The week of Sasha’s graduation they have one last class
Zoe has been learning a Ukrainian folk song for the past month, practicing by singing it to the dog and her stuffed animals and whenever they’re in the car and while she rides her bike. The song is about a girl who keeps promising to go on different dates with a boy but always stands him up. It starts on Monday when she says she’ll pick periwinkles with him but doesn’t end up coming. On Tuesday she’s supposed to kiss him forty times but doesn’t end up coming.
Ти казала в понедiлок
Пiдем разом по барвiнок
Я прийшов, тебе нема
Пiдманула, пiдвела.
Ти казала у вiвторок
Поцiлуєш разiв сорок
Я прийшов, тебе нема,
Пiдманула, пiдвела.
The song goes all week, but Zoe can only remember those first two days and the chorus, which reiterates the extent to which the singer is tragically disappointed by his beloved’s lack of interest.
Due to the fact that for them, all boys are Sasha, neither Amy nor Zoe is able to fathom how a girl could not want to go on a date with a boy. It may be because of this, thinks Amy, that her sister can’t remember the rest of the song.
Meanwhile Amy has prepared a ten-page paper on her plans for the coming years. The assignment was actually to use the conditional to talk about what she would do if she won a million rubles, but Amy wants to show Sasha that she is not a child, and that instead of winning a million rubles she plans to earn some money and travel the world in the future tense, rather than the conditional mood. She has learned the names in Russian of nearly every country, along with the names of exotic fruits, animals that live in the jungle, and because she happens on a book about architecture at the library one day, she also includes in her essay some famous architects whose names she transliterates into Cyrillic whom she may commission to build her a house on one of the continents (whose names she also knows).
As always, she waits in the living room while Zoe has her lesson. While Zoe attempts to sing, Amy pretends to read. Then when it’s her turn she presents him with her paper and looms over Zoe until Zoe finishes pretending to sort her papers and stands up. Then Amy gives her a look that makes her leave the room.
Sasha goes over Amy’s paper as he always goes over Amy’s papers, attentively, fondly, like a person playing a cello in the middle of a symphony. Amy can’t always tell if he thinks she is impressive or if he thinks she is a freak. She is aware that she works harder for these Russian classes than what is expected. In her mind as he reads she traces his premature laugh lines, the circles under his eyes, thinks what it would be like to brush his face at the cheekbone with the backs of the lower thirds of the fingers of her right hand. She repeats the gesture over and over in her mind as he turns the page.
It is all going as it always goes, as she wants it to go, when all of a sudden an unthinkable occurs: Sasha starts crying. He doesn’t even cover his face. He just cries, heaving like water beginning to boil, tears splashing down all over her paper, diluting the ink, undoing letter by letter.
Amy thinks she may be having a heart attack. Her left arm goes numb. Her heart is racing. She will die on the thick brown carpet of the dining room before anyone even remotely thinks of calling an ambulance.
Then as though possessed by some unfamiliar spirit she rises and takes a single step towards him like she’s gliding across a rink. She brushes the tip of her left middle finger against the back of his left hand. And in a flash he has seized her and is clutching her the same way the girls have clutched at their dolls and their octopi in their most harrowing moments of despair. Amy is on Sasha’s lap, her left shoulder and her neck wet against his flooded face. He holds her so tightly she can’t move, can barely even breathe, so she is spared the uncertainty of how to rub his back or pet him on the head. He sobs. Amy breathes him in, his briny musk, and what must be alcohol, and what must be cigarettes.
They hear the screen door get stretched back and then voices with the entrance of the key into the lock of the inside door. Sasha casts her off him and races through the kitchen to the bathroom. Amy hears the door lock. Their parents are in the middle of some conversation when they come in, don’t notice Amy’s wet shirt or face. Sasha reemerges a few minutes later seeming fine. But Amy doesn’t really look at him. He leaves. She goes into the bathroom and takes the wet sea-green hand towel and brings it up to her face. She takes a deep breath.
Or that they have three hearts that pump blood made up of copper, rather than iron?
Amy does not mention to Zoe what has happened between Sasha and her
There are now too many secrets to keep track. This one she would like to tell her, to relieve herself of this burden, this complete incomprehension and this complicated fear, but something new has begun to be erected between them, something like a wall, and on Zoe’s side it must stay safe, and on Amy’s side it can’t. Amy is responsible for repelling her sister as her sister tries to scale this wall. No matter how many boosts and footholds Zoe receives from their mother, who would rather there be more disasters.
Which is why when she lies to their parents about why she doesn’t want to go to his commencement she lies to Zoe, too. She’s almost even convinced herself she has a migraine. She spends hours in bed with the shutters drawn, lying on her stomach with the quilt kicked off, the octopus’s eight arms draped around her shoulders. Striving for quiet.
It is their mom who breaks the news to them, one by one, Amy first
It is July 26, 1997. Their dad is in Minnesota filling in for a friend at the Summer School of the Rochester Community and Technical College. It is strange to think that their father has so many friends, none of whom they really know. Amy and Zoe have often wondered where they came from.
