All the systems take over. It’s Judd, and he is here on top of me, and he’s both familiar and exotic at the same time, which could be a wonderful combination. And will be, just as soon as I shut the hell up in my mind and stop overthinking things.
He sits up and, without looking at me, takes the rest of our clothes off of us, throws them off the bed, and then runs his hands over the length of my body. I try not to think of what he’s thinking as he looks at all of me.
“Is this . . . okay?” I say softly.
He closes his eyes. He says, “It is. It’s everything.”
Which—well, okay. I’m glad he thinks that. It is not everything, however. It is not, for instance, the moon and the stars, and it’s not the firecracker or the sudden blinding flash of light.
It is a first effort. Embarrassing in only the tiniest sense. Putting the condom on, for instance. When he makes love, it turns out that he closes his eyes very tightly. Who does that? Also, he sighs a lot. My arm gets caught underneath us, and I have to shift him over a little bit. There’s a moment when I think I’ll be smothered from his mouth on mine.
It’s a little bit like watching someone else doing it, from afar.
But the parts all work.
When we are done, he looks at me, relieved. “That was fun!” he says.
Fun, he says.
And I say, “Yes.”
And a few minutes later, he is so relieved that he falls asleep.
I stare at his face, which is so soft and unprotected in sleep. His cheekbones and his excellent jawline. His eyelashes, peaked nose, and some little lines forming, heading down to his mouth now like they’d been drawn in with a pencil. Stubble where whiskers are growing even as we lie here.
He is my destiny, I think. I try that thought out again. I am going to make up my mind once and for all. He is my destiny, and I am going to stop asking myself the question every couple of hours: Am I going to marry this dude? Because I am. True, he is not cuddly. He is not romantic. He doesn’t stare into my eyes. He doesn’t make things flutter inside me, except for that once. But on the plus side, he makes me laugh, he bounces on his toes, which is entertaining, and he walks backward down the street when he’s telling a story just so he can see my face. He’s kind to old ladies. He washes dishes, he never yells, and he folds up the paper bags very nicely when we come in from the store. Babies like him.
That could be love right there, if you add it all up.
On the minus side, sex might not ever mean as much as I want it to. It might always be just this, an exercise that we have to schedule. He may never stare into my eyes and send shivers all the way down my body. But maybe that’s not important.
And . . . well, big on the plus side—I have seen him successfully carry a baby on his chest.
I lie there in the dark, adding up the pluses and minuses, and realize I’m not going to get any sleep at all. And then, right on schedule, Steve Hanover comes roaring into my thoughts, as he so often does after I’ve made love with somebody else. I married him out of that obsessive, can’t-live-without-seeing-him-for-one-more-second kind of love. He made me feel—electrified, like I was seeing the world in technicolor, like I could do anything.
But now I see it true. I was always off balance, insecure around him. Always with a stomachache that he’d see the real me and it would be over.
This stops now, I say to myself. No more stupid suffering.
I’m going to join the ranks of married people—Sarah and Russell with their fights, Hendrix with his admission that marriage is sometimes freaking hard, Talia who says the hotness just dissipates into thin air. I’m going to be one of the grown-ups, the people who know that love is sometimes simply a matter of having someone there to show up and battle back the loneliness with you. Someone to sleep next to, to cook eggplant parm for, to watch a movie with.
I turn and look at his sleeping face, at the shadows the streetlight is casting across his cheekbones, at his rather majestic nose. This familiar, dear face of my friend—I don’t think I’ve ever really studied him so closely, all these years. He’s just been a fixture in my life.
But now. Now he’s taken on another shape in my head. The shape of husband. He is going to be my husband. Replacing the husband who failed me.
I reach over and touch his cheek, softly. I can do this. I can have a plausible, successful marriage with this guy. It doesn’t have to be fireworks.
In the darkness, it almost seems as if he’s shifting before my eyes, turning into the man I’ll see across the pillow for the rest of my life. We’ll have children and we’ll bring them up in New York, and people will forget that we weren’t always a couple because we’ll fit together when we walk down the street. We’ll be like Hendrix and Ariel, marching forward into the uncertainty, not even acknowledging that it’s a risky road we’re walking.
I finally fall asleep with my head on his shoulder, and it feels like the most natural thing in the world.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It went just the way I thought it would go after Hendrix’s accident: we couldn’t go see Mama anymore. Oh, I argued with Maggie and my dad plenty. I said it wasn’t Mama’s fault that Hendrix had gotten hurt. I said it could have happened anywhere. I said we needed to see her.
But they were resolute. “It’s not safe there. She and her friends take drugs. It’s not a place for children. If your mother wants to see you, she can come here and stay in a hotel and have proper visitation with a chaperone.”
“Like that would ever happen,” I said. I couldn’t picture my mother ever coming back to New Hampshire, where they despised her. And stay in a hotel, and be chaperoned? Never, never, never.
“You’re being mean,” I said to my father.
“I know you love her, but she’s not a responsible person,” he said calmly. “She can’t be trusted because she’s impulsive and she’s flighty, and she holds her stupid art above everything else in her life. Even her children’s safety. And that is not what grown-up people do.”
