“Do you want to go?” I asked, feeling a lump in my throat. I’d been hoping—with thirteen-year-old magical thinking—that if I never mentioned the possibility of them leaving, it might not happen. For the year since the Duncans’ split, Ann had been running herself ragged trying to manage the boys’ schedules as she scrambled to get back into the job market and build a life for herself without her erstwhile husband. With Blair starting to compete in NorAms—meaning he was traveling outside the region to compete against adults—it was becoming impossible. It was alleviated only somewhat by the fact that Blair had turned sixteen and could drive himself to local races and take his brother out to Sun Valley to see their father twice a month. I frequently went along with them and couldn’t help but be impressed by Tad’s chalet, with its giant hot tub, which looked directly out onto the slopes of Baldy.
“Fuuuuck, I don’t know,” Luke said. “I mean the backcountry there is sick. The snow is better. My dad’s all excited about the club there, he says we could quit school. Not like, quit, but get a tutor or whatever so we can just go big, you know? But my mom would be wrecked. And, Bomber, you’d obviously cry your eyes out.” He smiled, and I punched his arm.
“You wish, loser,” I said. “What does Blair say?” Luke had become wilder when their father left—cutting classes, getting caught with a joint on the way back from the Junior Olympics—while Blair had become more stalwart, turning himself inside out to help their mom cope with her sudden single-parent status and taking a more fatherly role with his brother.
Luke shrugged. “He says he’ll go where I go, but I don’t think he wants to leave Mom. God,” he said, suddenly flinging his helmet to the ground. “My dad’s such a dick.”
I felt sick with several things at once: fear that Tad was going to win out and move my best friend eight hours away, dread at being on my own, and deep envy at the idea that Luke and Blair would get to turn their lives over to skiing.
It turned out Luke wouldn’t have to choose. Ann was soon so exhausted that she herself urged them to go to Sun Valley. She went along, renting a condo nearby with Tad’s help. He’d rearranged his life exactly as he’d wanted it. They left the summer before Luke and I would have started high school. I felt completely alone.
That summer, without Luke and Blair, I was adrift. A fourteen-year-old’s idea of the worst-case scenario is pretty limited if she’s lucky, and this was mine. I moped around, and Penny and Emily let me tag along to Sanders Beach and the occasional house party or bonfire, where I shamelessly clung to them.
By that time, Penny’s life revolved around her two main interests: horses and boys. She volunteered three days a week at a local stables with an equine therapy program for children and adults with disabilities. The stables adored her so much, they let her ride the horses anytime she wanted to. Even as a teenager, Penny was a helper, someone whose life was about being there for others.
I visited Penny at the stables every now and then. I liked the horses: they were big and strong and graceful; I felt like they got me. One afternoon, my mom and I arrived early to pick Penny up. She was on the paddock with her favorite charge, Matthew, who suffered from severe cerebral palsy, and I watched as she chatted to him and he smiled sweetly back at her. I knew I’d never have the patience for what she was doing.
“You’re so good with him,” I said to her once she and Matthew had brushed out the pinto he’d been riding and returned her to her stall.
“Matthew’s one of my best buds.” Penny shrugged. I felt guilty that I didn’t understand. But I never questioned Penny’s goodness; it was so evident, ran so deep.
I got my first kiss at CDA High School during my freshman year, and it was a fiasco. As predicted, I’d started to feel differently about boys as adolescence took hold. There was one in particular who caught my eye, Matt Berman, a dreamboat and basketball star in my sister’s year. The crush wouldn’t have amounted to much if I hadn’t gone to a house party with Penny that fall. After summer was over and all of us were back in school, the standing invitation to hang out with Emily and Penny had been rescinded, so whenever I was invited to something, I jumped. Being surrounded by my peers—with whom I had nothing in common—at school all day was only making me lonelier. The party in question was at a basketball player’s house, meaning Matt would be there.
