by Leah Stewart
“Can you believe I did that without you?” Sonia said.
Taken aback, I laughed. “You had to, didn’t you? It would’ve been sort of kinky otherwise.”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “All these big events in my life, you’ve been there. But for this one, you couldn’t be. It wouldn’t have been real if I hadn’t told you.”
“Oh, Sonia,” I said. I felt myself to be on the verge of something, though I wasn’t sure what—maybe I was about to confess my shameful crush or, finally, bravely, rid myself of it and reaffirm my love for my best friend. But then the phone rang, and her mother called from upstairs to say that it was Will.
Sonia hesitated. She glanced at me as if for my permission to go, but I looked away, wanting her to choose me without my telling her to. “Coming,” she called. Then to me she said, “I’ll be right back.” She patted me on the leg as she went. I heard her running up the stairs.
Only a few minutes later—minutes I’d spent staring at the digital clock on the VCR, determined that if Sonia wasn’t back soon I’d leave without a word—I heard footsteps on the stairs. I turned, awash in gratitude and relief, but it wasn’t Sonia who came into the room. It was Madame Gray.
“All alone?” she asked, as if she knew exactly what I was feeling. “I’ll keep you company.” She sat beside me on the couch and patted me on the leg, exactly as Sonia had. “I remember when my best friend first got a boyfriend,” she said. “It was hard for me. I felt left behind.” She turned toward me, the most sympathetic look I’d ever seen on her face. “That’s just how it is, you know,” she said. “Women always choose men over other women.”
I wanted to protest, but what could I say? Clearly she was right. To my great embarrassment, I felt my eyes well with tears.
“Oh, chérie,” she said. She handed me a tissue from a box on the coffee table and watched as I dabbed at my eyes and swallowed hard. She tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I know,” she said. “I know.” She rubbed a circle between my shoulder blades, and I forgot everything I knew about her and felt only grateful for the comfort. “Tell me something, chérie,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
In the same soothing voice, she asked, “Is she having sex with him?”
I almost said yes. In a flash before I spoke I saw myself repeating the story Sonia had just told me, ridding myself of it by putting it in her mother’s hands. Then I caught myself. “No,” I said. “Of course not.”
“But you hesitated,” she said.
I tried to smile at her. “I was surprised by the question, Madame,” I said.
She took her hand from my back. She said, “If she’s doing it, I’ll catch her, you know.”
“She’s not.” I offered her my most sincere expression, but she continued to look at me with suspicion. “I’d better go see if she’s off the phone.”
That night, lying next to Sonia in her bed, I couldn’t sleep, even after her part of our conversation had turned to disjointed murmurs and she’d dropped off. I was shaken by that moment of hesitation, when I almost told her mother what she wanted to know. I could have lied without missing a beat if some part of me hadn’t wanted to betray Sonia, hadn’t wanted her mother to punish her for having what I could not. How could I want that, no matter what else I felt?
I got up and went to the bathroom, where I stood for a long time, staring at my face in the mirror. I was just about to go back to bed when I heard a whisper outside the door. “I know what you’re up to, you slut,” it said. “Don’t think you’re getting away with it.” I froze, convinced the voice belonged to Sonia, that somehow she knew. I opened the door to face my accuser, and instead of Sonia there was Madame Gray. At the look of surprise on her face, I realized she’d also been expecting Sonia, but she didn’t apologize, didn’t speak at all. She just watched me as I inched around her out of the bathroom. She stared at me as I fled back into Sonia’s room.
I climbed back into bed and lay there, breathing hard, unnerved by the reminder of what I’d almost brought down on Sonia’s head, convinced Madame Gray’s accusation had been meant for me, no matter what she herself had intended. Sonia rolled toward me, the warm weight of her back against my shoulder. “Did you have a nightmare?” she asked, the last word dissolving into a yawn.
“Yes,” I said.
“Poor baby.” She reached down and squeezed my fingers. “It’s all right.” She fell asleep holding my hand.
