I Must Have You

by JoAnna Novak

  “Nah. My mouth tastes like butt, though.”

  I propped myself onto my elbows, looking for my backpack. It was on the floor, a million feet away from the bed, in another galaxy. “You wanna Listerine strip?”

  He shook his head. “Gelatin, right?”

  “I don’t know.” I paused. This music sounded like a morbid lullaby. “How would I know if I were high?”

  “Here.” He pulled something off the bookshelf and sat perpendicular to me. Now we were both on the bed again, our bodies processing the same air. I wondered if, like Lisa always said that Cher said in Clueless, proximity to certain furniture (i.e., beds) made him—like it made me—think about sex. “Can you read this?”

  It was a booklet, a zine, thicker than Real Talk. There weren’t any daisy chain Clip Art borders; instead, the entire front cover swarmed with Ethan’s printing. I flipped through. Each page crawled with the same crabbed handwriting. Between a list of Clear Channel radio stations and a stick figure cartoon, a Xeroxed Calvin Klein ad’s models had their eyes blacked out. On the next page, a pasture of cows sported devil horns, and on the next, receipts from the Gap and The Limited and United Colors of Benetton were packed with all caps, block-lettering: STOP CHILD LABOR STOP UNLIVABLE WAGES STOP JUST DOING IT STOP NIKE STOP THE GAP DON’T FALL IN STOP CONTRACTING YOUR “SELFISH TV DEATHWISH” (STD) TAKE OUT YOUR TUBES STEP AWAY FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND NO ONE GETS HURT PUT DOWN THE VOTE SAY NO TO MOBILES GIVE UP YOUR GAS AND WALK LISTEN TO YOUR KEANU GET YOUR MEMBRANE INSANE BE HUMAN BE MASTER OF YOUR OWN DOMAIN GIVE NAME TO YOUR NONPERSON.

  “Woah.” I was impressed, but embarrassed by Ethan’s unabashed interest in these topics, way deeper than anything I ever thought about outside of Social Studies. Suddenly, my concerns seemed petty, insignificant, like cheap stick-on earrings that belonged to, like Gwen Stefani said, “Just A Girl.”

  “I mean, yeah,” I said, staring at the text. “I can read parts—there’s a lot of writing in … this. What is … or who wrote it?”

  Ethan looked at the zine. At the roots, his blonde hair was almost black. I liked his head, too: in sixth grade, he’d shaved it down to the skull. “Nonperson, issue two. I’m tryin’ for twenty-five volumes. I don’t know. Four issues times twenty-five, that’s a hundred chances to disrupt the system before college.”

  “That’s ambitious.” I tried to sound cautiously respectful. “I bet you totally, like, shift paradigms.”

  “Keep it. I’ve got the master.”

  He took the issue from me and set it on the floor, on top of my mini backpack. He scooted toward me; his hips were touching my side, just below my ribs.

  Now my pulse was pounding. Ethan was so close, I could smell all of him: peanut butter, something grainy (oats?), and the blue masculinity of cologne, like the Stetson Lisa and I used to spray on each other’s wrists at Walgreens. I was excited and terrified: that he might touch me, that when he pressed my shoulder my bone would dissolve, slo-mo, the hard cortical, the spongy cancellous, and his hand would push and push all the way to my marrow, and he’d discover I was not vegan friendly, I was all animal, bred by, tested on, living amongst. I was not all there; my heart was in another field. I was so animal, I would’ve chewed off my own arm if it meant getting Lisa’s attention.

  “Um, what’s it called?” My voice shook.

  “Dude, Nonperson, you just asked. Double-der.”

  “Duh. I’m sorry. Wow—I think … the smack messed me up. Can I make that phone call now?”

  “Hey, what’s the rush? We’re just hangin’ out. Finish your water. Yo, whoever you need to talk to is gonna get a better Elliot if you’re hydrated.”

  I nodded. I felt spacey and, suddenly, swamped by sadness. I was no closer to Lisa. I took another sip and squeezed my eyes shut so I wouldn’t start sobbing.

  “Hey, Heroin Chic,” Ethan said. He pivoted. With his thumb, he drew little infinity signs on my thigh, right above my knee. Then he craned his body and faced his face toward mine. “You’re super pretty.”

