Nothing Real Volume 3

by Claire Needell

  Dad had always been a big guy, red in the face, round even in the shoulders. After he died, there was no noise at all in our house, no one thundering in laughter, or fury, the way Dad had.

  Mom said to me once, a few months after Dad died, just after we’d moved, “I like Saturday mornings over here. You can hear the birds sing.” She was sitting on our little back porch drinking coffee in a ratty wooden Adirondack chair the previous owners hadn’t bothered to move. She was wearing a black sweater that drooped at the neck, and I remember thinking how small she’d gotten. I held it against her, like the silence.

  That was in seventh grade. Something I’ve never told Rand, never told anyone, was how I kept track of those years.

  First there was June Morgan, and I hated her for her eyebrows, which were perfect arches that looked almost painted on. I wouldn’t let her share my seat on the bus. I wouldn’t let her sit across from me. I hated her nose for coming to a delicate point. I hated the injustice of her features and made her pay for it.

  Later, it was Debbie Gallagher. I hated her for her PTA mom and her springer spaniel. It wasn’t jealousy that spurred me, but perfection in all its forms. I hated Mary Pat Lesser for her legs and hair.

  But I hated deformity, for its mirroring of my own heart. And I hated Sally Emerson for her perpetually runny nose, and Floyd Mann for his rabbit eyes, and his rabbit-eyed sister. They were all on the bus, and I kicked and I scowled, and I refused them the right to sit anywhere near me, anywhere in the back of the bus, which was my territory, my scorched earth.

  “Why’d you walk out like that?” Rand asked. He had his hands in his pockets, and he leaned up against the building next to me.

  “I think you have me confused with someone else,” I said. “I’m really not worth the trouble.”

  “Were you saying I dress like your dad?” Rand asked, ignoring my stab at him.

  “The guy actually did exist. And he wore shirts, like those.” I pointed at his button-down collar, the little Polo Guy.

  Rand was quiet. Dad’s death had this effect on people. I sometimes wondered who it was, which town department had had to clean up the mess? Was that a hospital job, or sanitation? I wondered if other people wondered the same thing.

  Rand sat down, leaned against the wall of the building, and so I sat too.

  “He wore shirts just like that, with a pair of jeans, that’s how he dressed, even on weekends. We called him the Professor. That was his job. At the college.” I wanted to explain to Rand that I’d meant it as an insult, that I called my dad the Professor when he got on my nerves. But when I started to explain, it didn’t seem true anymore. It had been one of those inside jokes, a family thing, that wasn’t even half-mean.

  “What was he like?”

  I wanted to say he was an asshole, but I couldn’t get the words out. I wanted to say it had pissed me off, the way he died, so the whole town talked about it, and thought about it, every time the train went by. How people stared when they heard the whistle, how that made me want to tell them to fuck off and get a life.

  “I remember the things you remember five, six years later. Like when he was pissed at me. When he fought with my mom. Sometimes, I can remember some little thing he did, like a book he read to me. But I don’t really know what he was like, to tell you the truth. I know what he’s like gone.”

  “I guess that sucks,” Rand said.

  I leaned into him. “The thing is,” I said, “I feel like I remember him as long as I stay pissed.”

  Rand laughed, like he got what I was saying, even though I wasn’t sure what I meant. I only knew that when he died, I hadn’t felt sad. I didn’t recall how exactly I found out about the accident, but I remembered a shrill sound, either someone crying, or an ambulance, or just a sound in my head. I remembered thinking, Why did you have to do that? I remembered standing somewhere, alone, maybe the funeral, with my hands balled into fists.

  At graduation, my mom looked pretty. She wore lipstick, which she usually doesn’t, and she had her hair blown out, then put in rollers, so it was like TV hair. I wore a pink dress, really pink, almost neon, but I combed my hair down and parted it to the side, so it fell over one eye, instead of spiking it. Rand cut his, but only up to his earlobes, even though I’d been lobbying for regular-short.

