by Aimee Bender
The following day, after the green-curtain day, he was back. They ate cold spaghetti out of paper cups on the stoop. He said, I just don’t know if I want to marry you. She snorted. What? He said, I’m sorry but I’m just not certain that you are my future wife. She spit some spaghetti out on the stoop in a little red clump and he thought it was gross and she was laughing again, not with, definitely at. He said, I always thought the woman I’d marry would hit me easy, in a bolt of lightning, and there is not lightning there is not even thunder there is not even rain. It all feels, well, foggy, he said. And she said, What makes you so sure I want to marry you? and he said, Oh, hmmm, and she said, Why would I consider marrying a man whose brain is so bossy? I need a man with some calm, she said. He looked at her nose, thin and long and her eyes thin and long the other direction and her hair was straight and long and shone. He had a bite of spaghetti off her fork. They sat for a while on the stoop and watched the lizards skit and scat until the mailman came by and delivered some letters-two bills and a postcard from her cousin on an island. She made faces at the bills and laughed at the postcard and scrutinized the little type in the upper left-hand corner telling her where it was and then looked at the picture on the front for longer than he had ever looked at all the postcards of his entire life.
When they made love that day it was one step closer to making sense and she brought them some wine afterward and they sat and watched the sunset through the green curtains, naked, with deep-bellied glasses of wine. The green darkened into black. He let his hand trace each of her vertebrae and she did not say, That tickles, stop, like he thought she might. She just looked out the muted curtain and her hair swished at an angle. He moved his fingers down her whole spine, one by one by one, and during the time it took to do that, his brain remained absolutely quiet.
It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what’s happened; before you find yourself, at the base of her spine, different.
Debbie wore the skirt all the girls had been wearing, but she wore it two months too late. By then the skirt had lost its magic and was just a piece of cloth with some tassels at the bottom. It resembled nothing more than a shred of curtain-something all the mothers had said at the beginning-but for a few months, the skirt had held inside its weave the very shimmer of rightness. If you wore it you were queen of them all, and both girls and boys followed you like strays. But you had to take the risk to wear it even though it was strange, and as soon as enough people caught on, well then. Done with. Back to curtain status. Debbie wore the skirt because she’d seen enough people wear it to know it was okay. She wore the scary skirt safely. For that, we despise Debbie.
We find Debbie in the lunchroom. She is trying, always, to lose weight. We are repulsed by Debbie’s cottage cheese and her small styrofoam bowl of pineapple slices. One of us has worn all her rings, in preparation for the harming of Debbie; Debbie, wearing that skirt, eating her pineapple slices by carefully cutting them with the side of her white plastic fork. Soft yellow droplets clinging to her napkin as she wipes her mouth. It is so easy to lure Debbie out. All we have to do is put out some bait, bait in the form of a beautiful magnet that everyone knows, one who sits down out of the blue like a daydream and asks for a slice of pineapple, please. She shares Debbie’s fork. She tells Debbie some casual praise. Perhaps, for the final net, she compliments Debbie on the skirt. Debbie blushes. All day long, she has been in love with her legs swishing underneath the skirt, with how the tassels tickle her ankles. In the corner, our bile multiplies. We feel it passing among us like disease.
The girl who is bait asks Debbie if she will go with her to her car as she has something she picked out for Debbie. Something Debbie might like. It’s that easy. The girl who is bait is, today, everything focused on Debbie, and Debbie cannot resist this, could never have resisted it; even when she thinks about it later, there is no twenty-twenty hindsight. It is the stopping of her heart. A dream come true. She has no interest in the boys, or if she does, it is only in how they will make her look to us. And today! The girl has something for her! Something for Debbie! At last it will be true, at last we will have seen Debbie, at last we will have noticed the way she has been improving her walk and clothing choices, and that beauty her one aunt always compliments on the Fourth of July barbecue will finally be a truth in the company at large.
We follow the bait and the fish, hooked. We follow the fate and the wish. Cooked. Silent on our toes. Walk soft, like whispers.
We don’t wait long. Naturally, there’s nothing in the car and only so long that the bait can pretend to rummage around in the backseat. After a minute, we pounce. Two of us hold Debbie down against the passenger door. Two others grab her feet so she can’t run or kick. The one with rings strikes Debbie several times-a few times hard in the stomach and one fist in the face so it will show, tomorrow. So she will have to explain. Debbie is screaming and crying. We rip the skirt off with our bare hands and her underwear is almost too much to bear, with that pattern that is the knockoff of the expensive one, and a giant maxi pad weighing down the middle. We rip the skirt into pieces, which is what all the mothers have wanted to do, because it is rags anyway, it is a rag skirt, made of rags. The one with the rings slides her hands down Debbie’s arms and the rings she bought at the street fair cut lines into Debbie’s skin, where drizzles of blood rise freely to the surface. The bait sits in her car, smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio. It’s a giveaway; the tenth caller gets tickets to go to New York City.