Much to Dustin’s delight and surprise, the very next day I agreed to go with him and his youth group to a revival he’d been pestering me about for weeks. There were sermons, and giant video screens showing people witnessing and weeping, and a Christian rock star who wailed over some electric guitars about his love for Jesus while everyone swayed and clapped. There were hymns, and frequent altar calls, in which people made their way down the aisles to the stage and let the minister lay his hands on their heads and whisper something mysterious in their ears. They’d nod, their eyes closed, their faces suffused with joy. Through all this, I could feel Dustin watching me from his seat beside my own. “What did you think of that?” he’d ask, during every break after a sermon or a witnessing or a song. He’d search my face, hoping for a sign the songs and the videos were working.
“It was okay.” I’d shrug, even though my traitorous heart swelled and yearned when three hundred voices sang “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and Dustin’s face would collapse with disappointment. During the last altar call, I could feel his hope and excitement overwhelming him. He took my hand and squeezed it hard, and though I could feel his eyes trained on my face I wouldn’t look at him. He wanted so badly for me to kneel in front of the stage. He wanted me to cry. I took my hand from his and gripped the armrests like I was on a roller coaster. I didn’t think about Jesus. I thought about Sonia and Will, how I felt and what I’d almost done, everything I had to make up for. It came to me with the force of religious conviction that I had to rescue Sonia from her mother. I had to persuade her to apply to the same East Coast colleges I was considering, as far from Clovis as possible. I had to take her away. That was my responsibility.
I had a strange experience then, as around me people wept and sang and hurried down the aisles, almost tripping in their eagerness to prostrate themselves before the giant video screens. I’d feel nothing like this again until I started doing drugs in college. While I sat still, hanging on to my seat, everyone and everything around me began to speed away, faster and faster, spreading and dissolving into blurred streaks of color. Even Dustin was indistinguishable. There was only me, the lines of my fingers clear and sharp, the armrests cold and hard beneath my hands. I could hear myself breathing. I watched my chest rise and fall. I didn’t think about anything. For a moment I felt, with a dazzling clarity, the incredible joy of being left alone.
14
I looked up to find that I was ten blocks past where the camera-store clerk had said the magazine office would be. I turned around, telling myself that seeing Will Barrett changed nothing. I had to concentrate on the task at hand—giving Sonia the package, learning what was inside it, getting back on the road. Purpose and pride, as my father always said.
The office of the magazine was on the top floor of an old house. In the lobby I found an imposing gray desk with nothing behind it except the name of the magazine mounted on the wall. No one seemed to be there. It was four-thirty—perhaps everyone was gone for the day, but then why had the door been unlocked? I stood there a moment in indecision before I heard a woman’s laughter—not Sonia’s. I followed the sound past the desk into a large room with slanting wooden floors, low ceilings, and stained-glass windows divided by gray cubicle partitions. It was an odd mix of quaint and sterile.
No one was in the first set of cubicles. I ventured farther into the room, and there, gathered around a conference table, was a group of people. One of them was a girl, tall and dark-haired. I tightened my grip on the package, but then she turned her head, and no, she was someone else
, an Indian girl, about a year or two out of college, with a round face and red highlights in her hair. They all looked at me now. There were five of them: a short, curvy woman in her late thirties—I was sure she had been the one laughing—the Indian girl, a broad-shouldered boy about the same age, and two men who looked remarkably alike, lanky and white, in their late twenties or early thirties, with long, narrow faces and receding brown hair. One of them had a manuscript in his hand. There was that expectant silence that follows interrupted talk.
I found myself speechless under their gaze. I crossed my arms and assumed what Sonia used to call my Egyptian statue look—legs braced, looking down my nose from a great height.
“My, my,” the curvy woman said, and I waited for a comment on my size that didn’t come. She waved me over. She didn’t seem intimidated by me at all. When I reached her side she touched my arm, like she knew me, and then turned her attention back to the man holding the manuscript.
“Where was I?” he asked.
“She was looking for nipples in his fur,” the boy said matter-of-factly.
The woman glanced up at me with amusement. No doubt I looked confused. “Just go with it,” she whispered.
