“Were you at the library?” she asked.
“There, and the lake,” I said.
“The lake!” That dramatic shriek of hers. “Are you crazy now? Talk about freezing cold. And dangerous. What if you fell in?” Her voice cracked. We knew the answer: I would have died.
Yet I didn’t.
“I thought about Linda while I was out there,” I said.
“Maybe you knew it was her birthday,” Jess said. “Maybe part of you knew even if you didn’t know-know.”
“I think so,” I said. “Why else would I go to the lake right then, when I could go to the lake any day?” I scrunched the phone between my ear and shoulder, unlooping and tugging my scarf free with one hand. What if life worked that way, with secret currents carrying us in the direction we needed to go?
I said, “I don’t think you can understand Linda or what happened or why, or at least not now, or I don’t know. But I think you can find a way to live even knowing that you don’t know. Like, maybe knowing you can’t know is something. That that’s what we all have to do, is find a way to live. But it’s hard. It’s like maybe the hardest thing there is.”
Jess blew her nose. Then she said, “Don’t you want to hear why I’m jealous of you?”
I could barely speak, but I did: “Okay.”
“You know so much,” Jess said. “Like you’ve been alive forever and learned all these things I’ll never understand. Like, I always thought if you’d just tell me even half... And the way you move through the world, like the Devil’s daughter, remember that? Get out of my way. I belong here. Like, you’ve wrestled your way in and here you are.”
“Wow,” I said. “I’m not that at all.”
She said, “Like I got in through an open door, but you crawled through the window.”
“The door’s better,” I said.
“Not really,” she said. “So, what did you think about when you thought about Linda?”
I unzipped my coat, which was weird to do because I thought I already had. But I couldn’t get it off unless I took my finger out of the phone cord, which I didn’t want to do. Not until it was so purple I couldn’t stand it. I left the coat on, gaping open. I said, “I thought about how sad she must have been. And how sad that she didn’t see all the love around her.”
Jess let out a choked sob. “Really? Did I love her? All I did was complain.”
“My god, Jess,” I said. “You loved her the most of anybody. Sisters always love each other the most of anybody. It’s just how it is. Like how I love my sister.”
I listened to her fight the crying, and then she said, “Grace. That name is perfect.”
“I picked it,” I said. “Before she was born, they asked what I thought the new baby’s name should be, you know, a joke or something to make me feel involved. I was so in love with the Little House books that I said, ‘Grace,’ and they actually decided that’s who she would be. I was really proud.” I couldn’t remember if I ever told that story to Grace. There were so many bad things from our past, but that was one good thing. I couldn’t wait to tell her.
Jess said, “Linda was the name my mother picked, and Jessica was the name my dad picked. Isn’t that weird, dividing it up? Maybe that’s why I was jealous of her, that she got my mom’s choice.”
I said, “Your mom calls you ‘lovey.’”
“I know,” Jess said. “It’s just that after someone is gone, maybe that’s when you think of all the things you should have said to them.”
“That’s why it’s so hard,” I said. “Because we can’t say those things when they’re around, but also we can’t say them when they’re gone either.”
Jess said, “I caught her calling Penny ‘lovey.’”
“Oh my god,” I said, and something ripped through me, like soft skin tearing. There should be a scar, I thought, something thick and hard. I looked at my finger: almost pure purple, almost.
Jess said, “I was surprised, but I liked it. It’s nice. It’s the right thing.”
That’s what I was jealous of, that—that acceptance. This casual love.
I hadn’t cried yet. I decided I wasn’t going to.
Then Jess said, “My parents didn’t call me today. I thought they would, and I waited and waited, but they didn’t.” She sighed. “Maybe I knew they wouldn’t. Maybe I just had to wait and wait to know for sure.”
“I think they just don’t know how to talk about Linda right now.”
Jess said, “She’s still my family even though she’s gone and everyone’s afraid to say her name, right?”
“Oh my god, yes!” I said. “Forever.”
“That word again,” Jess said.
“That word again,” I repeated. “Sometimes it’s the right one.”
