“I’m going to give you my little speech about love, Taylor.” He knocked her knee with his knee and kept it there. “Ready?
“About a week before my wedding, I decided to call up my ex-girlfriend.” He rubbed his hands together. It was cold. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, Taylor had already noticed.
“I told myself I was the big man to apologize for not inviting her.” He squinted toward the pond. “Because that’s what we do now,” he said. “We’re so open.” He tapped her once on her coat on her breastbone.
“My ex-girlfriend picked up the phone and I said, ‘Sweetheart.’” He paused theatrically. “It just slipped out!” He smiled at himself in wonder. “Then I had to tell her I was getting married.” He slid farther out along his thighs until the heads of his elbows were on his kneecaps. He seemed to need to look out into the middle distance. “I told her that all love was part of the same big love. That marrying my wife wasn’t as much about my wife as it was about being part of this big love.”
He leaned back again abruptly. “So there you have it.” He turned toward her and she was sure he was going to kiss her.
But he stood up instead, and the sudden change in level made her almost seasick. Was she supposed to feel rejected? He took out the silver cigarette lighter and toyed with it. Her spirit was like an MRI. The metal hurt, everything went haywire in the echo chamber.
He refitted himself beside her, even closer this time, as if they’d suddenly been through something together. “Do you see what I’m saying?”
It seemed like the park was a painting of a park. There was a gray filminess about it. Nipples of light from the houses below, suddenly it was evening.
“Are you there?” he said. But he wasn’t used to listening.
She stayed where she was. The sky had a black eye, silver seams, seagulls coasted in on air bikes. He said he’d offer to walk her home but she looked like she was feeling pretty pensive.
What was there to go back to? Morgan’s disappearance? Her mother losing the florist shop? In both instances Taylor had been useless. Chunni had invited Taylor to her wedding just last fall and Taylor had never responded. There was always the demarcation of herself and the outside world. The park darkened like a theater.
It had seemed almost sacrilegious to turn her back on a double rainbow, but Morgan was the leader. They climbed back up the staircases, vertical tunnels of dark and glossy laurel. This jungle was all steep-bank waterfront, Morgan informed Taylor. The cement stairs were eroded by moss and Taylor had to concentrate to avoid slipping. Without turning Morgan said, “It would be the perfect place to get abducted.”
Taylor felt a quick stab of guilt for picturing Morgan’s father. He was so kind and so cool and here she was, nearly mute, monstrously shy, descending on them for the entire weekend. Morgan halted suddenly and Taylor ran straight into her and cried out in surprise before she could help it. Morgan had a low, almost manly chuckle.
Morgan quit school two weeks before graduation.
The AP English teacher informed them, and the socially deft students in the front row, commandeered by two brilliant Indian girls, speculated gothically before the teacher hushed them. Taylor cultivated indifference toward her classmates as a matter of survival, but it was terrifying the way Anjali and Enid could zoom in on someone, their psychoanalysis in high resolution.
As the class period dwindled, Anjali suddenly whipped around and fixated on Taylor. “You knew Morgan,” she demanded. The room fell silent.
Taylor’s vision, her hearing, even the taste in her mouth pinholed. Her skin was a sheer sundress, everyone could see through it. Somewhere far away the teacher might have said something in her defense but Taylor’s ears were plugged with raw earth, her mouth was filled with dirt, it was packed in around her and she could only breathe through the prick of light at the far, far end of the tunnel.
CHARM CIRCLE
1
From the sea, the pub would be a barnacle on the wall of the cliff, thought Sara. She had flown, of course, Seattle to London over the top of the globe, and the seasick coach tour to Cornwall. She wasn’t romantic.
The rowboat looked orthotic. The pub owner had proposed the excursion and Sara had replied that she was not at all into boating. He had looked at her even more searchingly for her refusal.
The pub was an ancient stone house, a wall rising from the narrow road, there was hardly a curb, not to mention a sidewalk. It was marked by a single, charmless streetlight. No great stretch of the imagination to see the drinkers like jowly insects drawn to the glow. Faintly green, as if the lens had moss in the corners.
