Astonish Me: A novel

by Shipstead, Maggie

  “I’ll be fourteen in October. I’m a little young. When’s your birthday?”

  “March,” he said, neglecting to mention that his next birthday would be his thirteenth.

  “Why did you ask?”

  “I was just wondering. You look young.”

  “I hope I always do,” she said with unexpected vehemence. “I do ballet. I can’t be big or old.”

  Jacob, who wouldn’t have minded being either of those things, said, “It might be hard to avoid getting older.”

  “I know that,” she said, sharply again. She was not as meek as she had first appeared, and he liked her more for it. “It only matters how you look.”

  “That’s not true,” he ventured after a moment, “in the big picture.”

  He was afraid he might have offended her, or that she would think he was an annoying goody-goody, but she made a wry face. “I mean in ballet,” she said. “Which is my big picture.”

  They fell into separate groups of friends—Joan’s smallness and prettiness and docility made her popular—but they chatted by their lockers and greeted each other in the halls. Their houses were not far apart, and sometimes they walked together. The ballet studio was on the way to Jacob’s house, and when he didn’t have baseball, he escorted her there, carrying her dance bag. He never went inside, and, in his imagination, the unassuming little storefront was a cloistered place of rites and mysteries. Sheer white curtains covered its front windows, and through them he caught vague, gauzy glimpses of girls in black leotards.

  “Is that your brother?” Jacob heard one of Joan’s friends ask in the lunchroom.

  “Basically,” Joan replied, and he felt both honored and insulted.

  Her nerviness and discipline appealed to him, and he felt protective of her in a way that seemed adult and masculine and new. As the younger brother of two bossy sisters, he was used to being clucked over by girls, but Joan seemed to trust that he could take care of himself and also, as needed, her. He understood that this was a role worth cultivating. Her mother was single and worked and didn’t understand ballet or Joan. Joan’s dance teacher, Madame Tchishkoff, was of the formidable, exacting variety and offered little beyond unyielding rigor and the motivational power of perpetual, implacable disappointment. Joan’s school friends were the kind of pretty girls who clumped together to assert their collective prettiness. They were companions and accessories, not confidantes.

  When Joan was lonely or distressed, it was Jacob she called, and he would take the phone from his scowling mother and retreat into the pantry, closing the flimsy door over the cord, gazing idly at the cans of soup and boxes of crackers while he listened. On the rare afternoons she didn’t have ballet, she summoned him to watch TV and help her with her homework at her house, which was always too dark and didn’t seem to have enough furniture and so felt like a hideout. Jacob’s mother would not allow a television in the house, nor did she approve of Joan’s lack of supervision or of friendships between boys and girls, and so he told her he was staying late at school.

  Joan trusted him with her darkest secret, which was that she had not only found her mother’s diaphragm but become obsessed with checking its presence in the bathroom drawer against what her mother said she was doing on a given night and the sometimes contradictory information offered by her Filofax.

  “See?” she said to Jacob once, having dragged him into the bathroom and opened a drawer with great portentousness, as though revealing the entrance to an Egyptian tomb. He saw cotton balls and shiny makeup compacts, emery boards, nail scissors with handles in the shape of a bird. “It’s gone.”

  “Okay,” he said, baffled by both her emotions and the workings of a diaphragm.

  “She’s doing it!” Joan told him, near tears. “With that man! His name is Rick! He works in her office.”

  To Jacob, this was not information to be cried over but rather to be filed away for later consideration. Joan’s mother was a thin, brusque woman who wore neat suits and pinned her hair in elaborate updos, the mechanics of which eluded him.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. He closed the drawer. Joan stared desolately at its white-painted face, its little ceramic knob in the shape of a rosebud. “It doesn’t have to bother you.”

  He wished he could think of something less dumb to say, less helpless, but she nodded and folded her arms over her chest. “It feels better just to show you,” she said. “But promise you won’t tell anyone.”

  He realized, with a flush of gratitude, that her standards for wisdom were pathetically low. He patted her shoulder. “I won’t.”

