“Go,” Jess’s dad said to me, twisting the key to start up the car, and as I slid out of the car, Jess and Penny slid in, and he said in a voice that was barely his, “Here’s a great idea. How about Walker Brothers for one of those great big apple pancakes?” and Jess said, “Oh, yes! You ever had one, Penny? They’re aaaa-mazing,” and I pushed the car door closed, not slamming because Jess’s dad didn’t like that, but not gently either, and partway up the walk, I turned around to watch them drive away.
I hadn’t asked, so there was that. But I had wondered, and there was that, too.
Now they were gone—anyway—and I had nothing—anyway—only the bills I squeezed in my fist.
I crushed my eyes shut, started counting backward. It was worth it, worth it, worth it, sang the numbers in my head as they sailed through, on their way nowhere.
I was alone the whole rest of the day, with so many things to do to keep busy. I felt divided, split precisely in two, with half of me accomplishing to-do list drudgery, and the other half of me watching that girl work, wondering why she needed herself to be busy. I took back my bedroom, sliding shirts into drawers and skirts on to hangers. I wadded up the accumulation of empty, pleated Frango mint wrappers from the pound box Jess’s dad had bought Penny, which explained why she barely ate. I yanked her blond hair snarls out of my comb. I couldn’t find two of my oversized sweatshirts or my off-white (“oatmeal”) polo shirt, and my lipsticks had been ransacked. She left only the pale shades, and since I never wore those, I pitched them, and then I went through all my makeup and threw away the eye shadows that were cheap drugstore brands because Jess had turned me snobby about Clinique. Penny left behind a clot of dirty T-shirts, three tube socks, and an unopened package of hair bands. I retrieved my fake pearl necklace from its hiding place in the toe of my winter boots and rolled up the three fifties and tucked them in there instead. The twenties, I buried with my underwear; yes, that was the first place anyone would look, but I always figured that they’d stop looking if they found something. I returned my books to the shelf, largest to smallest, and then I changed to alphabetical by author but that looked sloppy, so I went back to according to size. I threw away my nail polish because Penny had mixed up some of the brushes and colors and left caps loose; she’d also painted her initials in Evening Plum on a corner of the dresser. The boxes of rocks in the drawer looked untouched, but I lifted each and rattled it, making sure. It was a dry, scratchy sound, almost melancholy, like something I’d heard before but couldn’t quite place.
I scrubbed the bathtub, though Jess was the one who took baths, not me. I sprayed Windex on the bathroom mirror and the mirror behind my door and wiped with an old piece of newspaper until there were no streaks. I liked the smell of Windex, so I sprayed it on a couple of kitchen windows, too, but ran out of newspaper. Rags and paper towels were no good, according to my mother, leaving lint and streaks.
I ate the rest of the peanut butter, all the limp celery, and I thought about ordering a pizza but I didn’t, though I could afford to and could tip. That was the luxury, the choice and choosing no.
I wanted to sleep but I wasn’t tired. The phone hadn’t rung, though I hadn’t been listening for it to. I could go to the library to study. I could go watch the on-campus movie, always some big blockbuster on a Saturday night. I could find a frat party. I could find a guy at a frat party. I could do all of those things, one after the other, if I planned the night right, starting at the right time, which was now, or in five minutes, or in twenty minutes, or at quarter past at the latest, or in an hour if I skipped the library or the movie, which usually had two showings anyway.
I sat at the table, I sat on the couch, I sat in the ugly tweed chair. There was no place I wanted to sit, no place that was comfortable. Standing was worse and felt aimless. I stared out various windows, but all I saw was my own dumb reflection because it was dark.
I tried to get back to reading The Portrait of a Lady but closed the cover almost immediately. It wasn’t about marriage at all. It was about money. All the books I thought were about marriage were really about money. How had I never understood that?
