by Wendy Wunder
I’ve seen her like this before.
“Try this on. I need to see how long to make the sleeve.”
“Zoe, what is going on?”
“I started a new collection,” she says quickly. Her thoughts are fast. Too fast for her mouth to keep up with them, so she stops trying to talk, waves her hand around, and points to the rack against the side wall, which is bowed in the center from the weight of what’s hanging on it.
The collection relies heavily on some old black three-quarter-sleeve concert T-shirts with cutouts that are laced together with ropes of silver chain. These are paired with tailored velvet leggings the bright-white colors of lightning: white-orange, white-blue, white-lilac. They have intricate, jagged seams and are matched with fitted feminine velvet jackets whose sleeves taper at the wrists and end in fingerless gloves. The tulle is for petticoats beneath full, cloud-colored skirts. A charcoal evening dress seems to smoke and swirl around its subject like a tornado, the collar orbiting around the mannequin’s head in a theatrical hood.
“It’s good,” I tell her.
“I know.” She finishes her seam and rips the thread from the bobbin with her teeth. “I made a new installment for Noah too. It’s about hunger-slash-desire. He has to know how to access it. He has to know what he wants. It’s good to want things. We should know what we want, but society takes away our hunger. At least it does for girls. It takes away our hunger. Our desire. And tells us to be quiet and skinny and supportive. That’s the way it goes. If-you-can-be-skinny-and-quiet-and-supportive-you-may-even-get-on-TV-while-you-watch-from-the-sidelines-as-your-husband-wins-a-golf-tournament.”
She says all of this without taking a breath, zips the final skirt around the waist of her headless dress form. Her eyes are a little off-kilter and glassy. One seems a tiny bit bigger than the other, and her pupils are strangely dilated. Crazy eyes. Her fingers are in constant motion.
“Maybe you should brush your hair,” I say in a complete role reversal. “Maybe we should talk about last night. It seems like something happened. Zo. It seems like you’re working something out. What happened?” I hug her, trying to compress her body and slow it down. I look down, and I notice she’s not wearing any socks at all.
“It’s not going to work anymore, Banana,” Zoe says, reading my mind. She wiggles her bare toes at me.
“Then we’ll think of something else,” I say.
ELATION
It’s Sunday. I called over, and Zoe’s mom Susan said that she was asleep. It is a deep, worrisome kind of sleep, though. No one is able to rouse her at all. Noah has been climbing on top of her, tickling her nose with a feather, spraying her with a water bottle, to no avail. Susan is keeping close tabs on her. I decide to let her sleep.
I should set up the hot dog cart and try to make some sales, but I do need to think, and I do that best at the lake. So I go to the beach and sit on the bench at the end of the parking lot peninsula. I turn my head toward the sun, close my eyes, and listen to the lake as it laps and licks at the rocks.
I relax, and I try to replay the moment that Danny Spinelli bolted for the stairs at Ethan’s.
Did he really say, “Call me”? Or was I dreaming? I replay it over and over again. “Crap,” he said. “Gotta go.” He was blushing. His legs could have taken the entire staircase in one leap, but he floated up two at a time. He was afraid to get caught with me. And he fled. Taking the steps two at a time, and he said . . . Call me.
Or maybe he didn’t.
Maybe I wanted him to say that.
I force myself to think about something else. Honestly, in a million years, even if he had said, “Call me,” would I do it? No. So it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Zoe is in bed. And I can’t get her to talk about it. That should be my focus.
I try to think of a new cognitive behavioral therapy device (this is what the shrinks call it), like the socks, that will jog her into controlling her moods.
“I didn’t think anyone ever sat on this bench,” says a voice.
I turn around and jump when I see Danny Spinelli leaning on a piling, his arms crossed in front of him, studying me. His infinite legs are crossed too. I wonder how he can find pants that fit him so well.
“That is one stealthy ice cream truck. I didn’t even hear you,” I manage to say, hoping my voice sounds breathy and ethereal but knowing it is actually nervous and pinched and nasally. “Um. I come here to think,” I tell him.
“What are you thinking about?” He sits down next to me, and we look out at the lake.
“Cognitive behavioral therapy. You?” I actually flip my hair. I wish Zoe could have seen it.
“Whoa. That’s deep. Now I don’t want to say what I was thinking about.”
“What?” I insist.
“Never mind,” he says, blushing. “You should never ask a guy what he’s thinking. Ninety percent of the time he’s thinking of unbuttoning your blouse. The other ten percent is just blank. Or filled with the occasional thoughts about food. But only when we’re already starving and cranky.”
“You’re not giving your gender much credit. I mean, you did get a lot done while you had us enslaved, barefoot, and pregnant for most of history. You had to have had a few other ideas.”
“Nope. That’s pretty much it. It’s pretty motivating.” He nervous-yawns and stretches, wrapping his legs over top of each other and landing his elbow on the seat back. Shy, graceful, and catlike. It’s beautiful, the way he moves.
“I should wear more buttons,” I say with a sigh.
Danny stares down at me, smiling. “What?” he asks me, poking me in the rib.
“Nothing,” I say. I will never wash this rib again. “You kissed me once,” I say.
