by Suzy Vitello
“So,” Dad interjects after Willow dissects the brain of the waitress, asking five million questions about the menu. “How was Doktor Gray-ta?”
He always feigns a German accent when he pronounces her name, and that really bugs me. “Fine,” I say. “But she’s retiring.”
“When?” Dad happily accepts his pepper-infused vodka martini.
“Soon. Like a month from now. She said she’d refer me to someone.”
The Girlfriend sips tea, her bobby pins glinting in the track lighting overhead. “That must be difficult. Having to switch therapists.”
If anyone at this table has a real disorder involving food, it isn’t me. Maybe we could get a two-for-one deal with the next shrink. I don’t say that out loud though.
Dad gestures toward my food diary at the empty table space between us. “Homework?”
The book sits there like an innocent bystander with its stolen pages tucked inside. I haven’t yet had the nerve to investigate them, but my heart brims with anticipation. With a secret excitement. “I’m supposed to write about eating and feelings and so forth. SOP for OCD CBT.”
“Will someone turn off her brain? Jeez,” Dad says, smiling in that way he does when I’m clever and he’s clueless.
Our food arrives and over a steaming bowl of pho, the tangy bite of fresh cilantro all the way up in my sinuses where I like it, I get brave and ask, “So, um, were you born with the name Willow or, like, did you appropriate it?”
“Appropriate?” bursts Dad. “You are so vocabularistic, Miss Fancy P.”
“I was born with the name Wilhelmina, actually. Willy, they called me. Until I found out that was a euphemism for penis. That put an end to it. I decided Willow was more, uh, feminine, I guess.”
Dad reaches over his spring rolls and kisses her cheek. “A more fitting name for you, there couldn’t be.”
I hate seeing him kiss her. Touch her. The last time I saw him and Mom kissing, it was on their fifteenth anniversary. They came home from a dinner date, put Joni Mitchell on the iPod player, and danced around in our living room. Six months after that Mom threw his clothes out the second-story window. Willow. She was to blame. Willow, and probably me.
Dr. Greta tried to assure me that their problems had nothing to do with me, because that’s what shrinks are supposed to say to the children of divorce. There’s a party line they all use, and I know this because I’ve heard it on the radio, on television, and in movies. Your parents both love you. You are not to blame.
My pho is growing cold and thick. As usually happens when my food starts changing on me—cooling, thickening, congealing, whatever—my appetite evaporates. And some time shortly after that the thought of putting something in my mouth will make me ill.
Reading my body language, Dad says, “Is that all you’re going to eat?”
“Full,” I say.
The Girlfriend turns her wrist over, looks at it, even though it’s a silver bracelet there, not a watch. “Should we get the bill? The train will be here soon, I think.”
Dad summons the beautiful Asian waitress, her sleek black hair down to her butt.
“Your check, sir?” she asks, the tone in her voice like she’s gargling with honey.
Dad slaps a credit card down, and the waitress smiles and takes it away.
“You will really like Cory,” says Willow. “Every girl does.”
“Yeah,” Dad mumbles. “And I’m pretty sure he knows it.”
I gaze out the window as my father and Willow back-and-forth their thoughts on the boy. I watch a streetcar lurch to a stop: its bright orangeness, the music of its electric engine, yoga-panted passengers getting on and off with their rolled-up mats. So clean and new and familiar. I miss this neighborhood so much already, and I’ve only been gone a week. In every direction, just steps from Spice, are the lofts and apartments of my former life. Steel, concrete, bamboo, granite. My favorite building was one Mom and I called the Japanese Correctional Facility. Zen mixed with harsh lighting and long, exposed pipe corridors. The institutional look was soothing to me. So contained and no-nonsense. As opposed to Willow Creek, where nonsense is the rule. Furls and fronds on everything. If the Pearl was a pattern, it would be checkerboard, and the farm, paisley.