  Someone said there’d be a party at Paul Reggio’s house up on Villard. I had really fucked with Paul in Spanish class freshman year, taking his pen off his desk and sticking it down my top, daring him to come get it. But he’d invited me on Monday, me and Rand together.

  There were a few hours between graduation and the party, and everyone was going out to lunch with their families. Rand wanted me to come out with his parents, but I figured I couldn’t leave my mom. He said I should invite her.

  She was standing by the table where we returned our caps and gowns, talking to some of the other parents. When she saw me walking toward her, she cocked her head to the side and gave me a questioning look, as if I were someone she once knew but hadn’t seen in a long time.

  “Hey,” I said. “Rand says we should come to lunch with him and his folks.”

  “Why not get to know them, now that everything’s over?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s a pressure-free zone.”

  She squeezed my hand. I thought about how it’d be for her, in just a few months, with me out in Colorado.

  “Do you think you might move,” I asked her, “when I’m gone for good?” She thought for a moment.

  “I hadn’t really considered it,” she said. “Anyway, I’ve always liked this town. People know us here. It’s quiet.” I didn’t know what to say. After all I’d put her through, being dragged into school to talk about crap I’d done, year after year. After what happened to us here, happened to Dad, I’d always thought town was everything I needed to escape.

  “I thought you’d be dying to leave,” I said.

  “You never know,” she said, noncommittal. I thought how she must have been with Dad, how she was with me.

  “I guess you’re just not a leaver,” I said.

  She laughed and shook her head. “Sooner or later, a person puts down roots,” she said. I knew she had her friends, women she played tennis with, went to dinner with. But it had never occurred to me that in those years since my father died, the years I fought and clawed myself through, that my mother might have been, if not happy, at least comfortable there in town.

  “I thought you hated it here as much as I did,” I said.

  “I don’t hate it at all. I wish you didn’t have to. I wish you could just move on,” she said. She said this tersely, as if she’d finally lost patience with me. As though, in some way, she’d already moved on.

  I was about to say something, something about town being such a tiny nowhere shitsville, when I caught Rand looking across the crowd for me, and I remembered lunch.

  “Oh, well,” I said. “There’s Rand—and he’s the one thing in this town that doesn’t completely suck.”

  Mom chuckled. “I’m going to tell him you said that,” she said, and she tossed her glam-looking hair.

  “Please don’t,” I said. “He’ll think it’s true love.”

  “That,” she said, “would serve you right.”

  I watched Rand make his way through the crowd toward me. I thought about how we would be separated by an entire continent, with me in Colorado, and him in Boston. I felt my heart quicken in my chest. I had to wonder if this was only happening because soon we’d be gone for good. If I was hanging on to Rand just to feel the loss in August, so I could go around kicking at the dust again.

  Or maybe that part of me was what was gone. It was hard to get used to the idea of no one cowering when I came near, of there not being any score to even, of no one whispering about something I’d done.

  I waved to Rand, showing him I’d found my mom, but he didn’t see me. I didn’t stop, though. I kept waving to him across the crowd, not caring if I looked like an idiot, not caring
how eager I looked to find him. There wasn’t any time for that anymore.

  Sugar Babies

  Mary Ann is prettier than me—thinner, blue-eyed, with a nose that is so straight it looks like a drawing of a nose. That’s what makes me think it might be true when Mary Ann says I could be a sugar baby.

  When I look in the mirror at the store, I try to see what Mary Ann sees, what some older guy at the Athena Bar down in the city might see. I’m not tall or thin, but there isn’t anything wrong with my body. Guys my age seem to like it. I am told I have a pretty face—this has been true my whole life. Old guys have always said things like, Look at the face on that one, or The poor father, she’ll break his heart. I don’t try to deny it when other girls say that if I were taller, I could be a model. But I am no Mary Ann.

