“Oh, yeah, okay. Well, can I walk with you?” Her eyes narrowed. “I just want to see the neighborhood,” I explained. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be back out here again.” And then, because I could see she still wasn’t sure—because I could tell she was puzzled by my zooming back into her life, and who could blame her?—I added, “I like it here. It reminds me of Swarthmore. It reminds me of home.”
Her face opened. Swarthmore whizzed up before us, a snow globe of tiny houses and yellow streetlamps. “Yeah,” she sighed. “I love living here,” and when I fell into step beside her, she didn’t object.
We headed up a graceful side street lined with more stately mansions, each one brightly painted, with wraparound porches and wild gardens and mature trees. Beech leaves crunched underfoot, a dry, summery sound. “It’s funny,” I said as we walked. “I thought Swarthmore sucked when I was growing up, but now I kind of miss it.”
A shy, private smile played on her lips. “Yeah. We were actually really lucky to grow up there.”
This admission filled me with squirmy, hot joy, as if she had said she was lucky to have grown up with me. “And now you get to live in an exact replica of your childhood town!” I gestured grandly at the streets. “I mean, almost literally, right? I saw them shooting something when I was walking over.”
“They’re always filming. It actually gets to be a little annoying.” But she didn’t sound annoyed. There was a lightness in her voice I hadn’t heard before.
“It’s so meta, don’t you think? They’re replicating your childhood all around you.”
She laughed, a sound like cool water. “Yeah, totally.”
When we reached her building, she paused, and the same desperate drowning feeling overcame me. We’d been profoundly out of touch—I wasn’t on social media, and we’d cut ties long before email and cell phones—but now the ocean of fate had dumped her onto my shore, and I couldn’t bear for the waves to swallow her again. “So this is your place,” I said, craning my neck. A proper apartment building, six stories and made from brick, it was elaborately cut to maximize windows and balconies.
“Yep.” She looked, too, as if seeing it for the first time. “Umm,” she said, perhaps perplexed that I showed no sign of leaving. “Do you want to come up?”
“Sure.” I smiled. “I’d love to.”
Her foyer was dark and smelled of dried sweat. Following her lead, I kicked off my sandals and walked into a giant room of arrested chaos: a dining table cluttered with magazines and books, a drying rack of blouses and bras, and a small gray cat sleeping in an Amazon box.
I handed her the bags I had been carrying for her, and sank into the daybed, a veritable ship done up in red velvet with embroidered pillows of turquoise and tangerine. “Do you want coffee? Tea?” she called from the kitchen. The crisper door rattled on its track, and something clunked.
“No, I’m okay. Thanks.” I didn’t want to push my luck.
The furniture was motley but plentiful: overstuffed bergères, an epic dining-room table, a stray armchair done up in pink roses. Paperback novels and old New Yorkers littered the table, along with a sewing machine, a woodworking clamp, and a glass jar of colored pencils. On the mantel, a stack of old Paris Reviews, a tiny lamp with beaded fringe, and a faded photograph of a Merce Cunningham dancer mid-plié.
“It’s a mess,” she said when she returned, handing me a glass of water.
“No, I love it.” I meant it. “It’s so warm.”
She curled like a cat on the couch beside me. I wanted to say more about the jars of sequins and buttons, the careless heaps of books, the opened Moleskines marked with coffee rings, but I was distracted. She looked at me so expectantly that I knew I had to speak.
“Hi.”
She laughed. “I can’t believe you hunted me down at the farmers’ market.” I startled, but she was smiling, kidding. “Twice in one week, after so many years,” she added softly.
“Yeah.” I coughed. “Where’s Ian?”
“What do you mean, where’s Ian?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe you guys lived together.”
She laughed and blushed at the same time. She was pretty when she blushed. “Oh, no, we really just started dating. It’s all new.” She looked at me shyly. “You guys were together…on this island?”
“Well, Long Island. But yeah. It was like this residency thing.”
“Ian said you worked really hard. He said you were the best one there.”