Out the window, I watch the sun struggling to win out over the June clouds. This time of year it’s midafternoon before the gray gives up. Today, I sort of wish the clouds would win. Right up Glisan, just a few blocks away, is the Conrad. The doorman, Gus, sometimes allowed me to sit behind his reception desk and hand out biscuits to the poodles and spaniels who lived there. They would dance on their hind legs, their tiny tongues panting and expectant. Gus kept antibacterial liquid in a pump bottle behind the reception desk, and I slathered it on in between doggies. I miss Gus. He knew I loved to play the concert grand in the apartment, and he’d tease me, calling me Maestro. Just thinking about the sound of that piano, the sleek ivories, the high polish of the music deck, made me tear up.
Right outside the window of Spice stands a clot of teenagers waiting for the light rail. Their group has that accidental circle look, held together with the cool indifference they can afford because they all belong. My chest tightens when I think about actually meeting this brother, who’s probably chugging into the train station at this very moment. Boys like that—the popular ones, the athletes, troublemakers and smart-asses—to them I’m completely invisible. Becket stopped bothering me once Jewellee dropped him. Kevin, Gray, the AHA! boys who tormented me; they sort of slipped off the earth in high school. They became the stoners. The skaters. They cut school, or when they were in school, they cut class. But Cory didn’t sound like the type of kid who sold weed during football games. He was more like a football player with a nose for booze. Like Chris Seebold. Zach Preston. Kids whose parents had connections, so when they screwed up, there was a safety net.
This one loft-sitting job we had, the hedge-fund guy’s kid, Adam, was a senior at Lincoln, and if it weren’t for Mom and me pushing him out the door with a four-shot espresso every morning, he never would have graduated. “We’re enablers,” Mom used to say. “But it pays the bills.”
“Have another card?” the pretty Asian waitress asks.
Dad asks, “What’s the problem?”
“Denied,” the waitress says, the former lilt in her voice gone.
“Here,” says Willow, reaching into her Peruvian satchel. “I have cash.”
Dad doesn’t make a move to overrule, and Willow counts out the bills. I can tell the tip is minimal. Like under ten percent minimal. The waitress snatches the money and mumbles a thank you as she turns away. Transaction over. Good riddance. As I stand up to leave, I look at my mostly full bowl of pho and think I shouldn’t waste so much food. I wonder what Mom is eating on the high seas. Marlin? Crab? Prime rib? She likes expensive entrees. Especially when someone else is picking up the tab.
The cold metal of the seat worked its way into the backs of my thighs, and they’re tingly numb when I stand up, grab my ingestion book, and shuffle out of Spice, lagging behind, as usual. Outside, the sun gleams completely victorious, and the brightness hurts my eyes after the dark violet light of the restaurant. I blink, and blink again, then shake at the vision in front of me: Dad and Willow up the street, having a little argument. I hear Dad say, “I’m a little worried about his influence on Liz. She’s pretty fragile right now.”
Willow sees me and closes her mouth before whatever she planned to say comes out. Instead, she says, “We’ll get through this, Billy. It’ll be fine. Just have a little faith.”
The clock tower at Union Station rises from the edge of the Pearl like a middle finger. Unlike the organized checkerboard of the Pearl, the area around the train station is a frayed hem, bordering on tangled chaos. Train tracks scar up the yard behind the building, and two bridges choke it from either side. Cars circle the small parking lot in front, and more than anywhere else in Portland, impatience makes horns honk and t
empers flare.
Dad doesn’t want to park, so Willow squirts out as we inch to the curb, practically before the car stops. The heavy Volvo door slams behind her, and Dad reaches his hand toward her, like he’s ready to yank her back in by the ends of her hemp T-shirt. But it’s too late; she’s already inside the big oak doors of the ancient train station.
Awkward.
“Well,” says Dad to the rearview mirror, “our blended family is about to blend just a little more.”
I can see my eyebrows rise in the mirror. Bushy orange eyebrows. And my tufted hair looks very Bozo.
Dad says, “It’s not easy for you, all these changes. I know that.”
A red pimple has sprouted between my eyebrows. A third eye. I squint to see if I can make it smaller. Nope.
A security guy with one of those stomachs that drapes over a belt to below crotch level comes waddling up to the car. My father waves to the guy before he can open his mouth to tell us we need to move along, and then Dad guides the Volvo away from the curb with his two hands, both at twelve o’clock on the wheel. “I love her so much, you know,” Dad says. “She’s beautiful, strong, smart.”
