The Paper Wasp

by Lauren Acampora

  Tonight, mercifully, there was no hologram. I’d be in the presence of my classmates soon, so I was free to prowl down Main Street undisguised. So many storefronts were empty, brown paper hanging behind the windows. On the side streets, most houses had crossed the line from homey to unkempt. After the auto plants shuttered, the media had reported that capable young people were draining out of the state, but I knew that most of my classmates had remained right here, raising dispirited families in these weatherworn houses.

  I passed Everts Elementary and the concrete bench where you and I often sat. Opening the car windows, I breathed the cold, abrasive air. There were margins of black snow at the curbs, left from the first storm of the season. I steered west, away from town and toward the dunes, in the direction of your house.

  How I’d loved your house, Elise. Compared with so many hovels in town, it was a palace. I’d loved to wander your living room—what I imagined might have been called a parlor in some other era—with its beige carpet, heavy glass table, and chairs with buttoned cushions. I’d loved the ingenuity with which, by adding an upper floor and black shutters, your parents had made their basic ranch resemble a New England colonial. To me, the way the deck reached out toward Lake Michigan symbolized some intrinsic human striving. It was a launching pad. Standing on the deck overlooking the water and the lighthouse, the stirrings of the future already in me, I felt that I could be lifted by the wind and carried anywhere in the world.

  We played for hours. You wore your nightgown with ruffles at the hem and sleeves, a print of hearts erupting from clouds. I remember you in this nightgown, sitting on the toilet lid in the bathroom, plastic scepter in hand, as I knelt on the bath mat in front of you, giving directions. The rubber frogs, ducks, and crabs made a circle around us. “Round and round the garden,” you said at my prompting, and the animals came to life.

  At night, the beam from the lighthouse would enter your bedroom, lay a stripe across your sleeping face, then lift away—and, from the trundle beside your sleigh bed, I’d count the beats until its return. It was utter safety, being in your room under a white eyelet comforter. I’d stay as long as I could after breakfast the next morning, until your mother would gently suggest that my parents would want me home soon.

  The other girls blistered with jealousy. You were beautiful and I was not. I was neither witty nor mean. Still, I was the one you invited to sleep over every Saturday night. Our friendship was real and deep, our games transcendent. I knew that, as unlikely as it seemed, I brightened your life the way you brightened mine. Like the Brontë sisters, we’d created our own womb of imagination. Even then, I knew not everyone had that privilege. We were fortunate to dwell in dreams as long as we did. It’s easier to linger with a partner.

  I didn’t let you see me when I was sad. But when I felt good, when my bright surges came, I showed off for you. I drew extravagant murals based on my stories. You held my hand and said, “You’re going to be a great artist someday, Abby.” I didn’t argue. I let you believe the world awaited me with the same hunger it awaited you. But the truth was that, as you were born to be seen, I was born to crouch in the shadows. I was the hidden source, quietly generating the scenes you played out. I knew this, even if I didn’t yet recognize mine as the superior gift.

  One night at your house, toward the end of middle school, we fell upon an Auguste Perren film. It was Eureka Valley, one of his earliest experiments, a Swiss man’s vision of California: desert basins, old mines, drugs. We were too young for it, and the story had no logical arc we could find, yet we couldn’t stop watching. There were fantasias of inflatables, imaginary beings with human faces, rituals in darkened ghost towns. One unbroken shot lasted five minutes, through the lens of an acid high. Warped faces, halogen haloes, winged beasts emerging from ears. Watching it with you was like sharing an outlandish dream, being plunged into a mutual subconscious. The images cracked open a kind of elation in me. At the end of the film, we looked at each other, and I knew that you felt it, too.

  I remembered that night now as I drove slowly past your house, then around the cul-de-sac where we’d ridden bicycles, and past the house again. There were lights on in the bedrooms, but no silhouettes. Still, I sensed you were there. My sense was intuitive, but also stood up to logic. Even movie stars must come home, sometimes, to visit their parents. Even movie stars must succumb to curiosity about their old classmates. And really, if anyone should attend a high school reunion, it was a movie star.

