The diary was a slippery thing, weaving together confession with self-delusion, truth with distortion. No—the weaving metaphor isn’t right. That suggests truth and distortion are strands and, therefore, separable. I think it would be more accurate to say that truth and untruth were present in Alison’s diary as hydrogen and oxygen are present in water. The challenge is not one of separation—for what use are either hydrogen or oxygen in understanding the nature of water?—but of understanding these moments without attempting to separate them. I had to find a way to understand how truth and untruth make each other.
* * *
ONE DAY at work, a Facebook invitation appeared in my inbox. Jackie was throwing herself a birthday party: dinner at an all-you-can-eat-and-drink sushi and sake joint, followed by karaoke in Koreatown. I could no longer imagine attending such an event. How frivolous to be twenty-five and doing sake bombs, what a joke, what a cliché. What a cliché, even, to possess some ironic relationship to your own clichéd birthday party, as Jackie did, to affect a pose of self-mockery toward oneself and the basic things one loved. (Yes, we’re doing this. Bon Jovi non-negotiable, the invite said.)
Before I set out for the Little Sweet on the night of Jackie’s party, I texted her: Sorry, I have a thing tonight, but have so much fun!
Jackie texted back immediately: You’re bailing on my bday?!? Is everything okay??? I’m worried.
Her worry opened something in me. For a moment I wanted to go to Jackie’s party and have stupid fun there the way I would have just a few short months ago, but I knew I couldn’t; it was simply no longer possible for me to get wasted and eat bargain-basement spicy tuna rolls and belt out “Sweet Caroline” like these things were somehow relevant to me, and there was loss in this, too. Briefly I considered telling Jackie everything. I typed and deleted half a dozen messages, but in the end, I gave up. I never replied.
* * *
I BEGAN sleeping less and less, and erratically. Night after night, through the dark hours, I listened to Alison. I had not experienced insomnia like this since I was a child, churning out fatal scenarios in the darkness, and the feeling now was familiar: I wanted to stop listening, to give myself over to sleep, but I couldn’t. To press stop, to extinguish Alison’s voice, seemed dangerous in a way I cannot explain rationally, but which felt absolutely inviolable to me. I was almost grateful when the man above me began his nightly guitar practice at two A.M., the music sifting down through my ceiling providing an alternate and utterly ordinary explanation for my wakefulness. For the first time in my life, I was sleeping through my alarm and arriving late to work.
I JUST got back from a trip to Becca’s ski house. First of all, the trip was a freaking blast. I seriously think I have a six-pack from cracking up so much. I feel like I’ve been really, I don’t know, blah lately, and this trip made me remember that I really, really love my friends. A few highlights: Matt and Andy losing a bet and streaking across the yard in the freezing cold. Staying in the hot tub for hours drinking beer and talking. Getting ridiculously stoned one night and taking all the blankets onto the deck and lying there looking up at the stars while it snowed. After a while I couldn’t even tell if the snow was falling or the stars, it was just this beautiful mess. High stargazing is seriously the best.
Did I mention I broke my wrist? True story. It happened on the last day, otherwise the trip would have been a total bust. I fell coming off a big jump. Everybody else was in the lodge for a hot-cocoa break, and I went off on my own to get in one more run. I had a three-seater to myself on the chairlift. You know how sometimes the world just rips open and you find yourself in a moment that is totally sacred? This was that. The trees high up on the slope were coated in snow and glittering. The snow had that bluish glow, and it was like it was all here for me. I actually started to cry because I just felt so moved. I was still in that energy when I decided to take this jump on the way down. There was that moment when I was hanging in the air, that weightless, almost-flying moment when you start to realize your body is no longer under your control, then splat.
Ski patrol came and brought me down the mountain in one of those gurney thingies. Once my friends figured out where I was, they were all crowding around me in the med hut, and then at the hospital with me later for the X-rays and everything. I didn’t cry. It hurt like hell but I was a total champ. I’m really proud of how tough I was. But then again, the only reason I didn’t let myself cry is because I wanted the medics and my friends to tell me how brave and amazing I was, which is exactly what happened. So does that even count as toughness, or is it actually appalling?
