The Paper Wasp

by Lauren Acampora

  Thus infected, I descended toward the last remaining social refuge, the mash-up of oddballs who ate lunch in the school courtyard no matter the weather—girls with pink hair and piercings, boys in army fatigues. Christy, Ted, and Andrew. As I joined them, I told myself they were expatriates rather than outcasts, self-exiled. They were judgmental of our peers, those timorous puppets being groomed by Middle America. They were impatient to throw off their pinched surroundings for a larger world that could contain them. They were members of Amnesty International and PETA. Or, prematurely nihilistic, they were members of nothing.

  I sat outside with them, bundled in my parka. I began to wear black and dyed my dark hair darker. I wore lurid eye makeup. I knew my eyes were my best feature, that they made me look adroit even when my head was muddled. And the black clothing was good, slimming. I already had oversize breasts, and I layered chain necklaces upon them. I pierced the upper cartilage of my ears and shaved the hair around them. My father grimaced. “Disgusting,” he mumbled, but didn’t push further. He was exhausted from my sister, who was already rolling home after midnight in ripped tights.

  But now, at the reunion, the outsiders were indistinguishable from the anodyne crowd. I followed Christy, Ted, and Andrew to the other side of the room. The party was loosening up. People had taken the bottles from the self-serve bar and were passing them around. Some were sitting on the sofas now, in cozy little groups. The glow of lamplight turned each scene into an uncanny tableau, the faces of classmates softly tweaked by ten years’ work. Former members of the theater group intermixed with soccer players, and I saw pairings of peers that didn’t occur in nature: Nicole Oberink and Lydia Groen, Brendan Haverstraw and Greer Nolan.

  There was no sign of you, Elise, no buzzing hive. I pulled away from the others and circled the reception room. Perhaps you’d slipped away somehow. Perhaps you were already on your way to the airport, boarding a flight back to California. The blood drained from my head as I searched the room with rising agitation. Finally, I refilled my drink cup with straight bourbon and dropped into an armchair upholstered in a blurry toile. Anchored there, I passively absorbed the lap and sway of the party around me. People washed past, and I caught a feverish tone in the voices of two women.

  “Definitely a boob job,” flat-chested Amy Cunniff was saying.

  “And her face?” breathed her companion.

  “Probably. I mean, they all do it.”

  I knew they were talking about you. I finished my bourbon and stood, which was when I realized I was drunk, or close to it. I waded to the ladies’ room where, in the amber light of the vanity bulbs, I stared at my own face in the mirror until it turned foreign, until the features warped and my skull showed through the skin. The face, what a horror. A monstrous hood.

  When I went back out to the party, something had changed. How long had I been in the ladies’ room? There was music now, or I was just noticing it—country rock, the kind of thing that blasted from high-schoolers’ pickup trucks. Some people were vaguely dancing. I hated them all. Brad Bunton was pouring tequila shots and making a toast to the football team. Someone handed me a shot. I drank it and dropped the plastic cup to the floor.

  For what felt like hours, I cruised aimlessly. The room seemed to flatten around me like a stage set. With a shove of the shoulder, I could knock its walls down. I circled around the paper-doll people, walked right into them. None of them counted. None of them were you. Then, all at once, the overhead lighting came on, and everyone stood blinking.

  “Shit, seriously?” someone said. “How’d it get to be twelve already?”

  I was standing in a corner surrounded by hundreds of rosebuds that were replicating like cancerous cells on the wallpaper. There was a delay in my processing as I watched my classmates push together in a herd. The cold wattage exposed tight dresses, pinched flesh, curdled mascara. Christy appeared. “Abby, are you okay? Don’t worry, I can drive you home.” She led me through the room, past the ransacked crudités table. “Did you check your coat?”

  As we joined the crowd that streamed toward the door, I glimpsed a shimmer of dark diamonds. It took a moment to deduce that the shimmer was you, Elise, that you were in front of me right now, a three-dimensional, physical body. I yanked free of Christy’s grip and pushed ahead, close enough to see the dress, black and crusted with beads. I heard the upsurge of your laughter, and a bilious tide rose in me. The reunion was over. The impossible had flashed and vanished in an instant. Why hadn’t I raced toward you the minute you’d arrived and embraced you with the force of our lost years? How could I have squandered those minutes, those hours in the same building, wasted those breaths of the same air? Now, as I came close enough to touch your bare shoulder—to make you turn to see who it was—I stopped short. As in a dream, my feet were glued to the floor, and you pulled away with each step toward the exit, escaping again, a comet dipping through the solar system on its way to distant stars.

