Heather gathers her hair into a heap and then lets it go, saying, “You know, who the hell knows? I mean, we saw each other a couple of times during the summer. Then, that night I didn’t go with you and Celia to dinner before leaving for college, I almost let him—Well, I don’t know. I didn’t see him after that.” Heather swallows air like a shepherd nosing out a car window, gulping. “Vaughn. Vaughn. It’s weird. In my head he is still vawn, even though I know he’s not.”
Vaughn had worn a shiny Celtics jacket the first time Celia had brought him to a party and pronounced his name with a Chelsea or Southie accent so it sounded like vawn. Big-shouldered and muscled enough so the senior boys hadn’t made fun of him, he’d dropped his accent the next time, becoming Von. Celia had bought him a button-down shirt from Brooks Brothers to wear open and baggy over a T-shirt, but the sizing was off, so it looked lent instead of owned, as if he’d found it in a cousin’s closet.
“But so, you never told Celia? Or, I mean, she never found out?” Jenna asks. She pulls Heather down onto the brick-rimmed walkway and wraps her jacket tightly around her, thinking about the townie Vaughn—his beer runs, his undone sneaker laces, the way he touched Heather on the ass when Celia had her head turned toward the keg. At that first party, Heather had gone off with Vaughn, supposedly to buy more Rolling Rock, but they’d come back an hour later with no beer.
In French class the next afternoon Heather had mouthed her confession to Jenna. When Jenna shrugged her shoulders and held up her hands, miming she didn’t understand what Heather was trying to say, Heather had taken an empty page of her notebook and written in block letters “I made out with Vaughn,” then turned the paper so it faced outward, bold like an exit sign.
Right when Jenna would have reacted, she was called on to read aloud from Baudelaire’s “La Mort des Amants,” so all the lines came out surprised instead of lusty or sad, as the poem intended. She had memorized it and liked the words; Jenna had copied the poem with a fountain pen into the front of her journal alongside a recipe she’d clipped from a gardening magazine. She left her mother’s Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines filled with window-shaped holes and bits of paper that fluttered aimless to the ground. One canning and preserving magazine Jenna had taken in its entirety and brought to school to show Heather, who feigned interest outside the girls’ gym before tennis.
“How come you like food so much?” Heather asked while Jenna poked her fingers through the squares of the racket strings.
“How come you’re fooling around with your friend’s boyfriend?” Jenna shot back, thinking that would be the end of the questions and she could go to the bathroom to page through the quince jams and jellies in the quiet stall.
“She’s your friend, too,” Heather said, then rolled her eyes at herself. “I’m not sure, really. Maybe I don’t think people belong to people. Do you?”
“You mean like marriage?”
“I mean,” Heather said, “our bodies are just these things that we float around in. It’s not like they belong to anyone. It’s like I’m just borrowing Vaughn—what can I say?”
Heather rubbed the sole of her tennis shoe against the brick wall, tracing a rectangle, and then tried not to cry. Sometimes Jenna couldn’t tell if Heather was acting for an unseen film crew or if she really was upset. Jenna put her arm across Heather’s shoulder, thinking at the very least she’d have a walk-on role in the scene Heather had made.
“Are you okay?” Jenna asked.
Heather didn’t say anything, and she didn’t have a long, sobbing speech the way she’d had at Flynn’s party sophomore year, when she’d actually attracted a crowd. She took the magazine from Jenna’s hand and looked at a couple of pages before folding a corner down and saying, “This looks good. You should make this.”
From the bleachers Jenna watched Heather play doubles with two other varsity teammates. She looked down at the recipe her friend had marked. Persimmon Eggplant Relish called for only forty minutes in the kitchen, but Jenna couldn’t decide whether it sounded unusual or just disgusting. On the next page was a recipe for Peach Preserves. Jenna spoke the name out loud with an accent, as if she was saying “Jesus Saves,” and told Heather when she came off the court sweating.
“Peach preserves!” Heather said to anyone who came by. Then, when Jenna turned to face her, Heather put her hand to Jenna’s forehead, pushing her away, pretending to heal her. “Peach preserves!”
