd never kiss it.
However did Edie Cohen manage to stick a valentine into every classmate's mailbox when she had been sick most of the week? That was the wonder in the senior lounge, as Edie's classmates discovered their "perfect" individualized, homemade, secretly delivered card with her fat script and XXXXXXXX's.
" This might be my last valentine from Edie ever," Krystle said, and she made a tearful face.
Lisa Van de Ven bought herself a pair of silk embroidered boxers with rhinestones, but she told her classmates the gift was from Josh. In truth, though they had talked and e-mailed, she had not seen him since that night after the Dance Concert when, still in her leotard and gauze skirt, she slid past him into his apartment—"I can't go home. You saw it. My mother's a drunk." She invited him to take a shower with her, but he was smoking up in his bedroom — she could smell it — and didn't answer, so she came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her hand outstretched for a toke, and she said, "I've never had sex with a man, but that doesn't make me a virgin." She said, "Do you have something I could borrow?"
He gestured to the closet behind him. "Help yourself."
She sat with him on the floor; she wore nothing underneath his jeans and soft dress shirt. They smoked. They smoked, and Josh got up to put on something she thought he called narcotics, wobbly music that made her sway, but her boobs were bags of sand and her face was doing something ugly. "Oh my god," she cried, and she cried and laughed and cried. "It's all over, I can't believe it, that's the last time I will ever dance on that stage, the last time with any of those stupid people, stupid, stupid Alex Decrow — could you see how we had to cover for her? — oh my god, my boobs weigh a ton," Lisa said, and she went into the bathroom and flung herself into a defeated halter with gymnastic support, and who cared if it was stinky and damp — that stupid stoner Josh was asleep, so where was his hairbrush, didn't he have a hairbrush, where was his hairbrush? "Ach! I look so ugly!" — and she took up a scrub brush he used on his back and banged it against her head. Everyone has an outstanding feature; yours is your hair. Her mother said all she needed was a good colorist; all she needed was Elie at Ishi. She brushed her hair and wondered at her face; she knew who she looked like, and it was not her mother. She's got my hair, at least. Not her mother's color, never her mother's fake, man-made, fake. "I hate my mother!" How much does Suki Morton weigh, do you think?… How tall is that Ufia Abiola?… What does her father research?… All those minorities, you know… Is she Jewish, is she rich, is she smart, is she Jewish, she must be Jewish, she must be Jewish or Asian. My manicurist's daughter is an anesthesiologist. What are you?
"'How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?…the hives, which were people….' That's such a beautiful passage," Car said when she had finished reading it in the yearbook proof of Astra's ad to Car. The picture of them, girls, arm in arm, in bathing suits. Astra and Car had both wanted sisters, had wanted to be sisters, had pretended to be sisters. In the photograph both girls are missing front teeth, but their smiles make out that the world is hilarious, especially to those with secrets.
What were they keeping from Mr. Dell, who took the picture, and from Mrs. Dell, who stood behind the porch screen at the lake house? How prescient that picture now seemed with Mrs. Dell scratched behind the screen. The picture was years and years ago, if Car were being dramatic, and lately she had been very dramatic. "I called my father to tell him I wasn't coming."