by Lena Dunham
She holds my face, panting like we’re out in a snowstorm. Her eyes grow huge, and without words I understand. She knows I understand what is missing. Someone is gone. She beats her chest with a tight fist. “But it hurts so much. You can’t believe how much it hurts.”
“I know,” I tell her, and for that moment I do. “I know, I know. You’re so brave.”
She lies down next to me. We’re face-to-face now. Jenna is dancing over us, laughing, having stripped down to only a sports bra.
“It’s hard to talk about,” she says. “I love knowing you.”
I squeeze her. I feel as though I’ve never felt another person’s pain more deeply. I imagine my breath is terrible, but I also imagine she doesn’t mind things like that. And I don’t mind when she blows smoke in my face. I rustle her hair, my own, hers again. I didn’t think she’d kiss me, but I didn’t think she wouldn’t either. I said I was leaving an hour before I actually left, and in the cab home I clutched a piece of paper with her number on it and thought about how I hadn’t gotten to see her pond.
The next morning, I sleep until almost 3:00 P.M., lulled by the sound of cabs pulling up to my hotel in the rain. I have meetings in the afternoon and am determined not to tell anyone I vomited. But sharing is my first instinct, and I offer it up ten minutes into my first professional engagement of the day. I nurse a single cup of tea until, around 6:00 P.M., I’m ready to eat the crust of a potpie. I pull out my phone and start scrolling through images of the night before, none of which I have a memory of taking. In one, Aidan menaces the camera, blurry. In another Jenna kisses my sweaty face. In a few Nellie’s cigarette waves wildly, threatening to set fire to her house. In others we are face-to-face, eyes closed. Our hands are clasped.
If you look carefully you can see, in the upper-left-hand corner, the purple specter of my vomit.
I kissed three girls in college. All at once. Three straight girls were experimenting with universal love in a corner at a party to benefit Palestinian rights and, when they offered me membership, I took it. We went around in a circle, taking turns, kissing for just long enough to get a sense of one another’s mouths. They felt soft and tickly to me, minus the hard edges and rough bits I was still getting used to on boys. Afterward we laughed. None of my eighth-grade fears had come true. I was not, suddenly, the militant lesbian leader of a motorcycle gang, nor was I ashamed. I didn’t even flinch when a photo of me, mid-lip-lock, with a girl named Helen surfaced in the art building, part of a boy named Cody’s “Nan Goldin–inspired thesis.”
Later, alone in bed and almost over the nausea of my hangover, I zoom in on the picture of Nellie and me. The uncropped version, that is. Conspiratorial, sickly, lost girls on a good sofa. If I were a slightly different person, I’d have had many nights like this, a hard drive full of these images. I may hate the term “girl crush,” but a picture does not lie. It has the quality of an image taken by a ghost hunter, revealing floaters and spirits that the participants had been unable to see.
“I DON’T THINK this is working out,” he says. “I think we would be better off as friends.”
It’s seventh grade, and we’ve just come back from winter break. On our last date we walked up and down the street holding hands for a few hours before going into Häagen-Dazs to wait for my mom to pick me up. I know I like him because when his teeth filled with seeds from a Very Berry Smoothie it didn’t gross me out at all. Next Wednesday would have been our six-month anniversary.
“Okay,” I squeak before throwing myself into the bosom of Maggie Fields’s blue fur coat. She smells like cotton candy, and she feels so sorry for me, leading me into the girls’ bathroom on the twelfth floor and petting my head. He was my first boyfriend, and I feel sure I’ll never have another. Maggie has had three, and all of them disappointed her.
“What a dick!” she says. “What are we gonna do to him?” Her Brooklyn accent only comes out when she’s angry. This is the best part.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I say, and crumple against the window.
He sits in the driver’s seat of his green jeep, wondering what I’m so upset about while I cry behind my sunglasses. We park in silence, and he leads me back to his apartment like I’m a little kid in trouble. We shut the door, and he fills a Mason jar with water and tells me I’m the only person who has ever mattered to him. He says he knows I feel the same way, his face contorted in the only display of emotion I’ve seen since we met.
