I inch closer to Greta, just to make it look like I’m headed somewhere. I wish I had my phone to look at but it’s in my locker. I’ve already damaged it twice from pool water, and my mom has said no more repairs.
My toe catches the leg of a pool lounger and I stumble forward; my knees and palms meet concrete and I feel the burn of tiny rocks getting pushed into my skin. Laughter seeps into the air behind me. I look over my shoulder and see some of Greta’s friends—Wendy and Ryan—just sitting there smirking, hiding their laughter behind their hands.
“Had too much to drink?” Ryan asks.
I’ve had hardly anything, but I immediately react the way I think he wants me to: I throw my hair back and try to look loose limbed. I say, “I am so wasted.”
Their smirks deepen.
“He was kidding,” Wendy says. “We know you’re not drunk.”
Shame takes my breath away. My eyes dart to where Greta is sitting. I see she’s watching. She’ll say something to help me, to chide her friends.
But then she looks away.
My heart fades in my chest, like the moon when it’s out during the day. It’s there, but barely visible.
I pull myself up. My knees and palms sting. Little bits of cement cling to my skin. I dust off slowly and move away. I hear Ryan whisper that I’m a poser.
The stinging I feel is from tears now. Greta still isn’t looking at me so I walk past her. It’s too late, but I look for something to drink anyway. Poser or not, what else is there for me to do?
I swallow one shot, then another. After the third, the world tilts a little and my mind is wrapped in a cozy blanket. I sit alone on the far side of the pool and watch Ian; he blurs in and out of focus. He’s surrounded by Greta and her friends, gesturing as he speaks, occasionally making the group erupt in laughter.
He’s the one who doesn’t belong here, so why am I the one sitting by myself?
I look sullenly at the sky. I’m sitting beneath my precinct of stars but the constellations make no picture for me, not without Greta to point out the mythical figures and tell me their stories.
I look for more to drink. The drinks find their way to me like bugs to light. I’m the light. Or maybe the bug. I might be getting drunk faster because I’m alone. When you’re with someone, talking, you drink more slowly, you expel some alcohol through your breath. Not so with me right now.
Cheers catch my attention. Greta climbs up the ladder to the diving board. When she’s up there, she curtsies, then dives in—a smooth, long-limbed, graceful dive. People clap. Whatever, I think. I could do that.
I could do more than that.
Greta glides through the pool underwater and emerges on the shallow end. She hoists herself up, and by the time she turns my way I’m already halfway up the ladder to the high dive. The ground beneath me falls away, and sometimes it feels like I’m climbing sideways rather than up. My fingers sweat, and with each rung I climb I get less giddy, my idea seems less good, but I have no choice but to keep going: first rule of the diving boards is once you’re up, you can’t climb back down.
I’m up. I walk the plank. Below, necks crane, people murmur, and I put my feet in fourth position, shoot up on one toe, and do a pirouette with my arms over my hand.
I almost keep my balance at the end, but I tumble off the board. My forehead catches the rough edge and all the way down I spin my arms to try to keep from landing flat on my back in the water.
I hit the water hard; a muscle in my shoulder pulls loose from its tendon. Dazed, drunk, my heard hurt and spinning, I float beneath the surface for a few moments, like I’m just a ghost, or a memory, and the weightlessness makes me feel at ease.
Later I’ll think that I didn’t need saving; it’s just that I’d had a shock and didn’t quite realize, at first, I needed to kick, needed to breathe.
The surface of the water breaks again, and I feel the rush of a moving current. Two hands grab me beneath my arms and I’m suddenly above the surface, gasping for air. When I’ve wiped my eyes clear I’m looking right at Greta, her dark wet hair clinging to her face. Her eyes blaze—angry, annoyed. I see no trace of concern. For the first time, I look around at the people surrounding the pool. Maybe I’m being dramatic, but I swear no one looked worried.
She grabs my arm, pulls me kicking to the ladder.
