by Alix Ohlin
They were watching a TV show about a psychic who solved crimes. Vanessa liked anything about psychics; she was drawn to extrasensory information, any hint that the dead cared what the living were up to. She was lying on her stomach with her face too close to the screen; her mother would have scolded her for it. Barry rubbed her back with his knuckles.
The psychic accused a Botoxed woman in a short dress of having killed her husband. The woman burst into tears, though her expression remained the same.
“Do you think you’ll go back to Ghana?” Barry said suddenly.
Vanessa blew some hair from her eyes. “That’s a random question.”
“I was just thinking. I’ve never been that far away from home. My mom is afraid of planes so we never flew anywhere, and now there’s no money.”
She made a vague sound in her throat. She wanted to hear what the psychic was saying; she was pressing onward, showing the villainous woman no mercy, expositing the crime and its motives.
“I think it’s cool you went,” he said.
She wished he would stop talking, and he did. He was sensitive to her silences, one of his many good qualities. She didn’t want to think about travel or departure, or planes, or her own imminent trip to college. Ghana had been an exercise in failure. She’d found the program herself, by googling “volunteer in Africa,” and the website had shown adorable children in polo shirts and khaki shorts being read to by teenagers like her, in rooms with brightly painted walls. Everyone looked clean and happy. Of course she’d known the reality would diverge from this advertisement. But what divergence! The orphanage was dusty and falling down, and there were no brightly colored walls with murals of fish and flowers. What she hadn’t expected was how much she hated it there, how tedious the work was, how hard it was to entertain a sickly two-year-old. She experienced a visceral revulsion to the small bodies, their sores and runny noses and tears. The other volunteers handled it better; two of them were hard-core Christians and kept saying they were so blessed to help God’s little angels. Vanessa rolled her eyes at this and one of them caught her doing it and that eliminated the possibility of friendship. The third volunteer was a guy from Minnesota who never spoke to adults but came alive around the kids, tickling them, picking them up and holding them upside down, shaking them as if to see what would come out. The children ran to him with their arms out, begging to be upended. When they saw Vanessa, they stopped and stared distrustfully, picking their noses. Sometimes she made faces at them, not nice or funny faces but crazy ones, scary-on-purpose ones, and they backed away, knowing with their unerring kid instinct that she was an adult to steer clear of.
In turn, Vanessa began to do anything to avoid spending time with them; she mopped bathrooms and built a latrine and peeled vegetables in the kitchen for hours until her hands were red and cracked. Still, she’d stuck it out, the whole seven months of the program, because she didn’t want to admit how badly it had gone wrong.
She went to Ghana for her mother, who had always talked about privilege and myopia and the cultural self-absorption of the American electorate and who used to make Vanessa spend every Thanksgiving at the soup kitchen and every Earth Day picking up trash along the Arroyo Seco Trail. Vanessa had thought that going to Africa would get her mother’s attention. But after an initial congratulatory email her mother’s focus returned to her new life, the one that had so fully absorbed her. Vanessa didn’t interest her anymore. And that was just as true in Ghana as it had been at home; she was motherless everywhere.
Barry kissed her neck. “Lie on top of me,” she said.
“I’ll crush you.”
“That’s what I want,” she said.
He spread himself on top of her body, his hands on hers, his cheek against her ear. His legs on her legs. Her lungs contracted, shuddered with effort. She took short, shallow breaths and waited gratefully for the world to go black.
6
Graham and Kelsey were tasting cakes. They’d agreed on a small wedding, a simple ceremony on the beach. Kelsey had suggested eloping—she thought it would be funny if they got married at city hall and then went through the drive-thru at In-N-Out in a white dress and tux—but Graham was convinced that ultimately she’d look back on it with regret. He didn’t want to begin their life together with no sense of occasion. He believed in the need for symbols and trappings, the consecration of moments. Otherwise life was a mess of emotions, fraught and terrible, lacking form to contain them.