I thought about the murderer, maybe bored with Saturday night, staring out his window, eating his cruddy celery, jotting notes on what to do next: 1) get more cyanide; 2) sneak it into Frango mints at Marshall Field’s; 3) chuckle quietly as people died. That easy for anyone to stir a handful of poison into dorm spaghetti sauce or sprinkle it on top of the pizza I had almost ordered earlier. Utter power, like God. That was what he wanted, power—I felt sure of it and wanted to tell someone, but there was no one to tell. It was scary to understand that about him.
FROM IOWA
(fall, junior year)
“We’re women of the world now,” Jess said. “Aren’t we?”
“Sort of,” I agreed. It was our first night together in the new apartment, and her parents were finally gone, so like a party. All afternoon, her dad had hauled furniture as directed, this corner, that corner, this room, the other room. Jess told him how to rearrange my bedroom. She had a sharp eye, making him angle the bookcase in the corner, not push it flat and boring against the wall the way I would. Jess’s mom left for an hour and returned with a car trunk full of shopping bags jammed with more stuff to squeeze into this two-bedroom, one-bath, on the first floor of a stacked duplex, with closets like phone booths and half as many electrical outlets as someone would need. We ordered pizza from a place in the new neighborhood. Jess’s dad ate all the nibbled crust edges littering Jess’s and her mom’s plates. No one mentioned Tommy and how if he and Jess were still together that’s who would have been pushing around the furniture and paying for the pizza.
Now, Jess slouched sideways across the arms of the ugly brown La-Z-Boy. She had threatened to haul it to the curb, but I said they’d charge us since it was listed in the lease. She snorted. “They should thank us. It’s grotesque.” She sprawled in it, crumpled like a Kleenex, and even with a ton of boxes to unpack in her bedroom, she found a composition notebook and wanted to write a list in honor of, as she said, “escaping my parents.”
I’d been waiting for her to mention her sister now that we were alone, but she hadn’t. Linda. Linda. An echo off the walls. No one had gone to London that summer. Beyond the sadness, Linda’s absence shifted Jess’s family like an earthquake upending a line of buildings. Her mother and father barely spoke, with Jess the only thing left to agree on. Jess talked more, desperate to plug the gaping hole in their hearts. The ache I imagined filling Jess, overflowing: the agony of her easy scorn and silly complaints about her sister, and the abrupt finality of what she’d done and hadn’t done. I knew that ache. Who wouldn’t want to escape?
I was lying on the couch, and because the couch also was written into the lease, it, too, was wretchedly ugly—mustard slipcovers with the texture of a soggy pile of half-decayed leaves—so I didn’t feel bad plopping my shoes on the cushions. My mother had spent the whole summer nagging me to sit up straight and stop slouching and to get my feet off wherever I set them, table, chair, couch—anywhere that wasn’t the floor, basically. It was the sound track of that summer, “Get your feet off...” My boss at Kentucky Fried Chicken warned I’d get varicose veins if I didn’t prop up my feet and lifted her pants to show me a network of blue scarring her legs, but my mother said I was too young and why didn’t I get something real to worry about?
I kneaded one of the throw pillows before sliding it under my head, trying to settle and get comfy. These were the pillows I remembered from our dorm room last year, and it was reassuring to see something familiar, round and blue with stripes, square and yellow with polka dots. Classes started in a week, though I’d been here alone since the first, waiting for Jess to escape her parents.
Jess and I were drinking Tab, though I’d dropped in a scoop of vanilla ice cream, which appalled her: one calorie versus a million. “It’s competing interests,” she lectured about the Tab float, and also about my other great food invention, p
otato chips dipped in cottage cheese. Pat Benatar played on Jess’s stereo (which her dad had hooked up, stringing webs of wire to get the speakers precisely right), begging to be hit with our best shot. That song was my secret anthem, though so many people liked it that I pretended not to. The room had drifted down into that early darkness where someone stands up to turn on a light, and the mood shifts. Jess had just snapped on the floor lamp behind the ugly chair. Almost always, she was first to go for the lamp.
Now Jess said, “Here’s the new list. Men Every Woman Should Kiss at Least Once.”
“Always with the men,” I said. “You really need a women’s studies class.”