When I’m out, she wraps a towel around me, leads me to a lounge chair, and pushes me gently into it. She gets close to my face. “Get your shit together,” she hisses.
I wake up the next morning and in my sleepy haze, I have no idea where I am. There’s something crunchy in my mouth, and when I spit frantically into my palm I see it’s a leaf. I blink and the world straightens. I’m outside, lying in the lounge chair where Greta left me last night. My head throbs; I bring my fingers to the tender, blood-filled bruise on my forehead. I pull myself up, my shoulder aches, too, and I go about examining my body for all the drunken injuries I sustained. My raw knees and palms, my aching ankle.
It’s early. I’ve never been here this early and the sunlight lands like netting on top of the water. A soft breeze sends calm ripples through the leaves, across the empty, shade-soaked concrete pool deck.
I try to summon memories of last night, but they’re hazy. I remember the fall, I remember Greta wrapping me up in a towel, but not much else.
A thought trips into my mind: my mother. I search for my phone, but it’s not on me, so I limp to the locker room and dig for it. I find it, finally. Its battery is about to die.
Are you coming home soon, love?
A few minutes later:
Never mind, Greta called and said your phone died. Have fun my love.
My heart sinks. I picture my mom in bed with the covers pulled over her legs, papers and textbooks fanned around her, plus emails from work chiming in, and then I don’t respond, and she has to figure out what to do, if anything, about her daughter, drunk and loose in the night.
Good morning, Mom! I text now, so she knows I’m not dead.
I leave the pool wearing my bathing suit, with the towel wrapped around my waist, my flip-flops slapping the parking lot pavement wetly. I take them off; they’re annoying. Before I’ve even decided where I’m going, I head in the direction of Greta’s house, which is a short walk from here. The wooded road that leads away from the pool opens up to the wider country road that, if followed, brings you to town. Greta lives in a neighborhood on the town’s outskirts. Insects engage in small skirmishes midair. Birds swoop into the fields, making big parabolas. The road is dirt but I don’t put my shoes back on. If I bend over I feel like I might fall over and never be able to get up.
With Greta’s house in sight, my heart starts to pound. Her words have slipped back into my memory: Get your shit together.
I’m walking up to her door when Ingrid steps outside, her head bowed to her phone. When she sees me, she jumps. She’s dressed for work, carrying her car keys. She says, “Elizabeth, sweetie, are you all right?”
“Yes,” I say, brushing hair over my face to cover the bruise. “I had to work really early, to clean the pool. Is Greta here?”
Ingrid inspects me. She looks at her watch, at the car, at Greta’s window. She sighs.
“She’s asleep inside, hon.”
Just like my mom, she’s always too busy, always wishing she had more time, always a little too ready to believe we’re telling the truth. She inches toward her car.
“Have a good one!” I say, trying to sound cheerful, but my hangover is like a wood chipper and I spit the words out in an unused, choppy voice. Ingrid waves, then drives away.
Just as I’m about to slide open the glass door that’s always unlocked, Greta emerges from the house next door. Ian’s house. She walks slowly and cranes her neck toward the road, maybe checking for her mom’s car. Strands of her hair are airborne in the wind. When she sees me, she stops. She looks me up and down. Her face is serious, but then she yawns, and the yawn collapses into laughter.
“You look
like shit,” she says.
“Speak for yourself,” I say, but it’s not true, she looks terrific, a little tired maybe, but beautiful all the same.
“Come inside,” she says, “we’ll have breakfast.”
I follow Greta inside, and as I walk behind her I keep opening my mouth to say something, then closing it, then opening it again. I must look like a fish, my mouth pumping water. Before I’ve always been relieved that Greta forgets the ways she was annoyed with me, but this morning I don’t feel ready to forget what she’s said. She insults me and then applies the remedy of her attention, but small deposits of ridicule have been gathering in me ever since Greta started changing. She left me last night, and I was passed out and hurt, and now she’s pretending it didn’t happen. That’s what hurts the most—that she carries no memory of me from day to day. Of course she remembers me, but it’s not the same thing as mattering to someone.
