by Lydia Netzer
Bernice had no response to that.
That afternoon they started the playground club. The purpose of the club was to ritually perform all playground activities each recess period. They’d start with the swings on their long chains, always, Bernice giving Sally an enormous push and then jumping into her own swing to catch up. Then they’d leap from the swings and hit the ground running, and race to the slide. Sally usually got there first, with her long legs flying, unless she fell, which was frequently, and then Bernice grabbed the slide first. She pulled herself up the steep steps and flung herself onto the smooth metal, hurtling down and racing back around. Bernice found that in the company of Sally, she could grit her teeth and power through her fear, put aside the premonition that a fall was imminent, and just keep going.
Everything was a thrill for them: the bang of the teeter-totter, the dizzying whirl of the merry-go-round. The game always ended up near the monkey bars, where they would hang upside down on increasingly higher bars, grabbing on with their hands and then flipping off backward at increasingly greater risk to their ankles and heads. It was never fast enough, high enough, or hard enough for Sally, whose loud laugh rang across the playground even when she hit the gravel, or spun into a tree. Bernice met challenge after terrifying challenge with her teeth bared, her will determined. Sally was so uncoordinated, so gangly and unaccustomed to a body so rapidly growing, anyone would have thought it would be Sally that took a serious tumble and ended the game.
But instead it was Bernice. They were standing on top of the jungle gym that was shaped like a spidery dome. It had taken weeks for Sally to coax Bernice up to the top, and finally she had agreed. Now their feet were braced against each other and their hands were clasped together, and they leaned back against the connection. Sally was chuckling, trying to stare Bernice down, and make her laugh, make her forget she was so high up. Then somehow their hands separated, and Bernice went down through the bars, cracking her head on the metal pipe as she fell backward and passed through. Her hands seemed surprised to be empty, as if her very cells believed they were still connected to Sally, still holding hands on top of the gym. As the dull pain entered the back of her head and the lights went out on her consciousness, she found herself still reaching, grasping for Sally.
When she opened her eyes she was on the pavement under the jungle gym, and Sally was saying “Oh, no, no, my little purple bag!” Bernice was wearing purple overalls that day, and Sally had been teasing her, laughing as they rode the merry-go-round. Bernice blinked her eyes and looked up into Sally’s face, the big teeth hidden, the eyes full of tears. She had never seen Sally look this way before.
“It’s OK,” she croaked. “I didn’t die.”
“Where’s the teacher?” Sally barked at the crowd that was gathering around them. “Oh, for Pete’s sake!”
With that Sally slid her arms under Bernice’s legs and shoulders and lifted her. She cradled her tightly and said, “Don’t worry, purple bag. We’ll get you inside.”
Bernice closed her eyes and her brain went swimming away. She felt Sally holding her, threading her through the triangle shape of the jungle-gym openings, was aware of her jostling stride as Sally ran up to the school, banged through the door, and hollered, “NURSE!”
Bernice had a concussion and was out of school for three days. When she returned, Sally decreed, “No more playground club.”
“No,” said Bernice. “It’s OK. I can do it now. I knew that was going to happen. And I lived. It’s fine.”
“Are you kidding me? You knew that was going to happen? What are you, psychic?”
“No,” said Bernice. “I’m not.”
“Well, I don’t care,” Sally said. “Let the little kids break their necks on that shit. I’m done with it.”
That day Sally started a mystics club during recess with a smuggled-in Ouija board and some dice, with which she loudly stated she was going to nose out any psychic ability that Bernice might possess. They never went near the jungle gym again. The following year they went to middle school, and Sally was able to get her physical energy out of her system by playing basketball, softball, and field hockey. She was terrible at each and every sport, and spent at least a few minutes of every game laid out on the field. Bernice sat on the sidelines, feeling every trip, every slam, her body tense and shifting left and right as Sally ran from left to right in front of her, slapping her hand against her face when something went wrong. But Sally was always up again, laughing, smiling with all her crooked teeth, running again. And that made Bernice smile, too.