We release Debbie once she’s bleeding, and she slinks off, sobbing. Trying to pull her shirt down over the whiteness of her ass. Shoulders hunched, hair askew. She will never tell on us. She will never be the rat. She has a tiny part of her, the tiniest part, that still hopes this is part of some cruel initiation or test, and that if she passes it, she will still be included.
We think we could not despise Debbie more. But when we realize this, the loathing is bottomless. Possibly we could bait and hook her every day for a year, preying on that tiny hope until all of Debbie’s clothes are in a rag pile and her face is a disaster. If it was not so boring, maybe we would.
We do not speak to our mothers. Long ago we gave up on our mothers. All of us, even though some of us don’t have mothers at all. Our mothers died, or our mothers left. Our mothers changed form into a toad. Our mothers became presidents of companies or jumped off of buildings. Our mothers gave up everything for us. One of us has a father who beats the mother. We cheer him on. We like to hold the belt in our spare time and slap it against our palm like we are in a movie, with a cigar, and a damsel in silver tinsel that is ours waits privately on the couch. We go home after the Debbie beating, thrumming from some kind of adrenaline high, and somewhere close by, Debbie checks herself in the mirror. We can sense this. We begin to be concerned she might slightly admire her bruise, so we are hoping the bruise is in an unflattering spot. Since Debbie is not particularly good-looking, the odds are high in our favor. In general, we feel terrific about it all, maybe we even call each other up on the phone to talk, but generally the phone is for people like Debbie. We have better things to do. We realize life is not just a dress rehearsal and if you realize it, you don’t need a bumper sticker to remind you. We take off our rings one by one and in the sink we wash them clear of any blood left from Debbie’s arm. Her arm hairs were a little too black, frankly. We remember this as we stay up late, watching wrestling on TV because it’s so funny. We don’t mind being tired in the morning; often, we prefer it.
• • •
Many years later, we make a mistake. We make a grand error. It begins with the girl who comes to ask for directions on our college campus because we look like we always know where we are. In our features, we resemble, somehow, a compass on a neck. We see the girl approach us, with that walk of hers, very quick-paced, and her eyebrows seem funny. We have to look twice. Her eyebrows are straight and black and fierce but underneath the arch we see a g
arden of tiny weak brown hairs growing out from under the black. She is, apparently, in between eyebrow maintenance. She is one of those girls. We, ourselves, have never once given a shit about our eyebrows, which are fine and prosperous on their own. Still, she asks nicely, so we give her directions, and then we follow her, because there’s nothing else to do today and our classes are over. At her location we find we are waiting outside. Strangers float past, in particular that embarrassing person with her cell phone talking so loud. If our cronies were here, we would nudge her into a dark corner, but our cronies have gone off to different settings by now and are extremely poor at writing letters.
Where did Debbie go? Who cares. As soon as Debbie was removed from her skirt, we washed her from our viewpoint. She of course will remember us forever. Such is the deal we make with memory.
After about an hour or so, the one with the eyebrows exits her building, which seems like it might hold within it doctor’s appointments. We follow her. Eventually, she looks behind her. We ask her her name. She recognizes us and makes a witty comment. Because it is college, we seem less like a stalker than we will later in life. We are not sure what is going to happen as we are only one today, and therefore less certain, but there is something in those eyebrows that makes us take her hand unexpectedly near the lower parking lot. We end up kissing her by the fountain that is straight shoots of timed water. She is not as surprised as we might expect. She seems to be used to this. We end up kissing her for an hour, and her lips are so soft they are almost like a joke.
It lasts almost a year. It is our longest relationship. She has nightmares all the time, and huddles into our armpit in the darkness, but during the daytime she walks like she’s a cartoon hero. We actually catch some of her tears in a vial and hold it in our pocket and finger it when she’s at events working the crowd with all her teeth doing all that business. We grip the vial of tears knowing that at any moment we could expose her and the crowd might turn and tear her to pieces. We want to take care of her every minute. We want to make sure her eyebrows are safe; every time she shows up with those weak brown hairs growing in like poor weeds, like murmurs from a third world country, we are filled with a desire to strangle her while we whisper her name for the rest of our lives. We are worried all the time because she seems like the type to walk into danger without realizing it; after all, she let us kiss her by the fountain in broad daylight. She, however, is not worried about herself, or about us. We are very rarely the receptacles of worry, what with that compass we hold upon our neck.
On month eleven, she leaves us. She finds the tear vial creepy, and she’s annoyed with the constant worrying and questionings. After waxing her eyebrows until they are invincible, she goes somewhere else, to ask someone new for directions. She has taken on a new map; us, we have lost our sense of order. We find ourselves heading over to sit by the same wall where we met her. We go there every day. We go there too often. We cannot stop going. We end up Debbie.
Many years later from that, we meet Debbie again. It is not at the reunion because we don’t attend reunions. We have lost touch with one another anyway, and why else would we go? The rest of the people in high school were an uninteresting blur. We do not know who Debbie is, but she knows who we are, as we sit outside at Bob’s Coffee Shop on Wilshire Boulevard pulling change from deep inside our pockets. She has a couple of kids that she is lugging along, and she stops to say hello. Remember? she says. You used to beat me up?