  He kissed me. He was not so pretty—he had blotchy skin on his forehead where zits had been undid—but his eyelashes were long, wet, thick fringe and his eyelids were so smooth, blank, calm that I couldn’t take it. I closed my eyes and felt his mouth on mine. For a fat second, I sunk into contentment. I was the great ’90s abstraction, all the slow songs Park played rolled into one, “Truly Madly Deeply” and “All My Life” and the one about love suicide. Ethan’s tongue wrested my lips and I tried not to think about those old dances, the ones where Lisa and I would fake–slow dance together because neither of us was going out with anyone. I tried not to think of how it felt when she wrapped her arms around my neck and I clasped my hands behind her ribs, how she felt like crushed velvet, how the disco ball strobed the floor with pink and red lights, how our veins ran with Diet Coke. I tried to be with Ethan.

  He leaned back, paused, breathed deeply. A small smile started in the corners of his mouth. Then he stood up, reached for his fly, and unzipped. Peeking out the flap of his Space Jam boxers was a flushed red boner.

  He put a hand around my neck, half a collar, and pushed me toward his waist.

  “Woah! Hold up,” I said. I scrambled backwards. Be cool, I told myself. Other girls could handle this. I tried to pretend I wasn’t seeing his penis. It had that blinky hole in the tip, like a balloon with a leak.

  “I’m not pretty,” I said. My ears rang as I said it, like a siren was going off inside me, blaring Elliot, wrong, Elliot, wrong. “Do you know Lisa Breit?”

  Ethan’s shoulders slumped. He looked down and pulled up his jeans and zipped them back up. His face was confused. “I mean, just from school.”

  “She’s my best friend.” Suddenly, I really was about to weep, and I couldn’t control it at all. “I have to go. I need to call my mom. Do you think your brothers would want that? I mean, the dru—”

  Ethan knuckled his hipbone, which jabbed against his jeans. “I don’t know. Um. Elliot. Hey, mang, was that bad? You know? I’m—I’ve never done that before. It just … felt or seemed … right.”

  “Oh, no, I just—” And for a second, I wanted to fling myself onto his bed and let him trounce me like in my old stupid fantasies. I wanted to join him in something and fall asleep forever.

  I grabbed the baggie and my backpack and stood. All the organs and muscles and veins swooshed inside me. I would never stop being dizzy, like I would never stop loving—like a sister or a best friend or the person who recognizes your every blink and breath—Lisa. I leaned against the wall.

  Ethan backed toward the door. Red flared on his cheeks, nervous and sweet, but all I could think of was that D. In my head it was still staring at me, like a cyclopean mole rat. “You wanna make that phone call at least?”

  “Nah, I’m taking off.”

  “Hey—how are you gettin’ home?” he said.

  I opened the door. The rest of the house was dark, too. I felt like we’d broken into a construction zone. My footsteps banged down the stairs. I slipped on my boots.

  “Elliot! Wait,” he said. “Seriously. Don’t spaz. How are you—?”

  “I’ll walk, okay?”

  “Yo, my mom’s gonna be home any minute. Just chill. Dude—you see that cardinal sign thingy? Yeah, that’s a thermometer. It’s twelve degrees. We can watch a movie or something. I bet you’d love Pulp Fiction.”

  I opened the door. A lingering strand of Christmas lights gilded the snow. It even smelled cold, red and gold glitter raining down on the world. I zipped up my coat.

  “See you Monday,” I said.

  “That’s MLK. Dude, c’mon—”

  I waved goodbye and rushed down the stoop. My entire body cowered at the change in temperature. Home: it was two miles from here.

  “Hey!” Ethan yelled. He was standing in the doorway, in socks. In the foyer light, I could see his cheeks, still on fire. “Heroin Chic! It’s like lose a limb cold!”

  9 ·· ANNA

  THERE ARE ADA
GES I REPEAT to students: Writing is a process. Trust your reader. Revision is a door.

  There is ornate Italian: Villanelle—from villanella. Stanza means room. Volta, the turn a sonnet takes, vaunted time, vault of heaven.

  Corpo, body.

  Hate sits like a warden in the passenger seat, watching the slutty woman mouth.

  How relentlessly I detest my body. Open as an anemone! Hungry as a sea dog! Thirsty as a leech!

  In the Saab, I suck soda. Steer.

  Rot was right: the snow is thickening. The wind is tempered and flakes felt the windshield. There are no other vehicles on this path, a corridor mossed in white. I turn the wipers off. The polka dots cluster. I lift my boot from the gas and let the car creep. My eyes are closed, resting. So I may do the deed/that my own soul has to itself decreed, wrote hunky Keats. Let the auspices have their say.

