Girl, Unframed

by Deb Caletti

  “Whoa.” It made my stomach feel sick.

  “White Room,” he said.

  “What? That crying woman with the yellow hair?”

  “Girl. Crying Girl is the title.”

  “She’s a little old to be a girl.”

  “Lichtenstein. Enamel on steel.”

  “No way. Really?” He nodded. “Why is she crying?”

  “Over a man, probably.”

  I scrunched my face, but I couldn’t argue with that. If you looked at it, I mean. She doesn’t look like she’s crying over a missed promotion at work.

  “Old Roy Boy.” Jake chuckled. And then he winked at me, as if we were both in on a secret. “Lichtenstein loved women.”

  The wink, Picasso’s young girls, the way he said “Lichtenstein loved women”—for a split second, I felt like we had turned down some unexpected road. And then Lila pushed the door open. She had to shove it a little, from all the wrapping. She wore her short green satin robe, with her hair loose to her shoulders. “What are you guys doing?”

  “Look,” I said. I pointed to the painting.

  “Faceless. Super,” she said. “Just a body, huh?”

  She was right, but I could hear her tone. It meant, Uh-oh, watch out.

  “You feeling better, honey?” Jake asked.

  “It’d be nice if someone offered to get me a cup of tea or something.”

  “I’ll make you a cup of tea,” Jake said.

  “My throat is killing me. And, Syd, baby, you really need to get some friends.”

  Wow. It came out of nowhere, that cruel little bomb. It felt like a slap.

  “God, Lila.”

  “What?”

  “That’s so mean.”

  “I’m just saying, it’s not good to be always hanging out here with the adults.”

  “My friends are at home, because I’m here.”

  “Come on now, girls…,” Jake said.

  “I don’t know what has gotten into you since Christmas.”

  Even without her makeup, she looked beautiful. She supposedly didn’t feel well, she was “coming down with something,” but her eyes were still so blue and her features so perfect. It didn’t matter, though. I saw ugliness. I saw her urge to inflict pain on other people, on me.

  “You are such a bitch.” It came out before I had a chance to think. I’d never talked to her like that before. Never. And now it was like I’d removed a cork from a bottle where a serpent had been curled up and waiting. The room filled with a horrible energy, and she roared and then lunged at me.

  I ran. I ran out of the room and down the stairs. She was behind me. I felt her grab at my hair. I fled out of the open White Room doors and across the patio. I darted down the 104 steps into the darkness of China Beach.

  The tide was in. There was only the slightest strip of shoreline. You had to be careful out there. You could get caught on a bed of rocks and find you had nowhere to go. I stood on the sand in my T-shirt and shorts, my heart pounding with anger and fear and adrenaline. I could hear voices up at the house, traveling down. The surf rolled out, a crickle-crickle of water against pebbles, and then it came back in with a boom, rolled across my bare feet, sprayed seawater against my cheeks. My feet sank deeper into the sand with each wave.

  Before, I’d wanted only to be close to Lila. To have her attention and her love. But now I felt misunderstood, and weirdly, wrongly accused. And, too, I felt something burning that had only sparked before. Hate. It curled up inside me and rose, the way a flame does when a match is struck.

  Hate is dangerous. Hate makes you feel like doing dangerous things. Vengeful things. Things that would get her back. I’d wade out in the waves, or walk on the high beams of the house next door, or fling myself at that construction worker and let him do whatever he wanted. I’d slap her, or dig my nails into her skin. I’d strike a real match, or leave and never return. The possibilities seemed endless.

  “Syd? Syd-Syd?” she called.

  Great.

  Lila never came down to the beach. And now here she was, struggling down those steps, her hand against the wall for support. She couldn’t see well in the dark. This was one of her things. Something about the rods and cones and the particular shape of her eyes.

  “Baby? Come on. Let’s not do this.”

  I wanted to run away, but there was nowhere to go. I stood where I was and folded my arms. I watched the moonlight dance along the lifted tips of the waves.