  But in the next moment, miraculously, I heard your voice. Perhaps you’d felt my presence behind you, because all at once you’d turned toward me, a monarch in the parting water of admirers. The air in the room altered, became conductive. When our eyes caught, there was an instant of raw recognition. Your mouth curved in a brilliant smile. It might have been your usual smile, practiced for the cameras, but to me it was electrically intimate.

  The others stepped back in deference, and you lurched through the gap and took me into your arms. The beads of your dress pressed against me, and my cheek brushed the dangling sapphire at your ear. I breathed a honeysuckle scent at your neck that triggered an intolerably sweet memory of childhood. The others closed up the circle around us and hovered, listening.

  “Oh my God, Abby! I didn’t think you were here! I’m so glad I found you!”

  I held your arm and laughed, surprised at the music that rang out of me, a xylophone scale.

  “Abby, my best friend!”

  You leaned into me, and instantly the past decade hadn’t happened. What did it matter now what forces had conspired to keep us apart? We were reunited.

  “Come,” you commanded and pulled me by the elbow. You led me against the exiting crowd, back into the reception room, and sat me down beside you on a burgundy loveseat. The loveseat was plush and overstuffed, and you sank sideways into its cushion to face me. The embellishments of your dress were on full display: all of its folds and crenellations, the elaborate hand-sewn beads. I sat at the mercy of my loosened senses, my vision slipping and narrowing.

  “Abby, Abby, I’ve missed you so much.” Your words slurred, and you shook your head, your face turning exquisitely sad. You’d had too much to drink, I realized. “I’ve never had another friend like you, in all these years,” you said. “Oh, Abby. Do you remember when we used to go to Angelo’s for pizza? Remember how we used to get root beer and pretend it was beer?” You laughed and leaned into the couch cushions. I laughed, too, and swam in your green eyes. “Do you remember playing ‘shark’ in my pool?” you asked, putting your hand on my arm.

  “Of course I do,” I sang.

  Then your voice grew quieter. You stared at me, swaying slightly. “Do you remember the stories you used to make up for me to act out?”

  Your eyes seemed to open another degree as you said this, a shadow passing through them, and I knew that you were remembering the stories at that moment.

  “You told such strange, incredible stories,” you said in a lower voice.

  I was holding my breath. “Which ones do you remember?”

  “All of them, all of them. I’m sure I remember all of them.”

  A flame danced inside me. You reached out again, and grabbed my hand.

  “I haven’t forgotten anything.” You closed your eyes briefly. When you reopened them, a new gleam was there. You opened your little string purse and drew out a pack of American Spirits. I stared as you inhaled the lighter’s flame, and a ribbon of smoke came from your mouth. With the hand that held the cigarette, you pushed hair
from your face. “But, my God, it’s been such a long time. Tell me. What are you doing now? I know you went to U of M.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m back there again,” I said, the lie having bitten me earlier in the night. “Just some grad work in the film department.”

  “Oh, that’s great! That’s so, so great! Are you making films, Abby? I always thought that you’d make films.”

  “Some,” I heard myself say. “But not many, yet. Just some experimental stuff.”

  You smiled fully now, looking straight at me. It wasn’t a mistake. It was there—an unmistakable cord of energy running between us, strong and solid as a rope. I was certain you felt it, too.

  “Oh, you’ll be working on real films soon, I know you will. I always had faith in you.”

  Your hand was still on mine. You squeezed it. And then, as if a sheet had been lifted, the scene was revealed. We were in my dream, positioned on the loveseat. The table lamp was beside us, with its base of brass snakes. There was the orchid. I glanced up and saw on the wall above us the cardinals, the watercolor desert tents. Your figure was starred with beads, mine sheathed in violet and black, split by the white stripe like a dagger. I blinked, and when my eyelids lifted, you were still there, watching my face as if waiting for me to say it.

