Catherine buried the blade of her sword into the crumbling flesh of a tree stump. It was a collector’s item, ordered from a catalog that also sold pewter dragons and hooded sweatshirts with built-in headphones. Her brother, Camden, had thrown a tantrum when he was told that he would not be allowed to bring it with him to college, and Catherine had decided to punish him—for being a baby—by using the replica to hack through the woods behind their house.
The girls walked the length of the chain-link fence and eyed the big house, a disorderly Queen Anne with a turret that showed its hollowness by placement of windows on either side. There was something about its structure that lacked all the usual indicators of either vacancy or occupancy; it was impossible to tell if someone was watching. The woman laughed at them when they pushed their faces against the fence.
“Hi, little piggies,” she said, which embarrassed the girls. It may have been pride that led Catherine to start climbing. Whatever the reason, once she was over, Emi had to follow. Though Emi was taller, it was more difficult for her, and, catching the heel strap of her sandal near the top, she might have been stuck hanging cartoonishly upside down had the leather not snapped and let her fall. This pleased the woman in the swing and she kicked her legs in an attempt to get herself going. She laughed again and Emi saw the inside of her mouth, where the teeth sprawled. It reminded her of the time her uncle plowed their driveway and accidentally drove over the picket fence, bending and splintering the posts in the snow. To make matters worse, it was clear by the woman’s papery scalp that she had been sitting in the sun for too long. Her lipstick had gathered in a clump on her bottom lip.
“Boss!” she sang again, swinging her legs. “C’m’ere, boy!” The girls looked around in alarm, but there was no one in the yard. A hanging plant on the back porch gave the impression of a man standing in the shadows. It would catch them off guard another three times before they left.
Their little expedition had not been just about the sword. The girls were also trying to hold on to something that they had shared when they were younger: an unusual thirst for hard work. When they were eleven, they had surprised Catherine’s father by building a crude boat from a wooden box and three inner tubes, then paddling it across Parsons Lake. They used snow shovels for oars. Catherine’s father had driven them to the lake in his truck, all the while perfecting his “leave it to the professionals” speech for when the time came to haul them out of the water by their pigtails. But they had made it. Half an hour later, they were falling against the opposite shore, hearts like melons, the whole sky rippling around the edge. A man sitting on the dock with his feet in the water threw his head to laugh at them, and they could see the brown pits where he was missing teeth. And when they drove away, their slightly less-intact creation rattling behind them in the bed, Catherine’s father sat so silently behind the wheel that the girls felt they must have done something wrong.
Emi and Catherine’s projects continued, but they lost energy over the years. By now, they were fifteen and sad about this, but they could not quite grasp that it was not lack of imagination or desire that held them back, but a new and insidious kind of vanity that went far beyond pinching stomach rolls and comparing profiles. Without knowing, they were both cultivating an inner voice that kept a record of every time they were wrong and that whispered to them of small but ruinous embarrassments.
Still, they tried. They had packed Catherine’s borrowed camera as well as the contents of her mother’s makeup drawer and taken to the woods. The idea was to take suggestive photographs of each other with maybe an artistically placed vine binding their wrists, or across their mouths. They had practiced their “Help me—don’t help me” eyes in the mirror. But there were no such vines and, as it turned out, once you stopped walking all the mosquitoes that had been content just to stalk dove in for the kill. So they trudged forth, following the clean swish of Catherine’s stolen sword.
It was the summer that Emi went on birth control without her mother’s permission. Catherine had driven Emi to the hospital in her father’s truck. She would wait, she told Emi, in the hospital’s lobby, where there was a large fish tank. Looking into fish tanks, Catherine said, was like watching the opening credits of a lost memory, something that was impossible to retrieve but was achingly close. Sometimes Catherine said beautiful things, and she kept a long list of sentences under her bed that she would one day put into a story, when the time was right, she said.
Emi had sat at the edge of the examining table that day, tugging at the bottom of her paper gown, while the nurse laid two gleaming speculums across a towel.
