We stared at each other and then carried on. We took cues from nature. The trees watched indifferently; the sea softly brayed. She didn’t interrogate me. She wiped her mouth and returned to the cabin. After counting to ten, I re-coiled the hose and followed her through the ruined zinnias, past the tomatoes, over the lawn, back to the porch.
* * *
DURING DINNER, I GRILLED HER.
Because we were a modern couple, we lived pleasantly in filth. I was no breadwinner (I scored only Eucharists), Oola no Midwestern wifey. We alternated who would cook and who would clean up afterward. If I was cooking, we had spaghetti and salad, both dressed with off-brand olive oil and thyme picked from the garden, and coffee for dessert. Oola liked to try new things and use the oven, cutting out ambitious vegan recipes from her boatload of magazines, though she would always forget one critical step. As I hovered behind her in the kitchen, it was sometimes difficult not to remind her to add in the baking soda or turn down the heat. But I stayed loyal to my role as ghost and, come dinnertime, suffered the consequences.
She was good-natured about her failures; inspecting a Bundt-less Bundt cake, she shook her head and mumbled, “Bastards.” She doused an insufferably salty curry with hot sauce—“to counteract the taste”—and picked out the chocolate chips from a ruined batch of cookies so that we’d still have some semblance of dessert.
Once the kitchen table had been set and our paupers’ meal dished out, we chatted a bit, vague and cordial. When I uncorked the wine, we got down to business. I typically made a list of questions that had come up during the day, which I checked off over the course of the meal. Oola rather enjoyed this format (I asked her many times), although it took her a while to loosen up, her honest answers tempered by a sarcastic smile and sip of wine. I started with the ground balls, the quirks and tastes that everyone likes talking about.
Star sign? “Aquarius.”
Body type? “Long.”
Favorite shade? “Mauve.”
Must-have beauty product? “Crippling Shyness, or Rose-Tint My World.” Concealer and eye cream, respectively.
Her favorite food? “Sauerkraut.”
Her favorite word? “Oilcloth.”
Her dream destination? “Iceland. Cape Cod.”
If she were a drug, she’d be … “Quaaludes. Never tried them, but they sound up my alley.”
If she were an animal, she’d be a … “Squid. Quiet killer.” She paused. “Or, going by appearances, probably an emu.”
Earliest memory? “Sitting on a stoop somewhere, pressing my cheek to the bricks. They were warm. Also, the smell of gardenias. I know that’s what it was because someone was saying it, over and over. Regard the gardenias. Like a David Lynch film.”
One word to describe herself? “Fake.” She said this purely to annoy me.
Another night, she opened her mouth in a silent laugh. “Helter-skelter.”
At yet another supper, made more pensive by wine, she tilted her head to one side and took a minute to answer. “Pricked.”
“Pricked?” I laughed in spite of myself. “You mean, like, perky? Nipples in the cold? Moms in the morning? Or do you mean prickly?”
She shook her head. “Like how a dog pricks its ears. You know, listening to doors shut. Neck scruff on end.” She extended her arm and, truth be told, her faint hair was raised.
I asked your typical online-security questions. Name of first pet? “Cordon Bleu. Then came old Disco.”
Mother’s name? “Iris.”
Mother’s maiden name? “Smutt.”
Name of the street she grew up on? “Santa Inés. Like the mission.”
Favorite physical attribute? She made as if to high-five me. “My hands. Big enough for Rachmaninoff.”
Least favorite physical attribute? “My teeth. Too damn big. I used to be afraid that they’d get in the way of kissing.”
“They don’t,” I said.
She smiled cryptically. “I’ve asked every boy before you and they always tell me that.”
Best quality? “Youth.”
At my eye-rolling, she added, “My piano teacher told me that she preferred teaching spacey kids, that because of my distractible nature, I was, ahem, capable of great feeling and staggering depth.” She reflected further. “I’m shy, but I’m open. Things happen to me. I can go to a bar alone and I know someone will talk to me. I like that.”
Worst quality? “That I lose fucking everything.”
