Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,24
market without running into someone who wanted to pass the time, Mrs. Venti didn’t have a whole lot of friends. Maybe not any. I told my aunt Ruth that I figured she wanted to get out of the house at night.
“Getting out of the house is overrated,” said Ruth, putting down a line of cards slowly and then squinting at the result. By my calculation my aunt Ruth hadn’t gotten out of the house for ten years by then.
Of course, Mrs. Venti getting out of the house had turned out to be part of the problem, and was one reason why I was waiting tables at the Villa Venti Diner (“Good food, good folks, good prices”). LaRhonda was the one supposed to be covering the vacation shifts, but she was two thousand miles away on some special ranch for incorrigible girls. Word in town was that she was in trouble, taking one of those trips to an aunt that ended with a secret adoption and a permanent reputation. But she wasn’t. LaRhonda was one of the few girls in town whose reputation was much worse than the reality, so bad that my mother had stopped me spending the night at her house six months after the big flood, although LaRhonda was still allowed to stay at our house.
“I couldn’t let her if Tommy was still around,” my mother had muttered at the sink.
The problem was that LaRhonda always had to be ahead of everybody else. She was sure ahead of me: heels, makeup, hose, padded bra, home permanent. She was the first one to have a little stereo in her bedroom, that she could fold up into a kind of suitcase and tote to pajama parties. She got the first Beatles albums and the first transistor radio. “What’s that?” someone would ask, usually a boy because the other girls didn’t want to give her the satisfaction, and she’d flick the radio dial with her thumbnail, which was painted pink.
So she acted as though she was first to do a lot of other things, too, and she did a pretty good job of convincing people. You’d cut under the bleachers at a football game and there LaRhonda would be talking to one of the seniors with barely a playing card’s worth of space between them. Or you’d see her in some boy’s car sitting way in the center of the front seat. “It looked like there were Siamese twins driving,” my mother said one day when she’d stopped at a light on Main Street behind a yellow Mustang.
I guess I was the only one who knew that it wasn’t what it looked like, that when the Mustang’s driver would try to feel LaRhonda up she would slap his hand, that when the guy under the bleachers tried to stick his tongue in her mouth she would turn her head away. “They are disgusting,” LaRhonda would say, and if you’d heard her you would have known that she was telling the truth. But those guys were angry that she promised something and then didn’t deliver, and so they made sure everyone thought that she’d delivered plenty. I don’t know how her parents heard, but the day after freshman year ended LaRhonda was on a plane to a place where she was going to learn to ride a horse and cut hay to build character, two things I’d learned how to do almost as soon as I could walk. Although come to think of it my character might have been exactly the sort the Ventis were trying to build in LaRhonda. I’d learned to think of myself as not that kind of girl because boys never acted as though I were, and it wasn’t until I was older that it occurred to me that that was because they were afraid of what Tommy might do to them. Which he would have.
“You’re a good influence on her, Mimi,” Mrs. Venti sighed, handing me two of the pink uniforms the diner waitresses were assigned.
“There’s not one of us looks good in those things,” said Dee. “Plus it’s hard to get stains out. Did she tell you you have to take them home and wash and iron them yourself?”
“I like to iron,” I said.
“Save me,” Dee said, picking up a coffeepot.
The women I worked with were hard women, widows with kids who lived with their parents, middle-aged never-marrieds who’d given up on something better, women who wanted factory jobs but couldn’t get them because they paid