The Hole We're In

by Gabrielle Zevin

  “Do you like this?” Harland asked Patsy.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Nothing special.”

  “I like it,” Harland said. He sang a few bars along with the radio. “Oh baby, baby, how was I supposed to know that something wasn’t right here?”

  “It sounds way better when you sing it,” Patsy said.

  “Yeah, I bet it does.” Harland raised an eyebrow, and Patsy kissed him on it. “The thing is, she reminds me of you a little.”

  Patsy swatted Harland on the shoulder.

  “What? I thought that was a compliment.”

  Patsy swatted him again. “Well, it ain’t.”

  “Damn, I didn’t know you were so violent.” This time, Harland dodged before she could hit him. “She’s kind of hot.”

  “Kind of slutty, maybe.”

  “Slutty hot,” Harland said even though he didn’t find the pop tart in question to be at all slutty. Just young and sweet and maybe a little silly.

  “Slutty hot,” Patsy agreed.

  Patsy pushed herself out of the pool.

  “You’ve got pretty feet,” Harland commented. “Perfect toes.”

  She put her hand on Harland’s forehead. “You feeling OK?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “First with Britney Spears and now with my feet. You’ve just been saying some mighty unusual shit, Harland.”

  Harland shrugged. “It’s all good.”

  THE SONG WAS playing in the women’s locker room as Patsy toweled off after her shower. She caught a glimpse of her foot reflected in the mirror at the end of a row of lockers and paused to consider it. The foot was neither wide nor narrow. There were five toes and no calluses or other defects worthy of commentary. It was well-arched—no military would (or will) disqualify her on the basis of it.

  She was still looking at her feet when a gray-haired woman in a beige waffle-weave bathrobe approached her.

  “I’m Carolyn Murray,” the woman said. She then went on to explain that she worked with Patsy’s father and that they (Carolyn and Patsy) had met before. “At the ed department family picnic. Two years ago, I think it was. You were a lot smaller then.”

  “Oh, right,” Patsy said, but she was just being polite.

  Carolyn laughed. “You don’t remember me at all, do you?”

  “Not really,” Patsy admitted.

  “Well, I pass your picture on your dad’s desk almost every day. Nice to meet you in the flesh.” When they shook hands, Carolyn’s robe opened a bit and Patsy got a good look at Carolyn’s breasts. They were round and youthful, incongruous with the woman’s hair and face, and, most intriguing to Patsy, lacking nipples. It was like looking at a face with no eyes.

  Carolyn readjusted her robe as she stood back up. “Do you swim here often?” she asked.

  Patsy wondered if Carolyn had seen her with Harland at the pool and if she would mention it to her father, because obviously that could cause trouble. Patsy thought about asking her to pretend they hadn’t run into each other. Jedi mind trick. You didn’t see me. I’m not here. But that wouldn’t work and would probably just arouse suspicion. So, she only said something about having hurt her neck.

  “You hurt your neck? Your father never mentioned that.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, nice to meet you again.”

  Later, after everything had been revealed and all navigations had been irrevocably set, Patsy would contemplate the best lie she might have told at that moment. She could have said that the black man was her physical therapist. She would shake her head and imagine the inflections she might have used and how it all would have been so obvious and simple and believable really.

  IN THE CAR on her way to work, Helen called George.

  “What’s all the noise?” George asked.

  “It’s called music, Mother,” Helen replied. “I’m driving.”

  “Oh, hang up, Helen! It’s not safe to talk and drive at the same time.”

  “I can handle it,” Helen said. “I’m very capable.”

  “Just call me when you get there. I don’t want you to get into an accident.”

  “I won’t have any time to call you once I’m at work.” Helen sighed and turned down the radio—it was no sacrifice; she didn’t care for the song or the girl who sang it anyway—before stating her real reason for calling. It had recently occurred to her that the wedding venue lacked a certain something. A certain ambience. Helen had been thinking that the addition of live swans might be just the thing.

  “Swans?”

