“So will you?” Nancy calls after my mom. “Will you do mine?”
I was kind of worried Nancy would ditch me tonight, after how things had gone down at Judah’s, but she’d come to my place, just like she’d promised, smoked a little dope on my patio and everything seemed OK between us. Our apartment is small, so from the kitchen I can see through the cracked door to the bathroom, can watch Nancy pluck her arm hairs with the tweezers. She talks to us the whole time and even though she’s used Visine, I can tell she’s still stoned because she’s insistent; she gets stubborn when she’s high. She tells my mom, stop babying her; she can handle the truth about her past.
My mother leans against the stove. Normally, I’d tell Nancy just to shut up, not to provoke, but I’m still not sure she’s forgiven me for being a dumbfuck about Judah so I’m trying to be low-key.
“Can I borrow this lipstick?” Nancy calls. “It’s . . . Sweaty Salmon? I don’t have my contacts in. No. Sweet Melon?”
“Sure,” my mom says, bright as a bee. “And how about, when you’re done, I’ll read your energy. If it seems safe, I’ll do a small session with you.”
“Awesome,” says Nancy. “My grandfather in Poland, whatever, but he was this famous rabbi? I sense this mission, like a real purpose waiting out there for me. Not like a love affair, like Paris or something, but leading, teaching. ” She sticks her head out the bathroom door. Her arms are red and rashy from being plucked and she’s got one eye done in cat eyes. I don’t have the coordination for elaborate makeup. I always end up looking like someone from the women’s shelter, everything runny like a bruise.
My mother closes the oven door. “You can make tartar sauce with mayonnaise and relish,” she says. “Or, wait, no. Maybe that’s for thousand island dressing.”
My mother refuses to regress me. I 90 percent do not believe in it anyway. I 90 percent think her desert experience can be put up to sunstroke and amateur peyote-gathering. I found a notebook she keeps, pages of historical identities. Power issues possible marital trouble. Lorena Barros “You were lucky to be alive. My gun jammed.” Nieves Fernandez Agueda Esteban carried weapons and documents past American invaders. It could have been anything, some transcript of visions she was having, but what it read like, cross marks through certain words, was brainstorming, was her cooking up bullshit to feed the clients.
Some fancy people come to her, people with money. Our apartment is in a good zip code, in a nice brick front building between Coolidge Corner and Cleveland Circle. When my mom was in her protest phase, fighting against that diesel power plant they were trying to build in Mission Hill, she met a lot of liberals from this area, and it was one of them hooked her up with this place. It’s rent-controlled, but in the basement, and has windows only in the back. When spring broke this year, hundreds of carpenter ants emerged to die on our kitchen floor. Still, it has the patio. I’ve been doing my astronomy homework out there, keeping a journal of the phases of the moon. This cracks Nancy up.
“Like, every day, you’re out there? Like on your honor?” How she’d do it would be the night before it’s due. The moon, she points out, you can pretty much extrapolate. It’s not going to one night surprise you and be shaped like a heart. One night, instead of looking like a nail clipping, it’s not going to have a hole punched through its center. I think of my mother in the desert, and I think maybe Nancy is wrong on that. The moon could surprise you if it felt like it.
Later, I munch tepid fish sticks and apply blush to my cheeks while my mother and Nancy sit across from each other at the kitchen table. The lights are dimmed and my mother is playing the Andreas Vollenweider tape, which is New Age harp played by an Austrian with a white man Afro. Harp and Austria and blond curls is a combination that makes my mother swoon and also possibly is evidence that human women evolve into another species after thirty-five.
“Tell me what you feel,” my mom says to Nancy.
“It’s dark,” she goes. “I’m not alone.”
“Not what you see; what you feel, on your skin.”
“Yes,” says Nancy. “It’s very dry. Windy. It smells like—salt? There are two people with me but they’re not—they’re not able to reach each other.”
“No,” says my mother, very suddenly.
“Yes. A desert, but with the sea nearby.”