  He liked her delicate, feline face, her long, wispy hair, her narrow hips, her duck-footed walk, the gap between the tops of her thighs when she was in tights, her small, bony hands. If his sister Marion would drive him and not tell their mother, he went to Joan’s recitals, and he liked the way she was willing to stand onstage and be looked at. Eventually, March of sophomore year, when he finally actually turned fourteen, he confessed his age, and by then they were too close for her to make much of a fuss, although he thought he detected a new and faintly patronizing undertone in the way she spoke to him, especially about her dates, which were as frequent as her ballet schedule would allow and, he gathered, relatively chaste. She seemed more interested in the public victory of securing the attention of popular and athletic boys than the private encounters that might follow.

  “I can tell you anything,” she told Jacob often, which, to him, sounded less like a compliment than a command, the way his father said, You’ll make this family proud. Her confessional openness struck him, sometimes, less as a sign of intimacy between them than a smoke screen meant to keep him at a distance. She would chatter on, telling him how Barry Sauerland had offended her at the winter formal by implying that she was not his first-choice date or how Floyd Bishop had called her an icicle. She never seemed to notice that Jacob did not reciprocate her confidences, or not exactly. He confided in her about his father’s distant rigidity and his mother’s suffocating rigidity and about their clockwork marriage that, on rare occasions of malfunction, caused both to go wild with rage. But he did not talk to Joan about girls, even though he took dates to dances and sometimes to the movies, disguising his lack of a driver’s license as a lack of a car.

  Just before graduation, Joan tore a ligament in her foot. She had been slated to dance in a student performance in New York, where she would be seen by the directors of companies there and from San Francisco and Chicago and everywhere, she said, but now she could only lie around her house with her foot in a cast, paralyzed with fear that she would not heal, that she would miss her chance.

  “Let’s go to the beach,” Jacob said on a hot Saturday. Joan was lying on the couch with her cast propped up on a pillow, and he was sitting on the floor beside her, absently digging his fingers into the jungley olive-green pile of the carpet while they watched American Bandstand. “This is getting depressing.”

  Track was over; he was officially going to Georgetown, was officially the valedictorian, could relax for the first time in his life, and his big reward was to be pressed into constant service as Joan’s footman in her mother’s austere, gloomy den. At first, he had been eager to spend long, unsupervised hours indoors with Joan, but she was so morose that it seemed inappropriate to persist in the hope that they would finally make out, if only to dispel the boredom. Instead he made sandwiches for her that she didn’t eat, poured Tab over ice, changed the channel at her bidding, and waited for the unseen filaments of her ligament to knit themselves back together. Even Joan’s mother, off for the weekend with one of Rick’s successors, was having more fun.

  “I can’t go to the beach,” she snapped, pointing at her cast. “Remember?”

  “You don’t have to go in the water. Let’s just get out of here. My mom will let me take the car. She’s so happy I’m leaving soon.”

  “I’ll get sand in my cast.”

  “We’ll put a bag over it.” An idea struck him. “I’ll carry
you.”

  She looked skeptical.

  “I’ll put you down on a towel, and you can just lie there. It’ll be almost as good as lying on the couch all day. You’ll love it.”

  “You’re not that strong.”

  “You don’t weigh anything.” He was not entirely certain he could carry her all the way from the car to the beach, but he was willing to try. Her injury made her more approachable, somehow. Not that he was afraid of her. He was just aware of her boundaries, of the prickly force field around her. Standing over her, though, while she lay hobbled and clutching her plastic cup of soda, he decided to be daring. “Stand up,” he said.

  His authoritative tone seemed to surprise her. She set her drink on the carpet, swung her legs around, and, taking his outstretched hands, stood unevenly on her bare foot and her cast. He put one arm under her knees and one around her back, and then he straightened up, cradling her. The easy way she lay in his arms reminded him that she was no stranger to being carried. Jacob had met her pas de deux partner, the only boy at her studio, Gregory, son of Russian immigrant scientists, a sallow, pimply creature who was educated by private tutors to avoid the brutalizing influence of high school. Gregory, for all his apparent wimpiness, could lift Joan over his head with ease. Jacob had wondered what it would be like to lift her, to grasp her by her thighs or her waist and move her body through space as he pleased. She looked at him. Their faces were very close. “Okay, fine,” she said. “Let’s go to the beach.”

