by Leigh Stein
“I wasn’t cheating.”
A dog barked in the distance. It made the hair stand on my arms. “You have to take everything off,” Julia said, “right now, in front of us.” I looked at Summer. She was drinking and making circles in the grass with her toes. Kelly was watching Julia. Julia was watching Angela. Angela wasn’t looking at any of us. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and then shimmied out of her underwear.
“And your bra,” Julia said.
We all watched. We tried not to watch. We wanted to watch. We watched. Angela was crying inaudibly. The bra came off. Her breasts were bigger than ours, but not perfect and high like the ones on the women in the posters in our brothers’ rooms, in our fathers’ magazines; Angela’s were soft and uneven like our mothers’. She wiped her nose again, on her bare arm. I felt the circle closing in around her and knew I was part of it. The game was changing. Angela stood frozen like a statue, as if waiting for us to forget she was there.
Julia said, “Hold her arms.”
None of us moved.
“Kelly, hold her arms.”
Angela looked up at us, but still didn’t move. Her arms were crossed over her chest. Julia waited until Kelly was behind her, holding her, and then she said, “I’ll be right back.”
While we waited, I hoped a serial killer would target this birthday party and kill all of us, so our parents wouldn’t ever know what we had done. They’d think the killer had made Angela strip and stand in the center of our circle. They’d think we were the victims.
“Stop crying,” Summer said. “It’s okay.”
“Yeah, it’s just a game,” Kelly said.
We heard Julia’s footsteps in the grass as she approached. “Everyone move out of the way except Angela,” she called out. We obeyed. I ran back to the tent. I could have kept running, into the street and home, but for whatever reason I stayed, and watched from a distance. It was my fault this was happening. Angela uncrossed her arms and put her face in her hands as Julia turned on the hose and sprayed her with water, first in the head, then in the torso, then her legs, her hands, the side of her head again, aiming for whatever wasn’t covered, punishing; Angela crouched down into a ball, but Julia just moved closer and closer with the water. “You’re swimming,” I thought I heard Julia say. Angela’s pale skin rippled beneath the force of the spray. Julia held the hose with both hands like a pistol. We watched her get closer; we saw Angela’s tiny hands try to cover her body as she choked on the water, and I couldn’t think of any prayers, not a single one, so I just closed my eyes and recited the Preamble to the Constitution in my mind, we the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, until the neighbors turned on their lights and came outside, because they’d heard all of us screaming.
• • •
After we’d buried the dead, I put my arms out, and May let me lift her.
She laid her cheek against my shoulder and put a thumb in her mouth. I’d fallen in love with this little person because she seemed so untouched and unspoiled, still small enough to hold. I’d thought I could preserve her childhood by being there beside her, protecting her from harm, giving her the bliss of ignorance, innocence, safety.
But holding her then, in the yard, beneath a sunny sky of racing clouds, I saw I was deceiving myself. I was the one who wanted to regress to some Eden, claim a second childhood by using May as my ticket. I wanted to travel back in time, to before Kelly’s party, and relive the precious ordinariness of all those days I never knew I would miss. I wanted to trade this life for that one.
The simple innocence of my childhood was over and so was May’s, and it wasn’t fair. I wanted to give May’s back to her, and it made me feel sick that I couldn’t. Unlike what had happened at Kelly’s party, Annika’s death was inexplicable, a tragedy without a villain. Like a fire, it had burned May’s entire family. No one could say it had left May untouched because she was too young to even understand, because there we were, standing above our little graveyard.
I shaded my eyes with one hand and looked up to the attic window, to see if Amy was watching us, but I couldn’t tell; the glare of the light prevented me from seeing anything but the peak of the roof, the cable dish, the strange omniscient sky above.
