“Guys,” I say, but it’s soft, and I’m facing away, and neither of them notices. On television, wind blows through the palm trees. Waves crash to shore. The reporter wears his studio face, as if none of it is happening.
I try not to be a total freak. I imagine I am driving around, like everything in this basement is passing by a car window, so I can watch and not watch at the same time. The scene on the sofa should be instructive, but also, it seems like Nancy must be doing it wrong. Sex stuff shouldn’t look like flattening pizza.
I stand and fiddle with the rabbit ears. It’s still the storm, how the tropical depression that has moved up the coast from Haiti seems to be reforming in the Atlantic. The weatherman is Puerto Rican, which my mom mentions about him every time he comes on. She is once again without a job, once again at home during the day, so there are many opportunities for her to promote tolerance by watching other cultures on TV.
I can’t help it; I have to turn. Nancy is facing away from me, on his lap, skirt up around her waist. A thing I know about Nancy is that she has only had actual sex, like intercourse sex, seven times but it seems possible this is what she is doing, right here. With me in the room. She looks ugly, I think, her t-shirt rolling up over her back fat. He isn’t even looking at her. He’s looking at me. Has he been watching me the whole time? Staring at my hunched shoulders and my butt which is too big for the size of my waist? Or have his eyes only now focused on me, as he releases a shuddering sigh. His hand twitches like it wants to pull me into the sticky thing on the sofa. I’m ugly. I’m the ugly slut. He smiles, dopy, colluding, and not at all ashamed.
Someone is banging on the bulkhead. Nancy and Judah pull apart, guilty, hilarious, Nancy clown-mouthed with her own smeared lipstick.
Then it is Paul coming down the stairs. The light is behind him, wavery afternoon sunlight. He blinks, things flickering on his face as the scene below clarifies for him.
“Nice,” he says, to the room.
“Hi, twat,” says Nancy and she and Judah begin to laugh, the sound forced and still sticky with the thing that was in the room a second before.
“Nancy,” he says. “Are you coming?”
“Why?” She slides off of Judah’s lap. “What for?”
“The guys are ready to get your car.” Paul is slimmer than Judah, a little darker. Like me, he’s a half-Jew, but his other half is Chinese. He is not man-beautiful, his long skinniness, his fingers which go white in the cold, but if someone liked him, it wouldn’t be bad self-esteem.
“What’s up with your car?” Judah asks Nancy.
“We have to tow it to my garage so her parents won’t fuck with it again,” says Paul.
Nancy is still trying to stop laughing. “Sorry. I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”
That’s the thing about Nancy: she can be an asshole, but she’s not a wuss.
“My dad will be home in like an hour,” says Paul. “So, move it.”
“Should I come?” I ask.
Nancy shakes her head as she yanks down her skirt. There’s a stain on it by her right leg. “No room,” she says. “Truck cab. But hang tight. I’ll be back in like fifteen, cool?”
Paul fishes a roach from the ashtray and sparks it before they go. I guess that’s the thing about Paul: it worries him to hide a car from his father, but he doesn’t mind doing it high. Nancy catches me looking and gives me little smile as she smooths her hair. Her lip twitches, her eyebrow, something she thinks she knows about me. But I’m not the one having boredom sex, wearing a stain on my miniskirt.
Then the two of them are gone, and I’m alone with Judah Cohen in the crack house basement.
He looks at me. “You want to see the rest of the house? Andi’s room is pretty cool.”
“Are we allowed up there?” I ask him, but I am absolutely following him.
“Oh,” he says. “Yeah. No one cares.”
The galley kitchen and the TV room are on the first floor. The sofa where the mother was watching TV has been converted to a bed, and by the lump underneath the bright afghan, I assume she’s sleeping. Her TV is still on, warning of storms, but muted.
“Is there anything to eat?” I ask.
“Here? Never. They have takeout or they starve. Mostly, starve.”
On the second floor, it’s like the family ran out of steam, a mattress plunked down in the hall. Milk crates full of dirty dishes and cosmetics. There is no place that might be Judah’s, unless it’s the basement, so maybe he doesn’t live here after all. I find other people’s living arrangements mystifying, even Nancy who’s an only child in a large house. My mother and I live in three rooms just with each other. Every other permutation seems overwhelming.