Now I laughed and flushed. “That’s not true,” I declared. “I didn’t work that hard.” But I was pleased. Ian was like a sore tooth I kept pressing with my tongue.
Another silence. “Well. Do you want the tour?”
When we stood, the little gray cat rose and trotted with us down the hall, like a dog. Briefly I glimpsed her bedroom: a swell of calico comforter, more books and journals, half a dozen glasses shimmering in the morning light.
At the end of the very short hall, there was a closed door like a door in a dream. “Here,” she said, and flung it wide to reveal a room narrow and white, with a desk of heavy wood pushed beneath the window.
The room was immaculate. Pristine, studious, radiant. With it, the rest of the apartment suddenly made sense, chaos and creation anchored by clean simplicity. I loved it. Except: “What’s that?” I pointed at a giant wooden contraption.
“It’s a loom.” She laughed. “I know. It’s definitely the most ridiculous thing I own. It’s like the beast in the corner.” She scooped up her gray cat and kissed the top of its head. “My poor little beast. Totally neglected.”
“What do you mean? You don’t use it?”
She dropped the cat. “Not really. Not enough.”
“It’s so cool.” I stepped toward it tentatively, as if it might snap to life.
“Yeah, I’m lucky to have it. And I have all these great ideas for projects, but when I get home at night”—she flung her hand out and expelled an exasperated puff—“I’m so tired I just sit on the couch.”
“Oh. Well, you should work on your projects.”
I realized as I said it how harsh I sounded. But these were familiar roles for us: I had always been the one to ringlead our school projects, to say we should just do it, that it was easy, no big deal.
She laughed.
“No, I’m serious. You should feed the beast. No, you know what you should do? You should move this whole thing into the living room”—a bark of incredulous laughter—“so you have to look at it, and then it’ll annoy you so much you’ll start using it. Really.”
“And then what would I do with this room?”
“Let me live in it.”
As soon as I said it I knew it was a step too far. We both blinked.
Quickly I added, “I’ll help you move the loom.” Theatrically I rolled up my sleeves. “Really. Let’s do it right now. There’s space in the living room.”
“Ha-ha. It’s a disaster out there right now.”
“Oh, come on. There’s space.”
We were both grinning. I was ready for action; I wanted to skate over how sad it made me to think she had some big expensive piece of equipment she didn’t even use. When we had been friends, she was always doing arts and crafts.
As we strolled back, I saw the living room differently. Maybe it wasn’t humming with life. Maybe all the jars of sequins and woodworking clamps were only the detritus of stalled projects. Was there dust on the sewing machine? I had a sudden instinct to check.
As if reading my mind, Lacie said, “Yeah. Lots of good intentions, but I’ve got no follow-through these days.”
“Hmm.”
“But look. I’m happy for you. You’re making art. You wrote a novel.”
“Well, I’m writing a novel. Don’t get too excited.”
“I’ve always admired your
dedication.”
That was so unexpected that I really had to examine the carpet. When she was a teenager she never would have said something so heartfelt.
“No, really. In high school? You wrote that play on your own. How many kids would do something like that?”
“You made those amazing costumes.” Embarrassed for both of us, I blushed.
“Oh,” she waved me off, but I could tell she was pleased. “They were all right.”
“No, they made the play! They completely made it.”
And there we were, on the lip of the past. I almost asked. I almost said the name Leo Kupersky. But there was the cutting board with a golden boule, the cat sleeping on the chair, the mint growing in a clay pot. In me, a small motor of need. Rather than starting out in some anonymous, cramped box, I could have this. I could have Lacie. I wanted it; I wanted this neighborhood, and this house, and her.
Was it possible? I snuck a glance at her. She was taking a sip of water and avoiding my eye. The trick, I thought, would be to help her forget what I had done. And so I changed the subject. I stopped us from diving deep. I decided: not today.
Ms. Keener, who wore her breasts around her waist like an incomplete inner tube, had decided it was too cold for outdoor sports, so she cued up the tape deck and divided us into groups of eight.