  “Swans or, you know, it could be geese or something, too. You rent them for the day, then give them back. I think Canadian geese are the cheapest, but it might not be worth it ’cause they ... you know ... a lot, too,” Helen said. “And I was also thinking it might be nice if there were a pond in the backyard. Just a little one.”

  George said she didn’t know anything about building ponds.

  “How hard can it be to build a pond?” Helen asked. “You hire a couple of Mexicans to dig a hole. Or maybe Daddy could just dig the hole himself.”

  Postgraduation, Helen had had several places where she might have begun her speech therapy practice. She had chosen Big Rock because, of those options, Big Rock had the largest population. That her father had chosen to go to school there had not been a factor in her decision. However, when she first met Elliot at the local Adventist church, she had told him that she had chosen the city to be near her family. She had wanted to seem like the kind of girl who would choose a job based on its proximity to home. More to the point, she wanted to be that kind of girl; she wanted to understand what it was like to want to be near home. Having a backyard wedding (or at least consenting to it) had been a chapter in the story Helen wished to tell about herself.

  Sometimes she suspected that something inside her was a bit broken. She related to documentaries she had seen about autistic people. She knew how a person was supposed to react to things—love, for instance, or excitement or delight—and could put on the appropriate show of those feelings, but she never felt any of them. The only emotion she truly experienced was mild annoyance, and she felt that most all the time.

  At the office, her nine o’clock, Mr. Thayer, was late. She had the secretary call his house, and it turned out he was dead. He had hanged himself over the weekend.

  Since she had a good forty-five minutes to spare, Helen called her brother. She could hear that darn pop song coming from her brother’s side of the country.

  “Gosh,” Helen said, “that song is on the radio twenty-four-seven.”

  “I’m watching the video actually.”

  Helen told Vincent about Mr. Thayer hanging himself and how she wondered if it was the speech therapy that did it, and Vincent laughed at her. “Honestly,” she said, “I ought to be the one hanging myself, having to listen to people like him all day.” She had meant this as a joke, but it hadn’t come out that way.

  At some point, Vincent asked her how long it had been since she checked her credit history.

  Her credit was absolutely none of her brother’s business. It was no one’s business. That’s personal, she wanted to say. She could feel her sternocleidomastoid muscle constrict and she rotated her neck in the same way she would have instructed a patient. “Why?” Helen asked.

  According to Vinnie, their mother had been stealing from him. Helen wasn’t shocked by this news, though she very much wished it was something she could un-know. She wondered how much of her wedding had been put on Vincent’s purloined credit card. Then she decided that she couldn’t think about that anymore. Her mother was a grown-up, and Helen certainly hadn’t asked her to steal.

  “In terms of my credit report, my only real option is to sue her,” Vincent said.

  “Sue who?”

  “Mom.” But he wasn’t going to do that. He couldn’t do that to Patsy or Helen. And it would probably cost him more to take his mother to court than what she even owed him. Since trying to contact his mother had borne no fruit, V
innie had decided that the best thing to do was appeal to his dad’s better angel and get him to pay what he could. “But in any case, you really ought to check your credit card statements. And I’m going to tell Patsy to do the same the next time I see her.”

  Helen said she’d check, but she knew there really wasn’t a need. Her credit had been ruined for years, of course. Somewhere—maybe in that hunter green Rubbermaid tub with her old college papers, maybe in the netted bag in the garage with her ragtag collection of sporting equipment—was the free Frisbee that had started it all.

  A cute guy in a polo shirt had thrown it at her. “Yours,” he had said. “All you have to do is fill out the application.” He had smiled at her, and Helen had picked up the pen.

  CHERISH FLIPPED THROUGH a Rolling Stone and waited for the boss’s return from lunch. As Roger suspected, he had not been born Cherish. Cherish was the name he had given himself for his eighteenth birthday—he had taken it from a Madonna song.

  “What’re you reading?” Carolyn asked upon her return.

  Cherish held up the magazine. On the cover lounged a polka-dot-underwear-clad Lolita on a pink satin bed, talking on the phone and hugging a Teletubby.

