“I wish she’d shut up,” Imogen says, tilting her head back so she’s staring up at the ceiling.
“It is kind of loud,” Lucy agrees, studying the sway of Imogen’s hair and wishing hers did the same.
Imogen pulls Lucy over to where the crust-rimmed bottles of Gordon’s and bourbon are lined up and pretends she is the barkeep, unscrewing the tops and sniffing the sharp liquor. Like nail polish remover, it stings to inhale for too long, but Imogen tips a bottle just to coat her pinkie and then dabs Lucy’s tongue. Lucy swirls the saliva in her mouth and slicks a Tang-covered finger in to get rid of the alcohol. Fiddling with the soda tap her father has rigged up, Imogen manages to fill two tumblers with an uneven mix of cola and fizzy water.
From the slatted windows that rim the large room, stalks of sunlight cast a golden sheen on the plump painted ladies who, arm-linked and haughty because of it, smirk at the men. One woman’s hat has a feather that curves up like a question mark. Lucy imagines that the woman’s clothing wants to ask something, like why her painted friend’s cigarette is unlighted in its holder, or why her high-button boots turn in on themselves in conversation. Imogen stands up suddenly and slams herself against the wall, trying to shadow the smoking woman.
“Who am I?” Imogen asks, holding her fingers in a V by her lips and mock-inhaling. Lucy puts the sticky Cool Whip spoon down and jumps up to rush next to Imogen. They stand flush with the mural and sip cocktails with their eyebrows raised, speak with English accents, and with their arms latched, march out of the basement and up to Imogen’s room to decide what they should wear for their first day of high school on Monday.
In class, Mr. Denozzio claps his hands so everyone will be quiet. Imogen, in her argyle sweater plucked from the closet heap several days before, swings her feet out and back as if she’s small in her chair until Lucy plucks a piece of string from Imogen’s hair and deposits it onto her desk to get her to stop. Next to them, Carl and Mike sing “Love Stinks,” while Lissa Macdougal stands in the doorway talking to a sophomore boy, and the rest of the students foot-tap the chairs in front of them or listen to see if Bradley will fake-fart like he did last year.
Huck Yorensen links his pinkie fingers to the corners of his mouth and whistles hard and long. Everyone shuts up, and Mr. Denozzio goes right to the board, where he draws what looks like a balloon that’s come untethered—its string trailing in wave-water dips and rises behind.
“What is this?” Mr. Denozzio asks. He takes a seat on a metal stool, then points to Lissa. Before she can speak he says, “And don’t say ‘a balloon.’”
Hair back in a band, Lissa tugs at the wisps near her temples and writes her name in cursive on her notebook, as if this will help her formulate an answer. When Mr. Denozzio says the word sperm, Mike laugh-coughs, but everyone else is still, facing forward, ready.
Next to the lonely single sperm, Mr. Denozzio uses blue chalk to make a disproportionately large egg. He draws it like an edible egg, even though Lucy knows by the page she’s turned to in the text that a real egg looks more like an eye, one circle within another. The biology textbook suggests making a dot in the center of a piece of white paper with a pen tip to see how small an actual egg cell would be, and even that point is many times bigger than ones that sit waiting in the girls’ ovaries. Lucy feels her abdomen as if she expects to find something firm inside, then rests her fingers near her hips.
Imogen nudges Lucy for no reason and looks on later as Lucy copies the egg shape into her notes. Then Imogen, sucking on a honey cough drop, leans over and draws an arrow to the balloon-sperm, writing above it, “Don’t pop it!”
From a shelf near the chalkboard, Mr. Denozzio produces an egg carton. He cradles the bumpy thing, rocking the entire box back and forth, singing to it until the students all laugh.
“You can laugh all you want,” he says, “but these little eggs are your babies for the week.”
He goes on to explain the experiment, how everyone will partner up and parent a blown-out egg, keep it safe and never unwatched until class on Friday, when he’ll inspect the eggs one last time and give a final score.
“The bad news,” Imogen says when she and Lucy choose each other as egg parents, “is that if you want to try out for JV soccer this week, I’ll have to watch this thing by myself.”
