Transitions

50 Transitions Lanie heard Jane and Doug drive in and their hushed laughter as they climbed the creaking steps to the porch. She could hear a few words distinctly- "had fun," "like to go," and then a hush again, an abashed hush pregnant with mystery and longing. Lanie lay intently listening, wishing she could capture that elusive silence, a silence like popcorn and cheerleader pompoms and smiling with the brilliant knowledge that you are beautiful and loved. A waft of ripe honeysuckle floated through the open window by the bed. Lanie wondered if they were kissing. And how do you kiss, she wondered. Although an eight-grader, soon to go on to the new county high school and jrimed and pumped by Jane to follow in ier footsteps and become a popular, brilliantly loved cheerleader, Lanie tadn't the slightest notion of how to dss. But then, she'd never had a date, ? grade school, before acne and the awkwardness and rapid growth of adolescence, she'd had a boyfriend, at least a boy who wrote his and her initials together and "Love" and who waved goodby to her before she caught the bus. But how did one kiss? It seemed an almost insurmountable, unsolvable mystery -how to become a woman when you weren't much more than an ugly, too-tall kid. Lanie heard "Good Night" and the rattling of the door as Jane opened it and then the sad and faraway hum of Doug's old Ford, the crunch of gravel, the vanishing of popcorn and bright lights into the settled quiet of early night. She heard Jane groping to the kitchen by Barbara Bates Deatherage and dipping out water to heat on the stove to wash her face. And then a pajamed sister whispered "Scoot over" and ensconced herself on her side of the bed. "What was it like?" Lanie wanted to ask. "Did you have fun?" But most of all she wanted to ask, "How do you kiss?" But she lay intensely silent, knowing the world in which Jane lived was one she could not inhabit, not now, maybe never. Like a mournful whippoorwill , Lanie felt herself to be a thing of darkness and silence and aloneness so thick and so deep it could never run free and light like the brilliant bloom on Jane's blonde face. For the hundredth time, a metaphor rose to Lanie's mind- "She is day; I am night." A wind rose and began to tear fiercely through the white pine that sheltered the porch of the Rogers' small frame house. Lanie could feel the wind tearing through her, restless like her, and troubled . She thrilled a little to the sound, as she thrilled with frozen nights and snowbound earth, or with the beautiful, incredible terror of wind, sky, and glistening trees before a summer storm. For a long time Lanie lay motionless, pondering what it all meant, wondering, most of all, how to become a woman and how to learn to kiss. As she finally faded into sleep, she heard the German cuckoo clock: strike twelve. "Get up, Lanie," Mother yelled as she stoked the belly of the iron stove and shook down the ashes. "We've got to listen to the weather. I bet there s not any school today." 51 A snowstorm had come during the night. Lanie tried to pull herself free of sleep. Jane was already up and taking her sponge bath, gently massaging her face with a hand towel as she peered into the mirror for blemishes. Her tall angular figure bent to accommodate the low mirror, Jane gently combed her eyebrows up and out. Lanie finally dragged herself from bed and went to the kitchen and put on water for her bath. Then she sat down, disgruntled , at the kitchen table and broke biscuits into a cup of creamed coffee, then sweetened it. "Stop, kids!" Mom yelled at Rachel and Sara, the two youngest children. "Quit tearing up jack!" They were fighting over a little black doll Rachel had got for Christmas the year before. Mom turned on the radio and Artie Kay and "second cup of coffee time" zoomed over the air...