We Contain Multitudes

by Sarah Henstra

On another note, I lost my scarf the other night at Rosa’s. Remember that burgundy patterned silk one Bron was tying in a bow under my chin? I’m wondering if you happened to find it in your mom’s car. It’s not a vintage item, but it has sentimental value to me, since it used to be Lyle’s, back in his 1980s paisley phase.

  Yours truly,

  Jo

  PS: One more point about the SAT: I read that they grade for punctuation on the composition section of the test. I think it would probably be prudent for you to start practicing using quotation marks for dialogue, Kurl. I could help you by inserting them in your letters from now on wherever you’ve omitted them, if you want.

  Saturday, December 12

  Dear Little Jo,

  Half the time we were supposed to be talking about the SAT in the library today I was thinking about other things. Specifically I was thinking about how, that last time in the school library, I got so angry with you for bringing up our kiss in the park. And how now I’m the one who wants to bring up that topic. Kissing, I mean.

  You kept saying, “Are you even listening?”

  And I’d say, “Yes, of course. Keep talking.”

  And you’d tell me how to eliminate the two least-likely multiple-choice options right out of the gate.

  And I’d be thinking how there were only two or three other people in the library anyway, and would it be such a big deal if I just leaned over, just for a second, and pressed my mouth to yours? I mean I felt a sharp little thrill just thinking about it.

  You’d say, “Are you paying attention?”

  And I’d say “Yes,” but I’d be thinking about how you had to finish your letter to me in a huge hurry that time. I was standing in the classroom with Khang waiting for you to hand it over. Remember? You signed your letter differently that time. You left off the word truly and wrote, Yours, Jo.

  I know it was just a slip of the pen. But I couldn’t help it. He’s yours, I thought. Just go ahead and kiss him already.

  So finally I stood up and said, “Follow me,” and led you around to the back corner section of the library, the section on Reptiles & Amphibians where I know for a fact nobody ever goes.

  “What?” you were saying. “We don’t have much time before we have to—”

  I turned around and caught your words in my mouth. Caught your waist with my hands and snaked my arms around your ribs and pulled you against me and kissed and kissed and kissed you.

  Sincerely,

  AK

  PS: As you can see from this letter I pretty much know exactly how to use quotation marks for dialogue. I just always think they get in the way of telling the story somehow. To be honest when I first noticed you putting them in your letters I thought it was sort of pretentious. These are letters, not novels, I thought. But I get it. It’s a good idea to practice for the SAT at least. So okay, I’ll do it from now on.

  Monday, December 14

  Dear Kurl,

  Did you know that you have a freckle under your left ear, about an inch below and a quarter inch behind your earlobe? Today at lunch, when you stopped by the art room to hang out with me and the girls, I noticed this freckle for the first time.

  Bron had called us over to the window to see how beautiful the rain looked bouncing off the flat roof outside.

  “That’s a bad seal on that skylight,” you pointed out. “That’ll be leaking in a couple months.” And Bron teased you for focusing on practical rather than aesthetic concerns despite standing in the art classroom.

  I was standing next to you, noticing how the light from the window cast raindrop-shadows across your cheekbone. The freckle under your left ear surprised me: How could I never have noticed it before? I’d always believed your skin was uniformly pale. Were there more freckles I didn’t know about? Was there a matching freckle, for example, under your other ear?

  The three of you discussed that photo in the hallway by the restrooms at Rosa’s Room, the one of Raphael and Lyle onstage together. You told us you’d thought it was a picture of Shayna at first, and that you’d had to look twice.

  Shayna said, “Seriously, if it wasn’t for that one picture, I don’t think I’d remember I ever had a mother. I’d believe Lyle found us in a forest or something.”

  Meanwhile, I’d snuck around to your other side to see if I could find more freckles. My sister was in the way, so I squeezed in and hip-nudged her off balance, pretending I wanted the view from her side of the window.