  And so I told you about the dream. The swirling buttons on the phone, the alleys of the city, the stone manor and the ivy. When I reached the moment when you opened the door, our rapturous dream meeting, I saw what I thought was an affirmative glint in your eye. You knew. Your hand still squeezed my hand, and your eyes shifted between my eyes. I finished my description—the loveseat, the lamp, the cardinals—and gestured to the scene around us. You blinked and nodded your head. My heart beat violently.

  “That’s amazing, Abby. So amazing.”

  I waited for you to tell me that you’d had the same dream, that we had, in fact, dreamed it together. But the intensity in your gaze was gone, and your eyes lost focus. You released my hand and touched the side table, the brass lamp. You were drifting away.

  Suddenly, you turned back to me. “Listen, Abby, if you’re ever in L.A. you have to call me. We have to hang out.”

  I breathed in. “I’d like to go there someday.”

  “Here, give me your phone,” you said. You laughed when I handed you my old flip phone, and I watched you type a pattern of numbers, a secret code, like the one in my dream. “You just have to promise to keep the number to yourself, okay? I’ve already had to change it twice.”

  We stood, and you touched my shoulder, balanced yourself. You stared at me, and with what seemed to be intense concentration, carefully articulated, “Abby, do you remember what I wrote in your yearbook?”

  I tried to speak—Yes, I remember. I still love you—but the words couldn’t penetrate the fleece in my brain.

  “I really meant it,” you slurred. “I hope we can be close again someday.”

  For a stretched moment we stood there, boxed in with the anarchic floral wallpaper. For that moment, it became the setting of a Perren film—springing from the director’s imagination and mine together, with you cast in the lead role, fully costumed and sensuously available to my slow, loving scrutiny—before the film spun and sputtered. “Abby,” I heard Christy call as she came into the room. “The building’s closing.” She pulled me away from you, into the careening carnival night.

  The day after the reunion, my family sat for Thanksgiving dinner. I slumped in my chair as the tide of alcohol receded in my blood and a tiny metronome clicked in the pith of my brain. The wonderland of the previous night been abruptly demolished, and rather than ensconced with you on the loveseat, I was wedged between my parents at the old Formica table with grime beneath the metal lip. In lieu of a turkey, a rotisserie chicken squatted on a Corelle plate. My father mumbled a blessing. At the end, my mother spoke up, as if to an audience.

  “And, Lord, thank you for watching over our daughter for us. We’re thankful that Abby is safe.”

  “Amen,” my father muttered and began to dismember the chicken. “You said you’d call if you’d be home after midnight. I’m sure you can understand your mother’s concern, given the history.”

  “Abby,” my mother said. “We’d like you to consider going back to Dr. Miller.”

  I coughed. “What about Shelby?”

  “What about her?”

  “Why aren’t you worried about her? Why don’t you thank God for keeping her safe?”

  “Let’s not ruin the dinner, please.”

  I looked at her. “Thank you, God, for keeping my sister alive and out of jail.”

  “Amen,” my mother murmured.

  The metronome in my skull grew louder, painful, striking a tender panel of tissue. I sat still in my chair. If I didn’t move or speak, if I didn’t feed it, it would die out. I stared at my chicken. My father’s icy eyes watched me as he ate, but finally he excused himself from the table and put his dish in the sink for somebody else to wash.

  Shelby had looked in on me the night she left home. It was something she used to do when I was small, opening the door a crack and smiling at me in my bed where I lay in the light from my strawberry lamp. “Good night, sugarplum,” she used to say, and I’d always loved that her heart-shaped face was the last thing I saw before sleep. She stopped doing it at some point. Whatever affection she’d had toward me cooled as I’d morphed from child to adolescent. Eventually, I stopped caring. But that last night at home, she’d opened the door and peered in. “What are you doing?” I asked. She’d grinned and said, “Good night, sugarplum,” and I knew what she was doing. Her voice still sounded in my ear sometimes, lilting and sarcastic, the sound of failure.