“What are you going to wear, Katie?” Penny wanted to know as I sat back on her bed while she and Emily crowded her vanity mirror, maneuvering their lip liners.
“Oh, um . . . this?” I was in my usual uniform of Dickies and a thermal.
They shook their heads and made me change into a baby tee that showed off my newly arrived bustline, made more impressive once Penny had replaced my sports bra with one of her push-up bras. They took my hair out of its ponytail and added a couple of strategic braids and pulled out tendrils to frame my face. They swiped my lips with gloss in a shade called Rum Raisin.
“I feel weird,” I said, looking in the mirror afterward.
“You look pretty,” Penny said. It was the first time she’d ever said anything like this to me.
“So pretty!” Emily echoed.
I figured I had no chance with Matt. I didn’t know then that a girl’s willingness is its own aphrodisiac. I’m sure I was mortifyingly obvious about my crush; nothing about me has ever been subtle.
We’d been at the party for a while, and I hadn’t seen Penny for half an hour when Matt found me outside getting some air. It was nearly October but the weather was still warm.
“Hey,” Matt said, strolling up to me and handing me a beer. I was stunned; it was as though he’d been looking for me. Had he?
“Hey, Matt,” I said, willing my voice not to trill with excitement. His considerable height made me feel almost dainty. I wondered if this was how other girls felt all the time.
“How’s skiing?” he asked. He knew who I was! I tried to remain calm. The only boys I’d ever really talked to were other skiers, and we talked about skiing, about which runs were good that day, how the snow was, the falls and epic runs. Matt was exotic, from this other high school world I wasn’t really a part of.
“It’s good. I’m hoping to make the U.S. Team next year.” It would be the C Team if anything and it was a long shot, but he didn’t need to know that.
“Damn, Cleary, that’s dope. You’re big-time.” The jocks at my school had a habit of calling everyone by their last name; it would have put some girls off, but it made me feel at home. In my natural environment, I was also Cleary, or Bomber to Luke and Blair.
I asked him how basketball was going, and he rattled off a litany of things he was working on to improve his game and his hopes for college ball. He seemed impressed that I didn’t glaze over. I was relieved; this was my comfort zone. I countered with my take on balance drills.
“It’s hard to believe you’re Penny’s sister,” he said, downing the rest of his beer in one long glug. “You’re so much hotter.”
With this he leaned in and kissed me, his huge hand moving inside my shirt in one swift motion. The thrill and horror hit me simultaneously. First there was the delirious fact of being kissed by Matt Berman, but then there was the insult to my sister, the aggressive grope. I shoved him off me. Hard. He was drunker than I realized, and he stumbled backward dumbly, toppling over. His face went quickly from embarrassment to rage to amusement.
“Oh! Damn,” he said, “You hit like a dude, Cleary. Guys,” he said, hollering to his friends who were several yards away by the firepit, deftly transferring his own embarrassment onto me, something boys like him become adept at early on. “Don’t mess with Manly over here.”
The nickname was neither clever nor accurate—my height had briskly outpaced my weight and, ironically, my main focus with my coach at that point was building muscle—but it didn’t matter. Matt was popular and beloved, and the nickname had the advantage of being perfect for chanting whenever I walked into a room, ensuring that I was greeted with “Man-ly, Man-ly” wherever I went there
after.
That night, all I wanted to do was leave. I searched the house for Penny, feeling disoriented. She’d be fine with leaving early, since her current boyfriend went to another school.
“Emily,” I said, finding her in the kitchen talking to some other girls from her class. She’d always been well-liked, the perfect combination of pretty and nonthreatening, the girl next door.
“Little sis!” she said. Her voice was high and excitable, as it always was when she’d had a beer or two.
“Have you seen Penny? I want to get out of here.” I was trying to hide the fact that I was on the verge of tears. “This party sucks.”
Emily shook her head, “I haven’t seen her in a while, but let me know when you find her and we’ll go. Are you okay?”
I nodded, but the sympathy on her face made my tears spill over. “Fucking boys,” was all I could manage.