The road wound inland through salt-and-pepper plots marked by herringbone stone walls like calligraphy. Hectares and hectares, one of their obscure words, before you heard the main road, then you saw it, with a tourist center at the junction where the farm road had crossed the main road for centuries.
Centuries. So the pub owner told her. She had finally relented. The water was choppier than it appeared from land, from the cliff top. Afterward he drove her to the pit stop, as she told him it would be called in America, and he bought the tourist center lunch (he had no clue that “pit stop” was derogatory, but he didn’t adopt it) and stared at her across the table, cuddling his jaw in his hands. If he tried to draw her out she squinted up at the television mounted over the bar, green with constant football. Soccer. Just getting along with someone was sentimental.
Her mother had insisted she put together a travel address book. Her mother was under the impression that Sara’s dyslexia tutor had taken a special interest in Sara. Every so often the little book with the gold stair-step letters, A—XYZ, would make its way to the top of Sara’s jumbled luggage and she would become as nauseated by the sight of it as she’d been on the turbulent flight. The pilot had touted the polar route and it had seemed to Sara that they were buffeted by glaciers. The postcards to choose from were sheep hunched over their pasture, a taciturn pitchfork.
Secretly she considered her dyslexia a form of civil disobedience. Apparently she needed glasses. It was the very evening she and her mother were driving home from the eye doctor’s appointment that Sara had decided she would travel. As they merged onto the rush-hour interstate Sara’s eyes had stung with tears. To the west, the clouds were shredded over the mountains. She had made a small scene, refusing glasses.
Her mother was trapped in the slow lane. Far to the left, male drivers were slewing northward. There was the moon, even. The sky was like white laundry. Her mother had got that look of a mother animal that Sara hated. As if she longed to feed her baby bird her own vomit.
In her mind’s eye her mother was waving goodbye, nobody waved anymore, her mother looked like she thought she was in a hat, too. In a postcard with deckled edges. The thing about eighteen was that you only knew you were doing the right thing when it felt wrong, somehow.
The room she rented over the pub was wallpapered in parakeet-blue stripes studded with cameos of a slim-necked bundle-haired lady. Sara looked like her, like a nineteenth-century locket: tapered nose, budded mouth, a great deal of fresh slippery hair to twist up and take down several times over the course of an evening. She appeared more sullen than she felt, when she caught herself in the mirror over the fireplace, but it didn’t seem to stop the pub owner.
Her room had two windows looking over the tenacious road, no wider than one of her parents’ matching sofas, and across a field to the teal ocean. But the room itself was nothing more than a hammocky bed and a bare light bulb. Were those shower curtains on the windows? No pretense, the streetlight shown right through them. At least the door locked. That was how the pub owner was able to charge rent for it.
Sara used the pub owner’s bathroom. She used the payphone under the streetlight to call her parents once, as they said here, a fortnight. Like pop psychology, she was nine years old again every time she talked to her mother. If it were a family vacation, her mother would have voted for a stop at the very same tourist center. Her
father was Mr. Tourist Arrangements, her brother had hated her since the moment she uncribbed him.
She’d insisted she didn’t know if she would go to college. It wasn’t a given to do what her parents—although she never pretended there was anything wrong with her parents. The last half of senior year other girls made speeches, how their mothers had been there for them, I’d-like-to-give-a-shout-out-to-my-amazing-mother, how they would be forced, in college, to spend exorbitant sums on Girl Scout cookies, in Samoa season, ponyish fourth-graders trotting their stacks of boxes out in front of their own mothers. They pantomimed daggers to hearts behind their blouses.
The pub owner begged her, “Have a drink with me, Sara?”
Beer was served warm over here like a form of porridge.
She left after seven months—in self-defense, mostly.
She went to Portugal.
She met a travel-thin girl named Meegan whose tawny eyebrows were too high up her forehead. Meegan of the diaspora of Antioch College. That was sort of the point of Antioch, said Meegan, if Antioch succeeded. “I’m pro-life.” Her eyebrows strangely suspended. “In Life v. College.”
