by Leigh Stein
I fixed the couch cushions while May continued to search for whatever was missing. She looked like one of those indigenous children they photograph for National Geographic, crouched above an unusual bug on the ground, seriously plotting its capture. “I think I hurt my finger,” I told her, “but I don’t remember what I did.”
“Maybe you broke it a little bit,” May suggested.
“I can still move it. Kinda.”
“We have ice packs. I have a Hello Kitty ice pack that’s pink and has Hello Kitty on it.”
“Did you get it at Target?”
“My mom got it.”
“I think I saw those at Target,” I said.
The books that had been under the table were now spread in a mess across the floor. Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema lay next to Bless Me, Ultima and an educational DVD for teaching your infant Spanish. The dragon puzzle was back in pieces.
“Come on,” May said, in the voice of an adult at the end of her rope, and I followed her to the kitchen.
When Dateline NBC does special reports on parents who neglect their children, the kitchens in the re-enactments are made to look like Amy’s did. Rows of bowls filled with Fruit Loops floating in pinkish milk lined the counters. Flower vases had become Kool-Aid pitchers. There were a dozen emptied containers of microwavable macaroni and cheese and a baking pan with a picked-over chicken carcass on the stove. It smelled like rotten fruit.
May got a step stool from its place near the back door and lined it up with the refrigerator.
A Frida Kahlo magnet held the grocery list: butter, milk, avocados, curry powder, Goldfish crackers.
“Watch out,” May said. She climbed the ladder and opened the freezer door.
And when I saw her grip the handle, I remembered how I’d done it. I’d hurt my finger when I hopped the fence at Summer’s. The hot tub at her apartment complex technically closed at ten o’clock, but as long as we could climb the fence it was open to us.
Summer was someone who had learned to do the splits when the girls on her middle school cheerleading squad accidentally dropped her and she landed that way. We’d been friends since grade school, and before her parents got divorced, I could walk to her house by cutting through backyards if I was careful to watch for dogs. We watched MTV for hours, and made collages out of her mom’s old issues of Cosmo.
Then puberty hit, and it hit Summer like a magic wand. In high school, our gym lockers were across from each other, and she would always show me the expensive underwear her twentysomething boyfriend bought her at Victoria’s Secret. When she turned around, I would stare, blushing and wondering if I was attracted to girls, or if I just coveted her body, wished the soft slopes were mine.
She started smoking Parliaments and accepting rides home from boys who were old enough to buy them for her. Her blond hair fell to her waist. She said that after graduation she and her boyfriend were going to move to L.A. and be famous and I believed her.
We were in high school plays together. She played a pregnant Irish teen, a Grecian goddess, and a mobster’s trophy wife in a production of The Taming of the Shrew modeled after the Sopranos. When I once played her funny older sister, the director had me paint rosacea on my cheeks with a sea sponge and cream blush, so Summer’s beauty would shine even further. The audience congratulated her outside the auditorium after the shows, recognizing her even in her jeans because of those long legs, but I often went unrecognized. The anonymity was what I liked. I didn’t need the flower bouquets as much as I needed to be onstage, as much as possible, so I could briefly disappear, like swimming in the dark.
Things began to go badly for Summer at the end of our senior year. By popular consensus among the popular, she was appointed organizer of the senior prank, but instead of a harmless trick, like having the members of the football team wear skirts and heels for a day, or holding a mud wrestling match in the gymnasium, Summer decided to bring four live chickens to school on one of the last days of May, and let them loose in the halls.
All four chickens were trampled to death.
Although she technically graduated high school, Summer was not allowed to attend the graduation ceremony. She never heard her name called. She never moved to L.A. She broke up with her boyfriend and got a job waiting tables at a chain restaurant in the mall where the staff dresses up like characters from Grease and bullies the customers. If someone asks if they can have a straw, Summer says, “I don’t know, can you have a straw?” and when she returns to their table she throws a handful at their children’s heads and they tip her for it. Every fifteen minutes, the staff stands on the countertops and dances with bored facial expressions to songs like “Y.M.C.A.” Summer cut her hair off, dyed it brown, and continues to live with her mom in the International Village apartment complex near Sports Authority.
The night before, we had gone to her apartment after the party to sneak into the hot tub. When I was climbing the fence I bent my finger backward, but didn’t say anything because Jack was waiting to catch me on the other side.
“Jump.”
“I’m not gonna jump. I can climb over.”
“Jesus, Esther, jump,” Pickle said.
Summer hadn’t jumped. Summer had climbed. I got one leg over the top of the fence, and then the other. Jack put his hands on my waist and lifted me down. Why wasn’t Jocelyn with us? What do you tell a woman with two black eyes? I used to practice the splits in my bedroom at night with the door locked, as if someday my life would depend on whether or not I knew how to do them. As if someday I would be hopping a fence in front of the love of my life, and would want the flexibility to climb and not jump.
“Hold this on your finger,” May said, “for fifteen minutes.”
She climbed down from the stool and handed me a kitchen timer shaped like an apple.
“You’re a super good nurse,” I told her.