  For five seconds, it’s me and my breath. Beth, meth, death. Brain death. Crib death. Death death.

  “Oh Anna,” I say to the soundtrack (tires, motor, snow). “You chicken shit.”

  I am about to exit the Carousel Gardens Arboretum when I notice words. Café. The Grove. On a glaucous sign, a wavy arrow jabs: Welcome Center, Restroom, Orchid Temple.

  It’s one forty-five.

  This is what it looks like to forsake a job. This is what it looks like to give up.

  The Saab mushes toward a new lot. Here, no clandestine meet-ups. No befogged panes. Only nice cars, parked not so long ago. Their windows haven’t yet iced. Their blunt noses sniff the sidewalk. Sabayon and ecru and ivory, powder blue and platinum: these are lady-lunching Lexuses. Lexies? They slumber like snow leopards.

  In the Saab, full-blast heat chats with my vagina. I feel rather unladied. Let my crevices scent the world. Anna with the easy gibe: smells like Rot.

  I leave my panties in the glove compartment and put on my nylons. My scaly legs snag the hose. I examine my calf: a run the length of a banana, thin as a cannula. Could be worse.

  I’m missing my gloves.

  I shake the Crush and stab the straw between the ice cubes. I swig a sip. Watery soda and air. A growl pries up my ribs.

  Fuck. I’m hungry.

  ··

  I am a woman moving through space, waiting for her thoughts to crack open. My mind is an egg, rolling off a cliff. What do you call an egg in an ocean?

  (The joke is I’m hardboiled.)

  “Table for … ?” says the hostess. Screw her young body. She could like my Rot. Dolphin eyes. Parsnip face. Purple lipstick. Triangle hoops. In another life, she might do hair.

  “One.” I clench my camel coat around me. Then I drop my hands. My skirt is twisted, my black bra strap knotted. I feel louche. Trampy.

  Here is the dining room, the opposite of Laughlin Banquet’s white tablecloths. Gold charger plates. Napkins starched into accordions. A somewhere viola. Glass bud vases: vanilla roses, petals edged in chocolate. Three groups of women, two and four and five. Diamonds the size of front teeth. Brooches. Bouclés. Tweeds. Wrists poking out of silk like branches.

  No accident that I’m seated in the corner. From my skin, the Crush’s vodka seeps (it smells like a skinned knee misted with Bactine). My hair is not a helmet. It is every strand out of place, the crown erupting with bumps. Gray blackened with dye. My back is to the window: I ignore landscaping. Winter gardens. Boxy hedges. Pebbled aisles. Mums or crocuses. Plants bore me. Give me women, in whose figures I may lambaste myself.

  A pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

  In college I had a trick for meals. I brought no book, no folder, no magazine, no paper. I imagined a companion. Sometimes my mother: she critiqued my fork-and-knife skills. Sometimes my father: he shook his head at my sprouted pitas. Most times, Marky, my brother: his squeaky voice, one big agreement, his proclivity for sweets. With him at the table, we’d reminisce about the cartons of Neapolitan Seal-Test we devoured, root beer floats for breakfast.

  A server in penguin separates approaches. On his basset face, he wears round tortoise glasses. His hair is old-fashioned, trim and curling, a moldering toadstool.

  “Young lady,” he says. His water pitcher is pewter, its white linen a jabot. His pour is a last bow. On good days, I look younger than my age. This afternoon, though, Herr Ober is being kind.

  “May I see the dessert menu? And the wine list.”

  “Of course.”

  Last course, of-course course, off-course course: let dirty women dine in peace.

  ··

  Marky, I say, rate the crème brûlée.

  Meh. Custard a little liquidy. Should I be able to drink it like a melk-shake? And, c’mon. Aren’t we over vanilla specks yet?

  True. I lift the scalloped ramekin, where dark spots seed the ceramic. I lick my pinky, lift a field of vanilla.

  Like roe, crunch, crunch.

  I can’t believe you demolished that lava cake, Marky says, raising his eyebrows and rolling his eyes as he finesses the big butterscotch mohair scarf he always wears. I can picture him, his starburst dimples, like a baby that never grew up, how when he’s not smiling, his whole countenance clouds.

  Not terrible! That tasted like a sexy nap, with the port.

  The charade is voice-only, but I picture gestures, too: Marky’s hand raised, palm slapping forehead.