HOMELAND
That evening, when I got back home, back to that limbo, I was rocked by a headache that obliterated any rational thought. A heavy fatigue kidnapped my body. I felt too weak to look for aspirin. I just lay on my bed and went over all the roles I’d been cast in. I can’t do this anymore, I thought. Be the confidante, the mistress, the gravedigger, the daughter. When I closed my eyes, I saw Emily in her white dress. I saw Alice, as illustrated in Wonderland, drowning in her tears, mistaking a mouse for a walrus or a hippopotamus. Oh, Charles Dodgson! He knew what life is all about, I thought. Drowning and mistaking mice for hippos.
I wanted to talk to someone without actually having to talk to anyone, so I signed into Facebook.
Ximong is being John Malkovich!
Melissa is work 10–6, class 7–9, drinkssssssss!
Tierney is coup de foudre.
Django is a reptilian humanoid.
Oh, Django—I forgot about him all the time. Not that he was so forgettable, but I remembered him as Bernie Boggs, which was the name he’d had when he transferred to my school in third grade. He looked like his name. Like a round, furry creature from the swamp. My friend Sharon said Bernie smelled like egg salad, but I doubt she ever got close enough to find out. If any of the girls had to sit next to him in class, or be his badminton partner, we would make a big show of moving our bodies as far out of his sphere of influence as possible.
In high school, he finally grew taller and thinned out, and his single mother remarried, so he was able to legally change his name when his stepfather adopted him. Bernie Boggs became Django Davis, and choosing a slightly handicapped, Gypsy jazz guitarist for inspiration probably saved his life. He grew some facial hair and started dating a girl who wore leopard print pants. After graduation, he joined the army.
You’d think that once I was old enough to realize how much damage I’d likely done to his self-esteem when I was eight years old by laughing at him with the other girls, I’d apologize, but instead I just friended him on Facebook.
Esther is to pandas as Angelina Jolie is to Cambodian orphans.
Let them figure that one out.
I went to get some cereal, food of the gods.
The Fourth of July was almost upon us. As always, there would be a carnival in the wide grassy fields between the community garden and the police station. There would be a Ferris wheel, Tilt-a-Whirl cars, and bingo tents. Bands who’d had a hit in 1993 would come and play to a crowd of dads in Coors logo tank tops. Eleven-year-old girls and boys would be left alone to roam the carnival aisles unsupervised, to eat cotton candy and pick lucky rubber ducks and hold each other’s sticky hands at twilight, while waiting for the fireworks to start.
My mom was planning a party for the afternoon of the Fourth, a pre-carnival barbecue. Like our annual holiday party, it was a social event my dad would allow if she handled the details and all he had to do was show up and flip the burgers.
First, she made three dozen invitations with scalloped edges and sealed each envelope with an American flag sticker, which she delivered from our minivan for the extra personal touch.
Then she spent hours making little children out of balsa wood. She drew their happy faces with marker and glued curly red doll hair on top, and then impaled their balsa bodies on wire so they could stand as centerpieces on our picnic tables at the party. On the refrigerator, there was a recipe for a patriotic angel food cake with “1776” spelled in white frosting with fresh strawberries. Once she got started on a project, my dad and I knew it was best to stay far away from home, because if she caught us with nothing to do, we would be given a hot glue gun and coerced to help with some doodad and tchotchke assemblage. She was like Balto, the determined sled dog. The Balto of crafts.
I op
ened the pantry. Granola with raisins. Granola without raisins. Cheerios. Apple Jacks.
“Esther?”
There she was. At the dining room table with her reading glasses on, scissors in hand. Our table was an antique, a relic from my grandparents, and my dad had decreed that it be covered in a foam tabletop pad at all times. He was trying to preserve it, but preserve it for what—the pad never came off, we never got to see the varnish underneath. There was not a single occasion or holiday that was important enough for him to remove the foam and risk a scratch.
“Are we out of Cinnamon Toast Crunch?”
“Did you look?”
“I am looking.”
“We must be out, then,” she said, adjusting her headband.
I used to think that if someone told me they were going to show me a lineup of potential parents, including my own, and I could take home any pair I wanted, I would choose a salt-and-pepper-haired dad, a George-Clooney-playing-a-lawyer-in-a-movie dad, and a mom who wore the best-fitting jeans, who would happily drive her children and all their friends an hour each way to Great America, without ever proposing she go inside the park with them.
