“Are you getting sick?” her dad asked.
“No,” she said, “I’m fine.” She was smoking more, leaning out her bedroom window at night, holding the butt in whichever place made the smoke least likely to seep back into the room. She hated that she did it—that she could picture the textbook image of her father’s tar-coated lungs, that she knew she’d live the rest of her life being a fatherless daughter, but that she still looked forward to watching the city at night with a cigarette poised between her fingers.
“Is it a vacuum cleaner?” she asked, looking at the miniature device she pulled from the box.
“Nope!” Her dad grinned. “Guess again!”
“The final frontier—Dad—I have no idea.” Then she wondered if it was death—was death the final frontier, did he mean the beyond? She couldn’t remember.
Her father looked small in his chair. No matter how many Ensure drinks he had during the day, the weight slipped off, making his clothes bag at the elbows, wrinkle like elephant knees at the waist. The shoulders lagged as if he’d borrowed his button-downs from a bigger, healthier older brother.
“It’s a space saver!” he said. “Get it? Space—the final frontier.” He put on a deep stage voice, as if this would get her to understand what he was saying.
On the package insert, she looked at sketches of blankets and pillows bursting from a suitcase. One picture later, postspace-saving action, each item fit perfectly, stacked and even.
“Neat,” Imogen said and went over to her dad to kiss him.
He put his hands on her face, and she leaned in to his chest. She could feel his clavicle underneath the soft sweater, and before she knew it, she was crying into the cashmere, then his hands, as he palmed her head. He’d always had huge hands, and they were the one part of his whole body that hadn’t changed since the radiation and the metastasizing of the cancer. They stayed like that for a while. Through the butler’s pantry, Imogen could see her mother, slicking labels onto things they could already identify—regular things, like glasses, the refrigerator handle, the faucet, as if someday they’d all need reminders of what surrounded them. Imogen looked at her father’s foot, where his label was, and then at the floor, where the space saver’s looping snout lay waiting to suck the air right out of everything.
II. Cordelia
She’d loved her room at the country house—probably it was what Cordelia missed most from England. Her bed was set into the wall, curtained on the sides, with thick tapestry at the front. In the daytime, the hunting scene on the tapestry was so fitting to the house she wasn’t bothered by the fact that it actually depicted a dog chewing on a fox’s neck, trotting the flaccid animal over to its horse-propped master. At night you couldn’t see the hunting; the threads just looked mottled and dark. Out the window, the second-floor terrace was covered in bird crap, artfully splotched as if the peacocks and guinea fowl had consulted her mother on her design sense before relieving themselves on the bluestone.
They had four peacocks that had come with the house. Since they’d been coming on weekends, only three were left. One vanished the morning in spring after they’d had a reggae party for Cordelia’s sixteenth and she and Simon Hobbs had spent the night on the tennis lawn down by the river. She didn’t tell him she was a virgin, because it was just easier that way, but a couple months later, when they did it again and the condom broke, she wound up explaining as they waited for an appointment at the Day Clinic. Issued a round of morning-after pills that she took that afternoon, Cordelia helped her mother prep for the dinner party they were hosting that night. Simon Hobbs and Cordelia’s brother, Jack, swatted at croquet balls, just taking shots at whatever wire hoops were already set up since their set was incomplete—they had the red ball and the blue, but the yellow had disappeared along with a mallet. The family joked that someone could have stolen that mallet and used it as a murder weapon, and they practiced their alibis during the hour-long drive back to London each Sunday evening.
Just before they gave the Berkshire house up and got ready to move to the States, most of the guinea fowl turned up dead on the lawn near the metal table and chair set. They’d gotten into the fertilizer Cordelia’s father spread on the back shrubs and pecked holes in the tarpaulin he’d put over the poisonous mulch compound. The remaining three birds hissed, screeching out into the gray morning light. The sounds were so loud that Cordelia had to open the windows and yell at them the shut up until her brother came into her room and told Cordelia to do the same. She couldn’t sleep. The former owner of the house had told them that peacocks went through cycles like this when they were sexually frustrated.
Simon Hobbs found Cordelia before summer term started and kissed her right in front of her parents, who pressed the car horn and finally sent Jack out to pull Cordelia away. The peacocks weren’t fucking, and apparently neither were her mother and father, which was one reason they were moving back to the States. Either way, it was time to go.
