by Delia Ephron
Finally heading to the front of the restaurant, Isabella stopped short when she saw Sukie.
“Hi,” said Sukie.
Issy came up with a smile. “Hi. Is your dad with you?”
“No,” said Sukie. “Don’t worry about that.”
“What?” said Issy.
“I was just…nothing. He’s not here.” Sukie chewed her thumb, something she hadn’t done since she was five.
“Oh my God, these menus are a mess.” Issy picked up a bunch lying about on the hostess counter and stacked them. “You look so pretty. Well, you always look pretty. And it’s so nice to see you—you haven’t been here in a while. How many are you?”
Sukie had no idea what she was talking about. “How many am I?”
“For pizza?”
“Just me. I’m not hungry.”
“I’ll buy you a Coke. Diet Coke, right? Will,” she called to the bartender. “Diet Coke with double lemon for this darling person. You’ll love double lemon.” She guided Sukie to a booth, and when Sukie sat down, she slid in on the other side, chatting the whole time. “I’m over my eyeballs in work. Plus I’m taking improv. Do you know what that is? It’s acting class but basically you improvise. It’s hard. You have to be really brave. Like last week I was an assassin, but I did the cutest thing. I pretended my machine guns were made by different fashion designers and I couldn’t make up my mind about which gun went best with my outfit.”
“That’s so cool,” said Sukie, suddenly feeling she might be hungry after all. “Could I have a slice?”
“Sure.” Isabella flagged a waitress. “One slice of a margherita, please. And rush it.”
The waitress put down Sukie’s drink, and Issy peeled the paper off the straw and popped it in. “There you go.” She pushed the drink over.
“I love your hair,” said Sukie.
“What color is it today?” asked Issy.
Sukie laughed, surprised she still knew how. Wasn’t that just like Issy, pretending not to know her own hair color? She always said the best things.
“How’s school?” asked Issy.
“I don’t know. Okay. Do you like my dad?”
“What?”
“I just wondered what you thought of him.”
Issy looked deep into Sukie’s eyes. Sukie could feel her searching for a way to understand the question.
“I mean,” said Sukie, “do you think he’s nice?”
“Of course,” said Issy. “He’s very nice when he comes in. Oh God, it’s Mr. Pulaski.” She waved at a portly gentleman struggling to get his raincoat off. She leaned across the table and whispered. “I have to pay attention to him because he gives the hugest tips.” She slid out of the booth. “It’s so nice to see you. Tell your dad hi and your mom and Mikey.” She kissed her hand and placed it on Sukie’s cheek before turning away to charm Mr. Pulaski.
When Sukie tried to pay, the waitress told her it was all taken care of, and Isabella waved good-bye from across the room.
On Saturday night when her parents were out and Mikey had a sleepover at Tyler’s, Sukie poured a juice glass of vodka and, holding her nose, drank it without stopping. “No big deal,” she told Señor after the final gulp. A minute later her legs went wobbly, and shortly after that she got the sensation that her head was filled with helium and might float away. Curious about what she looked like, she tottered up the stairs and into the bathroom, stubbing her toe on the door. “Ow. Ow, ow, ow.” She grabbed her foot and collapsed on the bathmat. “Kiss and make toe better,” she ordered herself, and tried unsuccessfully to bring her foot to her lips. She offered the toe to Señor for kissing. He wanted nothing to do with it.
Sukie bunched up her lips so her teeth protruded rabbitlike and craned high enough to catch her reflection. She pulled the ends of her mouth nearly to her ears and pinched her eyes down, making monster faces, then rolled herself up in the bathmat and stuck her head up to see what that looked like too. “You’re nuts,” she said to her reflection or her reflection said to her, she wasn’t sure which. “You are sick, demented, and ugly.” Her face distorted, lips growing to gargantuan size, cheeks puffing, eyes shrinking to peas. One earlobe grew so long, she could have jumped rope with it. Sukie viewed these grotesque developments curiously, as if they were happening to someone else.
“Issy,” she called, but because her tongue felt thick, “Issy” came out “Ithy.”