I follow Judah up the last set of stairs into the tower room. It’s round, with a window seat, which I guess is pretty cool, but otherwise it’s a mess. There’s a sewing machine, length of purple fabric spooling from it, runny lipsticks and stubby eye pencils scattered before a mirror on the carpet. There’s a proper bed, unmade. I wish there weren’t a bed.
“I’m going to sit,” I say. From the window, I can see the edge of the hospital district, the nurses on their way to the second shift. The power plant belches black diesel fumes over the genteel mansions which remain from when this area was still remote from the city. Way beyond, I am now able to make out the White School. When Judah sits beside me, there is a half-inch’s distance between us.
Campaigning in New Hampshire, a woman answered the door without a shirt. It was twenty-six degrees, the White Mountains visible in the distance, and this woman was standing there with not even her arms across her chest, just her stretch-marked breasts and her appendectomy scar and a pair of chinos. It is like that feeling now, like some stranger at any moment could open the door and see your secrets.
“Do you remember,” I say. “At camp—”
“What camp? You were at camp?”
“I guess I was younger. In a younger cabin.”
“What about it?”
“There was a girl who supposedly drowned herself?”
He gives me a quick glance, like am I fucking with him. “She didn’t drown,” he says.
It’s like a skill with me, saying the wrong thing. It’s like being a genius. “Never mind.”
After a moment, I hear a small sigh escape his lips. “You ever try cloud?”
At first, I think I’ve misheard. “Cloud?”
“It’s new, legal”—he smiles—“even for a politician. Although, someone got a bad batch, with weird additives. The FDA is reviewing it, I guess, but so far, no decision.”
He takes from a cup beside the mattress several spoons with the mouth end covered in Saran Wrap. “But we cook this stuff right here. There’s nothing bad in it. “
He hands two over to me. It is maybe the same thing as they were doing behind the curtain, making these spoons. The next generation will know the cloud of internet purchase, of Lucite boxes and stacks of lozenges separated by squares of Cyrillic newspaper. But the early users sucked cloud off the tip of a plastic spoon. One story will claim the method came from an immigrant way of making Korovka, a sweet, for lunch boxes, that cloud was first made in homes. Another story puts its origin to a lab in Ukraine which was situated next to a plastic cutlery plant. When I meet Judah again, much later in life, he will be interested in other origins, not in how cloud began, but in how it splits your life. But that’s later. For now, I take two of the spoons from the cup and hold them carefully by the plastic end.
I think of Nancy squeezed into a tow truck cab with Paul and I ask what seems like the important question. “Does it get you high?”
He shrugs. “It’s different for different people. But worry is part of it, stopping worrying. It’s like this: you know how you do something dumb, some little thing, and you can’t let go? Aren’t there mistakes where years later, you still cringe when you remember? I saved her, you know. The girl who tried to drown herself, but I’m not sure it was the right kind of saving. That
kind of thing. You know?”
I nod.
“Cloud makes you forget. Not forever. It comes back, but not as bad. Also—” he laughs—“sometimes a little out of order. For some people, forgetting is a kind of high.”
“For you?”
Judah smiles. “I just like drugs. I’m not picky.” He peels the plastic off his spoon. There is a toffee-colored gel underneath that he licks into his mouth and then holds for a few instances, and smiles over his half-clenched teeth. “It absorbs best through the membrane of cheeks. Some people rub it on the gums, but I think, just savoring it in the mouth is enough.” He holds the cloud, and holds it and holds it. And then, he swallows—
—pop—
—he leans back, holding his spoon in his teeth, and drops his hand. Our fingers nearly touch on the seat cushion. I am thinking of the thing I witnessed on the sofa downstairs, and it’s still disgusting to me, but also maybe something else too. I watch the distant lacrosse players in their red skirts running across the playing fields.
“So,” he says, “taste?”
I look at Judah. I have a mother who cooks frozen pies and can’t keep a job. I go to the White School and do my homework. I worry too much about too many things. I think: no one can stop this. I think: I am alone, and all I have to do is say yes.
A door slams below us, loud and pissed off. A book bag thunks on the linoleum and then a voice, high and urgent, calls out, “Mama? Mama? Wake up, Mama. Did you have your medicine?”