“I’ll take the baby to your play auditions,” Lucy offers in return. She tries to imagine taking the egg to the movies, or even to the bathroom, and wonders whether she could hold it and wipe herself at the same time or if the egg would be okay just resting in the soap slot on the sink.
Mr. Denozzio interrupts the chatter to announce, “Your egg babies may be decorated or given whatever accessories you feel necessary to make them more real.”
The next day, with signed permission slips from the egg grandparents at home, Mr. Denozzio does the first check. Mike’s egg is already damaged.
“May I remind you,” Mr. Denozzio says after he’s put Mike’s egg back into the egg crate, which sits flapping open on the microscope cart, “the purpose of this project is to allow you to experience some of the responsibilities that are involved in the care of human babies. Would you toss your human infant into the air on the bus ride home as Mike did? You cannot underestimate how quickly cracks and breaks can occur. Keep this in mind at all times.”
By Wednesday, Lucy is used to cupping her egg baby as she walks, book bag slung over her left shoulder, from the science building all the way to the dining hall. At lunch the day before, Imogen had nearly thrown the egg out as she cleared her tray, but at the last minute Lucy had run to a pile of mayonnaise- and crumb-coated dishes to retrieve it.
“I think I should take her—Egg—home tonight,” Lucy had said when Imogen said she was overreacting.
“It was an accident, Lucy,” Imogen said as she bent down to highlight Hermia’s opening lines.
The auditions for A Midsummer Night’s Dream were being held on Thursday, and Imogen knew she wanted Hermia—especially if Jake, the boy who was gorgeous enough to wear overalls without ridicule as a junior and who made it into every school play, was cast as Lysander. At night, when she’d held the egg, Imogen had pictured stage-kissing with Jake, how they’d press their lips together in the fairy-dusted forest set, and no matter what occurred during the show, they’d wind up kissing again at the end.
Imogen mouthed her audition lines one more time before standing up. “Fine. You can have it tonight, but I want it to see me try out tomorrow, okay?”
Lucy nodded and let Imogen straighten the tiny hat Imogen had made from an old doll’s outfit.
“It makes Egg look like a sailor,” Lucy had complained when Imogen had brought the cap into school.
“It looks stylish,” Imogen had said. “Plus, it’ll keep the sun off its face.”
At home, Lucy had taken the hat off and let the egg be naked on the bed she had constructed in the bottom part of her mother’s body powder box. Before getting into bed herself, Lucy had tucked the egg under the puff, wiped what she could of the gardenia-scented powder off Egg’s face, and kissed it.
The next day, Lissa unfolds her palm to reveal the only pieces that remain of her baby.
“The rest are in my dog’s stomach,” she says and sits down with her mouth twisted up, sorry. Mr. Denozzio makes a mark in his grade book and checks the condition of the rest of the babies. Only three are left, and Imogen sits up straight and proud, kicking Lucy to attention. Lucy is too busy running a finger over Egg’s head, smoothing the part that would be the cheek, if eggs had cheeks.
After the audition, Lucy and Imogen put their baby into the egg day care their friend Carl started when he realized the best way to keep his egg safe was to keep himself and it motionless on the grass near the library. For twenty cents an hour, he watches and makes sure no one touches or moves the eggs.
Cleated up, Lucy runs her two required laps around the field and then takes practice shots at the net while Imogen, on the sidelines, talks with a fellow would-b
e actor about line-memorization skills and how Jake never does an empty stage kiss but instead inserts his tongue to make the whole scene seem real. Later, when Carl has to leave and hands Egg back to Imogen, she sticks the thing in someone’s empty sneaker nearby so she has her hands free to gesture.
The next morning, Lucy gets to the posted cast list before Imogen.
“Hi, Hermia!” Lucy yells up the corridor to her friend.
“Oh, my God, really?” Imogen drops her books and rushes to find her name on the wall. She reaches for Lucy’s hand, but Lucy steps back, protecting Egg, still hammock-swung in her cupped hand. Imogen waits for Lucy to hug her, or say something else, but Lucy just smiles small and raises Egg up so Imogen can see.