  I don’t have eyes like Mary Ann’s. Hers are light blue, and they sparkle under thick black lashes. She looks amused when she helps customers choose their bras, their bathing suits, and jeans, but she’s never disrespectful, never rude. She’s calm and thoughtful and looks at women’s bodies as though nothing could possibly be very wrong with them, no matter the size or shape, as though by simply being women they’d earned the right to have Mary Ann improve them, prod them into a kind of attractiveness. It is maybe the one thing I really like about Mary Ann—that she seems to deny she has any actual advantage over the rest of us, acts as though her beauty is a fluke, like getting the winning number at a Lotto stand, something that could happen to anyone at any time.

  We get some customers in the store who keep themselves fit, and they’re the ones who usually buy the expensive stuff. But Mary Ann is best with the ones who come in and you can see they don’t want to be there. They don’t meet your eye. They have ordinary bodies that I, for one, don’t have much need to see more of. But Mary Ann goes right into the dressing rooms, and you can hear her saying, Oh, how nice that fits, or No, we can do so much better. She doesn’t blame the women for being fat or old, and they really do leave looking happier than when they came in.

  Mary Ann isn’t going away to college. She’s sticking around to take some photography classes at the community college, and to work here, at Down the Lane. Being a sugar baby is all a part of this plan. As Mary Ann tells the women in the dressing rooms, You have to know what works for you. She tries to tell me this as well, to get me out of my long skirts and flats. What Mary Ann thinks works for me is the stuff she usually can’t get me near—skirts that lace up the side, corset tops, sandals with stacked heels. She says, You don’t know what you have. This makes me smile a little, and I think of Bobby Agnew’s basement and strange guys in suits at the Athena Bar.

  The corset she chooses for me is all black, has lace panels along the sides, and ties up the back. It’s a little hard to breathe, but it makes my waist look small, and I wear a jacket over it with black jeans and ankle boots. The boots are something I chose for Seattle. Mary Ann doesn’t think the squat heel does much for me, but hers are so high she wobbles when she walks, and I wonder why guys like that. It makes me nervous watching her, but she tells me she never slips.

  Mary Ann is leaning against the polished wood of the bar, and her hair brushes her elbows as she flashes a smile at the bartender. She’s so radiant and self-assured, you’d drop dead of shock if he carded her. Anyway, Mary Ann has the sort of look you associate with someone twenty-five or thirty, someone in an ad for pricey handbags who knows her way up and down Madison Avenue and places in Paris, and has never even been eighteen, or from nowhere.

  I get a gin and tonic, because Mary Ann does, and then we sit. She’s looking around the room, nudging me when she sees a couple of guys headed toward the bar, one tall and one short, both in suits, and I immediately scope out short. I already know about guys and Mary Ann, about the sort of guys who figure they deserve her.

  Short isn’t terrible, but he’s older when he gets closer, older than Tall, who has great teeth and shoulders and leans up against the bar by Mary Ann’s side without saying anything. Short gets a beer, tapping his fingers and looking around. I never can judge age accurately, but Short has only a bit of hair on top, which lifts itself off his head in thin strands, but his skin is pinkish and he has no wrinkles. I think maybe thirty-five, like my uncle John.

  I hear Mary Ann laugh, and Tall exchanges a glance with Short that tells me she hasn’t said anything smart. But he’s looking at her in a patient, unbelieving way I recognize as how I sometimes look at Mary Ann. She is talking and looking around the room and no doubt asking Tall all sorts of questions, showing him that, despite the cheekbones and heels, she is quite young and from a nowhere place—to be a sugar baby, you don’t need to hide this. Guys love to tell you stuff, Mary Ann says, and if you ask a lot of questions, they think you’re interesting, because you’re interested in them.

  I’m not saying much, just fiddling with the tiny straw in my drink, wondering if it’s to stir or drink from; Short looks bored, gets a little pink in the cheeks, and I wonder if this happens to him a lot, if he’s the guy who stands around looking for someone to talk to, finding no one there.

  The bar gets crowded fast, and Short gets pushed closer to the bar on my side of Mary Ann, so there is no way he can keep talking to Tall, and he seems to really notice me for the first time. He reaches for the bowl of mixed nuts in front of me and I push them his way, so he has no choice but to say something.

