“Won’t I hurt you?”
He shook his head. She put her foot in his laced hands, trusting only part of her weight to him at first, checking his face. She asked, “Does it hurt?”
He didn’t answer, just lifted her. She grabbed a knobby branch, pulling herself into the tree. She climbed quickly, then ran crouched across the roof.
He followed her. “It’s this window.” Dogwood leaves stuck to her arms and hair. In the dim light from the streetlamp, she looked familiar and unfamiliar, the way a movie star was familiar and unfamiliar. He pushed open the window and they crawled inside. He turned on the overhead light, then turned it immediately off: too bright.
Wendy touched the prom photo tacked to his bulletin board: the tacky Polynesian sunset, Khamisa’s green fuck-you dress, his arms around her. He’d had a crew cut then, too. Luke reached across, unpinned the picture, and dropped it in the trash.
He woke a few hours later. They’d slept in their clothes, pressed together in his narrow bed. It was hot now; he was sweating. He tried to get up, but Wendy was wrapped in the sheet, pinning him down.
Angie was here for breakfast; he could hear her voice rising from downstairs. The house smelled of syrup and coffee.
Wendy rolled toward him and opened her eyes. “Good morning,” he said.
She sat up and looked around. “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, my God.” She laughed once, then covered her eyes and drew a long, shaky breath.
“I wish it was yesterday,” she said.
“Wendy,” he said. He held her as tightly as he could, holding on with his arms and legs and torso, wanting to disappear into her.
He’d gotten what he’d wanted. Now they would walk downstairs and into the unsuspecting kitchen. He wanted them to have done it better, he wanted to feel happy, but it was already about to happen; and then it was happening.
Thirty-four
Across the street from the house Angie shared with four housemates lived a family with a brindle mutt. Most of the time the puppy was left alone in the fenced yard, which was bad enough, but occasionally the men who lived in the house wrapped the puppy in chains and weights and made it run. One of the chains had been connected to a doormat that dragged along the ground. The east side of the yard had a small hill; the owner would squat at the top with a piece of meat. The puppy charged gallantly up, dragging its chains and padlocks and doormat behind it. At the top, sides heaving, it would gobble the meat, then try to burrow into its owner’s hands to be petted, but the other man would hook a hand into the dog’s harness of chains and drag it—yipping, feet scrabbling desperately—back down the hill. If the owner did pet it for a minute, the puppy would freeze, eyes closed, like a lizard in the sun.
Angie was glad she had a back room, because she couldn’t stand seeing the puppy’s misery. The woman who had last lived in her room (Alison; the housemates often talked about how great, how funny, Alison had been) had painted it periwinkle blue, with gloppy purple trim. Angie had a Victorian couch with claw feet, a desk that had once been a high school lab table, a beautiful old iron headboard. They were the first pieces of furniture she’d ever bought for herself, and she loved them, although they were crammed together in the small space—the desk right up against the bed, the couch keeping the door from opening all the way. Above the bed, a window looked out across their house’s scraggly yard onto a motel whose sign flashed WELCOME, then VACANCY.
She hated weekends. They made her feel aimless and dull, unable to enjoy what regular people looked forward to all week. Her body ached with exhaustion, but she knew that if she lay down, she wouldn’t be able to sleep any more than she already had.
She forced herself across the room—it felt like walking through chest-deep water—and into the bathroom across the hall, where she pulled down her pants and peed. She should shower, too, but she didn’t feel ambitious enough. The bathroom had incense, seashells, driftwood. A claw-foot tub, its curved toenails painted with red nail polish.
Out in the hallway, she forced herself to turn right, toward the stairs, and not left toward her room. Their house, on Cort’s western outskirts, was a ramshackle Victorian. She made her way down the narrow, twisting staircase, with its low ceiling and wood worn to satin, shutting her mind: she couldn’t look at the steps, at the hallway she had to cross to reach the kitchen. If she thought of having to bend to the cabinet where the pots were kept, fill a pot with water, carry it to the stove, she would sit down on this stair, a fat girl in a sweatshirt, and be unable to stand again. Good girl, she found she was saying to herself with each step. Her legs ached to lie down on the stairs. She took a step. Good girl. Good girl.