“When I grow up I want to be a zookeeper.”
“Me, too.”
“You are.”
“Are what?”
“Growed up.”
I didn’t argue. I helped her put the stool where it belonged. She brushed the hair out of her face with two hands and patiently watched out the window until Amy came back inside.
“You’re in the kitchen,” Amy said, surprised to find us. She put her cigarette butt in the trash can, and washed her hands.
“Should I not be?”
Drying her hands on her shorts, she looked into the pan where the chicken was sitting and tried to pull out the bones, but they stuck. “I don’t know how it got like this,” she said. “I think it’s because I hate coming in here, so I don’t, and then it turns into, well, you can see. It’s out of control. I know. Don’t call the Department of Child Services or anything.”
I wasn’t sure if she was joking. “I won’t,” I said.
“It’s not like we have bugs. At least we don’t have bugs.” Amy opened the dishwasher and started to load the dishes that were stacked in the sink. I felt like I should be doing it since I was getting paid, but I didn’t know how to stop her or where to start. May handed me a plate with an old cob of corn and I just passed it to Amy, who then noticed my hand. “What happened?” she said, and looked right at May.
“I didn’t do anything!”
“May didn’t do it,” I said. “I must have just done something to my finger yesterday when I was helping my mom with our garden. It just started hurting now.”
“I love your mom. She gave everyone chocolate money at your Hanukkah party last year, remember? What do you call that? Gelt?”
Amy took the ice pack away to look at my finger and May tugged on the hem of Amy’s shorts. “Come here,” she said. “I have to ask you something.”
“Stop tugging! I’m looking at Esther’s finger.” She turned my hand over and moved my finger around a little. It was red from the cold. I wondered if she actually knew what she was doing, or if she was just doing what any other person wou
ld in the same situation. “It’s just a little swollen,” she said. “Probably sprained. Keep this on there for fifteen minutes.”
She turned to set the apple timer, not seeing it was already set.
May didn’t tug again, but finally Amy bent down so she could whisper something in her ear.
“I know where it is,” Amy told her, abandoning the dishes, and we followed her back into the living room.
Compared to where we’d just been, the room now felt monastic. May pushed the books she had thrown everywhere back under the coffee table while Amy searched the higher shelves. Their movements looked eerily choreographed in their efficiency; each always knew where the other was and anticipated what would happen next. It was as if May knew to go to Amy’s side and put her little hand in the small of Amy’s back. It didn’t look like she was holding on. It looked like a gesture of solace. I watched as Amy tucked May’s pale hair behind her ear absentmindedly, again and again, like the slow-moving hand of a clock.
What had Nate and Amy told her, I wondered, what words had they used, when they lost her sister? Not that they lost her, but when she was lost?
Or maybe the job had fallen to Amy. Maybe she’d read a book with different chapters on how to tell your four-year-old, how to tell your husband, how to tell yourself.
“Is this the one?” Amy asked May, and May reached up her arms.
I moved over on the couch to give her space, but May climbed into my lap with the book. It was a book of Joseph Cornell shadowboxes, tiny framed darknesses. She turned the pages with care until she found the one she was searching for.
“Tilly Losch,” she read to me, dragging her finger across the caption.
“Tilly Losch is our favorite,” Amy said. She was reassembling the dragon.
Tilly Losch is a woman in a blue dress hung from the sky like a hot air balloon basket. Below her, vague mountains meander and vanish into the horizon like smoke. She looks like a young Civil War bride, a girl on the verge of great loss. The strings holding Tilly in the air appear to go nowhere. They disappear into the frame.
I didn’t have to ask Amy why it was her favorite because I could see that she was Tilly, that Tilly was her, that she must have felt the invisible hands holding the strings that kept her upright.
“Do you like him?” Amy asked.
“Who?”
“Joseph Cornell.”
“I’ve seen his boxes at the Art Institute,” I said. “I like them.”
“They’re beautiful,” she said. “They’re like little rooms. Or like little windows inside little rooms. Are you a sleepyhead, May? Do you want to go lie down?” May’s feet remained in my lap, but her head had migrated into Amy’s. A thumb hung from her mouth.
“No,” she said, without opening her eyes.
“Lullaby, and good night,” Amy sang, “my May is a sleepyhead.”
“No I’m not.”
“Go to sleep now, little May, or I’ll have to throw you in the … bay.”
Amy hummed the rest until May stopped protesting. In her sleep her breath went in and out of her body like air into a little white balloon. Amy removed her glasses to clean them on the hem of her t-shirt. Now that we were sharing the weight of her sleeping daughter, now that we were more or less alone with each other, I was waiting for some direction, something to the effect of Now that you’re here and I’m paying you, here’s what I need.
“When May was born I joined one of these groups,” she began, “for new mothers, where you bring your baby and sit around and talk about whatever, nursing, diapers. Stroller elitism. Whoever’s hosting provides the coffee cake, and the other women wonder why they can’t lose the weight.”
“Was it GUABA?” I asked.
“Was it a what?”
“It stands for the Give Us a Break Association, I think,” I said. “My aunt was in it. No, wait, it’s Give Us a Break Already.”
