by Vendela Vida
We enter the house through the front door, which is a first—I’m accustomed to leaping through the window. The entranceway is dim: the windows are tinted and curtained and the floors are dark. My house is light, with mirrors everywhere. This is the result of a design trick my parents adopted when they were younger and broke and wanted their living spaces to appear larger than they were. Now that they live in a big house, they still haven’t abandoned the mirrors.
Mr. Finance and his wife greet us. She’s thin and wearing a large diamond necklace that doesn’t rest flat and makes me notice how much her clavicle juts out. Her dress is emerald green and her blond hair is pulled back to the nape of her neck. Standing behind the host couple is their elderly Irish maid, wearing a uniform. She’s holding a silver tray with glasses of champagne. I have only seen the maid from a distance, when she hangs hand-washed items outside a window that faces our house. Apparently, no one has told her this is not a neighborhood where you hang your laundry outside windows to dry.
My parents’ faces look suddenly strained, and I know the forced smiles and tightness around the eyes has to do with me. I turn and see Maria Fabiola’s parents. Their arms are linked as though they’re the bride and groom.
“Where’s Maria Fabiola tonight?” my father asks her dapperly dressed father as we stand together in an awkward pentagram.
“She’s at a sleepover at a new girl’s house. Dutch family.”
“Have you met her?” my father asks me.
“She’s in my class.”
My mother makes small talk with Maria Fabiola’s mom about Halloween and how many bags of candy they’re going to purchase this year. Halloween is a big deal in Sea Cliff. Residents go crazy giving out dollar bills or King Size Hershey’s bars, and as a result each house gets hundreds of trick-or-treaters before 7 p.m. Kids from other parts of the city are dropped off in Sea Cliff by their parents because they know they’ll take home better loot here than anywhere else.
Another couple who just moved to the neighborhood joins the conversation. “I hear they’re going to try to clamp down on outsiders coming in,” says the woman, who has an accent I can’t place.
“They really should,” says her husband. “It’s not right for us to be spending all that money on kids that don’t live here.”
I excuse myself to use the restroom.
The bathroom is large with a wooden sculpture of a boy peeing. When I wash my hands I use a small towel that I understand I’m supposed to toss into a special bin. Outside the bathroom door I hear someone ask, “Are you waiting in line?” Then I hear the response: “No, I’m just escaping talking to someone I don’t want to talk to. You know how it is.” I recognize the voice—it’s Maria Fabiola’s mother. I use another towel just because I can and toss it in the bin as well. Then I take a towel and without even using it, discard it in the bin.
When I exit the bathroom I offer Maria Fabiola’s mother a fake smile. I scan the room for my parents—I don’t want to go back to them. I spot an abandoned glass of champagne on a small table. I stealthily pick it up, down it, and then wander into the part of the house I know best: the TV room. I think I might find the younger brother there watching TV with his friends and I can show them how grown up I look in my black taffeta dress. I walk into the TV room and the screen is dark, most of the lights in the room are off. I look through the window to see what my house looks like from here. It looks like a regular house, I think. On my bedroom window I see a faded sticker alerting firemen that, in the event of a fire, there’s a child living in that bedroom. The sticker was placed there years ago and I’d forgotten about it. Now I vow to remove it.
“Aren’t you the neighbor girl?” a voice asks. I turn. It’s Wes, the older brother, the groom-to-be. He’s sitting by himself in the dark.
I nod and then realize he probably can’t see me very well so I say, “Yeah.”
We are both silent as we listen to the sounds of the party swell in the other part of the house.
“Aren’t you supposed to be out there?” I ask. “I mean, isn’t the party for you?”
“Well, in theory it’s for me, but it’s really for my parents.”
I nod again. He’s blond and wearing a tuxedo. He looks like a groom in a movie, which makes him appear more handsome than he is. More handsome than his younger brother.
“My head hurts so I came in here,” he says.
