A Case of Poison Ivy
When Jonathan first brought up the idea of my playing in the juniors’ tournament, I’d told him I couldn’t.
Now that the day had arrived, I realized how much it mattered to me.
In spite of everything else going on that day, the tournament felt like the most important thing in the world now. The only thing that mattered.
I set the three new tennis outfits on my bed. I’d cut the tags off, but I’d held off on actually trying them on. It felt as if, by putting on one of the new skirts, I’d be wearing a disguise, pretending to be this girl I wasn’t. Only maybe today I’d become her.
I chose the white tennis skirt—short, with sassy pleats along the hem and a matching white top.
Of the three outfits, this felt like the boldest and most confident choice.
I’d wait until I got to the tennis club to put it on.
But as I pulled my training bra over my head, I studied my reflection.
Still no breasts to speak of, but I had muscles in my arms and legs now that hadn’t been there two months earlier.
For once I actually liked the sight of myself in the mirror.
I could hear Forrest downstairs running the Vitamix. He was making his power shake to get him through the triathlon. Though Prudence had fixed him a mountain of pasta the night before, he was probably making the same decision I had for his own big athletic event—to go easy on the food that morning.
As I was getting dressed, I looked out the window. A figure in a hooded sweatshirt appeared to be walking toward the lake and the boathouse. When he turned sideways, I recognized that this was Hayward. Not a boy who got up at this hour, normally.
When he emerged from the boathouse, he laid a piece of paper on the picnic table by the water.
From where I stood at the window, it was hard to pick out the details, but it looked to me as if he had set out art supplies of some sort.
He had scissors and something that might have been glue. Also what appeared to be a marker.
Hayward worked in the semidarkness on this project, whatever it was, for a surprisingly long time.
Fifteen minutes, maybe. I needed to get ready for my match, but I had a hard time taking my eyes off him.
There was a sense of focus and determination about Hayward, as I saw him now, that I hadn’t witnessed in the boy who spent his days—as much as possible—reclining in his gaming chair with his hand on the controller and a bowl of Cheez Doodles at his side.
Finally he seemed to be finished with whatever it was he’d been up to. He folded the paper and placed it in his sweatshirt pocket.
He did not return directly to the house. He went first to the row of bicycles lined up next to the house, zeroing in on mine. He took out the folded-up paper and placed it in the basket.
I couldn’t see what Hayward did after this. He disappeared around the side of the house, but when I came downstairs, there wasn’t any sign of him. He’d gone back to bed, was my guess. Hayward liked sleeping almost as much as Regina did.
Downstairs, I found Forrest at the counter in his bike shorts, finishing his shake.
For him the day would start with the triathlon.
But at the moment, he appeared to be facing a different challenge.
He couldn’t stop scratching his arms, his legs.
He reached inside his running shorts, scratching wildly at his rear end.
“Damn poison ivy!” he said. “I don’t know what happened, but I’m covered in the stuff.”
“I’ve got some Tecnu in my room,” I told him. “I’ll run upstairs and get it for you.”
The medicine seemed to help. We sat down at the counter side by side. Like the old days, but different.
“You ready for the big regatta?” he asked me. He didn’t know about the rest of it.
What did I care about the regatta? No one had invited me to be on the Chris-Craft. There had been no pirate or wench or Pocahontas costume for me. I had something more significant to do: the tennis tournament.
“It’s going to be really something when we launch that birchbark canoe,” he said. “I don’t think that thing’s been in the water for thirty years. We made that baby tight as a drum, huh? And if I do say so myself, that outrigger I built is a pretty sweet setup. The kids are going to have a ball.”
“I hope it’s steady enough,” I told him.
That was the nice thing about the other canoe.
You got the feeling a tornado could come and it wouldn’t flip.
I did not elaborate on my experience with the Emersons’ other canoe, the Old Town, whose steadiness I’d become acquainted with from my trip to the island a few weeks back, when I’d spied on him and Brenda.
“Wait till you see the fireworks I’ve got planned for tonight,” Forrest said. “Everybody may think we’re just shooting them off for Labor Day, but it’s about giving you a great send-off too. It’s your birthday next week, if I’m not mistaken. Fifteen! Regina and I want you to go out with a bang.”
I studied his face, trying to find in it some evidence of the person I cared about so much, the person I’d always believed to have cared for me, the man who just this week had confided in me about his failures toward his wife, and all of us.
Go out with a bang? Was that the best Forrest could do to express his feelings about my departure?
This was when Jilly appeared, still in her nightgown.
