The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  “Okay,” she says. “Okay, thanks.” And she stands, brushes off the dirt, and looks at Faye. “Hey, look, I’m sorry for being weird.”

  “It’s fine,” Faye says.

  “Please don’t tell anyone.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I don’t think other people would understand.”

  “I won’t tell anyone.”

  And Margaret nods and begins to leave when suddenly she stops, turns back to Faye. “Would you like to come over this weekend?”

  “Come over where?”

  “My house, dummy. Come have dinner with us.”

  “Your house?”

  “Saturday night. It’s my father’s birthday. We’re having a surprise party for him. I want you to come!”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. If you’re going to stay in town after graduation, don’t you think we should be friends?”

  “Oh, okay, sure,” says Faye. “Sure. That’d be swell.”

  “Great!” says Margaret. “Don’t tell anyone. It’s a surprise.” She smiles and struts away, rounds the corner, and disappears.

  Faye leans back against the wall again and realizes the orchestra is going full tilt. She hadn’t noticed. A big torso of sound, a big crescendo. She is overcome by Margaret’s invitation. What a victory. What a shock. She listens to the orchestra and feels vast. She finds that music muffled through a wall makes her more aware of the physicality of it, that when she can’t hear the music exactly she can still sense it, the vibrations, like waves. That buzz. The wall she presses her face to makes it a different kind of experience. No longer music but a crossing over of the senses. She is aware of the friction needed for music, the striking and stroking of string, wood, leather. Near the end of the piece, especially. When, louder, she can feel the bigger notes. Not abstract, but a quaking, like a touch. And the feeling moves down her throat, a great pulse of noise now, a banging inside. It hums her.

  Beyond everything else, she loves this: how swiftly things can strike her—music, people, life—how quickly they can surprise her, all of a sudden, like a punch.

  6

  SOMETIMES SPRING SEEMS to happen all at once. Trees bloom, the first green shoots curl out of rain-muddy cornfields, things are renewing, beginning, and for certain members of the graduating class, this is a time of hope and optimism: Commencement approaches, and the girls—those with steady boyfriends, those who daydream about weddings and gardens and toddlers—begin talking about soul mates, how they can feel it, destiny, the ineluctable hand of fate, how they just know. Soft adoring eyes and a quiver in their pulse—Faye feels sorry for them, then sometimes sorry for herself. She seems to lack some essential romance in her life. To Faye it all seems so arbitrary, love. All happenstance. As easily one thing as another, as easily one man as another.

  Take Henry.

  Why, of all men, Henry?

  The two of them sit on the riverbank one night throwing stones into the water, picking at the sand, nervously attempting wit and conversation, and this is what she’s thinking: Why am I here with him?

  Simple. Because Peggy Watson started a dumb rumor last autumn.

  Peggy had come galloping to Faye after home ec all smiles and high drama. “I know a secret,” she said, then teased Faye the rest of the day, slipping her a note in trigonometry: I know something you don’t know.

  “It’s a good one,” she said at lunch. “Grade-A juicy. Something to write home about.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s better if you wait,” she said. “Till after school. You’ll want to be sitting down.”

  Peggy Watson, vague friend since the third grade, house down the street, same bus ride home, the closest thing Faye has to a “best friend.” When they were children they played this game where they used all the crayons in the box and whole pads of paper to write “I Love You” in different colors, scripts, and designs. It was Peggy’s idea. She couldn’t stop. It never got old for her. Peggy’s favorite was a picture of a heart with I Love You written in a circle around it. “A circle, so no beginning and no end,” she said. “Get it? It keeps going? Forever!”

  After school that day Peggy was ecstatic, exhilarated with big rumors and alarming news: “There’s a boy who likes you!”

  “No there’s not,” Faye said.

  “There is. Most definitely. I have it on good authority.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Lips are sealed,” Peggy said. “I swore up and down.”

  “Who’s the boy?”

  “He’s a boy in our class.”

  “Which one?”

  “Guess!”