I know he was in a major hockey accident at Dartmouth. He came home to recuperate for a while. The maid would hang his clothes outside the laundry-room window. One day his clothes were no longer there and I knew he was better, and had gone back to New Hampshire.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
“Just when I’m stressed.”
“Why are you stressed now?”
“Because I’m getting married,” he says.
His speech is slurred and I wonder if this is the result of the accident or alcohol. I continue standing in front of the turned-off TV and I shift from one foot to another. Tonight I’m wearing black shoes with short heels. I’m not used to them but don’t want to take them off because that would show I’m not used to them.
“Have you ever heard of that experiment they do with frogs?” he asks.
“Which one?” I say, and tap my fingers on my chin, as though I’m running through all the experiments I’ve studied involving frogs.
“The one where they put a frog in boiling water?”
“I think so,” I lie.
“They’ve done studies where if they put a frog in boiling water, it jumps out right away.”
“That makes sense,” I say.
“Well, they’ve also done studies where if they put a frog in, let’s say, medium-temperature water, and then slowly keep turning up the heat until it’s boiling, the frog won’t jump out.”
“It won’t?”
“No, it won’t. And you know what happens to the frog?”
“What?”
“It dies,” he says. “This is a scientific fact.”
He leans back on the leather couch and takes a sip of his drink. I think about what he’s said. I assume it’s a metaphor for marriage.
“So, you’re the frog,” I finally say.
“Ribbit,” he says.
I’m not sure if I should leave so I stand there in front of the large, blank television screen, and he watches me as if I’m the show.
“Have you ever given someone a lap dance?” he asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“You don’t think so,” he says and laughs. The champagne rises up, prickling my throat, and then settles back down.
“Come here,” he says, his voice quiet and smooth.
The room is so dim that I suddenly feel tired. As I approach him, he signals to me to turn around and I do. I sit on his lap so we’re both facing the same direction. The taffeta skirt of my dress rises. He places his hands on my hips and moves them in a figure-eight pattern. I stare straight ahead at the dark screen of the TV. I can make out the image of a young girl writhing around and the head of a young man thrown back. Maybe his accident really did hurt his head, I think, as he moans. Soon there’s a rush of heat, followed by wetness.
“Oh,” he moans. He holds me to him so my spine is pressed to his front. It’s uncomfortable and I don’t know how long I’m obliged to sit like that. I count to ten and then I stand and don’t turn around. I want to give him privacy.
I know I’ll see his underwear hanging outside the laundry-room window the next morning. The poor maid is all I can think as I straighten my dress out so it doesn’t poof. She’s over eighty and tomorrow she’ll be cleaning semen off Wes’s underpants.
9
October arrives but the palm trees don’t change color. China Beach is empty except for the fishermen who wait patiently on the cliffs in the early morning. Sometimes they wade out into the water to fish, despite the signs that appear at the entrance to the beach announcing: “People have drowned while swimming or wading.” The
warning is in English, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish.
Fall gives the flashers who like to stroll by Spragg an excuse to wear trench coats. The upper school classrooms have large windows that look out onto the public golf course that runs adjacent to the back of the campus. It’s not uncommon for us to glance outside the window when distracted or bored and spot a man standing with his trench coat open, exposing himself. “Just pretend you don’t see him and keep your focus on me,” Ms. Livesey tells us whenever a flasher shows up. My father says I should point at the flashers and laugh. These are two very different approaches. Everything I’m told by one adult contradicts something I’m told by another.
On the evening of October 30 my parents realize I don’t have a costume. I tell them it’s okay and I ask my mother if I can borrow a scarf. Then I weave one end of the scarf through the spokes of an old bike wheel. I wrap the other end of it around my neck and carry the wheel in my hands.
“Who are you?” Svea asks.
“Isadora Duncan,” I tell her.
“Who’s that?”
“She was a dancer who died of strangulation when the wind blew her scarf out of the car and the scarf got stuck in the wheel.”
“That’s terrible,” Svea says.