We squint. She is not recognizable; this woman is a middle-aged woman, with her hair cut short for practicality. Do I know you?
She describes the whole incident, and when she mentions the skirt it clicks into place. Oh, we say. Yes. Oh, we are sorry, we say, because at this age it is appropriate to say, even though we do not know if we are sorry. We do not know if we would do it again, if we had the chance, if we were surrounded by our friends and hula-hooping with pineapple rings.
She sits down. The baby on her lap is blue-eyed and has light hairs on its arms, unlike Debbie, with that black hair we still dislike intensely. The older child, also a girl, lolls behind her, looking at the stand-up menu. She is wearing expensive clothes and something about her mouth is very ungrateful.
Why did you do that? Debbie asks simply.
The waiter comes and retrieves our change, annoyed by all the linty pennies. Anything else? he asks dryly. The baby burbles.
We stare at Debbie’s baby, who looks like it is from another person’s body. Boy? we ask. Girl, she says.
It’s Debbie, right? we ask.
No, she says, wincing. My name is Anne.
Oh.
We can’t think why we have always been sure she is Debbie. Did she change her name?
I don’t know, we say. I don’t know why we did it. Sorry? we say again.
She shifts the baby like a sack of flour.
Everyone I tell the story to says you must have been feeling pretty awful about yourself to do such a thing, she says to us, gripping the top of our chair with her hand.
We listen and nod. We realize now that it has been a good story to tell people. She must get a lot of sympathy, and she has always enjoyed sympathy. Suddenly we feel she must owe us a thank-you for giving what would be an otherwise fairly dull life a little bit of texture. She stands and holds the baby close, and the baby starts to cry.
It was a good time, we say. We do not mean it in the shocking way. We just mean it was a good time, then, high school. We appreciated that time.
Debbie leaves. She doesn’t say goodbye. She has more fodder for her insulted self; she has a new way to tell her old story. We give up our table which is being eyed by new customers. Cars toil at the stoplight. We glimpsed sympathy for Debbie, yes, when we stood at the wall after our lover left us. We found ourselves hungry and desperate in the pit of the stomach, revolting to ourselves. Then we got over it. We don’t go by that wall anymore. Sure, we think of our old gal sometimes but unlike Debbie, we know what should be kept to ourselves, not available for public consumption. Sure, we still keep the tear vial in our car, even though we understand how it could be perceived as creepy. Most of it has evaporated anyway. If we ever happen to see her again, though, we like to think we could prove to her that she cried in our arms, just in case she is pretending to have forgotten. We hear, through college acquaintances, that she married some man. Of course. She always was predictable. We hear she is possibly pregnant. All we know is that her nightmares were intense and we were very comforting then, and we said smart things, and when she was crying in the middle of the night we were paramount, and that sort of connection does not evaporate. We own her, we think, as we walk west down Wilshire, toward the tar. The sky is an easy breezy blue. Perhaps, in a way, we own Debbie too. Perhaps, in a way, if anyone cries on us, we then own them, a piece of them, forever. Perhaps the vial is redundant. It seems nice, to think this. We begin the long walk home feeling refreshed. We look for who we can see crying, because after all, crying is not an endangered action. There are endless tears to hunt down and possess. To provoke or extract or soothe. We are delighted with this new world, this world full of possibility.
The motherfucker arrived at the West Coast from the Midwest. He took a train, and met women of every size and shape in different cities-Tina with the straight-ahead knees in Milwaukee, Annie with the caustic laugh in Chicago, Betsy’s lopsided cleavage in Bismark, crazy Heddie in Butte, that lion tamer in Vegas, the smart farm girl from Bakersfield. Finally, he dismounted for good at Union Station in Los Angeles.
“I fuck mothers,” he said to anyone who asked him. “And I do it well,” he added.
He was also reasonable; he didn’t fuck married mothers, only available ones who wanted to date and who’d lined up an appropriate babysitter for the child that’d made them a mother in the first place.
He wined, dined, danced, romanced-martinis and kisses on the neck, bloody steak and Pinot Noir-the word “beautiful” said sincerely with a casual lean-back into a booth. He asked pointed,
particular questions. By midnight had most of them in bed, clothes off in a flash, the speed of a woman undressing changing rapidly over time, faster and faster, and he was a very good lover, attentive and confident, a giver and a taker, and the mothers lined up to see him, their babysitters growing rich, twenties stuffed in those tight teenage pockets.
He never liked any of them for longer than one or two times. Or, he liked them but not enough to keep calling. I love all women, he told himself. He liked to try on hats in stores.
One afternoon, he was at a fancy Bel Air party on a damp lawn talking to some damp-and-fancy people. They stood in groups of three and four, stirring lemonades laced with vodka, that liquid shark swimming among the yellow feathers of their drink. The motherfucker wandered across the lawn to the starlet, famous for her latest few films, wearing the red straw hat and matching red dress, the one watching her four-year-old play on the lawn chairs, the one whose husband had left her for a man, or so said the newspapers. Everyone else was afraid to talk to her.
She had shiny hair under her red hat and was drinking nothing, hands still at her sides.