We were spindly ten-year-olds, fidgety squirrels. Jesse Grogan made farting noises while Leo Kupersky pretended to barf. Lacie, the new girl, was in my square. Solemn, tiny, all dark eye and bony shoulder, she rarely spoke, yet wore to school every day a pair of shorts, an audacity for which she was mercilessly teased.
In gym that day we learned the promenade and the do-si-do. Leo slapped a stray basketball her way and called her stupid: “You think it’s summertime?” he cried. A pass and a turn to our corners later, I felt her hand quivering in mine. “You should wear pants,” I told her. “Then he’ll leave you alone.” It was the first time we had spoken, but the drama of her refusal to wear warm clothes, coupled with her odd silence, had captivated me. I felt we had been talking for weeks.
“Why?” she spat back, her little white face flushing red. “This isn’t cold. Boston’s cold.”
At recess she paced the tennis courts alone. That day I joined her. She seemed neither grateful nor surprised. Immediately we fell into somber conversation. It made sense, walking beside her. I was lonely, too, though young enough that I didn’t know it.
At last Ms. Keener decided: we must perform for our parents. A professional caller was hired, and we endured extra rehearsals, the reluctant boys threatened with revoked recess. On the chosen night my mother brushed my hair and talked me into a skirt.
The gym from afar was lit like a birthday cake. Inside, the square of raised wood gleamed. Parents, jackets crumpled on their laps, watched from the bleachers as we circled and swiveled, bowed and curtsied, even the most rebellious of us momentarily thrilled to step into this courtly vision.
In my chest that night there beat a melancholic sense of my own importance. I was Lacie’s only friend in her new home. For weeks we had been drifting together, and now, under the motionless basketball nets, she looked so vulnerable, with her bright paisley shorts and thin calves, that I knew I must protect her. But she must not know that I was protecting her; she must not remember that she was the new girl. I trembled with feeling; the other kids twirled, and the caller called, but all I knew was the trust in her hand, the delicacy required to lead her through the dance.
* * *
—
Into that easy rhythm of my house–your house–my house we fell, tromping between homes with sleeping bags beneath our arms. Her family had two kids, mine had three; her house had one floor, mine had two, but these were just facts, the way the dates of the Civil War were facts, necessary but unremarkable. For me, at least, it was so; looking back, I’m less sure about Lacie. Once she said, “Your house is bigger than mine,” and I said, “You guys get more pizza.”
Her mom waitressed at the Inglenook until it burnt down one gloriously cold winter night. We all heard the sirens and ran, and our parents let us; our parents came too. Yellow flames jumped from the turret, and the firemen, burdened with tanks, forged through pale brown smoke. With a pop the windows burst and glass rained down, shards tinkling as they fell. Lacie and I stood, side by side, not moving, not talking, memorizing. I thought, This is happening to me, and right there is the church where I was a flower girl, and next to the church is Borough Hall, where the mayor gave me a ribbon one Fourth of July.
Afterward, when I walked down that street, I would think of the fire and the ribbon and the day I was the flower girl; I would hear little ghost whispers from my past childish life. Then Lacie would call, or jump the curb with her bike; then Lacie would suggest we make some prank calls, or spy on the neighbor. Though she was silent at school, at home she was reckless. She wanted to do everything.
Pain interested us. We were constantly perfecting our swagger. Once I dared Lacie to let a bee sting her. In a field of clover we watched a honeybee sink in its pointy stinger. Lacie gasped but did not cry. The next day she was not in school. I ran home after the last bell and called her: her arm and then her face had swelled up like a balloon, and she had spent the night in the hospital. “Awesome,” I said; “awesome,” she agreed.
For revenge we captured dozens of bees in glass jars and froze them to death. Then we zapped them back to life in the microwave. Mostly they exploded but one, left forgotten on the countertop, stirred after an hour. Gently, he flapped his cellophane wings.
Excited, we turned to proper science. We classified rocks and collected coins. We investigated whether her dog preferred Cheetos or Cheez-Its and experimented on earthworms. Lacie shrieked, “Keep chopping!” when she saw how they still wriggled.