The man began to read what I slowly gathered was a story about a woman having an affair with the Pink Panther. He reached a graphic description of what the panther could do with his tail. “Ugh,” the girl beside me said, turning away in disgust, but not leaving, and the woman let loose with her belly laugh again. When the story was over—the panther leaving the narrator forlorn, dreaming of their one night of passion—they all applauded. “Bravo, Andrew, bravo!” the woman cried, and the man who had been reading bowed and said, “Thank you, thank you.”
“Look for that in our next issue,” he said. “The short-fiction debut of . . .” He checked the name. “Oh, my God.” He lowered the manuscript and widened his eyes. “Her name’s Kitty.”
“You are so full of it,” the girl said.
“Would I make that up?” He handed her the story.
“Holy shit,” she said.
“What’s next?” asked Andrew’s look-alike.
Andrew lifted another story from the pile on the table. “A fine work of narrative, titled, evocatively, ‘The Undersmell.’ ”
The boy said, “What about ‘Big Tony Does His Business’? I thought you were going to read that one.”
“All in good time,” Andrew said.
The woman turned to me. “Come on. This could go on a while.” As Andrew repeated, “The Undersmell” like an announcer, I followed the woman through the office. “So, that’s not normal, you know,” she said. “We just finished an issue yesterday, so we’re blowing off steam with some atrocious fiction submissions. Not an average day at the office. I don’t want you to think we always have so much fun, especially at the expense of others.” She looked back to grin at me, then led me into a small corner office. It was full of books, some on the shelves, many stacked on the floor, and there were magazine layouts on the floor, too, marked with blue pencil. There was an odd collection of twisted metal on top of one of the bookshelves and, hung on the wall, a photograph of military cadets reading Howl.
The woman sat behind her desk and motioned for me to take a chair. “I’m Daisy Reid, as you’ve probably guessed.” Confused, I sat down. Daisy had an expansive, motherly sexiness, large breasts barely contained by a black shirt that snapped up the front. She wore a short denim skirt and black leather boots that seemed painted onto her generous calves. She gave a general impression of straining against her bindings, as if in medieval times she would have been a bawdy serving wench with her breasts spilling out of her gown. In fact, as she leaned way back in her chair to look up at me, the top snap on her shirt popped open. With no embarrassment, she closed it. “I have trouble staying in my clothes.” She smiled. “Buh-dump-bump.” She made a motion like she was hitting a cymbal. “I’m betting you know something about clothes not fitting,” Daisy said. “How big are your feet?”
“Eleven,” I said. She certainly came out swinging.
“Wow,” she said. She scooted her chair closer and leaned across her desk to look at my feet. “I’ve got one question. Will you mail anything I ask you to?”
This was so unexpected, I laughed. She stared at me. “Seriously,” she said. “That’s all I care about.”
“What’s in it for me?” I asked.
She laughed, one loud “ha.” “A paycheck, of course. The last girl quit because she didn’t want to mail things. She didn’t want to mail things, FedEx things, UPS things . . . I guess the job description escaped her notice.”
“Was that Sonia?”
“Sonia Gray?” Daisy made that “ha” sound again. I was wondering what she meant by that—surely she didn’t know about Sonia’s troubles with numbers—when she said, “You know Sonia? Did she know you were coming? She’s not in today.”
So Sonia wasn’t here. I considered lying, pretending to be whomever Daisy thought I was, taking the job, letting the package wait until Sonia returned of her own accord. Whatever this job was, it was sure to be something I could do. And I knew I’d fit in here. Those people out there had a look of pasty, indoor intensity that reminded me of our friends from the college paper. Seeing them read those submissions made me think of the way, punchy from staying up all night at the newspaper, we used to compose the sort of poetry published by the student magazine across the hall—The moon is a blue shoe, dancing in the twilight of my soul’s memory, and so forth. I was especially fond of this activity.
It was with considerable reluctance that I told Daisy Reid I wasn’t who she thought I was.
“You’re not Samantha Wood?”
“No,” I said. “I’m Cameron Wilson.”