*
In seventh grade, both of the girls’ parents got divorced. Sally’s mother suspected her husband of cheating on her during his business trips, laid a trap, and caught him at it. Bernice’s mother, who had been in the Far East doing historical research, sent word that she would not be returning and that her husband was free to pursue other interests. Sally and Bernice were twelve.
It was during a meeting of the mystics club that they revealed the news about their parents to each other. The mystics club had been sustained by several minor moments that Sally claimed confirmed Bernice’s psychic powers, and now had seven members, four or five of whom were in attendance at any given meeting. Their usual pastime was to test each other for psychic abilities with playing cards, tell stories about the witches of the Toledo swamps, and talk about boys. They met before school, in a remote section of the gym, climbing up to perch atop a folded-up section of bleachers. On this day, there happened to be only one other girl sitting up there, some sixth grader hoping to be included, so they told her to get lost, and then it was just the two of them.
Bernice held a deck of tarot cards, shuffling them halfheartedly, looking at each one as it came to the top of the deck.
“What’s wrong?” asked Sally.
“My mother’s not coming back from Thailand,” Bernice said.
“Not coming back at all?”
“Right.”
“Well, is your father going over there? Are you moving?”
Bernice turned to look at her friend. “Nope,” she said. “They’re done. Quits. Finis.”
Sally leaned back against the wall and looked up at the ceiling for a few seconds, then began to smile.
“My parents are done, too,” she said. “Apparently Dad got his dick wet in Albuquerque, and this is the fallout.”
“Wow,” said Bernice. “You’re tough.”
“Yeah.”
“Where are the tears and the dissolution of your identity?”
“Where are yours?” said Sally. Bernice saw that Sally was actually crying and that made her cry, too.
“OK, I admit it, I’m actually sad,” she said.
For a few minutes they sat there, and Bernice continued to shuffle the cards.
“Maybe they weren’t meant for each other,” said Sally. “You know, maybe it wasn’t true love.”
“Come on.” Bernice rolled her eyes and banged her heels against the bleachers. Someone had turned the lights on in the gym. “Are you stupid?”
“Well, maybe it wasn’t!”
“You know that’s just bullshit, right?” Bernice asked.
“You’re the one with tarot cards in your hand,” said Sally.
“Yeah, bullshit tarot cards,” Bernice said.
“Yeah,” said Sally. She let out a sigh that made Bernice feel terrible. That small puff of air had such finality, as if something permanent was falling away.
“Screw them,” said Bernice. “It’ll be different for us, you know.”
“Different how? Sam Thomas asked me to the mixer, and then not only did he take Rachel Crumbley instead, he didn’t even have the balls to tell me.”
“I know,” said Bernice, who had refused to even consider attending.
“So I got ready, got dressed, for nothing!”
“I know,” Bernice repeated.
“My dad even took time out from running around on my mom to take a picture of me! Waiting and waiting for Sam T
homas, who was already at the dance with—”
“With Rachel, yes,” Bernice intoned.
“OK, maybe it won’t be different for us.”
“Fuck,” said Sally. “We need arranged marriages. You know, like they did in India. You pick your kid’s husband, wife, whatever, and that’s it. Their divorce rate is like nothing.”
“Who would arrange our marriages?” snorted Bernice. “Our parents are too busy divorcing each other.”
“Just imagine,” said Sally. “Say you knew, when your kid was born, who they were going to marry? Think what you could do for them, to make that marriage awesome.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, like everything!” Sally spread her hands out in front of her. A clump of kids walked by under their feet, on the way to the band room. “You could just raise them to be together. Same ideas, same experiences, but enough different to make it interesting. Make them compatible, make them perfect for each other. This one plays the cello, that one plays the violin. This one loves mountain climbing, that one loves rappelling. You get it.”
“Science.”
“What?”
“It’s like science. It’s like what the swamp witches do.”
Sally frowned. “Swamp witches? That’s not science.”
