Miss Elva by Stephens Gerard Malone Page A

keep popping up in the middle of it all, a dream in which he carried Elva home? She didn’t want to see that Jane was changing from the beloved image of a bare-footed sister, arms caked with sand when she and Elva dug for clams, into something that would take her away. Butwhen Dom fucked her—and that’s how Elva thought about it, that’s the word she used because she didn’t want to think anything nice about him changing Jane, and she thought it with the same intensity as
I hate you
—so when Dom fucked Jane, Elva understood from it that Jane would know life, she’d know want. Haw haw, said God.
    But Oak was just being polite when he asked, Whatcha doing? So Elva scribbled harder and faster and said, Nothing.
    Amos let Rilla have it when he realized she’d agreed to Gil Barthélemy staying with them. As good as a murderer, he said, at the very least a coward, which, because Amos’s illness did not affect his voice, worked up to a goddamned-Jesus-fuckin’-Christ roar when he was in the jug trying to drown out the pain in his gut. Then it was best to keep doors shut, your head down, until his drink du jour, usually bourbon, worked its magic.
    Rilla didn’t care. She was thankful to have Gil and his friend as paying boarders even if Oak didn’t take kindly to her nursing at first.
    “Why do you think?” Elva asked, carrying fresh bandages for her mother.
    “You have to relearn some folks that not everyone wants to hurt them.”
    “Who did that?”
    Rilla didn’t say.
    After Oak first asked Elva to show him her sketch book, she shyly began to sit with him and Gil when she drew. The silence was unnerving. Elva sure didn’t remember Gil being bereft of the gift of gab, simultaneously skittish to be elsewhere and obsessively worried about Oak. For her part, Elva was still trying to understand why she felt like she was going to jump out of her skin. She hadn’t yet even begun to get her head around what people would say if they found out about Jane and Dom.
    “Well, then, read to me if you both won’t talk,” Oak said.
    On the nightstand was a copy of
The Great Gatsby.
Rilla kept it as a decoration. No one had read it, nor could she remember where it came from. Rilla said one of the factory workers must have left it, and judging from that lot, it had to be dirty. At least naughty. She didn’t think it proper to listen to Fitzgerald’s tale about men in love with other men’s wives.
    Jane, who flirted with the idea of changing her name to Daisy, or at least Daisy-Jane, was enthralled by Gil’s theatrical delivery. He made her laugh and Jane liked to laugh.
    “Who am I?”
    “Yes, who’s Gil,” said Elva as Jane assigned characters to all.
    Gil would have to be Daisy’s husband, Tom, but ofcourse, Daisy was really in love with Gatsby. No one had to ask who Gatsby was.
    And Oak? He’d be Wilson the mechanic. Probably on account of the clock business. Rilla could be Miss Baker, although no one could picture her lounging around, playing tennis now and then.
    “What about me?” said Elva.
    “Yes, what about Elva! Elva needs a role!”
    She could be the creepy eyes on the billboard.
    “But that’s not a real person!”
    From downstairs, Amos banged the wall. Guess he must have overheard Gil because he said shut the fuck up about those rich Jews up there. Amos figured all wealthy Americans were Jewish.
    The readings progressed much more quietly over the next few days, the perfect balm for the ache of reality, but somewhere betwixt East Egg and West Egg and Wilson getting it wrong, shooting Gatsby in the pool, the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg watched Jane watching Gil.
    Put up a roadblock and it was bound to happen to one as emotionally hot-wired as Jane. Jeanine Barthélemy wouldn’t stop short of having Jane burned as a witch if she knew where her saintly son had been, and Rilla, well, Rilla would know all too well how tenuous their situation with Amos was. Any scandal and he’d dump them like garbage.