by Nina Revoyr
Raina had a tournament game that night, but none of us knew where it was. The parents waited an hour for her to call and tell them, but she didn't, so they finally gave up and went to a movie. I sat in my room eating ice cream and flipping through a two-year-old issue of Sports Illustrated.
One of my biggest strengths, and biggest weaknesses, was my unshakable belief that things would work out for the best in the face of all evidence to the contrary. This was why I could walk out of a test with half the questions left unanswered and still imagine I'd get an A or a B. This was why we could be down ten points with two minutes left in a game and I would simply assume—often correctly—that we'd come back and win. This was why it didn't bother me much when Raina failed to come home the night after we'd talked, and also why it didn't alarm me when she was late on Friday. I myself referred to this outlook as healthy optimism. But it could also be called self-delusion.
When the phone finally rang at nine, I picked it up on the first ring.
"Are the parents home?" Raina asked without saying hello. I could hear balls bouncing and people talking in the background. She sounded far away, and it wasn't just because of all the noise.
"No, they took off already. Where are you?"
"In Lakewood. Where'd they go?"
"To a movie. They waited awhile for you to call, but then they figured you must be playin already."
"No. The game got moved back. They're running late here. I don't even think we'll start playin till after nine."
"Oh, really? Cool. I'll pick up Q and Telisa and come watch."
"Don't bother."
I spread my fingers across the open pages of the magazine. For a moment I thought she meant, we're playing an easy team, the game will be boring, so don't waste your time. But it began to occur to me that maybe that wasn't what she meant at all.
"All right," I said, deciding not to push the subject. I stood up, walked to the window, put the phone down on the dresser. Something was obviously wrong, but I'd figure it out later. "Listen," I said now, "are you gonna be home later? 'Cos me and the parents have been talkin about this Christmas thing, and you and I gotta work out the logistics of stayin at your grandparents' house after everybody else goes to Baja."
When Raina answered, her voice was artificially casual and high: "Oh yeah, I meant to talk to you about that."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't think it's such a good idea for me to stay down there."
I made myself take a deep breath. "What?"
"Well, we got a game on the twenty-eighth, and even though we don't practice till the twenty-seventh, I don't think I should take days off right now, especially with league coming up. I haven't played so hot the last couple of games, and there's been scouts here, so I need to be doin a lot better."
I paused. "You could work out in San Diego."
"It wouldn't be the same. I wanna use our gym and our weight room and shit."
As she talked her voice sounded more and more like that of a stranger. I couldn't believe that Raina would do this. My vision of our time together grew momentarily bright and clear before it evaporated completely. I didn't want to whine, to complain about the plans I'd made, and so I said softly, through clenched teeth, "Goddamn you."
I'd meant it to sound lighthearted, but it must have come out sounding bitter, because right away Raina said, "I gotta go."
I didn't reply. A buzzer went off in the background.
Raina sighed. "Nancy, it was only gonna be for an extra day."
"An extra day is a long time."
"Come on. It wasn't like this was a huge big deal or anything."
"Maybe not, but I was still looking forward to it."
"Well, guess what? You got a long life ahead of you. Look forward to something else."
My mouth dropped open. "Excuse me?"
"You put too much stock in things that don't mean as much to other people. You gotta learn to just, like, chill out a bit."
I stood there gripping the phone. "Thank you, Raina, for that incredibly valuable piece of advice."
"Don't be so oversensitive. I'm just tryin to help."
"Well, keep your fuckin help to yourself."
There was a long silence. Several times I started to speak, but I couldn't get a handle on the jumble of thoughts that were whirling around in my head. All I could finally come up with was a terse, "You know, you got some nerve tryin to tell me what to do."
"Oh shit," Raina said. "Listen, I just can't deal with this right now. I got a game to play."
"You were the one who brought it up."
"Well, I'm ending it now. Goodbye."
"Great. Goodbye. Have a wonderful game."