  Jacob’s mother handed over the keys to her Rambler wagon with minimal admonitions. The front seat stretched out long between him and Joan, its scratchy cream upholstery radiating early summer warmth. Joan sprawled in the sun: wiry legs poking out of short shorts, bikini ties in a tantalizing bow at her nape, her face turned to her open window. The Rambler, with its big windows and long bench seats and vast carpeted launchpad of a cargo space in back, did not seem, as it usually did, like a blocky symbol of maternity but was transformed into a terrarium of sexual possibility. For weeks, Jacob had been gearing up to try something with Joan. Not because he didn’t care about their friendship but because he felt like his participation in that friendship, as it was, had become disingenuous. He wasn’t a saint or a child. He wasn’t the palace eunuch. He wasn’t her cousin, as he knew she had told one of her boyfriends. She might reject him—probably would reject him—but he needed to come clean. High school was, for all intents and purposes, over, and he needed to slough off its context. He wasn’t eager to be separated from Joan, but he was curious what would be in store for him at Georgetown, who he would be there.

  They turned off the main road and bounced along a sandy lane to their usual spot, some way down the shore from the popular swimming beach. Before they’d left, Joan had rallied enough to stump around the kitchen filling a thermos with fruit punch and her mother’s vodka, and after he parked, Jacob took the towels and the ice chest and crossed the low, sharp-grassed dunes. He spread the towels out on dry sand, and then he went back to get Joan. She was standing on her good foot, leaning against the Rambler.

  “I think it would make the most sense for me to ride piggyback,” she announced when he drew near. “For long-distance transport.”

  He considered. He had already held her in his arms, and having her cling to his back sounded like a new and interesting variation. “Okay,” he said. “You’re the boss.” He turned around and crouched down. Nimbly for someone in a cast, she hopped aboard. As he started across the sand, he kept his eyes on the terrain in front of him, but his nerves were busily mapping her body. His hands were wrapped around the backs of her thighs. He could feel her ropy muscles under his fingers and a film of sweat. The rough plaster of her cast occasionally scraped the outside of his left calf. Her arms were around his neck, her sharp chin on his shoulder, the soft points of her small breasts against his back. The spot where the crotch of her shorts pressed against his waist was almost too potent to think about. His glasses slid down his nose, and he kept having to toss his head like a horse to keep them from sliding off. They didn’t speak until he stooped to let her dismount onto the blue-and-white-striped towel.

  “Such service,” she said, sitting and smiling up at him uncertainly. She felt the pull, too. He knew she did.

  He sat. She looked away, out at the surf, which was breaking sluggishly, the waves plumping up in gelatinous heaps before collapsing into exhausted white frills. He was alive with fear and need. Then she said, as though everything were normal, “The worst part about being injured is how smug my mom is about the whole thing.”

  He closed his eyes against the glare of the sun. “Yeah?”

  Joan nodded. “The other day she circled an ad for a typing course and left it on my pillow. I wanted to hit her.”

  “You can’t do that.” He dug in the ice chest and busied himself pouring out cups of vodka punch.

  “Hit her?”

  “Type.”

  She smiled ruefully. “With my mom, it’s like she’s missed the whole point of my entire life. I work myself to death at something that’s really actually important, and all she wants is for me to be a secretary. It’s not like I know if ballet’s going to work out, but I have to believe or else there’s no point.”

  “At least,” Jacob said, trying to focus on the problem at hand, to be, in spite of everything, a good friend, “you know that what you want was your idea in the first place. My parents brainwashed me into the fine citizen I am today.”

  “What do you mean? You don’t want to go to Georgetown?”