  It was dark and beginning to snow by the time I reached the community center and parked toward the back of the lot. I didn’t get out of the car right away. The building glowed. I could see the shapes of people inside already, each a living vessel of memory, holding a piece of my own history, whether I liked it or not. Blow this building up, and there’d be almost nothing left of me.

  I crawled out of the driver’s seat, and a few snowflakes stung my face. I stood for a moment in that unlit corner of the parking lot and was suddenly afraid you’d really be there. I was afraid that if I walked inside that building, I’d see you and disintegrate into a cone of powder on the floor. Slowly, I reapplied my lipstick in the sideview mirror. The effect was encouraging. The red mouth was a message of confidence, competence. I asked my feet to carry me across the parking lot. This was autonomy, I thought, for better or worse. I’d put it on like a coat.

  Indoors, the community center resembled a nursing home. Pine-green carpeting, polyester curtains, flowered wallpaper. At the check-in table, I wrote my name on a sticker and put it on my dress, over my heart. The reception room was furnished with mismatched groupings of sofas and armchairs, side tables and lamps, arranged as if to facilitate multiple intimate conversations. A random assortment of framed prints and watercolors hung on the walls, clashing with the wallpaper. A round hors d’oeuvre table dominated the middle of the room, ringed by small clusters of people. No one was sitting on the sofas.

  “Abby!” someone shouted, breaking away from one of the clusters.

  A woman trotted toward me in a red taffeta dress with spaghetti straps, something we might have worn to a homecoming dance. I frantically cycled through my index of tall blonds with overbites, but found no matches. The woman was now directly in front of me, stooping in for an awkward hug. As she pulled back, I sought a name tag, but the red bustier was anonymous.

  “Wow, how are you?” I attempted.

  The woman smiled in delight. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

  “Of course I do. Meg?”

  The woman laughed and gave my shoulder a little shove. “No! Becky Bordo!”

  This, of course, was impossible. Becky Bordo was fat and had been getting fatter since kindergarten. By high school, she’d fallen off the social wagon completely.

  Becky did a little stomp dance. “I am getting the biggest kick out of this. Nobody recognizes me!”

  “Well, you do look different. I mean, you look great.”

  “I lost a hundred and ten pounds.“

  “Amazing.”

  Becky stood there smiling, waiting for me to ask how she’d done it. But there were more people coming in, and the room was being enlivening with squeals and laughter. My instinct was to bolt for the door.

  “Wow, this is going to be such a fun night,” I muttered.

  Becky took my hand and led me to a group of women standing nearby. As the faces came into focus, I found that I was among girls who’d never spoken to me in school. Now, they smiled in unison. Most were still generically attractive, dulled versions of their prettier teenage selves. Cupped by this crescent of women, I felt that my dress was misshapen on my body, and I didn’t know what to do with my arms.

  “Wow, it’s so good to see all of you,” I piped.

  The girls—the women—seemed to be looking at me through a gauze of pity. They blinked slowly, their smiling teeth like vise clamps. The pity was in my imagination, I told myself. It had to be. There was no way they could know about my trouble in Ann Arbor, the long years
in my childhood bedroom. And yet, at that moment, I felt they could see it all on me like a rash.