  “I am not guessing.”

  “Do it! Guess!”

  “Tell me.”

  But Faye didn’t really want to know. She didn’t want the hassle. She was single, kept to herself, perfectly happy with that tableau. Why couldn’t people just leave her alone?

  “Okay,” Peggy said. “Fine. No guessing. No games. I’ll blurt it all out. Hope you’re ready.”

  “I am,” Faye said, and she waited, and Peggy waited, savoring it, staring at Faye, full of mischief, and Faye suffered through the big theatrical pause until she could no longer bear it. “Damn it, Peggy!”

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “It’s Henry! Henry Anderson! He likes you!”

  Henry. Faye didn’t know what she was expecting, but she was not expecting that. Henry? She’d never even considered him before. He was barely a presence in her thoughts.

  “Henry,” Faye said.

  “Yes,” Peggy said. “Henry. It’s destiny. You two are destined. You wouldn’t even have to change your last name!”

  “I would too! Andresen, Anderson, they’re different.”

  “Still,” Peggy said, “he’s pretty cute.”

  Faye went home and locked herself in her room. Seriously considered, for the first time, having a boyfriend. Sat on her bed. Didn’t sleep much. Cried a little. Decided by the next morning that, strangely, she actually cared for Henry a great deal. Had convinced herself that she’d always liked his looks. His sturdy linebacker physique. His quiet manner. Maybe she’d liked him all this time. At school he seemed different now—more pink, alive, handsome. What she didn’t know was that Peggy had done the same thing to him. Harassed him all day with hints about a certain girl who liked him. Revealed later that it was Faye. He came to school that day and saw Faye and couldn’t understand why he’d never noticed how beautiful she was. How elegant and simple. What fierce eyes hid behind those big round glasses.

  They began dating shortly thereafter.

  Love is like this, Faye thinks now. We love people because they love us. It’s narcissistic. It’s best to be perfectly clear about this and not let abstractions like fate and destiny muddle the issue. Peggy, after all, could have picked any boy in the school.

  This is what’s racing through her mind tonight on the riverbank, where Henry has brought her so he can, she believes, apologize. He’s been timid ever since that night at the playground. The incident after the prom. They talk about it, but obliquely. They don’t say anything specific. “I’m sorry about…you know,” he says, and she feels bad for him, the way he slumps over when addressing the subject. He’s been irritatingly contrite and penitent. Carrying her book bag home, walking a step behind her, head down, buying more flowers and candy. Sometimes, in fits of self-pity, he’ll say things like “God I’m so stupid!” Or he’ll ask her to go to the movies and before she can accept he’ll say something like “If you still want be my girl, that is.”

  It’s all arbitrary. Had Faye attended a different school. Had her parents moved away. Had Peggy been sick that day. Had she chosen a different boy. And on and on. A thousand permutations, a million possibilities, and almost all of them kept Faye from sitting here in the sand with Henry.

  He is a cauldron of nerves tonight, clenching and unclenching his hands, picking at the dirt, throwing rocks into the water. She sips a Coca-Cola out of the bottle and waits. He had pla
nned it this far, getting Faye alone, here, on the riverbank. Now he doesn’t know what to do. He wobbles back and forth in the sand, swats at something in front of his face, sits there hard and tense like a nervous horse. It irritates her, his torment. She drinks her Coke.

  The river smells of fish tonight—a damp and funky stench like spoiled milk and ammonia—and Faye thinks about this one time she was out with her father on his boat. He was showing her how to fish. This was important to him. He had grown up a fisherman. When he was a kid, that was his job. But she had no taste for it. She couldn’t even hook the worm without crying—how it coiled around her finger and brown goo came spurting out as she pierced the skin.

  Henry reminds her of that worm right now: ready to pop.

  They stare at the river, and the blue flame of the nitrogen plant, the moon, the light breaking on the water and scattering. A bottle bobs ten yards out. A bug whizzes by her face. Waves come ashore in their rhythmic way, and the longer they sit here in silence the more it seems to Faye like the river is breathing—how it contracts and expands, rushes in and rushes out, water caressing rocks as it pulls away.

