The Word for Yes

by Claire Needell

  Gerald kicked the legs of one of the kitchen stools and crossed his arms in front of him. “I was so fucking in love with you, okay? Always. For fucking ever. I made myself believe it was finally happening. That you didn’t see me as a waste of time. But I’m really just a waste of Melanie Russell’s breath!”

  “I’m so fucking sorry for you,” Melanie said. “But you are a waste of my time. You’re pathetic.” She spat the words at him, then backed out the door. She turned and walked toward the elevator with the door open behind her. She thought she could hear Gerald banging his fist against something, the wall or counter. Let him hit something, she thought. Let him have a hissy fit and break every glass, every dish. She pushed the elevator button and let out a choked sob. Then she felt strangely light.

  It was over. The whole ordeal was over. She didn’t have to think about that tiny twinge of guilt she’d had when Gerald said she’d thought he was a waste of time. That was the sort of thing she’d say to Jess about Gerald. But it wasn’t something she thought Gerald ever knew. Maybe it was true that she used him in a way, that she liked having him like her, and hanging around her all the time. But now he had lost any right to complain. He didn’t have the right to even look at her. She could go home, and eat a turkey sandwich, and do her English homework. She might even apologize to clueless Erika. It wasn’t really her fault she couldn’t understand anything about life.

  At first, Jan didn’t respond to the text from Adam. It was Friday evening, and she finally had a moment to herself. Eliza had volunteered to take Maxwell for a walk, and Melanie, Erika, and Mom all had work to do. Jan had a response paper to write for poetry, and reading for Early Romantics, but nothing too strenuous, and she and Eliza had the long train ride back to Providence to finish up any work she had left by Sunday.

  She treated herself to a hot bubble bath, and a semi-nap, headphones on, eyes closed, and nothing to demand her attention but the soothing voice of Elena’s Love, a band Jan heard about from Adam months before, but had never actually listened to. Then, as if conjured by the wispy voice of Elena Argent, Jan’s phone buzzed after only a few minutes of peaceful wafting in and out of consciousness. It was Adam. In a cryptic text, he seemed to be suggesting a meeting: “Seems strange not to be in touch when I know you must be home,” he wrote. Jan sighed.

  Was it worth seeing him, if that was all he had to say? It was like their relationship was a habit that he found odd, although not especially painful, to do without. But there was something else about that text. There was the slightest hint in it of the old Adam.

  Early Saturday morning Jan left Eliza a note. She didn’t mention the plan beforehand, so she wouldn’t feel the need to explain, or be subject to Eliza’s possible judgment—that she needed Adam in order to have male attention, that she couldn’t feel fully engaged in life without male approval, or some other theoretical nonsense, although Eliza had been relatively low-key since the fight between Melanie and Erika. Jan had filled Eliza in on what she knew about Melanie and the party, and Eliza had been surprisingly quiet. “Every girl has her own way of healing,” Eliza had said.

  Jan met Adam in the Village, at a diner near Rose Dyer. It was a place they’d been to only once or twice in the whole time they’d gone out, though it was just south of the Houston Street subway. Adam looked much the same as he had last month. Of course, Jan told herself. How much, after all, could he have changed? She felt oddly happy that she didn’t feel attracted to Adam anymore. He looked pasty. She had, she discovered, developed a thing for dark-haired guys.

  He stood waiting for her outside in the damp, cold air. “Thanks for coming,” he began. “I wouldn’t blame you if you never wanted to see me again.” Jan shrugged and followed him into the diner. The booths were all taken, but Adam agreed when the waitress offered them seats at the counter. It wouldn’t be a private conversation after all, but Jan surprised herself by feeling relief rather than rejection; she didn’t require a long, deep conversation. She didn’t want to stare into Adam’s eyes. She took her seat and feigned interest in the generic diner menu. “So how was Thanksgiving? Did your dad come?” he asked.

  Jan shook her head. “He comes back in a few weeks, though, for Christmas. I can’t begin to describe Thanksgiving. Let’s just say it wasn’t boring.” Jan couldn’t see attempting to recount Eliza’s presence, the fight between her sisters, Melanie’s fit, the allegations about Gerald. It was all too personal now, although scarcely more than a month ago Adam might have been there himself to witness the entire scene.