Kelsey said, “If it means I get to taste a lot of cake, I’m okay with it.”
She joked around about most things to do with the wedding but he sometimes caught her staring at the ring with a look of shocked and tender gratitude. He was sure she cared about all of it more than she allowed herself to show. At the bakery, he fed her vanilla bourbon cake with white chocolate ganache, holding the fork to her mouth, then kissing the crumbs away. The caterer averted her eyes with a politeness that seemed prudish. Anger rose in him, sharp and furious; he thought, You don’t know how I’ve been starved.
Kelsey asked for the carrot cake—which was absurd, who would have carrot cake at a wedding, but she could choose whatever she wanted—and the chocolate, and the coconut. She was enjoying herself. The caterer had brought her a piece of paper and a pen to make notes on but she wasn’t writing anything down.
“Don’t you have any other kinds I can try?” she said.
The caterer was Graham’s age, tastefully made up, her hair dyed purple-red like a turning bruise. She got up and returned to their table with two more samples. Kelsey exclaimed happily and set to eating. Sometimes he was amazed at the amount of food she could put away.
“Well,” the caterer said, smiling tightly. “Any thoughts?”
“Let’s have all of them,” Kelsey said to Graham. “A cake bar.”
“That sounds festive,” the caterer said. “Might I suggest—”
“Or cupcakes,” Kelsey went on. “With sprinkles.” She gripped Graham’s leg under the table, then moved her hand up his thigh. He sat rigid.
“Cupcakes are often popular as a second option. In addition to a cake for you to cut, of course.”
Kelsey was nodding, smiling at the caterer. “His first wife left him,” she said sweetly. “I’m the second option.”
“Kelsey,” he said.
The caterer opened and then closed her mouth. Kelsey said, “Babe, let’s go.”
In the car she put her legs up on the dashboard, her toes tapping the windshield.
“You’re not—”
“Forget it.” She waved her hand. “I just wanted to shut her up. Oh man, I ate too much cake.”
Later, in bed, he was seized with his own appetite. He rolled on top of her and kissed her until she was ready, then slid inside. Her hands trailed across his back, so lightly he could hardly feel them, then gripped his shoulders as she shuddered. He was sure she enjoyed herself with him but she never seemed to lose control entirely; she stayed inside her body, somehow just beyond his reach. Afterward, doubt sat heavy on his chest. Maybe to her it was all a staged game, a sequence of skits. “Am I being played?” he said.
“Don’t say played.”
“Well, am I, whatever?”
She nestled against him, in the crook of his arm, fitting herself there. Tracey’s voice was mute, refusing to guide him. He could not be abandoned to this absence. Kelsey told him not to worry; she was already falling asleep, which she did easily, every night; it was her most childlike attribute. Once he’d asked her what she’d dreamed about and she said she didn’t know. “When I wake up, I never remember anything,” she said. How he envied her. How glad he was to have her near.
7
Vanessa was leaving. In a week she’d be on the East Coast, a place she’d seen only once, on a brief college tour over a long weekend with her dad. She had a double off
Washington Square with a girl named Megan from Philadelphia; they’d already shared pictures on Instagram and agreed on a color scheme for the room. Megan was going to major in art and she took aesthetics seriously. Vanessa hadn’t known what to answer when Megan asked about her own major. But when she texted Unclear, Megan hadn’t seemed fazed. Excellent. You’re opening yourself to the world, she wrote back.
At home Vanessa repeated this to herself as she sorted and packed her things. She had to fit her whole life into what she could take on the plane. In Ghana, she’d grown wildly possessive of the few items she’d brought with her from home, her woven bracelet and track team T-shirt and notebook, things that when she got back to LA seemed shabby and dumb. The experience had taught her that attachment was arbitrary and separate from value. Or so she thought. When she was with Barry, attachment didn’t feel arbitrary at all. As their time together dwindled to weeks then days, they began to talk about the things they’d worked so hard, over the preceding summer, to ignore. Barry spoke about his father, who kept trying to make amends with misplaced gestures: tickets to Dodgers games and hamburger dinners, gifts to mollify a seven-year-old. “I can forgive him for taking the money, but not for lying to me,” he said.