“This,” said the nurse, cradling the smallest in her hand, “this is what we call our ‘virgin’ model.” She sealed her lips in anticipated satisfaction. “But this is what we will be using for you.” The nurse held up the second, considerably larger speculum and clapped the jaws, as if planning an act of violence.
The woman was right. Emi was no longer a virgin. It didn’t matter that Neil had stopped halfway through the act, left her lying on his bed while he bent over, pale ass to the ceiling, to rummage through a backpack on the floor. His head and shoulders had reappeared and he showed her the digital camera, pressed the button to prove to her that there was no memory chip. He set it on the nightstand on top of a stack of textbooks. The uncovered lens looked on with its empty brain.
“I just like to pretend that someone is watching,” he had said and smiled at the camera.
The doctor entered the examining room, picked up a clipboard, set it down. Emi noticed his broad shoulders, his eyes, heavy with knowing. He told Emi to place her heels at the edge of the table, then skootch—he used the word skootch—her bottom toward his light.
“Keep going, keep going,” he coaxed, until she felt as though she would fall, and then he said, “I won’t let you fall.” She must have mistaken this last bit for omnipotence, for when the gleam of the speculum made contact, she opened her whole self to him.
The girls had given up on their photography project. It was too bad. They had hoped to use the photos to shock their chemistry teacher, Mr. Albus, who taught black-and-white photography as a short block, whom Catherine had admitted to finding attractive because he once arrived late to class looking as though he had been crying. Catherine, Emi knew, had lost her virginity last fall, to Ricky Bruggs Jr. in a hunting tree stand, which poor Catherine kept mistakenly calling a tree house.
“Sex smells awful” had been the first thing Catherine related over the phone to Emi, only to find out later that the camouflaged sleeping bag that had covered the floor of the stand had been sprayed accidentally with deer urine. To Emi it didn’t seem fitting that Catherine—fish tank gazing Catherine—would fool around with Ricky Bruggs Jr., but, according to Catherine, he understood death with a wisdom beyond his years.
Once Catherine put away the camera and took up the sword again, Emi tried to describe to her how the eye of Neil’s camera had made her go cold, how she had felt as though she were hovering an inch above herself—a sickening, convulsive feeling, like water made to jump with the force of sound waves. The word copulation had come to mind, a frigid piece of vocabulary owned by scholars, not girls like Emi, who, unlike her friend, kept no beautiful lists beneath her bed.
But Catherine only swung her sword, caught it on an evergreen sapling. “So you guys made a sex tape,” she said, and she wiggled the blade free. That was when they had heard the voice.
“Boss,” it said. “Come home!”
The woman on the swing was smiling, like a child on a carousel horse, pleased, it seemed, to have an audience. Catherine took one of the tubes of lipstick that they had stolen from her mother—a dark color that the girls had decided shouldn’t be worn by a woman who says, “Oh, biscuits!” while tripping down a flight of stairs—and offered it to her.
“Stop—” Emi stooped as she spoke, feeling the openness of the yard, the looming pressure of the old house. She could hear the vacant melody of chimes from the back porc
h, the cicadas in the forest. She studied the fenced yard with its patches of dried grass, a barrel planter in the corner, where someone had attempted a circle of marigolds. The mulch was worn away beneath the swing, where the woman had gotten off to take the lipstick. She applied it, her eyes closed in concentration.
“Got any smokes in there?” Catherine reached into the woman’s moose pocket. She pulled out an ID card and read it aloud: “Maxie Mites. Height: sixty-two inches. Weight: one hundred sixty-five. Eye color: hazel.” Then she tucked it back into the pocket.
“Maxie Mites. Maxie might what?”
The woman opened her eyes and carefully screwed the lipstick back into the tube. She laughed.
“Maxie—” she managed, breathlessly, then stopped laughing. “Maxie bites.” She looked from Catherine to Emi, then back to Catherine, and clapped her jaw, which unnerved the girls enough to climb back over the fence.
