Love in Mid Air

by Kim Wright

  Phil rips open a bill, looks at it idly. “You’re using too much milk.”

  “What?”

  “The frothing device isn’t working because you’re using too much milk.”

  “Did you hear me about book club?”

  Tory and I have finished with the last side of her timeline and it looks great. She blows around the edges. Her hair is pulled back in a low ponytail and her face is as serious as a pilgrim’s. I wonder how much she notices between me and Phil or if she thinks this is the way all married people talk.

  Maybe it is the way all married people talk.

  I’ve been cutting things out of the paper, descriptions of apartments, tips for how to establish your own credit, starting times for computer programming classes. I don’t know what any of this means, but I told Kelly that I’m looking for a sign. She says the only sign I’m looking for is EXIT. Part of me wishes something final would happen, like a car crash. Not the kind that kills you, just the kind that shakes you up and makes you do something drastic. Maybe Phil will hit me or be arrested for fraud or run off with his dental hygienist, but I doubt he’ll make it that easy. I married a nice man and this is what will defeat me in the end.

  “Look, Daddy,” Tory says, waving a picture in his face. She went through the photo albums all last night and she’s especially transfixed by this one shot of me and Phil, taken two days before she was born. I am huge, wearing his red velour bathrobe, and it is still gapped open, but I’m smiling and the focus is clear enough that you can see the title of the book beside me, a grisly murder mystery, the only kind of reading that kept me calm in the last ponderous month of pregnancy. Phil is smiling too and he looks young and confident as he reaches around me to put his hands on my belly as if it were a basketball he’s getting ready to bounce-pass directly into the camera. “Be careful with that one,” I tell Tory. “Tape it, don’t glue it, and don’t let it get lost or bent.” It’s my favorite picture of us.

  “Who took it?”

  “I set it on a timer,” Phil says. “Then ran around to be beside your mom before it snapped. I wanted to take the picture because I knew something wonderful was just about to happen.” Tory ducks her head like she’s embarrassed, but she’s really pleased.

  “You’re a good daddy,” I say to Phil. Quietly, as if this is some kind of secret we have to keep from Tory.

  “Nice to hear I can do something right,” he says.

  It’s almost six. I stand before the sink letting water run over the mushrooms and tomatoes. I blow air into my imaginary trombone. Tory is climbing Phil’s back, putting her feet into the pockets of his pants as if they were steps. He cups his hands to make her a better push-off point and she struggles her way to the top of his shoulders. She shifts her weight back and forth, gripping his beard with her small fingers, knocking his glasses unsteady as she stretches up and slaps the ceiling with her palms. There aren’t too many more years he will be able to lift her like this. I stand at the sink and watch them, my daughter and this thoroughly decent man whom I cannot seem to love.

  Chapter Three

  Kelly is hosting book club this month, which means she gets to choose the book. Kelly isn’t much of a reader so what we’re reading isn’t much of a book.

  Kelly is the rich one in the group, although it would make her mad to hear me describe her like that. Her house is in the kind of community where you have to call down and give the gatekeeper somebody’s name before they’ll let them in—just dropping by to visit in this neighborhood is completely out of the question. But I come over so often that Kelly finally took a picture down to the guardhouse—a snapshot of me at her wedding that she copied at Kinko’s and printed beneath it: LET THIS PERSON IN NO MATTER WHAT. Now all the guards know my Mini Coop by sight and this one looks up from his newspaper and waves me through. I am not a dangerous woman. Anyone can see that at a glance.

  Mark’s car isn’t there when I pull into the driveway, which I assume means he’s having dinner at the clubhouse. Most of the husbands have found a way to avoid being home on book club night. Kelly is fanning out brownies on a platter when I walk into the kitchen.

  “Look at these,” she says. “Just like a fucking magazine, huh?”

  “You amaze me,” I say, and it’s true. Kelly is liquid—her personality takes on the shape of any container you pour her into. She only started cooking when she married Mark, and now she’s probably the best hostess of the group. She’s the kind who will see a certain dish on the Food Channel and spend the whole morning tracking down obscure ingredients at the organic market. Kelly throws her heart into things. Kelly knows how to fill a day.

