by Susan Choi
“Don’t you want to know how you come off in it? Don’t you want to see how she depicts you?” Karen asked.
“It’s not me. It’s fiction.”
“My turn to call bullshit. That whole thing about fiction not being the truth is a lie.”
“So I’m guessing you read it.”
It made no difference to this conversation that Karen had read only half. The point was that disciplined Karen had failed to resist, while impulsive David had succeeded. “Of course I did,” she snapped. “I’m still shocked that you didn’t.”
“And how did you come off in it? How are you depicted?”
You’ll be surprised that she had no immediate answer. She herself was surprised. All those years of work naming her feelings, climbing down the dictionary definition’s ladder into the dark dusty tomb of a word’s origin, yet she couldn’t lay hold of one word to give David. “Incompletely,” she said after so long a pause David must have forgotten the question. He laughed with too much amusement, as if she’d been witty.
That night in the Mexican restaurant-caravansary Karen told Sarah about David’s manic campaigns on behalf of her book, which she hadn’t intended to do. As already stated Karen hadn’t known, arriving that night at Skylight Books, what exactly she would do, apart from stimulate herself with the reunion and respond accordingly. Still, much as she hadn’t known what she would do, there were things she’d felt sure she would not do. She certainly wouldn’t stoke Sarah’s belief in the superior dramatic arc of her life by describing David’s manic devotion to publicizing her book. Yet no sooner had they agreed that Sarah would be Karen’s dresser than Karen said, “I think it’ll mean a lot to David that you’re involved in one of his shows. He was so excited when your book came out, he acted like it was his child. He got it put on the CAPA marquee.”
“He did?” Sarah said, looking queasy. Another item on her list of crazy things that had happened to her on her book tour: unwanted proof that this place that she’d written about actually existed.
“‘READ the critically acclaimed novel by a CAPA alum, available at bookstores everywhere!’ Yeah, he went all out. He didn’t tell you? I would have thought he’d have written to you.”
“I had no idea. No, I never heard from him. I was hoping I would.” This did not sound convincing.
“You could have written to him.”
Sarah grimaced like a child. She was certainly drunk, her anxiety and illogical pleasure burning brightly in her cheeks. She dreaded to hear about David but longed to hear more about David’s devotion. “Scared,” she said, in a little-girl voice, of the prospect of writing to David.
Karen gave her a don’t-be-silly look. “Why?”
“That maybe the book pissed him off.”
What could have? The book’s revisions and excisions seemed designed to spare David’s feelings. But Karen didn’t say this, let alone reveal that David had not even read it. “Are you kidding? He’s so proud to be a fictional character.”
“So he liked it?”
“He loved it. If there was anything he didn’t like about it, it’s that you didn’t write about him even more.”
Sarah’s laughter trailed off; there was no more evading the subject. “And what about you?”
“Me?”
“I worried that it might have felt weird to you, reading that book. Too familiar.”
“You worried about that?” said Karen, in tones of amazement. “Did you really?”
“I did. I mean, I do. I mean, I’m worried right now.” Nervous laughter erupted from Sarah again.
“Well, it didn’t feel at all familiar. I mean, you changed a lot. Wouldn’t you say? If you were worried that I’d recognize myself in your book, I didn’t.” Did Karen here lie, by omitting some facts? She merely spoke literally. I’ve said I recognized myself in Sarah’s story easily: recognized as in “identified” myself. I didn’t recognize to “acknowledge validity of.” I didn’t recognize to “accept.”
Sarah failed to recognize the kind of recognition I meant, as I knew that she would. Sarah’s face bloomed with relief. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am,” she said.