“Somewhere oriental,” says my mother authoritatively. “With camels maybe? There’s a story about Scheherazade—”
“No,” says Nancy. “Cactus, above the beach. I’m on a cliff. There’s a pool, and then there’s the ocean. I can read something. It says, like, Ne Lif?”
I close the bathroom door, and dip a Q-tip into the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. I am not allowed to bleach my hair, but my mother keeps peroxide because if you eat something poisonous, you can use it as an emetic. Slowly, as the weather warms, I am streaking my hair with it. I will be blonde by summer. If she notices—which I doubt—I’ll blame the sun.
I’m transferring my makeup from my backpack to my purse when I come across the cloud spoon. It’s collected weird dust, but I don’t want to throw it away, so I toss it in with my makeup. I’ll give it to Nancy later, or maybe to Paul.
There’s a cry. I emerge to find my mother and Nancy standing, both of them suddenly awake and scared, looking across the table. And then they look at me.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Nothing,” say my mother and Nancy at the same time, and then the lights come up, and they both are talking maniacally about something none of us care about, and I’m thinking perfect. Just what I need. A secret visionary conspiracy between Nancy and my crazy mother.
My mother drops us off in front of the Belmont School. Boys in polo shirts mill around by the entrance. This is how they do it at private school, like some holdover from another century. You go to school with just girls or just boys, and then you have these occasional contrived social events where three blonde girls who already know the boys from Harvard Club or yachting near Yarmouth dance and the rest of us, the two Jews and the black girl from Randolph and the short chick with the terminal disease, we stand at the edge of the sweaty gym and eat ourselves alive.
Nancy and I find ourselves a side entrance from which we can watch the parking lot, the dance floor barely darkened and still empty behind us.
“When’s he going to be here?” I ask Nancy.
She shrugs. “What do you care?”
Girls from my class are still arriving. Even the fat ones have beautiful legs, have perfect skin. Rich people are like that, great hair, good muscles, high-quality flab. There’s an imbalance of course, because at private school, none of the boys hit puberty until they’re like seventeen. I think it’s tennis, too much tennis, or maybe they get it from alpine skiing. Nancy watches the polo shirts wandering over from study hall as she taps a Prince cigarette from a pack.
“Oh, my G-d,” I say. “You can’t just light up.”
“It’s not my school. What are they going to do, kick me out again?”
“Whitney’s mom is chaperoning and she knows my mom from something. She will absolutely tell.”
“So? Your mother hates me already. I thought it was going to be cool, the regression, but she was just spewing generic bullshit. She insisted I was some Christian imperialist, leading a crusade. As if. As if I would make Bedouins worship a guy who rose from the dead.”
“Think of it like performance, maybe. She’s got limited shticks. You’re just not the intended audience.”
“At least it was for a cause, something like a belief.” Nancy inhales. “I could see myself in Lesotho. That I would have bought. But in the reading, the place I saw wasn’t Africa, or the Middle East. To be honest, I don’t think it was even the past.”
“Possibly, was it a kitchen? In Brookline, Massachusetts?”
Nancy stubs her Prince. “Totally. Total horseshit. Are there like refreshments or anything?”
The DJ is playing INXS, which I like, and Nancy kind of dances on her way to food
. There’s a plastic bowl of potato chips, another one of cheese puffs and someone has fixed a punch. Private school boys watch her. Whatever she has that guys like Judah like, it works here, too.
“Douches,” says Nancy through a mouthful of Lays. “Total fucking douches.”
A horn honks and Paul pulls through the prep school gates in Nancy’s Escort. He is a fantastically bad driver and can’t handle stick, but he’s been with the tow truck guys all afternoon and this makes him an automotive expert. He grinds the gears. I see alarm in the crowd of Lilly Pullitzer chaperones; ChapSticked lips purse; white loafers begin to march down the path toward the skinny half-Asian boy in the dented American compact.
Nancy and I jog, light in our pumps, miniskirts straining. Probably, Nancy tells me between huffed breaths, he rode the clutch the whole way here, but she’s fine with it, fine with ruining her first car. Her parents deserve to buy her a new transmission, after what they’ve put her through. Paul shoves over when he sees us running. Among all the people we know, Nancy is indisputably the best driver, will always pilot her own getaway car.