So I wrote her long letters that I never sent. I wrote stories about her that I kept in a notebook under my bed. I let my hair grow long like hers, and I embroidered hearts on my jeans.
One day I was snooping in my father’s desk drawer, and I came across the carbon copy of a letter he’d had his attorney send to her. I couldn’t make out everything it meant, but it said that she shouldn’t try to get Hendrix and me back again or else there would be legal action taken. The police would be informed that she lived in a house where there were drugs.
There was another thing shoved into that envelope. A little piece of paper, folded up. I opened it, and there, in my dad’s scrawly, loopy handwriting, was my mama’s phone number, written with a blue ballpoint pen so hard that it perforated the page. He’d written the number and then “Tenaj” right under it. He even wrote “Janet” in parentheses, like he still couldn’t get over the fact that she changed the letters around. I put it in my pocket, because someday I might want to call her up. It had been two years since I’d heard her voice.
It was just that I didn’t know what I’d say to her. I kept the piece of paper in my underwear drawer, just in case.
And then one day everything changed. I got my first period.
The day it happened I was at school wearing a pair of white jeans. These were statement jeans that I’d wheedled out of my parents for my thirteenth birthday. Maggie, of course, would have preferred for me to wear dresses to school, but I wasn’t having it. It was 1983—girls were wearing tight jeans and ruffles, lots of eye makeup and big hair. I had longed for a maroon and emerald-green jacket with padded shoulders, but Maggie had reached her limit with the white jeans.
And now they were ruined.
It was not all that unexpected, this period. I was thirteen and a half. I’d had a box of Kotex in my closet for two years just in case. All my friends got theirs ages ago. Missy Franklin got it in fifth grade and lorded it over everybody else, swanning around the locker room each mo
nth moaning about The Curse. But now it was my turn, and the first thing I thought was that this was the most shocking thing in the whole world. Women put up with this? If this kind of thing happened to boys, I knew for sure that Hendrix would just die of it.
I was in the stall in the girls’ bathroom upstairs, and Jen Abernathy was talking to me out by the sink, and I knew she was reapplying her eyeliner, and she was telling me she wanted to ditch Spanish and would I go with her to sneak out of school, and I just said, “Jen. Oh my God, Jen. I just got it.” And she thought I meant I just got it why Spanish was worth ditching, so I ended up having to explain. No, IT. I just got IT, Jen, you dope.
She came over and knocked on the stall door and said, “Seriously? You just right now got your first period?”
“YES!” I said. “You don’t have to tell the whole world about it. Do you have any pads?”
But she did not. And the stupid pad machine in the girls’ room was always empty, so Jen wadded up some paper towels and stuck them underneath the stall door, and she said, “Just put these in your underpants until you get home.”
This did not seem like a foolproof plan. But I did it anyway, and then we both nearly fell down laughing at the way I looked when I tried to walk with that big, bulky, scratchy wad of paper towels stuck between my legs.
I could hardly think of anything else for the rest of the day. And when the school bus dropped Hendrix and me off at our road, he wanted to race me to the front gate, and when I said no, he said, “God, you’re being such a weirdo,” and I said to him, “Listen to me. I am a woman now. I am officially now in my reproductive years, and you need to stop calling me names. Women deserve respect.”
I started telling him about the period thing for his educational awareness, but he said I was grossing him out, so I hit him in the arm as hard as I could, and he said he was going to tell Maggie on me, and I said I’d do even worse to him next time if he did, and then when we got in the house, I started to cry for no good reason, and then I walked upstairs and got rid of that huge wad of sandpaper I was wearing and put on a proper pad from my closet, and all of a sudden, all I wanted in the whole world was to talk to my mom.
I dragged the upstairs extension from the hall into my bedroom and dialed her number. Downstairs, I could hear Hendrix and Maggie talking. She got home from school every day just before we did so we couldn’t get into any trouble, she said, and she usually had cookies and milk for us, and she wanted us to tell her about our day and what homework we had. Like we were five years old or something. It was as though she’d taken a course called “How to Be a Real Mother,” and she wanted to get a good grade by the end of her life. Whatever.
The phone rang about five times and then I heard this soft voice saying hello. Only she said it like one syllable: ’low. Her voice was sleepy, like she just woke up, which is probably exactly what was going on. She slept ridiculously late sometimes.
For a minute I couldn’t even talk because the tears got all jammed up in my throat. Finally she said, in a cheerful voice, “Is this a crank call? Are you about to ask me if my refrigerator is running?”
And that made me start laughing. And then I said, “Mama, it’s me.” And she said, “Oh my God. Phronsie?”
“I got my period today,” I said. “I wanted to tell you.” All of a sudden I felt stupid, like this wasn’t a good reason to call her for the first time ever.
But she was cool with it. “Oh, honey! You did? Your first period?” she said.
“Yes.”