  Finally Henry turns to her and speaks. “Hey, listen, I want to ask you something.”

  “Okay.”

  “But…I don’t know if I can,” he says. “If I can ask you this.”

  “Why not?” she says. And she looks at him, sees him and realizes she hasn’t done that—actually looked at him—in how long? All night? She’s been avoiding his eyes, embarrassed for him, hating him a little, and now she finds him grim and scowling.

  “I want to…,” he says, but stops. He never finishes the sentence. Instead, he leans quickly into Faye and kisses her.

  Kisses her hard.

  Like he did that night at the playground, and it surprises her—the sudden taste of him, his warmth pressing into her, the oily smell of his hands now clutching her face. It’s shocking, his forcefulness, pushing his mouth to hers, driving his tongue past her lips. He’s kissing like it’s combat. She falls back into the sand and he pushes himself onto her, over her, still seizing her face, kissing wildly. He isn’t rough, exactly. But commanding. Her first impulse is to shrink away. He squeezes her, crushes his body into hers. Their front teeth knock together but he keeps going. She’s never felt Henry so strongly and savagely male. She can’t move under his weight, and now she feels other of her body’s demands—her skin is cold, her belly full of cola, she needs to burp. Needs to wiggle out and run.

  And just at that moment he stops, draws back a few inches, and looks at her. Henry, she sees now, is in agony. His face is screwed up in knots. He’s staring at her with big pleading desperate eyes. He’s waiting for her to protest. Waiting for her to say No. And she’s about to, but she catches herself. And this will be the moment, later on in the night, after everything’s over, after Henry has driven her home, as she stays awake till dawn thinking about it, the thing that will confuse her most is this precise moment: when she had the chance to flee, but she did not.

  She does not say No. She does not say anything at all. She simply meets Henry’s gaze. Maybe—though she’s not entirely sure of it—maybe she even nods: Yes.

  And so Henry goes back at it, vigor renewed. Kissing her, tonguing her ear, biting her neck. He drives his hand down, between them, and she hears the undoings of various mechanisms—belt and buckle, zipper.

  “Close your eyes,” he says.

  “Henry.”

  “Please. Close your eyes. Pretend you’re asleep.”

  She looks at him again, his face inches away, eyes closed. He’s consumed by something, some unutterable need. “Please,” he says, and he takes her hand and guides it down. Faye pulls against him, weakly resisting until he says “Please” again and tugs harder and she lets her hand go limp, lets him do what he wants. He draws himself out of his slacks and guides her hand the rest of the way, between the folds of his pants, under his briefs. When she touches him, he leaps.

  “Keep your eyes closed,” he says.

  And she does. She feels him move against her, feels him slide across her fingers. It’s an abstract feeling, removed from the world of actual things. He’s pressing his face to her neck and pumping his hips and, she realizes, he’s crying, soft little whimpers, warm tears puddling where he’s bearing into her.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  And Faye feels like she should be mortified but mostly she feels pity. She feels bad for Henry, his despair and his guilt, the crude needs wrecking him, the hopeless way he’s gone about it tonight. And so she pulls him closer and grips him tighter and suddenly, with a great shudder and a splash of warmth, it’s all over.

  Henry collapses, groans, falls into her, and cries.

  “I’m sorry,” he keeps saying.

  His body is curled up against her, and in her hand, he’s quickly shrinking away. “I’m so sorry,” he says. She tells him it’s okay. Strokes his hair slowly, holds him as the sobs ripple through his body.

  This cannot be what people mean when they talk about fate and romance and destiny. No, these things are ornaments, Faye decides, decorations hiding this one bleak fact: that Henry’s master tonight was not love but rather catharsis, plain old animal release.

  He whimpers into her chest. Her hand is sticky and cold. True love, she thinks. And she almost laughs.