III. Beatrice
Beatrice is the girl who won the Mary Trudeau Prize in seventh grade. Given once every five years, the award is in honor of a student who best exemplifies the Trudeau Way: honesty, generosity of spirit, and academic thoroughness. In a yellow skirt and matching short-sleeved top, she gives a short acceptance speech and takes a seat next to her trustee mother, who is already positive she will attend Princeton, like the rest of the family, even though college is remote and all she can think about is wanting to kiss someone before high school starts.
Bea will, of course, but it won’t be the boy at camp, Jed or Jet—a name out of a musical—or Quinn at dancing school, who pulls her to the Social Hall. The room is dark and filled with empty folding chairs all facing a podium where no one is standing. Quinn’s breath smells like cheese and Binaca spray, and when he leans in to put his lips on her, Beatrice will push him away and snag one of the brass buttons of his blue blazer on her dress-sleeve cuff.
In the locker room at school during sophomore winter, she will overhear Lindsay Wilton talk about how she had sex with Quinn at some party, and she will take longer to lace her Tretorns just to hear the end of the story, how Quinn fumbled and passed, thanked her at the end, but left her, hair matted and skin hickeyed, to emerge from the room alone. Later, by the One Day maxipad machine in the girls’ room, Lauren Malloy will watch Beatrice comb her hair into a ponytail and ask to borrow Latin notes. Before Bea knows it, the two of them will be studying every day together in the library, then jogging in the park on the weekends, then sleeping over when her parents go to Europe and St. Bart’s and she opts to stay home. When Lauren finally kisses her, gentle and on the mouth, Bea feels huge relief, thrill, as if she’s won the best prize ever, until Lauren’s parents catch her, pants down, in Lauren’s room one afternoon and they ship Lauren to Lucerne for boarding school and instruct the school to confiscate any correspondence to and from Bea.
Princeton will accept Bea, and Harvard, too. Bethany Meyers—who played Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and winked at Beatrice from under a cardboard tree during rehearsal—is going to Crimson—and Beatrice might, too. She’s just not sure.
At Kelter’s Deli, everything was somehow neutralized. They were girls. They were girls with odd names who smoked after school together and maybe sometimes alone. Beatrice was thinking of her old camp crush, Lucy, a pinnacle in memory of all the unaction, the unspokenness of her situation. Imogen was thinking about her father and the wideness of the city below, Cordelia of Simon Hobbs and what she might have had if they’d never gone to that clinic. But the girls never spoke of these thoughts.
Possibly they would be bridesmaids for one another, or then, too, they might never speak after graduation. Most likely was that they would drift, like cast-off breath, away from one another. Dissipated, they would recall not so much the details shared over the plastic-covered menus that they studied but never ordered from as the way their young mouths held the smoke, how the wide windows would fog over until drops of condensation began their desc
ent to the floor. How unhappy they were in their own isolated way—and, if they had somehow found the breaking point out of it, if they would have been more than smoking friends.
Imogen and Beatrice trace the small pyramids on the Camel box, and Cordelia, in her half lilt, tells some war story from England, about how you’re never supposed to light three cigarettes on one match. They’ve all done this at some stage, since they are three girls, since they all smoke now; but today Cordelia’s words seem darker, make them feel like something—everything—needs to change.
“With the first match, the enemy sees you’re there. With the second, they aim. And with the third”—Cordelia gun-points her finger—“you’re done for.”
Community Service
Seven in the morning on Sunday and the boys are gathered on the Warwick town green. In their bright orange vests, Justin thinks the kids look like hunters or convicts, or—after last weekend—both.
Justin is the likable teacher at an uptight last-resort school. In the catalog they don’t say fuckups, just troubled teens, but everyone knows that’s the subtext. The kids are of two camps: either they are determined to rise from the sludge of drugs (selling and taking), defunct friendships, familial despair, and academic waste, or else they’ve given up.
Wells Zanger is the king of the latter camp, self-stuck in the high-walled troth after being kicked out of St. George’s, Prindle, Markston Hall, and finally admitted to Country Cove, the last shot before juvenile detention. Justin and Wells have a greeting, “Hey, Dewar,” for the cap Justin took from Wells (no slogans of drugs or alcohol permitted on clothing, accessories, or dorm walls). Justin knows Wells says “Dewar” but means “do her.”
