The Girls' Almanac Read online

  The Girls’ Almanac

  Emily Franklin

  For my dad

  Contents

  Tips for Gardening

  Early Girls

  Suburban Solstice, 1977

  Animal Logic

  Voler

  Residency

  Who’s Got the Monkey?

  The Shortest Night

  Starting from Seed

  And She Was

  Come to Iceland

  Defining Moments in the Life of His Father

  Eggs

  Things We Talked About Smoking

  Community Service

  Never Sicker

  Kindling

  When to Plant, Weed, and Harvest

  The Justin and Matt Show

  The Math of the Fourth Child

  Everybody Has a Boy in Brooklyn

  A Map of the Area

  By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Gone

  What She Was Doing at His Parents’ House While He Was in the Bathroom

  43 Lake View Avenue, South

  Watermark

  In the Pink

  Talk

  In the Herd of the Elephants

  Behind the Vines: A Note from the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Emily Franklin

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  tips for gardening

  Early Girls

  At the gym, Lucy uses a yoga ball to stretch. Large and blue, the rubber globe has teats to hang on to, and Lucy does, all the while envisioning the bright-hued cow who might have the ball as an udder. In the locker room, she doesn’t bother to shower but notices the skin all around her in various stages of sagging and figures herself somewhere in the middle. All of the imperfections—moles and hip-flanking stretch marks, the puckered folds of back skin—all seem wonderful to Lucy. After Matt had proposed, they’d lain still in their swimsuits on the lakeshore with his hand like a map’s x on her belly.

  “‘I love this part of you,” he’d said, touching the pigmented splotch below her ribs. Like something melted, the spot spread each time she breathed out. “I wonder if it will get bigger when you get pregnant.”

  They’d speculated, tried to guess which state outline the birthmark might resemble as her body changed. Propped up on her elbows then, Lucy had looked at the smooth plane of water, watching for fish ripples and feeling her newly ringed finger. Matt had kept his hand on her as they stayed there, paperweighting her as if she might become airborne at any moment.

  When she thought about that day, she could make any of the objects huge in her mind—the birthmark splotch could seem to take over her belly, or the striped beach towel they were on could enlarge to blanket size, but usually the water took over, breaking out of its lake-hold and seeping onto them. The ring never grew, though. Once, in a dream, the diamond band had actually become minute, baby-earring size and then the size of a small-fonted o. When Lucy woke up, she went to the box on her dresser where she kept the engagement ring and checked to see if it still fit.

  On the back deck are the flats of pansies and new strawberry plants Lucy will earth later in the day. She walks past the small bobbed flower heads and tangled stems to the back door, going inside to change into nonathletic clothing, something her mother would call “an outfit.”

  “It’s hard to say,” she says into the phone to Kyla. “I feel like it should feel weird, but it doesn’t.”

  “Maybe you’re just blocking it out,” Kyla says, the slur of highway noise and radio coming through.

  “I hope you’re using your earpiece.” Lucy picks at dirt under her thumbnail and then, unable to flick it out, uses her teeth, feeling the sand grit on her tongue.

  “It’s called an earbud, Luce,” Kyla says.

  “I know. It just sounds gross—like an earwig or something that’s going to bite you or something. Anyway, I think I’m just going with the black pants, white top.”

  “Good,” Kyla says. “You’ll look like a very stylish waiter.”

  At Unveiled, the bridal boutique in downtown Boston, Lucy steps in the door, only to have the sensors go off.

  “I’m not even holding anything,” she says, trying to make light of the loud buzzers and the tomato-shaped and colored lights flaring atop the electronic gate. One of the saleswomen comes with a key to unlock and restart the device.

  When Ginny, Lucy’s mother, arrives with her black binder full of bridal ideas, Lucy tells her about the sensor incident, saying, “It’s like even they know I’m not supposed to be in here.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Ginny says and splays her bridal book onto the counter. “Now, let’s figure out some options.”