“Sure it is,” said Bernice. “They’re shuffling the cards, but they’re reading the faces. They’re putting protractors to the constellations and then naming them after gods. Like your idea with the arranged marriages—it’s actually so Toledo. Soulmates in a test tube.”
“Exactly. It’s so Toledo.”
The girls sat silently for a while, each thinking. Then the first bell rang.
“Fuck our parents,” said Sally.
“Obviously.”
A boy walked past with a trombone in a case, letting it bang rhythmically into the bleachers with each step.
“We could do better,” said Sally.
Bernice gathered her things, put the tarot cards in her backpack.
“Our kids get married,” she went on. “It’s me and you at Christmas and Thanksgiving, how cool would that be?”
“Cool,” said Bernice, zipping her backpack shut.
“I mean, having in-laws that get along is probably half the battle of having a happy marriage,” said Sally.
“That and keeping your pants on when you travel on business.”
“But don’t you see?” Sally caught Bernice by the arm. “We can make them do that. We can train them to do that.”
“What are you going to do, introduce electric shock whenever the kid hears the word adultery?”
“I don’t know,” said Sally. “I don’t know.”
For the rest of the year, during the mess of the divorces, they comforted themselves with their scheme. While Bernice’s father was mourning, forgetting to pay bills, sinking into silences that lasted a week. While Sally’s mother was engaged in her revenge affair with a neighbor’s husband.
“We could teach her to knit, right?” Sally would say, as they sat huddled in the back of the classroom during social studies, not working on their group project. “And then we could knit him a really special hat or something, pillow, scarf, something. Then we take it away and he loses it. Then when they get together, she happens to find exactly that pattern, and knits it for him again—boom, that’s love.”
“That’s science,” Bernice would correct her.
“That’s love,” Sally would say.
*
It was in high school that Sally kissed her first boy and Bernice took her first drink. The boy was a neighborhood friend she had trick-or-treated with as a toddler. The liquor was pilfered from Sally’s mother’s cabinet. It was a Friday night, and the girls were in Sally’s room. Bernice lay under Sally’s bright blue sheets, watching Sally’s Hitachi TV.
“You should come with,” said Sally, who was spreading Nair on her legs.
“That smells terrible,” said Bernice. “It smells like an old lady.”
“Why don’t you come with?” Sally insisted. “We can get Roger to come along for you. Or Chris.”
Sally knew everyone on every sports team, and they were all her buddies. They would no more date Sally, Bernice thought, than they would date their sisters. She was safe from them. But there were other boys, like this neighborhood boy, or boys from other social spheres: the science kids, the poets, the musicians. She still had them to worry about.
“I don’t want to come with,” said Bernice. She sat up and reached over the foot of the bed to change the channel on the TV. “I’m going to stay here with Ponch and Jon.”
“Will you be here when I get back?”
“I already told my dad I’m sleeping over. So it’s either stay here and wait for you to get home or else embark on a life of crime.”
“Are you ever going to double-date with me?” Sally asked. “Promise me you will.”
“I already promised I’d marry my kid off to your kid,” said Bernice. “Doesn’t that count?”
“Maybe,” said Sally. “Will we double-date first? Will we have double husbands?”
“Sure, I see it all now,” said Bernice, pretending to wave her hands over a crystal ball on the bed. She made her voice wobble and wiggle like a witch in a trance. “We’re living together, with our toddlers who are someday to marry.”
“Oh, good,” said Sally, drying her hair on a towel. “And mine is a boy. Come on, I want the boy.”
“Of course, sure, yours is the boy,” said Bernice in her normal voice. Then she resumed the act: “The babies are sitting in their high chairs, eating applesauce that we made from the apples in our own orchard, which we tend with hankerchiefs over our hair. And we’re washing up the pots and the apple grinder.”
“And our double husbands,” Sally reminded her. “Don’t forget that part.”
