“Agnes! You made it. Can I take your coat?”
Still clutching my thermos, I take off my coat and hand it to him. He tosses it on the chair behind him. I could’ve done that, I thought.
“Do you know everyone?” he asks.
“No. But that’s okay.”
“What do you have there?” Phil has gained weight. His face is jowly and stubbly and moist. Tea Rose pops into my head and I miss him, the smooth planes of him.
“Oh, just a few sips of whiskey. Sorry I couldn’t bring more.”
“Can I get a taste?” He moves closer to me and puts a hand on my wrist.
I don’t want his mouth on my strawberry-smelling thermos like I don’t want his mouth on my body. I can’t stop thinking, This is the first boy who went all over and inside me. The thought is mildly revolting.
“I think maybe no. I’ve had this sore throat thing.”
He looks at me, grinning. “That’s too bad. Though if I’m gonna get sick, I might as well have fun doing it.” His other hand goes to my hip.
A boy comes over and slaps Phil’s shoulder. “Jason’s here with beers.”
Phil tries to wink. “Guess you’re off the hook for now, Agnes.” He squeezes my hip and goes to the door leading outside, where most of the party has congregated to welcome Jason, who’s trying not to look like he’s struggling under the weight of two cases of beer.
I sit on a sofa. I consider going home. But home to what? I am home.
Dear Mom,
So here’s what happened last night. I went to this party at Phil’s from up the street and either got ignored or leched on. The other females in the room, it was like they had no faces. I can’t remember what any of them looked or sounded like. Why is that, when the boys are so vivid? Does this make me a terrible feminist? I think it’s because they were all looking down, which, I mean, I don’t blame them, when looking up could’ve been construed as an invitation. The boys, on the other hand, were begging to be seen, announcing themselves with every gesture.
Anyway, I brought my own whiskey and sat on a couch for a while, maybe feeling bad for myself, maybe feeling nothing. The only person, I realized, who would feel sad if I died is Dad. Which made me irrationally angry at him. Like, why should he be the one to be trusted with all the grief? And would it ruin him, or would he just slide it into the next empty drawer in his sadness vault? Are there even any drawers left? You and Simon take up entire rooms within him, within me. I kept thinking, “At least Simon is dead. That’s something. It’s a start. The pain can start there, circle around a few times, and end there.” With you, there is no beginning and no end.
All of which is to say: I sat there for a while, sort of invisible but not invisible enough. I kept wanting to leave but I kept not leaving. Finally I went outside to see if anyone was smoking. I only smoke when a night becomes irreparable. It was no longer snowing. Everything looked lit by everything else. This boy Jason was out there, talking to a girl who was smoking. Without meaning to, I guess, I was standing there, maybe three feet away, watching them. The girl’s eyes kept shifting toward me, and it felt so weird to do nothing, to just stand there and watch two strangers up close, like watching someone else’s dream. Maybe I was feeling the whiskey a little at this point. Jason took a cigarette from the girl and told her he’d meet her inside and she put her cigarette out and openly glared at me for a moment before going back in. “This is just the kind of boy I need right now,” was the thought I had as he sauntered over. This kind of lying, cheating boy!
I asked him for a cigarette, which felt like an insult to the girl he’d left. He gave me the one he’d taken from her. He asked me how I knew Phil and where I went to school and a bunch of other questions, some of which I didn’t answer because I didn’t see the point in him knowing anything about me. I didn’t want to know anything about him. He asked if I was cold and I said “I don’t know” and then he asked if I wanted to warm up in his car. Amazing. The gumption of boys. The ease with which they ask for what they want, only thinly veiling it behind something else, whatever else.
I did go with him to his car, Mom. I half hoped he’d kidnap me, drive me to the middle of that nowhere, where you are. But he only did what you’d expect, and I complied because it was the next best thing. I do hope, though, that the other girl gives him a harder time.