There was a silence. Then she said, “Wow! Well, this is a very heavy moment in your life. Let me put my teacup down and study about this. And you know what? It’s a full moon, which is very auspicious.” I heard a bunch of muffled sounds, some strains of music in the background. I could picture her in her little studio, the paisley curtains blowing behind her in the window, the candles all around her, the wooden door propped up on cinderblocks that she used as a table. Then her voice again, dry and soft: “Tell me this: When you discovered it, were there any wild animals around you?”
“Mom, I was at school. In the girls’ bathroom. I hope there were no wild animals in there. Because if there were, they would be rats.”
“Well,” she said. “That’s a good point.”
Her next question was, did I notice any signs when I was walking home later—feathers, or little rocks shaped like hearts? How did the clouds look?
“There’s snow on the ground, so I couldn’t see many rocks or feathers,” I said. We always looked for signs, me and her, when we were together. Her windowsills were filled with stones she’d bring home with her, and each one gave her a different energy.
“Did you see any tracks in the snow?” she wanted to know. I didn’t, so she got out her book of spells, which is exactly what I wanted her to do, and she said she was making me a concoction of raspberry leaves and some echinacea and a red ribbon and a cardinal’s feather she had lying around. She was going to call for a prayer circle for me at the full moon ceremony she was going to have that night with her friends.
Then she said that I was now in a long chain of women—women who had bled and brought forth life on earth. It was a sacred trust, being a woman. I must learn to pay attention to outward signs, she said. I would probably start to feel very intuitive, in tune with the moon. Her voice was soothing and sweet.
“Just think—the chain of womanhood is being handed down from me to you. You are a citizen of the greatest tribe of humans there could be. Woman power, my sweetest! You’re an agent of your own destiny. And you must get those around you to celebrate your entry into womanhood with a menstruation ceremony.”
“That’s not very likely,” I said and laughed at the idea of me, Maggie, my dad, and Hendrix even talking about menstruation, much less conducting a ceremony for me.
“Come on,” she said. “Tell the Woman with the Organized Hair that she should do something special for you.”
I laughed a little bit, just to show that I was in on the joke. “I haven’t even told her yet,” I said. “I wanted to call you first.”
I knew that would make her happy, and I think it did. Because next she said, “Well, if you want to call me again, I’d like that.” She paused, and then said: “Hey, I have an idea. What if you went to the store and bought a phone card, and then we could talk anytime? Because I think your dad will blow a gasket if he sees my number on the phone bill.”
“Okay,” I whispered.
“Do you think you could get a phone card?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Good. I’m glad you called me for this. It’s a blessing to talk to you,” she said.
“Okay, good-bye,” I whispered. I was looking at my bedroom door, listening for sounds. Was Maggie going to come up to see what I was doing?
After I hung up the phone, I went downstairs for a snack. Maggie was in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher, which was usually my job, and she said to me, “So, Frances, Henry said you have something important to tell me.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Whatever. I got my period.”
And she nodded and pursed her lips, all businesslike. “Funny that Henry had to be the one to tell me,” she said. I said that I would have told her, but I had had to run upstairs to get some supplies because the school didn’t have any, and she asked me if I had everything I needed. Then she wanted to know if I had cramps. When I said I did, she had some boring medical thing to say about cramps—like how they’re caused by the fluid buildup. And you have to be sure to drink a lot of water and get plenty of sleep when you’re having your period.
Then she stood there looking at me and wiped her eyes.
“You’re growing up so fast,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
I knew she would want to manage the whole thing. That’s why I hadn’t wanted to tell her first. Because there had already been too many times when Maggie stepped in to manage everything about me. She knew when I should go to bed and when I should wake up, and how
many vegetables I ate each day, and how many pieces of fruit. She knew all my teachers’ names and who my friends were, and when I needed vaccinations and dental cleanings, and what kinds of things were under my bed and what television shows I watched, and how my digestive system was working, and how often I should take a bath—and I was sick of it. Sick to death of being under the Maggie microscope.
Maggie put her arm around me when I went to the fridge to get a drink of water, and for a moment, we stood like that, and I tried to make her happy by putting my head next to her shoulder, and I could hear her heart beating and smell the laundered scent of her blouse, but as soon as I could, I moved away. I couldn’t stand to be touched, and the smell of the laundry soap was making me feel sick. It was like my skin was alive or something.
She stared at me for a long, long time, and then she sighed and said maybe we’d have hamburgers for dinner, to give me some iron. She said, “You know, you have to not use your period as an excuse to be in a bad mood.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I just have a headache and cramps, and I’m tired, is all.”
“Okay,” she said. Then she said, “It’s an exciting thing, your first period. You could have a baby now, you know.” She smiled at me and added, “But don’t.”
“I know,” I said. I got an apple and walked out of the kitchen. All I could think of was that tonight, up in Woodstock, New York, some women were going to gather to do a moon ceremony for me with a talking stick and some feathers, and here was Maggie making sure I knew how dangerous periods were.
When I got to the stairs, I called back, “By the way, I think I want to go back to being called Phronsie. That is my real name, after all.”
Boom. The silence from the kitchen was thick, like a bomb had gone off.
The Magic of Found Objects Page 13