Dad would soon lap into oversharing like he does. I put myself into see-no-evil, hear-no-evil monkey mode. It isn’t that hard, really, to become blind and deaf at will. I just have to concentrate on the transportation of blood, breath and nerve cells inside of me. I make myself small, smaller.
Dad: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The car chugs around the parking loop, and I tune my father out as I run my fingers over the cover of my journal and the stolen Sisi pages. I feel the urge to take a peek, but I pinch myself instead, hard, on the inside of my arm like I do when I don’t want to give in to something. Meanwhile, Dad drives around, up and down a couple of one-ways, and he blathers on in his telling-me-more-than-I-want-to-hear fashion. Then, after a while, I hear my name, and like one of Willow’s goats hearing the cracked corn bin open, I snap to attention.
“So, Liz, what about it? Have you had sex with a boy yet?”
Holy crap. Were fathers really supposed to ask that? And in such a casual way, as if the question had been, So, Liz, have you taken trigonometry in school yet?
“Yes,” I say, as alarmed at my lie as he must be to hear it.
“Really? When? Who?”
“Oh, you know, everybody at my school does. Especially girls from, you know, broken homes and whatnot?” Where did that come from? The sting of that particular meanness shocks me spilling out of my mouth that way. I crane my neck to see how what I said registered on Dad’s face. If he’s an emoticon, the mouth part would be a straight line. Confused.
“So, you’re sexually active?” he asks finally with a bit of discomfort.
Actually, I’m about as sexually active as a piece of sheet music. I haven’t even really had a boyfriend yet. No entwining of fingers. It’s true that the entire student body of Lincoln is getting it on in any available basement, family room and bridge underpass. But me? Nada.
Nobody in his right mind would want me.
“Do you use condoms?” Dad blurts as we cruise by the train station entrance for a third time.
Condoms. Right. There is no need for condoms. I’ve never even seen a penis. Well, not really, anyway.
It wasn’t until the sixth grade Students Today Aren’t Ready for Sex presentation at AHA! that I learned penises could morph into solid clubs of wood. By then I heard the term boner a thousand times, but I always thought it meant sly smile. The Students Today Aren’t Ready for Sex presenter sent around a large, stiff model of a rubberized penis. She said boner, woody, stiffy, chubby, hard-on. These were euphemisms for the male erection. Male erection, I thought. Is there a female erection too? What else have I missed?
Two years later, I would learn more about all of that—the female equivalent of a boner. And it wouldn’t be in a classroom, or on a couch in some dank basement rec room. It would be in a mental ward, where they sent me to protect me from perverts.
“Well, do you?” My father’s voice is growing impatient. Scared, even.
“Condoms?” I say. “Yeah. Sure.”
He wants to press for more, but at that moment Willow and a figure shrouded in a hoodie wander up to the Volvo.
“Okay,” Dad says, pulling the trunk button and unpacking himself from the car. “We need to pick this up later.”
Behind us the boy throws his bags into the open trunk. Willow is smiling as he does that, in the way of a proud mommy. Dad comes around behind the car and locks lips with her; his over-the-top grabbing and squeezing look like a poster of a soldier freshly back from World War II planting one on his girl. What has it been, five minutes apart? The hoodie-clad boy slams the trunk down. I wait in the car, gazing at the spectacle through the side mirror.
When he opens the car door and climbs in, the smell is clothes that had been stored in a cedar chest. The shoes he’s wearing, skater. And they make his feet look like the bumper boats at the Family Fun Center. Where’s the elite soccer equipment? I have to stop my own scrawny foot from touching the rims of his paws. He sits with his knees far apart in the backseat, next to me. I close my eyes for a moment and smell the cedar of his nearness.
“Hi,” I say.
“So, you’re the daughter, eh?” he asks, not looking at me.
The daughter? I nod, feeling myself shrink.
“Terrific,” he says under his breath. “Let’s do the whole getting-to-know-you chat later, yeah? I need to catch up on the z’s.”