I’m leaving for college next week and my parents said I have to sort through my so-called “junk” before I go. Today I was going through these boxes of old essays with my teachers’ comments and school photos of my friends, and every stupid trophy and medal from swimming and dance. All of a sudden I was like, “Why have I held on to this crap? Why is it so damned precious to me?” I got these heavy-duty black garbage bags from the garage and I started filling them. I got into this rhythm … trance is too dramatic, but I got to this headspace where I couldn’t see any reason to keep anything. The only memento I didn’t throw away was my prom corsage from Drew, and I only kept that because I kept imagining he was in the room with me, and how hurt he’d be just killed me.
As I was throwing everything away I had this vision where I had pared down everything I need in life to a black attaché case, like people use to hand off dirty money in espionage movies. Then, like, what if you got rid of not just things but parts of yourself? Memories you’d been holding on to and random skills and knowledge and all the books you’d ever read that didn’t matter? What if you pared yourself down to one essential part? What would that one grain be? It occurred to me that I have no freaking idea.
I broke up with Drew today. It was awful. He was crying in my bed and begging me to take it back. I know this makes me seem terrible but the begging actually made it easier for me. I kind of lost some respect for him, you know?
Now my mom is all concerned. “It was just so sudden, sweetheart!” Like sudden is this problem. But I did something that had to be done. We’re going to college, for one. But it’s more than that. I am totally settled into Drew, and I can see how it could just go on and on, and something in me is saying, No, no, no. Like, is that really where it’s supposed to lead? But seeing Drew cry and knowing I did that really sucked.
I had made my way through all but the final tape. I was terrified to reach the end, but I couldn’t slow myself down. I called in sick at work. I stayed in my apartment and listened.
Do you ever wish something terrible would happen to you so the world could see how strong you are? People probably think I’m this delicate flower because nothing bad has ever touched me, but I’m not. This is fucked up to say, but I think I would be amazing in the face of a tragedy.
“Humiliation is purification, because it causes the most corrosive, the most painful awareness.” We’re reading Notes from Underground in my World Lit Survey and Dostoyevsky is officially my new favorite writer. Dude gets it.
I really shouldn’t be recording right now, because I’m going home tomorrow for winter break and I need to pack everything I need for home and for the annual Thomas family vacation to a culturally devoid tropical resort, and I haven’t even gotten my suitcase out yet. But this thing from last night has been bugging me and I have to get it down. So I was at this dorm party and this extremely hot junior from the lacrosse team was there. We went back to his room and we’re sitting on the futon in that pre-make-out phase and he’s touching my hair and everything’s great. Then he launches into, “Have you ever wondered what if your green is my purple?” I told him I was really tired and left. Honestly, if I meet one more pseudo-intellectual, actually so stupid boy here, I’m going to lose it. Let me go on record and say that the number of dumbnuts at one of the best schools in the country is mind-blowing.
That was it. The number of dumbnuts and then the barely
audible spooling of blank tape. Right away I took out the tape, swapped in the first one, and started back at the beginning.
Today when I woke up I just felt different. I knew today was the day.
She’s only six years old and I can already see every single way it’s going to be hard.
Fanfuckingtastic.
The more I listened, the more I felt that I was far out in the ocean, swimming down, down, down. I knew I should rush up to the surface for air, but I couldn’t help myself. There was something at the bottom I was after, and I couldn’t stop.
Maybe it hurt him, maybe I hurt him.
I didn’t make a single mistake, not one, and I still completely failed.
Blah blah blah.
True story.
This beautiful mess.
It had grown dark in my apartment, but I didn’t turn on the light. I listened to my sister’s voice in the darkness until I could scarcely remember a time when I’d heard anyone but Alison. I had the feeling then that I was entering my sister. I stretched and filled her, head to toe. I opened my eyes and looked out through hers. Together, in our body that was Alison’s body, we descended through lilac clouds.