“Cute,” Amy said, “but no.” She didn’t actually think it was cute.
“Major topics of conversation included leaky breasts and how rarely we had the energy to have sex with our husbands. This woman Sue, her husband, he was addicted to Internet porn and she decided in the end it didn’t bother her because it meant she got more sleep.”
“That would suck.”
“What would?”
I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to have disdain for Sue or her husband. “The whole situation,” I finally said.
“Well, I can say I’ve met Sue’s husband and I’d rather sleep, too. And then, God. I don’t know. What else was there? Sometimes we’d talk about how many years should there be between each child so they would grow up to be friends and not resent the extra attention paid to their siblings. Things like that. I just thought, I’m an only child and look at me: I’m fine.”
“I’m an only child, too.”
“Only children know how to survive in the wild,” she said, and laid a hand on May’s side to be sure of her breathing. It had become slow and shallow.
“I wasn’t friends with any of them. Not really. After a few months, I said I couldn’t come anymore because I had to go back to work. We all had each other’s phone numbers, and I promised to call, to set up playdates, but I never did.”
The kitchen timer went off and Amy hardly flinched. She left her hand on May’s side and I got up to turn it off. My finger was pink and stiff, but less swollen. “Thanks for the ice pack,” I said, when I came back to the room. “It helped a lot.”
And as if there had been no interruption Amy said, “The afternoon I remember most vividly was at Andi’s house. She made this insane French toast casserole thing that we all said we’d try just a taste of, but then we all had seconds. I remember that. I remember I was sitting to Andi’s left in the living room after we’d eaten, and her son Max was able to walk if he was holding on to something, so he was making his way around the room, furniture piece to furniture piece, like a contestant in one of those contests where you win the car if you leave your hand on it longer than anybody else.”
Her eyes combed the room, placing the guests, as if the scene were happening again, here, now.
“We were on the subject of only children again and someone said, ‘Oh, I would never just have the one, they’d be so lonely. They wouldn’t know how to share or be socially developed, blahblahblah,’ like having an only child means leaving it alone to raise itself and coming back in eighteen years to see how it’s done.”
Amy turned, but instead of looking at me, she stared over my shoulder. “And Andi said, ‘No, no, no, those aren’t the reasons not to have the one.’ She said, ‘You have to have more than one just in case.’ ”
I watched the quiet rhythms of May’s slumber.
“What did you say?” I said.
“Oh, I don’t think I said anything. I forgot about it. But three years later, at Annika’s funeral, all those women came, dressed in black like it was a cocktail reception, and when Andi came up to me I saw those words burned across her forehead: Just in case. Andrea Stafford is the perfect scapegoat for me. I know it isn’t anyone’s fault my daughter is gone, but Andi and her husband have enough money, their children are healthy, I never have to see her, so why not blame her?” she said. Her voice revealed nothing beyond resignation. I didn’t know what comfort I could offer besides listening, so when it was clear Amy had nothing more to say, I gently removed May’s feet from my lap, and excused myself to finish the dishes in the kitchen, relieved to have something to do with my hands.
• • •
While I was walking home from Amy’s, there was an ice cream truck I couldn’t shake. Its twinkly Joplin rag was always one block behind, even after I crossed Main Street onto the western, less trafficked part of Wilson. I knew I was being paranoid, but I was just as certain I was being followed.
So I slowed my pace, paused to linger, pretended to look for something in the deep recesses of my handbag. There was nowhere I needed to be. No one was waiting for me to arrive anywhere safely. Come ge
t me, I thought. Kidnap me. I want to be Patty Hearst. I want Stockholm Syndrome and a media fortune.
Finally, the truck slowed to a crawl alongside me.
A teenage boy I didn’t recognize was behind the wheel.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing?”
He leaned out the window, conspiratorially. “They pay me to do this,” he said. His voice was nasally, and yet deeper than I thought it would be. He was probably stoned.
“Pretty sweet,” I agreed.
“What’s your name?”
“Es … telle.”
“Do you live around here?”
“My cousin does. I’m just visiting from New Jersey.”
“Estelle from New Jersey.”
He seemed to appreciate the lengths I’d gone to in order to lie about myself. Either that or he believed me. I didn’t ask his name or where he lived. If he told me, I would have realized I’d gone to school with one of his older siblings, and felt overcome by feelings of jealousy and disappointment. By this point, I knew no one was going to jump from the back of the truck and put a potato sack over my head. I continued to stand there because there was something I wanted, something sweeter than abduction: ice cream.
“Can I give you a ride to your cousin’s or something?”
“I like walking.”
“I don’t have anything else to do.”
And I believed him. I stared into his enormous, harmless pupils. “Okay,” I said, “but only if I can have an ice cream.”
The boy gave me a Choco Taco, and I let him drop me off three houses down from my own. He watched me walk all the way to the front porch of the Grazianos’ house, from which I waved. The boy made his hand into a gun and shot it at me, which I took as the international sign of ice cream truck driver affection, and then drove off into the evening, presumably in search of paying customers to answer his siren call.