East Coast Girls

by Kerry Kletter

  Maya and Hannah were the obvious. She hated the thought of them having to enter her place, how quiet and strange it would be without her in it. Maybe someone from work instead—ugh—one of the Wall Street bros on his lunch break, sorting through her personals while making deals on his cell. Or maybe her building manager.

  What would a person think of her when they walked in here? What would her apartment tell of her life? It looks like a showroom, she thought. She caught her own image in the mirror, alone at the door, then locked up behind her as she left.

  It was early evening and the city was gritty and seething in the airless heat. Cars and taxis nudged one another like a crowd charging for the exits, while swarms of people darted across streets and down sidewalks, cyclists zigzagging wildly in and out of traffic, everything jarring and intense and in motion beneath a vein of blue sky. The air smelled like pretzels and exhaust and urine. It always did.

  Blue’s doorman jabbed his arm into the air, and a yellow taxi swerved across two lanes amid an orchestra of angry, dissonant horns and pulled up beside her. She threw her bag into the back seat and climbed in beside it.

  “Port Authority, please,” she said while simultaneously composing a work email on her phone. She brought only a small leather duffel bag for the long weekend, packed “like a man,” Maya always said. One pair of linen pants, a classic button-down, a couple of khaki Bermuda shorts and white T-shirts, a ten-year-old bathing suit she had no business wearing, toothbrush, underwear and a pair of flat comfortable sandals. She usually felt no need for makeup or hair products, if only because she’d decided years ago that they wouldn’t help. But this time, because there was the possibility of seeing Jack again, she brought a few additional things: a necklace, a new leave-in conditioner her stylist had been trying to push on her forever, some fancy lingerie. When she thought of these hopeful little items in her suitcase, she cringed with embarrassment.

  Her phone rang. She sighed, picked up. “I’m on vacation,” she said. “Fine, okay, go. Mmm-hmm. Yes, I heard. Did you look at the reports? Well, look at the reports.” She ended the call.

  The phone rang again. “I’m on...okay. Yes, I heard. I told him to look at the reports.” She sighed. Pulled out a cigarette. She wasn’t a smoker. She just kept them around in case of emergencies.

  “Do you mind?” she said to the driver, though she knew they never did. They could smell the wealth on her, the big tip.

  She lit up, took a deep drag, creating a calm dampening cloud over her brain. Her email buzzed. Work again. She read it, responded, experienced a flash of dread at her overflowing inbox.

  While she was there, she opened up social media, reread the message in her inbox for approximately the fiftieth time. It had come in at the end of a long day, in a long week when even a few hits of weed off her vaporizer couldn’t quell a loneliness that made her skin hurt.

  Blue, I don’t know if you remember me. We knew each other many summers ago. I saw your profile in the Times and just wanted to congratulate you on your success! If you’re ever back in Montauk, hit me up! Love, Jack Giles.

  The first time she’d seen the message, she’d stared in a kind of blinking shock, the words Oh my God looping in her head. She’d stood, bewildered and giddy, wringing the nerves out of her hands as she paced, repeatedly returning to the computer to see if the message was still real. No way, she’d said to herself. No way, no way. He remembered her. All these years later. Thought of her enough to friend her, send a message. It had to mean something, didn’t it? It had to mean a lot. She felt like a carnival ride had taken up residence inside her body, making her all lit up and twirly and nauseated. She wanted to call Maya or Hannah, ask their opinion, disperse the giant unfamiliar feelings she was having, hand them off. But it had been two in the morning. And besides, she was convinced that everyone she knew pitied her when it came to such things, thought she was a loser at love—which was absolutely true, she was—but it was one thing to know it and another to have other people believe it. If she told them, they would just make a huge mortifying deal about it. Instead she’d poured herself another scotch and then danced around her living room like the fool she swore she’d never be.

