Pretty Things Don't Break

by Lauren Jayne

  Driving up Ben’s driveway, the lights were out and the house looked dark. I knocked on the door. After our fight, I didn’t feel comfortable walking in like I normally did. When Ben didn’t answer, I headed down the stairs. Hearing the door open behind me, I turned around, and Ben was standing with only a white towel wrapped around his tan, perfectly chiseled body.

  Walking slowly back up the stairs, Ben just stared down at me in my skin tight, sleeveless blue tennis dress that my Grandma had sent me. It came about four inches below my undies, something I normally wouldn’t be caught dead in.

  “This is my favorite dress,” Ben said.

  I crossed my arms over my body, as the dress was hugging every curve, and looked up at him like I was waiting. And I was.

  “I’m so sorry. I acted like an asshole. But my body…”

  “You know what? You know how to take care of yourself in that department. You know my situation. If you have to fuck someone, then fuck someone else.”

  “Why are you talking like this?”

  He grabbed me by my hand and brought me to his chest. Resting my head on his bare warm skin, surrounded by his knowing arms and the familiar smell of Irish Spring, I let him lead me into the house and down the stairs. His room was freshly vacuumed; his shirts had already been washed and hung in the laundry room in the corner of his room, and Ten Thousand Maniacs were playing on the stereo. Candles lined his coffee table and he slipped on some boxers and shorts. Lying down on the floor, Ben apologized again. I laid over him, my dress pulled up enough to straddle his body, my hands clasped in his. He pulled me down to kiss him, every inch of our bodies touching. His fast breath was in my ear, his hands on my hips, careful not to dip too low or too high. My heart was racing, beating through every inch of my body.

  Ben rolled over me, grabbed my hands, and led me to his bed.

  He picked me up and laid me in the center and said, “I promise, I’ll be good.”

  Lying next to him with nothing but candles for light and Natalie’s voice in the background, I took off my dress. Reaching up to me from where he was lying, his stomach muscles rippled. He brushed my hair away from my face and kissed my lips, neck, clavicle, then chest.

  He pulled me down on top of him, his face in my pink lace bra, and whispered into my ear, “I love you, I love you, I love you. You are perfect.”

  We rolled in his bed, me in my bra and silk paisley undies that were nothing more than two triangles sewn together, and Ben in his boxers, a meshing of hands and tongues and fingers and breath. We had never been in his bed with so little on our bodies. The energy between us was electrifying.

  “I love you…I love your body… I…”

  I whispered in his ear, “I’m okay.”

  “Are you sure?” Ben kissed me and pulled me to him.

  In under a minute, it was over.

  Chapter 20

  Confidential

  In December of our senior year, a note was delivered to my Math class instructing me to visit my counselor. When I walked into her office, there she sat – stiff as a board, with her nylon-covered legs crossed tightly. She was married to the math teacher who started the Spam Club. I just stared at her, wondering what I could possibly be doing in her office.

  “We received a call from your doctor’s office. Did you recently go in for a physical?”

  “We all did, for gym. Why?”

  “Your doctor notified us of your condition.”

  “My condition?”

  “The enamel on your teeth is thin, almost see through.”

  I put my hand over my mouth.

  “And your heartbeat is irregular. Did you know you could die? Drop dead from a heart attack from an imbalance in your electrolytes?”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about, and I thought my appointments with my doctor were confidential.”

  “They are, but you’re a minor, and your mom gave your doctor permission to contact us, so we could help.”

  “Help with what?”

  “We – your doctor and I – feel it’s best if you start an in-treatment program for your eating disorder. You’ll be out in ninety days.”

  I just stared at her and got up and walked out. Feeling betrayed and misunderstood, I went home after school that day. When Mom got home, I asked her what was going on.