“Huh.” She sat back in her chair. “So you don’t want the job?”
“Well, I don’t know. What is it?”
She seemed to think I was kidding—she laughed again, then said, “So what are you doing here?”
I explained that I was an old friend of Sonia’s, that I was looking for her.
“Why?” Daisy asked. “Is she in some kind of trouble?”
“No,” I said, puzzled. “I’m bringing her this package. It’s a gift, from my former employer.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“A first-edition Faulkner,” I lied.
She pursed her lips in a silent whistle. “I used to collect first editions,” she said. “I hunted used-book stores and garage sales, and bored the crap out of people, going, ‘Oh, I got this for ten dollars and it’s actually worth seventy-five.’ Then my husband gave me the British first of Lucky Jim—any idea what that goes for?—and for some reason that just killed the urge.”
I wanted to say something incisive or funny—I wanted this woman to like me—but all I could manage was a nod.
“I don’t know where Sonia is,” she said. “She called the other day when I wasn’t here and left a message that she was going out of town, not sure when she was coming back. Frankly, I’m worried.”
Out the window behind Daisy, a cat crouched on a rooftop. Daisy swiveled to follow my gaze. “Not out there,” she said. “Unless she transmogrified.”
“Is that normal? For her to just take off?”
“No.” She swung from side to side in her chair. “She’s very conscientious about this job. And she’s been planning her wedding. Maybe she just got overwhelmed.” She turned away from me to look out the window again, rubbing at the back of her head until her short hair tufted out like a duck’s tail. “I don’t want to be worried,” she said. “I love that girl.”
“Someone must know where she is,” I said. I made my voice as casual as I could. “Does she ever mention a guy named Will Barrett?”
Daisy cocked her head, thinking.
In high school, when I drove, Sonia used to sit in Will’s lap in the passenger seat. Once, I turned to look for oncoming traffic and saw Will take her earlobe into his mouth. Another time, at a high-school dan
ce, I saw him lean over to plant a kiss at the place where her breast rose above the black satin of her dress.
“I don’t think so,” Daisy said at last. “Her fiancé’s name is Martin.”
“Martin?” Suddenly I was buoyant with relief. Martin was a wonderful name.
“But what’s his last name?” Daisy frowned. “Shit. I never know anybody’s last name anymore. It’s just, ‘Daisy, meet Martin.’ ” She jumped to her feet. “Let’s look in her office. Maybe there’s something in there with his name on it.”
Daisy led the way back through the main room, where Andrew seemed to have moved on to “Big Tony.” I could picture Sonia among that group at the table, her head thrown back in laughter, and in my current benevolent mood the image made me smile. I should’ve known I’d find her working in a place like this. Sonia and I joined the school newspaper together—she was a photographer, and I was a reporter—and there, where everyone prided themselves on their quirks, their thrift-store distinction from their J. Crew–wearing classmates, Sonia had been the quirkiest of all. She talked in funny voices, staged elaborate displays of mock despair over missing photos, stood on the sports desk to lead everyone in a chorus of “My Favorite Things.” At three in the morning, on a sleep-deprived production night, she’d emerge from the darkroom demanding cake, and one of the boys on staff would go to a convenience store to get it for her. There at the paper, she was closest to the person I knew her to be when we were alone, though of course, no one was to know anything about her mother, and we worked to keep her dyscalculia a secret. When she screwed up a measurement on a photo, people assumed she was joking, or making an artistic choice. When she said to the sports editor, after giving him the wrong-sized print, “I thought it looked better this way,” he just shrugged and adjusted his page.
We met Owen, my college boyfriend, at the newspaper. The first time I saw him he was wearing a yellow T-shirt with a wobbly drawing of a crown and the words CROWN VIC scrawled across it in what looked like marker—the name of the band he’d led in high school. He had shaggy brown hair and an angular face that made his big green eyes look even bigger and more vulnerable. Despite his slender frame, he had strong hands. He wrote for the Arts section, mostly music reviews, and when he finished a review he was particularly proud of, he’d shout, “Ta-da!” and dash over to twirl me around.