  She’d stayed up half that night stalking him on the internet. There were no pictures, and she’d resented him for it. How did one make it to thirty without a single photo on Google Images unless they were in prison or the witness protection program? By the time she went to bed, she was already dreaming of their future courtship, the shared confessions of years they’d spent thinking about each other, how they’d never loved anyone else. Of course, she’d actually have to write him back first, but she needed to come up with a perfect response. Something funny and just a little flirty. If only she knew how to flirt.

  The following morning, sleep deprived and wired, she’d nearly put an extra zero in a million-dollar stock trade. Her mind had been usurped. All she could think about was him—this boy she’d met on a blue-bright summer day back when the world was sharp and immediate. This boy who had kissed the promise of love into her heart, unlocked a feeling of beauty within her she didn’t know she had. She could hardly bear to remember how long she’d gone since then without being kissed. Just the thought opened a cellar door inside her, dark bottomless grief and shame underneath. Twelve years. Jack had been the first and last boy to do it, the first to ever like her, the last to know her before that terrible night had turned her hard and sleepless and low lit as the moon.

  The taxi pulled up to Port Authority, and Blue handed the driver a hundred-dollar bill and waved off the change. The surprise and delight on his face made it worth it. Her favorite thing about money was the joy of giving it away. She often fantasized about giving it all away, but then inevitably she thought, Without money what would I have? No real friends in her own city, no love, not even a decent hobby, unless smoking weed in her bathrobe at midnight could be counted as one.

  She climbed out of the taxi and watched as an endless stream of people who were not Maya emptied out of the building into the steamy heat. She’d rushed to get here, assuming that there would be some sort of unexpected traffic jam or holdup. But of course, the holdup was Maya, who could cause more chaos than an overturned truck on the highway just by being herself. Blue was about to call her when a text popped up.

  I’ll be on the next one I swear!!

  She had to laugh. It was so utterly annoying but also so predictably Maya. There was an odd comfort in knowing and loving a friend so much that you not only accepted their flaws but found amusement in the familiarity of them. In that most basic way, Blue thought, all friendships were rooted in forgiveness.

  This made her think of Renee. She abruptly discarded the thought.

  Another email came in. Jesus, I picked the wrong time to take a vacation. Though on reconsideration she couldn’t think of a more perfect time. In truth, it had seemed like fate—the most romantic, perfect fate—that just a few days after she received that message from Jack, while she was still trying to come up with a response, Maya had called with the suggestion about going back to Montauk. She would write to Jack as soon as they got there. Make it look spontaneous. Say something like, “Coincidentally happen to be in town for the weekend, you free?”

  Now she walked alone down Forty-Second Street to the car rental place, something she and Maya had planned to do together. How unsurprising, she laughed to herself, that Maya was always miraculously absent whenever a credit card or cash was needed. But then, she thought, not always.

  There was that one time in junior high school when Blue got roped into doing a bake sale auction. It was a charity event to raise money for soccer equipment for her team. Blue had played goalie. She decided she would bake Nana’s famous cream pie, which happened to be her mother’s favorite. Truth was she wasn’t much of a baker. She was more of a wood shop kind of girl, but that was part of the problem. Blue suspected that her beautiful, feminine mother might
actually love her if Blue was a different kind of girl—pretty and dainty with a knack for cooking and shopping and ballet. These were the kinds of girls her mother would dote on and adore, the ones with bows in their hair and frilly dresses, delicate boned and shy. But Blue was built like her father, athletic and husky. It was a quality she’d felt proud of until around fourth grade, when society’s poisonous messages about femininity wormed their way in. That’s when Blue had the epiphany that her mother felt about her the way society did—that she was the wrong kind of girl.

  Somehow her thirteen-year-old mind thought that if she could just make a perfect pie, she could earn her mother’s approval. She was always looking for the angle, the mathematical solution—as if she could rearrange herself in the exact dimensions that could squeeze into her mother’s heart.

