Little Panic

by Amanda Stern

  “I did something to Connery.” Fuck, I was right. “Is Connery alive?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Thank God. Listen, Haruko, I’m really late for something. I have to go. Can we talk about this later?”

  “I have nowhere to go!” she says. “Can I stay here?”

  “Why can’t you stay in your apartment?”

  “Connery had me committed last night. I got drunk and we got into a terrible fight, and I ended up telling him he should kill himself, just like his sister. I think I even said that his sister killed herself because of him. Then I threw a bottle at his face, so he called the police. I got out this morning, but Connery won’t let me back into my apartment, so I have nowhere to stay. I’m totally homeless. Please, Amanda, please, let me just stay here.”

  “Fine, stay here, but I have to go. I really do. I’m sorry. Just stay put and we’ll talk about this later, okay?”

  She nods. “Thank you.”

  Eddie and Nina are already at the house when I get there, sitting in the living room with Kara on speakerphone. I sit next to Nina. I don’t take off my coat. Daniel, David, and Holly are not there, and I assume my mom will call them with whatever terrible news she’s going to tell us.

  “Because of the housing crisis, the mortgage on the house has gone up astronomically, and because of that, I’m unable to refinance the house in order to pay the mortgage, so I need to rent the house for a little while.”

  “You’re going to sell it!” I yell out, unable to stop myself.

  “I’m not.”

  “You are!”

  “The housing crisis is not Mom’s fault,” Eddie says. It’s so annoying when he’s reasonable. I lean back on the couch next to Nina and start to cry.

  “Where will you live?” Kara asks through the speakerphone.

  “I’m going to rent a place in Sag Harbor and live out there,” she tells us.

  “You’re moving out of the city?” I toss Nina a “Can you believe this shit?” look. Nina’s crying now, too. On top of the sickening homesickness I already have for the house, now I have to miss Mom, too?

  “I think it’s going to be good for Mom,” Kara says.

  “I agree,” Eddie says.

  Now I’m sobbing. Where’s their house loyalty, their sense of justice and outrage? They know as well as I do that renting is the gateway drug to selling.

  “You’re overreacting,” Eddie says to me.

  “I’m not!” Now I’m practically hyperventilating. “You don’t understand anything.”

  “What don’t I understand?” he asks, getting mad.

  “You and Kara, you have families. Nina and I don’t. This house is our family; it’s all we have, and now it’s being taken away from us.”

  “It’s not ours,” Eddie says. “So it can’t be taken away from us.”

  I glare at him, but I don’t say what I want, which is “But it was supposed to be.”

  “Things change,” Kara says through the phone.

  Together, my mother and the house contain my roots, the proof of my existence, and without them, I’m extinct. This house was supposed to be ours! How can they pretend not to remember that? All our lives we were told that we didn’t need to worry about being homeless because we’d always have a home, and the security I’ve attached to that knowledge is now being shattered. My mother is taking the house from us, giving it to someone else, only to disappear into some uncultivated ecosystem of tangled vegetation where I’ll never be able to find her. Everyone is spinning away from me.

  “I’ll rent the house for a year or two and then I’ll move back in.”

  I need this house to remain ours, always. My past, present, and future selves are all rooted here. I’m desperately sad and also furious. Not only do Kara and Eddie have their own families, they have their own homes; and even if Eddie doesn’t own his, he can afford to buy the things he needs, whereas I still come to my mom’s house to eat leftover party food and steal toilet paper. I come to watch cable, take naps, ask for money, hang out in the garden, “borrow” queen-sized bedsheets, fancy towels, and, sometimes, just to make phone calls. Occasionally, I even come to see my mom, but the house itself has its own identity, a personality all its own, and I feel safe in its arms.

  This house is where everything bad and good happened; it is our whole lives. But we all react in our own predictable ways, and, of course, I’m the most emotional and everyone is annoyed at how many feelings I possess.

  “We have three weeks to pack up thirty-eight years of stuff. I’ll need each of you to go through all your things in the basement and take what you want and throw out the rest,” my mom says.