  She stood next to me in that green robe. We were about the same height now, I realized. She wore these satin slippers, and they were sinking into the sand and were likely ruined.

  “Syd, please.”

  I didn’t say anything. She started to cry.

  God.

  The waves crickle-crickled across the pebbles. And then, boom. Crash.

  I sighed. The thing was… even when she was raging, she seemed like she was four years old. A little girl. I felt sorry for her. My anger slid away, leaving a slime trail of guilt. There were lots of little girls who weren’t little anymore. Daddy’s girls, lost girls, harmed and lonely girls. Crying Girl.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you still love me?”

  “Of course.”

  Neither of us said we were sorry.

  The point is—it was complicated. The point is—it was confusing.

  The point is—it was getting intense, very intense, at the house above China Beach.

  I think of her standing there on the sand, crying like that. And I think of her words in that restaurant, about power. But men and women both—we learn about power and powerlessness from our mothers and fathers first, right? And they learn from their mothers and fathers, and so on and so on?

  Fix that shit.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Exhibit 39: Photo of Crying Girl, by Roy Lichtenstein

  Do you know those View-Masters that you played with as a kid? That’s what the Camera Obscura building looks like. A big white View-Master, with a little pointed tower on the top, and the words GIANT CAMERA painted on the side. The building sits at the edge of a cliff, with the sea spread out below. Everything that summer sat at the edge of a cliff. The Cliff House, the labyrinth, Camera Obscura, our house. Lila. The summer itself. Me.

  Nicco and I walked inside. God, it was just so good to see him. He was starting to feel known to me, after all those photos. “Okay, so how does this work again?” I asked.

  “The light comes through the top and then hits a big lens? Reflects the image down on that flat part right there?” Nicco said.

  “Meaning, you have no idea.”

  “Something science.” We giggled.

  When the door shut behind us, it was totally dark in there. Then we really started to laugh nervously. Our shoulders bumped.

  “Man, I’m blinded.”

  But then my eyes adjusted and I saw the incredible lit-up image on the large circular surface in the center of the room. The image curved as if we were looking through an enormous fishbowl. It spun slowly, so that we could see Ocean Beach and then the sea and then Seal Rocks, with all the seals lying around, fat and lazy. Next came the highway and then Ocean Beach again. The light that came through the pinhole was dim, so it all had the feel of a vintage photograph, even though it was astonishingly clear.

  The camera operator explained how it worked, but I wasn’t really paying attention. After Nicco picked up my hand in the dark, that was all I could think about.

  Back outside, Max jumped on us with joy, as if he’d been worried we might disappear into that strange building and never return.

  I untied Max, held his leash. “Magic,” I said.

  “Right?” Nicco said.

  It was. The spinning image, the seals on the rocks, Nicco’s hand and mine, the joyful dog. All of it was magic. Things were getting more and more unsettling at 716 Sea Cliff Drive as the house and the people in it sank deeper and deeper into a dark crevasse, but
I was happy right then. All the rest of it disappeared when we were together.

  * * *

  Nicco and I got fish-and-chips. We sat at an outdoor table and grinned ridiculously across it at each other. Our knees touched underneath.

  He was wearing tan board shorts and a green T-shirt, and it made me realize how brown his eyes were. Really brown. Brown like a deep pool that might go on and on. I liked his wrists, too. I never knew I could like wrists. But, my God, I liked wrists. A lot. And his hands. I kept looking at them. I imagined those hands doing things—turning a steering wheel, holding a pen, touching me. I wanted their weight and strength. I’d never wanted before. Not really. Not like that. With Samuel Crane, it was more about what the kissing made me feel than what he made me feel. I never felt some raging attraction. Maybe I never even felt attraction. I always thought Samuel looked a little geeky when he got his hair cut.

  The want—it was distracting, honestly. It made it hard to focus. Maybe that’s what desire is—utter distraction.

