Jenna looked at Alice’s thighs, how her kneecaps exposed themselves through the skin.
“I’m sick,” Alice said softly and didn’t look at Jenna. It was the only time Jenna heard her say that without making a joke. She didn’t say that she’d get better or that she was trying to get help, she just let Jenna know the state of her. Maybe so Jenna could make a decision about spending time with her, so she could keep this knowledge in the back of her brain to refer to when she felt herself getting a best friend.
On the ice, Alice and Jenna could shut out the players, their families, the glint of bright sun outside. They worked on clearing the zone, which is when a defending player sends the puck out of the opponent’s attacking zone and all the attacking players have to leave the zone, clearing it in order to avoid being called offside when the puck comes back. Two weeks into hockey camp, Alice and Jenna had nearly perfected their blind pass, both skating fast. Alice would hang back about a yard, then suddenly she would pass the puck to Jenna without looking. Alice was good like that—once she got a feeling about where Jenna was on the ice, she could just let go and shoot to her without worrying about whether the puck would get there.
“It’s my own kind of faith,” she explained to Jenna. Alice was watching her eat toast with cheese and honey. They sat in the bakery Jenna wanted to work in, the kind that sold fresh apricot muffins and braids of glossy bread, and watched people in their summer modes. Kids dripped fluorescent Popsicles onto their shirts, women in the realm of her mother wore linen outfits that never seemed to wrinkle, and preteens stood like stars—their limbs jutting out like points all around them.
“Can you at least smell it?” Jenna asked Alice and shoved her bread up to her nose. Alice knew Jenna knew about her “food quirks” and was comfortable enough by this point to make jokes.
“Yum,” Alice said. “Vanilla.”
“Do you—did you—like vanilla?” Jenna asked. Sometimes she felt guilty asking Alice about food, but it was fascinating, like watching surgery on TV—on the one hand, absorbing and, on the other, too remote to cause a reaction—and Alice could shrug it off.
“I used to. It might be too casual now.”
Jenna loved how Alice used nonfood words to talk about food, which was nonfood to her. Vanilla was casual, blueberries were annoying, caramel was slutty. They’d baked Annoying Slut Muffins earlier in the week to celebrate their win against the Kenttown Vikings, and Alice had actually eaten an exact quarter of one, declaring them amusing.
“You really love all this stuff, don’t you?” Alice said to Jenna and looked behind her at the large oven in the back of the room, the baguettes poking up from their baskets.
“Yeah,” Jenna said. “I always liked rolling dough, decorating sugar cookies, that sort of thing. Braiding bread.”
“So you’re going to be a baker?” Alice smiled. She didn’t laugh at Jenna or make a joke; she tilted her head and nodded. “I can totally see that. You’re so nourishing. Jenna the Baker. It sounds like a children’s story.”
Jenna liked the sound of that, enjoyed the image she had of herself piglet-plump with an apron and puffy hat. Alice looked at her hands as if she expected something to be in them. Jenna thought about what she’d said, about the nourishing part, and how that was one of those sentences she’d never forget.
Sometimes, Jenna knew them when they were uttered—the sentences could be meaningful like that one, or just some angry deli lady shouting about how corned beef is the devil’s work, or a seventh-grade boy asking her at the 1950s-style sock hop if she wanted to dance but phrasing it as cut a grug instead of cut a rug. Other times, someone could say something to her and it dissipated quickly, only to resurface at a strange moment. Once, when she’d wanted sneakers, the expensive ones, her father had told her it was a mistake to go through life always feeling entitled. The words slid by unnoticed, then presented themselves again when she was baking a ginger-pear upside-down cake. The top layer of sticky sliced pears kept drooping over the sides, making the cake look as if it had had a pastry stroke, and she found herself saying it was a mistake to go through life entitled. She whisper-chanted the words until she’d fixed the whole thing, secured it on a glass cake stand, and stood looking at her work, making her father’s words into a song. Basically, she had no choice, it seemed, about which words stuck to her and which left.
“You should come visit me in Connecticut,” Alice said. She lived near a cheese outlet and a huge ice rink, and had an older brother, Justin, who bought beets for her when she asked. “He’s going to Dartmouth,” she said and pointed up, as if New Hampshire were in the ceiling. “But he’ll come home for breaks. Maybe he could pick you up on the way down sometime.”
“That’d be great,” Jenna said. There was something pulsing, daring about riding in a car with someone’s older brother. More so when that someone was as slim a presence as Alice. Alice showed her a photograph of Justin.
“He’s so cute. He looks like…” She couldn’t think what.
“A Labrador?” Alice said. She put her lips together. Jenna sometimes found herself doing Alice’s gestures, clamping her mouth shut suddenly or twisting just the front lock of hair around her fingers. Alice knew it, and would tell Jenna she was “being me—without the gagging part.”
And that part always came. Jenna had to wait for Alice to finish in the bathroom, puking silently if anyone else were around, or running the tap. She never let Jenna come in with her, not that she would have wanted to, but Jenna wished she could hold her back, less because she feared for Alice’s health than because she needed her friendship, wanted her to be around for her own benefit. It wasn’t like hearing about some senior girl at school and how her friend held her hair back while she threw up Rolling Rock or wine coolers. There was distance. Alice wanted Jenna as close as possible—right up to the bathroom doorframe, nosing against the wall, even, but not inside.
Alice told Jenna she always ate bright-colored foods first—Chee-tos or strawberry licorice, yellow peppers. After that she could move on to mozzarella sticks or bread, bland visions of starch. Then later, when she threw up, she’d know she’d reached the last of the food, cleared her whole system, when she vomited red or yellow. The shock of color signaled a win of some kind.