  Once you pack up and move out, you don’t move back in. Kara hangs up, Eddie leaves, and Mom and Nina go down to the basement. Crying, I make my way upstairs to my old room, lie on my bed, and stare out the window through the peeling rainbow decal. If I ever have children, they’ll never see this house, play in the garden, know the life I once had. Outside the window, I can hear the people at the Dante and the baseball game on the Houston Street playground. I sit up and lean forward, but the lady on the corner isn’t there. All my fears are the same as they were when I was a child, and sitting here now, looking for the lady on the corner, my worries about being homeless are coming true.

  I’ve been afraid, ever since I was little, that I’d never amount to anything. I don’t have anything steady or stable in my life. I am still waiting for something, it seems, but I’m not sure what. I’ve become the lady on the corner. Then it hits me that even the lady on the corner had something I don’t have: a routine, sameness. She was there every single day, but I can’t even do that; sameness is deadness to me. I can’t bear it.

  At least I have Calvin, I think as I head back home. He feels more like family than a roommate, but the good kind of family who doesn’t take your home away from you. There’s a note from Haruko on the counter. I’d forgotten all about her. “Thanks, love! I’m back home now—Haruko.” Calvin’s doing the dishes.

  “My mom is selling MacDougal Street! Can you believe this shit? My childhood home, gone!” I say as I walk into the kitchen. In the four and a half years we’ve lived together, I’ve never seen the expression on his face. I don’t like it.

  “What? What’s that face?”

  “We have to have a conversation,” he says.

  “I don’t like this,” I say. “Whatever it is, I already don’t like it.”

  “So, remember a while back when I said it might be time for me to live on my own, but then I stayed?” I nod mutely. “I wasn’t looking for a new place at all, but I accidentally found something that I love and that I can afford, and I’m going to take it.”

  I sit down. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m too old to have a roommate. I’m forty-four. It’s weird, don’t you think?”

  “Well, yes, but it’s New York City, so it’s less weird. If we lived in Minnesota or something, yeah, but New York, not so much. Plus, I’m not much younger!”

  “I’m sorry. I really love living with you, but I need my own space. I need to have a home that’s just for me,” he says, which makes me realize that I don’t. I want someone around, even if they’re down the hall with their door shut. Just to know someone’s nearby.

  I shake my head. I can’t believe all of this is happening on the same day.

  “Fine,” I say, mainly to stop myself from bursting into tears. “When are you moving?”

  “In three weeks. I’ll help you find a replacement.”

  “Fine.”

  “You want to talk about this now or later?” he asks.

  “Later,” I say. My lips tremble; my voice is clogged and damp. I leave the kitchen and go lie on my bed to cry. I’m losing everything; I’m losing everyone. I am a failure at life.

  I Am a Pinball Machine

  I’m seventeen now, and soon I’ll be eighteen. The year Taylor says he’ll be legal to fuck me. I don’t want Taylor to fuck me a
nd I don’t want to fuck Taylor, but how am I going to stop it from happening? Gwen is pregnant now, and I’m hoping fatherhood will distract Taylor from me, maybe even snap him back into being the father figure I was hoping for. I decide not to tell him when my birthday comes. I’m so mortified to be turning eighteen at the end of junior year instead of senior year that I don’t tell many people at all.

  Aram, on the other hand, is so smart he wins a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in civil rights. He’s a senior now, applying to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, schools whose sweatshirts I don’t even feel qualified to wear. I keep trying to get him to fall in love with me, but while our friendship deepens and we see each other all the time, he never tries to kiss me. My fear of rejection is too profound for me to lean in first. We spend a lot of time at my house, playing with Nina, getting her to say our names, teaching her random obscene sentences. I take long walks with Nina strapped around my chest in the BabyBjörn. Adults glare at me, and once, as I pass an older woman on the street, she snipes her disgust at me: “Babies having babies!” I stop and turn, watching her walk away, my mouth drawn open like a Victorian bridge. I will never, ever grow up to shame kids, no matter what bad choices they make. I promise this to myself, and to Nina. I put her to bed, I change her, I sing to her, I read to her. At night, she cries when I leave the room and makes me lie down on the floor next to her crib and stay there while she tries to fall asleep. When I try to duck out, she stands and cries out, “Danda, come!”