  “Screw off, you little worm,” she said, and dug her knuckles into my ribs, whereupon the whole scene degenerated into a sibling tussle upon which you and Bron looked with detached amusement.

  Yours,

  Jo

  PS: I must have been about six months old when that photo was snapped at Rosa’s. My mother is decked out in full grunge-maiden regalia: long floral dress, motorcycle boots, a choker with some kind of polished stone or shell, lots of rings on her fingers. I’ve got that photo committed to memory, Kurl. Lyle is playing the banjo, but he has sidled up beside her and leaned way over and is resting his temple against her shoulder. He’s smiling wide, and her head is thrown back in the biggest, happiest laugh.…

  I always wanted to know what song they’re singing in the photo, but Lyle was never sure. “It was all pretty much a green haze,” he would say. How I hated that! I have no memories of Raphael, so I can’t help but feel that Lyle needs to be responsible for all the memories. How could he have been that happy in the photo and not recall every single detail about the moment it was taken?

  Tuesday, December 15

  Dear Little Jo,

  Regen. I keep waiting for it to finally snow so there won’t be any more roofing until spring. But instead there was light rain all day and then it came pounding down after school. You were standing there at the bus stop when I drove by. I wasn’t sure if it was even you at first. I mean I’ve been doing that a lot lately, thinking it’s you and then it’s not you. Your hair was slicked flat and your shoulders hunched in trying to protect your backpack wrapped in your arms. Not standing with the other kids inside the shelter.

  My foot was already on the brake and I was already pulling the car to the curb before I even considered how it might look, me picking you up in my car. I mean we haven’t talked about it, Jo. We’ve just assumed we’re not telling anybody, not even Bron and Shayna, let alone the general public at school.

  It was my body making decisions for me faster than my brain. My foot on the brake, my hands turning the wheel. The sight of you shot something strong and bright through my veins. I swear my mouth started to water. It must be how a dog feels when its master comes home. Joy coursing through its whole body.

  I guess it must have spooked me a bit, how strong it was. How it got even stronger when you climbed in and slammed the passenger door with the water puddling on the floor mat. Shaking drops off your hair and saying, “Oh, man, you are a lifesaver,” and the whole car filled with the smell of wet Jonathan Hopkirk.

  Your scent, Jo. It’s like wool and bread and something else. I don’t know. A scent like if laughter had a scent, or daybreak. You filled the whole car with a yellow light like daybreak. I swear it felt like light pouring into my veins.

  I was sort of absorbed in this I guess, and you were talking about normal things. How all this rain reminds you of Prince’s Super Bowl show—“Have you ever watched it?” you asked. “It’s earthbreaking.” That was your word, earthbreaking.

  How Ms. Deane, the art teacher, wants Bron to apply to art college instead of journalism school. How Shayna cut class and disappeared this afternoon.

  Normal things, you talked about. Everyday things.

  And suddenly it all seemed really uneven to me. Unbalanced. Which is why I pulled into that grocery-store parking lot.

  “Are we doing errands?” you said. You were shivering a bit, so I left the car on and turned up the heat.

  It took me about five minutes to spit it out. And still it was completely faltering and awkward. “Do you think y
ou like me as much as I like you?” I asked.

  Total silence. You looked sort of shocked. You said, “Kurl, I think… I think it’s basically a miracle you like me at all.”

  I tried to explain what I meant. I said, “It’s just that I can’t really remember what my head was like, before. What was in my head.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before you,” I said. “I mean I think about you all the time. From the second I wake up, all day long. At school I see something going on in the hall, a crowd gathered, and I think, Oh, Jo would say that’s the crux of the dilemma. Or I will read something in class and I think, I have to remember this for Jo; Jo would love this phrase, or whatever.”

  You were smiling. “Jo would love this phrase?” you said. “Really?”

  “Or in the caf, they have those vitamin C cough drops you like, and I’ll want to buy them for you.”