“Oh, sissy,” she said, launching herself into my side, under my arm. By that time Emily came up to my shoulder and fit perfectly into the nook of my armpit.
I scoured the house for my sister. No one had cell phones then, only Zack Morris on Saved by the Bell and the occasional city person out for a weekend in CDA.
The party had long since spilled out into the warm night, and I stalked the perimeter, looking for Penny. When I came around the side of the house, I saw two figures barely visible in the shadows. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I was able to make sense of the grotesque tableau. There was Brad Winkle—a senior at CDAH—with his back against the side of the house, head canted back in ecstasy, and, below him, my sister on her knees. I froze in horror for a moment that stretched an eternity before bolting back into the house.
I saw Emily, who had migrated onto the back porch.
“Did you find her?”
I shook my head, plunging my hand into a nearby cooler to retrieve a beer and drink it fast.
Sometime later, Penny appeared on the patio.
“Let’s go,” she said, nonchalantly. “This party sucks. Brad Winkle will not leave me alone tonight. He keeps trying to make out with me. Like, Jesus, I have a boyfriend.”
I hadn’t, thank god, told Emily what I’d seen Penny doing or with whom. In that excruciating moment I was flooded by several things at once: disgust at what I’d seen, confusion about Penny’s lie, but also a deep protectiveness, a desire not to embarrass my sister, not to let her embarrass herself.
We left the party and never spoke of that night again.
Liz Meets the Madman of Belgrano
THE WEEK between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is maddeningly quiet in Buenos Aires. Many of the shops and restaurants are closed, and my Spanish school is on break. Everyone decamps to the beaches in Mar del Plata and Pinamar, or so I’m told. My tour guide duties won’t begin for another week and a half. The normally bustling streets now have only the occasional couple or group of tourists passing by. The emptiness lets my mind fill with memories, and I feel myself hurtling toward a crisis. I call my mom in Idaho.
“Oh, honey, what’s up?” she says, my voice giving me away immediately.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I tell her.
“Do you want to come home?”
“No.” My parents are a comfort, but I can’t face coming home. At least not yet. “I feel like it’s good that I’m here. I just . . . I don’t know. I’m lonely, I guess. I really miss my friends.”
She knows how complicated everything is with Luke and Blair. My mom has always been a chief confidante, but now she’s my only one, which feels somehow unfair to her.
“What about the people in your Spanish classes?”
“They’re all college kids,” I say. “And like three random retirees.”
“Well, I don’t know, honey. I never would have gone to a foreign country by myself, I think you’re so brave. Is there some other way you can meet people your age? What about taking some cooking classes or, I don’t know . . . tango classes?” My mom has always been good at throwing herself into her hobbies, deciding she liked something and swiftly becoming an expert. Our garden had been the most beautiful in the neighborhood growing up, and when their now-ancient German shepherd, Barry, was young, she had trained him to be a search-and-rescue dog.
“Mom, tango?”
“I’m just trying to help.”
“I know you are, I’m sorry. It’s just hard,” I say after a beat. “I feel like I don’t know who I am anymore. And I keep thinking about Penny.”
“I know, sweetie. But you can’t let it define the rest of your life. And it won’t. I promise.”
“I know this sounds crazy, but I just want to call her sometimes. I still haven’t taken her number out of my phone.”
“It’s not crazy,” my mom says. “I feel that way sometimes too.”
I imagine it for a moment, calling the number. Someone might answer, but it would not be my sister.
“Mom.” My voice sounds small as I choke on the question, the one I’ve asked and she’s answered so many times it’s become a call and response, an incantation. My mom is made of steel; neither of us ever deserved her. “Did we do the right thing?”
“Yes, honey. We had no choice.”
The thing about tragedy is that it isn’t about just getting through it, it’s about getting on with your life when the dust has settled but the landscape is bombed out, smoke in the air, charred remains at your feet. On New Year’s Eve, I decide I will take myself to dinner in Belgrano, a neighborhood I haven’t explored yet. I even dress up a little, just a simple jersey dress and some earrings, but it’s something.