In the weeks that followed, they were increasingly troubled by the possibility that they were now trespassers, the kind of girls who would have to carry out the tragic existence of rebels. When it came to Maxie, they agreed on the term challenged, because they had no idea who to consult on these matters. Furthermore, they found that it released them from the word disabled, which was too permanent a sentence for girls for whom everything still fluctuated: their waistlines, the pores of their skin, the names that they wrote and then crossed out on the inside of their binders. They stargazed with the smugness of those gifted with imagination. They would rather die than fall in love with a celebrity. And, despite themselves, they worried about Maxie, that her play yard behind the old Victorian was actually a prison, her new shade of lipstick a waxy curse.
Their minds were set at ease, weeks later, when they spotted Maxie buying a candy bar at a gas station in town. She was alone, wearing an orange reflective vest. The girls had been sharing a milk shake at a greasy table in the back by the magazine racks—Catherine taking only one sip for Emi’s two because she had decided then and there that she was on a diet. Neither wanted to admit how astonished they were at the sight of Maxie, and so they widened their eyes and gaped, masking surprise with surprise.
Maxie made her way down Main Street, eating her candy bar. Every few minutes, she would stop chewing and give a short whistle.
“C’m’ere, boy!” she called, and she stooped to look behind a garbage can. “Boss!” she yelled. “Boss!” There were others on the street, locals, used to this behavior, doing their best to keep an ignorant pace. The girls followed, keeping their distance, pretending to look with interest into shop windows. Emi sipped the remainder of the milk shake and feared, momentarily, that their friendship was in jeopardy, that once they ran out of windows to peer into—fixing their hair, feeling embarrassed by a mannequin for no good reason—that they would come to the end of the street and have nothing left to talk about.
Later, Emi would decide that the end of their friendship had not happened then, but soon after, the day that she had screamed suddenly in chemistry class. Her scream had been so disruptive that the class was dismissed early, and Catherine was pulled out of English by the high school’s vice principal. Catherine, Emi imagined, would have been told to gather her books, led down empty hallways to an unknown source of drama, wondering, Is a family member ill, has Ricky Bruggs Jr. been killed in a hunting accident? He had once written her a poem about tracking a wounded deer through the woods. He had rhymed doe with snow and thirty below, but then also plow, which Catherine said made it a sophisticated poem. Catherine would have thought of the poem as she walked, guided by that stern presence of the vice principal, a man who defied aging behind a large black moustache. She would have recited the poem under her breath, imagining herself the fated deer, would have hoped, secretly, that Mr. Albus would see her, recognize her as that wounded creature imagined by Ricky Bruggs Jr. but understood, truly, by grown men.
Mr. Albus was there, at the end of the hallway, behind his desk, his chalkboard scrawled halfway with the squashed spiders of chemical compounds. Emi was there too, sitting alone in the back row. She watched Catherine’s eyes travel across the empty desks, watched her disappointment turn flat, almost dangerous, as it became clear to her that no one was dead, that it was just her best friend, who, in nursery school, once burst into tears over the word Cray-Pas.
“Emi has had a hard morning,” the vice principal said from the doorway, and then he left it up to his moustache to convey the understatement.
What Emi had had was an out-of-body experience, though no one else would call it that, not even the psychiatrist that her parents were quick to hire at the urging of a guidance counselor. The psychiatrist had liked the term dissociation, which was one of those words that flew out of the gates too fast, like socioeconomic.
The first fourteen minutes of chemistry class had passed routinely. Emi, always the good student, had looked over her homework before delivering it to the wire basket on Mr. Albus’s desk. Her teacher had given her his pained smile, as if to say, Would it hurt to be wrong, once in your life?
The lesson had followed, with Mr. Albus turning his back to them to write on the chalkboard, the class already too bored to find enjoyment in the chalk dust on his elbows. And then he had turned around again, to make one of his points, the kind that could not be put to rest until he had made eye contact with every one of his students.
