by Sarah Bruni
It was only after a week of eating lunch in front of her locker freshman year, dodging hall monitors, that Sheila attempted to stake out a more modest seat in the cafeteria. She had sat down at the other end of a safe-looking, half-populated Large Caf table and busied herself taking her sandwich and drink out of her paper bag, looking as extraordinarily preoccupied with it all as possible, when she heard the boy at the other end of the table say, “It’s Sheila Gower, right?”
Sheila looked up from her sandwich slowly. It was always a shock to hear people you didn’t know say your name. It made you wonder what else they knew.
“Yes,” Sheila admitted.
“You’re in my English class,” the boy said.
He looked familiar. For a moment the words pig and toenail inexplicably flashed into her brain; she heard the words in tandem as a half-chant, a whisper. “Second period, Mr. Clemmont?” she asked.
“That’s the one,” said the boy. “I’m Anthony.”
“Anthony what?”
“Pignatelli.”
Pig Toenail. Tony Pig Toenail. That’s how some of the other boys in her English class referred to him. But the name sounded different the way he said it.
Anthony seemed to see that this is what she was thinking because he said, “The ‘G’ is silent.”
“Okay,” Sheila said. “Is that like Spanish?”
“Italian,” he said. “The ‘G’ is fucking silent anytime it comes before an ‘N.’”
“Sure,” Sheila said. “Cool.” She nodded, but in her brain a neat row of pink toes persisted, nails pointed uniformly, dangerously in one direction. She stabbed her straw into the mouth of her juice box and gulped furiously.
“Wait,” said Anthony, “Didn’t you used to sit in the Small Caf?”
“Briefly,” said Sheila. “But it turns out I don’t have an eating disorder, so it’s not really my crowd.”
Anthony smiled. “You like the stuff we’re reading in English?”
There had been a lot about disembodied hearts all that year. The hideous telltale variety, noisily thumping through the floorboards of a murderer’s home. Then, there was the way some poet’s heart was stolen during the cremation of his drowned body, and how his wife wrapped the damaged organ in a poem, like a piece of meat in butcher paper, and placed it in a drawer of her desk for thirty years. The point of everything they read—even freshman year—seemed to be about how life was short and everyone should just sleep together before they all died.
“You mean all that gather-ye-rosebuds crap?” Sheila asked.
It wasn’t crap, not really. It was fascinating to conjure one’s death and imagine life to be so brief a glint of a thing that all it made sense to do was grab hold of the closest breathing body and not let go. “I think Mr. Clemmont is maybe a little too invested in this unit,” Sheila said finally.
Anthony was laughing. “Definitely,” he said. “The guy is like obsessed with sex. If I have to ‘unpack’ one more metaphor about virgins and coy mistresses this semester I’m going to vomit.”
“Second period is way too early for unpacking virgins,” Sheila agreed.
This is how their friendship began. One of them would make observations about stupid people or stupid metaphors, and the other would laugh. For a while it seemed like she and Anthony weren’t simply clinging to one another out of desperation, but actually had something in common. It wasn’t until her senior year when she was enrolled in Mrs. Gavin’s English class that Sheila considered the possibility that Mr. Clemmont had not been sex-obsessed at all. All of English literature was obsessed with sex. When she shared this observation with Anthony at lunch, Anthony seemed to agree wholeheartedly with this as well. After a while, it seemed there was little she could say that was disagreeable to him.
Today, Anthony was already sitting at their table, halfway through his sandwich, by the time Sheila got through the line and sat down.
“Didn’t bring your lunch today?” he asked.
Sheila shook her head. “I didn’t have time to pack one. I was at the station until late.”
“That’s so cool that you have this whole other life.”
“Not really,” Sheila said. “It’s a gas station.”
“Still,” Anthony said. “Maybe some night I’ll borrow a car and come and visit you. We could steal a pack of cigarettes and smoke them and make fun of all the people who come in.”
