Very in Pieces

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  Well, Very, I suppose I was just like you. What if Nonnie had taken the train northwest to Minnesota instead of up to New York City? Would she have still re-created herself in the same way?

  “I really don’t think I could be a Minnesota person,” I tell him.

  “Fine, Very,” he says.

  “No, seriously, do you really think I could become a Minnesota person?”

  “I’m not even sure what that means.”

  “Earnest, affable, kindhearted. Not a sarcastic bone in the body. Maybe I could do that. I just wonder how much people can really change, without some, like, Logan Whelcher–type accident.”

  “Logan Whelcher?”

  “Yeah. Like, do you think the person he was before was who he really was? Or the person he is now?”

  “Is this about Adam and your head?”

  “Not really. It just had me thinking. Like maybe it sucks for Logan, this new version of him. But what if for some people their other version is better. Like—” I pause. “I mean, do you think people just are who they are and there’s no changing it? Or do you think we get to determine who we are? Could I make myself into a Minnesota person for you?”

  I wish I hadn’t said the “for you” part, but it seems to relax his body. He stops picking at the corners of the pages in his book. I stare at him with wide eyes, like if he can answer this question, then maybe we won’t have an expiration date. If he could just tell me yes, then maybe I will visit Minnesota with him and consider the arctic tundra. I want to shake him so he will tell me all his truths, all that he believes. I want him to give me my answers. “What do you think?”

  “I dunno, Very. Seems like people have been struggling with that question for ages, though I think ‘Can I be a Minnesota person’ is a new approach.” He grins at me. “Maybe there isn’t an answer.” And then I swear to God he chucks me under the chin like he’s my grandpa or something. “I know you don’t like a world without concrete answers.”

  I sit up and pull my textbook onto my lap. That’s what people don’t understand about math. They think it’s all concrete and right or wrong. And yes, there are right and wrong answers, but it’s how you get there, how you derive the answer, that matters. You can be plain and pedestrian, or you can meander around, or, in the case of the best mathematicians, you can be elegant. It’s not poetry, I know that. But it can be far more satisfying in its beauty.

  “Are you mad?”

  I shake my head, but of course I am.

  “I know I shouldn’t have said what I did about your grandmother.”

  “I’m not mad about Nonnie. I’m mad because you aren’t answering the question. All I’m trying to figure out is if you think personalities are set in stone.”

  He chews on the metal part of his pencil where the eraser is attached to the wood. I can practically taste the aluminum just watching him. “Well, there’s what you do and who you are.”

  I nod. Now we’re getting someplace.

  “And I know who you are, Very. You’re my girl.”

  This should be the final straw. You’re my girl. Who says that? It’s like we’re caught in this old movie where guys and gals went steady and shared sodas. It’s a world that never existed. I cast my glance toward the carpet, the place we first had sex. “What I’m saying is that who we are, maybe it’s all constructed for us. By genes and our families and people’s expectations, and it all gets built up around us. What if none of it is real?”

  “Genes are real,” he tells me.

  “But they aren’t everything. All that other stuff. The stuff other people put on us right from the start. We might not even know it happened. People get this sense of us and it’s hard to tell if that’s really who we are or if we’ve just been told it so many times we have to believe it. We’re certain it’s true. But then maybe someday someone lifts a curtain. Or there’s a hairline crack. And we decide to just throw off the whole cape, and underneath there’s a new us all pink and raw like the skin beneath a blister when it pops.”

  Christian wrinkles his nose at that. “I think you’d better leave the poetry to your grandmother.”

  I sigh and lie back down.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Let’s just get this done.”

  I go back to writing out the chemical equation in my notebook. I bet Nonnie never even took chemistry. She would call it ghastly, a real bore. She would be right. Who cares about atoms and molecules?

  “I’m two problems ahead of you,” he says, grinning. “Keep up!”

  This is not normal flirting. I have a hard time imagining Hunter and Serena sitting around doing their homework, and I’m pretty certain that joking about it doesn’t constitute their pillow talk.