Of course it turned out that Vaughn was tonguing half the girls in Boston, not to mention Chelsea, so Celia broke up with him, still unknowing of his involvement with Heather. Celia was going to Stanford anyway, so Jenna and Heather knew they wouldn’t see much of her after the summer. Jenna went back and forth, wondering if the physical distance made it okay that Heather had never confessed to what she’d done, or if Heather had somehow saved Celia’s feelings by never letting her know that Celia was Vaughn’s second choice.
At graduation, Celia tossed her long, red hair over one shoulder, undid the clasp on the chain Vaughn had given her, and let it slip into his open hand before taking her place in the horseshoe of chairs by the podium. After the headmaster called Heather’s name and she returned to her seat with her rolled up diploma, Vaughn had come over, crouched next to her, and slipped a thin bag of pot into the tied scroll before slinking off to his car.
In Jenna’s yearbook, Heather had written in French one of the stanzas from the poem they’d studied in class, the one about two spirits mirroring each other. Jenna had pictured speaking to Heather every week once she was up in New Hampshire, but they’d spoken only once since college had started, and that was when Jenna was home already for the long weekend.
“I was going to tell Celia,” Heather says. “But then I figured it didn’t really matter. I mean, it’s all in the past, right?”
Jenna remembers something. “How come you never called me back when I left my number at school?” Sitting on the ground, both girls are flicking pebbles onto the walkway. Heather touches the flaking edges of a maple leaf, then puts it in her hair.
Letting out one last puff of heavy smoke, she says, “Didn’t I? Maybe I thought I did.” And then, “I have to lie down.”
A van pulling rowing sculls stops near where the girls are sitting, and Jenna half-considers asking for a ride back to Heather’s house. Heather’s parents live in one of the university houses past the square, at least a mile away. Heather lies on her back, her legs splayed and loose; her hair covers part of her face. Jenna reaches over to push it away and says, “Heather, if I ever have a boyfriend, don’t borrow him, okay?”
But Heather doesn’t answer, not even when Jenna shakes her, kneeling by her face as if she’s about to do mouth-to-mouth.
“Hey, Juliet, cut the crap,” Jenna says, trying not to sound worried.
Just before Jenna lowers her cheek to check if Heather’s breathing, Heather grabs the back of Jenna’s head and pushes her down so the girls are kissing.
Jenna pulls away and stands up, looking down at Heather as if she’s a cutout cookie, all limbs outstretched.
“I am so much more Ophelia than Juliet,” Heather says, and then, “Help me up, Jen.”
“Sure. Of course,” Jenna says and sounds as if she’s trying gracefully to pass a casserole dish down the table instead of taking care of Heather, whose whole body seems to bend and then right itself with the wind. They begin to walk toward the square, heading to Heather’s house.
“I think I’m too high,” Heather says, and it comes out soft, as if she’s given up on something.
“Definitely,” Jenna says.
“Talk to me so I don’t pass out. Please, Jenny, please,” Heather says, but since she’s slurring, the pleases sound like peas, peas.
Jenna talks fast, trying to hold Heather’s attention. “Well, back to what I was saying. Personally, I wouldn’t want you to—you know—take my boyfriend for a test run while I was driving him—or whatever crappy analogy you want to make. You’re like my best friend,
but still. I just think people should be nicer, that’s all. And not think about themselves so much, you know?”
“All you think about is yourself.” Heather laughs, stepping off the sidewalk into the jetsam-littered street. “And what your parents think. You don’t know how the rest of the world works.”
“That’s so not true,” Jenna says and steers them both away from a group of rowers, still outfitted in their crew shirts. But she knows it is true, that she cares more about what her parents think of her life than about what she does, that the adult world still hovers at arm’s length. When will she know how mortgages work, or term insurance, use phrases like fiscal year or tax burden, or—forget those—just the word boyfriend? An Andean band plays on the corner near the newsstand, and outside Au Bon Pain people sit chewing on late-dinner sandwiches, watching a guy throw fire up into the air from his mouth, only to have it explode and instantly disappear.
“Why can’t you just do what you want? Go open a restaurant, go to Paris, go bake bread,” Heather says and points to the clouds in the fall sky. “They’re moving so fast, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, they are.” Jenna hefts Heather’s weight onto her side, grabbing under her arm to support her.