Guilty pleasure? “Getting stoned and using all the hot water for my bath.” This I knew.
Greatest insecurity? “That people only laugh at my jokes to be nice.”
Motto? “Find a lovely place to die.” She blinked. “I don’t know where that came from.”
Heroes? “Michael Jackson. Rest in peace.”
Dirty secret? “I’m not sure if I ever loved music.” A beat. “I always smell my fingers.”
Dream date? “Leif Kneatson on drugs.”
I cocked an eyebrow and she amended her answer. “Serge Gainsbourg. For the accent alone!”
Sometimes I was self-serving. What did she find most attractive in her mate? She gave me a look but didn’t laugh. “When we first met, I admired your gravity. Even if you were crazy, I felt I could trust you.” I repeated the word in my head: gravity. I assumed she meant gravitas, but looking back on my memory of these dinnertime quizzes, in which Oola fingered the tablecloth and tugged on her hair with the effort to express herself, voice jolly but faint, I suppose she could have also meant the other definition, pertaining to weight and space.
She continued: “Even when you were joking, there was still something serious about you. The serious people I knew from conservatory never cracked a smile. They only thought about one thing: music, from the minute they woke up to the minute they fell asleep, still wearing their shoes. You would go to their apartment and there’d be no furniture, no windows, no food in the fridge. Always terrible-smelling. They didn’t fucking care. Students from my school were always getting mugged or raped. They’d rent the shittiest rooms in the shittiest neighborhoods and wouldn’t even notice that their TV was missing until two weeks after the fact. They didn’t own anything valuable anyway, if they owned anything at all, except for their instrument, which they would defend to the death. I knew people who slept with their instruments, who would take up two seats on the subway and refuse to move their case so that a pregnant lady could sit down. This sort of thing was normal.” She ran a finger around the rim of her glass. “I think you were the first person whose seriousness didn’t make me gag. I was surprised to find it beautiful.”
As the meal went on, and we ate or didn’t eat our food, smearing the oddly colored remnants of an eggless quiche across our plates, more interesting things came out of her, stories that would make her eyes pop with premature laughter or her shoulders tense with something that would never fully surface but seemed like shame. Sometimes she told me things in a pondering voice, as if what she was saying came as a surprise to her too. Sometimes she made a point of addressing the tablecloth, paper napkin clenched tight in one hand.
What did she miss most? “Butter cake.” She answered so quickly that I thought she was kidding, but she gazed wistfully into her lap and went on. “My mom made it sometimes, before I went vegan. It was my dad’s favorite. He’d cut a piece in half and put more butter inside. We always left a piece of it in the freezer for when he got home. He’d pretend not to see it. You greedy girls ate it all! Don’t lie, Daddy knows! It was a stupid family shtick.” She swiped crumbs off her skirt. “Only now it seems special.”
Something about her tone made me uneasy. We rarely talked about our families; all I had to go by was the speech she’d made in Arizona. Family was something too slippery for me to put into words, the mixture of derision and fondness I felt for an ultimately boring tableau, while the slightest mention of Oola’s only ever seemed to hurt her. She’d turn away from me and be quiet for a long, long time. I couldn’t tell what song she was pul
ling from the air—something sad, no doubt, with an Okie air. I myself heard Joan Baez when I saw her sit like this, “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” leaked across a vacant lot, or a Dylan cover in a room with cloth tacked to the wall. Calm, cow-eyed torture. But perhaps that was California getting to my head; I never asked her to confirm. The way she spat out a window going 90 mph or her unholy combos of soda and booze told me plenty. “I hide my white-trash roots rah-ther well, don’t I, dear?” she’d ask wistfully, sipping her third gin and Squirt through a straw.
Why did she wear baggy clothes? “Oh, that’s simple. I get sick of seeing my skin.” She flopped her mile-long arms. “There’s so much of it.”
