The Girls' Almanac

by Emily Franklin

  Gabrielle unloaded her bags from the car, putting her hiking pack on but not fastening the waist belt, and slipped her daypack on backward so it rested against her chest. Andrea held Gabrielle’s plane tickets, and as she handed them over she said, “I hope you have fun in Quit-o.”

  “Actually, it’s pronounced key-toe,” Gabrielle said and then wished she could suck it back.

  Andrea nodded and chewed at her top lip. “Either way,” she said, and as if that constituted a good-bye, she tried to hug Gabrielle around the waist but couldn’t arm the girth of bags, so she leaned in and kissed her cheek near the ear.

  Leaning on the bus window on the way to her Friday dinner at Dr. Sandoval’s, Gabrielle would think of Andrea, who’d never left the South, and of her father, who loved to travel, to forget his city of origin and live like a local for weeks at a time. As the bus slowed at the newsstand, Gabrielle would get out, buy a couple caramel pops wrapped in pink cellophane, and walk the quarter mile out to the Sandovals.

  Dr. Sandoval was married with two children. Holding Martina, the infant, Gabrielle would listen to the boats docking, their guttural horns seeping into the night. In the kitchen, Dr. Sandoval and her husband roasted vegetables and potted them into water and ketchup. The resulting soup, which the entire family ate, was so dark it looked menstrual. Gabrielle watched how she was supposed to drop popcorn kernels in her bowl and push them into the liquid until they saturated and nearly sank.

  The husband played guitar while Dr. Sandoval cleared the table. Martina was put to sleep in a bassinet, and the toddler, Enton, spun himself dizzy in the living room holding a half-sucked lolly that Gabrielle had given him.

  The evenings at the Sandovals made her flushed and lonely. Gabrielle would get a ride home on Mr. Sandoval’s scooter. With no helmet, her hair lashed at her face, and she tried to hold it out of her eyes while still clutching Mr. Sandoval’s waist. He wore thin, cream-colored shirts with pockets on the hips and curled stitching on the lapels. Through the cloth, even in the dark, Gabrielle could see his chest hair. His arms were hairy, too, and he sometimes would tell her in Spanish to grip tighter on the sandy stretches of road. Once, Gabrielle had thought about kissing him as he helped her off the bike and steadied her feet by palming low on her back, but she hadn’t.

  Back at the apartment complex, she walked the six flights of stairs and hoped that somehow she might have a late-night visitor: maybe her father had come down to surprise her, or a medical school friend might have left a message for her, asking for a place to stay before a trip to the Galápagos, or an old boyfriend could have resurfaced, wanting a shower and simple accommodations until he had to move on.

  Weekends, Gabrielle worked Saturday mornings, five until noon, then again on Sunday nights. During her break, she drank milky coffee poured from the street vendors’ galvanized tubs and sat on the beach until the sand flies pecked at her thighs and she went toward the market to buy supper. One of the nurses had given her a recipe for fried squid with a sour cherry sauce, and Gabrielle made that quite a lot, since it tasted good warm or cold. The food at the hospital, even what the patients brought for her, was mainly meat, and she ate it while writing notes, trying not to place the animal that the flesh might have belonged to.

  Animal lungs, tripe, and esophagi were all customary in stews. Guinea pigs were a popular food source, and when offered some, Gabrielle could only think of Miss Penny, Andrea’s copper-furred pet, which grew too fat to fit on its running wheel and eventually suffocated itself.

  As girls they’d found the unmoving mound in the cage, and Andrea had reached in and picked it up. Tiny black beads fell from her hand as she moved it to her desktop.

  “Gross,” Andrea had said to Gabrielle. “Miss Penny poops even when she’s dead.”

  Gabrielle had put a finger near the rodent’s mouth, trying to feel for a pulse or breath, the way she’d learned in Water Safety class at the Y that fifth-grade summer, but all she could feel was fur.

  “We should get rid of it,” she’d said to Andrea. Andrea had nodded, and they’d carried the pet to the toilet but soon realized it was too large to flush. Gabrielle had wanted to call a zoo or pet store to see if they could feed Miss Penny to some deserving animal, but Andrea wrapped the guinea pig in a wad of paper towels and threw the ball of it into the Dumpster behind Stetson’s Drug Emporium, where they went afterward for slushies that turned their mouths blue.