  “How was Phoenix? You haven’t said much about the trip.”

  “I cut it really tight on my connection in Dallas. I wasn’t sure my bag would even make it.”

  She turns to me, spatula in hand. “You’ve told me that part twice already. Why do I have the feeling there’s more to the story?”

  “I’ll tell you, but not with everybody else on the way.”

  She nods, gives me a quick distracted hug, and runs upstairs to put on a clean shirt. I sit in her designer kitchen with its speckled marble countertops and shiny potted herbs and catch myself smiling at the sight of an avocado perched on top of a wooden bowl. Kelly hates the way avocados taste but likes the way they look. “The texture’s fantastic, isn’t it?” she asks, sometimes rubbing one against my cheek for emphasis. “They’re so slick and bumpy.” So she buys an avocado every week for her fruit arrangement and at the end of the week she throws it out to the birds, a fact that infuriates her husband. Once Phil and I were over here for a cookout and Mark took the avocado out of the bowl and shook it in my face and said, “Do you know how much these goddamn things cost?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I know how much everything in this house costs. I probably know a lot more about it than he does. “They’re a dollar eighty-nine.”

  “Did you know she throws them out in the goddamn yard?”

  “Women do weird things,” Phil piped up helpfully. He tends to agree with everything that other men say, one of the personality traits I didn’t notice until after we were married. Plus, I think he’s a little intimidated by Mark. We all are. He always seems to be on the verge of losing his temper and he makes so much money.

  “Humph,” Mark said, smacking the avocado back into the bowl. “She acts like they grow on trees.”

  For the record, I did not meet Kelly at the church. Kelly and I go all the way back to high school and she’s my best friend, even though I am too old to call anyone a best friend and we’re careful not to flaunt our closeness in front of the others. At least we try not to flaunt it, but I know they can tell. It’s always like there are two conversations going, the one that everyone hears and then there’s the one between me and Kelly, the one that is just beneath the surface. It’s this unspoken conversation that makes other people nervous. They think we’re laughing at them, and sometimes we are, but mostly we’re just trying to figure something out. It’s like Kelly and I share a secret that neither one of us can quite remember.

  And there’s one other thing. Kelly is beautiful, so beautiful that people stop in their tracks just to watch her walk by. Sometimes, even after knowing her so long, I forget this and then I see her coming toward me and I am like those strangers on the street. Shocked by her blondness, dazzled by her height. Amazed by the ease with which she navigates the world, and I remember how I’ve spent twenty-five years wondering why someone so tall and thin and perfect would ever have wanted to be my friend. Because me, me at fourteen, I wasn’t that cool.

  I never even would have made cheerleading if it hadn’t been for her.

  That’s where we met, at tryouts in the summer before ninth grade. I’d cheered for two years in middle school, but you don’t have to be that good to cheer in middle school. It’s not like you need gymnastic skills or anything, you just have to be cute and loud. So when I showed up for the high school tryouts it was obvious at once t
hat these girls were on a whole different level. Especially Kelly. I noticed her the very first day. Lots of the girls were good, but she was the only one who was casual about it, lithe and nonchalant as she went through her fallbacks and kicks.

  On the third day they taught us a pyramid formation and I was placed, along with the other girls who were sure to be cut, in the bottom row. Kelly was top tier and she put her foot on my thigh as she climbed me, then her other foot on my shoulder, and then there was this strange moment where the length of her body dragged across my face. And then, with the arches of her feet trembling against my shoulders, she slowly stood. I held her ankles, but once she got herself righted, which took her only a few seconds, she was completely still.

  She didn’t speak to me until it was time to drop out, always the most perilous part of any formation. She called down, “You’re going to catch me, right?” and I said, “Absolutely,” and I did, even though the force of her falling weight jolted me and for a moment I lost my breath. One of the coaches stood in front to spot us, but it wasn’t necessary. I caught her perfectly and the other girls, the returning cheerleaders for whom tryouts were just a formality, clapped.

  “You’re good,” Kelly said. “I’d even let you catch me in a flip.”