For the last couple of weeks she’d been sleeping badly, waking at three or four, thoughts racing. The mood chart she kept for her therapist dipped from 4 to 3. She forced herself not to fall below a 3, going to her temp job even though she was so exhausted by the end of the afternoon that she came home and slept. Her housemates used the word crash: I’m gonna go upstairs now and crash. Coming into her room she literally crashed, falling onto the mattress. It was the only thing all day that felt okay, the moment between hitting the mattress and sleep, when her body seemed to dissolve.
She’d had six good months this spring and summer, doing the things people just did, the grocery store, movies, forty hours of work a week. Most of her housemates had graduated from college, but they worked the same kind of jobs as Angie’s. Isobel waited tables, Jason temped out of the same agency—Temporary Solutions—that Angie did, and Bradley and Maureen both painted houses. They generally treated these jobs with casual good humor. They all had political causes or artistic projects that they considered their real work. Except for Bradley: he was apparently content painting houses and drinking wine and sharing a bed with Isobel.
When she’d lived at halfway houses, everyone had battled demons just to get breakfast or get dressed. Angie had usually been the most together person there, her functionality a source of wonder. These housemates were the first friends outside the System that Angie’d had since high school, and they stunned her a little, how easily they accepted the world. They probably would have said they didn’t accept the world at all: they smoked pot, Bradley hadn’t finished college, all of them were vegetarians, and Isobel belonged to about six environmental and animal-rights organizations. They knew each other from State or from the Art Institute and hadn’t moved away from Cort after finishing. But they seemed to accept unquestioningly the world’s inherent structure and logic, their own natural ascendancy. They didn’t probe when Angie said she’d spent the last few years “around New England.” She mentioned the year at Middlebury—scrunching her nose and saying, “I wasn’t really into college”—and her housemates nodded pleasantly, unconcerned.
Dishes were piled in the kitchen sink, the pot she needed at the bottom. It held water orange with grease, a few slimy pieces of spaghetti. She looked at the ratty sponge, the plastic bottle sticky with soap.
She couldn’t wash out the pot.
Of course she could wash out the pot. She just needed to raise her hand to the soap bottle. Just reach down into the sink, lift the pot, pour out the greasy water.
She sat down at the table, which had newspapers and breakfast dishes piled on it. She hadn’t eaten all day. On a saucer in front of her lay two toast crusts, one with a burnt black fringe. She made herself eat them—her mouth ached, chewing—and then drank from a cup of cold amber tea, a blond hair wrinkling its surface.
She woke to a grainy dusk. The front room where she’d fallen asleep had a red couch, the TV, and Maureen’s artwork, abstract canvases with a lot of rips and slashes. In the dim light, the TV stand—an ugly sixties occasional table—seemed to float above the floor. The fish tank behind the couch held a small, circling nurse shark. It had a face like a catfish, flat and whiskered, its eye small and hard and blue, bisected by a slit of black pupil. Turning, muscles undulating beneath its drab suede side, it kept its eye fixed on Angie.
This dep
ression didn’t feel like ones she’d gone through before. Those had been so blank and terrible it had felt like being wrapped in gray wool blankets, one after another, until she was choking on her own breath. This time was different. With her illness pushed back, she had to look at the full extent of her fucked-up life. She’d accomplished nothing in six years; she couldn’t even lay claim to her own thoughts. Was she the thoughts she had on meds, when her brain was as it should be? Or was she the thoughts she had off meds, her brain as it really was? If she existed only when her brain was balanced on meds, she existed only on the right meds: she’d been on nineteen different combinations. Either way, she’d been herself only a tiny part of these last years.And the rest of the time, she’d been—who?
She swung her legs off the couch; it took her a long time to move from sitting to standing, but once she stood she walked to the kitchen, where Bradley sat at the table, drinking wine from a coffee mug and watching Isobel chop onions.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Angie went to the sink. “The big pot’s gone.”