  I have turned into my mom’s couch, and it’s a lot more boring than I realized. I do love being Nina’s point person at night because I understand exactly what she needs, but damn, she takes a long time to fall asleep.

  When I’m not uptown at Taylor and Gwen’s writing the next play with the theater kids, Aram and I are spending all our time together. We see plays, talk about books, see live music, go to galleries, and watch movies. One night, he invites me over to watch Raising Arizona, and he does something he’s never done before—he pulls out a joint. My body puckers. I’m still afraid of pot, terrified at what it does to me. In his tiny room, I can’t use my usual tricks—I’m going to have to actually smoke. I take small, baby puffs and try to focus on the movie. It’s working, until Aram says something to me and I need to respond, which means I’ll need to move my attention off my body, and that’s when I feel my heart start to skid. A pinball is careening inside me, lighting up whatever it touches. I feel myself losing control.

  “Don’t you think?” Aram asks.

  “Yep.” I am going to throw up. “Bathroom,” I say, standing up.

  “Want me to pause it?” he asks.

  “No!” I nearly shout on my way to the bathroom. If he pauses it, it means he’ll hear me. “Turn it up!”

  He does not turn it up. He pauses it and I throw up as quietly as I can, which is not quietly. I am crying, dizzy, mortified. I will transfer to another school. I will move to Denver. I will get surgery and become a totally different person that Aram will never recognize.

  He knocks. Oh my God, why is he knocking? “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” I say, flushing the toilet. I stand, trembling and light-headed. I throw cold water on my face and run his toothpaste over my teeth and tongue. When I come out, he’s standing right by the bathroom door. He listened! I can’t look at him. I go for my shoes.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I gotta go.” How is this not obvious?

  “Well, let me walk you out. Was it something you ate?” he asks.

  “I think so,” I say, still not looking at him.

  “Can I do anything?”

  I shake my head, grab my jacket, and rush out. He’s behind me. I take the stairs, not the elevator, and he’s still behind me.

  “Wait up,” he says. I don’t wait up.

  Outside is better. Outside is wide and expansive. I am not trapped when I am outside. I see a cab and dash for it.

  “WAIT!” he calls. I stand by the cab door until he catches up, feeling rude. “I hope you feel better,” he says.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Aram lifts my chin so I’m looking at him and then he kisses me, half on the mouth, half off. I get in the cab. What was that? Did Aram just kiss me? Did Aram just kiss my vomit mouth? I am in love.

  * * *

  Aram and I have started spending time with Paul’s brother Jonathan. He’s gay and arty and beautiful, and when I’m not at the acting school or with Aram, I’m with Jonathan doing coke. We keep our extracurricular activities from Aram, who despite smoking pot is too straight-edge and would disapprove, just as Taylor and I keep ours from Gwen. Jonathan is determined to get Aram to officially ask me out. One weekend, the three of us go to Rockaway Beach, and when Jonathan sees me in my bathing suit, he starts making comments, trying to get Aram to check me out.

  “Damn, sister,” Jonathan says.

  “Shut up,” I say.

  “Why do you wear oversized clothes? You think this body will last forever? You’re gonna wake up one day with a tire around your belly pissed you didn’t flaunt your wares when you had them.” He seems genuinely concerned, which makes me laugh.

  “I’ll take my chances,” I say. Maybe he’s right. But if normal and appropriate people, like Aram, wanted me, I probably wouldn’t be so afraid of my body.

  Aram turns to look at me, and then he does a double take and smiles. As he starts walking over to us, I want him to be attracted to me, but I am also bracing myself for what’s coming, nervous that he’ll turn out to be just like Taylor, after all, and will say or do something crude.