In the mirror, Isabella obligingly appeared, eating a slice. She sat on a chrome chair, the kind Sukie had seen at Joe’s Caffeinated.
“No, please.” Sukie struggled to enunciate. “Sit anywhere but in that chair.”
Issy stood up and kicked the chair sideways, out of the reflection.
“Thanks,” said Sukie.
“No problem,” said Issy.
“My dad’s slime, what am I going to do?” The words bumped into one another.
“Slime? I think he’s charming.”
“You do?”
“Absolutely. Want a slice?”
Sukie shook her head no.
Issy ripped off a piece of crust and crunched it. “It was fun to see you today.”
“Same here,” said Sukie.
“We really have to go shopping, little sister. You’re fun.”
“But my dad’s slime.” Big fat tears rolled down her engorged cheeks. She poked out her tongue, large as a giant lizard’s, and swung it this way and that trying to lap up the tears. “Do you think Bobo will ever text me again?”
“It’s possible,” said Issy.
“Really?”
“Sure. But do you care?”
“I can’t talk anymore. I don’t feel good,” said Sukie, and she threw up.
The next night, while her dad was watching football, Sukie backed quietly out of the living room and ducked into her dad’s office. She could hear him cursing the ref—the Giants were losing—as she fumbled though the stuff on his desk. He always emptied his pockets next to his laptop after he came home from work: keys, money clip, change, BlackBerry, a credit card receipt or two. She wanted to check his calls and email. She wanted to know about the woman. But the BlackBerry wasn’t there.
And it wasn’t there the next night or the next, but then on the way to school, her dad pulled into the Sunoco station for gas while talking business on his cell. He shut off the car, chatted a bit more, hung up, and dropped the BlackBerry on the seat.
While he strolled up to the pay window in his lazy, handsome-guy way, Sukie threw herself over the seat and snatched it.
“What are you doing?” said Mikey.
“Shut up or I’ll tell everyone you masturbate.” She scrolled through the numbers, glancing up every second or two. Her dad was charming the cashier. One number turned up a ton of times with no name attached: 666 555-7372. A rap on the window. Sukie jerked up. Her dad smiled and twirled his finger, meaning open the window.
Sukie lowered the glass, “You scared me. I forgot my phone, I was calling it for messages.”
He put out his hand. She handed him his BlackBerry. 666 555-7372. 666 555-7372. Her dad winked at her through the windshield while he filled the tank. And Sukie, forcing a smile back, opened her spiral notebook. 666 555-7372. She scribbled it down.
As soon as she got to school, she ripped the number out of her notebook, folded it into a tiny wad, and tucked it in her wallet.
She was going to call the number. But she didn’t. Every day or so she unfolded and read the number again, folded it up, and tucked it back inside her wallet.
Thanksgiving came and went. Sukie’s family always celebrated with her aunt, who lived across the river in New Jersey. There were so many guests that no one noticed that Sukie barely spoke a word.
One evening, as her mom stood on her tiptoes trying to reach a champagne glass on a top shelf, and her father had phoned to say he wouldn’t be home for dinner, Sukie nearly blurted, “Dad’s cheating on you.”
“Can you get that for me?” her mom asked. “I’ve got a craving for
the bubbly.”
“Sure, Mom.” Sukie handed her the glass. Dad’s cheating on you. She imagined the consequences. Her mother’s grip would tighten in a spasm, the crystal would shatter, and the shards would rain down to reflect their brittle and broken world.
“I’m a little scared of champagne corks, aren’t you?” Pointing the bottle toward the pantry, her mom closed her eyes. The cork shot out and hit a cabinet. Champagne spurted, and she caught the overflow in her glass. “It’s really a man’s job.”
“What is?”
“Opening champagne.” She took a sip and moaned in happiness. “Ooh, that’s delicious. Do you think your dad’s up to something?”
The question so shocked Sukie that for a second she thought she might have actually told her mom about her dad without realizing it. Or had her mom read her mind?
“His business is so peculiar,” said her mom.
“He buys and sells real estate,” said Sukie.
“I didn’t mean his business business.”
“What do you mean?”