“Really?” Vanessa said.
“No. Fuck him for taking the money.”
Vanessa told him how she tried to stay out of the house as much as possible but she couldn’t not see Kelsey’s sandals by the front door, her drink on a coaster in the family room, her dad and Kelsey together, a constantly airing TV show that she couldn’t turn off. She could tell that her dad was happy with Kelsey; he cooked meals and asked questions and made jokes like he used to do when she was a kid. If their interactions were pleasant but awkward, they’d always been sort of pleasant but awkward, so it was only a question of degree. They were both watching the calendar, counting down the time to her departure.
She’d come back here. She’d come for Christmas and maybe spring break at first, and over the summers she’d find internships or research opportunities. She was good at applying for things. She’d go abroad junior year, and then grad school in something, anything. She wouldn’t live here again.
It was what happened to everybody.
But when she thought about leaving Barry, panic squeezed her breath. On her last night, they drove around listening to music, not talking. Her father had wanted her to stay home and have dinner with him and Kelsey, but she’d said no; understanding that he no longer had any prerogative, he didn’t argue. Vanessa was full of tears that somehow refused to fall; her head felt heavy with the quantity unshed.
Barry wasn’t saying much, but he held her hand as he drove, curling her fingers up then uncurling them, counting them as if each time fearing a different result. She knew he felt like yet another thing was being taken away from him. But he would never ask her not to go. Like her, he’d been raised not to make demands.
“I want you to come with me,” she said suddenly.
He didn’t answer.
“I’m serious,” she said. “Transfer. There are community colleges in New York.”
“Where would I live?”
“I’ll get an apartment. You’ll live with me.”
“Vanessa.”
“We can do this,” she insisted. Her voice was part whisper, part wail. “We can.”
She waited for him to say the practical things: about money, geography, youth. To articulate the internalized thoughts of their parents. Instead, he clenched her fingers into a fist inside his fist, which hurt but at the same time was not unpleasant, and said, “Okay. Yes. Okay.”
There would be a plan; they would be together. In a state of exhilarated relief they drove back to Vanessa’s. Barry walked her up the steps and they lingered under the porch light, kissing now, sadness waylaid.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” he said in her ear.
“You’ve decided to become a woman.”
“I am my own twin.”
“You killed a man in Mexico.”
“I want to marry you.”
She stood circled in his arms. The future swept her like a fever.
8
In the bedroom, Kelsey heard voices. Graham was out with a client; he had dinners most nights, and he’d come home clutching his stomach, freaked out about having eaten too much, requiring Zantac and reassurance. She’d finally called her mother and told her she was getting married.
Her mother said, “You marry an older man, you’ll wind up being his nurse.”
“I don’t mind being his nurse,” Kelsey said.
“You don’t mind now,” her mother said.
Kelsey hung up. She liked making Graham happy. And she liked living in this house; she liked watching TV on the king-size bed while waiting for her almost-husband to come home. She had solved the riddle of her future, and she was pleased.
When she heard the voices outside—she had the bedroom window open, though when Graham’s car pulled up in the driveway she would hurriedly close it, knowing that he’d strip off his jacket and say, first thing, “Is the AC not working? It’s hot in here”—she knew it was Vanessa and Barry saying goodbye. Unable to stop herself, she went to the kitchen, closer to the porch, so she could see and hear them better.
Her friend stood in the porch light, wearing jeans and a purple T-shirt she and Kelsey had bought together at the mall before she left for Ghana. It had a spaceship on it, Kelsey remembered, which was funny because Vanessa hated anything to do with sci-fi or fantasy. She wouldn’t see horror movies either. She wanted to be tethered to the real. The spaceship had an evil-looking alien inside it who was dropping bombs on a group of stick figures—mom, dad, two little kids, all cowering and running away. Underneath it said nobody cares about your stick figure family. The T-shirt was so stupid that it made them laugh and laugh. They’d spent most of their time together looking for things to feel superior to.