* * *
MEANWHILE, AMONG the girls, surprisingly it had not been Joelle’s house but Karen Wurtzel’s that became the headquarters. Notice how, unique among all the CAPA kids, all the English kids, and even in contrast to Martin and Liam, Karen gets a last name. An ugly one, that sounds like German food. It has the effect in the story of making her seem unfamiliar and distant, not invited to the party. Aside from “Wurtzel,” though, the sentence mostly is true, with some lies of omission, like the bulk of what Sarah has written. Likely it matters to no one but Karen that it was her own mother who turned their house into a crash pad, not just with permissiveness but a hard-fought campaign. She’d started with Karen’s official guest, whose designation, like the others, we won’t bother to change back from Lara, prying her away from Karen with confidences and cigarettes and staying up all night watching TV. Once the other English girls began coming around, the mother we’re fine to call Elli—it captures her well—kept it going by keeping the fridge stocked with wine coolers and cookie dough. Elli doled out advice on love and sex, loaned her makeup, hair accessories, and clothes. Astrological signs were explained. The Tarot was consulted. Soon Karen’s bedroom was hosting a nightly slumber party at which her mother was the guest of honor and Karen the least welcome. Karen went to sleep in Kevin’s room, which earned her the girls’ mockery and contempt. And so Karen took extra shifts at her job after school, set her alarm for extra early in the mornings, was simply gone, disappeared, every time the English girls needed a ride.
Elli tried to smooth it over by driving the girls to school in the morning on her way to her job, but she couldn’t take off work to pick them up when the school day was done. A hodgepodge of people—David, miscellaneous Juniors and Seniors the English girls started going out with, even a creep of a cabdriver Elli strung along who did her countless favors in the hope of getting laid—got the girls from school to wherever they went after school, and from there to Karen’s home at the end of the night. It was a pain in everyone’s collective ass, it pissed everyone off, because Karen with her adequate car could have always driven the girls where they needed to go if she hadn’t been such a sulky hypersensitive bitch.
This was where things stood when Karen, one day toward the end of her shift, came out from the storeroom and saw Martin standing there on the far side of the fluorescent-lit case. She was thoroughly surprised and embarrassed. She had seen plenty of Martin at CAPA but she had never yet spoken to him, marginal as she was, socially unnoticed as she was. She was mortified that Martin should know she spent afternoons here, pumping excrement-resembling fro-yo into stale waffle cones. The previous year, when she’d just turned fifteen, Karen had gone to a “lock-in” at church and made out with a boy who ground his crotch against her bare thigh so hard he abraded her skin, and afterward a girl ridiculed her for having “carpet burn” in the wrong place. That was Karen’s sexual experience to date. Coming out of the storeroom and seeing Martin, Karen assumed he was there by coincidence. She assumed he must like frozen yogurt. When he said he was there to see her, she might have literally let her mouth hang open from shock. But then, all was made clear. “The girls put me up to speaking to you, about how you won’t give them rides,” he said. Karen hadn’t even finished flushing with confused pleasure that he was there to see her when all her blood had to change gears and instead flush with angry humiliation.
But then he yanked the lever in the other direction. “I told them to sod off. You’re not their bloody chauffeur. I told them, ‘If you can’t even stay in the houses where you were assigned, you can’t throw a fit about not getting rides.’”
“You said that?” exclaimed Karen.
“I very nearly didn’t bring them on this trip. Should’ve known they’d be terrible guests. So this is your country’s best yogurt, is it? Should I try some?”
> Just like that he brushed off the girls and put himself on her side. Karen served him a cone of the fro-yo, which she had subsisted on her first weeks on the job and which now made her gag even when she just smelled it. She waved him off when he tried to pay for it. By now her co-worker had come from the back, tying his apron in place. Her shift was over. “How did you get here?” she asked when they walked out together. He’d already finished the cone. The crumbly little strip mall parking lot was empty apart from her own and her co-worker’s cars.
“I walked.” Martin shrugged.
“You walked? Nobody walks.”
“I did. It took a long time, too. I hope I don’t have to walk back.”
“So now I’m your chauffeur.”
Martin grinned, roguish. “Gives me a clever idea. I’ll tell the girls you can’t drive them because you’ve got to drive me. That way they can’t be angry at you.”
“I don’t care if they’re angry at me,” Karen lied.
“But I care.”