  “Hmmmmm.” Carolyn’s left eyebrow rose a nearly imperceptible amount. The picture wasn’t particularly shocking to her, though the use of the child’s doll did strike her as needlessly tawdry. Otherwise, this was just one in a very long line of blonde, overly sexed/sexualized, too young, usually tragic, female icons. The picture put her in mind of an auction at Christie’s that a colleague had convinced her to attend the prior year. The auction, arranged to coincide with the thirty-fifth anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death or some such, had consisted of the star’s books, garments, household goods, and ephemera. The auction’s pièce de résistance was that dress, the one Marilyn had worn to sing “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy, the one they’d famously had to stitch her into. For the auction, they had placed the garment on a Marilyn torso (cut to her exact proportions, but of course), while a recording of Marilyn’s birthday serenade had played in the background. “Can you believe this?” her colleague had whispered. Carolyn could see that the friend was already mentally drafting the essay on the event she would write, ideally, for the New York Review of Books, but acceptably, for the American Journal of Semiotics or Daedalus. As Carolyn wasn’t planning to bid, she just tsk-tsked appropriately and excused herself to go to the bathroom. She had never been a Marilyn Monroe person, yet she still found the whole thing enormously depressing. That sad, faded dress with the sequins falling off. It looked old and smelly and putrid. Carolyn went into the stall, locked the door, sat on a toilet, and for the first time since her own mother’s death, wept.

  “Who’s that?” she asked Cherish, though of course the image had already told her all she needed to know.

  “Britney Spears.” The cover story for the April 25, 1999, issue of Rolling Stone was “Britney Spears: Inside the Heart and Mind (and Bedroom) of America’s New Teen Queen.” Cherish didn’t think all that much of Britney. He thought she was basically a Madonna wannabe. Slightly better voice than early Madonna maybe, but no Catholic guilt or dead mother to make her interesting. Of the new girls, Cherish definitely preferred Christina Aguilera. He liked a girl who could sing, a girl who could Work. It. Out. Musically speaking, that is. Most of the time he preferred boys, though he referred to himself as bisexual and would continue to do so for the next fifteen years. In theory, though, he didn’t think it particularly mattered what hole you were in.

  Carolyn took the magazine and squinted at it a bit. “She looks like Sandra Dee.” Cherish looked at her blankly. “Well, you’re too young to remember her. Is she popular?”

  “Yeah, you’ve probably heard her song. It’s, like, totally ubiquitous, Carolyn.” Cherish sang a couple of bars, then, by way of punctuation, stuck a finger down his throat.

  Carolyn didn’t think she’d heard it.

  Cherish told her that she might be interested in the article because it talked about how the girl was this odd mix of God fearing and provocative, not unlike the country, not unlike Carolyn’s (he did not think of it as Carolyn and Roger’s) book. “Like, in her video, she’s wearing this Catholic school girl uniform, but the song’s all about S and M, basically. And she’s in her underwear on the cover of a magazine, but she says how she’s gonna be a virgin until she gets married. I’m so sure. And there’s, like, a burning bush outside her house.” Cherish rolled his eyes. “But mainly it’s all just the writer being a smarty pants. The kid’s just a cute little robot sex doll. Here, take it,” he said. “I’m so done.”

  Carolyn took the magazine and went into her office. She kicked off her shoes and removed her jacket and made a doctor’s appointment (she had found a small lump under her armpit, but it might have just been razor burn or a pimple) and called her publicist and left a message for her daughter Allegra at her dorm. Around five o’clock, after Cherish had left for the day, Roger stopped by, and they spent fifteen minutes on the topic of the book they were sort of writing and forty minutes having sex.

  A funny thing about sex with Roger. She had worried about him seeing her breasts, because of her decision to not have nipple reconstruction—it had seemed like too much bother to get a skin graft or tattoos, and she was perfectly fine nipple-less, thank you very much, and wasn’t half the point of most bras to conceal nipples? In any case, Roger had never once taken off her bra. He was equal-opportunity on this point as he had never removed his shirt either. In any case, if he’d noticed that she didn’t have nipples, he’d certainly never mentioned it.

  “I ran into your daughter,” Carolyn said as she put her underwear back on.

