by Radclyffe
I told her that the things inside had belonged to my grandfather, that I kept them only because they smelled like him, like the cardamom of his favorite tortas and the loose tobacco he rolled into paper. They would mean nothing to me if it weren’t for that, I told her. It could have been anything, I said, as long as it held that same spice and earth.
She believed me. They always believe you if you want it enough.
And it wasn’t all a lie. Everything in that crate my grand-father gave me, and every time I took it down from the top of the closet, the whole apartment smelled like my grandmother’s pan de muerto. That’s why I never took it down unless I knew there was enough time to let that perfume slip out the open windows before Sawyer got home. The few times I spent so long fingering its contents that the scent was too heavy to dissipate, I made tortas de aceite with enough cardamom that Sawyer didn’t notice.
Sometimes I longed to show her everything in that orange crate, to spill its contents onto our bed and give over its secrets. But I didn’t want to lose her. “Never let the boy think you are smarter than he is, m’ija,” my mother told me. “You never keep him if he thinks you’re smart.” When I met Sawyer, I thought the same went for a woman who dressed like a boy.
My mother hated that my grandfather gave me so many books. He told me I was smart and that if I did not read enough I would get lonely. “You want to know things,” he said. He could tell by the ring of blue-black around the brown of my irises. So he brought me a book each time he came to visit. One month a book of Irish poets who sang of a land so green it broke their hearts open. Another, a dictionary, because whenever I asked my mother what a word meant she said, “You ask so many questions, you stop being pretty one day,” and told me to stir the Spanish rice. For my birthday, a hardcover about the birds of the cloud forests where he met my grandmother. Its glossy pages shined with the emerald of hummingbirds and the blue tourmaline of the quetzal’s tail feathers.
He had brought me books for two years when my mother told me I was getting too smart. “No boy likes you if you talk like that,” she said. “Todas aquellas palabras.” All those words. It was two months before my thirteenth birthday, and she bleached my hair to the yellow of the masa we used for tamales. She said making me blonde would make up for all those books because my hair would keep boys from seeing those rings of midnight blue around my eyes.
Even after my grandfather was gone, my mother kept dyeing my hair. When I moved out, I did it myself, a force of habit as strong as biting my nails or reading la Biblia before bed. I knew she was right. I needed the maize-gold of my hair to hide what my grandfather had seen. He might have loved me for it, but no boy would.
When I moved in with Sawyer, I had to get rid of most of my grandfather’s books. I could only keep as many as I could hide. Choosing which would stay was harder than picking which doll and which two dresses to take with me when I was a little girl and my family had to evacuate for the canyon fires. It was harder than how I never opened my eyes all the way in front of Sawyer, afraid she’d see those rings of blue. She always thought it was how I flirted with her, half closing my eyes like that.
A book about chaos theory had taught me that a butterfly flitting its wings at just the right time off the coast of my abuela’s hometown in Guatemala could turn the tide of the Mediterranean Sea. It sounded so much like a fairy tale, that little winged creature pulling on the oceans as much as the moon, that I grew drunk off dreams of las mariposas and a million coins of water. It had to come with me.
A small paperback, a French children’s book about a boy who loved a rose so much it lit all the stars for him, more than earned the sliver of space it took up in the orange crate. The corners of a picture guide to the wildflowers of North America were still soft from my grandfather’s thumbs, so I kept it. I held on to a hardcover of Neruda’s poems if only for the line, “I do not love you as if you were salt-rose or topaz.”
Books would not have been such a secret for most women. They would have slid them onto the same shelves with their lovers’, letting the spines mix until they could not have remembered whose began as whose if not for the names written onto the flyleaves. But I never forgot my mother telling me, “Never let the boy think you are smart.” Sawyer loved me for my push-up bras and rosewater perfume, my cayenne-colored lipstick and all that yellow hair I made endless with hot rollers each morning. It didn’t matter that by the time we’d been together for three years, she knew I dyed it.