What would she change about herself, if she could? “I guess I’d be more assertive. When I say no, people always think that I’m kidding. It’s not that I’m a doormat, per se … but when people do walk over me, I don’t mind. I find it as interesting as being in charge. I like to see how things pan out. The meek shall inherit, but only because they’ve been watching and taking notes.” Oh, we were soulmates. “But I’m not laid-back; men always say I’m laid-back. I think it’s a euphemism for all girls who swallow. What I mean is … I think with my spleen, not my heart. I feel things in a different place, and the fact that I care doesn’t translate. You know?”
I nodded vigorously.
When and where was she happiest? “Immediately after a faint.” This required some explaining and, to my delight, a little list. “I’ve fainted three times. Once in a club. It was full to the rafters. My friend’s band was playing, but I couldn’t see him for shit. Somebody next to me was lighting up, I swear, the biggest blunt I’ve ever seen. They passed it to me, and that was it—I hit the floor. Luckily the place was so packed that I sort of bounced off the people around me. My head landed on somebody’s moonboots. No damage. Another time, I was running down a hill. I was much younger; it was in a field near my house. It was the hottest day on record for the month of May, I remember that. I was wearing a bathing suit, running toward someone at the bottom; I guess I got sunstroke or something. My friends thought I was trying to roll down the hill, so they joined me. My last conscious thought was I hope my bottoms don’t ride up. I was afraid that my labia would pop out. The third time was on my school’s football field. I remember exactly how old I was and where I was going. In fact, I remember the date: June twenty-fifth, 2009. It was the day Michael Jackson died. Most people my age, regardless of whether they liked him, know exactly where they were when they heard. Like Princess Di for our parents, or I guess for us 9/11. I was a freshman in high school and it was three-thirty p.m. I was walking with my friends to the parking lot. It must have been one of the last days of school. We always took a shortcut over the football field, right down the middle. The track team would be warming up on the sidelines. They ran laps and ignored us. I overheard a few runners talking about it; they were older and had cell phones, and their parents had texted them the news. One of them saw me falling; he ran over to catch me.”
“How gallant,” I said.
“Mmm,” she agreed. “That’s what’s so nice about it. Fainting, that is. When you come to, you can’t help but fall in love with the first person you see. It’s not romantic. It’s like this weird ecstatic human need, this burst of gratitude as you come back to life. Because that’s how it feels: like you’re resurfacing from some very dark, very soft, very lonely black pit. I visualize it as a lake, with water like oil. When you’re right on the edge of a faint, when your vision gets spotty but you’re still trying to stand, the lake seems to lap up to you. It’s just so tempting. You want to give in. And you do. You sink into it … and it’s so nice to fall backward, with this velvety weight on your chest. And then, waking up, you piece together this person, hovering over you, and their hands are so gentle, and their voice is so soft, and for one moment they are the whole world to which you’re returning. And it kind of feels like they’re the one emerging, like in movies when the love interest emerges from the pool. And you know that you have all the time in the world to just watch them. You have this feeling in your stomach, probably to do with adrenaline: fluttery, warm, like … a paused orgasm. Or like a mushroom cloud before it spreads out. Pushing up through your gut. Everything thrumming with energy, but slow motion. And your body is like a car being turned on, and you can feel every tiny part of it, every muscle, every button, lighting up. All with your head in some jock’s lap. It felt like I had centuries to think of what to say to him. Finally, I said, ‘Angel.’ I really did, to this boy who I passed in the halls. And then I said, ‘Michael.’ The kid was so sweet. He misunderstood me. He said in the politest voice possible, ‘No, I’m Ned. Michael’s over there, by the goalpost.’”
How much of her life had been determined by her beauty? She had to pause and think about that one. “I guess I’ve grown accustomed to getting free things. Extra ketchup, the child rate for bus fare, unimportant things like that. But you’d be surprised by how that shit adds up. People trust you if you’re pretty. They lend you things, tell you secrets. With the Titanic, I never doubted I’d be given a spot on a lifeboat. And part of me has always maintained that if nuclear war should break out, I can whore my way to Canada. Seriously, that thought helps me sleep.” She paused. “Overall, things run smoother, except when they don’t. Then it’s open season. The bus driver who five seconds ago told you to smile turns sour. What’s the matter, hon? Too good for me? A little rape would straighten you out.”