  I excused myself and slithered away, past men in T-shirts with hunting-club logos. I edged by without making eye contact, as if they were loiterers at a bus station. I retreated to a window and faced away from the room. As I looked out to the dark parking lot, the wave of fear approached. The tightness in my chest began. To counteract it, I focused on breathing slowly and did a quick Perrenian exercise. I attempted to turn off my labeling brain and blur my vision. I tried to witness shapes and colors simply as they presented themselves, to heed the sounds that met my ears without identifying their source. This practice was grounding for me, better than any mindfulness strategy I’d found. “Unity Gain” was the term Perren used for the state of equilibrium between the conscious and the unconscious mind—a term borrowed from audio engineering, the balance of voltage entering and exiting a device. Over the years, I’d learned to achieve this at will, the equalizing of input and output. When I attained Unity Gain, my anxiety diminished. I could retreat temporarily through an inlet to the unconscious, and invert my surroundings into benign mindscapes. Most of the time I held a light mastery over these visions. But occasionally I lost control, and the visions skidded into nightmare. Now, through the community center window, the cars in the parking lot were becoming marshaled troops. The rhythmic jabber of conversation behind me was punctuated by a woman’s delighted scream, which shot through my body. Despite myself, I envisioned a montage of atrocity taking place at that moment, outside these walls. A burning village in Africa, a migrant boat capsizing, a car crash on US 31. I heard the careen, screech, and shatter of glass. I saw babies in the water, children running from the flames.

  I gasped and snapped back into the room. The tightness in my chest had become a knot, solid as a ball bearing. I pushed toward the bar, a wellspring of self-serve liquor and mixers on a card table. I filled a cup with bourbon and concealed it with a splash of Coke. I wanted nothing but my bedroom, my little chair and strawberry lamp, but leaving this place seemed as impossible as staying.

  Turning around, I almost walked into a woman who beamed at me from beneath a blond mushroom cloud. “Holy Hannah,” she said and enveloped my body.

  “Christy?” I said when she released me. I stared, under the guise of delight. Her facial features had spread out as upon an inflated balloon, and her pillowy body was draped with something like an ivory tablecloth. The nose ring was gone, and a gold cross rested in her cleavage.

  “Abby, you look great. Exactly the same!”

  “So do you,” I inhaled.

  “I can’t believe it’s been ten years. What have you been doing? I can’t find you online at all.”

  “Oh, well. I’m, uh, back at U of M,” I blurted. “Grad school, for film.”

  She shook her head. “Really? That’s great. You were always so smart.”

  “What about you?” I asked quickly. “What are you up to these days?”

  “I’m teaching kindergarten. We have a little girl and are expecting our second.” She put a hand to her abdomen and smiled. “Are you having fun tonight? Who else have you talked to?”

  “No one, really. Just Becky Bordo in a thin-person disguise.”

  “Oh, Abby.” She shook my shoulder.

  Together we circulated. The tightness in my chest was still there, but it was a useful distraction to watch Christy, to see how she’d sloughed her tortured girlhood like a tight sweater, revealing the plump kindergarten teacher within. I imagined her reading a storybook to her pupils, tenderly brushing her young daughter’s hair, and felt a bite of envy. Watching her chatting with other women now, I was struck by her easy laugh and uncomplicated self-possession, and understood that Christy had never truly been a misfit.

  I returned to the bar periodically to refill my bourbon and Coke. Slowly the knot in my chest loosened. Christy and I found other members of our old troupe: Ted Yoakim and Andrew Sweeter, sardonic theater boys. They were both office workers now, in accounting and insurance. Ted, at least, had moved to Lansing.

  All at once, there was a change in the room, a dip in volume, a joint catching of breath. I turned and saw that a new group had formed and that people were heading across the room to join it, metal shavings to a magnet. Becky Bordo—somehow omnipresent in her new thinness—appeared at my side and breathed into my ear, “It’s Elise Van Dijk.”

  Like a dog at the sound of its dinner dish being filled, I experienced a momentary response of joyful anticipation. But the next moment it was undercut by panic. As I stood there holding my plastic drink cup, it was eighth grade again, the juncture of our disunion. Our sleepovers had come to a halt while you were at a summer acting camp in Grand Rapids, auditioning for parts at the city theater. When you were cast in Oliver! a group of classmates went to the opening performance. You accepted our flower bouquets with an air of experience, your eyes alight against the dirt-streaked makeup. We waited, expecting you to leave the theater with us, to go to dinner at Bennigan’s. After a moment, seeing us still there, you thanked us for coming and explained that you needed to get home to rest for the next day’s performance.