I am still holding the spoon. For a moment, I hesitate, and then I tuck the unlicked spoon into my bag, and I follow Judah downstairs.
What I’m thinking is that nothing would have happened, that I am a good girl, rich with junior wisdom and adept at responsible choices. But in the hours and days that follow, I will find myself returning to the image of the spoon, to Judah’s lips closing over the gel. What if the afternoon had stretched out? It is as if his first offer primes me somehow, as if being in the room with cloud teaches my body to anticipate the drug’s power, breaks down my resistance. I know a new kind of thirst. It is like how it happened when Nancy hooked up with a boy for the first time. She said, “I might not do it again.” “Bullshit,” I told her. “Now you know. It’s harder to say no once you know what you are saying no to.” I will remember the fog in Judah’s eyes, the recognition returning, and I will want to give cloud my worry.
The woman Nancy and I had seen through the window before now stands in the hallway of the condominium, assessing a handful of blue pills. Andi, the daughter, is in the galley kitchen, smoking a clove. She’s pretty, prettier than Nancy described, but small like a kid, like she’s twelve years old. Still, if it was just her face, eyeliner and freckles, you’d think she was our age.
“Seriously, fucker,” the girl is saying to Judah. “You want to have girls here? You want to get high?” She ignores us as we file past.
“I know,” says Judah. “I really do.”
There is the sound of a flush, a light flicking off, and Nancy emerges through the bathroom door with a bright smile and the eighth. I observe a wet patch on her skirt where’s she’s splashed water from the sink to blot out the stain. She grabs my hand. “Time to go. Get your stuff. It’s time to go.”
Judah spares us a glance, apology in it, but doesn’t stir to see us out. “Later, little Nancy,” Judah calls. Through it all, he’s forgotten to zip up his pants.
“Definitely.” Nancy delivers him her bullshit smile.
We reach the door. My own face is backlit, washed of detail like the early New England twilight framed behind us. Everything inside that house feels richer and more real than we are, like a soap opera without all the acting. I think of the spoon in my backpack, my fingers nearly touching Judah’s on the sofa, and I feel like I’ve taken something of the afternoon with me. I walk into the evening, steady pace. No need to run anywhere.
“Paul didn’t come back with you?” I ask. But Nancy is already ten paces ahead of me.
“Walk faster,” Nancy calls over her shoulder. “I’m famished.”
On the bridge that links the J-way to Route 9, I reach her side. She rubs the spot on her skirt, and I think of Judah’s fingers on the window, the circuit between us. A confession moves into my mouth. And it’s only because of that, because I can barely keep from telling her, that I ask her the dumb as dirt question instead.
“So, you and Judah? Are you like together now?” What do I know? I’ve never had a boyfriend, never made out, never kissed except truth or dare.
Nancy kicks a beer tab with her motorcycle boots. Mission Hill, on the other side of the Fens, is behind us, and twelve years earlier during the busing crisis, the riots spilled onto this bridge. Poor kids threw rocks as fancy cars fled toward the suburbs. It was 1975 by the time the North got around to integration and it’s not like nationwide you had a bunch of awesome stories about how desegregation went down, but here, all the rich people had already left the city. Sending students from one shitty Boston school to another shitty Boston school, plus Irish, plus racism—we failed pretty spectacularly. And how it turned out, white guys waving the American flag, mobbing that black lawyer, my mom said, it made you think nothing could be fixed, ever.
We lived on the poorer side of the border before we got our rent-controlled place in Brookline, back up the Hill. We didn’t have much money—but we got checks from my father’s family. We could have lived in Watertown or Arlington. Maybe it was some kind of Irish penance, my mom’s thing of living in a dangerous neighborhood, maybe she was trying to pay back something that had happened in those earlier years. My mom would walk me to my fancy private school, and point out the blocks where rioters had gathered. She has weird beliefs about the past, says that violence is a bloodstain, that its occurrence will always leave a ghost of itself in physical space. Most of that stuff is lunatic, but the imprints I believe in. Maybe the moment before I say that dumb thing to Nancy stays just behind us; maybe me and Nancy are back at the T stop, before she was kicked out of the White School. We’re still twelve years old and waiting for the train to come. Maybe we could rewind to that. But, no. We remain in the here and now: Nancy, sixteen, and grounded from her car, flicks at the moist corner of her eye like I’m not supposed to notice she’s crying. I want to take what I said back. I want to not be stupid, but I can’t.