  “Mom, why did you tell the school to call me in? Why did you give the doctor permission to talk about me? Who cares if I stick my finger down my throat once in a while? Everyone I know is having sex with everyone, getting high, doing coke and mushrooms and acid, and they’re not being pulled out of their classes. Me, I’m doing nothing, and now you’re sending me away.”

  “You know the reason you don’t do all those things is because of me.”

  I just stared at her.

  “I always talked to you kids about drinking and drugs and have told you since you were babies how my dad shot his brains out, drunk. And my brother, your uncle Stanley, shot his brains out, high on acid. That’s why you guys don’t do drugs.”

  In my head I was thinking, of course, any good attribute I may have is because of her. Or maybe I don’t do that stuff because watching my friends drink and get high and fuck everyone didn’t seem fun to me. After watching long enough, it just seemed like when they ran out of stuff to say, they grabbed a drink or the bong. I was ok with silence. So, no mom, I’m sorry this one is all me. Then I shook out of my thoughts and said,

  “Mom, what is going on?”

  “I’m taking you to a treatment center in Ballard tomorrow. They have a spot and the doctor said if I don’t, you could die.”

  “Do I look like I’m going to die?”

  “I don’t want to spend the thirty grand to do this either, but neither one of us has a choice.”

  The next day she dropped me off at what would be my home for the next ninety days. Ninety days without nature, without fresh air, without a cloud or a lake or a mountain or a tree. No music. That was my connection to my soul, and it was gone. Everything in the walls of the hospital was man-made, every smell covered with bleach and sadness. Ninety days of tapping shoes, closing doors and sniffling sobs. Ninety days felt like an eternity.

  I sat in group therapy with my arms crossed and listened. The girls surrounding me, some so thin it looked like they would break in a windstorm and some normal-sized girls like me, pretty much all had the same story. Never trusting anyone enough to speak the truth, I said enough to get by and get out. Seeing myself in the other girls, I realized that we were pissed at whoever it was that stole our innocence, our voices, our sexuality, our dignity; but now we were taking it out on ourselves. Being a listener more than a talker, it took me awhile, but finally I saw that we were all very similar. What had happened to most of us was over by now, or at least we had the ability to get away from it. As my ninety days were coming to an end, I started to put the pieces together. I realized that I had the power now to make my own choices. I was under a year from becoming a real adult, and it was up to me to figure my life out or end up like the forty-year-old woman in my therapy group who showed up with the darkest black eye I’d ever seen.

  When the girls came to pick me up with signs, I almost fell to the ground. My senses soaked it all in: the brisk, chilled air, scented with the essence of cedar-soaked trees and smoke from a fire that billowed out of a chimney in the distance, Carmen’s perfume and candy-smelling lip gloss, the bright blue sky with puffy pure white clouds, a tree just doing what it does. It all felt like magic. My eyes captured everything – every shaking branch, every sound that the world had to offer. Feeling free again, with a deep connection to life and a fear of it ever being taken away, I headed home.

  Having missed a chunk of school, my options for graduating were to go to summer school and graduate late or go to the alternative school, catch up, and come back to graduate. My entire life I’d heard my family scoff at school. Mom left in her junior year and was making more than most doctors now, and Noah was just shy of graduating too.
In the last weeks of his senior year, he’d skipped one too many days and was expelled. Without a fight, he didn’t graduate. The brightest guy I had ever met without a high school diploma. It couldn’t be me. I refused.

  I plowed through the smoking section, which was the front steps of my new school, and headed to my first class, mid-year. I scoured the room for a familiar face, but there wasn’t one. Plopping down in the first available seat, surrounded by kids with blue Mohawks and pierced cheeks, I listened as Brad, our teacher, spoke. They called teachers by their first names at this school as a way to deal with the kids with major respect issues or something. Brad was like something out of a movie: a real teacher, with passion and conviction, who made learning interesting.