  Two saleswomen, “bridal assistants” they call themselves, peck and hem at Ginny’s book, fondle the fabric samples she’s pinned inside, and remark about the work that went into the collection of torn magazine pages, clipped tapestry samples, articles about shoe dyeing.

  One of the assistants turns to Lucy and says, “Can I just do one quick thing?” Without a response, the assistant sticks her hands into Lucy’s hair and fluffs out the matted locks. Lucy is so grateful for the touch that she doesn’t react.

  Ginny nods as if there’s been some conversation that Lucy’s missed. “I know, her hair has always been baby fine. No body—wouldn’t even hold a perm. Granted, this saved her from those giant mistakes some of the girls made.” Ginny holds her hands several inches from her own head as if she’s trying on an invisible helmet. Then she turns back to Lucy. “She looks so nice when it’s just been cut, though. A blunt cut to frame the face.”

  Lucy rolls her eyes; she’s heard the hair speech many times before. She suspects the pale-skin talk will follow, but before Ginny can tell of the way a tan suits her daughter’s coloring, the assistant says to Lucy, “Now, tell me—will you wear your hair up or down for the ceremony?”

  “Actually, my mom’s the one getting married,” Lucy says, which prompts instant fussing from the assistants, who cover up their assumptions by fawning over the bridal binder again.

  They self-correct and distract by saying to Ginny, “Well, this makes much more sense. The designs you’ve picked out are far more suitable for a more mature bride, the closed sleeve for example.”

  Lucy wanders to the garment racks by the bay windows. Unveiled prided itself on being less a store than an elegant town house that just happened to house hundreds of bridal gowns, tiaras, and corsets. Sifting through the hangered dresses, Lucy wonders if her mother will wear white or settle on something more common for the déjà vu bride.

  “How about celadon?” Ginny shouts across the room, holding up a wrap the color of treacle.

  Lucy nods and then, to make sure she seemed enthusiastic enough, nods again, emphatic as a seizure. The gowns are set on the puffy silk hangers that make Lucy think of ballet slippers, trickling ribbons, the old poster she had in her room of a ballerina with torn tights and bruised knees. Shopping with her mother when she was a girl, Lucy would lose herself in the racks of clothing, stepping into the center or underneath the displays. She wants to do that now, not just to remove herself from the tea sandwiches and tiara talk but to feel the cool satins and rustling crinolines against her skin. She imagines sitting under one of the wide bell skirts like one of Mother Commedia’s children in the Nutcracker who suddenly bursts from the fabric folds and dances. Just then, Lucy remembers that the role is danced by a man, and this makes her sad. She would like to have the company of tiny children, huddled around her, tucked into the umbrella of the skirt. She goes to find Ginny in the dressing room and sits watching her mother being buttoned into a cream-colored gown that casts a pink hue in the light.

&nbs
p; “Well,” Ginny says into the three-way mirror. “The color’s no good. I feel like a cheap wine. But I do like the style, I must say.”

  “It’s very popular with our second-wedding brides,” the assistant says. She touches the waistline and adds, “It’s very flattering through here.”

  “Yes,” Ginny says. “I’m small so, you know, I have to be very particular about the cut of my clothes.”

  Lucy likes to refer to her mother as short, since it annoys her that Ginny will say only “small” or, rarely, “petite.”

  “My whole family is short,” Lucy says. In the mirror, she allows herself a glance—she is the same as she was freshman year of high school, dark blond hair, breasts bulbous as eggplants, nearly betraying her otherwise small frame.

  “The women are small, that’s true.” Ginny twirls around. “And with poor circulation to boot.” She holds up her mottled hands, pressing to show how slowly the spot under the skin refills with blood. “But we live a long time, so that’s what’s important.”

  Ginny always connected her circulatory issues with the fact that her mother and grandmother lived past ninety-six, and it never made sense to Lucy, who also had blotchy blues and purples on her toes and whose hands were always cold. The comment, though it is family lore, makes Lucy feel worse, mainly because her mother should have known better.