  Later, Andrea had moved on to a ferret, which lost itself a couple of weeks into its stay, and then Petunia, a ceramic pig that sat on her bedside table, holding first loose change and then, when Andrea had started dating some guy from San Antonio, cubes of dark, sticky hash. Gabrielle had found the stash in high school, and though she hadn’t said anything to Andrea, they both knew. Junior year was almost over then, and Gabrielle took SAT-prep classes at her father’s urging, then was accepted early decision to Yale. She wrote to Andrea from New Haven, long letters describing her classes and how she raised her dorm bed on concrete blocks so that underneath was a tapestry-curtained fort. Only once Gabrielle got a postcard back that Andrea had sent from Twitty City, where she’d gone with some girlfriends after seeing Dollywood. Andrea had written “New Haven” as “New Heaven,” but the card had reached Gabrielle just the same. Gabrielle laughed about Andrea’s misspelling to herself but felt too embarrassed about it to show it to her friends.

  Since her father and his wife had moved to Baltimore, Gabrielle had had no reason to go to Texas, but she’d called information and found Andrea listed as Rebecca-Anne Summers; the surname was her mother’s. Andrea told her that she was tired of always spelling Arginello, that Summers sounded cheerful. When they’d spoken, Andrea had offered to pick Gabrielle up at the airport terminal and took her to Little Lila’s, the twenty-four-hour diner out on the motorway. Spooning rice pudding and cheese grits, Gabrielle told Andrea about postcollege life, about the autopsy she’d done as part of her pathology rotation. Andrea picked at her Belgian waffles, splitting the strawberries into thirds while Gabrielle talked about how heavy the man’s brain had been, how dark the lungs, how the person responsible for sewing up the bodies afterward had sat off to the side doing a crossword. As she and Andrea finished breakfast, Gabrielle ate in silence, remembering how, from under her eye protection and mask, she grew woozy and sweat-lined while trying to help the necrologist think of a four-letter word for “shuttle site.” She’d finally managed to say, “Loom,” before passing out.

  “Just so you know, I talked to your dad,” Andrea explains, exhaling something into the phone. “It was bizarre to hear his voice after so long. I asked when would be the best time to call. I’m not sure he knew who I was.”

  “Maybe he’s just tired,” Gabrielle says. She wipes a rim of sweat from her chin, where the receiver has pressed for so long there’s a mark.

  “Could be,” Andrea agrees.

  “He has prostate cancer.”

  “Oh,” Andrea says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s the early stages, anyway”—Gabrielle passes it off—“so, he’ll be fine.”

  From the balcony Gabrielle listens to the slow night waves fall to the sand and seabirds rasp, scouring the jetty rocks for rotting crab or mussel remains. She’d tried it herself one night, chucking a bloated snail coil up into the air and seeing if it cracked open when it landed on a slab by the waterline.

  “Gabby?” Andrea says. She hasn’t used the nickname in years, since grade school, when they’d been Gabandrea, one name, one word for both.

  “Yeah,” Gabrielle says.

  “I need money for an abortion.”

  Cradling the phone between shoulder and cheek, Gabrielle puts her soda bottle on the cement deck and crouches down, looking at the ocean through the slats of the guardrail. She asks the expected questions: how far along, how much it will cost.

  Pulling her gestational wheel from her pocket, Gabrielle calculates a due date, keeps it silent while she tries to imagine Andrea r
eady to deliver, wide as a bell, in April. She remembers the way they had shoved bolster cushions in their T-shirts once and turned sideways to look in the mirror, pretend pregnant, before yanking the pillow babies out and marveling at their empty, stretched-out shirts.

  “It’s really hot here,” Andrea says. “And I feel pretty sick.”

  “It’s hot here, too,” Gabrielle says.

  She could mention alternatives, or tricks for fighting the nausea, describe the dilation and curettage Andrea will have in ten days’ time, but she doesn’t. She thinks of their fifth-grade summer, how they’d held hands underwater and fingered the pool drain, pressing into the grate so each palm showed the indents and bulges. Towel-dried, they’d turned the lawn chairs on their sides, slinking behind them, shut off and invisible to Andrea’s mother, Carin, who drank rum and Coke inside.

  “I bumped into Sheldon Marks,” Andrea says while she’s waiting for Gabrielle to say something, to decide.