  You said, “Can I have one now, actually? My throat is sort of—”

  “I didn’t buy them,” I said. “I just wanted to.” You were missing the point. I said, “I don’t know what was in my head before I met you. What did I even think about? Because whatever it was, it’s not in there anymore. It’s gone. I am completely, one hundred percent all the time filled up with you.”

  You were quiet.

  “It doesn’t feel entirely normal,” I said.

  You frowned.

  “I mean I’m not complaining,” I said.

  “You’re sort of complaining though,” you said.

  The heater was making an irritating clicking sound. I shut off the engine. “That’s not how I meant it, I guess.” It sounded wrong even to me. It was joy I’d felt, seeing you at the bus stop. What was my problem? Why did I have to switch joy into something else?

  “Maybe you’re looking at it the wrong way,” you said. “Maybe it’s a beautiful thing to be filled up with someone else.”

  I said, “Sure. So long as it’s two ways. So long as you’re not deluding yourself.”

  You turned to face me then. Nudged right up to me. Hooked your knee over my thighs and wrapped your damp arm across my ribs until your mouth was next to my ear. The scent of wet Jonathan. And now the feel of you.

  I jerked back and looked around to make sure no other cars were pulling into the spot next to us. It was raining so hard I couldn’t see much.

  “You’re delusional, all right,” you said, “if you think it’s not two ways. You think I don’t like you? Do you need me to tell you how I want you?”

  Of course I could feel that you did want me. But I wanted you to tell me too. Your lips were cold on my ear but your breath was hot.

  You started to say filthy things, Jo. X-rated things. Unrepeatable things. “I want you on your knees, Kurl,” you said, and “I want you flat on your belly.”

  You took me through it step-by-step: what you’d make me do to you, what you would do to me, what we would do together.

  It was just talk. I mean you were pushed up against me, and we must have been moving. We were moving a bit and you did kiss me at one point, now that I’m thinking back. Toward the end of your speech you were kissing me. My head was tipped back against the headrest. I was breathing your breath and not even hearing the words you were saying anymore but just the command behind the words and the kisses. The command was Surrender.

  “You think you’re filled up with me now?” you said. “You’re going to be so full of me that you won’t even know where you end and I begin. You’re going to be so full of me that you’ll think you’re going to die with the pleasure of it.”

  And of course I was dying with the pleasure of it right then, exactly like you were ordering me to. Surrender, I heard in your words. Surrender. And I did.

  And then without another word you lifted yourself off me and plunged back into your seat and I was torn from you and from myself too, it felt like. Hovering there, shaky and sticky and embarrassed. You cracked open your window to let the steam out.

  I crossed my arms on the steering wheel and rested my forehead on them.

  “Are you okay?” you asked.

  I waited until my voice was back in my throat. Then I waited until my brain found the words. It seemed to take a long time, a couple of minutes at least.

  “Those things you’re describing,” I said. “Have you done all those things?”

  “No,” you said. “I told you what I’ve done. Just groping, basically. Clumsy stuff.”

  “Then how can you say it? How can you even think the words and get them out of your mouth?”

  You laughed. “Are you shocked? I just wanted to turn you on, Kurl. Words are sex too,” you said. “There’s no difference between describing it and doing it.”

  I turned my head to peer at you past my arm.

  Another laugh. “Well, okay, there is a difference, of course, but maybe it’s a spectrum. Maybe describing it is part of doing it.”

  “Would you want to actually do it though?” I asked.

  “Which part?” you said.

  “Any of it. All of it.”

  “With you? Yes,” you said.

  That was all, just “Yes.” I lifted my head all the way off my arms and looked at you. You were doodling in the fog on your window. Your ear was bright red, and noticing that made me suddenly a bit less embarrassed.

  “Me too,” I said.

  Why am I repeating all of this? Why did I just sit here in my bed with my babcia’s ugly orange quilt wrapped around my shoulders against the chill, staying up late, trying to remember how the words went, who said what, how we moved against each other, how it felt?