  “My grandmother always said to marry for height,” the assistant says.

  Ginny instantly looks to Lucy—they both are thinking about how tall Matt was—about his extralong shirtsleeves and size thirteen feet.

  “You look nice, Mom,” Lucy says, goes back out into the living room section of the store, sits, fairly shrunken, on the love seat, and assumes her mother is telling the Matt Story. No doubt the bridal assistants would be riveted as Ginny told of her daughter’s courtship, engagement, and then prewedding widowhood after Matt’s drowning two summers before.

  Lucy didn’t enjoy overhearing her mother talk about it, but she found she would deconstruct the way the story was told—Was the emphasis on their meeting? The beach proposal on Cape Cod? The son-in-law Ginny almost had? Lucy barely spoke of it now, but she found that when she did—to Kyla, or to some old man next to her on the subway who wondered why a pretty girl like herself hadn’t been snatched up yet—she rushed through the beginning and middle of her time with Matt and zeroed in on the end.

  There was the last time she’d seen him, at the ferry port on his way to Block Island, the grease stain he’d had on his shorts and hands from fixing his slipped bike chain that had left a waxy thumbprint on her shoulder, the scab on his forearm where he’d scraped himself on an upturned trowel in the garden. Lucy liked to pick at Matt, look for blackheads on his nose or pluck the stray hairs that he missed shaving, and she found that if she talked enough or if Matt were tired enough, she could dig at a hardened scab for a couple of seconds without making him wince or hold her back from scratching at his skin with her thumbnail.

  She’d wondered about the scab when she found out Matt had been tangled in the sea reeds and drowned. The casket was closed, but Lucy had put her hands to it and thought about checking to see if the scab was still there. The drowning part, or the way she’d watched the ferryboat take Matt away from the mainland and out toward the island where he would two days later die, was the section of their relationship Lucy focused on. Ginny was wrapping it up now, Lucy could tell. She could make out her mother saying something about other fish in the ocean, not even realizing the tastelessness of her expression. She’d said it once before, and Lucy had said, “If there really are other fish in the sea, I hope they’re live ones.”

  Then Ginny usually went on to say something about moving forward, about Lucy joining a law practice in town, maybe. Ginny still introduced Lucy as a lawyer though she’d never practiced, never even passed the bar—even when Lucy took a part-time job at the bookstore café in town.

  Lucy’s interest in being a lawyer had been faint to begin with, tempered by the thought of having a private country practice—a swinging sign by the front porch while Matt’s garden flourished.

  Lucy visited her brother, Jacob, in Connecticut for a weekend of respite after Matt’s funeral. “You can have two more crackers and that’s it,” Jacob warned his toddler, Maddie. “Five,” she countered, her small fist clutched around the Wheat Thin she already had. “I said two,” Jacob said and threatened to take the yellow box from the table and stash it in the cluttered closet he used as a pantry. “Three,” Maddie answered, waited a beat, and raised her eyebrows. Jacob nodded. “Three.” Lucy watched as he lay the tiny squares on the table in front of his daughter. “She’d make a good lawyer,” Lucy said, her arms over her chest, then flapping useless at her sides. Jacob turned to his sister. “Yeah, that’s what Julie and I call it—lawyering. The barter system of two-year-olds.”

  Maybe then, maybe later—Lucy knew she wouldn’t take the bar, wouldn’t practice. She’d only just received her degree when Matt had asked her if she minded spending Memorial Day apart. His friend—now their friend—Justin had a boat out on Block Island, and they were planning on fishing the shallows for the bluefish that invaded the reefs and rock piles. Lucy had agreed—weren’t you supposed to give men their space, show them that you were a self-sufficient woman? Lucy said she was sure Matt would have fun and figured his time away would be impetus for her starting her bar exam studying with nothing to distract her but the sounds of the garden at night. Sometimes Matt would lead her to the window and they’d peer out at their plantings as if they could catch them in the act of growing.

