He leaned his head back. “This is so fucking surreal, you know that?”
“If you want me to leave, I will,” she said, and she hoped she sounded convincing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A Christmas miracle: Ben appearing on her doorstep in the early afternoon, the hood of his parka pulled up against the gray drizzle. She was so happy to see him that she forgot she was wearing her raccoon boxers and a T-shirt commemorating her middle school graduation.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, stepping aside to let him in.
“What are you wearing, Sorenson?” He tugged playfully, once, on her ponytail, and she saw him observe her just-vacated nest on the couch: a knot of blankets and a splayed copy of The Haunting of Hill House. He turned to smile at her. “I was sort of hoping you’d be caroling or something. Or dressed as a shepherd.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
Hanging out with Ben was one of the only things she enjoyed lately, apart from true-crime documentaries and going for occasional drinks with a dorky flutist named Candace who was her age and worked part-time doing payroll in her office. Her life was mostly a mundane marathon of work and sleep, except when it wasn’t, except when Ben made an appearance.
She wasn’t sure how to take initiative. She’d submitted, with a great deal of pleasure, when he kissed her—precisely two times, both when they were both reasonably tipsy—but she also found herself consumed with worry while it was happening, wondering where she was supposed to put her hands, whether or not her body felt lumpy or subpar beneath his hands, how to know if she was overstaying her welcome in his mouth, if he was ready for it to end but she was still going at it. And he hadn’t pushed it beyond those two pleasant but minor encounters. She was astounded by his patience and good nature, by the fact that he kept inviting her out, again and again, by the fact that he was willing to just spend time with her, beers at the Comeback or walks around Berkeley Park, nights that had twice ended with nice-but-awkward kissing.
And now he was in her house, on Christmas, bearing witness to her weird hermitage. “Anyway,” he said, looking again at her Shirley Jackson nest, “you seem busy, but if your day frees up, I was hoping I could take you out.”
“Like, murder me?” she asked. She was not wearing a bra and she hadn’t showered or brushed her teeth and her hair was pulled back into what she hoped resembled a chignon but was in fact just an unwashed ponytail that she’d sort of smushed into an orb with her hand.
“For Christmas,” he said. “It’s bumming me the fuck out that you have this giant adoring Kennedy family across the country and you’re spending Christmas alone wearing raccoon shorts.”
Tears sprang to her eyes. “You’re Jewish.”
“So what? I’m not taking you to mass.” He smiled at her. “Unless you’re into that.”
“Let me just change,” she said, but first she threw her arms around him, seized by a force beyond her control. “Thanks, Ben,” she said, releasing him immediately, face aflame. She skipped into her bedroom before she could clock his expression.
They ended up, no surprise, at the Comeback, which was empty save for the usual Irish bartender and a couple of regulars at a dark booth in the corner, people whom Ben had once genially described as having been “rode hard and put away wet.”
“That’s going to be us in like forty-seven years,” she said, a few drinks in, clumsy-tongued and giddy. “Lonely old barflies. What would you be doing today if you weren’t here?”
“Today I had a couple of options. There’s a pickup soccer game at the rec center. A family dinner at my aunt and uncle’s house. A few friends from high school are camping in Lazy Bend. A couple of people from—”
“Jesus Christ, I get it. You’re wildly popular.”
“I meant it as a compliment,” he said, and when she glanced up at him his expression was less impish than she’d been expecting. “I’m having fun with you.”
They hung out a lot, but they both seemed to have agreed that their conversations would not cross certain barriers; it was okay for them to make out a little bit under the striped awning of the head shop next to the Comeback before they went their separate ways; they were allowed to die laughing, sitting by Crystal Springs Lake with their feet in the water, about one of Ben’s high school classmates—who had started a crowdfunding page for her “artistic lifestyle,” asking for $1,900 per month in donations to support her pursuit of rendering, in polymer clay, what she referred to as “fractal goat likenesses”—but the second the laughter started to fade, it had become a point of fact that Grace would make a self-deprecating joke (“I, like goats, lack the necessary degree of self-control that should prevent me from eating tin cans”) and defuse any romantic tension that threatened to overtake their platonic camaraderie.