  I slide over so our sides all the way down our bodies are touching; not just shoulders but hips and thighs, too.

  “Hey, you can’t copy my work.”

  I tilt my head in toward his neck. I’m doing an experiment of my own. I’m more interested in how he will react to my coming closer than I am in actually doing the deed. A few months ago, my meaning would have been clear. A few months ago, he would have tilted his head to mine, kissing would have commenced, and our homework would have been forgotten.

  “That should be a negative charge, Very,” he says, pointing at my paper with his pencil tip. “You have it as a positive.”

  “Right.” I slide away and erase the work I had done on the problem.

  It doesn’t feel like a rejection. Maybe it should. It’s more like a nagging. A pit in my stomach telling me that things are not quite right. This feeling rises and falls throughout our relationship, and each time I have to convince myself I’m being foolish. Because I am.

  Maybe, I’ve decided, maybe this is what love feels like. Comfortable. Because I am comfortable with Christian—not as comfortable as I am with Britta and Grace, but close. And he is good-looking, even with his skinny, hairless legs. His eyes are deep and brown and comforting as a chocolate Lab. He can calm me down when I get riled up about school or life. He doesn’t even have to say anything. He just wraps his arms around me, and I feel better. So maybe that’s what love is. Or perhaps passion is limited to a select group of people—people like Ramona who seem to approach their entire life with intense emotion. Maybe wild, passionate love just isn’t in my personality. Maybe it’s not who I am. Or what I do.

  v.

  Back at home I follow the sound of laughter to find Mom and Dad on the sofa, and I stop short. The light on them is perfect. It filters around them from the Tiffany-style lamps that dot the room, casting a glow on them like the world’s softest spotlight. It makes their skin look golden. Mom puts her drink down on the floor beside her. “Is everything okay?” she asks.

  “You look like a painting,” I say, and they both laugh.

  “Middle Age, At Rest,” Dad suggests for a title.

  “Speak for yourself, old man,” Mom jokes back. “I prefer something like Interior Domestic, Number Two.”

  “What was number one?” he asks.

  She raises her eyebrows and they giggle.

  “Ew,” I say, because that’s what’s expected of me. “But you should paint the two of you like this, Mom. As part of your sabbatical project.”

  Mom picks up her glass and shakes the ice cubes. “Pour me another, love?”

  I take the glass from her and go to the bar cart, where I pour gin over the melting ice cubes, but the tonic bottle is empty. “We’re out of tonic,” I tell her.

  “I guess I’ll drink it straight,” she says. “You know I’ve heard that tonic has more sugar than just about any soda. I’m better off without it.”

  Dad strokes her arm. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

  I hand her the glass. “Did you know that gin and tonics came from when the British were in India and they took quinine to prevent malaria? They thought it was so disgusting that they added gin to cover the taste. And limes.”

  “Now, that is an interesting bit of history,” Mo
m says. “That is history I can get behind. They teach you that in school?”

  Grace had told me, though I wasn’t sure where she had learned it. I shook my head. “I’m a woman of endless trivia,” I say. “A trivial woman.” That’s something I’ll have to tell Nonnie: she’ll be proud of me. It’s just the type of word coiling she so admires. “Do you want anything, Dad?”

  He holds up his microbrew. “Still have plenty here.”

  “Move over,” Mom says. “Make room for Very.”

  Dad slides over, pushing the old, red afghan out of the way, and I sit down between them. Dad throws his arm over the back of the sofa so it’s behind my shoulders, and I tilt my head and look up at the exposed beams of the ceiling.

  After a long sip out of his bottle, Dad says, “I was looking at the Stanford website for you today, jelly bean. You couldn’t do much better than that school. I got lost in some of the pictures. The campus just dwarfs Essex College’s.”

  “Everything dwarfs Essex,” Mom says.