In the early October air, Wells has been squatting so long in the cold, wet grass that his buddies ask if he’s about to take a crap. Justin goes to investigate, kicking through the slick maple leaves that blanket the green. Ghosts, witches, and gourds dot the perimeter of the kite-shaped lawn, and like the good citizens they either wish they were or deny being, the boys pick up trash and deposit the wrappers, newspapers, and cups into industrial-sized black bags. This was part of the deal; at Country Cove everyone did community service, whether it interested them or not.
“Hey, Dewar.” Justin stops to the right of Wells, who is still crouching. Justin thinks that if these were regular kids on a science trip, say, Wells could be looking for an earthworm, or a special moss. Justin finds that he feels more for the kids when he imagines them this way, younger somehow, or alone. Often, he finds himself picturing his dead sister, Alice, with the boys. That she might have been better at saving the boys than he is, how good she was at rescuing people from their loneliness with just a touch on the forearm. How her slight physical presence gave her a gentle, otherworldly glow and calm.
“Hey, do-her,” Wells says, his voice pitched off a key.
“Wells is slackin’!” shouts Jimmy Bettina from over by the bench. He has managed to position himself well—seated but near lots of trash so no one can accuse him of not pulling his weight. The kids are expected to clean the lawn of any and all debris by 9:00 A.M., when the Fall Festival starts.
Justin watches Wells and wonders if he’s sick, if as the teacher he needs to do something. Situations like this are just reminders to Justin that he is the adult now, two years out of college, graduate school only a vague possibility in the distance. Even though the kids are messed up, Justin feels he could be one of them, trade in his official teacher’s blazer for the roughed-up baseball cap or faded cords Wells wears. Each of the kids has an expression or gesture, the way their arms cradle their exam papers or how they sneak chewing tobacco, that reminds Justin of how he and his best friend, Matt, used to be.
“What are we looking at?” Justin asks Wells and crouches next to him. Wells faces his tribunal later at school. He is accused of forcing himself on Rebecca Stanton at the heavily chaperoned dance last week. Justin saw them kiss, knows that something happened, but can’t figure out what, exactly. He wants to think Wells is innocent.
“Check out the slug,” Wells says. He’s ruddy-cheeked and soft around the edges still, his shoulders puffy under the orange vest. Justin thinks about Holden Caulfield and his hunting hat, and how none of the boys—even the ones who made it through most of prep school—have commented on the reference.
“Yeah, slugs are fascinating,” Justin says. “You still need to pick up trash.” He checks his watch.
“I know,” Wells says, but when he turns to look at Justin, he stays fixed in his spot. “I didn’t do it, you know.” Justin doesn’t say anything. “Like, I could have, but I didn’t. You know, like we got to that point and I just thought of her as, like, someone’s kid or something? Like if someone did that to my sister I’d want to kill them.”
Justin is touched by this and filled with the rare feeling of peace that comes only when one of the last-resort kids takes a slow step up, makes some realization that will help him in the long run. Then he says, “But you don’t have a sister, Wells.”
Wells twists his mouth and nods. “I know. But if I did, it would matter, right?”
Justin nods and stands up before he lets himself cry. He can see Alice in the wet leaves, first as kids, when they’d jump in them, then as teenagers, when she would lie on the cold ground and he’d cover her with red, orange, and yellow fallen leaves and he would wait for her, wait for her with his heart racing, hoping he hadn’t covered her up so much that she couldn’t jump up, bringing them both to action.
Never Sicker
It doesn’t matter whether liquor before beer is never fear or beer before liquor means never sicker—or even if it isn’t the order so much as the quantity—because Jenna is going to throw up regardless. On the snow-surfaced quad, sophomores and seniors work together to slick out a sculpture. A few hours later, when the Winter Weekend has officially begun, the ground will be statued with Disney characters doing decidedly un-Disney things—smoking snow joints, hefting kegs; Ms. White and her vacant prince will be ice-picked in an embrace.