“I remember.”
“You do?”
“Of course.”
I don’t think he remembers it the way I remember it, though. For me it was a perfect moment.
Somehow, a big group of us ended up at the beach. Boys and girls together. It was a day like today. Crisp but not cold. Sweatshirt weather. Danny’s sweatshirt was red.
A game of Nerf football started, and we ran around like a whirling rainbow of sweatshirts and Converse sneakers, and I caught the ball. Danny, his hands too big for him even then, grabbed me and pulled me onto the autumn’s dying grass. He looked at me, and without hesitation pressed his wet, red lips against mine. It was so instantaneous and unpremeditated. Time stopped. I felt relaxed. Contented. At home in myself. And for a microsecond of eternity, it was like we were in the Garden of Eden.
We had that kiss. And after that, I began to understand the story of Adam and Eve. The falling from grace. It was as if Danny’s impossibly red lips were the apple, and after I kissed them I was never again comfortable inside my own body. Something clamped around my stomach and my throat. I was suddenly ashamed and constantly aware of the fact that I was being watched. I no longer just did things; I wondered what I looked like while I was doing them.
He smiles, shakes his head as if he were remembering it too and needed to jolt himself back into the present. “Can I buy you an ice cream?” he asks. “I know a place.” He points to the spot in the parking lot where he has left the truck.
“Do you have a Toasted Almond?” I say.
“Whoa, that’s old school. And with all the nut allergies these days, I can’t risk it. I have SpongeBob, or Spider-Man with gumball eyes, or if you want something with actual milk and sugar in it, you’ll have to go for an ice cream sandwich.”
“Perfect. I enjoy ice cream sandwiches.”
Danny gestures in a gentlemanly way for me to walk in front of him. I’m shivering from having dipped my toes into the lake or from suddenly being on a “date” with Danny Spinelli. I shiver again and almost flutter a little like Noah would. Danny wraps his hoodie around my shoulders.
When we get to his truck, he jumps inside and
digs around in his deep coolers for an ice cream sandwich. I never realized that there were so many muscles on top of one’s shoulder. They bulge through the soft cotton of his T-shirt as he pushes around his product in search of my old-school ice cream sandwich.
“Okay. Here we go.” He hands it to me, and I unwrap it.
“Want some?” I ask.
“No,” he says, leaning his forearms on the edge of the service window.
I’m proud of myself for taking a small girly bite and not wielding my tongue around the edges, which is what I would normally do. A speedboat buzzes like an annoying insect across the lake.
“Remember the story of the guy . . .”
“Yeah,” I say. I don’t need him to finish it. There was the story about the guy who was decapitated during the annual speedboat regatta. He flipped his boat at 200 mph, fell out, got run over by another boat, and was left with his head bobbing and floating in the water like a cantaloupe. There was also the one about the guy who fell through the ice in his snowmobile and the one about the girl who wandered home alone from the carnival and got murdered in the woods. And the legend of the hopefully vegetarian sea monster that had the head of a moose and the wrinkled gray body of an elephant. Small-town, lake-country lore designed to keep kids terrified and on land and close to home.
He unwraps a Bomb Pop, and we walk together along the beach letting the edge of the water slip beneath our sneakers.
He smiles at me, feeling the same elation I am, I can tell. I can tell because the feeling hangs between us like a rope. When you share a feeling with someone it takes on matter and weight. Even if you’re the only ones who can sense it, it becomes a tangible thing with properties like shape and weight and heat.
“You like it here,” Danny says. “On the lake.”
“I guess. It feels like part of my body,” I say. “It’s hard to explain. Leaving would feel like an amputation in a way.”
“But it would be cutting off the part that hurts,” Danny says, throwing a rock into the water.
“Exactly,” I say. He gets me. “But I would still miss it.”
“Want to see my favorite place to think?”
“Sure,” I say.
The old playground by the beach has not been updated since the seventies. It’s still made of metal and cement, so kids can still scrape their precious knees and get a few stitches, which is good for them, I think. Sometimes being poor is good. You learn coping skills.
“This is it,” says Danny, and he points at an enormous scratchy cement tube some construction workers thought would make a good play structure along with some old tires and splintery railroad ties. It’s tagged with a red spray-paint heart. He crawls in and sits down, puts his feet up on one side of the tube, and bends his legs into his chest. “I don’t really fit as well as I used to. Come on in,” he says.
I hate myself for doing it, but I Seventeen magazinerize this moment:
When a guy asks you to join him inside an enormous cement pipe with no one else around, do you: A. Crawl in next to him, ignoring the fact that he has a girlfriend. B. Tell him you have to go. C. Call the police.
I’ve been waiting for this moment for six years, so I choose A. His enormous feet are straddling a window-like hole in the cement that perfectly frames the pale disc of the sun. My athletic left quadriceps is grazing his, and I think I might spontaneously combust. Luckily it’s cool inside the pipe, so I feel the blush on my face turn from fuchsia to carnation pink.
“See how it blocks out the outside world?”
It is silent. The constant chatter of the universe is finally quiet for once. I take a deep breath and remember what that feels like. Breath. It seems like I’ve been holding mine for a long time.