  “Where?”

  “At the Big Burger Barn.” Andrea laughs. “He’s married now. Looks like he did in eighth grade, though, when you went out with him—you know, same hair, same tilty mouth. Wasn’t he the first boy you kissed?”

  In her mind, Gabrielle can see the class photo from then, the argyle sweaters and dark denim, the braced teeth and thin arms as everyone faced forward and smiled until the flash went, then let their faces go lax. Inevitably, one of the boys would fake-fart, and Jill Weston would close her eyes the way she did each year, even in her prom portrait, and Andrea would give Gabrielle a kick.

  “Yeah, he was. Then again before we moved.” Gabrielle suddenly feels ancient, as if time has sped up to where she can’t keep anything still. “Do you want me to come back?” she asks. She takes off her socks and rubs at the spots above her little toes where blisters are beginning.

  “No—you don’t have to do that,” Andrea says. Gabrielle wishes she’d demanded it, needed her, wanted her there to hold her hand and explain everything as it happened. But Andrea just wants get past it all and move on.

  In the last photograph Gabrielle has of them together, Andrea is in her old driveway. Hair clipped at the nape of her neck, Andrea uses her hand as a visor. It’s difficult to tell if she is leaving or being left, if it is a temporary state or a permanent removal.

  Textbook-style, Gabrielle can draw the cell cluster splitting inside Andrea, can give a list of symptoms and warn of the milk-cold stirrups. It will be done. Gabrielle will wire the money from the office downtown, and Andrea will call once to say that everything is fine. In the exam-room quiet on the phone, Gabrielle will listen for clues in Andrea’s story, wonder about her wounds and how they clamp themselves quiet, twist the mouths of both of them until they are empty and closed.

  Who’s Got the Monkey?

  At Amanda Lyons’s Halloween party, Amanda’s not even there, rather she is holed up in the downstairs coat closet, kissing Jimmy Dearborn between the heavy navy peacoat and the embarrassingly red parka Gabrielle has just shoved in there. The coat, a last-minute purchase by Gabrielle’s father, Randall, has convinced Gabrielle that there is no way she could move this far north; even with its wool lining, she is freezing, her long fingers gray and sore. Gabrielle’s cousin Jenna has—at her mother’s insistence—invited her out-of-town cousin to this party while Randall dines at L’Escargot, a restaurant downtown where the Boston Medical Group hopes to lure him with a job offer and—presumably—snails.

  “Come on.” Jenna, already halfway up the stairway, tilts herself over the banister and calls to Gabrielle, who has recoiled from the closet and her glaringly new winter apparel. Tonight is Jenna’s third boy-girl party, Gabrielle’s second, and neither girl knows what to expect; they, as of yet, have no party routine. Jenna wears a loose-knit purple cotton sweater—it’s a V-neck, but she has turned it around so that the v dips down her back; her hair—the color of a fawn—is parted far to one side, bobbed at the nape. Upon finding out that her mainly unseen cousin would accompany her, Jenna tried to dress Gabrielle.

  “You look too southern,” Jenna said in her bedroom, her mouth rumpled.

  Gabrielle stood side by side with Jenna, staring at her southern reflection and asked why, how. Jenna sighed, her voice softer, wistful. “I’m not sure what it is, really. Just something different.”

  Called by her mother to demonstrate her piano playing for Randall, Jenna had left Gabrielle to change clothes. Gabrielle chose a white turtleneck with hearts on it from the back of Jenna’s drawer, dark jeans with tapered legs, and big, bunchy blue socks that heaped over the sides of her Keds.

  “That’s from sixth grade,” Jenna told her, touching the turtleneck’s tight elastic wrist cuff as they sat in the car’s cold backseat.

  “I thought it would be really northern,” Gabrielle said, and she and her cousin laughed.

  “Except you’ve got Keds.” Jenna tapped the bright white of Gabrielle’s shoes with her own roughed up Tretorns. “Oh—we’re here!” Jenna gave a squeeze to Gabrielle’s cold hand, letting her know just how excited she was to be going to a coed party.

  “So what’s your point?” Gabrielle asked her as they walked up the brick path to the arched front door of the house.