  “Oh?” Roger pulled up his boxers.

  Carolyn stuck one foot into her panty hose. “At the pool.” And then the other foot. “She’s adorable, Rog.”

  Roger put on his pants, but stopped short of zipping up his fly. “What was she doing there?”

  “Swimming, I imagine.” Carolyn made a face. “Something about a neck injury?” Carolyn slipped her skirt over her hips.

  “Oh, right.” Zip. “Cheerleading.”

  “She was with her boyfriend.”

  “Her boyfriend’s in Tennessee.” Roger tied his left shoe.

  Carolyn ran her fingers roughly through her tangled hair. She was in desperate need of a cut. “Maybe she has a new one?”

  “Hmmph,” Roger said. “I don’t think so.” As he was saying this, it occurred to him that he couldn’t even remember the last conversation he’d had with Patsy. “What did he look like?”

  “Handsome,” Carolyn replied. “Tall.” She sniffed under her armpit and decided that she didn’t have the scent of sex on her. She wondered if she smelled like cancer. “African American.”

  “African American?” Roger laughed.

  “Black. Whatever.” Carolyn presumed he was laughing at her use of the politically correct term. Since it had entered parlance, the term had made her uncomfortable—how could you assume that any black person you met was African or American? But that wasn’t why Roger was laughing anyway. Her beau, it turned out, was just a little bit racist. Not the white-sheet-wearing kind, but still. And so the conversation continued and the revelations kept coming: Roger knew African American people at his church and claimed to have several African American friends and acquaintances, but, all things considered, he would still prefer that his daughter not date an actual African American. Though she would hate herself for this later, Carolyn tried to calm him down by backtracking—“Maybe I saw wrong”—but it was too late. Just like that, Carolyn’s 1998–99 School Fling had become substantially less fun.

  They had been planning to have dinner that night, but Roger claimed to have some calls to make and Carolyn didn’t try to stop his leaving.

  Oy.

  She could only come up with clichés to describe her motivations in choosing Roger: easy conquest, self-esteem boost, abuse of power, quick fix. Maybe she had sim
ply liked his looks. He reminded her of Sam Champion, the New York City weatherman she’d become somewhat obsessed with during a recent stint as a visiting professor at Barnard. She suspected Roger might be a closeted homosexual, but that didn’t really bother her. Carolyn had always liked a project and she didn’t mind anal sex either.

  When she got home from school, she called her daughter on the phone and this time, she actually got her. They talked about whether Carolyn would be able to come to Washington, DC, to see A Raisin in the Sun (Allegra was playing Beneatha Younger) and they talked about Allegra’s new girlfriend, Grace, and they talked about Carolyn’s love life.

  “You seeing anyone, Mom?”

  “I was,” Carolyn replied. “But it’s just about kaput, I think.” She knew how she’d do it, too. It would all be very aboveboard or as above-board as it was possible to be under such circumstances. She’d tell him that the book project wasn’t working out and that would be that. She would encourage Roger to write his dissertation over the summer and fall semester. For her part, Carolyn would arrange for a sabbatical, in theory, to promote The Wheels on the Bus 2. The college would grant it—she was the star of the department and everyone knew it. By the time she came back, Roger would be gone, restored to the racist, God-fearing backwater from whence he came. She felt around her armpit to see if that bump was still there (yes) and thought to herself, I’m getting too old for this shit.

  In Allegra’s dorm room, someone turned up the volume, and Carolyn could hear a chorus of rowdy, young females singing along to a pop song: “Give me a sign, hit me baby, one more time!”

  Allegra shushed them. “Guys, I’m talking to my mother!”

  “Sorry, Allegra’s mother!” one of the girls called in a singsong voice.

  Carolyn listened to the music. She could hear it more clearly now that Allegra’s suite mates had stopped singing. It’s familiar. It’s ... “Oh, I know this! I know this!” Carolyn delighted in recognition. “The girl in the underwear.”

  April II

  “APRIL FIFTEENTH,” THE preacher intoned. “Shakespeare should have called it the Ides of April. Beware them nasty, lowdown, good for nothing Ides of April.”