“I like to think he has a secret life, that underneath all this perfection, things are more exciting. All this perfection.” She raised her hand and fluttered her fingers.
Was her mom suspicious, amusing herself, simply being provocative, or assuming an attitude that went with champagne? Sometimes her mom accessorized a drink with a mood or vice versa. In the past Sukie had read visual clues. These days she was clueless.
In terms of swelling and bruising, her mom’s face was nearly normal, but the result was less her mother than a mask of her mother. The skin stretched tight across her cheeks reminded Sukie of American cheese. In the way that American cheese, absolutely smooth and flat, didn’t quite resemble cheese, her mother’s skin didn’t quite resemble skin. Processed, that’s what it was, her mom’s skin looked processed. As for her lips, they were more severe, as if someone had pulled and tacked them down. Even at rest they appeared to be heading toward some expression, but who knew what? The nose was still a mystery under a narrow strip of tape, but the eyes…here Sukie had spent considerable time figuring out what was different. An absence of friendly smile lines to be sure, but the change was less in the way her mother’s eyes looked than in the way Sukie felt looking at them. Now a look at her mother turned into a search for her mother. Where was she in there? Might this feeling have to do with the fact that her mom’s eyes were wide open, wide open every single second (apart from blinking) as if she were in a permanent state of surprise, or had the surgeon made some other minuscule adjustment that Sukie couldn’t pinpoint? She imagined diving into her mom’s eyes and splashing helplessly. “Mom, Mom, where are you?” The doctor stole her soul, thought Sukie, and gave it to someone else.
What a predicament. She couldn’t bear to set eyes on her father, and when she set eyes on her mother, she couldn’t find her.
Long into the night she labored on her English essay, and the next morning she dressed in head-to-toe black to present it. Before entering Mr. Vickers’s class she took a selfie. She looked killer, a touch of lipstick and a pinch of each cheek, what Emma Bovary might do for a faint glow. She adopted a measured walk, each step discrete, intentional. No smiles, a simple slight narrowing of the lips indicating a private amusement of some sort that she would share with no one…yet.
“Our last day with Madame Bovary,” Mr. Vickers announced. “No tears, please. Sukie, let’s hear what you’ve written.”
Sukie slid out of her chair, stood, and shifted her shoulders back, which had the side effect of lengthening her neck and giving her chin a bully’s tilt. She took five steps to the front of the room and pivoted. “‘Like Tostes, Like Cobweb,’” she said. “By Susannah Danielle Jamieson.” Spinning Vickers’s empty chair out from around his desk, she planted her black-booted foot on it.
The move was a shocker. Several classmates stopped secretly texting. No one had ever taken possession of Vickers’s chair and branded the seat with their boot.
She took a while to peruse the room, and then—thrilled with her topic sentence, it was perfection—drilled the words into the skulls of her classmates.
“Although we live more than a century and a half apart, although Emma Bovary is a fictional character and I’m real, although she’s a French housewife and I’m an American high-school student, our lives could not be more similar.
“Every day in Tostes, a puny provincial town, Emma’s life had the predictability of a metronome, those little mechanical devices that tick-tock tick-tock with screaming regularity. The schoolmaster opened the shutters of his house, the policeman passed, the horses crossed the road, the barber paced, her husband took hours nightly to eat smelly boiled meat.
“How could I not identify?
“Since kindergarten I’ve endured Ethan’s relentless warnings of global warming, his hallelujah chorus of save the planet, his uniform”—she insulted that word, slathered it with sarcasm—“of cargo pants bulging with flyers, and his endless whining, ‘Can I change my topic?’ Yes. Change it and shut up!”
There was a burst of laughter.
Ethan’s large round eyes blinked rapidly behind his glasses. He stopped proofreading a notice about a dire situation—algae in drinking water—and pushed out a smile. As he forced himself to meet the eyes of his classmates, his head jerked.