And with that, instead of hanging the phone up, I lifted the offending bearer of bad news and hurled it at the wall. It made a thick crashing sound and landed upside down on my bed; I picked it up again and smashed it to the floor. The dog, her interest piqued by the explosion of noise, came to the doorway and gave an inquisitive bark.
"Shut up!" I yelled, and pushed past her on my way out to the hall. I went straight to the closet, opened it, and grabbed an armful of basketball shoes. These I threw one by one at Raina's door, enjoying the dull thud they made when they hit the wood, stopping only to dig deeper in the closet to root out hidden pairs.
After that, I grabbed my running shoes and took off on a long run, even though it was nine thirty and there'd been two shootings in the last few weeks. It's possible that, in my state of mind, the danger was part of the attraction. I headed first toward the park, and saw the crack lady there; she was swaying back and forth and laughing out loud, and I was sure she was laughing at me. Then I left her behind and ran on toward the ocean. I ran through run-down residential streets, past school grounds and empty, dark industrial buildings. It had rained earlier in the evening, and the sidewalks were soaked; the fog had settled down from the sky. I ran straight into it, barely able to see, and the world around me was an eerie white, absent of other people and noise. I could discern the vague shapes of houses through the billowy layers of fog, and the acrid smell of wet concrete filled my lungs. I had no idea where I was going and I didn't care. It seemed to me that I was one giant bleeding wound, and I could not outdistance my pain and disappointment. What made things even worse, though, was the knowledge that I'd contributed to this disaster myself. How could I have thought that Raina's openness at the beach was more than just a momentary lapse? I should have known she'd pull away. She didn't want to be alone with me in San Diego or anywhere else, and she had made that very clear by staying away from the house for two days. Not that it was all my fault—I was furious with her too, for the way she'd spoken to me, how nasty and cold she'd been. Still, as I hurtled down the sidewalk, I knew the pain I felt was as much my own doing as it was hers. I had willfully chosen to ignore the signs of her withdrawal. I hadn't held in the reins on my hope, and it had stampeded out of control.
It took an hour to wear the edge off that first burst of emotion. After that I turned around and ran home. I went into the house and headed straight for the bathroom, where I knelt in front of the toilet and retched. Nothing came up, but it felt like my stomach was turning inside out, so I stayed there on my knees for ten minutes. When the nausea passed, I leaned against the wall and shut my eyes. I was exhausted. I didn't even shower. Slowly, painfully, I dragged myself into my room, where the unrelenting glare of the overhead light seemed like a blatant affront to my misery. I began to strip off my soaking clothes, but then, like a protruding nail snagging a passing sweater, something on the other side of the room caught my attention. It was the mark the phone had made in the wall. There was a triangular dent in the plaster where the corner must have hit, which opened into a flat indentation that looked like the mark the spine of a book might leave if pressed into rolled-out dough. There were green marks in and around the triangular section, and in a couple of places inside the flat part. I stared at this complicated scar. Whenever I saw marks like this in other peopl
e's houses, I always wondered how they had gotten there, and if there was a story behind them; whether a hole in the wall was the legacy of a mischievous, bat-bearing child, or perhaps instead the testimony of an adult's surrender to fury or passion. But now, as I stood there breathing hard in the middle of my room, the mark I suddenly thought about was the one I'd made myself. Would some future resident of this house conjecture, as I did in other places, about the story behind this scar in the wall? Would I, if the house remained in the family, ever look at it with wonder or regret? Or would it come to mean nothing to me, be just another mark in the wall, devoid of all history and significance?
By the time I saw Raina the next morning I'd regained my composure. The emotional storm of the previous night had passed, leaving a dangerous calm in its wake. This calm, though, made it possible for me to function. So when Raina emerged from her room, waded through the sea of sneakers that still littered the carpet outside her door, and said, "Try on some shoes last night?" I was able to meet her eyes for a long, hard moment and turn away without saying a word. At breakfast the parents chatted cheerfully about the movie they'd seen the night before. They asked Raina about her game, which she dutifully described, and then they asked me if I had ended up going to see it.
"Nope," I said. "Pass the butter."