THE REAL WHEREVER
THEY ARRIVE AT SUNSET, slipping beneath pastel clouds as the sun slips into the sea. For a moment it seems to Alison that the plane, too, will slip into the sea, but the tarmac rushes beneath them just in time. As the plane brakes down the runway, a ghostly whoosh fills the cabin. The minute it subsides, her parents and the majority of the white passengers unbuckle their seat belts and stand to retrieve their things from the overhead compartments: carry-ons, rackets, straw hats. Her dad edges out another dad in the aisle. A third dad edges out her dad. The pilot comes on the intercom and requests that everyone remain seated, but he is ignored. Heaven forbid their vacations start thirty seconds later. Once the plane door opens and people begin to move, her dad looks back at the black woman he had been seated beside on the flight; “Welcome home,” he says to her, before hurrying along. When they get to baggage claim, the carousel is empty and motionless. Everyone prowls around it, staking out the most strategic position. Ten minutes pass. A guy with a winter coat unzipped to reveal a Hawaiian shirt walks past her muttering, “Unbelievable.” She smiles. Let these dopes wait.
“You know that woman next to me on the plane was a lawyer?” her dad says to her mom on the walk to the arrival gate, once their luggage finally arrives. “She’s from here. She was just in New York on vacation.”
“Huh,” her mom says.
“Imagine that, Dad. They have lawyers here,” Alison says.
The shuttle to the resort is late, too. Alison’s family stands on the curb with two other families, next to a white sign with gold letters that say INDIGO BAY, for quite some time. Everybody grouses and makes small talk. The other families are from the Upper East Side and Bedford Hills. The irony of traveling over a thousand miles to spend the week talking to other people from the New York metropolitan area does not seem to be dawning on anyone. The moms talk to the moms. The dads talk to the dads.
“How old are you?” Alison’s mom asks a girl who must have changed out of her winter clothes in the airport bathroom—she is wearing bike shorts and a cropped T-shirt with a rhinestone heart.
“Twelve,” the girl says wearily.
“She’s on a birthday trip!” her mother says.
“Mom, why are we waiting?” the girl asks.
“I don’t know, sweetie. Daddy booked this vacation.”
When at last the shuttle arrives, the driver begins to load their suitcases.
“Is all of this going to fit in there?” a dad says, looking skeptically into the back of the van.
“Not a chance,” Alison’s dad contributes.
They are wrong, everything fits, and soon they are pulling away from the airport. On the drive to the resort, the small talk continues, but Alison doesn’t hear it. Her face is pressed to the window. She sees scruffy dogs and houses with rebar sticking up out of the roofs. Three goats bite at the dirt outside of a small white building with a shingle out front: CENTRE FOR DENTAL AESTHETICS. Everywhere she sees piles of … stuff. Rubble? Junk? Supplies of some kind. There are houses with porches but no railings. A white concrete staircase ascends out of the scrub, the top step touching only air. As she watches the world pass by, she is filled with disquiet at her inability to parse the things she sees. Are the diminutive chickens pecking at the side of the road malnourished, or are they some breed of chicken she has never seen before, or is this what a chicken is supposed to look like? Do they belong to someone or no one? Is this place in the process of being built or unbuilt or rebuilt or none of these—maybe something is happening here that she lacks the experience to comprehend.
The van trundles past a girl standing in a yard along the road; she wears a purple T-shirt and yellow cotton shorts. When they drive by, she runs into the road and chases after them. Then she plants herself in the middle of the road, puts her hands on her hips, and thrusts out her tongue. The shuttle judders on over the uneven road and the girl disappears into the haze of dust and twilight.