“Like I need to study how to be a woman?” she said. “Seriously, this will be good. A list of a hundred essential kisses. Like every girl should kiss a musician. Remember that frat party with Eddy Clearwater playing, and me afterward totally making out with the drummer?”
Musician, check, I thought. “A boy with a motorcycle,” I suggested. “A lifeguard. Someone on Valentine’s Day. A stranger at midnight on New Year’s.”
“Slow down,” she said, scribbling. “You’ve kissed all those guys?”
“And don’t think I’m stupid,” I said. “I know what you mean by ‘kiss.’”
“Just kiss,” she said. “Really. Like, just all sweet is all.”
“A boy in the best fraternity,” I said. “A boy in the worst fraternity. In the rain. Under a starry sky. A boy with a great car. A boy who can fix a car.”
Still writing, she said, “I’d never kiss a boy in the worst fraternity. You know what they look like.”
I said, “According to Benjamin Franklin, ugly women make the best mistresses because they’re so grateful.”
“Then you take that disgusting frat boy,” she said. “Take Benjamin Franklin, too. My boy with a great car I guess was Tommy.”
Hearing his name startled me, and I had to speak before she noticed my reddening face. I said, “Should I kiss him to knock that off my list?”
The pen froze straight up.
“Just kidding,” I said.
“He was a good kisser,” Jess said. “Maybe sometimes too wet, but better than too dry, like those pecks from my old-lady great-aunt.”
“You want tongue from your great-aunt?” I asked.
She laughed. “Just please get your own guy with a great car.” It wasn’t a sharp tone, it was a joke; we were joking. Still, in my head: Check.
So I kept talking: “A guy who drives three hours to see you. A guy with an accent, preferably British.”
“Remember that French guy we met on Rush Street who thought we were models?”
“He said that so you’d kiss him.”
I thought she would laugh again, but she twisted herself to sit up properly and stretch out her legs straight in front of her. Because they were cramped, she would claim, and crunched sideways in the chair, and achy from loading and unloading boxes, but really she was secretly admiring them, how long and tan they were (which they were, maybe even better than Sydney Moore’s legs). I knew her habits.
She said, “Me, my turn. A guy you meet on a plane. A train.”
“The el,” I said, which just came out. That was forever ago, that first fall, when I was someone else. I couldn’t think of another guy. I couldn’t think. I scrambled to smile or smirk, to look lighthearted. I slurped Tab through the straw, distracting with noise.
“You kissed a guy on the el?”
I shrugged one shoulder. “You ride enough, it’s bound to happen. So add a guy on the Greyhound bus. Dry lips. You wouldn’t like him.”
She scowled, tapped the pen in quick patterns of three against the notebook. “I don’t have el or Greyhound bus.”
“I don’t have plane or train.”
“Because you don’t take planes or trains,” she said.
It was supposed to be silliness, not a contest, not a conversation. I rattled them off: “A guy you work with. Your boss. Your teacher. Your professor. Bartender. Waiter. Busboy. Black guy. Jewish guy. A guy who can whistle really loud through his lips. A professional athlete. A guy at a beach. A guy who’s prettier than you. Any guy and then later that same guy’s brother or cousin or best friend.”
“Whoa,” she said. “Too fast. I can’t get all these down.”
“A guy who can start a fire without matches,” I said. “A guy who trained his dog from a puppy. A guy who can field dress a deer. A guy who cooks as good as a chef. A guy who—”
“You’re saying you kissed all those guys?” she asked. “For real?”
I gave another ambiguous shrug and let her writing catch up while the list in my head tilted, darkened. Damn it. Guy who drives an eighteen-wheeler. Guy who’s your friend’s brother who’s really a boy who likes boys, who’s a fag. Guy who deals coke that you get free. Guy who buys dinner and a couple of drinks, guy who only buys the drinks, guy who brings a bottle of what he likes. A guy you meet for blow jobs in the library. A relative, a guy you’re related to, a man, a man you’re related to, a relative...