On Frat Row, Jenna and her freshman-year roommate, Cordelia, stand with their hands pulled into their jacket arms, trying to keep warm. Jenna pulls her scarf up so it covers her mouth.
“You’re going to get chapped lips, Jemma,” Cordelia says, slicking her own with roll-on gloss and anglicizing Jenna’s name as she likes to do. Jenna has stopped correcting her. “Here.” Cordelia hands the tube to Jenna, who shakes her head.
“That’s okay,” Jenna says. She thinks maybe she would be happier if she would do things like wear lipstick and blow out her hair so the ends didn’t curl, if she wore skirts and knee-length boots as Cordelia does, even though it’s below freezing. But Jenna’s in jeans and hiking boots, with a down vest over her Patagonia fleece.
“So, where should we go? Deek? Theta?” Cordelia rattles off frat names as if she’s ordering food at a diner, and with her lilt, the run-down houses come off as elegant, wines Jenna isn’t familiar with. “There’s always Alpha. Not that I want to go back there.”
Jenna shakes her head and thinks about that first weekend of the fall, when they’d returned from their freshman outdoor orientation. Each member of the class had been assigned a two-day trip, rafting or hiking, or camping in the dewy grass by Marker’s Pond, in order to commune with nature and—apparently—hook up with various people before the official semester started. On Jenna’s Trust Adventure, which consisted of a ropes course and allowing yourself to fall back into someone’s arms, hoping he or she caught you, Jenna had spent the evenings talking in his tent to some guy who later turned out to have a long-distance girlfriend. She’d felt the rush of connection, the warmth that seeped from her chest out to her fingertips when she’d made the guy laugh without trying, when he’d complimented her on her muscle tone. Such a specific thing to notice, she was sure that meant he liked her, and maybe he did, but the night ended like so many others, kissless and surprisingly alone.
Cordelia had come back from her hiking
trip with stories of campfires and s’mores, and the senior—Scott—who’d scooped her up and kissed her, how she knew it would be a great relationship because he’d kissed her in broad daylight, just as people were pitching tents and chewing handfuls of gorp. Cordelia said you could always tell that a guy was really interested in you when he did more than just make out with you at a party, or in the dark, if he did one of those hands-on-your-neck kisses in front of his friends, or on the steps of the dining hall.
Then, that first weekend on campus, as the “official freshman,” Jenna had followed Cordelia to Alpha House, where Scott lived, promising to keep her company. Cordelia left Jenna by the pool table holding a flimsy cup of warm beer, while upstairs Cordelia learned that the rumors she’d overlooked about Scott’s penchant for date rape were true.
“It didn’t happen all the way,” Cordelia said later that night, crying at the foot of Jenna’s bed. “But it was so close, Jemma. Sorry—Jenna.” Jenna touched Cordelia’s wrist, an awkward sort of hand-holding, while outside, the shouts of late partyers swarmed through the dark air. “I thought Scott was—you know—that he’d be my boyfriend. I’d be the freshman who got the hot senior guy.”
It occurred to Jenna then, watching her not-quite-raped roommate, that the myths of love—the music-over movie montages of beach walks and carnival rides, of fall apple picking where the guy leans over and brushes the fallen leaf off your shirt and then kisses you—that all those images could be just that, distant film cels that you could only imagine. In middle school Jenna had thought it would happen in high school, and then when that went flat, she figured for sure it would happen in college. But it hasn’t—not yet—and freshman year has half slipped by.
Over the summer, while her parents vacationed in Tuscany, Jenna had met a boy at The Baker’s Dozen, where she’d worked at the counter selling blueberry muffins and lattes. His name was Nick, and they’d kissed in the back room by the warm beehive oven. Jenna could smell bread browning, the sugary heat from the cinnamon buns, and Nick’s clean soapiness when they were together. But Nick was around for only two weeks before heading off to train across Europe with two friends from school. When he’d left, Jenna had missed not just the way he’d made her laugh by holding up sticky buns to his head to resemble Princess Leia but how warm the bread oven made everything seem. It cast a glow over the whole room. Jenna had felt sexy-funny, like Lucille Ball with flour streaks on her face, a crumb-covered apron that didn’t exactly flatter her, and yet Nick had kissed her like a prom king falling for the reinvented girl in a movie.
The Girls' Almanac Page 15