She shakes cereal into a bowl in her kitchen. She asks what I want to eat, but I tell her I’m not hungry, so she shrugs and leans her elbows on the counter, shoveling big spoonfuls of cereal into her mouth.
So she’s not going to talk first.
It takes all of my self-control not to start off by apologizing to her. I do owe her a thank you, though, so I say, “Thank you for helping me last night. Helping me out of the pool.”
Greta rolls her eyes. “That was torture to watch, E. What were you thinking?”
I try to keep an even face, but there’s a scowl inside of me, deepening.
“I was drunk,” I say timidly.
“You were only drunk because Wendy and Ryan accused you of not being drunk.”
“Not true,” I say, my voice heating up. “I was drunk because I didn’t have anything else to do. You were ignoring me and I’m not close with anyone else.”
“You don’t know them well because you never talk to them,” Greta says. “They wonder why you’re just standing around looking sullen.”
“They’re just not very nice,” I say.
Greta drops her spoon into her bowl. “You’re not my charge, you know. You have to learn to fend for yourself without doing stupid shit. You could’ve gone home if you were bored. If you don’t like the people at the pool.”
“They’re not really the problem, though,” I say. “It’s Ian. Ian who’s everywhere, who’s changing things. He’s so annoying—and so old. There’s just something gross about him.”
I don’t mean it—not all of it, anyway. But I know it will get Greta’s attention.
“Spare me,” Greta says. Milk runs down her chin and she wipes it away angrily. “I don’t need boy advice from you.”
“He’s not a boy,” I mutter. “Old man is more like it.”
“Shut up,” Greta says. “Just stop talking.”
“Look,” I say, frightened a little by how angry Greta is—finding myself, as I always find myself, desperate for her not to stray too far from being happy with me. “I just want to help you. I don’t want you to get hurt by this guy—he’s clearly taking advantage of you. It’s barely not illegal, what he’s doing to you.”
Greta turns cold. She dumps her cereal bowl in the sink, where it lands with a spin and a clatter. “You don’t know anything about what we’re doing together because I haven’t told you, and am not ever going to. You don’t own me. You’re not my husband.”
“First I’m your mother, now I’m your husband?” I say. “You’re crazy. You just don’t give a shit about me anymore and you don’t want to be my friend but you’re trying to find a way to make it my fault.”
The self-pity that has always been so much a part of my everyday life swirls like a double helix inside of me, but this time, I can’t let Greta see it. What she said—she’s trying to hurt me, I realize. Maybe she doesn’t realize it. Maybe she’ll regret it. But if I back down, she’ll only want to ridicule me more.
“I saved your life last night,” she says. “Jesus Christ, what more do you want from me?”
“Uh, for you to not be the worst friend ever,” I say snidely.
“You’ve been annoying the shit out of me. It’s just not worth it anymore.”
“I’m trying to help you.”
“Well, you’re not.” She throws her hair up into a messy bun and grabs her keys from the counter. “I’m going for a drive. Be gone when I get back.”
The door slams shut behind her. The house makes all the noises of a quiet house, the ticking and creaking and sighing of the foundation. I feel wronged, but also guilty, like I messed up big time, too. I look around desperately, like I could find the pieces of our friendship on the floor and put them back together, but there’s nothing but the usual mess of Greta’s house, the piles of mail and loose shoes and her lifeguard suit hanging to dry over the back of a chair.
Panic settles in: it’s really over between us. My best friend doesn’t want me anymore.
I find it strange that I don’t feel empty inside. Instead I feel so energized I might burst. I want to do something that will leave a mark on Greta, but all I can think of is cleaning up the kitchen so she’ll feel bad that I had to clean up after her—but she probably wouldn’t even notice. I think about leaving her a note to tell her how much she’ll regret taking me for granted, but I can already see the photos of the note pinging from phone to phone at the pool. The rumors that will spread about my attempt to make her miss me.