I loved Sawyer for her saffron-colored hair, always just long enough to get in her eyes. I loved her for how the weight of the Leatherman on her belt pulled her jeans just enough to show a band of bare skin at the small of her back. I loved that her tongue always tasted like saltwater.
I loved these things about her the way she loved those things about me, so it was not fair to let her know I was curious and smart like my grandfather had told me. It would have changed too much. It would have made her doubt the way I laughed when she traced a finger along the scalloped lace of my bra, or how, after I ironed her shirts, I liked leaving a blush of lipstick on those clean, starched collars. All of that was true. All of it was as much me as the secrets inside that orange crate. But Sawyer might not have believed it. My mother might have been right about all my words.
Sawyer had loved me that way for seven years when I came home and found her with my grandfather’s books. It was the weekend after Thanksgiving. She’d taken down the Christmas decorations from the high shelf of the closet and had found my orange crate behind the boxes.
“I wanted to surprise you,” she said. She bit her lip, a little guilty. “Thought I could get all the lights up before you came home.”
I blushed to see that the books were in a different order than when I had last put them back in the crate. Sawyer had gone through them.
She caught me staring. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to go looking where you didn’t want me to.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “They’re just books. I never read them.”
“Then why’s your handwriting in them?”
I knelt on the floor to put them all back in the right order, but Sawyer took my face in her hands. I felt the familiar grain of her calluses on my cheeks, the pads of her fingers worn rougher since the first time she touched me years earlier.
“You’re smart,” she said, her mouth close enough to mine that I could feel its heat on my lips. “I see it.”
I loved my lipstick and my rosewater as much as todas aquellas palabras, and I loved Sawyer more than any of it. I wanted both. I wanted my body to be soft under hers, not so full of words that I was as hard to hold in her arms as water.
But she held me a little harder, her calluses like the finest sandpaper. I imagined each of her fingertips on my tongue, rough and sweet as the husks of the lychee nuts we bought from the farmer’s market on Sunday mornings. Thinking of how much the fruit inside smelled like violets on our sheets made me close my eyes. A tear fell from my lash line.
Sawyer kissed it when it was halfway down my cheek. “What else are you hiding?” she asked.
I opened my eyes and let her look at me. I did not squint to keep from her those rings around the brown of my irises. She stared into me like I was fire opal, and I knew she’d seen them, that deep blue that had first told my grandfather I was a girl for questions and words, all those words.
“Did you think I didn’t know?” Sawyer asked.
She put her hands on my waist and kissed me, quickly but gently, like she was pinning me down. She wanted me, still touched me like I was as soft as wet roses, even with all those secret pages. I was a butterfly over the waters of my grandmother’s homeland, and Sawyer was an ocean I could move with the flicker of my eyelashes, as easily as if they were wings.
My hand found that band of bare skin between her shirt and her jeans. My fingers brushed the knobs of her spine. The soft whistle of her breath in through her teeth gave me permission to pull her shirt away from the warmth of her back, and then her
body was as open as the Ireland of those poets. Her tongue, her breasts, her thighs were salt-rose and topaz on my lips. She had irises as green as those cloud forest hummingbirds, and the black in the center of each opened and spread when she slid her hand up my skirt.
She reached between my thighs like I was her rose and she was that boy who loved me like a sky’s worth of stars. She touched me like I was all petals, her fingers looking for the tight bud at the center.
She was all those words. Todas aquellas palabras. And I could tell her all of it, everything, as soon as I caught my breath.
CURRENT
Sara Rauch
I emerged from the upstairs bathroom, having gone in twenty minutes before to cry my eyes out. I’d redrawn my liner and lashes from Poppy’s makeup bag, but I still felt shitty, was thinking of slipping out the side door through the yard and running for home. Clara caught me off guard. She was there at the top of the stairs, waiting. I jumped and said, “Shit.” I was past polite, past profound. I knew my eyes were puffy and bloodshot despite the freshly applied kohl.