“She made it,” Lucy says as they walk to class.
“So did I,” Imogen says. At the doorway, Imogen is still annoyed and asks, “How do you even know that Egg is a girl?”
“Sometimes you can just tell,” Lucy says and thinks about how her mother, Ginny, tells that story about eating cherries straight from the grocer’s display and suddenly knowing she was pregnant with a daughter.
When Lucy takes a seat, Imogen leaves a space between them. As Mr. Denozzio enters the room, Lucy can feel her chest swell; it’s all she can do not to stand up and run to him to show him how well her egg girl has done. Lucy looks at the carton Mr. Denozzio has placed in front of him, which holds the remains of all the babies who cracked or shattered during the week, and realizes that her whole baby will be alone unless Carl’s has managed to survive overnight.
Before the final points are added up, each student has to write an in-class essay titled “Egg Baby—What Did I Learn from Caring for Mine?” worth ten points of the total score for the project. Imogen watches Lucy say good-bye to the egg, placing it into an end space in the carton. Carl does the same. Lucy turns the face side of her egg girl toward Carl’s, and the two brown shells stand there among the ruins of the others. She wants to write something funny, like the other kids, who are guffawing over their egg puns and jokes, but instead finds herself writing a poem for her egg girl, and how she loved her, and worried for her, and wishes she could have her back. She thinks maybe Mr. Denozzio will get it, understand her connection to this project, but after fifth period, when she runs back to ask him if she can keep the egg, she finds the whole carton chucked into the industrial-sized trash can in the science lab. She picks through the debris but doesn’t find her egg, just shell remains and trash.
After the whole year has nearly passed and Mr. Denozzio takes the class outside to sit in a circle on the lawn, Lucy looks across at Imogen, who wears a jacket that is obviously not hers. With the cuffs pulled over her hands, Imogen looks small, and she puts a sleeve to her mouth so it looks like an elephant trunk. Lucy wonders if the jacket is Jake’s, and if Imogen has shown him the murals in her basement, if they’ve kissed surrounded by a painted audience. She misses that part, the basement part of Imogen, but not the rest. She will miss only that snapshot memory of her when Imogen moves to New York City a month later and doesn’t return.
Mr. Denozzio stands up in the sun so the students use their hands like visors to see him and explains the next project, in which teams will try to construct a cushion so that, when they drop an uncooked egg from the top of the science building, it won’t break. He tells how they can use cotton balls, Popsicle sticks glued together, or a balled up wool sweater—any means necessary to keep the yolk and white from seeping out onto the asphalt.
“It’s a bit like the egg parenting you did before,” Mr. Denozzio explains with his palms flat, as if he’s holding something up for show. “Except those babies were hollow. With these, it’s more than just the shell. You’ll have to protect what’s inside.”
Things We Talked About Smoking
Cordelia, Beatrice, and Imogen were still wearing their coats when one of them—they later couldn’t remember who—told the rest of them they couldn’t smoke Marlboros anymore. Rumor had it that the design on the hard-pack box symbolized the KKK and, much as they liked the gold and white of the Lights, they’d have to switch to Camels and the hard pack, with its pyramid and distant palm trees.
Cordelia liked Silk Cuts best. She’d come from the Latimer School in London and sometimes called cigarettes “fags,” just to remind everyone she wasn’t from Manhattan, as if what she did there didn’t count. Beatrice and Imogen had met in Earth Science the year before, when they paired up just to bemoan their Shakespearean names.
“At least yours sounds normal,” Beatrice had said, lighting the Bunsen burner under the test tube. They were distilling bits of wood that looked like skinny tongue depressors.
“Imogen is not normal,” Imogen said, looking at Beatrice through the protective eyewear they’d been issued to avoid possible lawsuits by litigious school parents.
“I guess not. But at least you can go by Jen, which is fine,” Beatrice said.
“But too common,” Imogen said, taking notes on the liquid pooling at the bottom of the test tube.