“That’s against the law,” Sheila said. She could feel all the hairs standing up at the back of her neck. Her reaction surprised her. The thought of Anthony walking into the station made her uneasy. “I mean, you don’t even smoke,” she said.
“Yeah, but you do.”
“Not really,” Sheila said. “Only every once in a while to pass the time.”
“Whatever,” said Anthony. He took a bite from his apple. “Are you going to this pep rally thing next Friday?”
“No,” said Sheila. “Are you?”
“I don’t know,” Anthony said. “Maybe. You’re not even a little curious who’ll get nominated?”
“Nominated?”
“Jesus, Sheila,” Anthony chided her. “Spring Fling? They’re nominating the court at the pep rally. They’ve only been talking about it over the PA for the last three weeks.”
Sheila looked up at Anthony from her side of the table as if from the other side of the room, past the lunch line and panes of glass. He was wearing his favorite blue jeans and a faded T-shirt with a vintage ad for Orange Crush soda. It wasn’t immediately obvious that these were the school colors, but there was no denying that that’s what they were. It made her feel a little sad for him, and for an instant she wanted to grab ahold of Anthony’s hand and save him from some obscure threat. She had been kissed by two boys in her entire life—once by a college boy she met swimming at the reservoir, once by a boy in the fluorescent-lit parking lot of a movie theater the summer after eighth grade—and both times the transition from talking to having his tongue in her mouth had felt nonexistent in a way that made her wonder what had been going on in the boys’ brains up until that moment. Was there something specific she had said, some obscure invitation, that made them think touching their tongues to hers was the obvious course of action? The thought occurred to her that this was happening all over the country. There were kids in every cafeteria draping themselves in the representative colors of cougars and falcons and mythological animals, pushing their tongues into one another’s mouths, chanting things, casting votes for the kings and queens who would represent them. But so what? Sheila had to remind herself. This was high school. It was a regular thing. It was no cause for alarm. It was nothing to be depressed about.
Pickup trucks were always pulling into the station. They had bumper stickers at eye level that said things like AMERICA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE, not even LEAVE IT, which at least would have been a parallel construction. Sheila knew all about parallel construction. She knew all about past participles and all about subjunctive tenses because she was teaching herself a whole new goddamn language. Her father’s critique seemed to place her knowledge of French around that of a traveler with a well-read phrase book, but by her own assessment she had to give herself more credit. She had studied vocabulary for a wide range of social situations and predicaments, chapters with titles like “At the Library,” “A Doctor’s Visit,” and “Accepting and Declining Invitations.” She knew how to borrow rare books, blow off important social engagements, and describe obscure sources of pain in her body—vocabulary clearly way beyond the grasp of the prudent traveler. Behind the counter she had her English to French dictionary and a CD and workbook set. Sheila could play whatever she wanted over the speakers at the Sinclair station, so sometimes she played the workbook CD, and she’d join in conversations between ringing people up. Today she and the French CD woman had met at a museum.
“Ça va?” said the French woman on the CD.
“Ça va,” said Sheila.
“Tu as de la chance d’être à Paris pour cette expositi
on.”
“Pump four, sixteen dollars,” said Sheila.
Ned never mistook her for one of the college girls, but if her French CDs were playing in the station when Sheila paused in her lesson to count out his payment, he’d solemnly repeat the foreign phrases along with the woman on the CD, as if he were taking the responsibility for saying the things that needed saying.
Truckers who walked into the station to buy a box of condoms or a bag of Doritos would stare at Sheila’s lesson speechlessly for the eternity it took for their tanks to fill with diesel before saying something like, “You ever heard the French invented the threesome?” Sometimes they winked. With this particular kind of customer, Sheila played ignorant to her native language completely.
“Je suis désolée! Je ne comprends pas!”
Peter Parker usually let the lessons go without comment, but today he entered the station especially riled by something.
“What’s that you just said?” Peter asked.
