“—that’s what I’m here for.”
“I’m okay,” I say, another lie.
“Well, any time, Very. If you’re upset, or if there was something you wanted to say, about anything, I’d hope you’d come to me.”
“I know. I mean, I would. But actually,” I say. “Actually, there’s something I need to tell you.”
Christian reaches over and brushes some fuzz off my T-shirt. I don’t know what it is about the tenderness of that gesture, but I start to cry. I wipe roughly at my eyes.
“Oh, hey, hey, shhh, stop crying. It’s going to be okay. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.” He rubs his hand on my back.
Which just makes me blurt out, “I want to break up with you.”
He pulls his hand away from my back and blinks his eyes rapidly. “What?”
It wasn’t a What did you say? It was a What the hell are you talking about?
I wipe my eyes again and try to go back to the script. “It’s just that, well, it’s just that I’ve been doing a lot of, you know, thinking.” I can’t look at him as his face collapses in on itself. I want to reach out and stroke his cheek. I can stop this. I know I can stop this, keep him from hurting, but I have to go on. “About our relationship and love, and I think that the way I feel about you, it’s not . . .” I shake my head. He’s started to cry, too, and it makes me lose my train of thought. I breathe in deeply. “I don’t feel as strongly, it’s not fair, and I just think you’d be better off with someone else.”
“Who?” he asks. I hadn’t expected him to ask this, and it hits me like an out-of-unit question on a test.
“I don’t know. Someone.”
“But I don’t want to be with someone else, I want to be with you.” His voice is choppy, and red splotches have appeared on his cheeks. He doesn’t even seem embarrassed that he’s crying.
“I know, but it’s not fair to you if I don’t love you like I should.”
“What does that even mean?”
What did it mean? “It just doesn’t feel right.”
“Since when?”
Since ever. But I can’t tell him that. “I don’t know. Listen, Christian, I didn’t mean for this to go this way.” As he gets more upset, calm returns to me. “Really. I’ve given it a lot of thought, though, and I know this is the right choice.”
“Do you want to be with someone else?” A question I probably should have anticipated, but I can’t make any words come out. I know who he’s talking about; he doesn’t need to say it. And my silence is all he needs. “I see.” He doesn’t accuse me. He just looks away, disgusted. He knows. Of course he knows.
“This is about you and me,” I finally manage to say.
“Sure it is.” He stands up. “See you around, Very.”
I watch him walk across the driveway and around to the back of his house. Vomiting seems imminent. I didn’t know it could hurt so much to hurt someone else.
iii.
Ramona’s feet hang from the old oak tree. She swings down from the tree right into my path. “Have you been crying?”
It would be foolish to lie, so I say nothing. She trots after me as I head toward the house.
“Where have you been?”
“Breaking up with Christian.”
Something—some emotion, surprise or dismay or maybe even anger—flutters across her face and then is gone. “Was Christian upset?” she asks, her voice even.
“Yeah,” I say. “I don’t think he expected it.”
She nods. A breeze comes up the hill and makes a whistling sound as it passes through the sculpture of bottle caps and pipes on the house. “Because you’re fooling around with Dominic?”
“I’m not fooling around with Dominic. I kissed him once.”
She bends over and picks up a small pebble from the ground and rolls it between her fingers.
“Sometimes I think he’s the one making the sculpture at our house,” I tell her.
“Dominic?”
“Yeah,” I reply.
“You really think so?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I look down at a small pile of acorns, then shake my head. “No. Forget I said anything.”
“Okay.”
She isn’t listening to me anymore, though. She’s already pushing the door open and going into the house, where we find Mom sprawled out on the couch in the sunken living room, a glass of gin perched on her chest, while she reads through one of Dad’s Rolling Stone magazines.
“Very and Christian broke up,” Ramona announces on her way to the stairs, not even stopping to say hello.