Ben was awkward too, so she assumed she was doing him a favor, sparing him further unfolding. But now he was complimenting her, having fun, being sincere, it seemed.
Her phone began to buzz on the table between them.
Ben read from the screen. “I get to witness communication with Mama Sorenson?”
Grace, flustered, declined the call. “Sorry about that.”
“Jesus. Did you just hang up on your mom?”
“I sent it to voicemail.” She cleared her throat. “It’s impolite to answer the phone at the table.”
“Okay, Queen Elizabeth. But it’s Christmas. You should talk to your mom.”
“She’s not expecting me to answer.”
Ben studied her. “I don’t want to pry, but is there some bigger reason you didn’t go home? Other than the cost of plane tickets? You speak so highly of your family, and…”
She pounded what was left of her vodka soda. The bartender looked up from his Sudoku and, seeing her empty glass, saluted her and set about making her another drink. Despite their afternoon walks, the wee-hours beers, the caffeinated chatter about Christopher Guest and Camera Obscura, she’d never actually told him about the lie she was living. Only Ben knew the truth—that she’d been rejected from law school, that she had a weird-as-fuck job answering infrequent phone calls from struggling saxophonists, that she had never felt as lost as she did now. Ben was the only person in her life who knew the substantive truth, but she hadn’t told him that she’d been lying about that truth to everyone else who mattered to her.
“Nobody in my family has any idea what the fuck I’m doing right now,” she said. “They don’t know that I’m a receptionist and they don’t know my house looks like a residential treatment facility and they don’t know that I’m spending Christmas in an abandoned bar with a boy who has a whole roster of better offers.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Ben asked. “You— What do they think you’re doing?”
“They think I’m in Aspen,” she said. “Or, no, the Alps. Which one’s closer?”
“I can’t tell if you’re joking.”
“I’m not,” she said. “But could we pretend I am? For the purposes of my not weeping in a bar on Christmas?”
Ben studied her, then raised his glass. “To far and away my best offer of the day,” he said, and she felt her face ignite.
A shitty frenemy from Reed had once drunkenly asked her, “Is it hard? Having such pretty sisters?”
She knew her sisters were beautiful. But she had always harbored some hope that she was the same way, that she was similarly alluring and just had low self-esteem. She was fine-looking, she had always assumed. She had nice hair. She had good skin. She had teeth perfected by years of costly suburban orthodontia. Her breasts were large but not obscenely so (plus didn’t guys like that? Weren’t they supposed to? Wasn’t that just biology?). She had her mother’s defined waist. She had short, bitten nails like a fourth-grade boy and prematurely jiggly upper arms but her eyebrows were striking, full and dark, and as far as she could tell there was nothing wrong wit
h her labia, no unnaturally large “wings” or anything, which she had learned about (and wished she could unlearn about) in an unsettling documentary about cosmetic vaginal surgery she watched in GWS330: Psychology of Feminine Self-Perception, and her butt was whatever. She had always skirted the topic in her mind, avoided thinking about the fact that maybe no man would ever want her, because she figured something would eventually click.
Her sisters were sexually interesting. At least she thought they were: Violet was take-charge and fierce; men seemed to like that. And Wendy was—well, not a slut, but adventurous, free-spirited, and that had to translate into some kind of prowess, didn’t it? And Liza was just good—a very complicated, intense kind of goodness that radiated from her, made both men and women stop what they were doing and just smile at her, lightened somehow by her presence.
Grace, conversely, was profoundly uninteresting. But if there was such a marked difference between her and her sisters, wouldn’t someone else have pointed it out by now? Wouldn’t Grace be more aware of a grave disparity? If you were the Hobbit in a sea of Sirens, wouldn’t you know it? Her mom thought she was pretty, would sometimes get teary-eyed and contemplative and say, “You’re so beautiful it hurts me, Goosey.” But moms had to say those things, Grace supposed. And they probably especially had to say them if their children were homely, to fatten them up with compliments before they unleashed them into a dark world of people who were not their mothers.