Skip ahead. Imagine Karen made witty, by the attention of this witty man who assumes that she somehow is witty, like him. And she is! Or at least, with him, believes herself to be. Imagine the driving around. Day after day there are hours and hours of driving around. Avoiding the vengeful girls, her outmaneuvered mother, is a game they automatically win, just by forming a team. Karen shows Martin all the places in her town she thinks are special. Martin does not make her feel naïve at her failure to notice that every one of these places is located in a corporate park. It’s that kind of town, possessed of only artificial beauty, manmade “ponds” spanned by poured-concrete bridges underneath which the water glows a blinding ghastly green from spotlights magically submerged but somehow not electrocuting the resident ducks. Topiaries cut into the shapes of the letters which spell out the name of the multinational conglomerate whose headquarters are surrounded by these hedges and ponds cast impenetrable shadows on the closely clipped, comfortable grass. Overhead, at the top of the corporate tower, a beacon swings in circles, all night long, as if there were a coast somewhere within a thousand miles, and ships to warn. Beneath Martin’s body, Karen’s body comes alive the way it never has before, not at the “lock-in” when the boy scraped the skin off her thigh with his denim-clad hard-on, not under the covers while reading the dirty parts in The Thorn Birds and poking herself. Possibly it would have made no difference if it had been Martin or if it had been her yogurt-place co-worker whose name history fails to preserve. Possibly first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached. Martin, retrospection shows us, was scrawny, smelled and tasted like an ashtray, and had yellow nails, yellow teeth, and yellowish whites-of-the-eyes. Inside his underpants, where Karen’s hand was urged, a single clammy mushroom thrived. Even in the nearly total darkness of the topiary shadows, Martin’s penis seemed unwholesomely pale and wet. But this was love, a crazy clamor to receive recognition. Did it matter that the person who unleashed Karen’s floodgates was much older—even older than she knew? Did it matter that he was a liar? Did it matter that he had practice, and she had none? Did it matter that after he opened Karen’s floodgates Karen’s “lake, river, reservoir, etc.” never refilled, to stick with the floodgates metaphor? Karen has thought about this, believe her. She knows she’s not a special kind of victim, for having gotten shown the ropes by a much older man who, it turned out, did not care about her. She knows this is perfectly common; just look at all the stories/plays/movies about it. She wanted him. In her ignorance and inexperience she thought he was handsome, worldly, earnest, and reliable, and now, with her knowledge and experience, she can see that he was ugly, provincial, duplicitous, and untrustworthy; even cruel. The fact remains that she wanted him. Her wanting him means that she chose. She doesn’t have a case here, she’s fully aware; this would be why she’s kept her mouth shut and kept her problem to herself. Martin’s “witch hunt” is made up of women who insist they have a case, but what’s different about them, exactly? Karen’s attitude toward them is violently mixed. She might defend them to David, but in her bowels she scorns them, these young women who made a bad judgment and now want to blame someone else.
In Sarah’s story, Karen and Sarah barely know each other. Sarah winds up in Karen’s car, Karen’s home, and even Karen’s mother’s bed essentially by accident. In the ethics of friendship this means that she owes Karen nothing, because they’re not friends; but in reality, as already revealed, this wasn’t the case. They were friends. Sarah was the best friend Karen ever had, while Karen was, at the time, the only friend Sarah had with a car, not to suggest this was Sarah’s reason for maintaining the friendship. In Sarah’s story Karen resents Sarah’s involvement with Liam, regarding it as an intrusion. There is likely some psychological truth to this. Girls are complicated. They rarely love each other without also hating each other. They often react to differences of situation with envy even if the difference, the thing their girlfriend has that they don’t, is a thing they never wanted in the first place. When Sarah began dating Liam—the way it really happened being so much simpler and more inevitable than the way it unfolds in Sarah’s story, because Sarah and Karen were always together, and Martin and Liam were always together, so that Sarah was almost obligated to get together with Liam once Karen was together with Martin—Karen did suffer a pang. Liam was, at a glance, better looking than Martin. And Sarah always had some intrigue or several, while Karen never had any. But the pang was fleeting. First of all, Liam was not so good-looking as Sarah’s story suggests. It’s true he had nice eyes and interesting bone structure. But his teeth were bad, as all their teeth were bad, and his Adam’s apple stuck out too much. As depicted in fiction he had a very weird vibe. In the matter of Liam’s weird vibe please refer back to Sarah. On this point she’s flawless, unsparing, she practically admits that Liam was a rebound/placeholder because her more prestigious/precocious intrigues had collapsed. So Karen suffered a pang, because she’d enjoyed, briefly, being the one with intrigue, but the pang didn’t just pass, it was wiped out, erased, by the greater pleasure of this best-girlfriends-double-dating situation. Not just willingly but happily did Karen drive herself and Martin, Sarah and Liam, around in her car. Not just willingly but happily did Karen, with Martin, watch Sarah, with Liam, saunter off into the topiary shadows of the corporate park.