My finger was purple. I was just about to release it when Jess said, “All this doesn’t mean back to us. I don’t think I can ever do that.”
“I know,” I lied. Maybe I did know. I wasn’t sure what was the lie.
“Maybe he didn’t mean anything to you, but he did mean something to me,” she said. “Maybe it was stupid that he did, but he did. I really loved him, even if it was stupid to.”
“It wasn’t stupid,” I said. “Nothing about you is stupid.”
“But you’re the only one I could talk to today,” she said. “There’s that. What does that mean?”
“Something.” I twirled the phone cord off my purple finger, that perfect condition of nothingness before all the feeling flooded back into it. Then I tried: “Jess—”
“No,” she said, and abruptly she hung up.
I listened to the dial tone for a minute, but she wasn’t coming back, so I hung up. I took off my coat. This call should have made everything worse, but somehow it didn’t. It was like waking up, like when I stepped into the library after being out in that cold lake air. The things I had said were true and honest, and we agreed: even if someone is gone, they are always there. That was how sisters were. That was how I saw my sister, anyway.
I reached for my pillow and finally cried.
TODAY
(summer)
Grace and I are walking to the campus to look at the lakeshore. I’ve brought her to the school to show her how pretty it is. It’s that kind of perfect June day that shouldn’t exist in real life, but because we’re incredibly lucky, it does and we’re right here in it. We ride the rattling, jiggly el and hop off at my old stop, Noyes, then stroll east, toward the lake. She holds my hand because she likes to do that when she’s in a new place. I don’t tell her that we’re near where I used to live with Jess. I don’t tell her anything about the old life I had: typing papers at midnight and the Chinese books in the library, heating water in a hotpot and the heavy Chicago sky pressing down on the twilight, how soupy-warm Jess’s dorm room was when we’d sit side by side barefoot on her bed and write our lists and talk about a million different topics and nothing at all while the light around us thickened. Grace doesn’t need to know those things now. Those things are gone anyway. I don’t miss them. They never felt like mine.
We pass the tennis courts where ponytailed girls whack balls back and forth in an even rhythm, and we watch for a minute. They rarely miss. They’re good at tennis. Everyone should be good at one thing. I still don’t quite know what that thing is for me, but I suppose I’ll find it. Grace could be good at drawing. She drew a picture of me last week that we taped to the wall. I imagine I’ll own that drawing forever. In it, I’m smiling.
When we’re done watching the girls play tennis, we wait for the light, then cross Sheridan Road. When I lived here, I barely cared about the light. I might cross against it, betting that the zooming cars would slow for me, but now I consider things like What if they don’t?
We skirt the clusters of brick fraternity houses. The Rolling Stones blare through a screen door. Some boys are playing Frisbee on the quad. They’re shirtless, and they’re good at Frisbee; the orange disk snaps and sails. They look carefree and happy, but I know it’s
possible that they aren’t. That they may look one way and be another. There’s a pause where their gaze latches upon us as we pass. I walk a little faster. I would meet their eyes and look them dead-on if I were alone, stare them down into motionless silence. But Grace is beside me, holding my hand.
We pass one of the north campus dorms. If I had been assigned to this dorm when I was a freshman, I never would have met Jess. I squeeze Grace’s hand. A breeze picks up when we get behind the dorm, and we curve our way to the lakefill and the walking path along the water. It’s what someone means when they say “summer breeze,” the exact lightness, this precise refreshment. She’s getting excited, bouncing as she walks, swinging both arms. “Look at the lake,” she says. “It’s gigantic. Are we swimming in it?” She sounds doubtful. She’s still a shy girl. I don’t think she wants to swim in a lake this big so I suspect she’ll be relieved at my answer:
“The water’s freezing now,” I say. “Maybe later in the summer, at a beach. Today we’re just going to walk, over where all those big rocks are.” I point ahead. They’re not really rocks, but jagged cement slabs piled up along the shoreline. This was how the lakefill was built back in the sixties, dumping into the lake masses of torn-up cement chunks and tons of landfill materials when the Port of Indiana was built for the steel mills. So, unwanted dirt and trash basically. You wouldn’t know that if you looked around. This beautiful, grassy park was part of a plan, a way for the school to create land where none existed. It’s almost impossible to imagine the school without the jutting peninsula of this park and its pathways, a place where bikers and walkers and daydreamers and students dreading their final exams can escape to. The catalogs and brochures all include a picture of the lake, usually right there on the cover. I bet lots of students were lured to this school because of those pictures of this lake, because of this exact scene we’re walking into right now. I always like to remember that it’s secretly garbage we walk on, that this park isn’t really supposed to be here but is anyway.
