“I know a place.” I stood up and got walking. He would follow. I should’ve walked without looking back, the way Jess would, but after a moment, I looked. He was a few steps behind, trailing his fingertips loosely along the spines of books on the shelves. He looked like a stranger, he was a stranger. I wondered if he was thinking about all those law schools that didn’t want him, or about his dad; I wondered if he wondered what I was thinking and knew he wasn’t. Good, I thought, good. This was why Jess knew to “never look back”: the blank randomness of his face made me pity him.
I let him catch up to me, and when he did, I glanced away and pointed to the scuffed white door: “In there.” I wanted my voice to sound confident. It did. He nodded, turned, and ducked slightly.
Afterward, he told me that Jess said blow jobs were totally disgusting. You’re the one marrying her, I thought, but I corrected myself inside my head: engaged, because I knew it wouldn’t work between them, and not because of this.
Later, I made my way out as the main library closed, when everyone with still more homework funneled down to the twenty-four-hour reserve room or pushed out onto the dark campus, into the dark night, the waves of Lake Michigan a distant growl, all of us pressing home to our dorms, walking with our brains raging like infernos, lit by all we had learned.
Finally, finally, I had learned who I was angry with. Finally, I knew how to punish that bad girl.
THROUGH THE DOOR
(spring, after college)
Time can slide itself forward, not only backward.
Sometimes late at night or at random, odd moments of random, odd days, I imagined Penny’s grown-up life. I imagined her married. I imagined her divorced. I imagined her gay. With four kids, two, none; Penny referring to a fluffy black cat as her “fur-baby.”
Each time I imagined Penny—loading a cart with organic produce or pumping the cheapest gas; barefoot and sprawled across a blanket at an outdoor classical concert; slouching in a subway seat, head propped against a grimy window; ordering a cappuccino—I reminded myself that she was without her mother, always, always, always. That on any morning, like Penny, we might wake up as one person but fall asleep that night as someone totally different.
That was a reason I took her in that night when we stood together on the porch, time suspended, both of us waiting to see what might happen. Let’s call it the main reason.
Another reason was something she said the next morning, a stray comment I’m surprised to remember with the fury I do; something I’m guessing Penny remembers, though she may not recall telling me. That boy. Maybe she said a name, maybe not. The boy who told everyone he went to second base with her when he didn’t. (Second base! That sounds almost sweet now, almost Mayberry.) That boy who thought he could do that to a girl, that boy who was rewarded for doing that to a girl. I hated that boy, and I had to believe Penny did, too, even as she later confessed her tremendous crush on him.
That boy—whose name I can’t remember, whose name I maybe once knew—was all the boys and all the men who made me heap the blame upon myself. How was it punishment to that boy to take Penny in? I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now: only that it was. I was punishing that boy by pulling Penny in off that porch. Maybe that was the main reason.
Greg Tomlinson. And all at once, there’s his name. That fucker.
This happened after that night and literally was impossible in affecting any decision as the two of us stood on that porch, precarious and alone. Yet now I believe it did. There are ways to escape logic when thinking about the past.
And there was another night, after I took her in, and we were eating a batch of experimental pizza bagels I brought home after working at the carryout. The new manager was testing them, thinking he might add them to the menu. I volunteered as guinea pig. He used terrible-tasting frozen bagels because they were cheap and, actually, about all there was back in that time and place. The pizza toppings helped.
Penny and I were at the kitchen counter, standing to eat out of the box. Penny said, “My mother was always late. Like picking me up. Was yours?”
“Not really,” I said. Some of the green peppers were raw and some had been roasted; I was supposed to report back with opinions. Sausage crumbles or marble-sized dabs? What about the thick layer of sausage across the whole bagel top, with a hole matched to the bagel hole—was that fun or too much sausage?
She said, “Once when I was ten I sat in the grass of my friend’s yard for three hours after a birthday party because my mom was so late.”
“Why didn’t you ask to wait inside?” I said, tilting grease out of a concave pepperoni slice.
She shook her head. “No way.”
Too embarrassing. I knew. Too needy. I knew that, too. Too proud.
“They probably saw you from the window,” I said.