“I know when to put out, OK?” Nancy says. “It’s a skill I’ve developed.”
“Nancy. I’m sorry. I—G-d, duh—”
“What have you got? What makes you too magical to smoke weed or blow a boy or stay out past eleven? Why are you so fucking precious?”
What have I got? I excel at conjugating French verbs, at compare-and-contrast essays. I can write a killer lab report, but in my after-school existence, nothing of worth. No one is ever going to ask me to dance or kiss my lips or share their box of Entenmann’s with me because I give good graph.
I am studying for a life that will be more like Nancy’s. I am learning about stains that rub out and don’t, how you need to arm yourself for basement rooms and no adults, and things behind curtains. Nancy has her tits, and the ability to ride in the cab of a tow truck, and to look mad when she’s scared. What do I have? Panic, fear, thinking too much, hesitation and doubt. I think about the spoon still tucked in my bag, how the worry eased from Judah’s face when he put it in his mouth. A drug like that, it could smooth you out. All the awkward moments, all the missteps, cloud could fix all the times you got it wrong.
Three
Brookline
2010
Emily meets me early for the Monday meeting. We stand with the others in little clumps behind the church. I can’t help thinking this semicircle of paving was made for the hearses, to bring the corpses to their own funerals, but maybe this is where brides drive their horse and carriages, up to the door, away in a shower of rice. What do I know of church life on weekends? I’m just trying to make it through another day. It’s fifty degrees with occasional gusts—still cold, but
bright and sunny. Since this is Boston, weather like this, none of us have our jackets on. I’m about to get my thirty-day chip.
“You look like crap, though,” says Emily by way of congratulations.
“I was up late. As you may recall.”
“You want to do it how you’ve always done it. Hanging on by the skin. You think you can outsmart it. But willpower isn’t how sober happens. You got to do everything the regular people do. Every damn thing. You understand?” She’s perched on the stone retainer wall, huffing a cigarette.
“I do.”
We’ve got fifteen minutes until the meeting starts, and I know Emily is thinking about last night, whatever was underneath my late-night phone call. She wants to get her sponsoring in. Emily’s taken me on, even though she already has too many sponsees, because of Juni. Emily got helped, when Leo was young, and she says there is something particular about having a baby in the program, how you can’t throw your whole life after recovery, how a part of you needs to stay in reserve.
“You offering to babysit?”
“I’ve done my stitch in the romper room,” she says. “Much as I love your kid. But if you could use a pair of hands, how about your mom? I know she’s wherever, Costa Rica, but planes exist, people fly in—”
“It’s Belize.” I shake my head. “I’m fine, Emily. I’ve got the sitter forty-five hours a week. Juni’s not the problem.”
Emily sucks on her cigarette. “Not now, but you need a plan. I know you hate to talk about it, and I got my own asshole ex, but is it impossible, Juni’s daddy? Or, how about his side, mother? Family?”
“There’s no one,” I say, but I think of the black SUV with white sticker and the Cali plates, the man trying my car door with Juni inside, and I know it’s never clear who’s a friend, who’s a danger.
Emily reminds me that most people never make it this far, that even many of the people hovering by the church entrance won’t be here in six months. Twenty years ago, when it was still legal, you could find people in front of some meetings rolling cloud. I’d see them when I walked past here on my way to the public library, spoons hanging out of their mouths like people drink the coffee now. It was a big thing in the recovery community when they made cloud illegal, a debate, and you’ll still meet people who’ll tell you a cloud addict never shot anyone, who will tell you you can work your program and still eat cloud, but the Monday noon meetings are a good place for people who’ve been through it to come. Once you have lived with cloud for five years, for ten, you learn that it is not benign, that just like any of the other monsters that drive people to church function rooms to tell their stories, cloud wants to eat your life. It wants to take your precious things and turn them into muck, to rot every good thing out of your brain. We’ve barely survived. We are all miraculous.
The Likely World Page 3