I tell Grace that the kids at the school, like maybe those guys we saw playing Frisbee, paint their names on the cement blocks before they graduate. “Why?” she wonders, and I try to explain what tradition means and why some people might want to leave part of themselves behind before they leave a place, why they might like thinking that something of themselves is left there, wanting to feel they’ve made an impact, that a place—the place they love—is ever so slightly different, thanks to their presence. I ramble on, noting that people also like to take something of a place, maybe something to carry with them. My explanations and ramblings are half-hearted, because my idea of leaving has been to slip through, the way water slides through fingers. Maybe there will be a day when I want to care about tradition, but for now I like it best when things feel fresh and clean.
She says, “Maybe we could paint our names someday,” and I tell her sure.
We’re quiet for a while as we walk. It’s a nice quiet.
We merge onto the asphalt path with the bicyclists and joggers. There’s a woman walking six dogs at once, leashes a crazy tangle, and Grace and I laugh that one dog is a towering Great Dane and another is teeny-tiny and yappy, busy dancing between the Great Dane’s legs. It’s the kind of day where seeing this would make anyone laugh. “Think his name is Tiny?” I say, pointing to the Great Dane, and Grace is still a kid so to her I’m hilarious.
We round the bend by the observatory, a white dome jutting out of its own prong of land. I had signed up for an astronomy class because I thought we’d get to go inside the observatory and see the stars, but we didn’t. My astronomy class was for nonscience majors, so we looked at pictures of stars in our textbook and on slides the professor projected onto a big screen in the barely dim auditorium. The stars were for the real science people.
Now we’re walking south, right along the edge of the jumbles of concrete, the lake six feet below, lapping the bottom of those piles of cement. Ahead in the distance stretches the silvery Chicago skyline, glittering like a line of jagged teeth. From this vantage point, the buildings look minuscule, like children’s blocks, like one kick would knock them down. Yet if I were in the thick bustle of Michigan Avenue, I would be overwhelmed and dwarfed; I would be the one easily knocked over. I’m still holding Grace’s hand.
It might seem a funny turn that now I work as hostess at the Keg, Evanston’s fancy restaurant. I smile at everyone who sashays through the door, students and their credit card–wielding parents, prom couples, townie families celebrating anniversaries and birthdays, businesspeople in their buttoned-up suits, faculty groups hosting visitors and job candidates. It’s easy for me to be nice when I’m there, even to people who aren’t especially nice to me. I just smile at them as long as it takes until they smile back. And I take summer classes at Chicago Circle. It’s mostly a commuter school, so hardly anyone lives in the dorm, and most people have other jobs, usually more than one. The teachers are smart. My class is focused on Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. I started out nervous to read Moby-Dick because it’s eight hundred pages, but I love it. Last night I read the first chapter out loud to Grace just for fun, and she liked it. “Call me Grace-mael,” she goofed in a deep voice. “Call me Grace-mael,” and she danced around the kitchenette being silly. I like watching her be silly. I hope she’ll be silly more often, whenever she feels like it.
You can’t always escape the past just because you want to, is what I might tell someone today, and maybe you shouldn’t want to escape all of it, every scrap. I like to think Jess taught me that. Or maybe I taught her. Anyway, I like to think we’d agree on being alike like this.