When I got home from the party, I had that raw feeling between my legs and whatever fortitude or emptiness I needed to go into Simon’s room. I just went right in. I opened the front door of the house with my key, and I shut it and locked it and I took my coat off and threw it on the piano bench and I went upstairs and stood in front of his closed door, and then I pretty much hurtled myself inside. I left the light off for a while. Then I turned it on, and the wincing began. I wanted to burn everything I saw. I wanted to burn the rest of the house and spare only this room, and live in it, alone, forever. I sat on the double bed with its blue flannel blanket and stared ahead at the long, wide desk he’d made from our old kitchen island. The karate trophies. The Ramones poster. The corkboard with Morrissey tickets, never used, from the week after. And in the closet, shirts hanging, shoes in a row. He was always very neat. It wasn’t crying, exactly. It was all the water in my body coming out of my face. It was my body, coming out of my face.
I took a flannel shirt from his closet and put it on over my clothes. It smelled like grass and air, like boy. It was the only thing, besides his bed, that I touched.
I’m still wearing it,
Agnes
Two days later, Christmas Day, it is exactly noon when I open my eyes to my Sony Dream Machine alarm clock, which I got for Christmas when I was ten. Only twelve more hours until it will no longer be Christmas. I close my eyes to see if there is any sleep left in me, but there is none.
Downstairs, my dad sits reading the paper at the table. The smell of bacon and coffee is strong.
“Merry Christmas, Agnes,” he says. “Are you okay? I was starting to worry you were sick.”
“I’m okay,” I say. “Merry Christmas to you too.”
“I made a fresh pot of coffee—the other one sat around for too long—and there’s bacon.”
“Thanks.”
Outside, the day has the gray cold look of early morning.
“It might snow today,” my dad says. “That would be nice. White Christmas.”
We take our mugs into the living room. The fireplace is empty, rarely used because of a chimney defect, and today its emptiness seems especially prominent.
Yesterday, hungover from the stupid sex I’d had and the emotional weight of Simon’s shirt, I drove to the big mall and sat in traffic for twenty minutes before turning around and going to a strip mall on the other side of town. I needed something for Dad and my options were Spaghetti Warehouse, Auto Parts Plus, Dee’s Pet World, Perfect 10 Nails, or Book Shack, which seemed to sell mostly magazines. On one shelf misleadingly labeled “Current Events,” I found an anthology called The Most Fascinating People of the 20th Century. I figured it was better than an iguana, and I could actually see my dad reading it. He liked compilations, taxonomies, greatest hits. The idea, I suppose, that some ruling body makes the tough decisions and does the tidying into groups so that we don’t have to. But I did debate the iguana. Something to keep him company, something he could care for.
I found last year’s wrapping paper in the attic and wrapped the book and put it under the fake tree, which we’d put together and halfheartedly decorated a few days before. Today there are two boxes next to the wrapped book.
“Go ahead and open your gifts,” my dad says now.
The first box is light and contains a handsome wool tartan scarf. I’m touched because I can’t imagine him shopping for it. Maybe he found it in one of my mother’s drawers? But the tags are still on, and I, for Christmas’s sake, decide to believe that he went out and bought it himself.
“Thanks, Dad. I love it.” I wrap it around my neck, the ends trailing over Simon’s shirt, which
I am wearing like a robe. Dad sort of cringes and beams at the same time.
The other box is smaller and heavier. I unravel a tissue-wrapped thing and it is a framed photograph of my parents and Simon and me from my freshman year of high school. We are standing outside the front door, all dressed up for Easter, Simon wearing a blue knit skinny tie and white-framed sunglasses, me in a knee-length floral dress with a sailor bib. I hated that dress, though I loved those white patent-leather pumps, my first pair of heels. Dad stands behind us and Mom stands next to Simon, her arm around his shoulder. She is wearing a baby-blue dress and red lipstick, her hair big and frothy, and she is smiling widely—a unique event. Dad looks, apart from the tie, exactly the same as he does right now, today.
“Who took this picture?”
Dad tilts his head and looks at it, as though he’s never seen it before. “Neighbor, maybe? I can’t recall.”