Again, the head shake. “That’s how come she was my friend. Because she understood to let me stay there.”
“That’s sort of screwed up,” I said.
“Totally,” she said. “But everyone needs that kind of friend, that person who gets who you are even when who you are is sort of screwed up.”
“Needs,” I thought, not “wants.” “Needs.”
Penny pushed aside the bagel topped with wedges of Vienna Beef hot dogs and rolled her eyes in disapproval. She said, “I was ten then. Now I’d go in, ask the mom to call up my mom or something.”
“Sure,” I said.
I was thinking about how Jess would declare a pizza bagel “idiotic” but who was practically never late, and how that was a tiny, tiny thing, but weren’t friendships made of tiny, tiny things? So many tiny things you couldn’t sift through them all.
“I miss her,” I said, without meaning to, and Penny merely said, “I know,” with the saddest smile I had ever seen, and that was why I let Penny through the door that night: that same sadness I saw on Jess’s face sometimes, like when I told her not to worry on my birthday if no one from Iowa called me. Long distance was expensive, I chattered on, assuring her they’d all sent cards, the kind I secretly liked, with glitter layered an inch thick and something popping up when you opened the card, the exact type of card Jess had given to me minutes before, the card I displayed on my desk until enough time slipped by that I pretty much forgot about that desolate birthday, until now.
GIFT EXCHANGE
(winter, sophomore year)
Jess and Christmas confused me. Back in high school in Iowa, I’d steal my friend Janey a lip gloss from Drug Fair for Christmas and she’d steal me nail polish, and the lip gloss would be my favorite flavor and she’d really love the hot-hot pink of the nail polish, and we’d swap right then, both of us relieved. But Jess wasn’t like that. For one thing, starting in November she’d dumped a swirl of hints that what she picked for me was totally amazing, totally awesome, totally, totally. Snooping around our dorm room didn’t net any clues. The gift could be hidden over at Tommy’s, where she spent all her free time, or in her car, or at her parents’ house.
All my ideas were dumb. No college sweatshirt, because Jess wasn’t rah-rah and she’d never wear school colors because “purple plus my skin tone equals sallow.” I couldn’t afford her favorite makeup brands, which were all from department store counters and hard to lift. She didn’t read except for assignments. She was the first to call her musical taste unpredictable and suddenly now it was jazz, which I’d barely heard of as being something people our age might be into. Miles. Coltrane. Bird. Chet Baker. Why did he get two names and everyone else only one?
Freshman year Christmas had been a miracle. I took charge of a shopping bag someone left on the counter when picking up his to-go pizza at the takeout where I worked and answered the phone when he called. “Sorry,” I said, “it’s not here. Hope you track it down.” Inside was a Marshall Field’s box holding a glossy pair of scarlet leather gloves lined with cashmere. For a long minute, I wanted them for myself. But no, they had to go to Jess. She adored them enough to wear them around all winter. N
ot like a Marshall Field’s bag was going to pop up again this year.
She gave me Lauren perfume that first Christmas. The woodsy-rosy sweetness was intoxicating, as was the size of that bottle, a ruby-red glass cube bigger than a grapefruit. I couldn’t imagine this for myself, and she filled in when I couldn’t stammer out my gratitude, lost in the shit feeling of having not picked out those gloves special: “I knew you’d love this,” she said. “I knew it would be the most perfect thing for you.”
This year, sophomore year, she buzzed endlessly about what Tommy might be giving her, so possibly a token from me would work if it was thoughtful. “Jewelry,” she guessed, talking about Tommy, “which better be real gold, not bogus silver crud. At least fourteen karat, but I like eighteen karat better, don’t you?” Me too, I assured her, also assuring her it had to be jewelry, mostly because Tommy seemed to me unimaginative, with the standard checklist in his head: roses were always red; gifts for girlfriends were earrings, bracelets, or necklaces; sex was with him on top. I didn’t like him, or maybe I did; I barely knew him because Jess hogged him up for herself, and she was insane over him. It was impossible to sort out my exact feelings so I didn’t bother. Her parents hadn’t even met him, which at least I had. There was that.