One afternoon we microwaved CDs, looking for the blue sparks Lacie swore would fly. A thin burnt smell filled the air, and the smoke alarm shrilled. Her mother threw us from the house. “Do you think we could get lost in Swarthmore?” Lacie asked. We rode bikes to Baltimore Pike and the college woods and the condos, to Chester and Media and back behind the community pool, but no luck: everywhere we went, we knew where we were.
Boys, we were obsessed with boys. We wanted to smash them, destroy them, drive them mad; we wanted to bottle them and freeze them like the bees, but we settled for the soccer field. I loved them all: Leo Kupersky, who ran fast and light like a baby deer; Jesse Grogan, with his dirty blond mop; Mike Sibley, one of the Sibley boys, that legendary band of brothers who were all thick-necked, ram-headed, and put on earth to play ball. By sixth grade they were following us home, smacking Lacie and sneaking kisses. I smacked them back with my trombone case. I was nobody to them, just her protector, just an obstacle, just the girl who talked too much in class.
“I hate boys,” I said. “Me too,” Lacie agreed, and when my mom said, “Lacie’s going to break hearts,” I ignored it. I didn’t know we had hearts to break.
The time came for us to write a novel; I told her, gravely, that we must know our characters better than we knew ourselves, and so we sat in her parents’ parked Volkswagen and made lists of all we knew, not writing but preparing to write, filling entire notebooks with our heroine’s likes and dislikes, the names of her aunts and uncles, the ages of her cousins, the grades on her spelling tests. We drew a map of her hometown. We decided that she had a sister, and so we wrote down the name of the sister and what she smelled like and what she sounded like, and we stipulated who got to ride in the front seat when and where the family went on vacation. All afternoon in the hot car we worked, passing the notebook back and forth, saying, “No, no, what if she…” and “I think we should say that…” and “We don’t know enough yet, we’re not ready.” We wrote until we had created a model of the world as complete as the world we were in, but it was so beautiful, this world, all that we had mapped and all that we knew, that we could not
bring ourselves to begin. Leaving the lines under “Chapter One” blank, we climbed from the car and rode bikes down to the creek, where there were baby salamanders under the rocks.
As befitting an entity called Ivy Prep, our training was both self-important and useless, presented as exhaustive even as it degenerated into an empty exercise of form. None of us—there were seven new tutors circled around that gray kidney-shaped conference table—wanted to complete the twenty officially released SATs, as instructed by the agenda, and after a few days, when we had only reviewed the first section of the first test, it was clear we didn’t need to, though our instructor, a beefy, middle-aged man who had once written screenplays, continued to make frequent reference to all the officially released tests as listed in Appendix A of your agenda. Appendix A, like all the pages of the agenda, was embossed with the crimson-and-gold insignia of Ivy Prep. That first morning, as the screenwriter talked, I rubbed the stamp until its ersatz gold stuck to my sweaty finger.
Along with refreshers in algebra and geometry, the training offered a tour of the ways tutoring could torpedo your artistic ambitions. There was the opera singer who taught graphing calculators, the inevitable actor glossing reading passages, and the writer who explained prepositions. They were all “no longer young”: their hair was thinning, their faces etched, and their waists thick. They were, Griffin had told us, the very best that Ivy Prep had found—no one knew graphing calculators better than this woman who had once sung at Lincoln Center. At breaks I asked, and learned: No, they did not compose music anymore, they hadn’t had time for auditions, they had a kid, would I like to see a picture?
On the last day of training, Griffin himself came into the conference room. His sleeves were rolled up; he spoke to us kindly, as a father might. The rules were simple and, as we would agree, the epitome of fair. Compensation was determined as followed: The difference between our students’ beginning SAT scores and ending ones was divided by the number of hours we had spent tutoring them; this provided a numeric representation of our effectiveness as a tutor. When we reached a certain number—confidential, of course—our rate would be raised. We would start at a hundred dollars an hour, but if we were good there was practically no limit to the money we could earn.
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You Page 3