Finally, after three more attempts at ending it—at the beach, on the phone, via email—I sit with my friend Merritt at a sidewalk café in Park Slope. It’s a little too cold to be outside and we wear our sunglasses, shrinking down into our hoodies. I pick at my pancakes while she tells me, simply, “It’s okay to change your mind.” About a feeling, a person, a promise of love. I can’t stay just to avoid contradicting myself. I don’t have to watch him cry.
So I stop answering the phone, I stop asking permission, and soon he’s completely gone, like being grounded over Christmas break or some other terrible thing that seemed like it would last forever.
“When you’re my age, you’ll know how mysterious this all is,” he says.
He’s talking about love, and he’s only eight years older than me. I should have known. It was going almost too well, a bicoastal relationship. He called me every morning on his way to the beach to surf. I described the view from the window of my new apartment, snow falling on the neighbor’s garden, local cats whining from their respective fire escapes. I couldn’t always remember his face, so my visual for him became my feet, bare and pale and pressed against the wall as we talked for hours. “I wish you were here,” he said. “I’d take you for ice cream and show you the waves.”
I nodded. “I’d like that.” Or I’d like to like that.
But here I am at his birthday party, all wrong in my mother’s black dress, face red, braid greasy, heels sinking into the soil of his friend Wayne’s backyard. The girl who is DJing has eleven buns in her hair, and he is standing by the hot tub talking to another girl in a romper, and I know, as much as I have ever known anything, that my arrival isn’t what he’d imagined. Maybe he never really imagined it at all. The next day he takes me on a day trip up the coast that should be romantic but feels like a hostage situation. As we wait in line for fish tacos, I hope against hope that no one can hear him speaking, and if they do, they don’t judge me for it. I want more than anything to be alone.
I head home, and having concluded this chapter I am able to relax for the first time in months. After all, desire is the enemy of contentment. From the bathtub, I call Audrey. “It isn’t going to work,” I tell her. “I think he thinks he was being really deep by dating a chubby girl.” Later, we will find out he was simultaneously courting an actress from television’s The West Wing and that he bought her a cactus.
Audrey starts to laugh. “What a goon. He’s lucky to know you, but too stupid to ever realize it.”
“I still love you,” he says, “but I have to go my own way.”
“So you want to break up?” I ask, trembling.
“I guess so,” he says. I fall to the floor, like a woman in the twelfth century fainting at the sight of a hanging in her town square.
Later, my mother comes home from a party and finds me catatonic, lying across the bed, surrounded by pictures of him and me, the mittens he bought me at Christmas folded beneath my cheek. I am crippled by what feels like sadness but what I will later diagnose as embarrassment. She tells me this is a great excuse: to take time for myself, to cry a bunch, to eat only carbohydrates slathered in cheese.
“You will find,” she says, “that there’s a certain grace to having your heart broken.” I will use this line many times in the years to come, giving it as a gift to anyone who needs it.
1. “She’s chubby in a different way than we are.”
2. “Don’t worry, no one will remember this when you’re dead.”
3. “No, please don’t apologize. If I had your mother I
’d be a nightmare, too.”
4. “It’s all right. Honesty has never really been your thing.”
5. “Maybe you should open a store? That would be a good job for you!”
6. “Holocaust, eating disorder. Same difference.”
7. “I Googled him and ‘rape’ autofills after his name.”
8. “But it’s different because I actually have a dad.”
9. “Come on, please let me pay for lunch. You don’t have a job!”
10. “There’s a chapter about you in my book.”
11. “There’s nothing about you in my book.”
12. “Oh, hey, your boyfriend tried to kiss me while you were off getting a smoothie. I mean, either that or he was smelling my mouth.”
13. “Have a nice life, bitch.”
I WAS AN ONLY CHILD until I turned six.