  “You’d think more people would be in the Hamptons,” he says. “But maybe this is the first stop on the Jitney.” I know what he’s talking about, because Bobby Agnew’s brother has a share he says Bobby could take over at the end of summer, but that Bobby can’t bring me. He doesn’t have an actual bed anyway, just a mattress on the floor in a room with a couple other guys, which makes the beach sound like one of Bobby’s parties, and not somewhere worth taking a bus to.

  “I hate the beach,” I say, and this gets Short looking at me. It’s only partially true, because I like sand and the water—that shock of both cool and salt that hits the skin like a jolt of memory. But I hate the girls in bikinis and the guys looking over every inch and how faces get lost in the flood of sun, so it is all worse than nakedness, which has at least a kind of natural humility.

  “I don’t,” Short says, and looks thoughtful. “But it’s better in September, even October, when everyone’s back at Rolphe’s.” I figure this is more of the same hating on the crowd followers. Short has brown eyes that are round and bright, which makes him cute in an animalesque way, so now I can imagine him with hair and looking too young for his grade in high school. I like the way he’s snotty about people without seeming mean.

  I tell him I prefer mountain views and not looking out at water, especially the Atlantic, which is only gray and always the same. Short stares at me, opens his mouth, then closes it, but not stupidly—just changing his mind, the way you might put your signal on, then decide not to turn, taking maybe the long way around. He glances Tall’s way and sees what I see, which is Mary Ann’s head bent forward and Tall whispering in her ear, and her shoulders shaking at something funny.

  Short gets me another gin and tonic, and as I drink it I see Mary Ann tottering in her impossible heels away from the bar without looking back, Tall’s hand fluttering across her back. I get a feeling of slight panic, because it was her sister, Elise, who drove us and who said to meet at midnight outside the Athena, but to text if we aren’t coming. There are trains back to Westchester and cabs at the station, and my parents are in New Hampshire at the Steins’, where I could have gone and spent all weekend with the mosquitoes and a book, looking at the lake where we used to fish and catch the same ancient snapping turtle over and over. We knew it was the same turtle year after year because he had our hooks in his mouth, or rough turtle-skin scars over holes where the hooks once were.

  The Steins had us every summer, and one year their son, Mike, touched me in the tent we’d pitched out back. He was older than me by a few years, but he’d said it didn’t matter, it’d feel all rig
ht just the same. And it did feel all right, too, though I hadn’t wanted him to at first. He said for thirteen I looked pretty much like a woman, and afterward he laughed at me and said I’d someday make my boyfriend a happy man. The next morning, Mr. Stein made pancakes, but I didn’t eat any, and I took a walk by myself along the shore of the lake, sometimes stopping to skip stones. I had just learned to do it, and it made me feel like a girl in a book, a rebellious tomboy type who liked to be alone and skip rocks, though I didn’t enjoy either. When I got back, Mike shot me a look like he worried I was going to tell, but I didn’t.

  I don’t think Short was ever a boy like Mike. I look at his chin, which is nice, but a bit on the round side, and his full bottom lip, and I think maybe Short would have been the kind of boy to want what he couldn’t have. Maybe Mike did, too, but I doubted Short would have turned around and found some careless girl to make moves on.

  “Do you live around here?” I ask Short. It’s a wrong sort of question at this point, but Mary Ann has already left and I at least want someone to walk with, or to put me in a cab to the station. Short says “Greenwich,” and I am surprised because I figured all the other people at the Athena must live in the city. “You,” he says, “must be a college girl? NYU or FIT?” He gives me a wink like he is onto me, knows I am a kid, a faker. But he seems interested in the answer.

  “Almost,” I say. I’m two months away from being a freshman. I’m curious to see if there is some particular line Short will refuse to cross, if living at home for six more weeks puts me off-limits, while being in school already is seemingly unproblematic.

  “Are you at least eighteen?” he asks, picking up his briefcase, a dadlike move. He smiles when he asks this, bemused.