In the middle of the flute music and swaying fire watchers, Heather turns to Jenna and pokes her cheek, feeling the give of the skin before saying, “Who am I to talk, really, right?”
Jenna looks at Heather and wants to tell her how beautiful she looks with her unwashed hair and ruddy cheeks, how fluid her friend’s movements are when she’s inebriated. Jenna says, “You have the right to your opinion, O drugged one.”
Heather tilts inward so her forehead and Jenna’s temple touch. Gauzy, the long-skirted girls nearby twirl to the sidewalk guitarist who plays a too-slow cover of a Blind Faith song. Like moths, they flit and bend, unaware of Heather and Jenna standing in their midst.
“Jenna, do you know what I am? Do you know?”
“Let me guess,” Jenna says, caught between amusement and annoyance. “You’re very very very very high?” She thinks of other words she could put in: wild, funny, extreme, lovely. Then Jenna thinks the word ruined, but can’t think why.
“Yup,” Heather says, and when the song ends and there’s a moment of quiet on the street, she adds, “And I am also a girl who got—who—Did you know my stepbrother raped me?”
Jenna chases Heather down the street through the red tint of taillights on the fallen maple leaves and follows her into the house entrance of the dorm where Heather’s parents are the university-assigned parents. Upstairs, there’s no light coming from the parents’ room, and Jenna thinks about who she could call to help while Heather strips herself of her jacket and shoes and drinks whiskey from the cut-glass decanter in her stepfather’s study.
“Heather, what can I do?” Jenna asks and tries to get the bottle away.
“You can just fuck off,” Heather says. “Or drink.”
Jenna swigs some just to hold Heather off from having more. Already, Heather is about to fall over, and when she does, she sits cross-legged on the kilim rug and starts to undress herself. Jenna thinks how orderly Heather is with her clothing for someone who is so wasted. Each article is folded and piled up until, naked, Heather stands up and goes into the crawl space under the oak desk where the housemaster is meant to sit while signing university papers or disciplining undergrads.
Jenna knows now she has to get Heather’s thin and shrill-voiced mother from bed, where she lies, eyes covered with a sleep mask like the ones they issue on overnight flights. She tries to form in her head the words she’ll use before saying them out loud. Jenna catches herself in the hallway mirror and blushes even though she’s alone, embarrassed that she cares about Heather’s mother assuming that they both smoked pot, that maybe Jenna is responsible for her too-high daughter. The parents’ room is curtained gray, the mother’s body undistinguishable under the feather duvet. Jenna touches the side of the bed, and when the mother’s eyes are open, she spills everything out and leads her downstairs to where Heather can’t stop rocking, balled up and still under the desk.
When Heather’s mother can’t get her to come out, she manages somehow to get in there with Heather and holds her, saying, “I know, I know. Oh, Heather, honey, I know.” Heather’s mother is softer than Jenna has ever seen her, yellow-nightgowned and big-chested, like a woman on a syrup bottle.
Later, Heather’s mother explains that the nineteen-year-old stepbrother accompanied Heather on the movie shoots long ago, that Heather hadn’t remembered what happened until her first gynecological exam at seventeen. In the shock lights of the exam room, the doctor suggested that Heather had been sexually active at least once despite Heather’s shaking head and handed out several pamphlets detailing date rape and incest while Heather, detached somehow from her blue-gowned body, watched the scene as if she was the offstage actor waiting for her cue—only she kept thinking, What comes next? Jenna listens and can’t believe she hadn’t known about this, wonders how Heather kept it all so quiet, even when Mandy Jenkins had been assaulted sophomore year and everyone at school knew, except that had been by a stranger.
