Chapter 16 #3
Bumper cars temporarily restored the peace, as both my friends loved violently banging into each other and strangers while screaming.
Then mini golf, which presented the opportunity of taking pictures of ourselves half bent over.
Eleanor won. Then we finally began to see people we knew and flung our arms around their necks and impressed them with our outfits, and Margaret built her way toward six different evenings, making vague but exclamatory promises, telling people we’d meet them at a ride later but not what time.
She wouldn’t let us linger with any of these groups for long, lest they think we belonged to them, cutting us off from alternatives.
She surged ahead through a crowd of strollers and dented clouds of cotton candy, ducking and weaving through the gaps between shoulders, propelled by her infinite store of energy and the sight of the back of some tall boy’s head.
She paused periodically for us to catch up, but once we did, she’d take off again.
Eleanor kept getting bumped and jostled by the other fairgoers.
She had to stop and get out of the way, slowing her down.
She was much smaller than I was and had less of an I’m-coming-through vibe than Margaret.
Eventually, I offered to carry her on my back.
Her chest pushed into my shoulders. Her legs wound around my waist. I felt her hesitate to position her face beside mine.
Instead, she rested her cheek against the back of my neck. Her cheek was hot.
Five minutes later, we reached the fair’s eastern edge to find a spectacular regiment of farming equipment.
I set Eleanor down. Neither of us looked at the other.
Even the possibility of eye contact felt explicit so soon after having her pressed against me.
A hundred or more shining tractors stood in neat rows before us.
Fathers helped their kids up into the hot black seats so they could pretend to drive.
Margaret gave her phone to Eleanor and grabbed my hand, pulling me up onto a green-and-yellow machine.
We wrapped our arms around each other and smiled with our cheeks smushed.
She stood and I sat. I sat and she stood.
I had been absent from the majority of Margaret and Eleanor’s documentation of that summer and felt determined to get a good picture.
But Eleanor was doing the job unenthusiastically.
She looked impatient. She wasn’t pushing the button on Margaret’s phone often enough to capture the in-between images we admired.
Nor did she shout any compliments, provide instructions, or even make any encouraging noises to dissipate the awkwardness of publicly posing for a photo.
In the absence of vocal encouragement, I began to feel we were doing something wrong.
Around us, adult men spoke with salespeople and leafed through brochures about equipment.
A few of them idly observed our posing, looked away.
These machines were being sold and would eventually make incisions in the earth.
We’d positioned ourselves among the instruments of a life different than our own and used them as props.
The rules of my world with Margaret and Eleanor had fractured over the course of the summer, rules that helped to insulate me from larger social norms and the anxieties of imagining how I might be perceived, as a very tall young girl from an affluent suburb posing on a tractor with her butt cheeks out—things I didn’t want to matter.
I felt momentarily lonely and dumb and climbed down.
“Thank you!” I called out in the direction of the saleswoman.
She didn’t look up from her clipboard. As I dismounted, I saw a group of girls waiting to take our place.
They set their drinks down on the ground and adjusted their hair.
Margaret realized she knew them and began an enthusiastic hello process without getting down from the tractor.
Instead, she waited for one of them to climb up with her and began a new round of photo taking, conducted by another of the girls.
Since I wasn’t needed and not in the mood to be introduced, I walked over to Eleanor and noticed that she didn’t look well.
Her cheeks and forehead were flushed, her posture slumped.
The many hours of heat had become too much for her, the crowds, the constant walking.
“Are you okay?” I asked quietly, standing with my back to the tractor, so Eleanor would know the question was private. “Let me get you some water.”
I paid at a food stand while she waited nearby, not wanting to get into line herself.
“It’s a million degrees outside,” she explained.
I nodded, used to being the member of the group who was having a problem and wanting to shield Eleanor from the feeling.
The bottles were soaking wet, just pulled from a cooler full of ice.
The plastic was so thin they crinkled, bent, and folded as we drank.
Eleanor spilled water down her chin and onto her chest. I got her a napkin.
Around us, families were beginning to file out of the fair, their children sticky and tired.