Mom sits up quickly, almost spilling her drink. “Oh, baby, come here,” she says, patting the seat beside her. I drop my backpack by the door and cross the room to the sofa, sitting a few inches away from her. She lunges toward me and pulls me close. “It’s okay to cry, Very. Don’t be ashamed.” I’m smushed up against her chest, and every time she breathes, I smell the gin. Her body is oppressive. Finally she lets me go, but there’s no relief, because she just stares at me with the saddest expression on her face.
“It’s okay. I broke up with him.”
Mom sips from her glass, and then stares at the ice cubes as she twists her wrist to clink them together. “Did Christian do something to you?”
“No,” I say.
“Is it because of the boy? The butcher boy? The one with the grand gesture?”
So Dad hadn’t been fooled after all, and Mom had figured out that I’d been talking about Dominic. “It’s not because of Dominic. It just wasn’t working out. I didn’t really love him.”
This makes her smile, and I’m afraid she’s going to say something like, “Of course you don’t love him, you’re only seventeen,” but she doesn’t. She reaches out and runs her fingers through my short hair. “You’re going to be all right.”
“I know.”
“Before I met your father—before we moved to Essex—I dated another man. A boy, really. We were still in high school, after all. He was everything I thought I wanted. It was in New York. He was sophisticated—the son of a stockbroker and a lawyer and his family were huge patrons of the arts. He brought me to concerts at Lincoln Center. We’d stroll through the galleries at the Met. We could spend hours in Central Park.”
Ramona lingers at the top of the three stairs that lead down to the living room. “That sounds like when you and Dad met,” she says.
Mom blinks her eyes, and then moves closer to me. “I’m sorry. You’re the one who had your heart broken, and here I am talking about me.”
“I didn’t have my heart broken.”
“I’m sure you’re in pain. It’s okay to admit it.”
“Fine. I’m in pain. I also have a huge problem set that I need to do for chemistry.”
“That can wait.”
I shake my head. Before I go, I ask, “Have you heard from Nonnie?”
She looks away, toward the old stereo and the bar cart. “I went in this morning. She was sleeping. Her doctors say she should be able to come home tomorrow or the next day. You sure you don’t want to talk about Christian?”
“Not right now.”
“Okay,” she says, nodding her head and trying to put on a concerned-mom face. “Okay, I understand. But when you do want to talk about it, I’m here.”
“I know.” I stand up, and as I do, she grabs my hand.
“I mean it, Very. Any time.”
“I know.”
Her eyes are shiny. They implore me, but I can’t tell what she wants from me. So I disengage my fingers and head toward my dad’s office. I want to be the one to tell him, at least, and not have Ramona gleefully report the news to him. But when I push open the door, he isn’t there. Just some dry cleaning hanging from the chair looking almost like a real person.
iv.
I do have a giant chemistry assignment, more on specific heat capacity, but I’ve stared at the formulas for fifteen minutes, and everything is swimming. So I get in the Rapier and drive to the hospital. I hav
e the top down, and the air washes over my shorn head.
Nonnie’s in her room, her bed tilted upward, the television on with no volume. “Veronica,” she says.
“Tell me more,” I beg. “Tell me more about who you were before you were Imogene Woodruff.”
“You mean when I was Genie Wood-ruff.” She divorces the D from the R, breaking the syllables in a way that seems much less refined.
“Yes. And how you changed. How you became her. It’s not so simple as writing your own story.”
“But it is, Very. You just tell people who you are, and they’ll believe you as long as you make the right choices—provide the supporting evidence. The problem, the danger, is thinking you can control a story once it’s out there, once you step away from the truth.” She holds her fingers in front of her mouth and coughs, just a little one, but still she winces. “Did I ever tell you about my Vanity Fair article?”
“With the monkey.” I smile, thinking of the picture in her room and the stories she had told me.