I figured, knowing what little I did about reproduction and family planning, that this was how it was always going to be. I had heard the kids at preschool discussing their siblings or lack thereof:
“My mommy can’t have another baby.”
“My daddy says I’m just enough.”
“Do you have brothers or sisters?” my teacher asked me on the first day of preschool.
“No,” I replied. “But my mommy is pregnant with a baby.”
She wasn’t pregnant with a baby, not even a tiny bit, and had to explain as much when the teacher promptly congratulated her on the “coming addition.”
“Do you want a brother or sister?” my mother asked me that night as we ate takeout Chinese off the coffee table. “Is that why you lied?”
“Sure,” I responded, as casually as if she’d offered me an extra moo shu pancake.
So, unbeknownst to me, my vote tipped the scales, and they began to try in earnest. I continued with my routine, unaware of the storm brewing in the bedroom down the hall. And two years later, on a boiling day in June, my mother turned toward me from the driver’s seat of our Volvo and said, “Guess what? You’re going to have a baby sister.”
“No, I’m not,” I replied.
“Yes, you are,” she said, smiling wide. “Just like you wanted.”
“Oh,” I told her. “I changed my mind.”
Grace came late in January, on a school night, no less. My mother’s water broke, splashing the hardwood in front of the elevator, after which she waddled back to my bedroom and put me to sleep. When I woke up at 3:00 A.M. the house was dark, save for a light glowing from my parents’ bedroom. I crept down the hall, where I found a babysitter named Belinda reading on their bed, next to a porcelain doll I had requested from an ad in TV Guide (five payments of $11.99) and a pile of wrapped peppermints.
In the morning I was walked down Broadway to the hospital, where Grace was the only Caucasian infant in a nursery of Chinese babies. I peered through the glass: “Which one is she?” I asked.
My mother lay in a hospital bed. Her belly still looked as full as it had the day before but soft now, like a Jell-O mold. I tried not to stare at her reddened breasts, hanging from her kimono. She was tired and pale, but she watched me expectantly as I sat in a chair and my father placed the baby carefully in my lap. She was long, with a flat red face and a bulbous, flaky skull. She was limp and helpless, flexing and unfurling her minuscule fist. I found my new doll significantly cuter. He held up the Polaroid camera, and I raised Grace like I would the prize rabbit at a 4-H fair.
I spent Grace’s first night at home wailing “INTRUDER! RETURN HER!” until I exhausted myself and fell asleep in an armchair. The feeling was so sharp, so distinctly tragic, that I have never forgotten it, even though I have never felt it again. Maybe it’s the sensation of finding a lover in your spouse’s bed. Maybe it’s more like getting fired from the job you’ve had for thirty years. Maybe it’s just the feeling of losing what is yours.
From the beginning, there was something unknowable about Grace. Self-possessed, opaque, she didn’t cry like a typical baby or make her needs clear. She wasn’t particularly cuddly, and when you hugged her (at least when I hugged her), she would wriggle to get free like a skittish cat. Once, when she was around two, she fell asleep on me in a hammock, and I sat as still as I could, desperate not to wake her. I nuzzled her downy hair, kissed her chubby cheek, ran my pointer finger along her thick eyebrow. When she finally awoke it was with a jolt, as if she had fallen asleep on a stranger on the subway.
Grace’s playpen sat in the middle of the living room, between the couch and the dining room table I had carved my name into. We conducted our lives around her, my parents talking on twin telephones, me drawing pictures of “fashion girls” and “crazy men.” Occasionally I would kneel on the floor in front of her, stick my face into the mesh of her enclosure, and coo, “Hiii, Graaacie.” Once she leaned in and placed her lips on my nose. I could feel them, hard and thin, through the barrier. “Mom, she kissed me! Look, she kissed me!” I leaned in again, and she bit down hard on my nose with her two new teeth and laughed.
