Drift

by Victoria Patterson

  Chris waited for Heather to serve, right hand gripped around the handle of her racket, left hand lightly holding the strings of the head, swaying slightly. She looked confident and bored. The serve, when it came, was surprisingly strong, but Chris sliced a backhand to the corner. Heather ran, her face showing signs of strain, and barely lobbed the ball back. Chris drove the ball to the opposite corner, and Heather lurched, swinging her racket and missing. She set her racket on the court, bent forward, hands on her knees. Rosie imagined she was catching her breath. Chris liked to cruise past Rosie after such winning shots, adding her personal commentary.

  “I got a leather jacket from some man in the navy. Patches and fake fur on the collar. I’ll show you.” Chris’s voice was a hardened monotone, as if she’d just smoked a pack of cigarettes, not matching her appearance: white perfectly shaped teeth, golden legs lean with muscle.

  Of course she got a leather jacket from some man in the navy. Men followed Chris. They gave her gifts. She was seventeen years old, and she could already credit herself with two teenage stalkers. She had blond hair that looked like there was light glowing in each strand. Her eyes were a cool blue. She was tall and skinny. And she lured men with her languid walk, and then ignored them, moving on as they continued to stare, taking her beauty and slapping it in their faces: You like to look at me? Fuck you.

  Chris walked slowly to her position, a tennis ball creating a lump in her skirt where it was tucked in her tennis underwear. She bounced the ball three times—she did so every serve—leaned forward, and peered across the net. She tossed the ball up and in one defined, smooth stroke, drove it across the net. Heather hit an unwieldy forehand, and the ball landed outside the white line.

  Rosie saw Chris hesitate, and then Chris gave the point away. Chris’s father, Walt, sat in the stands with the other parents, but it was as if he was sitting behind Rosie, breathing down her neck. He couldn’t contain himself, standing and yelling, “That ball was out! Goddamn it, Chris! Call it!” He wore silver tinted sunglasses.

  Rosie knew Chris would ignore him, but she saw her wince. When Walt got angry, he cussed and yelled, but the other parents tolerated him because he was Chris’s personal tennis coach. He’d been threatening to send her to reformatory school. “It’s in one of those small states—Rhode Island or Delaware,” Chris had said. And he’d already sent her to a military-style tennis camp over the summer, where she’d claimed that a counselor had “stuck a curling iron up a girl’s twat.”

  When Chris walked past Rosie—dead eyes, smart-ass comments, tennis racket dangling, radiating with rebellion—Rosie was pleased to be her friend. Yet she couldn’t help but worry that it was only a matter of time before it all ended: badly, quickly. It was because Chris talked about death, telling her the different ways she thought of killing herself: “I’ll slit my wrists in the bathtub. The warm water will make it flow. Not cut across, but along the veins.”

  “I wonder what it feels like to drown? I could hold on to Mom’s hand weights and sink in our pool.”

  She typed eerie notes for Rosie in their typing class, on flimsy tan paper:

  Have you ever had an experience or thought you’ve been somewhere before because you’ve dreamed the place, and you know it’s going to be the same when you’re dead? Let’s leave today. Let’s take a razor and cut our arms and then suck the blood.

  Chris signed her notes—Friends Forever—as if to avoid doubt and ensure her loyalty. Chris’s rebellion was bottomless, rooted in a lost and sad dreaminess. “Anyone home?” Rosie would say, waving a hand in front of Chris’s face. And still, Chris would stare off.

  Chris liked to tell her, “You’re different. You feel things. You’re going to do something with your life. Not just marry some dumb-ass executive and go to the country club. Not just have a couple of babies and play tennis.”

  Chris was winning; she always won. She was the number-one singles player on the varsity tennis team. Her next serve was gentle and slow, as if trying to help her opponent. Heather hit a deep backhand and ran forward on the court. In an effortless gesture, Chris lobbed the ball over Heather’s head to the backcourt. Heather ran fast and hard, but she netted the ball, her arms spread for balance.

  Rosie began to wish for the end of the match, and Chris brushed back a loose strand of hair and frowned in her direction, as if to say, Let’s get this done. Three requisite bounces of the ball, serious stare across the net. She tossed the ball in a serve and swung down on it. Heather sped toward the ball, swung and missed.