Growing up, I’d been peripherally aware that other girls put untold energy into hating their bodies. Even watching Penny and Emily—both a perfectly normal size—I’d become aware that “fat” was not simply a physical state but a state of mind, a feeling, a lens through which all teenage girls seemed to at least occasionally see themselves. Being an athlete and spending most of my time with boys had shielded me—my body had always been a machine to fine-tune and optimize—but that was all gone now. Looking in the long mirror affixed to the wall of my apartment, I feel a mild disgust. All of my abilities, all of my strength, this was my armor, and now I feel gelatinous and weak: permeable. The old me hides in the more abundant shell of the new one: of Liz Sullivan.
Belgrano is one of the more expansive neighborhoods in the city and I take myself on a little walking tour before dinner. I’m still getting used to the fact that no one eats here until 9:00 p.m. In a lush stretch of park—the Barrancas de Belgrano—at the center of the neighborhood, a small band is playing beneath the pergola with people dancing tango around them. The dance really is everywhere in this city; maybe my mom’s right and I should learn it.
I’d never eaten alone in a restaurant before arriving here and it makes me nervous. I find a little place called Aldonza Bar, make my way up a narrow flight of stairs, and take a seat at the bar. I order tapas and a Malbec and people-watch from my perch. There’s a giddy, charged atmosphere; summer has begun, and the New Year approaches. 2010. It was supposed to be another chance at gold. Instead I’m here, marooned in my own life.
I’m conscious of a pair of guys two seats away from me at the bar. They’ve been conspiratorially casting glances at me for the better part of an hour. They look painfully young, and they’re clearly on their way to getting happily shit-faced, but it’s not like I have other plans. Eventually they order three shots instead of two and flag down the bartender.
“For you,” he says in English, my accent having given me away, “from the, uh, gentlemen at the bar.” We’re sitting so close to one another, the whole thing is ridiculous.
“Thanks,” I say. “Cheers!”
They seem thrilled that I’ve taken the bait and jostle over so that they’re sitting right next to me.
“Welcome!” one says, his accent rough.
“You are welcome,” the other one corrects. “We are please to meet you.”
We clink our li
ttle shot glasses together and throw them back. The boys cheer and order another round. I suddenly decide I’m game. Their names are Alberto and Santiago. I don’t remember which is which, and I don’t ask their ages because, frankly, I don’t want to know. They’re going to a party and they tell me I should come.
“The host won’t mind you showing up with someone who wasn’t invited?”
“It’s Edward’s, no one is invited,” says one.
“Which mean,” the other adds, “everyone’s invited!”
“Who is Edward?” I ask, a question that seems to open a Pandora’s box of myth and nonsense. Edward is an aging matador, an American billionaire, an exiled British lord. It quickly becomes clear that my new friends have no idea who Edward is, but they do appear to have his home address. This is all a very dubious plan, but following them still feels like a better option than going home alone. And one of them—Santiago, I believe—is actually pretty cute. And he’s sure to become more so the drunker I get, and what is New Year’s Eve for but alcohol and bad decisions? What is there to stay sober for?
Santiago (I think) takes my hand as we walk the several blocks to Edward’s alleged home. Okay! Santiago, mine for the moment. The sun has just gone down and around us people are dressed up and headed out into the night. There’s a teeming sense of revelry in every direction, a liveliness I’ve been missing this past week. Alberto (I think) studies the piece of paper in his hand, seemingly annoyed that his friend is more interested in flirting than helping him find the place. The houses on the block are large and elegant, their numbers tastefully obscured. The boy hanging off of me is the one with the better English, and as we walk he asks me questions and I tell him a swift river of lies starting with the fake name, that I’m from Texas and a recently retired rodeo cowgirl. Really? Sure. Why not?
We Came Here to Forget Page 5