But at that moment, if faced with a lineup, I would have chosen my own: a dad who had been going bald for years and never mentioned it, who bought DVDs of movies he had fallen in love with twenty years ago, who laughed at his own jokes; a mom who wore overalls and hairstyles most conducive to storing pencils, who dedicated herself to personalizing our home with every hand-sewn napkin, every monogrammed towel, lest we forget that all these things she and Dad had earned were ours.
I poured the Cheerios. I often felt like my parents and I were roommates, passing each other in the hallway, or bumping into each other at the kitchen sink, bewildered to find we weren’t alone, but now my mom was looking at me with the most embarrassing tenderness. A look that said she wanted to make up for all the missed looks in all the time I was ever away from her. A look that said I had come from her body and that meant I was forever a part of her.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said, and took off her glasses.
“You’re staring at me.”
“I’m not staring at you. You’re my daughter.”
I felt sorry we were a real mother and daughter, and not actresses playing the parts, sorry to not know my next lines, something like, I’m sorry for everything and I loved you always and let’s begin again.
“I wanted to make sure you knew I didn’t make any invitations for your friends,” she said. “I figured you could invite them to the party with instant messaging.”
“Which friends?” I thought of May.
The tenderness in her eyes shifted to confusion. “What do you mean, ‘which friends,’ ” she said. “Why don’t you call Pickle right now so you don’t forget later.”
I was chewing. She was watching me chew. I realized I was supposed to call him now, in front of her, so she would know I’d done it.
“Hey,” I said when he answered. “My mom wants me to invite you to our house on the Fourth for a barbecue. My dad’s making bratwursts and my mom’s making special napkins or something.”
“Did you fuck Jack or what?”
“And angel food cake,” my mom whispered. “Angel food cake.”
“Who told you that?” I said, and turned the volume down so she wouldn’t be able to hear him.
“Did you?”
“Does it matter?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, man, I better call Pickle right away so he’s the first to know.’ ”
“Jack told me.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “One o’clock. Bring a salad if you want to, but my mom says your company is present enough. Can’t wait to see you!” I hung up the phone.
“See,” my mom said, “you do have a friend.”
Somehow I was able to maintain a neutral facial expression. “Do you need the minivan for the next couple hours?” I said.
“I was going to go to Hobby Lobby to buy some raffia before they close, why?”
“Where’s Dad?”
“At Home Depot.”
I had to go somewhere. If I didn’t go somewhere I knew that I would retreat to my bed and find a book to take me to Nazi Germany.
“Then I’m going to go for a bike ride,” I said.
“Will you be home for dinner?”
“Yeah, sure, who knows if I’ll even make it around the block?”
I assumed my old bike was still in the garage. I went back to my room to change into a pair of plaid pedal pushers and green low-tops. I was going all out. I was going to look like someone who was born to ride.
I don’t know what the bike of my dreams would look like, but I know it wouldn’t look anything like the bike in the garage, the one I’d had since I was fifteen, which was hot pink and lavender and about as chic and sleek as a Barbie Hummer.
But it was too late to change my mind. I fastened the straps of my ladybug-patterned helmet under my chin and prepared for my great adventure through the even, well-planned streets of my hometown, streets named after dead presidents and disease-prone trees.
I rode north. I tried to change gears. There had been a time in my life when I knew which gear was for what, but now they all seemed arbitrary; it was difficult to pedal no matter which one I selected. Was I doing something wrong? Probably. I turned right on Cleveland, left on Hickory. This is recreational, I told myself. You are recreating. The air was hot and sticky, even in the fading daylight. Lawn sprinklers waved their slow hellos. I passed a couple of kids chasing fireflies, clapping at phantoms in the air. I knew how they felt. I’d always thought that if I completed the right steps, in the right order, each next step would magically reveal itself to me, like the blink of a lightning bug, or the glint of a skein of gold spun from straw. I got good-enough grades, I got into a good-enough school, where I got more good-enough grades, I made the plays, I graduated. I had learned so much—how to drink imaginary hot coffee, the definition of chlorofluorocarbon—and yet I was prepared for nothing. I didn’t know how to shift bicycle gears.