  I also loved my writing teacher, Cindi. Cindi was a gorgeous Latino-looking woman who couldn’t have been more than ten years older than us. She taught writing with her hands flying, using her markers to underline key points on the board with such gusto, time flew by in her classes. Writing in a journal was a way to get extra points; everything was about getting extra points. There really wasn’t required work; we could go at our own speed, and mine was warp speed out of here. Filling out journal after journal, I fell in love with writing; it brought me into a moment in time, into my imagination and out of my life.

  Shortly after I got out of treatment, Ben’s mom Gayle got a new boyfriend, and everything changed. He didn’t think it was appropriate to have girls sleeping in the basement with Ben. Was he kidding? We were best friends and shared a deeper love for each other than anyone else I knew. Gayle was like a mom to me, and I was her daughter, but women are so stupid when it comes to men. This was Gayle’s house – it should have been Gayle’s rules. Since I wasn’t at school anymore, and I had basically been with Ben every day since we started our junior year, my relationships with my girlfriends were different now. We were still close, and if we saw each other it was like not one day had passed, but it wasn’t like I could just go stay at Jen’s house anymore. I was forced to spend my nights at home.

  Mom came into my room while I was on my bed one night writing in my journal and said, “Dad found a new Japanese place. Come with us.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  But Noah was going too, so I knew it’d be tolerable.

  When Dad parked the car at a strip mall beside QFC, I rolled my eyes. The windows were lined with white paper and had bamboo-looking squares over them. When we opened the door, it was packed.

  The Japanese chefs from behind the counter yelled in unison, “Moshi Moshi!”

  Dad rattled something off in Japanese and in no time we were seated right in the middle of the restaurant. Dad had picked up the language when he was stationed in Japan in the Air Force years ago. A little woman wearing a blue kimono buttoned up to her chin with black hair surrounding her doll face poured tea and spoke with Dad. She was laughing, and they were speaking in Japanese. She looked at me and asked if I spoke too. I just looked at her and smiled and shook my head.

  “Your dad, he very smart. I close my eyes and he is Japanese.”

  Pretty soon our table was filled with steaming soup and ceramic dishes of cucumber, steaming platters filled with meat and veggies, plates of sushi, and more soups with noodles in huge oval bowls. Every time a plate was taken away another one was brought out. Pretty soon Dad was speaking to all of the Japanese families that surrounded us.

  When he said a few words to Noah, Noah repeated them back, and our waitress said, “Oh, you like your Dad. Sound perfect. You practice, you perfect like him.”

  *

  Getting mono in my senior year seemed like it would ruin my last chance at graduating on time, but Carmen, now at BEST too, brought me all of my school work. Being trapped at our house felt like being in jail, sleeping behind my locked door most of the time.

  Ben called. “I have to come see you. I’m going crazy. I’m sick too; I have LOS,” Ben’s term for lack of sex.

  Waking up from a nap, I heard talking out back. I crept out of bed and cracked my window, falling back into my little twin bed and listening to Dad talk to Ben.

  “Ben, that’s really amazing! They let you paint the school mural, and you’re getting attention from art schools around the country?”

  “Yea, I love it, but my grandparents think I should get a real job.”

  “You have one life to live; you have a gift and if you love it – do you love it?”

  “It’s part of me – art is who I am – I can’t separate it from myself. I love it almost as much as I love your daughter.”

  Lying in bed, my blood was boiling. When Ben came up the stairs and knocked on my door, I unlocked it, then jumped back in bed and rolled over, facing away from him.

  He tapped my shoulder, “Hey pretty girl, I miss you. I came all the way over to see you. What’s wrong?”

  “Why don’t you go talk to your buddy, Ben.”

  “I know your dad’s a dick to you, but he gets me like no other adult besides Mrs. Mroz, and…”

  “Ben, you need to go,” I said, pulling my blankets over me even tighter.

  Later that night, when the phone rang, I picked up assuming it was Ben.

  “Lor, it’s Car. My mom’s going to Mexico with Randy. I’m coming to get you; you can do mono here.”