  On the first full day of school I was at the end of the cafeteria line, ready to pick up my tray and go sit with the girls I’d known from middle school, and I heard her call out, “Elyse?” We’d worn nametags at tryouts but I was still surprised she would remember my name or know how to pronounce it. Most people don’t. Half the time in middle school I’d answered to Elsie. Kelly was sitting at the table with the other cheerleaders, the most popular girls in the whole school, and she said, “Come eat with us.” The room blurred. She was a star—of course they’d wanted her, and apparently she had somehow managed to convince them to bring me on too. I looked down at my tray, ignoring the faces of my former friends who had already cleared a place for me to sit, and took a deep breath. That’s it, one casual invitation, and I knew in that moment that my whole life was going to be different.

  Our periods were synchronized within a month. We used to—I can’t for the life of me remember why—slip into the bathroom between classes and switch shirts, and then I would smell her baby powder scent all day. Kelly would sit in class drawing medieval-looking pentagrams on the backs of her spiral notebooks and then coloring them in purple and magenta. I learned to draw these patterns from her and for years they encircled my pottery. Her mother, in fact, was the one who first taught me how to throw pots, and Kelly slept over at my house so much that my father, who used to call me Baby, started calling her Baby Two. We got the same haircut—a long curly shag that was known as a “Gypsy” and required twenty minutes in hot rollers every morning. We lined our eyes in kohl and our mouths in a light shimmery lipstick by Yardley called Berryfrost. We bought matching pairs of black platform boots and wore them with long V-neck sweaters and short pleated plaid skirts, a juxtaposition that struck us as sophisticated and ironic, as if we were prep school girls hooking on the side. Looking back at pictures from that time, it amazes me how much we willed ourselves to look alike.

  At one point we even dated twins, shy studious boys that I doubt we ever would have noticed if there hadn’t been two of them. Fridays were for ball games but on Saturday nights we would go to the drive-in with the twins, whom Kelly insisted on calling the Brothers Pressley. Frank and I were always in the back, Kevin and Kelly in the front, and we knew each other so well that there was no pretense about watching the movie. Even as the previews were rolling, we were shifting into position, and almost the minute Kelly would lie down, with Kevin poised above her, her foot would begin to tap out a nervous rhythm against the seat.

  Now I hear that it’s all about blow job parties, that it’s all about what the girl can do for the boy, but I grew up in a time when girls weren’t expected to do anything, when you could render a boy speechless with rapture just by leaning back and letting your legs fall apart. Every Saturday night for most of our junior year and into the summer that followed I would lie there passively while Frank bent over me, his face gone sweet and serious with concentration. He studied me as if I were a lock.

  I was as mysterious to myself as I was to him. Frank would unzip my jeans and turn his hand… I can still feel it. The hand slowly sliding, the middle finger grazing the full length of my opening, the palm cupped around the mound, the grip, the slight shake. Once I finally got him going on the right spot, once I finally managed to persuade him that—despite what logic dictated—it wasn’t down there but actually up somewhere higher, once I finally got him to stop rubbing me in that hard, systematic way that he undoubtedly used on himself and got him instead to do this small delicate flutter… then something would begin to build and my foot would shake too, answering Kelly’s taps in the same nervous rhythmic pattern. Such bad girls we were, so bad, so conspiratorial, and it was always worse when we were together. She tapped. I tapped back. We may as well have been convicts passing news of a jailbreak.

  Frank was intent on his mission, but somewhat confused by my constant navigational redirection. Once he whispered to me, “Are you sure this is right?” I was sure, suddenly so sure that I put both of my hands on Frank’s wrist. “Yes,” I said, and I think I said it out loud. I gripped his wrist with both of my hands and guided him up and down and in small circles, just there, holding him back to where he had no choice but to touch me lightly. Over and over again we traced a pattern of curves and circles, my hands clamped around his, almost as if I were teaching him to write. “Are you sure?” he said again, and now I realize that he probably could hear me just fine, but that my muttered “Yes, yes, yes…” must have excited him, that it must have pleased him to think he’d made me so lost in the moment that I didn’t even care if Kelly and Kevin heard me cry out.