Jenna stands watching Heather and her mother until she is motioned upstairs, leaving them together in the darkened room. Jenna is struck by the idea of family betraying itself, of those boundaries being crossed. In the hallway, she picks up Heather’s coat and hangs it on the rack near the kitchen. Since the kitchen serves the entire dorm, it’s huge, industrial. The enlarged ladles and colanders lure Jenna inside, where she lets her fingertips graze the stove knobs, the stainless-steel countertops, and a wooden spoon the length of a yardstick, which she turns like a baton. In the high-ceilinged room, with its black-and-white marble floor, Jenna feels tiny, shrunken under the hanging metal bowls, stacked platters, and enlarged appliances. But then, when she sees the giant mixer in the corner—its bowl large enough to climb into—she thinks about how well it does its job. Jenna understands its functions, how to work it, what the levers do, and to let the yeasty dough rest after it has been turned with the mixing hook. She feels good about that, as if she has a talent nobody else knows. She imagines loaves rising, bulking in the night kitchen, readying.
Upstairs in bed, Jenna tries to sleep, first under the covers and then lying on top, wondering if Heather had something happen to her in this very room on this very mattress, and if she did, what they could do with the mattress and frame just to purge the room. They could burn it or sling it in a Dumpster somewhere so no one would touch the remnants.
As the shouts from party revelers passing under the windows drift upward, Jenna thinks of Vaughn, of red-haired Celia and her 780 math SATs, of friends she will never see again who clutter her school-themed dreams. Jenna considers whether she could picture sharing a man with someone and decides she might be able to—if that someone were really close, like Heather. Then the guy would sort of serve his purpose but not get in the way. Even though she can’t imagine the faces, she thinks of three people holding hands, lying head to stomach on spring grass, the tickle and itch of insects. But just as the image begins to appeal, and Jenna’s thinking how close everyone could be, it dawns on her that someone would have to break away and go cook the dinner, and who would decide?
From downstairs, Jenna can hear noises echoing in the kitchen—Heather’s mother still pawing at her daughter’s hair, both of them sobbing. Remembering Baudelaire’s poem from French class, she wonders about the lovers he wrote about, who also cry out, and she can’t remember the exact context—if the tears are due to farewells or falsities. Then Jenna thinks maybe that’s what this sobbing is about also, figuring what is past and what is now, stoned solid in the present.
Jenna remembers the way Heather used to exaggerate kisses on the back of her hand when they were kids, and then Heather’s lips tonight, outside, how they’d felt like pouchy fruit, a plum or an overripe nectarine. The pillow Jenna lies on smells like honey or vanilla, traces from the shampoo in the bathroom. M
aybe it’s the scent or maybe it’s the beer Jenna had earlier, or the thought of a smaller Heather being touched and scarred, but she heads to the bathroom to be sick.
While she throws up, she conjugates French verbs to distract herself from the unease of sitting on someone else’s tiled floor and heaving food bits and frothy beer. Aller, attendre, couper; then she moves to cooking verbs: assaisonner—to season, chauffer—to heat, bouillir—to boil, consommer—to consume. Then she remembers how some verbs have two meanings. When she’s back in bed, she conjugates voler, reminding herself to explain to Heather in English what she has already learned at college; voler is to steal, it is to fly.
Residency
Gabrielle receives Andrea’s phone call at the apartment house after a day spent looking at the vaginas of twenty-three Ecuadorian women. The phone’s double rings are louder and longer than rings back in the States, and when she picks up, Gabrielle knows right away it has to be long distance since there’s a delay and an echo. She says hello after setting her bag down and slips off her shoes. Padding in her socks to the tiny refrigerator that opens from the top like a camp trunk, she pulls out a Thirsty Boy!—the local equivalent to an orange Crush—and uses her hospital scrub top like a glove to twist off the cap.
With the first sip, she and Andrea are past their overlapping hellos. Andrea’s voice is the same as in fifth grade—deep, raspy as if she’s been smoking, jagged from a cry. Since Andrea is quiet or the delay is longer on Gabrielle’s side, Gabrielle goes on with a description of her flight to Quito from Bogotá. There were miniature tins of smoked fish that she’d picked at with a spear-tipped toothpick, and the swell of mountains she’d seen when she woke up thirsty and hot a half hour before landing, the disorganized sway of customs lines. She’d taken her duffel to the guesthouse and slept again until dinner that first night. Strings of plastic limes and bright beads hung up around the doorway. When Gabrielle had gone out that first night by herself, she’d walked through them thinking that if they’d been lit from inside, the place would have the feel of a themed frat party.
The Girls' Almanac Page 5