  “Their music department sounds amazing. Their webpage says they’re ‘vigorously engaged with the technological and artistic evolution of sound.’ I wrote that down. ‘Vigorously engaged with the artistic evolution of sound.’ Got me thinking about how sound does evolve, and tastes, too. It really got my head spinning.”

  “If I end up going, I’ll be sure to take a class.”

  “Are you sure everything’s okay?” Mom asks. “You look—” She waves her hand and doesn’t finish the thought, as if the gesture is enough. Evidently I look like a flitting hand feels: disconnected and purposeless.

  I could tell them that I’m not so sure about Stanford anymore, but that’s not what’s bothering me. It would be impossible to explain the lingering sensation to them, the feeling left behind after seeing Christian. Their love is not typical. It’s storybook. They met, of course, at a New York City gallery. They bonded over the art—early-twentieth-century minimalists—and went from the gallery to a bar to dinner to another bar and closed the place down. Long ago I realized that most likely the night had not ended with a kiss on the cheek and the exchanging of phone numbers.

  It’s a Manhattan fairy tale through and through. They went for walks in Central Park. They visited the galleries in SoHo. They went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Smalls Jazz Club. Each day they fell more in love, though it seemed impossible that their love could get any bigger. At the end of the summer, Dad started working at, coincidentally, Essex College. Mom came home to do her art and, eventually, began to teach at the college, too. It all fell into place so easily it was as if it were fated.

  And the love hasn’t faded. All these years later, and it’s just as intense.

  “How long have you been together?” I ask.

  Dad stares up and to the right, and Mom looks down at her hands, counting on her fingers.

  “Twenty-three years,” Dad says.

  “No, Dallas, it’s nineteen.”

  “Right,” Dad says. “I never was good with math. That’s your strength, Very, though who knows where you got it.”

  It doesn’t matter if it’s nineteen years or twenty-three. It’s a miracle that they still have so much to talk and laugh about. It’s Guinness World Records book worthy. It’s not normal, but it’s beautiful. Nothing like what Christian and I have. Or Christian’s parents, who seem like partners in Mrs. Yoo’s law firm. Or Grace’s parents: her father watches each of Grace’s mom’s transformations with bewilderment.

  “And you knew right away?”

  They exchange a look.

  “Not right away, right away,” Mom says.

  “Well, I knew right away. I knew before we even spoke. There you were standing in the doorway, books in your hand.”

  Mom stretches her legs across me to kick Dad. “Dallas,” she says in a singsongy way. “I had an inclination,” she says to me. “I had a hope.”

  “I knew,” Dad assures me. “And by the end of the night, she knew, too.”

  Mom giggles, and this time I don’t say “ew” because it’s too perfect, too lovely. And at the same time it makes my stomach turn because it has been six months with Christian—six months!—and as much as I tell myself it’s just an arbitrary number (186 days, more or less) it does mean something. It means something that after six months I still don’t know what my parents knew after six hours and continue to know after nineteen years. Or twenty-three. Whichever.

  four

  i.

  IN ANOTHER WEEK, MY bruise has faded to a bluish green with yellow around the edges. Now Nonnie says it’s like a banana bruise and this scares me more than her coughing: that she would resort to fruit analogies twice in row, one of them actually using the word bruise. That her words are slipping away from her seems the cruelest twist of all.

  It’s after school on Thursday and I’m waiting for Ramona. I’m always waiting for Ramona. We’ve been in school for two weeks now. School time is funny that way. It feels like we’ve been back for months. The weather is nice now, not as hot, so as I wait, I sit outside on the low wall that leads up to the building. I have my English packet out, and I’m struggling through some Emily Dickinson: “Hope is the thing with feathers”? Hope is hope. The thing with feathers is a bird. And I don’t think birds are particularly hopeful. They’re practical. Mercurial even.

  When Dominic sits down beside me, smelling not quite of smoke, but of something smoky, like he’s been spending time in front of a campfire, it reminds me of my grandmother, although she has never been camping, that’s for certain. “Hey, Rapunzel,” he says. My hair goes halfway down my back, and I’ve gotten the Rapunzel comment before.