I shrug. “Fashion can be dangerous.”
* * *
ON HALLOWEEN MARIA FABIOLA, Julia, Faith, and Lotta come to school dressed like the Go-Go’s on the cover of “Beauty and the Beat.” They’re dressed in white bathrobes (on the album cover, the Go-Go’s wear towels, tucked precariously over their breasts, but this was probably deemed too risqué by my friends’ parents). To their faces they’ve applied masks of a white substance that has hardened and cracked on their cheeks. Their teeth look yellow in comparison. The group outfit was my idea; I shared it with them in September, a century ago. Lotta, the Dutch girl, didn’t know who the Go-Go’s were before she came to America. There are five members of the band, but on Halloween at Spragg there are only four.
At school the teachers vote and give me the Best Costume award, which is an awful decision. I know they choose me as the winner because they can see I’ve been ostracized, that I have no one to talk to. Don’t they know that awarding me and my costume that I started making at 8:15 the previous evening is more humiliating?
On Halloween night I take Svea and her dour friend trick-or-treating. Then we give out candy at our house until the big black cauldron is empty.
“We’re all out of candy,” I yell to my parents, who are in the kitchen.
“We can’t let them know we’re home or they’ll egg the house,” my dad yells.
“Turn off the lights,” my mom commands.
We enter a state of high alert. We blow out all the candles inside the jack-o’-lanterns that line the front steps to our house. Then, as a precautionary measure, we carry the carved pumpkins inside. The light switches are turned off so that it appears no one’s home. Sitting near the windows is deemed too risky so we huddle on the carpet on the floor of the foyer. “I feel like Anne Frank hiding from the Nazis,” my sister’s dour friend says.
Even in the dimness I see something I’ve never seen on her face before—a smile.
10
My mother is in a Swedish sewing group. That is, it started off as a sewing group called the Stitch ‘N’ Bitch but it’s been a year or so since anyone’s brought their dress patterns or quilt squares to the monthly meetings. Last winter my mom started calling it the Bitch ‘N’ Bitch because she wanted to chide the members about their constant complaining and cajole them into focusing on sewing. Her ploy backfired—the group loved the phrase so much that they adopted it as their official name. They left their sewing baskets at home and started complaining even more.
Tonight it’s my mother’s turn to host the monthly Bitch ‘N’ Bitch meeting. It’s a special night: the TV episode filmed at Joseph & Joseph is airing this evening. I leave notes in Maria Fabiola’s, Julia’s, and Faith’s lockers making sure they know the show starts at 7. My hope is that it reminds them of how close we used to be.
From the way my mom torpedoes through the door that afternoon I can tell she spent her bike ride home from the hospital making a mental list of all she needs to get done. She asks Svea to help her in the kitchen with the meatballs and the lutefisk. For reasons I don’t fully understand, I’m not trusted in the kitchen—it’s my mother and Svea’s terrain.
“How can I help?” I ask, trying to secure an invitation into the quiet camaraderie of meal preparation.
“Hmm . . . maybe you can make a welcome sign for the guests,” my mom says. “You can hang it on the front door.”
“But some of your friends come through the back door,” I say. I want to be included, not make a sign.
“Then you should put a sign on the back door telling them to go around to the front door,” Svea suggests.
“Good idea,” my mom says.
I take sheets of paper and colored pencils from the art supply drawer and make two signs, using an orange pen and my finest approximation of calligraphy. One sign says: “Welcome Bitchers!” The other says: “Bitchers! You came to the wrong door. Bitch yourself around to the front.”
My father comes home from work as I’m taping the sign up to the back door.
“That will show them,” he says.
“Why do you think they complain so much?” I say. “I mean, it seems the main thing they complain about is America. Sometimes, I want to yell, ‘Go back to Sweden!’”
“How do you think I feel?” my dad says. “They use ‘American’ as a negative.”
“They tell me I don’t look Swedish because of my dark eyes,” I say. “They mean it as an insult.”