Sukie continued blandly. “Every day in the cafeteria, Autumn, the human wire hanger, performs brownie consumption. We see you. We get the message: ‘Here’s what I can eat and still poke your eye out with my elbow.’ Your favorite actress is Cate Blanchett. ‘She’s so real.’ Tell me that one more time and I’ll scream. Does anyone here not know that Denicia has allergies? Has Denicia not brought up her allergy to cornmeal every single time she buys lunch? And how often is cornmeal on the menu? Never.”
A wave of titters, but the laughter was more tentative, kids realizing, as Sukie trashed Autumn and then Denicia, that soon she would eviscerate them. And she did. Fleur for her mindless obsession with nails (an idiot savant, she called her, whose area of brilliance was manicures). “You either lose them or break them, is there any other choice? Perhaps you could choke on one.”
Frannie was next.
Only here did Sukie waver. She skipped the sentence about how Frannie’s mournful eyes raised themselves from doodling only to judge, and rushed on to Troy—sticking him for sneaking the Olympics and fencing into every single sentence. “Is Jenna a cheerleader?” she asked. “Yes, except the team she’s jumping for is James. ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’ Squeal, squeal, squeal. Congratulations, you have a boyfriend and can point your toe over your head. Whoopee.”
Sukie’s eyes danced from one student to the next, enjoying the possibility of increasing his or her discomfort. Troy had a smirk stuck on his face, Jenna’s face flushed red, Fleur’s teeth were bared—perhaps she would stab Sukie with her nail. Many students lowered their eyes or turned away. I’m an alpha dog—Sukie managed to squeeze in that pleasing thought while reading her essay. Her slightest glance produced submission, although not in Frannie, who had abandoned her drawing to rest her chin in her hands and regard Sukie frankly.
Sukie hit the principal for being “a crashing bore.” The three C’s were not creativity, community, and culture, but conformity, claustrophobia, and control. Showing off her critical prowess, Sukie managed to relate that to Flaubert’s use of metaphor, and then, surging with power, she launched into her closing paragraph. “One test of a great book,” she said, “is not whether it worked when it was written but whether it resonates across time. When I read that Emma, with her exquisite taste, had to endure the sight of her husband, Charles, in his dowdy clothes while I endure the daily vision of Mr. Vickers in his loud, baggy sweaters—that tells me that I’ve read a classic.” Sukie then praised Flaubert for his prescience—exposing the stifling life at Cobweb 110 years before Cobweb existed—and concluded with a final condemnation: “Thanks to all of you, my soul suffocates. My spirit bleeds. Just like Emma’s.”
She removed her booted foot from the seat of Vickers’s chair and returned to her seat.
Mr. Vickers crossed his arms, seized the bottom of his thick sweater with its colors as random as spin art, and, in one motion, pulled it over his head and off. Sukie expected that, underneath, he would be wearing a T-shirt. Who wears a big heavy sweater with nothing under it? Vickers, apparently. His pale hairless chest was muscled, his abs defined, his arms positively sculpted. Under that shapeless blob of yarn, Vickers had a body, stocky but buff. From the class there were a few gasps, strangled snorts of laughter here and there, but mostly a hushed astonishment.
“If, by my taste in sweaters, I’ve contributed to your misery, please forgive me,” he said.
Sukie nodded. If he expected her to wilt or apologize, the man could guess again. A hidden truth, she thought, observing his ripped bod. Vickers is hot. I’ve done him a favor.
He continued, rambling on about Flaubert as if he weren’t half naked, as if tufts of hair weren’t peeking from his underarms.
Sukie, meanwhile, sat primly, her ankles crossed, her hands clasped, aware in a satisfied way of everyone hating her.
“Oh, Sukie.” Vickers summoned her when class was over and motioned that she should sit. She waited while he brushed the lapels of his sports jacket, which was always draped neatly over his chair, before he slipped it on over his naked torso.
“What’s going on?” asked Vickers.
Sukie blew on her palm.
“I’m worried about you.”
Sukie flipped her hand over and blew on the back of it. Her first F. She was about to get her first F. What would it feel like? Cool.
“You upset your classmates. Why?”
“How’d you like my essay?”
Vickers took his time, loading his briefcase with papers. “It was original,” he said finally. “Very original. But I’d expect a backlash. You can go now.”