Because of her insanity over Tommy, I didn’t see Jess a whole lot and that was why the promise of the big present, I guessed. Guilt for abandoning me the whole fall. To hear her talk, it was a new car or a trip around the world. Last July, Jess’s parents took her and Linda to Europe for a month for a big family vacation. Jess sent me a postcard of Big Ben: “Pretty big, haha,” she wrote. “Fancy,” my mother said as she sorted the bills and past dues from the junk mail. She slid the card to me across the kitchen table. I acted like it was no big deal and read the back. Then I passed it to Grace, who right away taped it to her bedroom wall. That was too pathetic to tell Jess, but I liked Big Ben up there, knowing that whenever she wanted, Grace could see somewhere that wasn’t where she was.
It was the night before my last final and I’d be on a Greyhound after the test was over and still no present. What I had for Jess was a Chet Baker album. I just grabbed one from the record store, happy to spot his name on a plastic divider amid the rows of records. It wasn’t even American. “Imports cost extra,” the record guy said, but for once I didn’t care. I was waiting for Jess to go first but also hoping she’d forgotten. She slouched in a chair at her uncluttered desk, a spiral notebook open as if to memorize lecture notes, but she was doodling stick men. The stress of this gift or not-gift was killing me. The stress of her around nonstop after weeks of not was also killing me. I had missed her, but sort of I hadn’t. I’d been floating through classes and guys and random cliques of girls. She yanked me out of that, yanked me back. I’d started wondering what if I hadn’t met her.
Suddenly she said, “Do you think Tommy loves me?”
“Did he say he did?”
“Of course,” she said. “But only after sex.”
There was a pause. I looked down at my notebook. In tiny letters, I had written in the margin, “Boring as death.”
I said, “Then if he says he loves you, he loves you.”
She said, “But only after sex.”
I said, “Do you love him? Do you tell him?”
“All the time,” she said, repeating herself for emphasis. “All the time.”
“Guys are different,” I said. “They don’t like feelings.”
“I don’t like feelings either,” she said. “No one does. And I can still tell someone I love them.”
I said, “What about me?”
She laughed, a horsy sound, and tossed her pen into the air. It fell onto the desk with a small clatter, and she jabbed at it with one finger, rolling it from the desk onto the floor. “We’re talking about my boyfriend,” she said. “Tommy, who only loves me after sex.”
I stretched my leg, nabbing the pen under one foot, pulling it toward me. I bent over and picked it up, then lobbed it back onto Jess’s desk.
“Do you love me?” I asked again.
“You’re like a sister,” she said. “But a thousand times better than the idiot related to me.”
“And?” I maintained my voice as a flat line of steadiness.
Finally: “You know I do,” she said. “Don’t be so stupid.”
“You don’t go around telling me,” I said. I held the silence for a moment of dramatic effect, before announcing: “Tommy’s like that. Just because he doesn’t go around telling you he loves you, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t.” I felt like the world’s smartest lawyer, whisking all that out of my sleeve, presenting the ironclad case I had constructed. Voilà! I wanted to shout, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to say the word correctly.
“Let’s see when we exchange gifts tomorrow night,” she said. She had bought him—actually bought for real—a pair of black driving gloves, handmade in Italy, and a leather portfolio with his initials embossed on the front for when he went off to law school. “Which reminds me...” Jess jumped up and reached into her backpack and held out a gift-wrapped box. “Merry Christmas. I can’t believe I almost forgot!”
It was the exact width and length and thickness of the box for Tommy’s gloves, and was it irrational to imagine I was trapped in a loop where the only gifts were gloves? I gave it a tiny shake, but nothing inside moved. “Is it a pony?” I asked, making Jess laugh. Sweat coated my palms as I tugged the shiny red store-bought bow, eased my fingers under the Scotch tape.
“Hurry up,” she said, standing over me. “This is excruciating.”
I got the wrapping paper off in a whole sheet, practically undamaged, and I doubled it over, doubled it again, creased it flat. There was a Marshall Field’s logo centered on the box lid, but before I could get attached to a gift from Field’s, she said, “That’s just a dumb old box.” Probably from last year’s red gloves, not that she would remember.