  We ate the fish-and-chips and talked about how Nicco was graduating early and how he wanted to go to college and then get his master’s so he could teach literature. Literature held all the small moments he tried to put in his notebook, he said. I told him how I’d started seeing the moments too. Like this woman who pulled up alongside us in a parking lot when we were in LA. Her car was a million years old, and it was so beat up that the door wouldn’t open. She was trying everything, but it had finally had enough, locking her out so it could die in peace.

  He laughed. And then he told me about his moms’ old cars—the Blue Pony, the Dark Devil. They always named their cars, and the cars were always breaking down in awful places.

  He told this story like we understood each other about old and broken cars. I needed to tell him about Lila. I’d avoided it for too long already. In some ways, we lived in very different worlds, and I needed to say so before things got awkward.

  “That Lila Shore?” he asked.

  “That Lila Shore. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before. It’s just…”

  “Wow.” He even pushed his chair back a little. Away from me, I thought.

  “It’s okay.” I didn’t know what was okay. I didn’t know what else to say.

  “I live in a crappy apartment. My family’s idea of fancy is Thai takeout.”

  “She used to live in a crappy apartment. Most of the time, I live in a dorm room that’s so small and messy, I can barely walk across the floor.” It wasn’t exactly true. I’m a pretty tidy person. There was maybe, you know, that usual pile of laundry and a few term papers.

  “Sea Cliff Drive, huh?”

  “She rents it from Jake. Her, uh, boyfriend.”

  “You don’t like him?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He pointed to his eyebrows, the scrunchable part between them. He was always so observant. Unnervingly observant. The sort of observant that kind people often are.

  “I’m trying to like him. I sort of like him. I mean, he lives with us. I’m expecting to see a ring on her finger any day.”

  “Still, man, that kind of life. I can’t even imagine it.”

  “This kind of life is what I like best. Right here,” I said, and gave a fry to Max.

  It sounded like a lie, even though it wasn’t. I worried I’d wrecked something by telling him. I was always worrying I would wreck something by revealing who I was.

  But maybe I hadn’t.

  “You ready to get out of here?” he asked. “I saved the best for last.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  The best was the off-leash part of Ocean Beach, which I didn’t even know existed.

  “Now he can run and run,” Nicco said.

  “Oh, man! I love when dogs get to go as fast as they can.”

  And so we unclipped Max and he took off. He ran like a galloping horse that was part rocket ship. I thought we might never see him again. He zoomed toward the water and swerved in. When a couple of dogs came speeding down the beach, a big one and a small one, he got out and wrestled with them. They growled and snarled and played, turning figure eights. He swam and ran some more. He tried to eat some gross seaweed thing. He was having the time of his life.

  When it was time to go, I called him, but he wouldn’t come, same as a toddler at the playground. But then Nicco whistled, and Max came right to him.

  “That is so wrong!” I said.

  Max shook his big, wet self all over us.

  “Yikes!” I squealed, but Nicco didn’t mind.

  “I could give you a ride home,” Nicco said.

  “This big, wet, stinky thing in your car?”

  “I think you smell just fine,” he said, and I punched his arm.

  * * *

  Nicco slid open the van door, and Max hopped in. We brushed sand off our legs and feet. Up front, I got comfy in the passenger seat, which was covered in a beach towel with a palm tree on it. I looked for more clues about him. There was a fat, laughing Buddha sitting in the open ashtray. His gold arms were raised, and it made it look like he was on a thrilling roller-coaster ride.

  “The air conditioner’s busted, so we’ve got to roll down the windows.”

  I watched his hands on the window knob, and on the steering wheel, and on the radio dial, because that’s the only music the van had. The song sounded far away, like it was coming from a distant solar system. Everything rattled, and Max was panting in my ear. It was hard to talk, so we didn’t.

  I just felt it. Summer, your perfect idea of summer, the warm car, the wind coming through the windows, a happy dog, your sandals sitting on the floor beside your bare feet, a VW van that knew about summer, since it had seen so many. Nicco, pushing his hair out of his eyes when the light turned red. Whatever IT was, well, I felt the pieces of it right then, swirling around me like fireflies.