“So, it’s almost 2017,” Ben said, beside her, nicer than he had to be, blessedly quiet on the subject of her major and troubling confession about her family. “What’s in store, Sorenson?”
“New leaves?” she said. “Leafs?”
“What’s the one thing you most want to have happen?”
She paused, considering it. “I’d like to find my destiny,” she said, boozy and sentimental. “I’d like to transcend all the bullshit. I’d like to be…happy.”
“You’re not happy now?”
“I—I mean, like, right now I am. Here.” She blushed. “But broad-scale, there’s not— I mean, there are things I wish were a little less…you know. Up in the air.” She wasn’t sure what to do with her body. She wasn’t sure what to say. She put a hand on his thigh—loosened, lively—and he looked up at her, smiling.
“Less up in the air sounds good,” he said.
She raised her glass again. She felt like she had as a little kid when she had to present in front of her class: aware of being on the precipice of something, unsure of how to make the final leap, of what it would mean if she did. “To being rode hard and put away wet.”
“Hey.” He laughed. “I’m game if you are.”
But she didn’t know how to navigate this space. Didn’t know what on earth she could say beyond I both bodily and psychologically want this, but I need you to tactfully and generously navigate our course from here on out, because I just can’t take the initiative myself. Didn’t know why Ben would ever possibly choose to go further with her; out of—what? Kindness? Pity? Some trippy altruistic mind-meld, like when her sisters would invite her along to the movies, impelled by their mother, forced to go see Air Bud or Harriet the Spy instead of what they actually wanted to watch, Fight Club or The Ice Storm?
“You don’t have to—like, flatter me,” she said abruptly.
His face fell. “What? I’m not.”
What’s it like to have such pretty sisters? Her heartbeat quickened. “I know I’m not, like, a catch.” She forced a smile, reached for her drink.
Ben didn’t say anything, and when she looked up at him he was staring into his beer.
“What?” she said.
“Why do you talk about yourself like that?”
She blinked. She was truly not one of those people who said self-deprecating things as a means of fishing for compliments. She took another swallow of her drink. How could she articulate this to him, this handsome, inexplicable person sitting beside her drinking a Leinenkugel’s? How could she convey to him that she knew how embarrassing it would be if she were pursuing him romantically and that knowing was half the battle, that neither of them had to feel embarrassed, that they could keep on with their platonic union without his ever having to worry that she would one day awkwardly break the rules and try to kiss him? She just wanted him to know that she got it. She wanted to stay friends and keep talking about Jeff Tweedy and Twin Peaks and taking bets about when Justin Bieber would have an emotional breakdown.
“I just don’t want you to think that I have, like, some kind of agenda,” she said finally. “I’m Eleanor Roosevelt, and I’m actually super-stoked for my spinstress hovel in the woods, because I bet there’ll be a bunch of deer and stuff, and I’ve always wanted to live in a tree stump.”
Again, he was quiet, and he took a long sip of his beer. “How do you know I don’t have an agenda?” he asked, and she chewed the inside of her cheek, disappointed that her preemptive strike had not, in fact, deterred them from this excruciating topic.
“Because. God, Ben. You’re normal. You’re, like, a regular person.”
“I guess you’ve got me figured out,” he said after a minute, looking up at her sharply. He didn’t sound like himself, first because he wasn’t calling her Sorenson and second because he sounded mad; he had never been mad at her before. “First of all,” he continued, and his voice still had a distinct, uncomfortable edge to it. “I’m not sure if normal is supposed to be some kind of insult, but you’re as normal as the rest of us, and I don’t know why or when you decided that you weren’t. You’re not weird, and you’re not Eleanor Roosevelt. And it’s really hard for me to listen to you characterize me as basically some douchebag who’s looking for a catch, and it’s hard for me to listen to you say that you’re not a catch, and this entire exchange is making me feel like maybe we don’t actually know each other as well as I thought we did.” He met her eyes once, quickly. “Which really fucking sucks for me because I’ve wanted to ask you out for like a month, like on an actual date to an actual place like an actual adult person, not just fucking around at a bar like every other dumbass around here. I’ve wanted to feel like this is—something.”