  “No, I do. But I’m not sure I wanted to be skipped ahead and put in extra classes and all that. I don’t know. It’s done. I get to leave home early, so I should be grateful.”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” Joan said, her mouth red from the punch, “how you’re supposed to know if you’re really feeling what you think you’re feeling. Like how do we know everybody sees colors the same way, you know? Do we all feel ‘happy’ the same way?”

  Jacob shrugged.

  “In ballet,” she went on, “when something’s really beautiful, I feel a lot, but not happy or sad, really. Just a feeling. With goose bumps. I like it.” After a moment, she sighed and rolled onto her stomach, resting her forehead on her arms. “If I can’t dance, I know I won’t die, but it feels like I will.”

  He rolled over onto his stomach, too. “It’ll work out.”

  She turned her head so they were looking at each other. “You’re the only person who takes care of me. You think I don’t notice, but I do.” Her punch-stained mouth was as inviting as red velvet.

  Later he would not believe that he had simply scooted across his towel and put his mouth on her red one, lunged at her, really. The desire was so pure it set his teeth on edge. He pushed her over onto her back with an insistence he didn’t know he was capable of. Her arms went up around his neck; her hands clasped the back of his head; he sprawled across her. Some seconds passed before he became aware that her hands had dropped to his chest and were pushing at him. He lifted his face slowly, unwillingly.

  She looked stricken, panicked. “I can’t,” she said.

  His frustration produced an abrupt and furious certainty that he had been cruelly wronged. “What do you mean you can’t?” he demanded. “Of course you can.”

  She shook her head, opened her mouth, but said nothing.

  He couldn’t stop himself from saying, “You’re a selfish tease, and I’m sick of it.”

  She sat up. Her small face was hard, knowing. “Oh, I see. You’re not really my friend. You were just hoping to get some all this time. Didn’t you have anything better to do? Isn’t there someone else you could follow around? You’re such a kid.”

  “No one cares about you like I do,” he said. The core of his anger had gone cool, and he felt an appalling flicker of the remorse that would follow. “I’m the one who takes care of you. You said so yourself. But what does that get me? Nothing.”

  “What does that get you?” she repeated. “W
hat do you think it should get you, Jacob?” She flopped flat onto her back, limp, legs apart. “Here you go. Here’s the grand prize. Buffet’s open. Help yourself. Go ahead.”

  He looked down at her and couldn’t help but consider kissing her again. Instead, he wrapped his arms over his head and pulled his knees to his chest. In the past, when he had imagined kissing her, his worst-case scenario—also his most likely scenario—had ended with humiliation. He would plant an exploratory kiss; she would balk, embarrassed; he would be humiliated. He had not anticipated the lunge, the greedy engine driving him through the kiss toward more and more. “What’s wrong with me?” She didn’t say anything. He looked at her. “Really. What’s wrong with me? You go out with other guys. I know you like me more than them, but you let them kiss you.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with you,” she said. “Usually.” Whatever debt might have been between them had been erased, or reversed, by the word tease. She owed him no explanation for why she didn’t love him the way he wanted her to. “Let’s just forget about this. Let’s go home.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I know,” she said. “Let’s forget about it.” But when he extended his hand to help her up, she waved him off.

  “You’ll get sand in your cast.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to go to the beach,” she said and set off over the dunes.

  They saw each other that summer but not often. Jacob was scrupulously respectful. Joan made a show of joking about all the girls he would get in college. Georgetown had gone coed the previous year. There was malice to the way she showered him with affectionate mockery, but he endured it, thinking about how he would leave in August and get some perspective. That would be a relief. Their friendship was no longer a thing in itself. They were warily circling a different thing, something that might exist or might not.

  Then he left and heard nothing from her, and for a time he thought their relationship, whatever it was, might have run its course. He missed her, but he also felt a self-congratulatory satisfaction in having outgrown her. He learned to play racquetball. He drank beer. He decided on psychology, much to the disappointment of his mother, who had been pushing for medicine. He dated a girl named Sarah and lost his virginity to her. Everything was fine, and then, late one night, drunk, he wrote his first letter to Joan.