  Another serve, another ace. On Chris’s fourth serve, Heather managed to lob the ball back, bringing a collective aaaahhh from the audience. Chris’s racket head waited between her shoulder blades, her elbow pointed at the ball. There was a thwack. Heather’s legs were spread wide and slightly bent, racket listless by her side, and she watched with the others as the ball bounced inside the white line and slammed into the fence.

  Applause erupted from the spectators, and Rosie heard Walt whistling, but Chris was bored by the praise. She walked slowly past Rosie, head down, expressionless.

  “Take that,” she said flatly.

  Rosie and Chris sat on Chris’s bed making plans for the winter formal dance. This year’s theme was “A Night of Magic.” Chris would supply her with a date, one of her leftovers. Older and handsome was how she described him.

  Rosie’s grandparents were fly-fishing in Montana, the spare key to their house hanging on a hook in the garage, an invitation. Chris had decided that they would make an appearance at the dance, take the obligatory photographs as proof for parents, and then spend the entirety of the evening at Rosie’s grandparents’ house, away from the restrictive gaze of adults.

  Chris’s mom poked her head through Chris’s bedroom door, blond hair swinging—“Can I get you girls something to eat?” Doris drove a canary yellow Jaguar. She belonged in a canary yellow Jaguar, Rosie thought. Doris was an older, lit-up version of Chris, if Chris weren’t suicidal and promiscuous. She had an optimistic smile that Rosie never trusted. Doris and Walt were born-again Christians, and she knew that they prayed before meals, holding hands around the table, even if they were at restaurants.

  “Leave,” Chris answered. Then, as if she pitied her mom, she softened her response, saying patiently, “No, Mom. Please leave.” Rosie saw a flash of red from Doris’s manicured fingers as she shut the door.

  They could hear the mumble and canned laughter of the television from the living room. Caitlen, Chris’s twelve-year-old sister, was watching a sitcom. Caitlen was the opposite of Chris—compliant, eager to please. Her chances of becoming a professional tennis player were good.

  Chris sighed heavily, her mother’s interruption darkening her mood. She reached underneath her bed and pulled out a shoebox, setting the lid on the bedspread. Inside the box were a blue and white package of Ex-Lax, various pill bottles, the white packaging from a container of diuretics, three tattered matchbooks—each advertising a different bar, folded squares of paper, a green plastic pill container with the days of the week, a small bottle of Lemon Zest air freshener, and a ceramic lizard. The lizard’s mouth was the receptacle for lighting and smoking the pot, which Chris retrieved from a drawer beneath her underwear, in a Ziploc sandwich bag.

  “John Wayne,” Chris said, prepping her lizard, initiating a game she’d invented: speculating about sex with different men, whether random (Tom Hanks, their high school janitor), repulsive (Ronald Reagan, school principal Mr. Johnson), or desirable (the actor from Kiss of the Spider Woman). “Not that bullshit macho John Wayne,” she added, “our John Wayne.”

  Rosie knew that Chris thought of herself as her personal sex-mentor, and she’d told Chris in a vague way about Rod; but she’d buried the memory of what had happened: the only proof that she hadn’t invented the loss of her virginity was the large X she’d marked across the page in her journal, with the date September 21, 1988.

  “No good,” Rosie said.

  “Like having sex with
a five-year-old,” Chris agreed.

  “Like incest or something,” Rosie said.

  “Yeah, well,” said Chris. She sucked the lizard’s tail, and then passed the lizard to Rosie. Rosie sucked. “I’m all fucked up,” Chris began in a choked voice from holding in the smoke. She let the smoke stream out, picking up the Lemon Zest air freshener, and simultaneously squirting and waving her hand in the mist. “I read about it in Cosmo. I have sex because I think that sex will bring me love. Really, there’s a hole inside me. It can never be filled. I’m destined to be lonely forever.”

  “Shut up,” Rosie said, and they laughed.

  After much tactical negotiation, Walt had agreed to allow Chris to get ready for the dance at Rosie’s grandparents’ house (although he didn’t know that her grandparents were out of town). Their dates were freshman varsity tennis players from USC, and Walt was pleased: as long as Chris was back by curfew. It was dusk, and rain, blown by the wind, tapped on the sliding glass doors, streaming down the windowpanes.