  The night before the auction she invited Renee over to help her bake, and the two of them made sure to copy Nana’s recipe to the letter. They made two pies to sell plus one to sample to “make sure it was right.” As it turned out, she had a lot of fun doing it, especially the sampling part. It was delicious, just the perfect amount of sweet, and by the time she went to bed that night, Blue was imagining a big stage and an enormous crowd, everyone fighting to get ahold of her pies.

  In reality the auction was held in a small hot tent behind the gym, the unimpressive crowd comprising the parents and siblings of the soccer team members. The girls got up one by one and described into the microphone what they’d baked, using the most mouthwatering descriptions they could come up with, and then the auctioneer (their soccer coach—this was a low-rent affair) would open up for bidding. As the auction began, Blue noticed that pretty much the only people bidding were the parents of whoever was onstage at the moment. Blue sat to the left with the rest of her team and scanned the crowd for her mother. She’d told her about it several times, and each time her mother promised to come. Just in case, she’d left the flyer on the counter that morning with the time and location circled in red to remind her. Her mother would be there, she would. Blue looked at the clock. Her shirt was beaded with sweat and her heart was starting to pound hard against its dampness. Her mother was probably just late. She was always late.

  The line of girls ahead of her was quickly dwindling. Blue watched with panic as the girl two ahead of her finished her presentation, sold her pie to her own grandfather for a cool hundred. Still no sign of her mother. The next girl was called. Blue wanted to dissolve into the grass beneath her chair. What if she got up there and no one bid? What if she had to stand there, exposed and humiliated, with her stupid, unlovable pies?

  The room went suddenly fuzzy, the coach’s voice muffled in her ears. Her own name was called twice before it registered. She stood, her legs shaking so hard that one of her knee socks dropped to her ankle. Once at the mic she stammered into it, her wavering voice sounding so much louder than the girls’ before her. She kept repeating herself as she tried to describe what she’d so proudly baked. She could see the audience quickly drifting, losing interest. Who would want a pie made by a sweaty, brutish girl whose own mother didn’t like her enough to come?

  Her coach opened the room up to bidding. There was silence from the crowd. Please, she thought desperately. Someone. Anyone. A woman coughed. People looked around, shifted, waited. Sweat was pouring off her forehead into her eyes. Oh God. Then at last a hand was raised. Someone’s mom she didn’t know, some kind, beautiful person who took pity on her and bid ten dollars. Blue was so grateful. She wanted to run out and hug her. She wanted to be adopted by her. She started to walk off the stage when her coach said, “We’ve got ten dollars! Can we get fifteen?” Blue turned to him, pleading with her eyes, Please don’t do this to me. Take the ten and let me go. She was so afraid she was going to start crying and make the humiliation worse.

  Then suddenly a commotion from the back of the tent. A loud shout from just beyond it. “Fifteen dollars!”

  Blue turned and peered out and there was Renee running in, waving her hand high, Hannah and Maya trailing behind her.

  “We have fifteen!” the coach said excitedly. “Can we get twenty?”

  There was a pause.

  “Twenty!” Hannah called.

  “We’ve got twenty, can we get—”

  Maya’s hand shot up. “Twenty-five!”

  Hannah whacked her. “Do we even have twenty-five?”

  “Oh, shit, good question,” Maya said, completely oblivious to the judgmental looks from some of the parents. “Hold on a sec!”

  Renee and Hannah pulled out crumpled dollars from their pockets, Maya retrieved hers from her shoe and they piled them together, holding up the auction as they counted. “Uh, never mind,” Renee said finally. “Our bid is twenty-three dollars!”

  “And ten cents!” Maya added.

  God, they were just so unbelievably embarrassing. Just look at them, all grubby and weird and oblivious. But Blue didn’t care! Because they were there, they showed up and now everyone could see that she had people. Ridiculous people but people!

  “Sold for twenty-three dollars and, uh, ten cents to the young ladies at the back!”

  “Suckas!” Maya said to the crowd. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  Blue covered her face with her hands. Maya always took it too far.