There’s nothing left for me to do but leave. I put on one of her shirts and a pair of her gym shorts. I leave her towel, the one she wrapped me in, in the laundry room for Ingrid to wash. Cool morning air meets me when I open the door. I start down the road to walk the three miles home, feeling like I’m about to embark on the second phase of my life, the sad phase, the one without Greta, when a voice calls after me.
It’s Ian, jogging down the road.
He looks completely jovial. A cigarette sits between his fingers. He’s wearing a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up; a tattoo of a sword pierces his bicep.
“You had a rough night last night!” There’s laughter in his voice, but it’s not cruel laughter. He nudges my hurt shoulder. I grimace. “Oh, shit!” he says. “Sorry!”
“Yeah,” I say. “Last night was a real doozy.”
As friendly as he’s being, I’m ashamed of the way I look—bruised and dirty—and the fight with Greta is still echoing in my ears. I excuse myself, say I have to head home to clean up, when Ian pulls his car keys from his pocket.
“Let me drive you,” he says. “You look like you could use the break.”
I almost turn him down, but he’s already walking backward toward where his car is parked on the street. I’m aching all over. My leg is bruised from where it hit the water. So I walk with him and climb in.
Greta’s somewhere not too far away, tearing up the roads, her aviator sunglasses perched on her nose. The windows rolled down and the music up. Ian doesn’t know anything about the fight, about what Greta said about me or what I said about him. Soon he’ll know, but for now he doesn’t. He’s casually flipping through the radio stations, frowning at the offerings, finally reaching under my seat for a book of CDs. His arm brushes my leg, his face is near my knee, and when he straightens, I catch his forearm. I kiss him.
I’m smarter than this, better than this, less petty than this: but I want it this way anyway.
And the thing is: Ian doesn’t pull away. I know it’s nothing special about me; he’s confirming what I thought all along, that he’ll hook up with anyone. The fact that he kisses me back feeds my desire—not for him, but for some glimpse of attention, of affection. I know that later I’ll feel sad about Greta, and I won’t feel good that I was right about Ian, but right now I just feel like I want something, anything, and I don’t know what it is so I’ll just try everything.
Ian pulls me into his lap.
“This is an E. I haven’t seen before,” he says, his voice breathy, and I think he’s stupid for saying it, but I kiss him again.
I know that, s
oon, Greta will return home, and she’ll see us. Word will get out. Maybe I’ll be praised for what I’m doing, maybe I’ll be as cool as Greta, or maybe I’ll be ridiculed. A slut, a backstabber. It could really go either way.
As I kiss Ian, Greta’s tarot cards fan open in my mind. The chariot card—she said it was an interesting one to get for the center card, but she never told me why. I want to know badly all of a sudden. Maybe, if I’d asked her sooner, I would’ve known what to do today—I would know what it was I wanted.
Ian’s hand crawls up my shirt.
I could look the chariot card up online, but the answer from the internet wouldn’t be as good as if Greta told me herself.
Higher Power
Although Harris’s ex-wife, Ella, had divorced him six years before, and it was bad at first, they’d grown friendlier over time. When Harris found out he needed quadruple bypass surgery and that the recovery would be long and painful, Ella flew from Michigan to South Dakota to help him out.
He’d called his daughter first, not asking her to come but hoping she might pick up on his hints and offer to fly out for a week. Lindsey sounded worried for him on the phone but also distracted. She was a college student. One day she would know what it was like to be sick but not now. But even so, he’d been hopeful his impending surgery would have had more of an effect on her. Maybe that was asking too much. They’d only just begun talking to each other again. He hadn’t even seen her since the divorce. He’d tried, but for a long time she’d been too angry with him. He was sober now but hadn’t been for much of her childhood. He often wondered what it would take for them to be friends again, or if they would ever be.
So he called Ella. She heard the question in his voice. She came to him even though travel was hard for her. Her MS had debilitated her in recent years. She needed a walker to get around, and trips to airports required that she be pushed in wheelchairs by underpaid airport staff.
If the Body Allows It Page 22