  Chris had giant rollers in her hair. “The trick,” she said, sitting on a barstool and peering at her face in a lit-up mirror where Grandma Dot usually kept her beer and ashtray, “is to use men the same way they use you.” She squinted at Rosie. “That way you don’t get hurt.”

  “Sure,” Rosie said. She wore a red satin gown with a V-back, smooth against her skin, but she felt like a splotch of color, nothing more, compared with Chris. Chris took out the bobby pins and rollers, and the rollers rocked on the bar before settling. Her hair bounced with release, and her dress shimmered, silver and strapless.

  Rosie glanced out the sliding glass windows toward the deck, the view soft and blurred through the rain. She thought the lounge chairs looked like skeletons. In the distance was a streak of dark, as if painted with a brush, and she knew that it was raining even harder there.

  “Did Walt make you practice last weekend?” she asked, looking back at Chris.

  Chris smiled sadly, as if the question were inconsequential. “I have this recurring nightmare,” she said. “The first time I dreamed it was when I was five: the tennis balls kept shooting at me, like from a machine gun. I’d duck, but the balls kept hitting me.” She applied her lipstick, pursed her lips, and blotted with one of Grandma Dot’s Kleenexes. She set the crumpled tissue next to her rollers, the scarlet mark reminding Rosie of Grandma Dot’s lipstick prints.

  “Why don’t you fix us a drink?” Chris asked.

  “You sound like an adult,” Rosie said.

  “I feel old,” Chris said. “Really old.”

  The Smirnoff vodka bottle in the bar had been marked with a faint line: Grandpa was paranoid about his vodka, and she knew better than to touch it. Instead, she opened a Schlitz and one bottle of Coors from the refrigerator. Since when had Grandma Dot started drinking Coors?

  A loud knocking came from the front door, and Chris stood from the barstool. “They’re early,” she said, and she hopped barefoot on the kitchen tile over to Rosie. They held hands and stared at each other, excitement increasing, until Chris said, “Ready?” She nodded, although she wanted to tell Chris that she didn’t seem really old now.

  Chris set her feet carefully in her high heels and made her way to the front door. The men entered with paper bags, unloading in the kitchen: twelve-packs of Coronas, a bottle of Jose Cuervo tequila, and plastic corsage boxes with white carnations inside. Chris settled her body against the taller of the men, Tate, and Rosie discerned the other, Sean, to be her date. Tate was better looking: eyes sad and hostile and a down-turned mouth; Sean was smaller, more tightly put together, with darker hair. Their manner with each other had an edge of confidence, as if their bond was entirely rewarding, and the surrounding world didn’t measure up.

  The night progressed rapidly into shots of tequila, beer, and the blurring of everything into a whirl of motion, colors, and laughter. The rain stroked the windowpanes, and the ocean seemed to rock the house, back and forth, as if supporting them. They played quarters on the marble coffee table, bouncing the quarter into one of Grandpa’s martini glasses. Rosie and Chris weren’t as skilled, they lost their eye-hand coordination quickly, the quarters clinking against the rim, spinning, and then landing on the table or the carpet.

  Tate and Sean went out on the deck in the misty rain and puffed greedily on cigarettes, consulted with each other, flicking ashes in the bay, now and then glancing at them through the sliding glass windows. Their orchid boutonnieres looked like wadded tissues. “God,” Chris said, laughing, and Rosie knew that she was telling her that she was drunk. “Yeah,” she said, and they stared at each other, happily. The men reentered, the glass door sliding open and closed with a gust of cold air.

  Rosie was woozy, noticing the static coming from her grandparents’ stereo. She rose to change the station, and she was aware that she walked unsteadily. When she returned to the couch, Chris and Tate were leaned into each other, kissing. She sat next to Sean, and he put a hand on her knee. He kissed her, his other hand sliding down her back. The warmth of his lips dampened her earlobe.

  As he pulled her to a stand, she knew something was going to happen between them, and her throat tightened. He opened the door in the hallway, leading her by the arm to The Daisy Room. ( John Wayne had told her that he’d named the rooms, and she’d come to think of them the same way.) She looked back at Chris, who smiled lazily, her body flopped out on the couch, one leg crooked underneath the other in a position that looked uncomfortable. Tate was leaned forward, reaching for his pack of Marlboro Reds.