A mom in a pair of pedal pushers with a perfect pageboy is hard on our heels.
“Girls? Excuse me? Can I see your permission form?”
I hop into the middle back seat and lean forward.
Nancy smiles gigantically and gives the chaperone the finger and Paul is packing a bowl, and the engine guns.
“Shit,” I say, ducking down. “Shit, shit, shit.”
We peel away from the Belmont School, away from the teachers with the Smith BAs and the boys with dermatology skin and the yacht club girls and we three head off into the June night.
“Shit,” I say again.
“How about thank you,” Nancy says. “How about I ate your fucked up fish sticks, and had to waste nine minutes of my beautiful life on these prep school twerps just to spring you for the night, my dear beloved friend.”
“You ate the fish sticks?”
Between the mirror and my peripheral vision, I can see Paul in sharp detail, the razor nick where his neck meets his hairline, the faint gloss of pomade. He has particular coloring, not Caucasian, but not quite brown either. He wears a single, thick ring around his index finger. I lean between them, smell curry. Nancy doesn’t like spice, so this must be Paul. I think of sitting on the window seat in Andi’s room, of everything that felt like it could have happened with Judah. It feels like some credential I’ve gained, but there’s no way to transmit it to the people in the front seat, and so instead I am a freak who is weirdly sniffing things.
It’s an interesting question, are Paul and I friends. We hang out together all the time, but it’s never been the two of us, never just the two of us alone. What you notice about Paul are the things you’d notice about a girl, wrists and ankles and knees and hipbones. His every gesture is both elegant and awkward, like a water bird unfolding its jointed leg. Dark hair, large generous features, golden eyes.
“Actually,” continues Nancy, “in a weird way, I like your mom. I mean, she gives a shit, and she isn’t fake, but she’s also not at all normal. I don’t care if she hates me, but for you, you need to stop letting her control you.”
“She doesn’t control me,” I say. “You don’t understand. My mom—it’s just about what’s easier. It’s just about how much of a mess it is if I go against her.”
“Whatever,” says Nancy. “Sorry if I’m trying to save your life.”
“My mother gets like that,” says Paul. “Needy, needs me to make her feel OK.”
“See?” I tell Nancy.
“Yeah, but he tells her to go fuck herself and leaves before the hysterics start.”
He smiles. “You gotta be willing to tell your mom to fuck off.”
A thing about Paul I know from Nancy: he still has his Bar Mitzvah money saved. He’s going to use it to go to Europe and see the Globe Theater and real Commedia and Moliere in Paris. Another thing I know, even if he never told me: Paul wasn’t really out of cigarettes when he came to Nancy’s window and it wasn’t really about being cold.
The fight with his dad was about Hebrew School, Hebrew School versus Chinese School and which Paul should drop.
“Which do you like better?” Nancy asked.
“They both suck,” he’d said. “Seriously, what’s wrong with Spanish? Twenty-five percent of the people in this country speak Spanish.”
Objectively, the father was the bigger asshole. The jokes Frank Greene made were usually about Paul, about how lazy he was, what a druggie, although Frank liked sex and race jokes, too, jokes with slurs no one used anymore. You’d laugh at the first two, Nancy said, and then keep laughing even though the jokes had crossed a line.
Paul’s dad was smart, had almost gotten his PhD in geophysics, then ended up the slumlord of these fucked up brownstones. On all the deeds, in everything he ever signed, he listed himself as Dr. Greene, despite the fact that that was fraudulent. His tenants were always complaining about the heat being set at sixty-four, about the bare drywall and half-finished repairs.
Paul’s mother was a lawyer, still filing briefs and challenges to the original custody agreement hammered out in the Mass courts in 1980. Everything was split evenly, but there was always something new to divide, always some perceived unfairness. This was why, Nancy explained to me later, Paul couldn’t just go to his mom’s when he was locked out. Even when Paul was high as Jesus, he remembered which house he was due at; he never messed that up.
Nancy shook her head. “We’re all just waiting this out. Two years. That’s the thing we have to get through.”