Isobel glanced at Bradley, then pointed with her knife toward the stove. “I’m using it for pasta. You can have some if you want.”
Angie suspected she was supposed to say no, but she was too relieved at the idea of not having to cook. She sat at the table with Bradley, who lifted the wine bottle toward her. She shook her head. Everyone in the house liked Bradley, who was quiet and good-natured, with bushy hair and a long nose. “I don’t know what he’s doing with Isobel,” both Jason and Maureen would say, as though being people who recycled and grew their own herbs meant they weren’t susceptible to simple beauty. Isobel was very tall, taller even than Angie, and had modeled for a year and a half in Milan. She had long brown hair and slightly oversized front teeth. “I hated modeling, though,” she’d told Angie once. Later, Angie had asked Maureen if she knew that Isobel had modeled.
“Of course I know that. She lets it drop the first time she can get you alone. Did she tell you about Spanish Vogue yet?” When Maureen talked about Isobel, her face took on the look of someone tearing a piece of stale bread with her teeth. “She was in Italy a year and a half without learning ten words of Italian.”
Isobel moved lightly between the cutting board and the stove, onions held between the blade of the knife and her palm. She swept them into the skillet, where they hissed in the heated oil. “Should we eat up on the roof?”
“Sure,” said Bradley.
Angie asked, “Do you want some help, Isobel?”
“No, thanks.”
“Does everyone call you Isobel?”
Isobel added a jar of sauce to the onions and mushrooms in the skillet. “Well, it’s my name.”
“I mean, your family? Like, my family calls me Ange sometimes.” Her voice pitched too high, coming too fast.
“That’s very original.”
“Be nice,” Bradley said. He turned to Angie. “Her family calls her Is.”
“Is. That’s great.”
She needed to take her six o’clock meds, but she couldn’t stand to be alone and the pills were hidden up in her bedroom. Isobel busied herself with finding a colander for the pasta. She wore a man’s white tank top, a long Indian-print skirt, running shoes. Across the front of the tank top were small orange asterisks where the tomato sauce had spit. Bradley lifted the bottle questioningly toward Angie again and this time she said, “Yeah, okay.” The pale yellow wine was warm and tasted of ash.
A song began on the radio, something so familiar she couldn’t place it. Then Stevie Nicks’s voice came in: It was “Gold Dust Woman.” Without thinking, Angie jumped up and switched the radio off. When she turned, Bradley and Isobel were both looking at her.
“I don’t like that song,” she said lamely.
They glanced at each other. Then Isobel shrugged, not looking at Angie, and began loading three plates with pasta and sauce. Not sure if she’d been invited, Angie took her plate and tagged upstairs after Isobel and Bradley.
They climbed out the attic window onto the roof. The sun had gone down already, but the sky still held streaks of light. They ate without talking much. The early fall air, loose around them, was cool. When Isobel stood and untied her sweater from around her waist, Angie realized both she and Bradley had paused to watch. Isobel slipped the sweater over her arms, then raised them so it fell down her body.
Thirty-five
Jordana’s house was tiny but two-storied and many-roomed, as though a larger house had shrunk in heavy rain. It was set far back from the road, next to a small pond rimmed with silvery-green weeds.
In the kitchen, Jordana cut a red onion in half, the two pieces rocking apart on the cutting board. The kids were coming for lunch, a picnic. Angie had been here before, but Luke had not. Luke and Wendy had not: Jordana wasn’t used to thinking of Luke as part of a couple. She turned and tossed the onion skins into the trash. She’d never enjoyed cooking before. Now she found herself admiring her hands as she lifted apples from their bowl, as she sliced bread, as she lifted a glass of wine. She’d changed in other ways, too, these six months she’d lived alone. She slept better, and therefore less. Instead of rocketing to the clinic two hours before she needed to be at work, she spent mornings curled up in a blanket on her porch. From thrift stores she’d picked out rag rugs and old quilts, things Pieter would have called precious. She’d never thought of herself as a nature lover, but she loved the animal life around this house: grazing deer, skunks waddling toward the pond at twilight, a family of opossums filing into the trees that edged the property.