“Sorry,” she said. “I saw you come up here and—”
I studied her, her outfit and unfamiliar face. I’d glimpsed her downstairs, sitting by the window alone, beer in hand. She had a nose pointy like a woodpecker, and a crest of dark blond hair, pale skin, shadowy smudges beneath her light blue eyes. All I could manage was, “Oh?”
She said, “I wanted to talk to you. Now that I’m standing here, it seems like I’m being strange.”
It did seem strange, but I’d been crying in the bathroom at an afternoon potluck, wishing my ex was dead and not my dad, and it was one of those floating September afternoons that always got under my skin. My thirty-second birthday was a week away. My mother had sent a ring—she rarely visited, though I’d asked her to many times—a thick band set with rubies, and a note that read: This is your year for peace and passion. My mother was a gemologist, so I figured this arcane blessing had something to do with the stones. I rarely wore jewelry, but I wore the ring that afternoon, constantly aware of its weight on my finger.
“No, not strange. I just wasn’t expecting you,” I said.
Clara stepped toward me and touched my arm. She said, “I’m Clara. I work with Dale at the university.” There was something in Clara’s face, some openness, that made her proximity, her assertiveness comforting rather than grating.
“Sienna,” I said. “Poppy’s best friend.”
For many weeks I’d had the feeling that I was approaching a cliff, with no idea of what came next, with no parachute or brakes. All the desire I once carried—to be an artist, to do something with my life, to make meaningful contact with another human being—had come to naught. I carried with me, instead, an unbearable sense of loneliness.
“Why’re you hiding out up here?” Clara asked.
“Avoiding my ex.”
Dale and Poppy’s parties were legendary. Today the crowded rooms of their immaculate house and the people in bright colors dappled across the back lawn merely added to my sense of removal. How unlike my best friend I was, with her perfect hostess skills. But like always, I’d come early, in my black jersey dress, to help her set up. To listen to Poppy gossip about the hook-ups and breakups of our mutual acquaintances and several couples I’d met at other parties. What Poppy seemed to be saying today was that nothing was wrong with me at all—relationships blossomed and they shed their petals, the cycles of life, blah-blah. At least she was kind enough not to point out that it’d been many years since she’d seen me in bloom.
“Your ex is here?” Clara asked, biting her lip.
“The cocky brunette. Nancy.”
Clara shook her head, which I took to mean she didn’t know who I was talking about. Nancy was visiting from the West Coast, that’s why Poppy invited her. You don’t mind, do you? Poppy had asked, putting a baking sheet of biscuits into the oven. It’s been seven years, I’d said and was happy that Poppy couldn’t see my face. The worst part was I knew I shouldn’t mind. It’d been forever. And it hadn’t been that great anyway. Nancy was self-absorbed and bad in bed.
“One great thing about moving a lot,” Clara said. “No need to confront your past at parties.”
“Are you new to town?” I asked.
“Two years.” She pushed her hands through her hair, letting the little pomp on the front fall back against her forehead.
“I’ve been in the Valley since college,” I said. “Fourteen long years.”
“You don’t like it?”
“I do, I just wish—I don’t know. For something new. New air.”
“It’s overrated.”
“What is?”
“New air.”
I looked down the stairs to the glass sliding door that opened out onto the patio. There was Nancy’s back, and the lit-up face of Poppy’s friend Annabelle. They were drinking martinis and leaning in close to one another. I felt the warmth of Clara’s arm near mine, the little blond hairs tickling me.
I stood, not steadily, and said, “I need to get outta here.”
Clara said, “Do you want to go to my place? It isn’t far.”
Under any other circumstance I would have said no. But that afternoon did not feel normal. I felt like a fish that had suddenly grown legs, or a human waking to a set of gills—unsure of what to do with myself, afraid of the strange gift I’d been given.
I said sure. I motioned to Clara to follow me, and we slipped out the side door by the downstairs bathroom. Walking across the lawn, the grass long and lush and tickling my ankles, I felt a moment of urgency pass through me. I stopped abruptly and turned. Clara, not paying attention, almost crashed into me.