  “Well,” he started again. “I wanted to say I’m sorry. For how things went. I mean a lot of what I said to you in Providence was true. It was how I felt. But I didn’t want you to think nothing was real about the past. I didn’t really mean any of that stuff about when we were together in high school.” He drenched his pancakes in butter and syrup, leaned over his plate, and hungrily took a bite. He barely made eye contact with her. Jan nodded and eyed her suspiciously yellow scrambled eggs. She should eat something, she knew, but she felt too full from days of doing nothing but eating. Listening to Adam wasn’t doing much for her appetite.

  Adam wasn’t saying the relationship was important or real now, she noted, only that it had been something real to him in high school. But high school hardly mattered. If there was one thing the first months of college had taught her, it was that no one cared anymore who you were back in high school. She wondered why she had come. Adam, with his long, awkward torso, his pale skin, his perpetually uncertain expression, was not what she was looking for. She knew that absolutely. Maybe Eliza, with her short attention span, would forget all about her hookup with Roberto, and he’d be free game. That was only a dream, though, a crush to pass the time, but it was something, something to add excitement to her life.

  She didn’t need to be stuck in Adam’s unhappy world. As he explained what he had been doing the last four weeks, Jan felt fidgety. She moved her eggs around and took a sip of lukewarm coffee from the too-thick diner mug. Her life at Brown wasn’t half bad. It was starting, even, to feel a little exciting.

  “I’m tutoring at this school near my parents’ place. In the nineties on West End. Eighth grade math. It’s amazing,” he was saying, still shoveling in large bites of syrup-sodden pancake. “I’ve got this one student, John. He’s truly an enigma.” Adam paused, eyes half shut in contemplation, a dripping forkful of pancake dangling midbite. “He seems bright. He can tell you anything you want to know about motorcycles. He draws them all over his notebook in perfect detail. Everything he draws is a Harley and he knows the exact models. I asked if his dad or anyone in his family had a bike, and he said no. But when he was a little kid some guy in his building had one and he parked it below the kid’s window in some back alley. That’s how the kid got into bikes. He’d sit there in his bedroom for hours, and look at this guy’s bike, like it was the most beautiful thing in the world.”

  Jan realized Adam was strangely invested in this boy; his story had somehow become his own. “John told me he remembered this day the guy got on the bike, and it wouldn’t start, and he started banging on the handlebars, and then he got off it, and started kicking it, and John started crying and yelling at the guy and his mom had to come into his room and make him stop. I asked him how old he was when this happened and the kid said he was maybe four years old. Amazing, right? He remembers this whole story, every detail of it. But the kid knows absolutely nothing about math. Not even multiplication.”

  Jan smiled vaguely. She couldn’t tell whether Adam found the boy’s story sad or simply fascinating. “I guess he didn’t go to very good schools, and now it’s up to you to get him caught up. That’s really meaningful,” she said. She wanted Adam to think she admired him for doing what he was doing, or at least to not think she thought he was a loser for dropping out of college.

  Adam shook his head. “This kid is like the Hercules of not learning. I’m no match for him. But anyway, it’s something to do. I’m applying to Columbia an
d NYU for next year. I’m thinking about living at home for a semester, then maybe easing back into school. My parents are okay with it. They seem to think I had some traumatic experience I’m not talking about. Like a bad trip.”

  “Well, there was that,” Jan said. “I mean, we did those ’shrooms.”

  Adam shook his head. “No, that was clarifying to me. It was that night I knew I was doing the right thing. I still think you and I are in very different places.” He had finished his pancakes, but was still swirling his fork in the crumbs that were left sticking in the golden syrup. Jan watched him. Where had he gone? He wasn’t the same boy she’d dated in high school. Adam had been serious then, but never like this, never telling random stories and talking himself down. He was depressed—it was like the articles she sometimes read in the Times about people who became detached, people who felt miles away from other people. That was how Adam talked, like she was emotionally distant from him, more distant than this boy, John, with his sad obsession. It was both annoying and flattering the way Adam seemed to see her, like she lived on planet normal, and he lived somewhere else, a place that was painful and static, a kind of nowhere. The way he talked about John, it was almost like he was in competition with him and the kid was the expert, the one who really knew how to lose at life.