Jess and her family haven’t come into the Keg yet, but they will. I’ll smile. It’s possible they won’t see me, even as I lead the four of them to their table and hand over the menus with the specials typed on index cards that I clipped there at the beginning of my shift. I recommend the fried shrimp if anyone asks. Also the walleye, which I had never eaten before but which is delicious. I’ll watch them from my hostess stand, watch how they’ll talk and share bites of food and laugh at a funny joke and squabble over hurt feelings, how they’ll be a family together. I’ll watch, and I hope I’ll be happy seeing them that way.
And. Well. Say it. There’s some money in the bank. Not enough, but more than I would expect. Maybe it shouldn’t be my money technically. But now it is, and anyway, I think of it as our money, mine and Grace’s, and that makes what I did feel better during the times I worry about it. The round, burly man at the pawnshop didn’t ask any questions. He said he had a daughter who looked like me, and he showed me a picture from his wallet, so it wasn’t a lie, and when I left he said, “God bless,” and meant it. I’ll have to tell Grace someday. Not today. I tell myself those kinds of people have lots of insurance. Those kinds of people think they’re protected against loss. I don’t know why Penny claimed she lost the ring. Maybe she thought she owed me. Maybe she felt sorry for me. I don’t know why Jess believed her. Maybe the same reasons.
There were authorities to call in Iowa and papers to sign and words I won’t forget. Both my father’s fists walloping their way through my mother’s face as cops barreled up onto the front porch, my mother shrieking, “She did it, not me,” the cops hearing that, the neighbors too, the echo: “She did it.” Things happened that were ugly, so ugly. Grace was there for some of them. They will probably haunt us. Not today. Today is only for this, for now.
They haven’t caught the Tylenol killer, and maybe they won’t. I should be surprised but I’m not. People get away with things they shouldn’t.
We’re midway through our walk along the lake, and I decide here is the perfect place to climb down onto the rocks, to get ourselves closer to the water. Maneuvering isn’t difficult or scary; each rock is at least the size of an armchair cushion but thicker, and many are stacked flat, almost creating a tier of stepping-stones. At the bottom shoreline, the slabs protectively slant and jag upward, making it hard to get all the way to the
water. That’s fair. They don’t want anyone to drown. The rock piles appear random, chaotic, but surely this barrier at the bottom is planned. The water is freezing anyway, so you wouldn’t jump in even if you could. But plenty of people clamber down the rocks, to find a flat one so they can sunbathe, or read, or stare into the soft waves or deep into the horizon.
Scads of names and messages decorate the rocks, their bright colors and diverse lettering a cacophony: BUGGO LOVED AHERN; JEANNIE JOHNSON, CLASS OF ’81; LET US GO THEN, YOU AND I...; the Greek letters of various fraternities and sororities; TECH RULES!; GO CATS!; BUDS 4-EVER; and lots of names and dates, some faint and faded, from five years ago, fifteen, longer. I was here, I was here, I was here. The words surge along these rocks like a tide. The air smells distantly like fish, delicately, just enough to remind us we’re somewhere different now.
We scramble across the rocks and around the scattered people lounging on the rocks, me leading, holding Grace’s hand and guiding her to the flat parts, helping her stretch her step over the dark crevices where snaky vegetation bobs in the water below or lies dank. I make sure she puts her feet only on safe spots, and we claim a flat, sunny rock all to ourselves and sit cross-legged facing the water.
“Down there is Indiana,” I say, though there’s nothing to see beyond the triangles of sailboats, beyond water and more water. “And directly across is Michigan,” I say, gesturing at the narrow line of the horizon. “Up north are the fancy suburbs, Winnetka and Wilmette and Lake Forest, and someday we’ll go visit that white lighthouse. Past all that is Wisconsin. And down there, of course, is Chicago.” I point to these various places, visible and not, and her eyes follow my hand. I imagine her remembering this day until she dies, the day her big sister brought her to the lake for the first time. I hope she remembers this.
In my pocket is a handful of small stones, pebbles really. I bring some with me, a few at a time, whenever I know I’m coming out here. I’ll do that until the boxes are empty. I scoop them from my pocket and divvy them up into two neat piles, putting the extra on the pile closest to her because there’s an odd number.
Silver Girl Page 32