“I thought, ‘This is it. I’ve arrived. Serious work in a serious magazine.’ They sent me on this African safari, and I just had to write an article about my experiences. First-person travel narrative. Easy peasy. Then I get there and suddenly there’s a new clause to the contract: a pictorial. A fashion shoot. They dressed me up in that safari getup, with the blouse unbuttoned, made me stand next to that old car. The monkey had the right idea never holding still. The monkey had more gumption than me. I wanted that byline. So I looked right at that camera and let the man shoot away.”
She fumbles for the oversize plastic water cup that they’ve left for her. I grab it and hold the straw to her lips. “I’m sorry. You need your rest.”
“No.” She shakes her head. “No. You asked about Genie. I can tell you about her. What do you want to know?”
“You said you were just like me then.”
She glances up at the silent television, where a cat is looking embarrassed about its litter box. “I suppose I was, Very, though not as sure of myself.” She holds the water cup in two hands. “We weren’t the bare-feet-in-the-dirt kind of poor, but everyone had to pitch in. We had chickens, Very. Chickens. Right in the yard. Shitting on everything. Pecking at grubs. And us running around and playing in that same yard. We’re lucky we never got tetanus.”
“I don’t think tetanus comes from chickens.”
“Salmonella, then. The point is—” Her thought is interrupted by a rough cough that seems to heave itself up and out of her chest. “The point is I was healthier when I was living in filth, chicken shit, and poverty.”
I can’t tell her that she would have gotten cancer no matter what. Or maybe she wouldn’t have. Maybe she should have stayed on the farm, married some nice farm boy, never published a word. Maybe she should have gone to Minnesota. Who’s to say she wouldn’t have been happier?
“So what’s this all about?” she asks.
“I just don’t know—I just don’t know who I am anymore. It’s like there are all these different versions of me, different faces on a cube. But they’re divided into pieces, and I can’t get them back together because I don’t know who I want to be.”
“Well, good.” She leans back into her pillows and closes her eyes. I don’t say anything else and neither does she. Eventually her breathing slows, though I can still hear the ragged wheezing. Her eyes move under her eyelids. I sit beside her and watch her lungs raise her chest up and down, up and down. It begins to feel like a ritual, like superstition, like if I stop watching, they will stop moving. This is when I know it’s time to leave.
As required, I turned off my cell phone when I went into the hospital. Passing through the sliding front doors on my way out, I click it back on. I have three voice-mail messages and eleven texts. They are all from Grace and Britta.
I go to turn my phone back off, but I’m not quick enough. The phone rings and I hit the answer button without meaning to. It’s Grace, but Britta is with her, on speakerphone. I sit in the median of the hospital parking lot on a green bench, which is surrounded by cigarette butts.
“Is it true?” Britta asks. Her voice, edgy at the best of times, crackles through my tiny speaker.
“Which part?”
“Which part of what? The Christian part, of course.”
“Yes.”
An ambulance careens into the parking lot toward the side entrance for the emergency room.
“Where are you?” Grace demands.
“At the hospital. Nonnie is not doing so well. She’s still here.”
“Oh.” I’m not sure which of them says it. Maybe it’s both of them, the air dribbling out of their indignant balloons.
“I’m sorry,” Britta says.
“Yeah,” Grace agrees. “Sorry.”
“Me, too.” I know I’m being purposefully unclear about what I’m sorry about.
Britta coughs. She called for a reason, and she’s not going to let it go so easily. “The thing of it is, it’s like we are breaking up with Christian, too. And I don’t want to break up with Christian.”
I swing my feet to clear a space from cigarette butts. It’s the workers who smoke them—the orderlies and nurses and even the doctors, out here sucking the nasty air as if flaunting their good health to their patients. They do it surreptitiously, don’t make eye contact when you walk by, but I know they feel the secret thrill of being so alive you can take it for granted.
“I don’t think Christian wants to break up with you, either.”
“I know,” Britta concurs. “And it’s not like I didn’t expect it to happen someday.”