  “Did anyone bring Kadima?” he asks.

  As he heads off in search of a place for us to play, I feel like a bad person for questioning his motives. For questioning anything about him. Out of all the men and boys I know, Aram is the safest. What he says and what he does match the things he says he believes. I trust him, I realize, and I want to be more like him.

  Jonathan sits across from us on the way back to the city. “Have you two ever thought about going out? You’re a cute couple.”

  I sputter a bit—Jonathan is very good at this game—but Aram looks over at me. At the train station, after Jonathan leaves, Aram kisses me good-bye, landing even closer to my lips than the last time. At home a little while later, I can’t sit still: I have to tell Aram how I feel. Time is running out. In two months he’s going to Stanford, where he’ll find a fellow valedictorian who, unlike me, probably never vomits. If I don’t tell him now, I never will. He’ll leave and I’ll have missed my window. I have to get this right.

  Without giving myself time to think, I call him and invite myself over. I listen to Cat Stevens’s “Wild World” over and over again on my Walkman on the train uptown. I’m sweating hard; I can’t take one smooth, gliding breath, just choppy little ones. I will not let my body vomit. When I get to his place, he’s in a T-shirt and sweatpants. His parents and sister are watching an Ingmar Bergman movie.

  “Wanna go for a walk?” I ask, knowing if I go into his apartment, I’ll end up throwing up in the bathroom. Soon we’re walking and talking and it’s all normal until I stop and I take a deep breath. “I think I’m in love with you.”

  He puts his hand to his forehead. “Oh God,” he says, turning his back to me. That’s it; I am going to throw up. Everything is turning black and rushing in to crush me. I take a few steps backward, but just as I’m about to run away and never see him again, he turns back and looks at me.

  “I think I’m in love with you, too.”

  I am overcome by happiness and relief, and stunned that finally I’m getting something I wanted. He is kissing me and I’m happy—and then a deep pocket of grief scoops me up. He’s going to Stanford. He’s going three thousand miles away. We’re going to be separated. The thing I want, the thing I’ve always wanted and finally have, is about to be taken away from me. He’s going to leave me, and I’m in Deep Countdown.

  “I can’t believe I’m goi
ng to Stanford,” he says, as if he can read my mind. “Why did I pick someplace so far away?”

  “Don’t go,” I say.

  “I have to, but we have the entire summer,” he says.

  For the first time ever, an entire summer feels too short. Why can’t it feel interminable the way it did the summer I was sent to camp?

  We kiss some more, and I try to shake off the countdown and enjoy what’s happening. I have to go back downtown to meet Libby for dinner, and as we say good-bye I’m in such a swirl of emotions, leaping onto the train as it pulls in, celebrating the timing as a lucky omen, that I don’t notice I’m going the wrong direction until I’m at 207th Street. I have to get out and switch trains, but it’s an elevated stop, in a particularly terrifying place, and I know now that all my good luck is about to end. No one can achieve such happiness without having to pay for it, and as I clatter down the metal stairs to cross the street to the other side, I know I’m going to get killed at this train station and I’ll never have the chance to be with Aram, to marry him and have kids and the whole big life that is finally within my reach. I bolt up the stairs on the other side and wait to get knifed in the night on the platform, but then the train comes, and miracle of all, I am not dead. No one killed me as revenge for being so fucking happy. This is because my happiness was coated in worry. The worry is still keeping me safe.

  The System Is the Problem

  My love for Aram is so all-encompassing, so painfully full, and it’s about all I can focus on. I know that grades are important to Aram, that studying and learning are a huge part of what turns him on. We have long talks about intelligence and I confide in him that I think I’m stupid, but I don’t mention the learning disability or the tests. That labeling is too mortifying, and besides, I still don’t know which part of my learning is disabled. His assurances that I’m not dumb bounce right off me, like compliments. I confide how hard it is for me to take tests at school, how even when I know the material I never seem to be able to answer the test questions in the moment.