Rowing in Eden by Elizabeth Evans

men’s department of Drew’s. Crew neck. Short sleeves. Red and white stripes.
    â€œCome to the kitchen after you see your friends to the door,” Peg said.
    â€œBut they just got here!”
    â€œDid you clear it with me? Have you done your piano?”
    No.
    â€œAll right, then.”
    When Franny entered the kitchen, she found Peg yanking open and slamming shut the cabinets’ old wooden drawers and doors—a number of which did not want to open or close at all because of the summer’s humidity. “Twenty-three sixty-seven,” Peg muttered with a glance Franny’s way.
    â€œWhat?”
    Peg raised a finger— shh —and made what Franny thought of as her “devil face”: one brow cocked high, eyes open demoniacally wide, a look that would have been funny had Franny not known better. Always, in the past, there had been both the mother and father whom she loved, and who loved her back, and the monster mother and father—who maybe wanted to kill her for not doing or being what they wanted. The monsters had been almost transparent, hardto see, a little like ghosts. Now, however, they were increasingly opaque if not yet entirely familiar, and they fitted themselves over the mother and father in such a way that, sometimes, for days on end, Franny could not make out even an edge of a loving parent.
    â€œTwenty-three sixty-seven.” Peg began to rifle through the contents of the purse on the counter.
    â€œMom”—Tim Gleason in tow, Rosamund entered from the dining room—“do you know where this morning’s paper is? Timmy and I want to see what’s at the movies this week.”
    Peg pointed to one of the ladder-back chairs at the breakfast table. “There,” she muttered, and “twenty-three sixty-seven,” and then, “oh!” She gave a derisive snort. “Guess who I saw at Hayes’s, Roz? Cynthia Sandvig! With that thing she married!”
    Rosamund laughed. “So what was ‘the thing’ like?”
    â€œA goop! He sat there the whole time we drank coffee and he had this goopy smile on his face”—Peg produced an imitation of the “goop’s” buck-toothed, simpleton smile—“and he never said ‘boo’ or, ‘Gee, Mrs. Wahl, I’ve heard such nice things about you!’ or anything else for that matter.”
    â€œâ€˜Goop,’” said Tim Gleason. “That’s a new one to me, Mrs. Wahl.”
    â€œTwenty-three sixty-seven.” Again, Peg opened the purse on the counter. “Franny, you haven’t done something with my checkbook, have you?”
    â€œOf course not. And how am I supposed to practice piano with all those people in the living room?”
    Peg waved the question aside, then turned with a smile to Tim Gleason. “You don’t know the Goops, Tim? The girls loved the Goops. ‘The Goops they lick their fingers, the Goops they lick their knives’”—
    While Rosamund and her mother recited the “Goops” poem for smiling Tim, Franny edged into the back hall. It was darker in the back hall, and even a little cooler. That flicker of noise from a few feet off meant that her hamster, Snoopy, was shifting positions as he slept away the day. She drew closer to the cage, its toasty perfumeof animal heat and cedar bedding. “Hey, Snoopy,” she whispered. She pressed a finger against the tiny metal bars of the cage, and stroked the bit of soft, soft fur that poked through. The weekend before, a party guest had put beer in the water bottle that hung on the side of Snoopy’s cage, and, this afternoon, sometime, Franny meant to sneak the cage up to her bedroom for safekeeping.
    â€œHere’s one that’s supposed to be good, Tim,” Rosamund said. “ The Pawnbroker.”
    Tim Gleason groaned. “It’s depressing, right? Why’s your daughter have to go for all these gloomy movies,