That was when it began: a queasiness, a doubling of self, very similar to what Emi had experienced in Neil’s bedroom. She had not floated, nor had she looked down upon herself, as near-death survivors have claimed, but instead she found that her perspective had shifted, so that Mr. Albus’s face was suddenly disproportionately large and very near, even though he remained at the head of the classroom. She saw his face as an insect might, or a baby peering out a fifth-story window during the Macy’s parade—confronted by giants, frightfully convex. The eyeballs bulged, like whole moons, rolling in fleshy cauldrons. A mouth opened and she saw that frothing orifice as nothing more than a mechanism for swallowing up worlds. She had thought of the word behemoth, watched as it erased all neurological alliances with the words person, man, friend. She had screamed, of course, and clinging to her desk, so as not to be sucked into the void, had accused her teacher, in front of the whole tenth-grade chemistry class, of trying to eat her.
The psychiatrist prescribed her an antipsychotic, which nauseated her in the mornings, which led her mother to ask her if they needed to talk, to which Emi, taken off guard, had replied: “Yes, mother, I have copulated.” This led to sobbing—on Emi’s part—at the sad relief of confession, the loneliness of finding herself on the other side of her mother’s trust, and, of course, that same embarrassment that she had always suffered at the ownership of words that she believed were not hers to own. She was still haunted by Cray-Pas.
There was much speculation as to why it had happened. Catherine, for one, had discussed it with Ricky Bruggs Jr., who revealed that sometimes he, too, left his body, to see through the eyes of the animals he hunted. He had seen the world dim around the edges, he said, then plunge into darkness. But you didn’t see Ricky Bruggs Jr. running to a shrink.
Then there was Emi’s mother, who pattered around outside her daughter’s door, day and night, waiting for Emi to emerge and confess that she had been on drugs the whole time.
Neil, naturally, believed that his erection had been the instigator.
“Childhood trauma,” said the psychiatrist. He wanted to know if Emi could recall any past occurrences—anything at all that stood out, loose threads that might mar the tapestry of her childhood. Yes, she had told him. There had been one thing.
Emi’s parents, like all parents, she had assumed, had a private bookshelf in their bedroom for miscellany—that dirty comic book that would have been thrown out had it not been a gift from her father’s close friend—and then a public bookshelf for guests to admire, its contents mundanely bound in reverence to the entryway. Emi was often drawn to this second bookshelf, as though it w
ere a puzzle; surely, if she looked long enough, she would discover something interesting, something grown-up, or at least anatomical. What she had found was a Birds of North America guide, pages filled with brown females and white throats. Names like nuthatch, nightjar, titmouse; compounds that found safety in odd partnership. And then she had come to the egrets, the ibises, declared them the princesses of the birds, because they were slender and picked fish out of the water in a dance that she knew to be highly selective. She wanted to see these birds in real life, and she let her parents know. They weren’t the type of parents to take this news as an opportunity to visit a conservancy or go for a hike, but as permission to yell, pointing out of car windows—“Look! Ah, you missed it.”
But one day she hadn’t missed it.
“A great blue heron!” her mother had cried, practically screaming. It flew up from the marsh, vertically at first, wings open, as if it would shoot off into the clouds. A skinny angel with an appointment. It wasn’t really blue, but gray and white with some black markings. How could Emi explain to her mother the horror, this buildup of expectation—of blueness, of greatness! It wasn’t that she was disappointed at the sight of the bird, but that for an instant the gears of recognition jammed and the thing outside her car window, this long figure of ascension, revealed itself to be not a heron—not even a bird—but the specter of life behind feathers. It stretched out of the murk, like a twiggy soul leaving the body, and Emi had shut her eyes, fists in her sockets, so that she wouldn’t have to see anymore.
The psychiatrist did not see how this was relevant.
In the wake of Emi’s confession to her mother, she was no longer allowed to visit Neil at his house. They spent the remainder of the warm days walking, to the gas station for milk shakes, through the graveyard, or on that one glass-strewn path to the river, where it wasn’t the village of tarps and clotheslines or the still-smoldering cigarette in the mud that frightened them, but the sight of human feces, wrapped loosely in newspaper. Neil suggested that they go to the park, maybe watch the boys crash their BMX bikes on the track. This did not seem appealing to Emi, but Neil insisted.
Prepare Her Page 6