  We’d never been close the way sisters are supposed to be close. With just eighteen months between us, we looked so much alike that strangers asked if we were twins, which annoyed us both. We were axiomatically incompatible. She’d come out hard and blustery with a love of the physical. I was a morose thing who agreeably lost at running races, stood stiffly in the jewelry she draped on me, didn’t scream when she stole my things. When she raged, I shut down, retreated to my room, and closed the door. This just made her angrier—until she finally stopped bothering with me and found her dramas outside the house.

  I never forgave my sister for her choices, but maybe they weren’t her fault. She lacked discipline and imagination. She was destined to follow the code written in her genes—bad men, drugs, vagrancy. When she left our worn neighborhood with its chain-link fences and barking dogs, it was for a place called Hesperia just a couple of hours north. I couldn’t imagine this new town was much better, though I’d never visited her and didn’t plan to. There was a different story in my blood.

  After Shelby’s departure, there was a noxious silence in the house. As difficult as she’d been, at least my parents had understood her. They operated on the same histrionic level. They knew how to fight with her, and had cared enough to do it. The flames in the backyard had looked like a midsummer bonfire on the night Shelby tried to go out in hot pants and a sheer halter top. The neighbors wouldn’t have noticed my father coming outside with armfuls of my sister’s clothing, then going to the garage for a gas can.

  In contrast, I was introverted, dully inscrutable. There was no need for bonfires. Whatever happened inside me stayed inside. My parents may have believed my opacity was something I’d created for myself, and that it shielded me somehow. They assumed I would be all right.

  I had money, but not enough for a plane ticket. I’d been paying for my own groceries those past years, as well as for my art supplies and film collection. It would take weeks, months, to save enough. Logically, of course, I could have packed my things the day after the reunion and flown to you on my parents’ credit card. But I wasn’t in the right state of mind. I had to wait for the surge to come, to lift me off the ground. And so I exhausted the next stupid, agonizing weeks in my bedroom turret. As time passed, the thought of simply calling the number you’d given me—of actu
ally speaking to you again—became an impossible abstraction. I began to doubt that I’d even seen you at all. Maybe our encounter had been a vivid, alcoholic dream.

  It was possible. The walls around my dream life leaked. My night visions were three-dimensional, lavishly detailed scenes, feature-length films. I went through at least three cycles each night that I could remember, and sometimes four or five, one bleeding to the next like orchestral movements. Many of them recurred, again and again, with slight variations. They’d been the engine of my imagination since childhood, and consumed me still. I’d wake with the sharp sense of having experienced them, of having been yanked from a real place. For years, I’d been drawing these dreams from memory. I’d long ago run out of room in the art portfolios beneath my bed and had begun rolling the drawings into poster tubes in the closet.

  Recently, I’d been having the satyr dream with more frequency. In it, you were a professional dancer in a midnight-blue leotard and gossamer skirt, pointe shoes, and a headdress with artificial horn bulbs. You took the stage for an outdoor performance in a wooded clearing. There was a rustic amphitheater with log benches, filled with admirers. You danced with lightness and grace, and the audience stirred. They became more impassioned as the dance continued, standing and jostling to get closer, until finally they stormed the stage. They surrounded you and became satyrs—naked beneath goatskins, with hairy masks and horns, erect phalluses attached. I tried to run, to intercept them, but my legs wouldn’t obey. I watched helplessly from afar as they engulfed you.

  In the daytime, when I wasn’t at Meijer, I was in my bedroom watching Perren films and rereading passages of his book The Rhizome and the Spring. I was intrigued by his references to the Rhizome, his academy in Los Angeles, tucked in the Santa Monica Mountains. It catered mostly to Hollywood types—actors, screenwriters, directors, costume designers—who aspired to enhance their creative abilities and deepen their craft. “We’re all part of the universal Rhizome,” the book said, “which is an infinite, horizontal root that dwells within the Spring, the greater waters of the unconscious, the source of communal imagination. We depend upon the creative nourishment of the Spring the way rhizomatic plants depend upon nutrients from the water. Whenever we sleep, or wakefully turn off our clamoring consciousness, we rejoin the Rhizome, renew contact with the Spring, and open ourselves to powerful images and messages.” There were no photographs of the physical Rhizome campus, but I pictured a Gaudí-like building, florid and organic, embedded in a tropical mountain studded with palm trees.