Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

She didn’t really spend all that time studying. She drifted from her books to the windows to the kitchen cupboards, eating whatever Mamie had left for her almost at once, and then spooning things out of expensive jars from the delicatessen (only enough so that no one could ever tell) and ferreting out the forgotten ends of packets of cakes and biscuits and nuts. She made herself comfortable with her bare legs up over the back of the collapsed chintz sofa, hanging her head down to the floor to read Becky's copies of Honey and 19. In fact, she took possession of the lovely weather-washed old house with a lordly offhandedness that she never felt when the others were around. She ran herself copious baths perfumed with borrowed Badedas in the old claw-foot tub with its thundering taps. She tried on Mamie's lipstick and Becky's clothes. She browsed through the boys’ bedrooms with their drawn curtains and heaps of sandy beach gear and frowsy smells of socks; she experimented with their cigarettes and once, for a dizzying hour, lost herself over a magazine of stunningly explicit sex- ual photographs she found stuffed down between one bed and the wall. (She didn’t know whose bed it was, and the next time she felt for the magazine it was gone.) She sat in a deck chair on the sagging picturesque veranda whose wood had been rainwashed to a silvered gray, drinking Campari in a cocktail glass with a cherry from a jar and a dusty paper umbrella she’d found in a drawer; afterward, she cleaned her teeth frantically and chewed what she hoped were herbs from the garden so that no one would smell alcohol on her breath.

Once, after about an hour of this kind of desultory occupation, she happened to glance up through the open French windows from her dangling position on the sofa and was smitten with horror: she had been sure that they had all gone to the beach, but there was Tom, stripped to the waist, cutting the meadow of long grass behind the house with a scythe, working absorbedly and steadily with his back to her. Tom was particularly frightening: moody like his father, skeptical of the family charm, dissenting and difficult. Actually, he was the one whom Gina chose most often for her fantasies, precisely because he was difficult; she imagined herself distracting, astonishing, taming him.

Appalled to think what he might have seen of her rake's progress around his mother's house, she scuttled to her bedroom, where she spent the rest of the long day in what amounted to a state of agonized siege, not knowing whether he knew she was there, paralyzed with self-consciousness, avoiding crossing in front of her own window, unable to bring herself to venture out of her room even when she was starving or desperate to use the loo. Tom came inside-perhaps for lunch, or perhaps because he’d finished scything-and played his Derek and the Dominoes album loudly, as though he believed he had the house to himself. Gina lay curled in a fetal position on the bed, worrying that he might open the door and find her, but worrying, too, that if he didn’t find her, and then learned that they had shared the house for the whole afternoon without her even once appearing, he might think her-whom he barely noticed most of the time- insane, grotesque.

She wept silently into her pillow, wishing he’d leave, and at the same time mourning this opportunity slipping away, this afternoon alone in the house with him, which was, after all, the very stuff of her indefatigable invention. They might have conversed intelligently over coffee on the veranda; she might have accepted one of his cigarettes and smoked it with offhand sophistication; he, surprised at her thoughtfulness and quiet insight, might have held out his hand on impulse and led her off on a walk down among the dunes. And so on, and so on, until the crashing, inevitable, too-much-imagined end.

When Gina was at her unhappiest during that long fortnight, she wanted to blame her mother, and for short passionate private sessions she allowed herself to do so. Her mother had been so keen on her accepting Mamie's invitation, ostensibly because she was worried that Gina was studying too hard but really because of a surreptitious hope, which had never been put into words, though Gina was perfectly well aware of it, that Gina might get on with Mamie's boys. “Get on with”: it wouldn’t have been, not for her mother, any more focused than that, a vague but picturesque idea of friendly comradeship, the boys coming, through daily unbuttoned summertime contact, to appreciate Gina's “character,” as her mother optimistically conceived of it. Boys, her mother obviously thought, would be good for Gina. Apart from anything else, they might help to make her happy. But it would be disingenuous to make her mother solely responsible: when the holiday had been suggested, Gina had not refused. And this could only have been because she, too, had held out hopes, less innocent ones even, which appeared, in the event-as she should have known they would-to have been grotesquely, insanely, and characteristically misplaced.

There came another day of rain. At the end of a long afternoon of Monopoly and a fry-up supper, Mamie was suddenly visibly afflicted with panic like a trapped bird, shut up alone with her charm and a brood of disconsolate young ones, in the after-aroma of sausages and chips. When she proposed a surprise visit to friends who had a place twenty miles along the coast, she hardly paused to press Gina to join her, or Josh, either, who was building card houses on the table and said he didn’t want to go. She and Becky and Tom and Gabriel set off with a couple of bottles of wine, some dripping flowers from the garden, and a palpable air of escape in their voices as they called back instructions and cautions, Tom shaking the car keys out of his mother's laughing reach, refusing to allow that she could manage his old car, which needed double declutching.

Gina was going home the next day. Mamie would run her into town to catch the train. Probably that was the explanation for the comfortable flatness she felt now; it didn’t even occur to her to mind that Josh had stayed. She knew with a lack of fuss that it had nothing to do with her; he had stayed because he didn’t feel sociable and because he had become idly fixated on a difficulty he was having with the card houses. The sound of the car driving away dissolved into the soft rustle of the rain, beneath which, if she pushed her hair back behind her ears to listen, she could also hear the waves, undoing and repairing the gravel of the beach. When Gina finished putting away the dishes, she sat down opposite Josh, watching him prop cards together with concentrating fingers; she was careful not to knock the table or even to breathe too hard. They talked, speculating seriously about why it was that he couldn’t make a tower with a six-point base; he had built one right up to its peak from a three- and a four- and a five-point base, but for hours he had been trying and failing to do a six. Josh had a curtain of hair and a loose, full lower lip that made his grin shy and somehow qualified. There was silky fair beard growth on his chin. He was gentler than his brothers, and had a slight lisp.

There was a second pack of cards on the table, rejected for building towers because the corners were too soft. Gina picked it up and fiddled with it on her lap without Josh's noticing. The six-base tower came down with a shout of frustration, and Josh washed his hands in the mess of cards.

D’you want me to show you a card trick? Gina asked.

O.K., he said. Anything. Just don’t let me begin another one of these.

Actually, I’m not going to do it, she said. You are. Put those cards out of the way. We’ll use this older pack. It feels more sympathetic.

He was amiable, obliging, clearing the table, his eyes on her now, watching to see what she could do.