“Did somebody really say that to you?”
She nodded. “It’s funny. They get the feeling that you owe them something, for the things you didn’t ask for. That you should be thankful they were nice enough to hide the fact they want to ram you.” She snorted. “As if that weren’t assumed.”
In these conversations, she was always cheerful, almost detached, even when we veered into unpleasant territory. “I feel oppressed by my gender,” she noted early on in my study, blithely, as if she had said that she hated bluegrass.
“Me too,” I said, perhaps too eagerly, thinking of my own desire to do away with my body, that lackluster container, and step inside her skin.
She smiled at me patiently. “I don’t think you understand.”
No turn of phrase could hurt me more.
On more lighthearted evenings, we moved beyond the question–answer format. She spoke freely, zigzagging between topics, like a celebrity surveying her life.
“You know,” she said, leaning forward, as if inviting the studio audience to be her confidant, “it may sound weird, but sometimes, when I’m still waking up, I narrate myself in my head. You know the radio DJ for the late-night jazz station? The one with the slow, deep voice who calls everything smooooth? That’s the voice I use. He dedicates my morning shower to all you lonely souls out there. When I drink my coffee, he growls, That’s the stuff.”
Or shaking her head at the folly of youth: “I formed my identity by watching TV. Mostly cartoons. Like it or not, cartoons are very important to my, our, development as children of the nineties.”
“Does this mean you’re a caricature?”
“NOOO-O-O,” she shrieked, waggling her eyebrows. For good measure, she farted on cue.
On another evening in late June, she waxed nostalgic. “I always fetishized old-school courtship.” I think we had been talking about West Side Story, the first movie that made her cry. “The kind my grandma talked about. Getting picked up by a boy you didn’t know and going for a ride. Personality be damned. These days all the shy girls get left in the dust. Bossy sorority girls going in for the kill. What’s wrong with picking someone purely for their looks? The way my grandma told it, they didn’t even talk on dates. They drank ice-cream sodas in total silence, then listened to music and ‘necked.’ What relief.”
Sometimes she refracted questions back at me. “Your spirit animal is definitely a rat.” She eyed me. “Does that offend you?”
I pictured myself in a burrow, which looked more like an artery. “Make
s sense to me.”
Another night, with surprising urgency: “How many squares of toilet paper do you use?”
I was taken off guard. “I don’t normally count. Why?”
“I read in a magazine that you’re only supposed to use one per wipe, two max.” She shook her head in disbelief. “No one ever taught me that. I get a thrill in unwinding the roll and ripping off, like, fifteen, still attached in one long flag. I wind it around my hand, like a bandage.” She clapped a hand to her mouth, which, given the conversation, momentarily disturbed me. “I never realized I was an eco-criminal.”
After dinner, I’d stand in the front doorway, running gear on, lingering. “I’m leaving now,” I’d announce to O.
“OK,” she’d say. “Have fun.”
“If I’m not back in an hour, call the authorities.”
“OK.”
“You’ve got the number?”
“Yes,” she’d say, not looking it up. “I’ve got it memorized.”
She would turn on the radio, urging me out. And while she was usually careful to finish practicing before I returned, she sometimes got carried away. I could see her through the darkened window as I crossed the lawn, strains of Chopin barely audible. To be perfectly frank, the few times this happened, it unnerved me. Watching her silhouette pitch to and fro, her shoulders tensed with emotion, I felt jealous, though of what or whom exactly, I couldn’t say. I waited on the porch for her to finish. Always, when I entered, her smile struck me as guilty.
On Fridays, we went to get ice cream. It was a ritual of sorts, a way to fill the impossible afternoon at the center of all interactions. It was a felt afternoon, not a real one, of course, as we digested the last of our dinner and donned our sweaters and walking shoes. The sky would be marbled as we set off down the road, always on foot. The general store was a thirty-minute walk. We didn’t talk along the way and trooped one behind the other, still clinging to a sense of ceremony, on the fire roads that led to town. I obviously walked behind her, watching with interest as her ponytail bobbed.
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