Alison is mortified to be in an air-conditioned van with her family and her fellow resort guests driving past it all. In her Global Justice class, she learned that two billion people, more than a third of the humans on earth, live on less than two dollars a day. (Are the people on this island those people? Are the things out the van window poverty, or just people living their lives? She doesn’t know how she would even begin to know.) Anyway, it’s not like she didn’t know people were poor before—she isn’t a complete idiot. In high school she volunteered at a soup kitchen. But her lasting memory of that experience is not of bearing witness to poverty, or of any good she did; it’s of the men … looking at her, calling her pretty with their ruined mouths. “You’re coming home with me, little girl,” a man in a giant tan parka told her one night. He pointed his index finger at her, then curled it toward himself and laughed madly. She felt afraid, though she was pretty sure he was messing with her, making himself into a caricature to mock her—like, Boo! The acrid smell of male bodies and the simultaneous unease and pleasure she felt in their gaze—this is what she has kept.
So the things she sees out the window do not raise her awareness, or whatever. They just mortify her. An old woman limping down the road. The accusation of that little girl’s sharp pink tongue. That girl is really millions of girls. You cannot permit yourself to forget that. How is she supposed to square millions of these girls with her own life? And how, in turn, to square millions of girls with a trillion trillion stars? She has been born on the one temperate, unhostile planet in the universe, in the richest country on that planet, into a family whose wealth places them at the tippy top of that country. It is a disgusting amount of luck. You could never be forgiven for such good fortune. Sometimes, when she thinks of her teeny-weeny life and how obsessed she is with it, she feels physically sick.
She is also mortified that she will spend the next week darkening her skin on a chaise lounge alongside other oil-slathered tourists, while people whose skin is darker than hers will ever be (and darker than she wants hers to be) bring her beverages and fresh towels. And she is mortified that her parents see nothing wrong with the whole arrangement. No, that isn’t exactly right. They do see something wrong with it, but they think something along the lines of, We’re fortunate, they’re unfortunate, and it’s neither our fault nor theirs because we are all part of something that is beyond any of us, and we just as easily could have been born them and they just as easily could have been born us, but we weren’t, so here we are. Welcome to paradise. Honestly? She doesn’t even want to be here.
* * *
HER FIRST night at Indigo Bay, after her sister is asleep, she walks out onto the balcony to look at the stars. The warm breeze ripples against her skin. Venus burns a cold, clear blue. She unzips her dress. Just because she can. You can stand on a balcony and have an utterly ordinary moment, or you can let
your dress fall to the cool terra-cotta tiles, unhook your bra, and offer yourself up to the night. Possibilities are everywhere, hidden in the fist of each moment, yet most people don’t see them, or they see them but leave them untouched.
She wishes she could see the picture she makes with the white curtains billowing behind her, hair fluttering in the wind, breasts lit by a fingernail of moon. She surveys the resort grounds below her. No one. This pleases her, not because she would be embarrassed to be seen, but because it means this is a secret moment. Hers alone, then, poof! Gone. When she thinks of all the secret moments locked within this instant—of all the people on earth doing things no one will ever know—her heart feels so full it could crack.
She looks at the starry sky, the dark shimmering sea, and tries to savor the beauty of it all, but she can’t get herself to really feel it. The view from the balcony bleeds together with too many other views on other vacations in other paradises. Which island had the pink sand beach? Which one had those zippy orange birds? Where was it you could wade out a quarter mile from shore before the water deepened? Somewhere she saw a sunset like a bloody sacrifice and a woman tossing white petals into the surf. She is eighteen and beauty already seems such a cheap thing. She can behold it and behold it without feeling a thing.
* * *
SHE SLEEPS late, then spends an embarrassing amount of time appraising herself in the mirror in the marble bathroom before making her entrance on the beach. When she finally emerges, her family is already set up, with a row of four chairs with white cushions in the shade of two white umbrellas. These resorts often have an obsession with white. White buildings, white floors, white linens, white uniforms. Like they’re trying to convince you you’ve died and gone to heaven, or like you’ve arrived at some hedonistic sanatorium because you’re afflicted by something and you didn’t even know it but now you will heal.
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