  A part of Jan still wanted to be exotic, like Eliza and the other girls who dressed up for the slut walk night, or like Mr. Stainless and his dreadlocked girlfriend, someone known all around campus for her hipness or her brilliance. But she also knew she was changing. She felt on the edge of something, only she didn’t know quite what. If it was a new romance, that would be awesome, but it was okay if she was on the romantic sidelines for a while too. It was fun to scope guys out, live out imagined entanglements.

  Jan insisted on paying for breakfast, although she knew this might be a cruel reminder to Adam of his past money obsession. She didn’t care, though. If she were the normal person in the relationship, why not embrace that? Why not make it the thing she had to offer?

  Erika put her hand to her face. Her nose was still tender to the touch, but the stitches were small, like the doctor had promised; they formed a thin, dark line, almost perfectly straight and hardly wider than a hair’s width.

  “If you stop messing with that shit, no one will even notice it,” Morris said. Erika and Morris were studying European history in Morris’s room. They were supposed to have a test the Tuesday they got back from Thanksgiving break, and Morris needed the notes. Sometimes, Morris and other people fell asleep during history. Cynthia Barrow was the most boring teacher at RD. Unlike the other teachers, she tended to lecture almost every class. It was like she was blind to the fact that half the class was slumped in their seats becoming catatonic. Erika liked Cynthia, though. She was like a teacher in a movie about teachers, the way she stood in the front of the room and talked, and wrote on the Smart Board. She even dressed like a movie teacher, in tight-fitting skirts with conservative blouses, hair pulled back in a ponytail, glasses perched on the end of her nose, as though there only as proof that without them she would be prettier. Erika enjoyed being in Cynthia’s class and playing the made-for-the-movies part of the excellent student, the girl who almost always already knew whatever the teacher was talking about.

  “These aren’t even notes,” Morris said, shaking his head at Erika’s notebook pages. “This is a freaking exact transcript. You should take notes for the United Nations, or the Supreme freaking Court or some shit.” He took a bite from a piece of the pecan pie he had on his desk and shook his head in self-disgust. “If I eat any more of this pie, I’m going to be sporting a Big Daddy Foss-style belly. That is no look for a young, single man in his physical prime.” Erika laughed and took a big bite from her own plate. She was eating both apple and pumpkin pie. “Your dad practically made me take half of each pie,” Erika said. “He told me I’d be doing him a service. He said he ordered like six of them.”

  “Damn right,” Morris said. “The dude is getting to be an embarrassment. I mean, there is a gym right here in the building, and he employs this guy, Fred, practically full-time to keep him on track, and he’s still the inflatable man.”

  Erika contemplated her plate. The pie was good, but she figured if it made her overweight, it wouldn’t be that hard to give it up. She was lucky she never gained weight. She could hardly ever recall feeling like she was overly full, even after a large meal. It was yet another way she didn’t relate to a lot of other girls. When Binky expressed dismay about her figure, or Jan or Melanie did, Erika always kept silent. It reminded Erika of the silence that had fallen over the Russell apartment since Friday morning, when Melanie and Jan suddenly reappeared after both being absent without explanation.

  Mom didn’t question Melanie at all. But Melanie had seemed okay. She’d gone to her room and played her music loud. Erika liked having Jan and even Eliza around the house, but it was messy and disorganized with them there, with their shoes and coats always strewn around the living room. She vaguely looked forward to a return to her regular routine, especially now that Mom and Melanie seemed to be working together on Melanie’s problems. It was all out of Erika’s hands. Although Melanie had made good on her threat to hurt her, even that was done now. She had hurt her, but it hadn’t seemed exactly intentional. Erika unconsciously fingered the scar on the side of her nose. Again, Morris barked at her.

