Twilight Girl - Della Martin

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and raged his protest vainly, ignored in his protests by Dad, who now had a son to be buddy to. For above all that was sacred, Eddie Harris Senior believed fervently in his mission as Father, the Pal. So that After Eddie, there came to Lon the life-vital need to be more a boy, more a pitcher, more, more—until the gentle swelling under the smudged T-shirt proclaimed the odds insurmountable, the competition too heartlessly stacked against her. So that now Dad had Eddie, and L.A., not Brooklyn, had the Dodgers. And Lon had the Island, discovered in reverie between her twelfth and thirteenth years—the undetermined pin-point in the Pacific to be peopled with a painstakingly selected population. Excluding the Harrises, one and all. Except Lon.

      “People are noticing the way she runs around, Dad.” Her mother’s flute-pitched lecture on the state of the beltline of Lorraine Harris’s jeans was usually channeled through a neutral source. “You’d think if she has to dress like a hooligan, she could at least recognize where God put her waistline!”

      The voice-sound blended with the whine in Lon’s head. Shut up! Just shut up and let me go.

      “It could be worse.” Dad apologizing for her again. “She could be painting her face like a barn and staying out late with boys. Am I right, Lonnie?”

      Lon nodded yes to the milk glass. And when it was over once more, she washed and dried the dishes mechanically, then closed the door of her room behind her.

      The room, like the rest of the new gingerbread-tract house, was furnished in an abortive maple—rag-rug—pepper-grinder—lampbase attempt to resurrect old New England in new Los Angeles suburbia. But the Polynesian masks Lon had whittled from fallen dried palm fronds were her own. The draped fishnet and cork floats were hers. And the papers she took reverently from the bottom desk drawer belonged to a world that none other traveled, except by invitation of the fertile mind. Carefully she chose them, the residents of this unsurveyed microcosm of her fantasy.

      She passed quickly over the world map, the South Pacific circled in red crayon and marked: In This General Area. Nor was there need, this evening, to review the List of Supplies (fish-hooks, canned milk, thread, pencils, paper)—some day to be alphabetically arranged, but scrawled now in green ink. And no time for the Sacred Rites of —— (name of Island to be selected when we arrive). No interest now in the Secret Incantations, lists, charts, schedules, village layouts, codes, rules, menus, constitution, cultural and recreational plans—or the notebook devoted to Ideas on How to Get There, including:

      A. Boat (Check costs)

      B. Where to Sail From

      C. Knowledge of Sailing (Find someone who knows about it)

      With none of these details was Lon Harris concerned on this evening of the last day of school in June. From the imposing sheaf of papers she pulled the list of proposed inhabitants. For reasons she had never considered, accepting the fact as casually as she chose a gray sweatshirt over an eyelet embroidered blouse, none of the names recorded was male. Under the heading LON HARRIS, HIGH PRIESTESS was another name she had added to the roll call early in the second Junior-year semester. With a surge of something inside her that had wavered before friendly Dalmatian eyes, she picked up a ballpoint pen and traced a question mark after SECOND HIGH PRIESTESS. Then grimly, her revenge tempered by the solemn responsibility of her ritual, she drew a line through the name of Netta Chamberlin. And in that moment, the sound in her head that was not a sound abruptly stopped.

       2

      LUIGI’S Drive-In jumped with cars. The cars jumped with kids and the kids’ radios jumped with the beat of Fabian’s mixed metaphor:

       I’m your tiger, you’re my mate!

       Hurry up, buttercup, and don’t be late!

      Lon turned off the ignition and waited in the old Plymouth, wondering why she had come here alone, where no one came alone. Not knowing what she waited for on the outer edge of the parked cars. Still, a lonely voice inside was telling her she had pulled into Luigi’s because this was one of the restless evenings when the Island was not big enough to hold her, and where else was there to go? So she had come where the music jumped and the cars bulged with kids delirious with the prospect of three undisciplined months spreading out before them.

      Jumping, too—with menus for the heap with blinking headlights, and a tray of Luigi-Burgers and malts for the gang in the dago-ed Ford—was a curved and compact doll, all five feet of her crammed into the Air Force blue slacks and vivid red bolero that identified a Luigi car-hop. Her face was buried somewhere beneath layers of pinkish pancake. Yet Lon was certain that under the thick make-up, the girl’s complexion would be genuinely pink and white. Mascara-weighted lashes fluttered provocatively over lavender-blue eyes that, like the rest of her, were round. For her face was round, the breasts that strained against the scarlet monkey jacket were round, and her hips in the tight gabardine slacks were just wonderfully round. Too, she had a round button nose. Her mouth, when she was not smiling to reveal even white teeth, formed a perfect O. And under the round gray-blue cap, her face was a pretty pink moon.

      But the hair, Lon thought. The hair out of some technicolor nightmare, untamed by the required hairnet and falling midway between the girl’s chin and shoulders, assaulting the eyes with a shade that hovered between lavender and violet.

      And it was, “Hey, you, Vi’let!” that the boys howled from the parked cars. “You with the purple mop!” “Wha’ hoppen’ ta the ketchup fer my fries?” Roaring like the tiger looking for its mate: “Is it purple all over, Vi’let?” “Prove it, honey. I only want the facts, man!”

      The girl replied with winks, responded with smiles. And the boys who asked for proof were rewarded with sidelong glances. She gloried in her upstage role and Lon thought, she’s not beautiful. Not actually beautiful. But she acts as if she is and so nobody can be sure she isn’t.”

      Not actually beautiful, but seeing the girl through the girl’s round eyes, Lon shivered a little, felt her tongue turn to balls of wool as Vi finally got around to the old tan crate in the back row.

      “Hi. Sorry it took so long.” She shoved an oversized menu at Lon.

      “It’s okay. No hurry.” Lon pretended to study the glossy card.

      “They sure give me a hard time about my hair,” the girl complained proudly. Wrinkling the little round nose, pleased with the hard time. Her voice was coarse and she spoke with a practiced attempt at sexy intonation. Lon felt an unaccountable swell of disappointment.

      “I notice.”

      “At first Luigi said to let it grow out natcherl or blow. The crust! I said he could take his lousy job an’ shove it. One night, on’y one night I worked with it like this and he’s beggin’ me to leave it alone. Guys come around jest to see me an’ don’t he know it!”

      The girl studied Lon while speaking, looking Lon over carefully. Faded red of the cotton T-shirt, mostly. Sizing me up as a weirdo, Lon told herself. And said aloud, “It’s very pretty.”

      “I bleach it first an’ then I put on this stuff I mix myself. Jest food coloring, that’s all it is. Red an’ blue. Holy Jeez help me I ever get caught in the rain, huh?” She laughed, catching Lon’s eyes with the lavender-blue discs and holding them uncomfortably long. “It goes with my name. My name’s really Vi’let. You dig?” She was quiet then, waiting for her order, staring in a strange, knowing sort of way.

      Muscles tightened under the red shirt, a spasm of remembering for no special reason the agony of undressing in the gym locker with perspired, perfumed bodies crowding her against the steel cabinets, the gagging, hot-faced bewilderment of her own nakedness and theirs. “It’s sharp. I mean, it goes together.”

      A horn sounded and the girl spoke again. Under the heavy black lashes, the pastel eyes looked vaguely amused. “Listen, I gotta go. What’ll

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