Leaving Eden by Anne Leclaire Page A

headed straight for the water, both of us grateful to be getting cool. Wiley didn’t do any of the dumb things boys usually did, like splash you, or dive under water and try to lift you on their shoulders or swim between your legs, their hands brushing against your tits like being in water gave them permission to touch you in a way they would never try on dry land. After a while we got tired of swimming and we spread out my blanket and sat down. Then I split my sandwich with him. He refused the Coke, to my great relief, since I didn’t know how I’d drink it after his germy lips touched the rim. Then we swam again. We’d been coming to the creek every summer since we were old enough to go without our mamas. Will and Wiley were our only neighbors, and the three of us had played together as long as I could remember, mostly riding bikes or building forts in the field behind their house. Being without Will changed everything, like Wiley was someone new. Course, any fool could see he liked me. I wished there was a way I could switch his deep affection for me with Spy Reynolds’s apparent indifference. It was a mystery to me why things like love couldn’t be equal. Why, when someone loved you, you couldn’t just accept that love and return it in equal measure. My theory was that one person always loved the other more. Even if they were both in love, one person was more the lovee and the other the lover. Like my daddy and my mama.
    I was lying on the towel, conscious of the way my bathing suit was riding up my butt and wondering if I should pull it down or if that would only serve to draw Wiley’s attention, when he started talking.
    “What’re you doing after high school?”
    “Haven’t decided,” I said. “We still have another year of high school.” Of course, I knew all right. Like I said, I was running off to Hollywood. I planned on leaving the day after graduation, not that anyone would be missing me. Certainly not a daddy who’d clean forgotten I was alive. “What about you?” I asked, like I didn’t already know he’d end up working at Chaney’s Garage, fixing cars for his uncle. Just like Will would continue on at Winn-Dixie, where he bagged groceries on weekends. Spy Reynolds and Elizabeth Talmadge and all the others who lived over by Carlton’s Way in two-story houses with screened-in porches would go off to college. Someone like Ashley Wheeler might have the gumption to open a little bed-and-breakfast and hope to get the business of the tourists on their way across to the Blue Ridge. The rest—even the smart ones—would be teachers and accountants, bank tellers and store clerks, and would get married and have children and start the cycle of life in our town all over again.
    People in Eden didn’t have one stick of imagination. They couldn’t picture a life beyond the present circumstance or geography. Mama was the only one I knew who had the capacity to dream.
A person’s as big as her dreams
, she used to say. Her scrapbook was full of actresses who’d come from humble beginnings and transformed themselves into famous stars. Joan Crawford was born poor in San Antonio, Texas, and was once a telephone operator before she became an actress. Her real name was Lucille Le Sueur, which Mama thought sounded like the name of a stripper. Mama said we could learn a lot from the glamorous stars of the thirties and forties. She said those women knew how to invent themselves before people like Cher or that awful Madonna were even born.
    No one I knew had the imagination to dream. Or to even think of reaching for the sky. A perfect example of this was the school play. Just before school closed for the summer, we held a big meeting to decide what next year’s play would be, which was a complete waste of time as far as I was concerned since we all knew it would be
You Can’t Take It with You.
As long as anyone could remember, there were only two plays ever done at the high school. That one and
Our Town
,