Danny places his hand on the knee of my brown corduroys and traces my patella in wide concentric orbits. I put my hand on top of his, and he flips it over, using that magic index finger to follow the lines inside my palm.
“You read palms?” I ask him.
“Indeed,” he says. He brings my palm closer to his face and shakes his head, tsking.
“What?” I ask.
“You are a hard worker,” he says, tracing a line at the inside of my wrist.
Like sands through an hourglass, my insides are draining through my core.
“That’s what I like about you,” he continues. “You try. Not everyone is like that.” His hand finds the waistband of my sweatshirt and moves up beneath it. I am not wearing a bra.
“That’s not my palm,” I tell him.
“Don’t worry, it’s part of the process,” he says.
“Really,” I say. “I’m suspicious.”
He leans his long torso over and kisses me then, pressing his lips softly against mine, taking gentle nip-like kisses until I open my mouth.
I am immediately in love with him. As if touching tongues was the final step in some ancient magic ritual.
I try to think of Zoe stuck in bed, her hair matted against her face, or my dad drinking at the end of the bar, or Rebecca Forman’s bad teeth. I think of her posse of cheerleader friends who wouldn’t be afraid to beat the crap out of me. That does it, and I break away, remembering to suck in a little like Zoe taught me. The sign of an expert kisser.
“I have to go,” I tell him.
“Okay,” he says, and I love him even more for not pressing the issue. His lips are wet and red and glossy. His cheeks are flushed. And he looks at me, shaking his head like he doesn’t know what to do with me. He likes me, I think, but I push it out of my mind.
We crawl out of the pipe, and walk back to my bench. A pair of mallards flies low and furiously over the surface of the lake.
“They mate for life, you know,” Danny says.
“Because their lives are short,” I quip.
“You’re a glass-is-half-empty kind of girl, aren’t you?”
“No, not really. I just like surprises, so I keep my expectations low.”
He seems to think for a moment and then says, “The difference is subtle.”
LUST
Zoeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, I text.
But she doesn’t respond.
She won’t pick up her phone. It’s killing me.
There is such a thing as a shy extrovert. People think extroverts are all loud and mouthy, like Rebecca Forman, but that’s not true. The definitions of extrovert and introvert have to do with how you process the world and from where you draw your energy. I’m shy, but I process my world by talking about it. Which makes me an extrovert. But I don’t talk about it with just anyone. I have to talk about it with Zoe.
Zoeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, I text again.
My retelling of events to Zoe is what grounds them, shapes them, makes them real. If I can’t tell Zoe about kissing Danny Spinelli, it didn’t happen.
I call her mom to find out what’s going on.
“Susan,” I say.
“Hannah.”
“What’s going on?”
“Well.”
“Well, what?”
“Well. She promised to let me watch her for a week. If she doesn’t get better, we’re going to the hospital.”
“So it’s like an S-word watch?” We never say the word suicide out loud.
“No. We’re not there yet.”
“So it’s like a what?”
“Just a watch. I’m watching her.” Susan had quit smoking years ago, but I hear her exhale what can only be cigarette smoke from the side of her mouth, then I hear some tamp-tamping into what must be an ashtray. I trust Zoe’s mom because she’s a nurse and she sees so much humanity on a daily basis. She usually understands people, especially people in crisis, and knows what to do about it.
“Should I come over?”
“Why don’t we let her rest?”
“Okay . . .”
“Don’t think I forgot about the fact that you two took Noah to a party. I’m going to visit that at a more appropriate time.”
“Okay,” I say, and I hang up.
For that entire week Zoe is on lockdown and doesn’t even go to school. I text her, but she doesn’t answer.
So for an entire week, I worry about her. And without her counsel, I have to pretend I didn’t kiss Danny Spinelli. I avoid him, sneaking through the halls and eating my lunch in the library, because I don’t know what to say to him.
For an entire week, I sneak alone to the attic at Sussex Country Day. (The secretary notices me, but she turns a blind eye.) She and my mom used to play bridge. I learn the conditional past tense in Spanish and how to find the volume of a curve when you rotate it around its axis. Two things I will never use. I watch Ethan Drysdale stare catatonically at the whiteboard. He doesn’t remove his sunglasses. Which would never fly in public school. And he doodles in his notebook, what seem to be large storm clouds and crooked flashes of lightning.
I go alone to sell the hot dogs, reading in my chaise lounge as the whoosh of the highway relaxes me and covers me in gray dust.
I go alone to my father-who-is-back-on-the-wagon’s AA meetings, and I whisper the Serenity Prayer along with the drunks.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.
I try to be supportive, wearing my EASY DOES IT, ONE DAY AT A TIME T-shirts and making random Crown Royal sweeps through his cupboards and filling his refrigerator with fresh vegetables and grapefruit juice (a natural detoxifier).
I learn to accept my fate. Accept the things I cannot change. For a whole week, my life is pretty calm, the way I like it. Huddled among the soft weeping of old men in the dark basements of churches.
And then on the seventh day, I go to Zoe’s house. It’s Friday morning.