Then Prudence, who had shown up earlier than usual to help Jilly with her entry in the Snap, Crackle, Pop Bakeoff at the club—a contest whose entrants tried to come up with new and amazing variations on the old standard recipe for Rice Krispies Treats.
She made no further reference to the disclosures she’d made to me about Regina’s dead sister, the secret room. I didn’t speak of it.
To me it was a momentous day, but you wouldn’t have known this from the behavior of anyone else here.
There was Hayward, of course—his odd appearance down by the boathouse in those first hours of daylight.
I’d discover what he’d been up to when I went out to my bike to ride over to the club later for the tournament.
But Hayward was always weird. I felt no urgency to find out what he’d left in my bike basket.
I helped myself to a handful of almonds. This was when Regina floated in. She was fully dressed for once, in one of her Lilly Pulitzer dresses with a pair of matching flats. I figured the festivities at the club had inspired her to get her act together that morning.
I swung my racquet case over my shoulder then and headed out to my bike. My last ride, I said out loud, only to myself. My last everything at Wonderland. As I made my way to the rack of bikes, Regina called out to me. “I have something for you!”
I turned around. She stood there in her little print dress, skinny as ever, of course, but alert in a way I had never seen her before. She didn’t appear happy, exactly, but she definitely looked excited. A person might even have described her as wired. Now she was running toward me.
Regina running. I’d never seen her do this.
“I don’t want this to be our big goodbye,” she said. “But we’ll have so much going on tonight, and then there’s your father’s arrival . . .”
Don’t remind me, I wanted to tell her.
“So I thought I’d give you this now.” She handed me a small package, wrapped in tissue paper that I recognized as having been recycled from a gift someone had given Jilly recently.
“I finished it last night,” she said. “Knowing you were leaving this weekend. Something to remember me by.”
As if I’d forget.
The moment she put the package in my hands, she turned around, heading back to the house. I got the impression Regina would prefer that I open her present when she wasn’t around. Expressions of emotion were never easy for her.
After she left, I stood there for a moment.
I remembered the small folded-up item Hayward had placed in my bike basket.
He’d placed it there and then disappeared.
Like his mother, it appeared he preferred that I open whatever it was he’d put in the basket at a time when he wasn’t around.
Maybe he didn’t even want me to know he was the one who’d left it there for me.
Two unknown offerings awaited my discovery that morning. Which to examine first?
I reached for the paper Hayward had set in my bike basket and unfolded it.
It was a page ripped from The Joy of Sex—an illustration featuring one of the more surprising positions in the entire book.
The image had been altered. In the place where the faces were—the woman and the bearded man—Hayward had glued a couple of pictures around the same size, but cut out from a magazine.
I recognized which one: my July issue of Seventeen.
For the man’s face, he’d substituted the smiling, clean-shaven face of Michael J. Fox.
For the woman, he’d chosen the picture of a girl also featured in the magazine.
From my close examination of this issue (I’d basically memorized it), I recognized this girl.
She was not one of the models. She’d written an essay they published about why she didn’t smoke marijuana.
The least cool girl in the entire issue.
You could have said this girl bore a passing resemblance to me. He’d glued this picture onto the body of a woman on all fours, with large full breasts and thighs, rear end jutting out to meet the penis of the man now bearing the face of Michael J. Fox.
Written across their bodies in marker, four words:
You want to Fuck?
I couldn’t move. I was still holding Regina’s package.
Assuming whatever it was she’d made for me carried a more benign message, I felt glad I’d saved this one for last. I thought of that scene in the Sleeping Beauty movie I’d loved as a child—the Disney version that Forrest and Regina had taken me to at a drive-in when I was little (my parents not being the type to take me to the movies, let alone a drive-in).
It was the scene where the evil fairy bursts into the christening of the baby princess and puts a curse on her.
The good news being that one more fairy remained at the christening that day, who had yet to offer her gift.
She’d chosen to cancel out—or lessen, anyway—the harshness of the curse with a benevolent gift of her own.
This would be what saved Sleeping Beauty.
This was how I viewed the still unopened package from Regina now—as my one chance at undoing the curse of Hayward’s terrible offering.
I unwrapped Regina’s package. It took me a moment to understand what this was, though I recognized what it was made of. Mohair.
It was a piece of knitting, roughly five inches square, made from the yarn I’d seen looped over her knitting needles all that summer.
At first I thought it was some kind of a hat maybe, or a scarf, but this item was smaller than that.
Regina’s gift to me was more along the lines of a pot holder.
If pot holders were made from white mohair yarn.
I stuffed it in my racquet bag and set out for the court.