It had taken more than a year to leave Pieter. She’d begun to look surreptitiously at places for rent but had talked herself out of each apartment: too noisy, or Angie was going through a rough spot, or too close to home. Sometimes she’d thought it was just a game, that she wouldn’t leave at all. But then she’d seen this place. The idea of someone else getting it had made her feel robbed.
Angie’s car turned into the lane. She still drove Abe’s ancient Galaxie 500, pale green and finned. Jordana wiped her hands quickly on a napkin and went to open the front door. Cool, crisp air: it was September, the first leaves changing on the trees. The Galaxie rattled even after the ignition was turned off. The kids were getting out of the car, talking, slamming doors. Wendy was about half Luke and Angie’s size, and her neatness made her seem even smaller next to their flapping shirttails, loose jeans, rolled-up cuffs. She and Luke had been in New Hampshire about a month; they were still staying with Pieter, which allowed them to save up some money. Jordana had mixed feelings about their living there. If Pieter wasn’t alone, it made her desertion of him less stark. Other times—even though she’d been the one to leave—it made her feel rejected, the three of them together.
Jordana hugged her daughter; Luke didn’t move in to be hugged. “So this is it,” Jordana said. She opened the door and motioned them inside.
Luke glanced around, then picked up the newspaper from the table.
“It’s very nice,” Wendy said.
Angie walked around without touching anything. “It’s still strange seeing your stuff here.”
Jordana stored pots and dish towels in the drawers of a bureau that had been in their basement, its legs warped by water damage. Her books were in the living room in three unmatched wooden bookcases, also from the old house. On the fireplace mantel roosted things she’d found on walks: a smooth black stone; a broken shard of blue and white pottery; a fragile nest, a spray of dark hair woven in with the twigs.
“Here, let me show you something,” she said to Luke, and led him into the kitchen. “Put your hand here on the wall. No, to the right a little.” She didn’t pick up his hand to show him: he’d shake her off. “Do you feel it?”
“What am I supposed to be feeling?”
“There’s a seam.” When downtown Cort had been “revitalized,” some of the older houses were sold off. The woman who was now Jordana’s landlo
rd had paid a dollar for this place, with the agreement that she would haul it to a new plot of land. “They sawed the house in half to transport it out here, then put it back together.”
“Huh. Cool.” He dropped his hand, turning as Angie and Wendy came into the kitchen.
Angie asked, “Is she showing you where they cut up the house?”
Hurt, Jordana said, “I think it’s interesting.”
“They cut up the house?” Wendy said, and so Jordana had to show her the seam under the wallpaper, explain about the Preservation Act. Luke and Angie were talking about Angie’s housemates, Angie imitating someone and Luke laughing. Jordana wished she could hear better what they were saying, but Wendy was asking polite questions: “How is the neighborhood?”
Jordana swept an arm toward the window. “No neighbors.”
Despite the sun, it wasn’t really warm enough for a picnic. Jordana tramped down a circle of grass, then spread the wool blanket. The grass beneath was bristly through the fabric. She pulled tomatoes and cheese and eggs from the basket. She wasn’t a fan of Angie’s vegetarianism—the faint air of self-righteousness to it, the rejection of sensual pleasure—but at least Angie wasn’t proselytizing against meat to strangers anymore.
Luke picked up a plate. “You made deviled eggs.”
She blushed a little: Pieter had always made deviled eggs. “How is your dad?”
Angie stiffened and said, “He’s fine,” just as Luke said, “Why do you care?”
“Luke. I care.”
Wendy stood abruptly. “I think I’ll get our coats.”
“You don’t have to. It’s warming up,” Jordana said.
“I’ll just get them.” She took off across the yard.
Jordana picked up the bread and realized she’d forgotten to bring a knife for it. She thought of calling after Wendy, but instead tore the loaf into ragged pieces.
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