  Afterward they sat on the bleachers and ate the pies with their fingers and fed some to the birds and it was just normal, that they did this for her; she could take it for granted just like people with loving families did. In retrospect that was the best part.

  For a moment the memory made Blue soft—to think of how friends are life’s greatest first responders, rescuing one another time and again from life’s little atrocities. It was the big atrocities that no one could help with. Which was why Hannah was nuts now and Maya was reckless and imprudent and none of them had spoken to Renee in twelve years, Blue’s anger toward her so solid and unmovable that even that moment of fond memory couldn’t make a dent. Pie auction rescue or not, Renee didn’t deserve her forgiveness, not after what she’d done.

  She put away the memory and pulled out into the blare of car horns and the smoky breath of buses and an early evening sky as luminous and blue as the Hudson beneath the glow of bridge lights. The city had a particular lively beauty she could recognize but not connect with. She’d only moved here to be with Nana in her failing age, but she always felt like an outsider—a tourist who forgot to leave.

  As she pulled back up to Port Authority, she spotted Maya on the corner, standing out among the throngs—the only person in New York without her guard up, the only person smiling. It was in part this careless beauty that drew people to Maya. There was something so compelling about an adult who was as trusting as a puppy on its back. Blue rolled down the window and shouted Maya’s name twice before she noticed.

  Maya took one look at the frumpy green sedan Blue had rented and then bent down to look at her with disgust. “You’re kidding me,” she said, climbing in. “You rented a Jolly Rancher.”

  “Sorry you’re late,” Blue replied.

  Maya laughed and her eyes flashed with love. “Let’s try this again.” She leaned across the front seat and held her arms out wide and warm and welcoming as a beach. “Hi! You look amazing!”

  “Hi!” Blue said back, and the feeling of having someone be so truly, openly happy to see her was like the sun shining right into her chest, brightening the place up a bit. In all her busyness it had been over a year since they’d last seen each other in person, and she’d forgotten what it felt like to see in someone’s face that she mattered. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would like her enough to give her such a reception. But that was the thing about old friends. The love was built-in to the innocent bones of youth, long before a proper assessment of each other’s qualities could be made.

  Now Blue accepted Maya’s hug, then surrendered it just as quickly, aware of her own awkward
ness, how she’d forgotten how to be close.

  “It’s been way too long,” Maya said. “But really, you’re joking with this car, right?” She eyed the roof like it had insulted her. “How are we supposed to re-create our fun trip without a convertible?”

  “I think we’ll be okay,” Blue said.

  “We’ll just have to improvise. I assume you’ve got a chainsaw at the house?”

  Blue rolled her eyes. “Buckle up. Poor Hannah is probably freaking out that we’re not there yet.”

  “Wait, you didn’t tell her we were going to be late?”

  HANNAH

  Hannah sat beside her suitcase with her phone in hand. On the other line, Vivian’s voice buzzed with excitement.

  “It happened again! I was wheeling Henry outside for some air and he looked up at me, his eyes so clear and present—you know how they can be sometimes—and he said, ‘Hi, Mom’! Just like that! ‘Hi, Mom.’”

  The smile on Hannah’s face was so big she could feel the stretch of it. “Ooh,” she said, “that’s amazing!” And there it was, just like every other occasion when Henry had spoken or squeezed a hand or flashed a smile—sudden irrepressible, delicious hope. On those days everything was okay again, everything was worth it, all the waiting and worrying and caretaking and loneliness and sleepless nights and gray despair, all of it worth it because he was still there, he was still in there, her Henry, her love, her one. He was still capable of coming back. Oh, how she wished she’d been there to see it!

  She glanced at the clock, sorry to have to rush Vivian off the phone, but the girls would be here any minute. As soon as she hung up, she thought of Henry in the care facility, imagined him wide awake and conscious, back for good. There was still some brain activity. And advancing medicine. Miracles did happen. Even the doctors said that. There was that kid who woke up after eighteen years—turned out he’d heard everything around him. There was just so much they didn’t know.