Then we sigh almost in unison because the truth is we kind of love the Bitchers. They’re good friends to my mom.
It’s a brisk November evening. At 6 p.m., when the doorbell rings, my family falls into their Bitch ‘N’ Bitch party-hosting positions. My mother opens the door for her guests, my father offers each of them a drink, and Svea walks around with a tray of meatballs that have been stabbed with toothpicks bearing the Swedish flag. Somewhere between the opening of the door and the offering of meatballs, it’s my job to collect the coats and hang them in the hall closet.
There are a dozen members of the Bitch ‘N’ Bitch; many of them have the same name, so each woman has been given an adjective. There’s Tall Mia, Short Mia, Fat Ulla, Thin Ulla (whose California license plates say “Uuulala”), Loud Lisa, and Quiet Lisa. They really call themselves by these names. Things got complicated when Fat Ulla did a juice fast and dropped a couple dress sizes, and Thin Ulla gained weight during menopause, but no one bothered to change their monikers—not even Fat and Thin Ulla themselves. My mother is the only Greta.
As a group, they are blond and punctual. My arms are promptly loaded up with similar lightweight wool coats, each smelling crisp, like business envelopes that have just been sealed. Tall Mia is the last to arrive, and her coat stands out in the closet—it’s the only pink one. She once got her colors done and was told summer was her most complementary palette. She promptly discarded any article of clothing that wasn’t pink or orange. Her nail polish is usually one of these two colors, as is her lipstick. Tonight Tall Mia is wearing burnt orange pants and a burnt orange blouse so that the overall effect is that of a large autumnal leaf that’s fallen from a tree. She sits on the backless imitation Louis XIV couch, which is like a daybed, with cylindrical ivory pillows.
I approach her and sit near her because I can usually count on Tall Mia to prop me up. She’s the one who tells me that my style is impeccable and that I resemble Sonja Henie, the Norwegian figure skater. She started making the Sonja Henie remark one day when she was at our house and I was coming back from an ice-skating party for Julia’s birthday. So I think her praise has more to do with the fact that she once saw me in ice-skating apparel than my appearance. But she is different this evening, and I am shallow, I think, to come to her wanting reinforcement.
“You can’t count on men,” Tall Mia says. “Those boys? The fancy boys at dancing school? You should forget about them. Believe me. Steve is fancy and he has been nothing but bad news.”
Steve is the married man she’s been dating. He’s been the subject of many Bitch ‘N’ Bitch conversations. None of the Bitchers think Tall Mia should be dating a married man. They don’t seem to object on moral grounds—their collective reservation has more to do with the nuisance of it all. They treat her relationship with Steve the same way they would treat the idea of getting a puppy. Why would you get a new puppy when you’d spend weeks training it and cleaning up after it? Why date a married man when that means you have to deal with a wife? These women are very practical.
“I’m going to jump,” Tall Mia informs me.
I look at her, not knowing what she means. Then I follow her gaze to the Golden Gate Bridge.
“You’ll probably hurt yourself,” I say. It’s the first thought that comes to mind.
“Then Steve will know the pain he’s caused me.”
I look around the room and quickly understand why I’m sitting alone with Tall Mia. The Bitchers warned Tall Mia, they expressed their distaste for her affair, and now she is my problem. Aside from feeling a little out of my depth, I don’t mind. I know most thirteen-year-olds are sheltered from this kind of conversation, so I’m proud to be privy to it. I rest my head on an ivory bolster and listen to Tall Mia talk about Steve and how she’s going to kill herself as though it’s a goodnight story. At some point she switches from speaking in English to Swinglish, and then she makes the transition from Swinglish to pure Swedish. She’s speaking quickly and intently and I’m having trouble grasping exactly what she’s saying. But I listen to her words and see her mouth moving and I know that she’s telling me something terrible and suicidal and probably not at all suitable.
“Okay,” my mom says, and claps her hands together loudly. “Let’s move into the study to watch the show!”