The two adopted Cordelia as soon as they saw her name on the admitted students’ board. One side of her hair was longer than the other and covered her left eye. Cordelia wore jeans patched with a U.K. flag bandanna and a Psychedelic Furs T-shirt that had some concert dates printed on the back as well as the name of the current hit single, “The Ghost in You.”
“Great band,” Beatrice said to Cordelia on the first day of school while the headmistress detailed the new dress code rules.
Cordelia flung the long side of her hair back and looked at both of them. “Who are you two?”
After they’d exchanged names, Cordelia smirked and nodded. That afternoon, the three met out in front of the lions that flanked the school’s main door and walked to Kelter’s Deli four blocks down to sit and smoke.
I. Imogen
That was the year Imogen’s father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and decided to order all the Christmas presents from TV. Her brother, Brian, got a clock radio shaped like a football. The receiver had white plastic ladder marks, as if it was the part of the football you’re supposed to grip, and when Brian talked to the girl he liked, he’d line his fingers up on the fake laces as if he were about to spiral-throw. Her mom opened her box and pulled out what looked like a red gun—something from a cartoon.
“It’s the Labeler,” their dad explained. He was propped in the yellow chair by the window so when they were all in other rooms he could look out and watch the specks of people on the sidewalk, the stop and go of the cabs, the distant flick of lights strung from the traffic poles in the shape of wreaths.
“Fantastic!” her mom said and slipped the tape coil inside so she could start using it right away. She typed out LABEL GUN and stuck it on the thing. Then she wrote HARRISON, and slicked it onto the dad’s foot, then went into the kitchen to start on the confectioners’ sugar and flour-filled canisters.
“Open yours,” her dad said to Imogen when Brian had gone to his room to try the phone jack there.
They used a large spider fern as a Christmas tree, one third due to laziness, another to Imogen’s father being Jewish and his guilt regarding traditional fir trees. Another third, Imogen figured, was so no one would be stuck with the dénouement, the task of cleaning the fallen needles at the end of the holiday season. Offshoots from the spider fern’s main stems perched on the pot’s rim, dangled nearly to the rug, and burst like fireworks above, bobbing until the cat pawed at them. Imogen pulled her gift out from the few that were left. On the tag her father had written, “To Imo—May this help with the final frontier.” An unspoken rule for all their birthday and Christmas presents was that the card should have some sort of clue on it. Most of the time, the clues didn’t make much sense, and sometimes the people who wrote the clues couldn’t even remember their relevance, but they all liked the tradition.
“I don’t get it,” Imogen said to her dad. He coughed into a handkerchief and tilted his head.
“Imo—come on no
w, think. You can get this one,” he said.
He wore a red cashmere sweater that her mother had given him about a decade earlier. He brought it out from the cedar closet only for the week before December twenty-fifth and the day after, then folded it up for the next year. He hadn’t dry-cleaned it last year—all the holiday washing, balled up and wrinkled, had sat untouched. Dad had coughed blood into his linen napkin at the Petersons’ Christmas Eve party and went the next day to the emergency room, where he was diagnosed. The red sweater, blotched with crab cake bits and lines of eggnog on the sleeve, was folded and put away sometime in late January by Greta, the housekeeper, who seemed to be less into cleaning the apartment than into rearranging items to give the appearance of order.
Her dad sat watching his daughter open his present, and Imogen wanted to go over and pick at the year-old food stains. They’d just toasted the year anniversary of his diagnosis with a bottle of Château d’Yquem from 1973 that they’d been saving until her college graduation. Now they all quietly understood he wouldn’t be around for that. But her mother had gone to each person and labeled all their glasses so they’d know whose was whose when they toasted with the cancer wine, trying not to let it dominate everything.
“I can’t open it without a knife,” Imogen said, picking at the package.
“Here.” Her dad handed her a pen from his breast pocket. “Use the tip.”
She sliced along the tape seam with the pen point and opened the box. The cat came right over to bat at the packing kernels. Greta would later shake her head at the mess the family’d made—crumbs and Styrofoam mashed into the Oriental, but the cat would manage to sneak a couple Cheez-Doodle-shaped pieces away. Imogen was coughing while she took a smaller box from inside the outer one.
The Girls' Almanac Page 14