She tells her. Amy says oh the way she’d say it to someone she didn’t know, like she means to say okay but forgot to finish.
Then their mother tries to give her a hug, but now Amy recoils, eyes bulging, blood cold. Their mother tries again. Amy pushes her away, hard as she can. Their mother staggers back, and for one split second, she doesn’t seem to know what she should do. Amy stares and backs away.
At first, before she blames herself, she blames their mother. Then Zoe walks into the room, and Amy and their mother turn to her, and the three of them just stand there, in silence, and then Amy runs out.
Amy runs out the front door and down the steps of the porch. She runs down the sidewalk and then down the driveway. She gets to the street, and she keeps running. She runs and runs and runs all the way down New Haven until it ends. She is all out of breath now and has a stitch in her side, but she can’t stop. She turns and does a dragging lope down a couple more blocks till she gets to Whiteside Park. She sits down in a swing.
She looks straight ahead of her and then slips out, sliding down onto the woodchips, with the swing sideways against the backs of her knees. She lets it go. She brings her knees to her chest.
Now it hits her, and she begins to apologize into the air, over and over: I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. Because Amy is the one who did this. Amy is so lucky she brings others all the bad luck in the world. Amy has infected everything she’s truly loved. Amy has poisoned them, and she should have known, and she should have done something. She should have done something. She should have done something.
How can it be too late?
As evening falls she tries to go home, but she has lost her sense of direction, and she drags herself down blocks that could be anywhere for what seems like it must be hours, until finally somehow she finds their long, squat house, the clumsy globs of gray between the rough red brick, and entering unnoticed she makes her way back to their bedroom and goes to sleep beneath their bed.
When we were kids I used to wish we could be octopuses, so we would not need words.
And we wouldn’t ever
even think about disasters, since we would just be textures, and copper, and water.
And light.
To get away from Zoe, Amy transfers all her operations to underneath the pear tree in between the front yard and the backyard
Amy still expects for Sasha to come back. Their mom is a liar who tries to hurt them on purpose. Amy does Russian homework all day long as though invoking him. The sun beats down and brings her freckles out, an endless succession of freckles, impossible to count. The wind picks up. Amy completes every remaining task in the second-year textbook and then starts over.
She sees Zoe at mealtimes but doesn’t speak to her. She takes big bites of her food and then goes and spits it out into the toilet. She is on a hunger strike. She will not eat until Sasha comes back. At 3:28 on the following Thursday Sasha will knock on their door as though nothing has changed.
Amy and Zoe sleep stiffly, like strangers forced by some natural disaster to share a pallet. The catfish sucks at the small stones at the bottom of the tank while the little machine pumps oxygen into the water. The angelfish are too old now to lay eggs. They always ate them anyway.
Most of Amy’s sleeping she does outside, under the tree, during the day. She dreams of Sasha. She dreams that he tosses her up into the air and catches her, and then they spin around and around and around and around, faster and faster and faster and faster, and then they hold hands, chests heaving, and skate back to the center of the rink to take their bow. Then she wakes up and screams inside and tries to fall back asleep.
Sometimes she claws at the concrete. Sometimes all her muscles tense up so tight she gets terrified because what if she can never move again. She listens to the cars go by and tests out her fingers and wraps her hand around her throat.
Remember how whenever we’d play Ring around the Rosie Mom would remind us that the lyrics were about the plague? But we pretended not to hear her because Ring around the Rosie was the best, and all you had to do was all fall down.
Because Sasha shot himself in the mouth rather than at the temple, they are able to do an open-casket funeral
Amy and Zoe scour their closet for something black to wear. They ask their dad to take them to the mall so many times he finally relents. Amy and Zoe scour the sale racks for something black to wear. They purchase dresses. Both of them are sure that Sasha will come back. That this event is an event he’ll be attending, just like them. Thus they both want to look pretty.
People mill around on the sidewalk outside the parlor. Some of the college girls smoke cigarettes. Amy glances at Zoe, but Zoe keeps her eyes on the little bows at the toes of her shoes. Their mother walks ahead of them, puffed up, pushing through the crowd.
Inside some of the college girls are crying. Questions form in Amy’s brain, horror and adrenaline surging through her body. Amy and Zoe know next to nothing about Sasha’s life. Where is his family? Who are all these girls?
Then their mom works a space for them in the line to go up to the coffin. Amy goes first. She places a tidy pink envelope on his stomach just above his hands. Then she stands there and looks down at his face. His eyes are closed instead of sparkling. His hair is long, and she nearly reaches down to brush it off his forehead. Gripped by vertigo, she staggers back and hears, right before she faints, the sound of all things being torn in half, a resounding pulling apart that drowns out everything else.
Amy spends the next few days in bed as though she has a fever. Her sister ferries trays of food she doesn’t touch back and forth between the kitchen and their room. She begins to lay down little notes beneath the juice glass. When Zoe isn’t looking, Amy takes them and unfolds them. They are written in a shaky hand, using Russian Cyrillic or the symbols of the earlier alphabets that Amy invented. Zoe has recovered the marks without the meanings.