  “Hey, Big Bad Wolf,” I reply, and immediately wish I hadn’t.

  He laughs. “Truthfully I think of myself more as the woodsman.”

  “In some versions the woodsman is no better than the wolf.”

  “Fairy tales were all just ways to keep young women in line in the Victorian era. Don’t stray too far from the path, little girl, a wolf might get you. Or a woodsman. Don’t go poking around the castle, a spinning needle might prick you and make you fall asleep. If you’re pregnant and have weird cravings, don’t send your husband off to steal lettuce from a witch’s garden.”

  “What are you talking about?” I put my packet down on my lap and squint over at him.

  “Rapunzel. That’s how she got into the tower. Her mother wanted leafy greens when she was pregnant, so her dad went to steal them, and when the witch caught him, he promised her the baby. Then years later the prince came along to Rapunzel’s tower and figured out that he could call out ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,’ and she’d invite him up. So then they had lots of sex and she got pregnant and the witch figured it all out and chopped off her hair and banished her. Then the witch tricked the prince and when he came up to see Rapunzel, instead he found the witch, and he jumped off the tower and landed in the thorns that blinded him—”

  “You’re making this up.” This is nothing like the version I remember.

  “No. This is the original. Don’t worry. It ends happily. Eventually they find each other in the woods and her tears of joy make it so he can see again.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

  “That’s love for you,” he replies.

  A group of freshmen come tumbling out of the school, howling and giggling. I recognize some of them as Ramona’s friends, but she’s not with them. One of them looks over at us, elbows another girl, who turns to look, too. I know what they are staring at. Very Woodruff sitting with Dominic Meyers: that was a combination they’d never expected.

  “So, what, you just sit at home reading fairy tales?”

  “Beats sitting on this wall.”

  “I’m waiting for my sister. She’s late. As usual.”

  “So why don’t you go?” he asks.

  “I can’t leave her here.”

  “Why not?”

  “She needs a ride home.”

  �
��I’m sure she’ll figure something out,” he says in a way that makes me wonder if he knows Ramona. “And if you leave her, you’ll be teaching her a lesson.”

  I smirk. Teaching Ramona a lesson is a feat worthy of Hercules, or maybe Sisyphus. Few have tried, none have succeeded. “It’s easier to wait. I have homework I can do anyway.” I hold up the packet and hope he gets the hint that I want to get back to reading it.

  “Emily Dickinson. I like her.”

  Of course. Everybody but Very gets Emily Dickinson.

  “She was a shut-in, you know,” he tells me. “This guy in town broke her heart and she locked herself in her house.”

  Nonnie had mentioned this to me, how it was starting to seem like a good plan. But Nonnie could never shut herself away like that. “Sounds pretty stupid to me.”

  “It was a real waste,” he agrees. “She was kind of a dish.”

  I think of the pictures I’ve seen of her: narrow face, hair in a bun. “That’s not what I meant. I meant she was smart. She should’ve just gotten over him and out into the world.”

  “Well, now I know who to come to for a sympathetic ear when I need relationship advice.”

  I didn’t realize that Dominic had a girlfriend, and I’m embarrassed at how this makes me feel.

  “Though it would be cool to be that guy—the one she packed it all in for.”

  “Ah, yes, every guy’s dream—to be the guy that makes a girl lose her mind.”

  “Not that. I meant how it would feel to inspire greatness.”

  He slips the packet from my hands, flips to the next page, then returns it to me. “This one is my favorite.”

  I read the poem, “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” Only three short stanzas. It’s more subtle than Nonnie’s poems, but even I can understand the imagery of a ship seeking a mooring. “It’s funny though—” I begin. Then stop. For what I was about to point out was that the poem is from the perspective of the ship, seeking the mooring “in thee.” So the speaker seems masculine. I can practically hear Grace yelling. “Insertion! This poem is about inserting a penis into a vagina!”

  But of course I can’t talk about that with Dominic.