“Oh nothing,” said Sheila. “There was a demonstration in the street, and one of the organizers was trying to give me a leaflet to read.”
Peter snickered. “Did you take it?”
“Oh no, I refused to take it because I was practicing being furious over how this student demonstration has created a huge traffic jam in the street,” said Sheila. “But the next time I practice this dialogue I will take the leaflet and practice being sympathetic to his cause.”
“Lots of opportunities to speak French with student organizers around here?”
“For your information,” Sheila said, “I’m getting the hell out of this town.”
“Let me guess,” said Peter. He raised his finger in the air as if it were an antenna picking up signals from Sheila’s brain. “You’re moving to Paris.” He continued to hold his finger in the air and the smile persisted—knowing, accusing.
Sheila started to ring up Peter’s pack of cigarettes. She said, “You owe me $6.25.”
Peter made no attempt to reach for his wallet. He closed the distance between Sheila and himself and leaned in across the counter. “Tell me if I guessed wrong,” he said.
Sheila placed a hand on her hip. “You’re right,” Sheila said. “I’m glad that amuses you. Now take your cigarettes and get out of my station.”
“I’m not the least bit amused,” said Peter. He didn’t take his eyes off her. “I just don’t quite understand what you’re waiting for. If you want to leave, leave.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” said Sheila.
“Says who?” said Peter.
“I’m saving money.”
“How much money is in the register when you close out the books?” asked Peter.
“It doesn’t work that way,” Sheila repeated. “That’s not how the world works.”
“If you say so, sweetheart,” said Peter, and he threw seven dollars on the counter and left before she could make change.
Sheila sat behind the counter of the station and continued to watch the doorway he had walked through. Peter was wrong. Still, she felt a kind of electricity coursing through her, some kind of foreign energy she didn’t know what to do with, and when it was time to go her hands shook as she counted down the register and turned off the pumps for the night.
“Bring me to the bar with you?” Sheila asked her sister.
She had ridden straight to Andrea and Donny’s from the station. Why ride home to her parents’ to eat microwaved mashed potatoes alone in an empty kitchen, when Andrea and Donny would be eating tamales and popcorn out of greasy paper-lined baskets, splitting pitchers? She and Donny were friends with most of the bartenders, so it shouldn’t be that hard for Sheila just to walk in with them. Her sister wouldn’t deny her; Andrea liked to feel older, more experienced, showing Sheila how the adult world operated. Usually Sheila resented this attitude, but sometimes she saw how useful it could be.
“Sure,” said Andrea. “Okay.”
Sheila would turn eighteen in a few weeks, so it seemed conceivable that she could pass for twenty-one in a college town inundated with fake IDs. She had never wanted to try it before. Donny dropped Andrea and Sheila off at the door and parked around the corner. Sheila felt nervous for only a second before following her sister inside. Immediately, she was impressed with how many people were clearly trying to get away with the same subterfuge, unsuccessfully. There were two college girls up to the bar, fluttering their eyelashes, who asked the bartender for a vodka tonic and for a Cape Cod, and when they were asked for identification the girls shrugged and giggled and said they had forgotten their wallets in the car. As the girls turned to leave, the men at the bar’s eyes fell to the words ironed into the asses of the girls’ sweatpants: “princess” and “volleyball.”
“I’ll take ‘princess’?” one suggested to the other. “You take ‘volleyball.’”
“Sure,” said another man, “I’d do ‘volleyball.’”
“Gentlemen.” Andrea nodded in their direction, and they greeted her as she made her way toward the bar. “Hey Carlos,” she said to the bartender, “What does a girl have to do to get a drink around here?” Andrea ordered a drink for herself and then turned to Sheila. She was impressed by the way her sister commanded the attention of the men in the bar. She never would have guessed her capable.
Sheila tried to think of the least likely drink an underage girl would ask for. She heard one of the men sitting at the bar order a Maker’s and Coke. Sheila asked for the same. The bartender didn’t even look up. He just started making the drinks Andrea ordered.