I lifted the lid. Folded back slippery layers of white tissue paper. My heart thudded hard and heavy, like a stone dropped again and again. I was afraid. Inside was a ticket. Another swoop of irrationality, as I immediately assumed it was one of her many parking tickets, but she shrieked, “We’re going to London next summer! You and me!”
Automatically, I dropped the box on the desk, pushed the lid back on top. “No,” I said. “That’s too much.”
“I knew you’d say that,” she said. “It’s nonrefundable. Like it or not, you’re flying to London with me in July.”
“Oh my god,” I said.
There was a moment to imagine this might be true, that I might go to London with Jess, that the postcards taped to Grace’s wall would come from me.
“Told you it was big,” she said. “Told you it was good.”
Big Ben. Tea. Shakespeare. Whatever else there was in London. Everything there was in London.
Jess romped around the room, half skipping, half dancing. “We’re going to London,” she singsonged, and the words hammered my brain, “we’re going to London.” Abruptly, she halted and grabbed my shoulders and twisted to look at me, her turquoise eyes stabbing mine: “Well, so, let’s hear it. Do you love me?” she demanded.
I was dizzy. The tiny dorm room was too dark and too bright, too empty and too full. I couldn’t breathe. Sharpness pressed into my chest. My fingertips were icy.
“Do you?” she said. She dropped her hands off my shoulders, took a step back.
“Yes,” I said, but maybe not loud enough because she said, “Do you?” as she cupped one hand around her ear.
“Yes!” I shouted. “Yes!” I shouted again and again. She heard, but she let me shout six or seven more times before dropping her hand away from her ear and hugging me. It was funny. Or we were laughing as if it were.
I thought I was going to leave the Chet Baker album in the room for her the next morning after my test, but I didn’t bother. By then I knew I wasn’t going to London. For one thing, no one had mentioned hotels or food or how my summer had to be
devoted to working at least one job and probably two, or how I could possibly leave these jobs in July to traipse around London. So I didn’t give Jess anything for Christmas that year. Tommy presented her with a robin’s-egg-blue box from Tiffany that contained earrings in the shape of an X—“Like a kiss,” Jess told me, “get it?”—designed by Paloma Picasso, whom Jess knew all about. Eighteen-karat gold. Jess loved them.
Eventually, the nonrefundable ticket was switched to Linda’s name, which was Jess’s mother’s idea, who said it would do the two of them a world of good to spend some time, just the two of them, together, and what was better than travel to a foreign land?
SHADOW DAUGHTER
(spring, sophomore year)
Money was why I didn’t smoke, drink, or do coke. If I wanted to, I found boys.
“He’s not good enough for you,” Jess might suggest, her suggestions always commandments. “His face is tedious. And that dragony breath. What do you see in him?”
I spouted clichés about still waters running deep while remembering how the boy drove me to a blues bar on Howard Street, putting down a twenty for as many shots of Wild Turkey as I wanted while the music pulsed my skull. If I thought about that, I wouldn’t think about later, kissing him in his car, where he panted dragon breath into my ear and across my eyelids. Or when, with the sun coming up, I trudged to my dorm and its fluorescent-bright group bathroom, where I jammed two fingers deep into my mouth, crushing hard against the back of my tongue to make myself puke, the way to avoid hangovers, to not feel rotten the morning after.
Strangely, Jess didn’t catch me and Tommy. It was his ex-girlfriend, the one I warned Jess about from the beginning, certain he would go back to her. Jess was only a sophomore, the whirlwind rebound, and no diamond ring would change that. Sure he was a senior, sure he panic-proposed to Jess in early April, but come on, the ex was Sydney Moore, a junior. Number one on the women’s tennis team. A Seventeen model in high school. Naturally she gravitated to Theta, where rumor was she was a neat freak, screaming about toothpaste dribbles in the sink. She should’ve been set for homecoming queen but was too bitchy to win any election; girls gossiped about her the second she walked away. But she looked damn good framed by the bucket seat of Tommy’s Porsche 924 Turbo, waiting while he ran in somewhere—picking up a deep-dish—a tiny, haughty scowl completing her tanned face. She and Tommy were last year’s celebrity couple, and Jess was the evil slut who came between them, and I was a secret.
Silver Girl Page 11