The crowds of people our own age thinned out too as everyone retreated to houses for dinner and an hour or two of rest before returning for the evening.
“Let’s find a place to sit down,” I said, and when she didn’t immediately decline, I turned to tell Margaret, who remained atop the tractor, supremely visible, chatting away, that it was time for us to leave, but Eleanor grabbed my wrist, hard. Then, noticing the strength of her grip, she let go.
“We’re going to lose Margaret when Bea and Olivia get here later, anyway,” she said with an outright annoyance that caught my attention.
Usually, I was the one who complained about Margaret to Eleanor, and Eleanor was the one who reminded me to let Margaret be who she was.
Also, complaints about a third person were an invitation to confederacy, and Eleanor hadn’t openly invited me to anything in weeks.
“Fair,” I said. The knit of afternoon clouds temporarily loosened, and the sun punched through. I led Eleanor into a patch of shade.
“Why is it so easy for you to do what she wants?” she asked.
I gave her a look of incredulity. I could rarely do what Margaret wanted. I’d had to negotiate with my mother just to attend the event where we then stood.
“I don’t mean logistically,” she clarified. “I mean in general.”
“I don’t when it’s only the two or three of us,” I said, a little defensive. Did Eleanor not see me as a person who held her own?
“Isn’t it worse when it’s in front of other people?”
I shifted my weight from one leg to the other. These questions held an accusatory edge I didn’t understand, but at least, at last, for a moment, Eleanor seemed to be speaking to me frankly. My pulse sped.
“I guess I feel like she has my permission. Like I want her to—under certain circumstances.”
Eleanor’s eyebrows, so blond they were almost invisible, furrowed. “What are the circumstances?” She truly wanted to understand. Something about her own relationship with Margaret had gone off-kilter, and she’d come to consult me on mine.
“I also tell her what to do,” I said, which was more a defense of myself than an answer to the question she had asked. The circumstances in which I wanted to be led were when I liked Margaret’s leadership.
“She’s not in charge of us,” Eleanor said fiercely.
Did she want me to like Margaret less?
“She’s not in charge of us, but it’s usually more fun if we let her be,” I answered.
Eleanor and I both knew that from experience.
We knew we benefited from what Margaret did for us, on our behalf, and therefore spared us from having to do.
The preliminary gestures, the establishing tone.
If Margaret drove the car of her charisma, we got to sit prettily in its back seat.
But maybe Eleanor didn’t want me to explain the advantages of our usual division of social labor with Margaret. All our usual divisions were off, warped, and had been since she kissed me. She smoothed the sweaty baby hairs from her face and tucked them behind her ears.
“I can’t be how the two of you are,” she said.
“How are we?” I asked.
“You know how.”
I did know. I knew what Margaret and I were usually like, and I understood what Eleanor wanted me to acknowledge.
“But we’re not like that right now,” I said. “We haven’t been like that for weeks.”
Eleanor had been Margaret’s best friend, not me.
She knew that, and yet she wanted me to say it aloud.
My face burned from acknowledging what I’d lost. Eleanor’s eyes looked both green and gray, a little bit triumphant, like she wanted me to say more, but then she looked over my shoulder, which meant Margaret was coming.
The clouds reknit overhead, sealing off the light.
“I want to eat a cheeseburger,” Margaret said, skipping into our midst. “Let’s go eat cheeseburgers.” The girls she’d been talking to were driving to a nearby fast-food chain to meet up with their guy friends, but they only had one remaining free seat in the car.
Eleanor refused to follow on foot. “Can’t we sit under a tree or something?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Margaret answered. “We could definitely chill for a couple of minutes and regroup before we walk over.” I was going to have to tell her to cut it out with this phrasing. “Mina, what do you want to do?” she asked.
Eleanor looked at me too for my answer. They both wanted me to intervene.
For the first time since the start of summer, I was between my friends instead of outside them, but not because they both wanted to hang out with me.
Rather because I was the third vote. I was the most likely conduit for either of them getting what they wanted out of the next few hours, a position I didn’t enjoy, to say nothing of how little it made me feel loved.