“Damn,” Donny came up behind Andrea and wrapped his arms around her shoulders, “Your sister doesn’t mess around with her liquor!”
When the drinks arrived, Donny threw down enough to pay for all of them, and they made their way to the far side of the room. Donny and his friends added their names to a list on the chalkboard by the pool table, started placing bets on games. Sheila sat with her sister in the wooden booth and watched the ice bob and twirl in her drink. The first few sips felt like fire, but then the taste turned sweet, like the fire was responsible for caramelizing everything as it passed her tongue. There was this heat expanding throughout her body; there was Pasty Cline on the jukebox correcting some jerk who had done her wrong; even Donny didn’t seem so bad when Sheila was watching him calculate shots on the pool table. In the corner by the bathrooms, a couple was dancing.
“Sheila,” Andrea said, and her name sounded far away. Sheila smiled up at her sister and for no reason at all remembered this time when they were kids Sheila had become lost in a Hy-Vee supermarket, and Andrea had called her name down each of the aisles. Sheila had heard her sister’s voice leading her and had followed it from the chaos of the cereal aisle all the way back to produce, where her family was waiting. And for a moment, she wanted to reach out and seize her sister’s hand and say, let’s get out of here, Andy, you and me, we could just go.
“So are you?” Andrea said.
Sheila’s smile faded. She swirled around the ice in her glass that signified the end of the drink. “Am I what?” she asked.
“Sleeping with anyone!” Andrea said. “Hello? Are you in this conversation or not?”
“No and not,” Sheila said. But she smiled.
“But you’ll tell me when you are, right?” Andrea said.
“I wouldn’t hold your breath or anything.”
“You should do it in high school,” Andrea said wistfully. “That’s when it’s the best, sneaking around behind lockers, and those dark storage rooms near the gym.”
“I’ll probably do it when I’m in France,” Sheila said. “By the river or something.”
“Ugh, gross,” Andrea said. “That sounds like a great way to get a disease. The river is probably where women go to get molested.”
“The Seine? The fucking Seine, Andrea, really?”
Her sister rolled her eyes. She opened her mouth as if in rebuttal, but then shut it just as quickly.
“What?” said Sheila.
“Nothing,” said Andrea. “Forget it.”
“Say it,” said Sheila.
Andrea shrugged. “Just that the whole thing’s weird.”
“Maybe to you.”
“Not just to me. I think Mom and Dad sort of thought you would go to college next year.”
“You didn’t go to college,” said Sheila.
“It’s different,” said Andrea. “I have Donny. And we have a business plan.”
“So if I was having sex with someone who I was starting a business with, I wouldn’t have to go to college either.”
“Touché,” said Andrea rolling her eyes.
“French!” Sheila shouted. “Ha-ha!” She waved her finger in her sister’s face, as if she’d caught Andrea in the act of something, as if this usage were evidence Sheila was winning the argument they were always perpetually having on some level. “Vive la France!” she growled in the direction the pool table. She laughed until she hiccupped, until her body shook, and when she looked up again, she saw that Andrea was regarding her with a look of slight concern from the other side of the table.
Sheila felt uneasy. The fire that had felt warm under her tongue had moved into her stomach. She wanted to feel as she had before, as the drink was still going down. Patsy Cline had given way to Peggy Lee, who was angry in a different way, demanding to know whether or not that was all there is. Sheila looked at her sister, five years her senior, who obviously had figured out some way to live in the world, and wanted to ask of her something similar. But she held her tongue. “I’m going up for another one,” Sheila said. She was looking through the money in her purse to go up and ask for the drink herself. But just as she was getting ready to leave the booth, she froze.
Peter Parker walked in and sat at the bar. She watched him take a roll of bills out of his pocket and lay a few of them down on the counter. He counted the money flippantly, as if it were irrelevant how many dollars were there, and how many needed to be laid down to pay for his drink. When he looked up and met Sheila’s gaze, she looked away.