  “Nothing.” Jenna shook her head and pulled at her shirt hem, then readied her hair the way Amanda Lyons did: half a toss followed by a quick smooth-down. “You look fine,” Jenna said and thought it was something her mother might say, which really meant “You are lacking somehow,” but hoped her cousin wouldn’t hear this.

  Gabrielle wishes she could whisk herself away from the front door and join her father at his medical dinner. She would fit in better there, amid the fine flatware, the amuse-bouches, the adult conversation, than here, where Amanda Lyons is rustling around with some boy at the back of the closet.

  “Gabrielle,” Jenna says, her voice stern. “Come upstairs now!”

  Bowls of salty chips, caramel popcorn, and an ice chest filled with soda cans line the buffet table. Kids sit in clumps, boys stretched out the length of the twill-covered couch, girls clustered around Dina Montello, the go-to girl with Amanda Lyons temporarily out of the picture. Jenna slings her lavender leather purse over her right shoulder and motions to Gabrielle to come meet everyone. Gabrielle has a purse, too, one of Jenna’s mother’s castoffs, wrinkled and brown, the pouch of it deflated like a withered old person’s cheek. Gabrielle has never carried a purse before and has nothing to put inside it, but Jenna has insisted she have one with her. In the car ride and before hanging her coat up, Gabrielle undid the clasp and looked inside the purse but, of course, found nothing.

  “This is my cousin Gabrielle,” Jenna says and then points to each girl, naming their names, and when she reaches Dina Montello, she adds, “Dina’s in eighth grade.” Gabrielle watches as Jenna perches on the side of Dina’s chair, causing Dina’s tiny tote bag to drop onto the floor. Jenna listens for a way into the conversation. As far as Gabrielle can tell, the girls are comparing notes on who likes which bag and which boy. Finally, Jenna breaks—she cannot understand why she is one of those girls whose secrets no one asks. Daringly, she throws in the name of her crush, Peter Devlinson. Gabrielle is sure, upon hearing this, that Dina and another girl wince, but she feels powerless to do anything.

  “Which leads me to my next point of interest,” says Dina, conversational tour guide for the evening. “How to get a boy to notice you.” Dina is so smooth, so able to weather the gusts of judgment and jealousy. Gabrielle pictures herself at this same party but in Texas and knows that the Dina role would be played by Melinda Sayles, and she is—despite considering herself an aware person—surprised to find that it is all the same. Everywhere you go, nothing changes; you are the social second in command or fringed forever, in any place.

  Gabrielle wonders why Jenna can’t see Dina Montello plotting her demise by the Chee-tos and diet 7UP. Dina licks an orange finger and whispers something to her cronies that make them shudder with laughter. The giggles, Gabriell
e thinks, have more to do with relief than with true humor.

  “Jenna,” Gabrielle says. “It’s almost nine.” She checks her watch to prove to her cousin that they can leave soon, that they’ve been in a room with boys for nearly two hours and have nothing to show but mouths ringed with fake barbecue sauce from the chips. Gabrielle clasps and unclasps the brass fastener on her borrowed purse. Then she realizes that she is nearly head-to-toe covered in borrowed goods and feels itchy, caught in some fraud. Without her cousin, she would be wearing only her underwear, bra, and Keds.

  Jenna suddenly bursts into action. “Oh, I almost totally forgot.” She dips into her purse and pulls out a handful of colored hair elastics, each one thick and ropy, topped with a tropical flower. Like hounds to the scent, the cluster of girls shifts from the snacks to Jenna, who, momentarily in command, doles out one per girl.

  “These are awesome,” Amanda Lyons says, stretching her red one from thumb to forefinger. Jenna does not say that her mother bought them for her to give out.

  “I love it—thanks, Jen,” Dina Montello says and holds hers like a bunch of flowers and sniffs. Amanda’s elastic rockets through the den, landing near Peter Devlinson’s head. Jenna immediately blushes, remembering she’s admitted he is her current crush.

  “What the hell?” he asks, emphasizing the hell since no parents are around to hear.

  Dina offers, “Jenna did it!”

  Which is how Jenna finds herself downstairs, heading toward the closet with Peter, leaving Gabrielle upstairs alone in her heart-covered turtleneck playing games with the rest of the partygoers.

  “So,” Peter starts, his voice three coats away, distant enough for Jenna to feel even more dreamlike than she already does.