  Soon after, you began making trips to Chicago, then flew to Los Angeles with your mother. You missed the first week of ninth grade. You’d been cast in a car commercial, you breathlessly told me on the phone. When you finally appeared at school, in October, you wore a vintage lace dress, and your hair was cut in a pixie style. You were an alarming new creature, poised and long-legged, universally charitable. I hung back and observed how you mixed between classes, exchanging adult pleasantries as easily with the volleyball team as with a huddled group of Trekkies—a flowering lotus atop our pond of mediocrity.

  You flew to California every few weeks. Then, with one well-placed role in a drama about drug trafficking, your destiny was sealed. You took the rest of the year off from school and studied with a tutor in L.A.

  I remember watching that first film in the single-screen theater on Main Street, the same theater we’d come to as children, where we’d raised our little faces to that heroic expanse. Now, barely out of girlhood, you were magnified to god size, your freckles washed in a fusion of makeup and light. Your enormous eyes, hermetically green, stared past mine to a brilliant horizon.

  For most of high school, you lived part-time in California. I rarely knew when you were there and when you were home. You finally returned for senior year, a phantom in bright tights and ankle boots. Although you were physically present, it was clear that you wouldn’t be rejoining our world. It was evident to me that our friendship had ended, naturally, through no fault of our own. For your sake, it was important that I reveal no regret. To be seen as unhappy would be an unfair burden to you. And so I didn’t turn to stare like the others when you passed in the hall between classes. Stealthily, I marked your movements in my peripheral vision. When I glimpsed you walking in my direction with your diplomatic new smile, I slipped around a corner into an empty classroom.

  At the reunion, I didn’t turn to stare either. Ted and Andrew were talking in raspy whispers, but I’d stopped paying attention. The most important thing was not to turn around, not to let you see me seeing you. It was crucial that I kept a dignified distance, maintained visible poise, while the other classmates unabashedly swarmed.

  “I can’t believe she actually came,” Andrew stage-whispered. “I wonder if the paparazzi are outside.”

  “Oh, no,” Ted said. “They wouldn’t follow her here. I mean, she’s not that big. Yet. I don’t think.”

  Christy joined our group, aflush. “I just talked to Elise.”

  My face convulsed involuntarily. With an effort, I returned it to a neutral expression, took another drink from my cup.

  “What did she say?” Andrew demanded.

  “She was really nice, totally down-to-earth. She gave me a hug and everything and asked what I’ve been doing since graduation. Just like anyone else.”

  “Her hair looks really red
, don’t you think?” Andrew asked.

  “It was always red,” Christy said.

  “You don’t think she does anything to it?”

  “Abby,” Ted said suddenly, turning to me. “You used to be friends with her, didn’t you?”

  My voice, when it came out, was a frog croak. “If you’re asking whether she dyes her hair, I highly doubt it.”

  Through my interior turmoil, I was thankful for Ted, Christy, and Andrew—this core of old comrades, my only friends. After your defection, I’d become socially unstable. For a while, I was still accepted in the comfortable pocket of the advanced-track crowd, the brushed and tended girls with corduroy skirts and big backpacks. But then, one dark winter when there was nothing to do, I watched all of Perren’s films. After each film ended and I was delivered back to the wood-paneled family room, the faded paisley couch, the overhead fan at a standstill above my head, it was as if the film were still rolling. Everything around me vibrated with umbrous power. Outside the window, the moonlit trees were paralyzed against the sky. I was reminded of the wild potential beauty in everything. I felt that you were with me, Elise, that I could turn to you as I had after watching Eureka Valley and see the wonder in your eyes mirroring mine.

  When I mentioned Perren to my schoolmates, one of them wrinkled her nose and said, “Isn’t he the one who made a movie about defecating?” I tried to illuminate them, but it didn’t seem to matter that Perren’s work was considered the pinnacle of artistry, celebrated at Cannes and in college textbooks. The more I argued, the more incensed I became and the more they pushed back. They were ignorant and provincial, and I told them so. Only you understood, Elise. I know now that it was foolish to expect more from anyone else. From then on, the other girls avoided me like a contagion.