But even though the notes seem to say nothing, she begins to take sips of the juice, until finally one night in the middle of the night she gets up and rifles desperate through the fridge until she finds the big piece of leftover chocolate cake and eats it all standing up at the counter with a soup spoon. Then she feels sick, throws up and goes back to bed. Zoe is still sleeping.
On August 10, 1997, they move Amy into her dorm
The girls live on the second floor; the four of them trudge up the stairs carting boxes and garbage bags of things.
Zoe weeps. Zoe won’t stop weeping. Amy would like to hug her, but she can’t. She just stands there and waits for them to leave, and then when they do, she steps up to the window and watches them as they get smaller, trailing her fingers down the glass pane.
Remember how we’d all fall down and then do angels?
Amy lives in the Honors House, in the middle of fraternity row
The Honors House is a designated residence for participants in the Honors Program, otherwise known as nerds. But it used to be a fraternity house, too. It was converted in 1995 after one of the new recruits was accidentally killed during hazing.
There are not that many nerds at the University of Tulsa, so unlike in most of the campus residences, everyone has their own room. Amy has never had her own room before. She takes her few things out of their bags and boxes and lines them up on top of the extra bed. She is about to hide her valuables at the bottom of what is to become her sock drawer when she realizes: she doesn’t have to anymore.
So she leaves her things lined up on the extra bed and makes her own bed and lies down. She does some snow angels, and then she lies still and thinks of Sasha in his coffin and begins to cry, silently, a skill she has perfected. She thinks of her sister’s sadness, which redoubles her own. She cries until she falls asleep, wishing she had never wished for her own room.
The next day Amy meets people
Everyone is friendly, and no one seems so much older, and she doesn’t tell them she’s fifteen. But she doesn’t tell them anything other than her name. When in the evening they all gather in the living room for their first official house meeting, Amy hangs back, standing in the doorway, watching them like you’d watch TV. They go around and introduce themselves officially and say their major; Amy’s whole body is shaking by the time it gets to her. She almost whispers Amy, undeclared, and then it’s even worse because she knows no one’s heard her, and yet she also knows she has done the best she possibly can. She has the inexplicable sensation that trying again may kill her, although she couldn’t say how. But just then the boy standing closest to her repeats her information on her behalf. She had not noticed him there, in the shadows. Now she looks at him with wet and thankful eyes. He goes on and says his name is Tommy and that he is doing a dual major in philosophy and German.
After the introductions, once everyone turns their attention to something else, Amy starts to take baby steps backwards until she reaches the base of the stairs. Quietly she creeps back up to her room holding tight on to the rail. Without Zoe Amy has no idea how she should be when she’s with people, and no balance.
(This is a picture of several disasters: a shipwreck at the bottom of what was once the Aral Sea, a harbinger of the emergency upon us.)
But the next day Amy becomes famous
She wakes up knowing she’ll be in the paper. She showers quickly and gets dressed, heads fast across the campus towards the QuikTrip on 11th Street. It is early, and there is no one around. It is her favorite time of day.
Amy has never gone to a gas station alone before, and now as she glides along the asphalt of the parking lot and pushes in the glass door without slowing it occurs to her that now her life will be like this. That all she has to do is get the money and she can go wherever she wants. She approaches the counter where the Tulsa World is kept, and she pictures herself on Red Square. It is a Red Square with Saint Basil’s Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower, a pair of tame rhinoceroses, and the Berlin Wall. She is standing very straight and looks the boy behind the counter directly in the eye.
Yet while Amy feels all-powerful at the thought of her name in the newspaper, when she glances down and sees her face taking u
p the whole top half of the front page, the power bursts, and she starts shaking, and she runs back to the bathroom, where she pees with her head in her hands.
In the front-page picture Amy’s long blond hair rolls smooth as a single piece of silk over her shoulders
She wears an oversized coral-pink T-shirt she considers more dignified and a little amber pendant on a slender silver chain. Her eyes appear greenish gray, and she appears to be looking at the camera and looking away at the same time. She smiles without showing her teeth. Except for the slight sunburn on her cheeks and across her nose, she looks like a doll.
The headline of the article reads: Wonderkid Starts TU at 15. It starts by explaining that Amy is the youngest freshman in the history of the University of Tulsa. It goes on to include statistics from the U.S. Department of Education and interviews with the University of Tulsa’s Dean of Admissions, Amy, and their mom. The Dean of Admissions is quoted in the second paragraph saying he would advise against anyone doing anything like this. The article’s author explains that the issue is not so much whether Amy belongs in a college classroom as whether a fifteen-year-old belongs in a residence hall on TU’s fraternity row. The Dean of Admissions again: We made sure she and her parents are aware of the maturity issues.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, says the journalist, the number of college students who are younger than seventeen has actually declined since 1970. The potential for that number to grow, however, is considerable. How many Amys are out there is anyone’s guess.
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