And maybe I said it a little too coldly, because as Raina handed the butter over without turning to face me, the parents exchanged a glance. They knew that something was wrong between us. I didn't have it in me to care.
The next few days were like a nightmare I couldn't wake myself up from. Although I managed to eat, and play, and do my Christmas shopping, it was as if I were moving in a dream. Raina was out most of the weekend, although she did call a couple of times to see if anyone had called for her. I felt like her message service. I also felt like asking her for an address so I could send along the rest of her possessions. There was this distinct sensation that I can only liken to a magic carpet being pulled out from under me, and because I'd been flying along so high, the fall, when it came, was much worse than it might have been if I had stayed more restrained in my imaginings. I was like the penny a babysitter had once told me about, the one dropped from the top of the Empire State Building—I'd fallen so far, so fast, that I didn't just hit the ground, I sank into it.
What I remember most about that time is that I felt disconnected from everything, even my own body, which seemed more like a machine then, a collection of so many movable parts. The blood vessels were no more than wires, the nerves just message centers which transmitted commands to muscles to move or stay still, expand or contract, with no impulse or life behind the movements. This new soulless me did not function well, of course, on the basketball court. I had a game on Saturday and was so down and listless that my coach and teammates thought I was sick. We lost and were eliminated from the tournament. I hardly noticed. All the basketballs in the world could have shriveled up like raisins and I wouldn't have cared in the least. In my deadened state it did occur to me that I was being unprofessional, that Raina, for one, would never have let her emotions interfere with her play. But that was because she was so used to having drama in her life. Suddenly I felt no compassion. So what if Toni was hurting her? If she was going to keep allowing herself to get screwed over, then she deserved whatever she got. Let her suffer. By herself. I didn't care.
* * *
On Wednesday afternoon, after an hour of rearranging groceries, duffel bags, and Christmas presents in the backs of the parents' cars, we started our drive to San Diego. My father seemed to be the most excited of all of us; he was glad to be out of school, and eager to get away from his problems with the Hendersons. Claudia and my father went in my father's Mustang, and Raina and I in her mother's Honda. We hadn't explicitly planned it this way, but it was an unspoken rule that whenever we took two cars, parent always rode with parent, and kid with kid. Raina drove. And while she spoke every once in a while to comment on a license plate or a song, I held my tongue and sat as far away from her as possible. When she solicited my opinion about which of two dresses she should wear for Christmas dinner, I glared at her, annoyed. Finally she turned on the radio and stopped trying to talk. This made me feel better. I still couldn't stand to be in the car with her, though, so when my father waved us off the freeway so that Claudia could use a gas station bathroom, I was out the door as soon as we'd come to a stop. I paced back and forth for a couple of minutes, then walked over to the side of the Mustang.
"I wanna ride with you," I said to my father, who'd just opened his door, swiveled, and stuck his feet out onto the pavement.
He shaded his eyes with his hand and looked up at me. "There isn't any room in back, Nancy. We've got all the bags."
"Then let Claudia ride with Raina in the other car."
He looked puzzled. "Well, okay, sure. What's the problem?"
"There is no problem! I'm just fuckin sick of being cooped up in that goddamned car!"
I knew I was causing a scene. People at the gas pumps looked over, nozzles in hand. Claudia, who was walking toward us from the back of the station, slowed to a near crawl. Raina, in her mother's car, looked down as if in shame. As I stood there, out of breath from yelling, I again had the sensation that I was falling, and falling, and falling through space, powerless to stop and not knowing what I'd hit at the bottom. I expected my dad to yell at me for swearing, but instead he gave me a long look, pulled his legs back in the car, and reached over to open the door on the passenger side. Claudia went to the other car; I slid in next to my father and slammed the door. We got back on the freeway. He was mercifully silent and let me be silent for the rest of the trip down. We drove behind Claudia's car, and so for an hour I stared silently at the back of Raina's head. I missed her. She looked so small to me then, and I pondered the fact that she was moving just ahead of us in a bubble of impenetrable steel. It seemed fitting, somehow. She was precisely that shut away from me, impossible to reach.