  “Erika, stop touching that shit already! It’s giving me the willies! I hate blood and stitches and all that hospital crap.” Morris shut his textbook, stood up, and stretched. His pet birds all sat in two large cages by the window, and Morris leaned into the bigger cage and poked the male cockatiel, coaxing it onto his finger until it perched there. He withdrew his arm from the cage and stood still, showing Erika how tame the bird was, sitting on the end of Morris’s finger, preening. It was tricolored, with a patch of yellow near the leg joint, while the rest of the body was blue, melding into the red feathered crown. The bird tilted its head and eyed Erika with its wide, yellow eye.

  Erika didn’t mind the birds but worried the cockatiel might perch on her head again, and maybe even peck at her stitches. “What do you think I should say, Morris, when people ask me what happened?” The bird had seemed to be eyeing the black line of stitches. If the bird noticed the stitches, surely people would as well.

  “To mind their own fucking business,” Morris said. “Except that never works with anybody.” He stroked the bird’s back with a single finger. “How about, my psycho-bitch sister tried to one-eye me? Got in a knife fight at a bar? The turkey fought back? Lots of options.” Morris continued stroking the bird’s back while he spoke, seemingly lost in thought.

  “Seriously, Morris. I don’t want everyone to talk about it. There’s already been a lot of drama about Melanie and Gerald. I probably shouldn’t have even told you or Binky about the fight with Melanie.”

  “You got nothing to worry about there,” Morris said. “This whole Gerald-Melanie drama is just sad. It’ll be lucky if that Gerald kid doesn’t off himself. Tell you what. I will personally beat the crap out of the next person at RD who says anything about you, your sister, fucking Gerald, James Jamison, or that goddamn Halloween party. That shit is over. That shit is done.”

  “You’re going to beat people up, Morris?” Erika said, shaking her head. “But you’re a pacifist. That’s what you always say.”

  “Uh-huh, a lover not a fighter, true that. But I think it’s time to shut this show down. You say Melanie is good, right? You have nothing more to worry about than this test Tuesday, and applying some scar-be-gone crap on that scrape. I’m the one around here with worries. This dude has some nasty little mites crawling up his little bird butt. Look at them here. Tiny little birdy ass bugs. Yuck.” Morris made a disgusted face and held the bird at a further arm’s length, averting his head. “I’ve got bird ass bugs in my pie. That is what I call an actual problem that requires immediate attention.”

  Erika laughed as Morris sprayed the co
ckatiel with bird-bath spray. The bird spread his wings and puffed out his chest as though waiting for another dousing. He liked it and Morris kept spraying him so the bird shook his tail feathers, flapped, and made low, chuckling sounds. “That’s right, Mr. Bird, you go ahead and sing in your shower. Flap your wings and sing, you bird-bug-infested fuck. Morris is going to clean you right up, or you’re going out that motherfucking window.”

  Erika shook her head. Morris was not the best pet owner, but the bird didn’t seem to mind. “You’re not even getting any on his butt,” Erika said. “You’ve got to turn him around. Here, let me do it.” She took the spray bottle from Morris, and while Morris cooed to the bird, she sprayed his back and tail feathers until they dripped with spray. Morris was probably right, Erika figured. Neither she nor Melanie wanted anyone else to know what had happened between them, and so no one had to know. The bad things that had happened didn’t have to live on and on in everybody’s minds. If people and animals, insects and universes—even bird mites—all had a life span, couldn’t experiences, memories, and feelings have life spans too? Couldn’t feelings simply die?

  23

  The snow was not supposed to begin until after seven, but at five in the afternoon it had already begun to flurry, and by five-thirty the storm had hit full force. The forecast was for a wild night, with blizzard conditions and nonstop snow. Some schools had already canceled classes for the next day, but not RD, or at least not yet. Melanie had just finished track club. They met in one small section of the gym and then ran, idiotically, around the school building, up and down stairs, sprinting through empty hallways. There would be only two meets with other track clubs for the entire season. It wasn’t like being on a varsity sport, but Melanie had blown off track tryouts the year before, and after having done nothing but paint scenery for the school play last spring, Melanie felt she should join something. It wasn’t only because colleges liked to see that you were a joiner of some kind. But also, sad to say, Melanie had gotten bored. She felt a little out of shape. Suddenly, in the last six months, her body had thickened. She wasn’t the girl she once was. It was especially bad when she was getting her period. Then, her jeans sometimes didn’t fit at all.