She acted as if she had nothing to protect, though. She never bothered sleeping unless sex was a part of it. She pointed out Britishly (she was from California) that it was a very decent way to organize your lodgings.
Neo-hippy again, she said she had a relosophy about barter, and her offering was just her sweet positive self in the world.
She looked at Sara. “Religion and philosophy?”
All her clothes reminded Sara of old blankets.
One night they found themselves staring up at a white ship steep as an iceberg. There were four red letters on its flank, CCCP. Meegan said it was a Soviet tanker. They were barefoot in a little grassy park between docks. They couldn’t have been very drunk because they found themselves standing. The dark grass went down to the dark water. Sara’s feet were cold, and she noticed she was carrying a plastic market bag with her shoes inside it.
They didn’t know how they got there or how to get back to the apartment where they weren’t sleeping but where another diasporan had indicated a corner where fifteen or twenty backpacks were already huddled, dropped off like preschoolers.
They didn’t know if they’d arrived quietly or made some crucial disturbance. The water was worse than a hole it was so un-seeable. It seemed to Sara that the dark was slowly bending. From behind the bend of a boat came the shadows of dancers. Sinuous young men in small sweaters and high-waisted pants leapt around them. Meegan fell to her knees, laughing and praying. Sara stared out at the four red letters and the piers on stilts and the lapping water. Fear made her body light and tingly.
It seemed that the young men were trying to herd the girls away from the water, toward the blackish clumps of houses and thready streets above them. Meegan half rose and began to do a Sufi dance, maybe it was Cossack. Then one of the men—they were slender as snakes, thought Sara—showed a knife and Meegan dropped to the ground and rolled out of their charm circle. She ran barefoot toward the water and the men stood amazed, watching. Sara watched too, until the dark form of a dinghy began to rock on what must have been water. They could hear the oars splashing.
The young men, now Sara’s head was clear enough to count three of them, shook their heads and dropped their voices.
“Bus?” she said.
She didn’t even bother with the Portuguese. If they were. She wasn’t trying to impress them. They shook their heads again but they pointed toward the neighborhood. She walked off knowing there were no buses at this hour but she was safe because—this was how it was—Meegan wasn’t.
The summer that Sara was seven they visited her grandmother in Connecticut. The first and last visit; she still wasn’t sure of the spelling.
There was a dogpatch yard beneath a hangnail of a front porch, Sara was shocked but she would not show it. Tarps and disintegrating straw beach mats looked like scarecrows. The front rooms of her grandmother’s house were so dark that the rugs and furniture seemed unreliable; landmines of filched postal crates, garbage bags of old clothes studded with expired canned goods. Sara’s brother said it was a pit, and their parents didn’t protest.
Her mother never stopped weaving between rooms, sighing extravagantly. They would pay the dump fees, she pleaded, it was a firetrap, and weren’t those asbestos shingles?
There was a squawking sound from the mechanical voicebox in her grandmother’s neck—Sara could see the outline.
One afternoon Sara’s parents decamped to Hartford. Her brother promptly disappeared in the basement, where all four of them were sleeping on army cots beneath low fluorescent tubes jerry-rigged by their grandmother.
The house fell quiet. Her mother had discovered caches of droppings in the living room, but Sara was far less afraid of bats (her grandmother’s claim, to spite her mother) or ghosts (she had overheard her mother say once that she, Sara, was simply not an imaginative child) than she was wary of her grandmother. Heeled-down cardboard boxes of old magazines took up the sofa but Sara couldn’t read yet. She didn’t really even like to look at pictures; she had reason to believe she was the only one in her family who suffered boredom. Almost a year had passed since a certain Sunday morning, thinking she was alone, she’d opened a book and spoken gibberish. Too late she’d heard the bathroom door creak open, and there was her gaping, over-grinning brother.