  The port, in its tulip glass, gave me one hard punch in the mouth. The cake was a strangler. Some food, I eat to feel my arteries’ protest. A coward’s morbid flirt.

  Jean-Georges called. He said he wants that sad cake to strap its molten self into a time machine. Hand over the raspberries and mint leaves. The ’80s called—they want their signature dessert back.

  You know, for someone so sweet, you’re a real tart.

  For someone so straight, you’re a real fruit.

  I tip back a flute. No more champagne. Empty. The glass is bird bones. I run my tongue around the inside rim for the remains, a taste, brut sticky.

  Brut sticky, by the way, says Marky the clairvoyant, is the name of my favorite leather bar. Second favorite. Next to Berlin. Remember when you were at University of Chicago? My fake got us into so many clubs. Raise a glass to whoever, that Canuck me-clone out there. God, all those fakes at Grizzly. I could die. Don’t you miss those days?

  You ate more of the lavender cheesecake than me, I say. What does that say about you? When you’ve been the oldest your whole life, you don’t start admitting what’s wrong just because your baby brother baits you in daydreams. You don’t stoop yourself. You chin up. Soldier forth. Expire silent. Don’t act like I’m the only one at this table.

  “Anything more?” says my waiter. I blink. I have forgotten him, though surely he hasn’t forgotten me. My “every dessert” order. My “keep the drinks coming.” My nod to Glenn Decklin: “here’s to feeling good all the time.” The restaurant sounds blare their fastidiousness. The women are gone. Another server rolls silver. A bar back hefts a rack of highballs. The hostess flips through the reservation book.

  “You’ve been too patient,” I say, in professor voice. My talents are squandered in the classroom. You’re prince for keeping your trap shut about the menu sweep. Who are you? I want to ask. What could you have brought to this life? You wear glasses—you must be perceptive. What do you see in me? “I’m sorry to have kept you.”

  I hand him my AmEx. When the check arrives, I forget how to sign. The waiter stands at the next table, holding a chardonnay glass to the light—and watching me.

  “Can I help you up, Ma’am?” he says.

  I throw down the pen.

  “Help me—help me by shutting the fuck up. Ma’am. Ma’am.”

  “I beg your—”

  “Grow a pair. Not even my husband wants a man as floppy as you.”

  “…”

  “If you know better, you’ll stutter on your own time.”

  I push my chair back from the table and the waiter scurries away. It takes me several starts to stand. The room waltzes. My table is
busy with remains, glasses and three forks and two spoons. Plates like decapitated, faceless dolls. Only the crust of a lemon tart is left. The filling was smooth curd. Rosettes of Chantilly cream. The crust sucked. It was saltines but too salty, too soggy, like licking the Morton Girl’s bloomers. Still. I’ve had deux splits of champagne, a pour of port, Crush and Russian’s blood, whatever lingered on Rot’s lips, water water water. Forget the fork. I pick up the crust and chomp it like a chicken wing.

  ··

  Every step requires a deep breath. I beseech composure: Stay with me. Steady, girl.

  So much snow has fallen, I can’t spot my car.

  At least not from one step beyond The Grove’s door. From the walkway, I see a glass wall (Garden of Donors) heaped with white, hedges blinking red holly berries, the half-moon of pinecone on a conifer. I feel for gloves, pockets. Then I remember: I am a woman with hands. Plans.

  “‘Fair and foul are near of kin,’” I say, under my breath. Nature, dumb mother, doesn’t care. I yell: “‘Fair and foul are near of kin!’”

  I could shout an hour and the world’s turn would be no different.

  I pull open the door. The music in The Grove is louder. Wilder. Not my wild. Phil Collins wild. The hostess props her elbows on the desk. She eyes me, like a sore that’s leapt from a vagrant’s body and is trying to be seated for—no, not dinner, too late for lunch—linner.

  “May I help you?” Her voice is incommodious.

  “Where is the, I need to use the … the girls.”

  Even my phrasing is sozzled.

  The hostess flips her hair. She has a birthmark like a pinto bean on her scalp.

  “The hallway beside the bar. Either door.”

  Handicapped accessible. Solo stanza. Private stall. Score.

  ··

  The myth of the drunk-puke goes like this:

  Once there was a poor, featherweight woman. The woes and whether-or-nots wore her. On any given Wednesday, nary a meal did she eat. A snack here, a nibble there: meager the energy expended by worrying! Our woman remained drawn and dour.