  On the wallpaper in The Daisy Room, she could make out clusters of dark flowers, reminding her of children holding hands. She looked at Sean, and his eyes glittered at her. He had a scar across his eyebrow, a pale slope dividing the hairs. It made her uncomfortable since her father had a similar scar and she couldn’t help but think about him. She didn’t like her father popping into her mind as Sean urged her to give him a blowjob.

  She did her best, it was only her second time, but he wanted her to go fast and deep. He was not patient, and he grabbed the back of her head and forced her down on him until she thought she might gag, tears welling. When it was over, and she’d swallowed, as Chris had instructed (“Just get it down quickly; it’s not so bad, and it’s good for your skin and hair”), she lay in the bed and watched the dark familiar shadows waving from the walls.

  Sean lay silent for a few moments until his breathing normalized. His weight left the bed; she heard him zipping his pants. He left: the door shut. She slept; she didn’t sleep; she wasn’t sure. And then she missed Chris. Where was Chris?

  She walked down the hallway, past the kitchen and the living room. All the lights were off, except for the kitchen’s sleepy-yellow light. She thought about telling Chris what had happened with Sean, but decided she’d tell her later, when she’d arranged events to be less humiliating.

  The door to The Fish Room was open, and she saw the silhouette of Tate and Sean in the dark: Sean was moving up and down on the bed—steady, rhythmically. Tate stood beside the bed, a hand on his friend’s back, as if to push him or guide him. They were calm, concentrating, and did not notice her.

  She saw a flash of Chris’s hair—her head against a pillow, face turned away; she couldn’t see Chris’s body, only the rise and fall of Sean’s back. Her stomach dropped, and she felt a panicked relief that it wasn’t her in the bed with the men. But seeing Chris humiliated her in a helpless way, less easily dismissed.

  When she left the doorway, her hand was on the wall for support, and she was shocked, knowing that it was still happening, even without her watching. She felt blood drain from her face, and when she set her hand out, it shook.

  The phone was next to Grandma Dot’s can of pens and pencils, and Grandma Dot had taped a list of phone numbers to it. Uncle Stan’s was second on the list, even though he was long gone. She dialed, hoping to reach John Wayne, phone ringing upstairs in the apartment, an echo to the beep from the receiver—ten, eleven, tw
elve times. When she looked toward the bay, her body jerked involuntarily. John Wayne stood on the deck, his palms spread on the sliding glass door like wet leaves.

  She slid the door open, and wisps of rain licked her skin, blown inside from the dark. The sky and bay seemed connected: she couldn’t distinguish one from the other, only darkness. He came inside, wearing her uncle’s bell-bottom jeans, cuffs wet and turned under his bare feet. He stared at her, and she got the impression that he already knew.

  “Get them out,” she said, gesturing toward The Fish Room. His eyes narrowed, as if considering, and he looked from her face to the room and back again. He walked toward the dark doorway, and when he turned on the light, it bounced out the door and hung in the entryway. She heard John Wayne’s voice, although she couldn’t make out what he was saying, and then Sean said, “Fuck this shit.”

  The men walked out of The Fish Room—calm, just like before—and her chest tightened at the sight of them. Tate took one of the paper bags and loaded it with leftover Coronas, leaving the empties. They spoke in hushed voices, and then Sean moved close to Tate, whispered something, and Tate glanced over his shoulder at her and laughed.

  She closed her eyes and leaned against the sliding glass door, glass cool on her back, a dull nausea settling in her chest, and when she opened her eyes, Tate and Sean were leaving by the front door. She could still taste Sean in her mouth, and she had the urge to brush her teeth.

  Rosie and Chris climbed up the hill from her grandparents’ house to Chris’s house, high heels long gone, mud clinging to their damp dresses, cool against their legs. They wore sweatshirts over their dresses. The succulent ice plants that covered the hill crushed under their feet, unleashing more wet, and the leaves glistened from the earlier rain. Chris’s home was at the top of the hill, a block down. Her curfew was one A.M., but it was past two A.M. last time Rosie looked, the neon numbers glowing from Grandma Dot’s alarm clock. She was spending the night at Chris’s house.