  Well, I know why. Because remembering it brings some of it back, sensation-wise. But also because I have this idea that it needs to be written down. For the record, for some kind of record. No one knows about us, Jo. There’s an entire universe that we’ve created from scratch, just you and me. And I mean I would like to live here full-time. But the outside world doesn’t match up to the inside one, so I keep feeling like you and I are a dream.

  No. It’s the opposite. I feel like I walk around all day in a dream and then, when I see you, I wake up.

  Kurl, you wrote in the steam on the car window.

  So I wrote on my window too. I wrote, I am large, I contain multitudes.

  You squinted, trying to read it. “I didn’t know you could write backward.”

  “It’s Walt,” I said.

  “But why backward?” you said.

  “So it makes sense from the outside,” I said.

  Sincerely,

  AK

  Friday, December 18

  Dear Kurl,

  Maybe it is always like this. We are granted these tiny windows of time, these small pockets of space, where nothing else intrudes. Maybe that’s all we can ever hope to get, together. And maybe, just maybe, it will be enough.

  I’m referring here to your bedroom, Kurl. Your un-Inner-Sanctum, with the bare walls and your babcia’s pink-and-orange quilt on the bed.

  More specifically, I’m referring to me in your bedroom, with you, last night for the first time.

  Can I write about this, Kurl? Or is it a topic—a memory—that belongs only to the secret universe we’ve created and therefore should stay there? To which universe do our letters belong, do you think: to our own or to the one outside of us?

  I’m going to wait and see what you write, to see if it’s okay with you.

  Yours,

  Jo

  Friday, December 18

  Dear Little Jo,

  Well, I guess now you know where your scarf ended up. You did leave it in my car that night after Lyle’s show. Sorry I didn’t say so when you asked about it. Actually, you didn’t even leave it. When we were parked at the curb around the block from your house, the scarf was slipping out of your collar down the back of your seat. I reached around and gave it a little tug so it dropped onto the floor in the back seat.

  I’m aware it was weird of me. It wasn’t straight-up theft. I mean I didn’t want Lyle
’s old hippie scarf for myself or anything. I just wanted some kind of souvenir of you, something that smelled like you, Jo. I’m aware it’s a little weird.

  “I feel like I should have brought flowers,” you said, at my front door. I was thinking I should have changed into something better than jeans and a T-shirt at least. I’d been roving around the house all evening looking at everything through fresh eyes—through your eyes—and trying to hide all the most obviously horrible things. Elementary school photos, my mom’s prescription bottles, my bathrobe with all the strings hanging down at the hem. I mean I’d started to regret inviting you over, even though it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that my mom and Uncle Viktor were away overnight. A once-a-year opportunity, anyway.

  It’s how they first got together, actually. The year after my father died, Mom skipped her orchid show in Chicago, and the next year Uncle Viktor offered to go with her.

  I don’t know if I ever told you that my mom works for a plant-care company that does most of the big office buildings downtown. But her hobby is orchids. She has grow lights in the basement and a little fiberglass greenhouse out back. They go to the orchid show every year, Mom and Viktor.

  You came into the house and put down your mandolin case, and for some reason I unzipped your coat for you and took it off your arms like you were four years old. Tugging one sleeve and then the next so you turned a complete circle to release it. You closed your fist inside your cuff at the last second and pulled the coat, and me, toward you. Went up on your toes to kiss me with your cold mouth.

  I offered you a cola, and then we didn’t have any, which for some reason made us laugh. Everything seemed funny, even not having cola. We drank water and joked around.

  You went around looking at everything in my house, but somehow none of it looked as horrible as it did before you showed up. You asked me to plug in the lights on the Christmas tree. We sat with our feet up on the coffee table and my arm around your shoulders. We talked about how they used to make those ornaments by hand with a glassblower and a fire. We laughed about that stupid Christmas-ornament argument we had that time, about which of us was the sparkly glass object that would break under pressure.