What if I kept going? How far would I get?
When I saw homeless people my age, sitting on the bridge near the Lyric Opera, or under the Belmont red line stop, I wondered if this was how they got there. Maybe they went for a bike ride and never looked back. Maybe their hometowns were worse than this one. Or maybe they were like me—maybe they were from here, too.
My legs ached. Good idea, Esther. Way to get away from it all. I kept pedaling. I was going to go as far as I could, and then turn around and go back. Eventually I would reach the park near the library, and I could rest beside the koi pond, and check to see if all the fish were alive.
I thought I saw Kelly VonderHeide pass me in a red Ford Taurus, smoking a cigarette with her arm dangling out the driver’s side window. It could have been someone else, but the driver was the right age, and I thought I recognized Kelly’s glossy ponytail, the posture of a ringleader. Part of me wanted to yell and ask for a ride. I’d never stopped blaming her for that party, not really.
But Hickory was beginning its downward slope into the center of town and I could pedal more fluently, faster. I dodged low-hanging leafy branches like a samurai. I aimed for sprinklers and they aimed for me. What do you want to do, Esther? Just tell me and I’ll let you do it. We’re in this together.
I want to move, I thought. To a city where no one knows me.
Okay, then. Let’s move. Who is this?
Who’s talking?
The pocket of my pedal pushers began to buzz and vibrate.
I pulled over to the curb and hopped off.
“Hello?” I said. I had to wedge the phone beneath my helmet.
“Esther?”
“Amy?”
“Sorry,” she said. Her voice was low. “Is this a bad time? Can you talk?”
“Uh, sure,” I said. “I’m just a little out of breath.” A Dodge Caravan
drove past, blasting mariachi music. Across the street, a porch light flickered to life.
“Where can I meet you?”
I told her I didn’t exactly have a car, but I could ride my bike a few blocks to the strip mall near the cemetery, and we could meet at Burrito Express.
“See you in a few,” she said.
Since I’d last seen her earlier in the day in the attic, Amy had changed into cotton shorts and a t-shirt that looked like it’d been rescued from a thrift store carousel. The thinness of her legs made her knees look disproportionately large, like broomsticks and grapefruits. I tried not to stare. As soon as she sat down at the table, she raised her hands near her head and made a face like she was screaming, without making any sound. Then she laughed.
I made the same face and laughed with her.
AHHHHHHHHHHH.
“Do they sell alcohol here?”
“Uh, I don’t think so,” I said. “Do you wanna go to O’Malley’s?”
It was two doors down. I’d never actually been inside, but having grown up here, I knew that all my friends’ parents who had fought in Vietnam, and/or rode motorcycles, drank there.
We left my bike inside Amy’s van since I didn’t have a lock for it, and then found barstools. I put my helmet in my lap. We’d forgotten to leave it with the bike, but Amy didn’t seem to notice that I still had it.
“So,” she said, raising her glass.
“So,” I said.
“To Arizona.” Amy clinked hers against mine. She wasn’t smiling. “My therapist says when I’m thinking about self-injuring, I should call a friend to talk, but this is the first time I’ve actually done that.”
“To Arizona,” I said, ignoring the second remark, and drank. She came here to tell me she’s moving home, I assured myself. She was doing what everyone did when they felt confused—move back in with their parents. I tried to picture Arizona, but I’d never been there or any place like it. All I could imagine were fields of cacti, undulating in the sun like flowers, which didn’t make any sense.
Amy took off her glasses and began to rub her eyes with the heels of her hands. I waited for her to start crying, or to pick a fight with the bartender, or to make a joke about the three bikers sitting at a table in the back who all had ponytails, but she just rubbed her eyes like she wanted them out of her sockets.