  Ginny had liked Matt. She would say sometimes, since he had been in agriculture, just setting up his own organic farm, that her future son-in-law had grown on her. Matt laughed at the joke every time. Of course, she’d assumed Lucy would marry someone from the law school in Cambridge or maybe an engineer. But she’d watched Lucy and Matt in the garden together, seen them turning the soil, watched them lay pine branches loosely over the broccoli plants they’d grounded to protect them from the late-season snow. As she stamped snow and dirt from her boot soles, Lucy’s cheeks would be cold and ruddied, and while she assumed Ginny, who might have popped by for coffee, was studying her daughter’s mismatched layers of clothing, Ginny was really overwhelmed by how much the outside suited Lucy, how appropriate she was among the curling vines and stalks that bent, boneless, over the swollen zucchini.

  Ginny goes to sit on the love seat next to Lucy and puts her hand on her daughter’s knee. Lucy defends the milk stain on her black pants immediately. “They were clean, seriously, but then I spilled something on my way here in the car.”

  “It looks like milk,” Ginny says and points to her daughter’s white shirt. “Too bad you didn’t spill it on your shirt.”

  “Kyla said you’d think I look like a waiter,” Lucy says.

  “Waitress, yes,” Ginny says. “You do, a bit.” Ginny shakes her head. “Poor Kyla, she’s just saying that because she is a waitress.”

  “Don’t start, Mom,” Lucy says but is glad to deflect the critique onto the nonpresent friend.

  “Lulu, I asked you to come with me today because I kind of needed the support.” She gestures to the assistants hovering by the dressing room. “They’re too much for me. I need your opinion, someone who knows me.” Lucy nods.

  By the dressing room, Lucy inspects the two gowns Ginny is deciding between. “This one has the dip in the waist that I like,” Ginny says, moving her hands across the garment like a game show host displaying a new leather luggage set. “But this one has the boatneck, which I think is very becoming on someone my age.”

  Lucy agrees with this last bit and says, “I think the boatneck works. And you should get it in cream, not white.”

  “Not lilac?” Ginny laughs. “The color of old ladies?”

  “You’re not old, Mom,” Lucy says and touches the gowns again. She wants to touch her mother but doesn’t. Then, right when Lucy is set to leave the moment, her mother—without fi
xing her hair, without letting her gaze wander to the stain on her daughter’s clothes—looks at Lucy straight on.

  “Neither are you,” Ginny says.

  It’s late spring by the time Ginny’s wedding outfit is stitched and fitted. She picks it up from the tailor and hangs it, sheathed in plastic, from a hook above the passenger-side window of her car. In the back of the Jeep, spread out on flat black garbage bags, are flats of tomato plants she plans to deliver to Lucy.

  Along the dirt driveway up toward Lucy’s house—the house she and Matt had only just put an offer on that is now only hers—small lights shaped like Chinese boat hats are still on, confused by the day’s dark clouds. Prestorm, in the hush of the blue spruce trees that back the garden, Lucy slips her feet out from her red plastic garden clogs and sets the clogs by a bag of Nurseryman’s Preplant fertilizer. Far off, eggplant-colored clouds suspend from thinner gray ones, looming bulbous and full.

  Rooting into the loose dirt with her bare feet, Lucy thinks about Matt’s lips, about the way he kissed her first on the side of the mouth and then looked at her, surprised, as if the action had come before the thought. She thinks about what they would have been doing on this day two years ago—were they planting the Early Girl tomatoes that were the first full-sized ones to ripen in the summer? From inside the kitchen she used to watch Matt pick the small, deep red ones, mouth one, and collect the rest in a shallow basket and bring them to the counter. Lucy would have drizzled maple syrup, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon juice on a plate. When the Early Girls were halved and put open side down onto the plate, Matt and Lucy would stand there, staring at the tiny red bluffs in a darkening sea.