I barreled onward, though Jess was flexing her writing hand: “A guy you have a huge crush on who you didn’t think knew you were alive. A guy who’s going to inherit a boatload of money. Married guy. Married guy married to a friend, married to your best friend.” Shut up, I thought, as Jess tossed the notebook and pen onto the carpet that had been unrolled, then rerolled and moved and unrolled again to center it properly.
“Enough,” she said. She lifted her half-full glass off the (ugly) coffee table, spun it to rattle the ice cubes, then set down the glass without drinking from it. “I’m your best friend, so I should know everything about you. Have you kissed all those guys?”
“You said it was a list for what we should do,” I said. “A hundred kisses before we die. A wish list.”
“You want to do all those things?” she demanded. “Even if they’re wrong? I mean, your friend’s husband?”
“Don’t you?” I asked. “Now that they’re on a list? Don’t you secretly sort of want to a little bit? You know, to be bad?”
There was a moment where she opened her mouth, about to say something. Maybe I’m engaged, before remembering she wasn’t. Or maybe she didn’t like me assuming she wanted to be bad. Anyway, I sensed the whole Tommy and engagement thing remained unsettled. I wasn’t about to trash him unless she started. The one she thought she wanted to kiss was him.
I said, “What is this list for then? If it’s not like a shopping list for you?”
She sighed. “I thought it might be fun.”
“Is it?”
Another long sigh. My feet on the couch cushions looked huge. Size nine. Maybe that’s why my mother didn’t like seeing them. She wore five. Elvis loved dainty, delicate feet on women, she often pointed out. Not that it mattered now with Elvis dead, but my mother bragged that people said she was a ringer for Priscilla.
“It’s just a silly list,” I said. “Like Zittiest Boys in Astronomy.”
“Don’t you want to fall in love?” she asked. “Get married?” I watched flickers of complication cross her face, sadness but something trickier, and I paused before passing along my usual lie:
“Of course.”
“Then you have to stop... this,” she said. “Picking up boys on the el.”
She chose that one. Yes. We knew each other that well. I jabbed my straw deep into my drink, through the ice cream and to the bottom. There were things I could admit. She called herself my best friend. What if I admitted them?
She waited.
“He was a man,” I finally said, “not a boy. With amazing green eyes and a chin dimple. Worked in the pit at the Board of Trade, which is how we met; he was still wearing his jacket, and I asked about it. They stand out in the pack of men hustling down on the floor, he said, so everyone knows whose guy you are. Working down there is like shoving your way through a football game, waving your arms and screaming all day, then going out to get wasted. ‘Nothing like it,’ he kept sayin
g, and he cracked up laughing when I said I wanted a job just like that, told me I wouldn’t last five minutes and shoulder-slammed me, about knocking me off my feet. ‘That’s just what’s going on in the can,’ he said. So he was kind of drunk, I guess, and when he grabbed my hand and yanked me through the cars, I was like, Why not? We wedged into one of those unused conductor compartments, and there we were, you know, like from a movie.”
I stopped. I had been talking too fast all of a sudden. I had to stop.
“And?” she asked. Her fake-casual tone prickled the bare skin of my forearms, lifted the hairs. I set my Tab on the floor, then rubbed my hands fast against my arms to warm them.
“Brr.” I smiled pleasantly. “At Howard we transferred to different trains. End of story.”
He said, I know you want it, and he wrenched back my arm and wrestled up my skirt, pinning my body where he wanted it, and a jagged hook scraped the middle of my back, dug into me, dug in, and he said again and again, I know you want it, like convincing himself, and I wondered if I did, if I really did, and if I did, how did he know? How did he know? It was over fast.
I added, “No idea what his name was.”
She said, “You don’t have to do that.”
A little prim of her, and exactly why I was careful with the story, inventing the chin dimple for charm, stopping when I was supposed to—exactly like I’d been taught. I felt awkward, so I picked up the Tab again, sipped politely, silently.
Jess said, “I promise some guy will come along and love us the way we deserve to be loved.”
“How do you know—” I started, then stopped, and she thought that was my whole question, because she launched into the fairy tale about the “right one” and the usual bullshit bull crap. I only half listened, because my question wasn’t that. My question was: How do you know I deserve to be loved?
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