“No, it was a timer. Simon set up the tripod. I remember now.” I wrap it back in its tissue. I feel like I can only look at it in glimpses.
Dad unwraps his book. “Wow,” he says. He turns it over, opens it, flips a few pages, as though what he is holding is a book artifact and not an actual book. “I love it. I’m going to start it today. Probably will learn a lot.”
We sit there on the couch, a small moat of wrapping paper between us. “Do you like your gifts, Agnes?”
“Oh, yeah. Yes. Thanks, Dad. I love them.”
“Just because…,” he starts, then clears his throat. “I know it’s just us for right now. But try to always remember you have a family who loves you.”
* * *
I try once or twice, but I do not go into Simon’s room again. I continue wearing his shirt. I also do not go into my parents’ room. I think, if I see it half empty, I will feel a new level of feeling, and I’m not ready for a new level. I’m not even ready for the level I’m on.
One night we are eating a wordless and noiseless dinner of pizza. I reach for a napkin and I see my father crying. He is holding a limp piece of pizza up to his face as though to cover it, but I see that his eyes and chin are wet.
“Dad.”
He bows his head, still holding up the pizza.
“Dad, it’s okay.”
Minutes pass. I don’t know what to say, what to do with the murderous way I feel toward him, toward my mother and toward Simon, for embarrassing us like this, for offering no protection against these unbidden moments of feeling. I get up and leave my father at the table, slumped behind his slumping pizza. I go upstairs and sit cross-legged on my bed. I think about writing a letter. I think about leaving. When I can’t do the second thing, I tend to do the first.
Dear Mom,
I finally called Jenny and Sadie back and wound up at Jenny’s on New Year’s Eve. There was talk of some big party downtown, but it either didn’t exist or the correct details were withheld or they weren’t actually invited, so we had a sleepover at Jenny’s like we used to in high school. They’d gotten all dressed up, but I was happy to be in jeans, and eventually, when it became clear that there was no party in our future, they put on sweatpants, Sadie borrowing a pair from Jenny.
We talked about college. They were roommates, and they took turns painting a picture of Greek life and formals and football games. I sat on the floor in Jenny’s disaster of a room, facing them on the bed, feeling half there and half not, lapped over like shoals by the soft water of their chatter. They’d been very smart in high school, if you recall—we took all the same classes. College seems to have dumbed them.
Also, they’d had crushes on Simon. They used to come over a lot, peering down the hall or into his room, trying not to look disappointed if he wasn’t home. When he was around, there was a lot of giggling and futzing with bra straps. I remember one time Simon took his baseball cap off and placed it lightly on Sadie’s head as he was leaving to go somewhere. She turned beet red but tried to play it cool. She ended up taking the cap home, and Simon got mad at me for letting her. “She thought you were giving it to her.” “Why would I give my best lid to some kid?” I got it back from her in school the next day. After everything happened, they stopped coming over. Our house became foreboding, I think—inhospitable.
At some point, Sadie pulled a small bottle of warm, cheap champagne from her bag, and we passed it around. Jenny went downstairs—her parents were glued to Dick Clark in Times Square—and came back a couple minutes later, a third of a bottle of Ouzo under her shirt. We passed that around too. We talked about ordering pizza but figured no one would deliver on New Year’s Eve, and we talked about how we would always be friends, no matter what, and we talked about if I was okay or messed up—I said both—and we talked about Sadie’s parents’ divorce, and we talked about all manners of things in our lives, but through the fog of alcohol and our liminal sense of togetherness, our words sort of slid around the sides of us without any traction.
I woke up early the next morning with a crick in my neck, having fallen asleep on the floor amid shoes, magazines, and clothes. Jenny and Sadie slumped together in the bed like a fallen cake, faces fudged with makeup, a thin line of drool stringing from Sadie’s mouth to Jenny’s shoulder. I used the bathroom, and when I came back in, Jenny was up, and so we poked Sadie awake and said our goodbyes, hugging into our hangovers, creaky mouths sour as we promised to keep in touch better—as I promised to keep in touch better—and then I left, my head buzzing, but beneath the buzz, a weird tranquility.