Barry moved into the light and put his arms around Vanessa’s waist. He whispered something in her ear. Kelsey leaned closer, trying to hear. But they’d stopped talking. Vanessa reached her arms around her boyfriend’s neck and rested her head against his shoulder. They looked like kids at a middle-school dance, frozen at the end of a slow song. Then she raised her head, smiled at him sweetly, and they kissed. Kelsey held her breath, and it seemed to take all the strength she had to leave the kitchen, granting them their privacy. She walked quietly down the hall and into the bedroom, and although she closed the window and got into bed, pulling the covers over her head, still she could see them and hear them, rapt in the midst of a moment she’d never have.
The Woman I Knew
I first read Mulvaney’s book, the woman i knew, when I was thirteen years old, an impressionable age. Although I should say that I was impressionable at all ages, especially where books were concerned. I wanted books to press themselves upon my body and mind, to change me in every way a person could be changed. I don’t know where I got this idea, as I came from a home almost devoid of books. My parents were from a small town in New Hampshire, neither of them with much money, and my mother worked as a waitress to support my father as he went through medical school. He became an ER doctor who tended with meticulous, coiled energy to people like those he’d grown up with—people in exigent circumstances, with stark, immediate needs. He bore down on the practicality of things. Novels, if he’d thought about them at all, would have seemed frivolous to him—and to my mother, too. In our home books were instruments: there was a Merck manual, my mother’s Joy of Cooking, and not much else.
Mulvaney’s book was what my mother called smut, though it had won the National Book Award for fiction the year I was born. I found it in the fifty-cent box at the local library sale. I was drawn first of all to its cover, which showed an ink drawing of a woman’s body, her naked back arched in a parabola. The thick black lines o
f her shape communicated confidence, as if the artist were someone who understood exactly what he saw. At this time in my life, early adolescence, I was obsessed with the idea of an invisible, unknown spectator—that there was a person watching me, a man, older, who saw something special in me, who was my particular and desired audience. In retrospect I’m very lucky that this attitude didn’t get me in more trouble than it did. I read Mulvaney’s book over and over; it was how I learned about orgasms and blow jobs; it was also how I learned about language, because Mulvaney was an exuberant stylist, whose long and rhythmic and vibrant sentences cataclysmed into paragraphs, and even now, years after the last time I read the book, there are passages I can recite from memory.
* * *
—
My parents sent me off to state school in Vermont with the hope that my bookishness might transform into something vocational over the course of my degree. There was talk of my being a teacher or going into advertising. My two brothers were well on their way to practical careers; one was going to be a doctor like our father, and the other had declined college and gone to work at the car dealership, where he sold sedans and trucks with cheery, voluble aggression. He already knew he wanted to be rich. I didn’t know what I wanted; to me four years seemed so long that there was no point even visualizing what might happen at the end of it. I took my classes, worked at the campus dining hall, and forgot entirely that once I graduated, my student loans would come due and there would be a reckoning.
My roommate was from Southern California, and once the spectacular Vermont fall gave way to cold, dark winter, she fell victim to seasonal affective disorder. She spent each day huddled under her duvet in our room, refusing to go to class, and then she went home in December, swearing never to return. I was thrilled by the idea of my own room; even though I still went down to the hall to the bathroom and showers, this was more privacy than I’d had at home. My family, who thought closed doors were weird, were forever barging into rooms. My brothers came out of the bathroom bragging about what they’d accomplished there; my parents walked around half-dressed and mid-change; they believed that nobody should be precious about the body, which was just another physical fact of the world. So I was disappointed when I returned to campus in January to learn that I’d been assigned a new roommate, also from California, named Iris Dolores. The fact that she had two first names—two old lady first names—seemed a bad sign.