“Mommy was bound to leave Daddy eventually,” Grace says.
“It’s just that I would have liked a warning,” Britta says.
“How did you know we would break up?”
There is silence on their end. An orderly comes across the parking lot, hesitates, then seems to say, Screw it, and stands by the far edge of the bench as he lights his skinny cigarette.
Britta clears her throat, but it is Grace who speaks: “We didn’t think it seemed like you were super into him, but we thought that maybe that’s just the way you are.”
Subtext: We knew you didn’t love him, but we thought maybe you were incapable of love.
“I guess that is just the way I am.”
“Very, I—” Grace begins.
“Listen, I have to go. I’ve been here for hours. I haven’t even started my chemistry problem set.”
“Okay, but if you need anything, we’re here,” Britta says.
“One hundred percent.”
“We love you.”
“Love you, too,” I say, and hang up the phone before turning it off for real.
I run both hands through my hair and glance over at the orderly. He has long hair pulled into a ponytail at the nape of his neck, and stubble sprouting in uneven patches. He holds out his pack to me. “Need one?”
“My grandmother is inside dying of lung cancer.”
He knocks the pack. “Take two, then.”
I laugh. I laugh and laugh until there are tears streaming down my face and I don’t know if I’m still laughing or crying, but my body is shaking. I am making the most inhuman sound: a guttural sob that sounds like it’s from some pre-evolutionary part of my body, some part we don’t even need anymore. I wipe my eyes. The orderly is still holding out the pack of cigarettes toward me.
“I’ll pass,” I tell him.
“Smart girl.”
“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”
His smile falters, but he has it back on in a second. Surely he’s dealt with grieving family members before. Surely he knows the best way to deal with us is calmly, slowly, like we are rabid animals. His voice is low when he speaks. “The truth of it is, it’s awful, and you want it to be over, for them and for you, and then it is over, and it’s a thousand times worse.”
I reach out my hand and take one skinny cigarette from his pack; I do have to replace the one
I smoked from Nonnie’s cigarette case. “I guess I’ll just save this for later, then. In case of emergency.”
“You do that,” he tells me.
“Thanks,” I say. “For telling the truth.”
“Don’t tell no one on the inside. I could lose my job for telling the truth.”
“My lips are sealed.”
I give him a half wave, half salute as I cross the parking lot and then get into Nonnie’s Rapier, where I take the cigarette and put it in Nonnie’s case. Then I slip into reverse, back out of my spot, and head home—what’s left of home without Nonnie.
Outside our house, I open my car door and step out into the cool night air. The seasons are finally starting to behave and it feels like fall. A tinkling sound makes me turn my head toward the bay. There’s something about the water down behind our house that bends sound. Voices come trailing up, words spinning around like mist. I used to sit by my window listening to them, imagining the speakers and the lives they led. I wanted them to come for me. I wanted them to wind up the hill, across our lawn, around the house, and then to throw pebbles up at my window and ask me to come down, to come with them on whatever wonderful adventure awaited.
I hear the voices again tonight.
The moon is full and shines in slats on our driveway. The light hits the bottle caps—have they grown in number?—and they seem to dance on the side of the house like water shimmering in midday sun.
There’s another square of light on the driveway, more yellow, and when I look up to the house, I see that the light is still on in my mom’s studio. She’s up there moving around in an almost choreographed way: twist the hair, cross the room, hand to cheek, cross back in the other direction. She seems to be circling something, regarding it, but of course I can’t see what it is.
Even from this distance, you can tell she is beautiful by the curves of her body and her posture. I straighten my own back.
She stops short and raises both hands to her head and leaves them there, as if she’s posing. Her elbows jut out to the side the way Ramona and I would pose for pictures when we were younger. We called it the supermodel pose, although honestly I’ve never seen a photo of a supermodel standing with her hands behind her head as if she were resting on them, hip jutted out to the side.
Very in Pieces Page 18