When we got to Claudia's parents' place, her father, James, a skinny man bent three inches by age, grabbed our duffel bags and shuffled back into the house. Her mother, Gail, was tiny and covered with an intricate web of wrinkles, but when she flashed her disarming grin it took twenty years off her age and you could see the family resemblance. I watched them for signs of discomfort as they talked with my father, but there were none, they were fine; they acted like he was an old and dear friend. We all sat in the living room and talked; then Raina took off for the beach while I stayed and watched the adults get drunk on eggnog. Claudia treated her parents lovingly, as Raina treated her, although I didn't want to remember any of Raina's good points just then. At bedtime she wasn't back yet. Her grandparents put our parents in one of their extra bedrooms and set the other up for Raina and me. I lay motionless and awake until one a.m., when Raina crept in and crawled into the other bed. I considered the irony of our finally sleeping in the same room together at a time when we weren't even speaking. It seemed that she was doing some thinking too. She tossed and sighed and shifted for at least an hour. At one point she turned and I could feel her looking at me, and she took several short, sharp breaths, as if she were getting ready to say something. I willed her not to speak. She didn't. Finally she got settled and her breathing assumed the slow, regular pattern of sleep. I lay there rigid, staring up at the ceiling, until the soft, gray light of morning began to creep in through the shades.
The next day, Christmas Day, was like one of those comic-tragedy versions of a holiday turned on its head, except that only I was able to recognize the disaster. No one thought it strange that while Raina and I had presents for everyone else, we didn't have any for each other. (I'd chosen not to buy one out of spite, and felt justified when I realized that she hadn't gotten me one, either. "It hasn't come yet," she explained. "I had to order it.") No one thought it strange that when I did manage to smile, it was the kind of ghastly grimace that sick people use to assure their visitors they're not in any pain. And no one remarked upon the fa
ct that I hardly touched my Christmas dinner. For an hour I sat rearranging the piles of food on my plate while everyone else ate heartily. As I played with my turkey and stuffing and yams, the four adults and Raina engaged in a fast-paced, lighthearted discussion about who had messed up at what critical juncture of the preparation of the meal. Raina, by the way, looked beautiful. She was wearing a dark purple dress that made her look regal, and her hair, free of its usual braid, was glorious and wild as she shook it out before sitting down to eat. Everyone joked and laughed all through dinner and dessert. I'd never felt more alone in my life.
Late that afternoon my father's friends came by to take the adults to Baja, and Raina drove back up to LA. I finally had the place to myself. Claudia's parents had been kind enough to let me stay there even though Raina had left, and I was determined to have a good time without her. That night I watched football and an old rerun of The White Shadow. Then I walked around the neighborhood—it was safer down here—and looked at people's Christmas decorations. I had a fleeting urge to call Lisa, the girl I'd had the summer fling with, who was now a freshman at San Diego State, but, knowing that this urge came purely from spite, I managed to fight it off. Finally I took a six-pack out of the fridge and headed down to the beach. And as I sat there on the cool sand, thirty feet up from the water, the numbness of the last few days wore off and I realized how upset I still was. The last time I'd been to the beach at night was, of course, the time I'd gone with Raina. That night had been like a teaspoon of water to a woman who was dying of thirst—it hadn't provided any relief; it had only made me want even more. Foolishly, though, I had thought it was some kind of breakthrough—Raina had actually talked to me about herself, and hugged and thanked me afterward. Very sincere, I thought now. Yes. Thank you, Nancy, for being there this one time, but please understand that I must now shut you out. Thank you for listening while I talk about a life you can hear about but never take part in. Well, fuck her if she couldn't deal with me now. As I sat there thinking, all the anger came back in a rush. I was so furious with her for opening up to me and then punishing me for it that I wanted to rage and cry until she understood how much she'd hurt me. But she wasn't there to hear me then and never would be, so I screamed instead at the ocean, which seemed, that night, as angry as I, and which answered with a deafening roar.