She’d pushed past him to shut herself in the same bathroom he’d just abandoned; his own book was lying face down on the tile. In his excitement to out her he’d failed to flush the toilet. She might not be imaginative, but she could bear a grudge like no one else in her family.
She heard her grandmother grunt without using the voicebox and her grandmother’s shape was in the doorway.
Her mother said her grandmother had smoker’s wrinkles. Some dogs had wrinkles too; folds, even, thought Sara. She watched her grandmother take two kinds of cookies and a jar of peanut butter down from an unpainted kitchen cabinet. Her grandmother used the same glass all day. “Vodka kills germs,” Sara had heard the voicebox growl.
They sat at the kitchen table spreading peanut butter on Lorna Doones and Ladyfingers.
It seemed she was allowed to pour as much of the sweet, perfumey tea as she liked, take as many cookies. She thought of her clever brother starving in the basement. Soon the teapot was empty. A strange feeling: her whole chest seemed to be getting faster and faster.
Her grandmother asked her if she put herself to bed and she had to admit she didn’t. Her grandmother said she could fall asleep upstairs but Sara had never felt less tired. She had the feeling that her heart was many new baby hearts squirming like an earthworm chopped up by the lawnmower. That’s what she had lied once, when she had, herself, hacked apart an earthworm with a knife of slate from the shedding patio.
The sheets on her grandmother’s bed were tangy and the bed swallowed her in the middle. She tried not to fight the deep pillow. She thought of the voicebox resting on the pillow like the miniature treasure chest she had recently been given for the tooth fairy. It had locks like buckles.
The streetlight slammed across her grandmother’s dresser. There was a picture of Sara’s mother with a round face, a strange and pretty child. Each minute banged into the next one. Sara’s arms and legs kicked of their own accord. She couldn’t hold onto her thoughts, but she couldn’t stop thinking. She got up and went to the dresser in bare feet—the floor was gritty.
She walked around the bed, a dark peninsula. Light fell in the doorway and met the light from the streetlight. She didn’t want to touch anything. There was a deep channel between bed and dresser. Her lungs were tight, her heart, or hearts, like coursing water.
What was going on here?
Her parents had come back after midnight.
“Seizures!” cried her grandmother, catching them at the door, trembling herself, almost in ruins.
But her mother had coldly inquired what they’d had for
dinner.
“Caffeine, Mother?”
She pretended not to speak English when a missionary-looking American in silky slacks approached her on the train to Paris. It was the short-sleeved button-down that gave him away, thought Sara. Meegan had bragged about a cheap youth hostel in Paris and Sara knew the museums from a trip with her parents. She could have spoken high school French if she weren’t so shy. Self-protective.
She had a bottom bunk in the hostel that was as good as a mansion. Impossible to fall asleep before two in the morning, but during the day the large tiled dorm was empty except for a few Asian girls dropping their film off.
She never thought about the pub owner. She never thought about Meegan. She never thought about her friends from high school. She saw her mother pulling out of the driveway, swiveling backward, like a mature Barbie with her chin wrapped around her shoulders and her hard-packed tits in a sports outfit. Then the driveway pulling out from under the car, resuming itself at the mouth of the garage, now automatically closing.
She bought packaged French groceries in the supermarché; she didn’t even like pastries. She ate on her bed, which was what she meant by a mansion. How many other girls had also?
Once she jumped a turnstile and she was promptly pulled out of the crowd and ticketed. She started to feel sick and then she went out of the metro and dropped the ticket in a can on the street and an hour later jumped another turnstile at a different station. She heard the bureaucrat in the kiosk rioting through the bulletproof glass.
Nobody stopped her.
The hostel bunks were metal painted crimson. Was it supposed to give the auditorium-sized room an alpine feel? She knew she had no right to hate her mother but it was a free country. She supposed France was also, or was it deceptively socialist? Something her brother would accuse her of misunderstanding. At least hating her mother was better than missing her. More pop psychology. The lights in the hostel went out at 1 a.m. but girls still tramped back and forth to the bathrooms. The only way to get to sleep was to think about her own abduction.
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