As she grew, I took to bribing her for her time and affection: one dollar in quarters if I could do her makeup like a “motorcycle chick.” Three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds. Whatever she wanted to watch on TV if she would just “relax on me.” Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying. Maybe, I thought, she would be more willing to accept kisses if I wore the face mask my grandmother had for when she did her dialysis. (The answer was no.) What I really wanted, beyond affection, was to feel that she needed me, that she was helpless without her big sister leading her through the world. I took a perverse pleasure in delivering bad news to her—the death of our grandfather, a fire across the street—hoping that her fear would drive her into my arms, would make her trust me.
“If you don’t try so hard it’ll be better,” my father said. So I hung back. But once she was sleeping, I would creep into her room and listen to her breathe: in, out, in, out, in again, until she rolled away.
Grace always intrigued adults. For starters, she was smart. Her interests ranged from architecture to ornithology, and she approached things much more like an adult than with the irksome whimsy of a precocious child. As a little girl I had been obnoxiously self-aware, irritatingly smug, prone to reading the dictionary “for fun” and making pronouncements like “Papa, nobody my age enjoys real literature.” Things I’d heard “special” people say in movies. Grace simply existed, full of wisdom and wonder, which is why we often found her in the bathroom at a restaurant, talking a forty-year-old woman through a breakup or asking what a cigarette tasted like. One day we found her in our pantry swigging from a small bottle of airplane vodka, disgusted but intrigued.
On only one occasion did her maturity go too far. It was the dawn of social media, and Grace, then in fifth grade, asked me to make her a Friendster account. Together we listed her interests (science, Mongolia, rock ’n’ roll) and what she was looking for (friends) and uploaded a blurry picture of her blowing a kiss at the camera, clad in a neon one-piece.
One night I picked up my computer, and it was open to Grace’s Friendster messages. There were a dozen or so, all from a guy named Kent: “If you love Rem Koolhaas, we should definitely meet up.”
Always the alarmist, I woke up my mother, who confronted Grace about it over whole-wheat pancakes the next morning. Livid, Grace refused to speak to me for several days. She didn’t care whether I was trying to protect her, or what “Kent” the “ad sales rep” had in mind. All that mattered was that I had told her secret.
In college, my dormmate Jessica started dating a girl. To me, it seemed sudden and rash, a response to trendy political correctness rather than basic human desire. “She’s trying to prove she’s not just another JAP,” I told people. “She broke up with her boyfriend like two weeks ago! All she cares about are shoes and dresses.”
Her girlfriend, a pretty-faced soft butch with round glasses and hunk-at-the-sock-hop hair, had graduated already and would drive t
o Ohio every other weekend, at which point I would have to clear out, sleeping on the floor of someone else’s room, so they could go down on each other for infinity.
Sometimes I would ask her to tell me about the sex and whether someone else’s vagina was insanely gross.
“No,” she said. “I actually like doing it.” “It” meant “oral sex.”
Grace came to visit me at school one weekend, and I brought her to a party. By this time she was fifteen, all legs and eyes and fawn-colored freckles, with shiny brown hair that fell down her back and two-hundred-dollar jeans she had somehow convinced my father she needed. She stood in the corner, laughing and nursing the single beer I had promised her.
Oberlin being a liberal haven where opposition was king, the coolest clique at school was a group of rugby-playing, neon-wearing lesbians. They dominated every party with their Kate Bush–heavy mix tapes, abstract facepaint, and pansexual energy. “Kissing is a dance move,” their leader, Daphne, once explained to me.
And that night Daphne noticed Grace, her little puppy nose and the big ridged teeth she still hadn’t grown into, and dragged her onto the dance floor.
“We’re alive!” she shouted, and Grace was embarrassed, but she danced. Awkwardly at first, then with conviction, engaged but not overly eager. I watched her from the sofa with pride. That’s my girl. She can roll with anything.
“Your sister’s gay,” my Jessica announced the next day, folding the fresh laundry spread across her twin bed.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“I’m just saying, she’s into girls,” she said casually, like she was offering me a helpful tip on how to save money on car insurance.