I said, my voice quiet though I knew it didn’t matter, “I wonder how long it’ll be till they notice we’re gone?” And I giggled. The sound was foreign as it emerged from my mouth and filled the air. Clara raised her eyebrows and gave a sly smile.
“Maybe never,” she said, and I hoped she was right.
She whistled at the old maroon Volvo. I dug in my purse for my keys and when I unearthed them, she closed her hand around mine. “Could I drive? I love these old cars,” she said.
“Where’s your car?” I asked, confused.
“I don’t have one.”
“How’d you get here?”
“I walked,” she said.
I never let anyone drive my car. The old Volvo’s clutch was loose and it frequently ground between gears or stalled out in second if it wasn’t given the proper finesse. It had been my dad’s before he died.
Maybe it was her hand around mine. Maybe it was the dying of another summer. Maybe it was the feeling of a petal or two loosening from the bud. I gave her the keys. She got in and leaned across the seat to pop open the door. She said, “Get in.” Coming from anyone else it would have seemed a command, but from her, it was gentle. Most everything about her was gentle.
All I really knew about her was that she worked with Dale (which department, had she said?) and that she lived on Wood Street and dressed like a dandy. Or at least, she had for the party we were leaving—pressed gray trousers and matching vest, a burgundy tie knotted over a white short-sleeved oxford.
I’d never been to Wood Street, in fact had no idea where it was. It wasn’t like Northampton was a small town, but having been around for so many years, I figured I knew all the streets, neighborhoods, places to see or be seen. Wood Street, Clara told me, was at the edge of town, out by the highway.
It was only a few miles, but Clara took the long way, down the narrow back streets, turning right and left and left again. Her pants pulled taut over her legs as she worked the pedals—she was slender but solid, I could see the muscles in her thighs flex as she pressed the clutch—and her spoon-shaped fingers manipulated the gearshift with ease.
Stopped at a red light, she glanced over at me. Autumn hadn’t peeled back summer’s warmth, though September was almost finished, and we drove with the windows down, my arm extended and hand gliding t
he air currents. Poppy would wonder where I was when the party ended, but that was several hours away. She liked to recap the minutiae as she cleared dirty glasses and loaded the dishwasher. It was her favorite part of the party, or at least one of them. Her sweet round face would be flushed with more gossip, recounting the silly moments—Did you see Max hit Greg with the croquet mallet? Priceless—who’d been drunk and who’d not shown.
Clara and I drove past pastel Victorians and farmhouses with sagging front porches. She drove slowly, as if relishing each turn the wheel made, each time she downshifted. I stared out the window, saw my reflection in the side mirror—dark hair lifting in the breeze, the sharp curve of my nose. The streets became unfamiliar, the houses and yards shabbier.
I lived near the college, in the opposite direction from which we were headed, in a second-floor apartment with refurbished wood floors and drafty windows. The apartment, beautiful and spacious, cost more than half my monthly income at the food safety nonprofit where I worked, but I’d reasoned it was worth it—given the location. I could walk to cafés and bars, there was a meticulous park only a few blocks away. Years ago, when I’d signed the lease, I’d reasoned that was enough. Now it loomed as a symbol of my inadequacy—sterile and stagnant.
As we got closer to the highway, she said, “I have a cat. You aren’t allergic, are you?”
“No,” I said. “I have a cat too. Laurent.”
“Mine’s Bell.”
“Like the translator.”
She looked at me as if I’d unintentionally caught her naked. Then she looked forward again, smiling. “Yeah, like the translator.” Her teeth were remarkably white but very crooked, both incisors jutting over the teeth in front of them.
She pulled up to the curb in front of a small white house with white shutters. She eased the gearshift into neutral, sliding it back and forth a few times before killing the engine. Noise from the highway filled the air: steel rushing, the peculiar long whine of cars passing through, the occasional horn or tractor trailer, the dissonance of movement.