As they drive home their last night from the corporate park Karen’s outfit is ruined by grass stains and her vision is blinded by tears. In the morning, without the originally planned school assembly featuring the principal you’ve met as Mrs. Laytner thanking them for “sharing their art across oceans,” the English People will finally leave. Mr. Kingsley will put them into three taxicabs and send them off to the airport without so much as a wave, though he might produce his tight-lipped, white-lipped smile. Parked outside Mr. Kingsley’s house on this departure eve, Martin hugs Karen’s head in his arms and strokes her hair with his nicotine-stained fingertips and says, “Oh, my sweet girl.” This romantic comment remains a landmark of Karen’s sexual life. The next day Karen and Sarah, conscious of their tragedy, skip school. Instead they go to a US passport office downtown. Because they are sixteen years old, “parental awareness” of their passport applications is “required” but incredibly easy to fake, far easier than faking the credentials for buying a beer. What a strange, neither-here-nor-there position for the government to take. Karen’s mother isn’t just aware of Karen’s plans, she’s ecstatic. She almost ruins it for Karen with her excitement. Sarah’s mother is the opposite of ecstatic but we’ve mentioned this already. Sarah pays for her own ticket, Karen’s mother helps Karen with hers, warning her to keep this escapade a secret from her father. Departure is six weeks away, as soon as the school year ends. In that time Sarah receives letters from Liam almost every other day. The letters are enthusiastic and stupid, like the letters of a dog. They sprawl across pages and pages, detailing such events as a car driving into a hedge and the driver having to climb out the back door because the f
ront door was stuck on a branch. When not detailing such incidents the letters natter on about how pretty Sarah is and how much Liam is dying for their reunion. With each new letter Karen can see Sarah’s interest in Liam declining further. Even Karen, who initially scoured the letters for mentions of Martin, can’t bear to skim them anymore. Meanwhile Karen receives very occasional, jocular postcards from Martin that don’t seem to track with her letters to him although it’s clear he’s received them. “Hi there, Karen! Thanks for the tape. Super mix. How’s everybody in the US of A?”
In the days leading up to their flight, Sarah lives with Karen. She says her mother’s kicked her out, although Karen doubts it. Given Sarah’s mother’s disability it’s easier for Karen to believe that Sarah simply walked away. Sarah’s mother calls the house constantly, Elli pulls the phone into her bedroom and closes the door but Karen doesn’t need to hear to know what’s being said. Elli is playing the fellow adult, commiserating with Sarah’s mother about how stubborn girls are, promising Sarah’s mother she’ll bring Sarah around. As soon as Elli hangs up the phone she forgets all about Sarah’s mother until the next time the phone rings. All Elli cares about is helping them pack. She calls in sick to her receptionist job at a realtor’s office to take them shopping for the things they still need. One good scarf: they should both have one really pretty silk scarf to tie their hair back or to tie around their necks. Karen has never in her life worn a pretty silk scarf. And one cute light jacket, because it gets cold there, it’s not like here, remember when the English People brought all the wrong clothes? By one cute light jacket Elli doesn’t mean Karen’s ratty jean jacket, she means something like Sarah’s man’s blazer with the maroon silk lining that shows when you roll up the sleeves. Sarah has a vintage style that Elli adores; for hours Sarah and Elli try on Sarah’s clothes, put together different outfits, weigh the advantages of one item over another, the blazer, the old-man cardigan, the plaid kilt, the funky khakis from the Army Navy store. Just one suitcase, girls: sophisticated travelers travel light. Elli has never been out of the country. It’s possible she’s never traveled on a plane. Karen doesn’t know where Elli’s gotten these rules about silk scarves and traveling light. Karen herself has never been on a plane. Right after her parents first got divorced, Sarah flew to see her father a few times before he disappeared for good. “All by yourself?” Elli cries.