  7

  THERE ARE TWO CONDITIONS, Margaret says, for dinner at the Schwingles. First, pick up a package at the pharmacy. And second, tell no one.

  “What’s in the package?” Faye says.

  “Sweets,” Margaret says. “Chocolates and stuff. Bonbons. My dad doesn’t want me to have that kind of food. He says I need to watch my figure.”

  “You don’t need to watch your figure.”

  “That’s what I said! Don’t you think that’s unfair?”

  “That is so unfair.”

  “Thank you,” she says. She smoothes her skirt, a gesture that seems inherited from her mother. “So when you pick it up, can you pretend it’s yours?”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “Thank you. I already paid for it. I placed the order in your name, so I wouldn’t get yelled at.”

  “I understand,” Faye says.

  “The dinner is going to be a surprise for my dad. So when you see him at the pharmacy, tell him you’re going on a date that night. With Henry. To throw him off the track.”

  “Okay, I will.”

  “Better yet, tell everyone you’re going on a date that night.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Yeah. Don’t tell anyone you’re coming over.”

  “All right.”

  “If people know you’re coming over, my dad could find out and he’d suspect something. I know you wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.”

  “Of course not.”

  “If you tell anyone it will definitely get back to my dad. He’s very well-connected. You haven’t told anyone yet, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, good. Good. Just remember. Pick up the package at the pharmacy. And say you’re going on a date with Henry.”

  The party would be unforgettable. Margaret has promised balloons, streamers, her mother’s famous salmon aspic, a cake with three different layers, homemade vanilla ice cream, maybe afterward they would even take the convertible out for a nighttime joyride along the river. Faye feels so special to be singled out for the occasion.

  “Thank you for inviting me,” she tells Margaret, to which Margaret gently touches her shoulder and says, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  On the evening of the party, Faye is in her bedroom trying to decide between two versions of the same dress, a smart little summer dress—one green, one yellow. Both were purchased for special occasions that Faye can no longer remember. Probably church-related. She looks into the mirror and holds one up in front of her, then the other.

  On her bed, spread out over the blankets and pillows, is paperwork from Chicago Circle. Documents and forms th
at will, once delivered, officially hold her seat in the freshman class of 1968. She’ll need to put them in the mail within the next week to meet the deadline. She’s already filled them out, in ink, in her neatest handwriting. Each night she’s been spreading out the materials like this, the brochures and pamphlets, hoping something will speak to her, hoping to see something that will finally convince her to go or stay.

  Each time she feels near a decision, some worry compels her in the opposite direction. She’ll read another Ginsberg poem and think, I’m going to Chicago. She’ll look at the brochures and read about the space-age campus and imagine being in a place where the students are roundly smart and serious and wouldn’t look at her all funny when she aces another algebra test, and she’ll think, I’m definitely going to Chicago. But then she’ll imagine how everyone in town would react if she went, or, worse, if she came back, which is just about the most mortifying thing in the world, if she can’t cut it at Circle and has to come back, then the whole town would be gossiping about her and rolling their collective eyes. She pictures this and thinks, I’m staying in Iowa.

  And so it goes, this awful pendulum.

  But she can make one decision, at least: the yellow dress. Yellow feels like the more celebratory color, she thinks, the more birthday-appropriate.

  Downstairs she finds her mother watching the news. A story about student protesters, again. Another night, another university overrun. Students pack themselves into hallways and won’t leave. They invade the office of the president and provost. They sleep there, right where people work.

  She watches it on television, Faye’s mother, gaping at the weird happenings in the world. On the couch she sits and stares, each night, at Walter Cronkite. The events lately have seemed otherworldly—sit-ins, riots, assassinations.

  “The vast majority of college students are not militant,” explains the reporter. He interviews a girl with pretty hair and a soft wool sweater who tells him how much all the other students disagree with the extremists. “We just want to go to class and get good grades and support our boys overseas,” she says, smiling.

  Cut to a shot, wide angle, of a hallway filled with students: bearded, long-haired, unkempt, shouting slogans, playing music.