  When we went through the pillars of the neighborhood, he turned the radio off. I saw the street through his eyes—how everything was so boring and quiet and well manicured, how it looked as unreal as a film set.

  “Oh, man. I feel like they might arrest me here for driving this piece of shit.”

  He didn’t know what went on behind closed doors, our doors. I hadn’t told him that part yet.

  “The orange one,” I said, and he pulled up to 716 Sea Cliff.

  “Wow.”

  “Want to come in?”

  “Uhh.” He waved his hand over himself, indicating his day-at-the-beach-with-wet-dog self. “Maybe next time?”

  Next time. Those were beginning to be my very favorite words.

  “There’s this all-ages live music venue in South of Market. Wanna go?” he asked.

  “That’d be great.”

  “I’m off Saturday night.”

  “Sure.”

  Good people didn’t make you guess. There weren’t shit games. He got out, and so did I. He opened the door for Max, who jumped out too. The three of us stood there, looking at each other. I wanted him to kiss me, bad. I don’t know why he didn’t do it. I don’t know why I didn’t do it myself. The first kiss, the first I love you—you waited until they were bestowed upon you, even if that kiss was sitting right there between both of us, and belonged to both of us.

  Next door, all that sawing or drilling or whatever was making the noise—it stopped. The sudden quiet caught Nicco’s attention. He looked over that way. I did too. The guy, that man—he was staring at us, watching. Out of the corner of my eye, I also saw the blinds shift in our upstairs window. I didn’t know whether Lila or Jake was spying, but it seemed like everyone was watching me. I felt that way the whole summer.

  “They’re building a mansion over there,” Nicco said.

  “I guess.”

  “Giant House,” Nicco said.

  “Giant House,” I repeated. It was a joke from earlier that day, after GIANT CAMERA on the Camera Obscura building. As if every building should declare what it was. Small Café. Medium Coffee Shop.

  “See you?”
He gave my fingers a little shake.

  “See you.” I smiled.

  “Bye, buddy,” he said to Max. I liked that so much. Some people forget to say good-bye to dogs. Nicco was such a great guy. There are lots and lots of great guys, and you shouldn’t forget that.

  He drove off, and I watched him leave. The man next door made sure I saw him looking. He folded his arms and stood there a long time. Then he put both hands in the air, palms up, and shrugged, like, Hey, I can’t help myself.

  Whatever. I didn’t even care. Watch until your eyeballs fall out, I thought. There was nothing to see.

  And that’s what kept driving me crazy. The nothing part. The no kiss. No kiss, no kiss, no kiss!

  Desire—it was a force too.

  Inside, Max ran toward the kitchen because Jake was there.

  “Hey!” I called.

  “Hey!” he said.

  I didn’t see any signs of Lila, either downstairs or up. I went into my room. I felt dirty and sticky from sand and salt water. I stripped out of my gritty beach clothes and ran the water in the tub. I poured in some bubble bath.

  No kiss, no kiss, no kiss!

  I dropped into the water. It felt clean and hot and wonderful. I imagined telling Meredith all this, about Nicco. I kept thinking how Meredith would probably say, Slow down. How slowing down did not sound good, but how slow and down did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Exhibit 40: Evidence bag containing alprazolam (Xanax), zolpidem (Ambien), oxycodone (OxyContin)

  The water slurped down the drain. The sound seemed to travel through all the old pipes in the house. I got out of the bath. Wearing shoes made of bath bubbles, I got a nice white towel from the cupboard and dried off. I wrapped the towel around myself. I felt that good kind of tired that makes you really hungry. I combed my hair back.

  When I stepped out of the bathroom, Jake was coming up the stairs. He was wearing workout clothes, heading to the exercise room next to mine.

  “Oh!” I said. I felt caught there in my towel. So often, he made me feel caught.

  “Hey. You coming with us to dinner tonight? I gotta make the reservation.”