“Yes, now I see,” said Bernice, covering her eyes with one hand and reaching in front of her with her other arm. “Your husband comes in the room, just as we were laughing about something, and we stop laughing, and we look around at him, and he’s like, ‘What, me? Brave, handsome me?’ and he swings his arms out—”
“His strong, manly arms,” Sally put in. “What does he look like anyway?”
“Like an idiot. He knocks over the crockery on the countertop, and it shatters all over the floor. What a thug. I hate him already.”
Sally laughed. She spread the cream above her knees, up onto her long thighs.
“You don’t even have hair up there,” said Bernice, flopping back down onto the pillow and pulling the sheet and quilt up around her. “You’re just removing hair from nothing.”
“You’re just removing hair from nothing,” Sally pretended to shout at the lotion on her legs. “Oh, my god! Stop removing hair from nothing.”
Bernice sat back up and waved a threatening fist. “I would throw a pillow at you,” said Bernice. “But you would just remove hair from it.”
“Probably,” said Sally, yawning. “Probably I would.”
Bernice leaned up on her knees to turn the sound up on the television, then flopped back on the pillows.
“Hey,” said Sally, “I’m going to write that shit down in my journal, you know? So we can check back. Were you seeing that? Or like seeing that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, were you seeing it for real?”
“I don’t see things that way,” Bernice said.
“You do, though,” said Sally. “You do, and you know you do.”
Bernice just shrugged and rolled her eyes. Did she see things? Did she know things? No, it was perception, not prescience. The safety of analytical deduction, not the madness of some second sight. If she could see the future, she would certainly not see Sally married to some arm-swinging oaf.
Sally went out the front door punching her date on the arm, falling off her high-heeled sandals, tugging her cutoffs down over her butt. Her long blond hair was pulled into a ponytail, and her fingertips had been c
arefully polished by Bernice: petal pink. Bernice shut the door behind her. And then silently crossed to the window to watch them down to the guy’s stupid car. A Gremlin. As it pulled away it made an awful grinding noise before it puttered off. Bernice looked at her watch. Sally’s curfew was 11 P.M., but her mother was out, possibly until morning.
Bernice stood at the window watching the dark street, and then turned to the liquor cabinet and took out the first thing she saw that was clear. She knew enough about high school drinking to understand how to cover her tracks by refilling a bottle with water. Bernice sat down on a black leather ottoman and uncapped the gin. She took a deep swallow. It burned, but not too much. She had imagined liquor would be harder on her throat. Her second thought was to throw up, but she breathed shallowly, and got through it. By the time Sally got home, Bernice was asleep, and nobody ever found out about that. There was no comical scene. There was no hysteria. There was just a mild swimminess, and then lights-out.
The next night, she pressed Sally to try it, but Sally wouldn’t.
“I’m an athlete,” said Sally. “I don’t put poison in the instrument.”
“I’m a chemist,” returned Bernice. “I do.”
*
High school was almost over. Bernice was headed to Bowling Green to be a chemistry major, and Sally to the University of Michigan on a basketball scholarship. Through dogged determination and a cheerful willingness to throw fouls, she’d been able to get pretty good at the sport, and at a long, lanky 5′11″, she looked made to play. It was not a full scholarship, but Sally’s father was happy to make up the difference. He could afford it, and he wanted to see his daughter playing NCAA.
Bernice felt at home in the chemistry lab, among scientists who were not prone to ask her how she was feeling, or whether she had good thoughts or bad thoughts, or whether the vomiting was flu or something more sinister. Bernice accepted the separation from her friend. In fact, Sally’s acceptance letter with a scholarship, from the University of Michigan, had been a seed that bloomed into a strong sapling of despair that felt inevitable. Maybe it was rooted in that first night when Sally’s wobbly sandals had carried her down the sidewalk with her first boyfriend on her first real date. It’s when tragedy was born in Bernice’s heart, and never did it leave. In that moment, she saw Sally’s trajectory, and she saw her own, and she saw how they did and didn’t intersect. Everything that mattered to her was clear. And it never got better, all through her whole life.