Paul, now, from the passenger seat of Nancy’s Escort, fills us in on the afternoon. The tow truck guys brought the repaired car to his place, and they’d showed him how to give it an oil change. Wiper fluid’s topped off, too.
“Nice.” Nancy runs her hand over the dash as if she can feel the mysterious engineering beneath, can appreciate the workmanship.
“You owe me,” says Paul, and Nancy nods, and I know it’s not about the oil or the fluid. Paul touches the bruise on his wrist, and I see that it has the shape of fingers, of someone’s fingers trying to hold him or pull him.
We kick around. There’s a rent party later, but before, there’s just time.
“I hope he’s not there,” says Nancy.
“Who, Judah?” Paul asks.
“No. Nothing. No one,” says Nancy.
Paul punches the lighter and lowers the volume on the radio as the weatherman comes on. The storm has made landfall in Florida. Here, it’s still just a darker cast to the sky here, just what feels like an earlier and weirder coming of night. We’re on Memorial Drive, windows cracked, Nancy and Paul barely audible over the rushing air. They gossip about people I barely know, the tow truck guys, and the girl who lives in the Fenway apartments.
“I heard it was an explosion, like some giant chemical explosion.”
“Naw. It was a drug thing, a revenge thing from smugglers who were trying to get him into the country.”
“What kind of drugs come from Russia? Drugs come from South America.”
“Let’s just go by the Fens,” says Paul. “Let’s just see if anyone over there has good ID.”
Waiting for the light, Nancy stares at herself in the side view mirror. “I’m on a diet. Seriously, no more cookies.”
We head back toward Cleveland Circle, and I watch the minute hand on my watch, trying to keep myself from falling silent for too long. Nancy makes us check the parking lot again for the tow trucks, then we head over to the one with a wife’s house and do the whole circuit again.
“Man-slut,” Nancy is saying. “A lot of guys are just man-sluts, and they’ll just take anything they think they can get. They’re not, like, discerning, and girls always think it means something.”
It’s eleven, and we’re in Boston, somewhere between Chinatown and the South End. It’s not a part of the city I know. Nancy stops at a payphone so I can check in with home.
�
��The dance was the usual,” I tell my mom. “I’m not the type. Those boys aren’t into me. This one guy, but whatever. Nothing’s going to happen.”
My mom tells me to thank Nancy’s parents for driving me and putting me up, and reminds me not to eat too much of their food. I’m meant to be sleeping at Nancy’s, but her parents go to bed early and never check up, so we’re basically free after nine. Nancy puts on more eyeliner in the visor mirror and reglosses her lips. Paul prerolls a joint and stashes it in his box of Princes, tucks the rest of the weed and his pipe under the seat. He’s been smoking all night, but Nancy tries to stay sober if she’s driving.
There’s a thing where we eye each other, where we each kind of look each other over, but no one says anything. We’re a little out of our league, here. This party is a little too cool for us. Paul’s the one of us who might know some of these people, and now he’s walking ahead like he’d rather be seen with anyone else, as if he were in a band instead of beardless and girl-pretty and sixteen. We can hear the music as we enter the side door of the warehouse building. We follow the sound up the concrete stairs. There’s a girl with a studded bomber jacket and a guy in a red Mohawk and a kid puking. We step over the vomit, the cigarettes mashed into the ground. I’m clutching my five-dollar cover. Then, suddenly, I’m like, I think it’s going to be OK. I look skinny in my shadow, pointed in all the right ways and I recognize the song coming from the loft party. It’s the Lemonheads, and Nancy takes my hand and pulls me and Paul up the stairs, and we’re already dancing as we pay the bouncer, already inside with the noise and the pink lights and the crazy motion of so many bodies.
“I have to tell you something,” I say to Nancy.
“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t say anything. You’ve got to stop thinking it’s boyfriend and girlfriend and over the rainbow. I’m saying this because you need to be educated, Mellie.”
“Are you still pissed about this afternoon?”
“I don’t even remember this afternoon. I’m saying, learn to do something with your face.”
The Likely World Page 6