A large percentage of her was trying to determine whether or not this was actually happening—and, if it was, how she was supposed to respond. Her first instinct was, she was almost positive, joy, complete elation and delight, but in the passenger seat sat the usual skepticism, the constant, hyperactive court reporter who transcribed her interactions with a healthy dose of cynicism: BEN EXPRESSES HIS AFFECTION FOR GRACE BECAUSE HE FEELS SORRY ABOUT THE FACT THAT SHE’S A MALADJUSTED ADULT CHILD WITH A JUST-OKAY ASS AND A SHAMEFULLY FAULTY GRASP ON NORMAL SEXUAL MATURATION.
“You don’t have to…” she started to say without thinking, and she immediately stopped herself but Ben was already standing up, pulling out his wallet, dropping a couple of twenties onto the bar. He was apparently paying for her drinks while simultaneously walking out on her.
“Thanks for letting me off the fucking hook.” Who knew boys could be so dramatic? Who knew that Ben would wear it so well? “I’m going to go. Do you have money for a cab?”
It occurred to her, then, that she didn’t. Much to her father’s chagrin, she never carried cash on her. “I’ll go to an ATM. It’s fine.” She mentally slapped herself—she should have just lied—because Ben pulled out his wallet again. “No, Ben, it’s—”
But the look on his face silenced her, and she reached out and took the money. She watched him go, and suddenly the bartender was at her elbow again.
“You doing okay?” he asked. He was always there; she’d seen him a million times before but tonight was the first time she stopped to take stock of him, youngish, and Irish, and ruggedly not-quite-handsome, sort of big and outdoorsy, like a bear.
“Not—especially.”
“That your boyfriend?”
“No.” She sipped
her drink, hated herself. “Not really.”
* * *
—
So elusive, her girls, Marilyn thought, preparing a little bowl of Christmas leftovers for Loomis, who was waiting eagerly at her feet. Gracie hadn’t answered the phone when she called. Violet had responded to her novel-length Merry Christmas text—featuring an account of the day’s activities at the house on Fair Oaks, a photo of Loomis eating a rawhide candy cane, and a reminder of the time that Wendy and Violet had gotten matching roller skates from Richard and had spent the entire holiday gliding around the basement to the histrionic soundtrack from Ice Castles—with a cold and abstruse xo. The day had been quiet; they’d done low-key present time and pancakes with Jonah in the morning, and then she and David and Loomis had taken a snowy walk through Thatcher Woods, and then Wendy and Liza had arrived for dinner, and it felt like any other day of the week, utterly devoid of the infectious delight that came from celebrating holidays with children. Her kids weren’t kids anymore. She stooped to kiss the dog’s impatient head.
“What are you doing?”
She turned to see Liza in the doorway. She’d reached the point in her pregnancy at which her size was almost preposterous. Marilyn thought of Grace again, her most belated baby, who’d been technically, physiologically ready to be born, full-term, for ten days before she actually arrived. She was, still, that sweet, dawdling girl, unwilling to enter the world.
“Nothing.” She set the bowl before Loomis. “Sweetie, why are you even still upright?”
“I’m not an invalid. If anyone should understand how irritating it is to have people telling you to sit down every eight seconds, it’s you, Mom. How the fuck did you do this four times?”
“Darling,” she said, chastising. “Bodily discomfort took a backseat to the livelihood of a bunch of little kids, in my case. I’m sorry I’m micromanaging. I worry about you.”
“You talk to Gracie?” Liza asked, sitting down, after all.
The Most Fun We Ever Had Page 38