  Years later Kelly and I were drinking wine and the conversation fell to the twins. Older and kinkier then and slightly drunk, I said, “You know, at some point or another, we should have swapped them.”

  And Kelly said, “What makes you think we didn’t? They were totally into the twin thing, remember? Always switching off to fool teachers, so why wouldn’t they have tried it with us?”

  I was shocked even at the suggestion, but she’s right, it isn’t hard to picture. The two of them plotting at the snack bar, walking back and simply sliding into different seats. It isn’t hard to imagine them sharing notes later in their bedroom about the ways she and I were different, or alike. I imagined them smelling their hands, as boys do, as men do, and breathing in the combined scent of her and me. But I hid my unease and said, “Well, that would explain why I had to keep teaching him the same things over and over,” and Kelly laughed, still willing to accept, as she has always been willing to accept, the myth that I am the more sexual of the two of us, that I am the risk-taker and trailblazer, although her tapping from the front seat all those years ago should have told us that this was never so.

  When the Brothers Pressley would go to the snack bar to get my popcorn and her Twizzlers, I would climb into the front seat, loose-limbed and giggly, and Kelly and I would watch the movie until they returned. The owner of the drive-in showed a lot of oldies; I guess he figured the kids weren’t paying attention at all and it was a good way to save money. But Kelly and I watched, and we loved Katharine and Bette and Lana and Ingrid. We watched them storming in and out of elegant rooms, crying and throwing martini glasses, taking the stand to testify, going beautifully mad, sobering up, checking their lipstick, and setting sail for Europe. We watched their flawless faces fading into the shadows of sex while their eyelids fluttered closed and the music swelled. The drive-in was where we first got our passion for Elizabeth Taylor, an obsession we share to this day.

  “Frank’s better-looking,” Kelly would say, poking me, and this always made us laugh harder.

  “He is not,” I’d say, “Kevin is the prince and Frank is the frog.”

  But Kelly would
only shake her head, sighing in that mock-tragic way of hers. “Face it, baby. You got the better-looking twin.”

  What’d you think of the book?” Kelly asks, coming back into the kitchen. She hasn’t just changed her shirt but her pants as well, and she’s used a flatiron on her hair. She makes me look like shit.

  “Next month, I want to do David Copperfield,” I say. “We need to get back to the classics. He’s got this great line, he says, ‘There is only one question, whether or not a man is to be the hero of his own life.’ Isn’t that great?”

  “Huh,” says Kelly. “Is it in paperback?”

  “Yeah, it’s old, it’s Dickens. Charles Dickens. Of course it’s in paperback. You don’t think that’s a great line?”

  “It’s a great line.”

  “Because that’s what I want. I want to be the hero of my own life.”

  “Just exactly what happened in Phoenix?”

  At that moment there’s the pop of an opening door and Nancy and Belinda come in, Belinda already apologizing because she hasn’t read the whole book. “Good God, you look terrible, what happened to you?” says Kelly, who frequently greets Belinda this way, never seeming to notice how tactless she sounds. Belinda does give the impression of someone who has just rolled out of bed, no matter what time of day you see her, and she launches into a long story about how her youngest busted a tooth out on the coffee table just as she was leaving the house and Michael didn’t want to be left with a hurt and whimpering kid and she felt bad about it herself, but this was her one night out and she had read most of the book, or at least about a hundred pages.

  Nancy rolls her eyes at me and Kelly. Belinda is the youngest of us by nearly ten years and we’re all accustomed to the way she lurches from crisis to crisis.

  Belinda says all the time that she’s getting fat, and she pulls up her shirt as she says this, in case somebody doesn’t believe her. She says that she’s stupid, although she doesn’t bother showing any concrete proof of this, and—perhaps most telling of all—she refuses to do anything by herself. Her list of phobias is long and bizarre, ranging from cake batter to suspension bridges. She’s afraid to drive at night, which is one reason Nancy always picks her up and takes her places. And Belinda constantly points out, especially when she’s inside the guarded gates of Kelly’s neighborhood, that she doesn’t really fit in here.