The rest of my time at home was hazy and disjointed. I spent a lot of hours in my pajamas watching daytime TV, trying to precipitate a rock bottom, to depress myself into some kind of action. One morning I woke up in a film of sweat, a low, striated pain emanating with such force that I felt halved. I finally stood up and realized that I had bled through my pajamas and all over the sheets, the brightest red I’ve ever seen. So that gave me something to do—laundry and bleach and showering and driving to the drugstore for Advil and tampons. Faint stains are still there, no longer red but the color white would bleed if it could. I feel strangely proud of it, a commemoration of my time at home: a little bit of blood spilled, but at least nobody died. On the contrary, a reminder that I’m still very much alive.
Dad offered to drive me back to school but here I am—it’s been a few days since I started this letter—back on the train. I wanted our goodbye to be at home. He gave me some extra cash and told me how nice it was to have me there. He drove me to the train station in light snow, but it stopped as soon as the train started moving, as though even the weather was demarcating home from not-home.
From not-home,
Agnes
Back at school, the force field is real. Tea Rose and I inscribe circles around one another. I find myself walking by his dorm on my way to class, which is not on my way to class, and then knocking on his door, and then staying, instead of going to class. We sit close together on the floor and watch shitty TV, our hands wandering, our eyes straight ahead. I leave my shift at the dining hall and he is there, sitting on a bench. He picks me up off the ground so that my legs wrap around him and I can feel his heartbeat through his cold neck, where I hide my face. We want to do what we are doing without talking about it. We do what we are doing and we avoid each other’s eyes, as though our faces are suns neither of us can look at directly.
By the beginning of February, I am lying in Tea Rose’s bed more and more often. We have started to look at one another more, our faces close together on his flat pillow, our bodies intertwined below. I have most of my classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I go to them most of the time. In this semester’s philosophy class, I write about how my sense of duty is a handicap. I don’t know why I am taking another philosophy class. It has nothing to do with anything.
His roommate has left. He does not have a new roommate. The room feels two times its regular size, once for having lost someone and twice for not having gained someone. The bed where the roommate used to sleep is stripped and empty. The desk where the roommate used t
o study is bare. We do not use the new vacancy. We sleep in Tea Rose’s twin bed and when I get dressed, I stand in the midst of his clothes and piles. He watches me. He drinks me in, but it’s me who feels intoxicated.
“Agnes,” he says now, as we lay facing one another.
“Yes.”
“Nothing. Just thought your name and said it.”
He runs his fingertips over my arm patternlessly. I practice using my eyes like a zoom lens, staring into the different parts of his face. There is so much symmetry. I remember those “check double-check” games from when I was a kid, where you had to find the subtle differences in otherwise identical photos. It would be impossible, I think, with Tea Rose’s face. Even his eyebrow hairs are indistinguishable.
“What should we do?” I say. We are naked.
“When?” he says.
“I don’t know. Now. Tomorrow. Overall.”
Tea Rose uses his limbs as a simple machine and hoists me on top of himself. He kisses my neck, my shoulders. His hands are busy. “We should do this,” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “This.”
After a while, it is night. After a while, it is day.
Dear Mom,
I guess the body is a ruinous place or it is a comfort. I go to Tea Rose like going to church, or therapy, or the ocean, and I just surrender there, floating, bobbing. Is this love, or is this oblivion, or are they the same thing.
Surprise is seeing someone. Not the boy she lost her virginity to. This boy is working hard for her. He’s homely but fastidious, always pressed and tucked. She knows a lot, already, about his family, his three sisters, his surgeon dad. She comes and goes with a new air now, of someone knowing who she is and what she wants and what she expects of the world. Within the scope of this way of being, this mild transformation, she seems happy. Surprise is a person who can seem happy and also be happy.
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