We drive quietly, our new team, each of us lost in our own thoughts, whatever they are. I resist plugging in, so my iPod wires hang over my shoulders like stray threads. This boy next to me is bigger and less hippie-esque than I thought he’d be. The smell of him, his half-closed eyes under dark, bushy brows, I can’t stay near it too much longer and continue to breathe like a normal person. I need my music, but if he saw my playlist of Mozart, I’d be right away advertising how nerdy I am.
Willow lurches her head around to us. “I know you haven’t been living at Willow Creek long, Liz, but why don’t you show Cory around when we get back?”
Dad is quiet, his one hand on top of his other hand on the steering wheel. The tension in the Volvo is thicker than morning fog. I can tell Dad isn’t really keen on this new development, and the whole sex and condom talk has stirred him up.
“Okay,” I say.
By the time we turn into the gravel driveway, Cory is full-on snoring. He doesn’t even wake up when Dad jerks to a stop, gets out, and slams the heavy door closed. I scramble out my own door, the stolen pages tucked in the ingestion log tight in my clutches, and wander over to sit in a big tire lashed to a branch of an enormous oak that stands just outside the back door of the farmhouse. Willow removes her brother’s luggage from the trunk and begins hauling it to the back porch.
My father’s forehead creases, and he booms, “Shouldn’t Cory be doing that?”
Willow shrugs, says, “He’s exhausted. I don’t think he slept all night last night.”
“And why would that be?”
“This is a pretty traumatic situation for him, Billy,” she says. “I wish you could chill out for a bit. Give him a chance.”
They walk inside, the two of them, no longer hand-in-hand. Cory is still in the car, sleeping away. I try to swing, but the problem with a tire swing is that you really need someone to push you, so instead, with my diary firmly squeezed between my thighs, I inch my feet around the circle of dirt under the tire and twist myself in a tight, round ball.
Jewellee and Becket, back when they were going out, I’d see them at the Couch Street playground outside of AHA! and once they were on a swing together, her sitting backwards on his lap. They looked like a lunar landing vehicle with their four legs splayed out. Some outer-space creepy-crawly thing. Their crotches were fused together, separated only by cheap denim, a couple of zippers. I wondered if Jewellee’s father ever asked
her if she’d had sex. If she used condoms. He owns a BMW dealership in Beaverton, and just last week I heard Jewellee’s taunting voice molded into an advertisement for expensive Bavarian Motor Works sports cars. Her dad sells top-end cars; mine fixes beaters. Not that I really care.
At Providence, there were lots of girls like Jewellee. Rich girls who cut. Ballerinas who puked. Smart girls who made themselves stupid to be popular. Jewellee, though, never landed in the psych ward. She straightened out somewhere between eighth and ninth grade, and freshman year, after I returned to school, she even came up to me at lunch and asked me if I wanted to sit with her and her friends. I declined.
I spin around, hugging the top of the tire between my upper arms and chest. One thing about being flat: nothing really gets in the way.
Inside the Volvo, there’s movement. The boy stirs.
The back door of the Volvo squeaks open and out he comes. He stretches and bends over and touches his bumper-boat toes. He twists his back one way, the other way, and then his eyes, peeking out from under that hoodie, go straight to my eyes. “Tire swing,” he says. “Sick.”
He clomps his big skater shoes over to the tree.
“What’s that?” he asks, pointing to my ingestion log.
I feel my cheeks flush. “Nothing. My, uh, homework.”
“It’s summer.” He lifts his lips enough to show off two major dimples.
I’m mortified. Already he thinks I’m a geek. “Yeah, well, you know. I’m making up some work.”
“Whatever floats your boat,” he says. “Where’d everyone go?”
I point to the shack.
“What’d you say your name was?”
“Liz,” I say. “Elizabeth, actually. I don’t think I said my name was anything, so don’t feel bad if you didn’t remember …” Why am I such an idiot?
Cory thrusts a clenched hand at me in a fist-bump invitation, and it takes me a second to understand that he isn’t just showing me a Livestrong rubber bracelet or something. “So, Elizabeth. You just moved up here yourself, right?”