  I lay on Carmen’s couch so I wouldn’t get her sick while she brought me soup and played with my hair. Seeing the tears stream down my face, she asked me what was going on.

  “Ben and I broke up.”

  “What? When? And why?”

  “He was talking to my dad all buddy buddy. He’s like, ‘Your dad listens to me and takes my art seriously.’ Fuck you, Ben. Fuck you! I know he doesn’t know everything, but he’s seen him get violent with me. He came into the house to get clothes with me once, and Dad didn’t know he was there. He watched as Dad leaped from his La-Z-Boy, bounded up the stairs and knocked me into a wall before he saw Ben. He knows that the reason I freak out sometimes if the lights are off when he touches me is because I think it’s my dad. He knows that when I push him away, it’s only because I can’t push my dad far enough from my memory. How could he ever speak to him? It’s a complete betrayal, and I don’t ever want to speak to Ben again!”

  “I hate your dad forever touching a hair on your head, and if you’d ever let me meet that sorry excuse for a man, I’d…”

  “I know, Carmen, that’s because you love me. I’ve spent my entire life being doubted and called an exaggerator and crazy; now it feels like Ben’s doing the same thing and I can’t take it.”

  As the days passed, the anger in my heart turned to sadness. One day Carmen walked into the apartment with a little goldfish, an apple fritter – my favorite doughnut from Winchell’s – and a new cassette tape.

  Pointing to the plastic water-filled bag, she said, “He’s your new boyfriend; he’ll be loyal and love you forever, even if he dies.”

  A few days later Ben and I were back together again.

  Chapter 21

  AVM

  During our graduation ceremony at my alternative high school, surrounded by the so-called fuck-ups, I felt more at home than I ever did at my high school. In our tiny ceremony, the teachers spoke about us as humans and cried at our triumphs. At our ceremony for regular high school, surrounded by over 800 faces, they raced over our mispronounced names and jammed a fake diploma in our hands just long enough to snap a photo.

  Our school-sponsored graduation party was held at a water park and, had we not been shuttled there by bus and held hostage, we would have left immediately upon finding out where it was. Sitting on the cement steps among a group of twenty chatting voices, I drifted away. A paralyzing thought washed over me, “What next?” Racing to the finish line to graduate, this was the very first time the thought had crossed my mind. What would I do now? After my upcoming graduation trip to Waikiki with Carmen, I would figure it out.

  I stood behind the counter at Pumpkins yogurt shop, a few minutes from Ben’s house, refill
ing the canisters in the glass case that held chopped candies, cookies, nuts and fruit. The boys had just left; when they came in high as kites, I’d make them sandwiches and let them come back and make yogurts topped with every sweet imaginable for free. Paul, my cool, ex-hippy boss, didn’t question how we were always out of food and never had money in the till; this was the job of the century.

  One day, I looked up to see a vaguely familiar face: she had brown hair pulled up into a ponytail and was tall and thin with huge brown eyes, with brown lip liner making her thin lips look plumper.

  “Hi, I’m Jody. Remember me?”

  “Kind of.”

  “I met you with Carmen; she brought you to my apartment on Green Lake a couple years ago.”

  It snapped back to me. Carmen needed to drop something off and brought me with her. Jody’s apartment had been beautifully decorated, and she had the same poster of Marilyn Monroe on her wall that I had in my bedroom, except hers was matted and framed. Candles had lit Jody’s apartment as I’d watched her and Carmen split a bottle of wine.

  “Hi. Do you want to taste anything?”

  “Do you have the calorie info on the Atavi?

  It was basically air whipped with a tiny bit of fruit juice. If you ate an entire pint, it was about 20 calories.

  I handed her the nutrition info that Paul had left for me, and she read through it like she was scouring for ingredients she was deathly allergic to.

  “OK, I’ll do a small.”

  When she sat down to eat, she said, “Carmen’s in treatment again.”