Jenna preferred to think of Alice that way—like an art project, colors swirling inside her, rather than of how sick she was. During that summer, Alice ate only on days that had a t in them, so Saturday afternoon Jenna could tell Alice was preparing herself for that night’s binge. Alice was fun when she was just about to eat—it was the time she was most excited, bouncy, singing Top 40 songs, skating the rim of the rink at full speed, daring her body to collide with the ice.
Then, later, she put on “And She Was,” the Talking Heads song. Jenna listened to the lyrics and how they mention the highway breathing. Suddenly it didn’t seem cool, the way Alice had said, it felt scary and unsettling—too bizarre to imagine things that weren’t meant to feel or have lungs expanding and contracting right at the roadside. When she came out of the ladies’ room, Alice wiped her mouth on her hockey jersey. Her eyes were teary and bloodshot, but she looked beautiful, placid. Calm and ease drifted onto her after she’d been in the bathroom, as if she’d solved everything.
All the padded hockey girls skated to the music while they practiced. Jerseys and pads made rectangles of them, and Jenna would think about their geometry as they shucked by one another, passing the puck, dekeing, making a decoy, a fake motion that players do when they have the puck and make the defensive players think they’re going to move in a certain direction when they’re not. Teammates can shoulder-deke or stick-deke, even head-deke—the kind of shot that made Jenna feel kind of conceited after she’d done it right.
Sometimes she thinks that Alice is dekeing everyone; that maybe she dekes the players and coach, her brother or whoever else is at home, that Alice is this superstar who doesn’t even need fuel to make a goal. And maybe Jenna is the one who’s been completel
y deked, thinking she’s made a lifelong friend.
This was the year that the overtime loss category, the result for a team that loses in overtime a game that was tied after regulation, worth one point in the standings, was approved for hockey. Their camp team won because of this, and when the girls got their fake gold medals from the coach, who walked in her shoes out onto the ice, Jenna thought about those words. Overtime loss. Would those words stick? The coach looped green and orange ribbons—the team colors—around their heads and then let the weight hit each padded chest. Flush-faced and proud, the girls stood, steadying themselves on their sticks as the other team offered palms of congratulations.
Summer is nearly over. The fanning arc of full trees shade Jenna and Alice as they walk to the car. Jenna is giving her friend a ride to the train station out on Route 128. That night Alice will be in Connecticut and Jenna will go back to her house and put the hockey gear away. They’d all signed each other’s pads, graffitiing the shoulders so they looked like tattooed butterfly wings. Jenna imagines shutting them into the cocoon of her closet until the next time she plays hockey—whenever that will be.
At the second traffic light, Jenna stops behind a car with various stickers on its rear—LABEL GENETICALLY ENGINEERED FOOD, NO VICTIMS EVER, and NO NUKES. She thinks about waking Alice to tell her to read them, how she might change NO NUKES to NO PUKES. Before the light switches to green, she watches the slight rise and fall of Alice’s chest, breastbone visible through the T-shirt; ribs, clavicles, all juts and eaves—as if her bones were struggling to escape the confines of her body. Jenna wishes that Alice had buckled her seat belt, that something held her down so Alice would stay with her, but she has the feeling her friend will be gone soon, that she’s let herself be deked.
Passengerless later, Jenna knows that what she loved about Alice—part of the thrill of being with her—was the absolute certainty that she wouldn’t last. That she would pine for her when Alice eventually flushed herself, her laugh, and her song, right out of this world. Alice would leave Jenna missing her the way Jenna misses the parts of her parents that aren’t young anymore, the way she misses the weight of what was on the other side of all her choices—colleges, camps, ice-cream flavors. The way you can miss someone you never met, never even had the chance to—like a sister, like a boy.
Come to Iceland
When Randall drives to Keflavik Airport, he brings with him a small pot of skyr, thick yogurt made from skimmed milk curd, to which he has added a teaspoon of raspberry jam. He stands near the customs exit, keeping back from the turnstiles so Gabrielle won’t feel bombarded by her father and his dairy products when she emerges dry-lipped and untucked from the plane.
“Hi, Dad,” she says and hugs him from the side so only half of each of them touches. He hands her the skyr, and she folds back the tinfoil top before even moving out of the way of the other grounded passengers. He watches her and wonders at each motion of her fingers, thinking she has doctor hands and digits—he has a daughter who can slice skin, remove tumors, and open yogurt containers! He lets her have a couple of mouthfuls and then leads her over to baggage reclaim, where they stand in the zoom and hush of circling luggage until her knapsack clumps onto the belt.
In the rental car, green fields slide by, tiny farmhouses and pitted rocks surrounded by grassy tufts mark nameless roads, and Randall reaches over to touch Gabrielle’s face, patting her cheek, then resting his arm on the headrest as if he’s about to back up.
“We need to catch the bus at two this afternoon,” he says. “We go right to Landmannalaugar. Did you remember gloves? I think we need them for the glacier.”
“For the fifth time, yes.” Gabrielle smiles and fiddles with the radio controls on the dash until a local station comes on. She and Randall listen to the Icelandic, which neither one understands.
“It’s sort of nice,” Randall says, “not to know what they’re talking about.” He gestures to the radio as if the announcers live inside.
“I know,” Gabrielle says. Treeless, the verdant landscape passes outside the car window. So low, the shrubs seem like new growth, and Gabrielle thinks that if she were to step out there, she would feel giant, enlarged.
“It’s relaxing, really,” Randall says and points to the radio.
“What is?” Gabrielle looks at her father.
“Not knowing what people are saying,” he says. “It takes the pressure off responding somehow.”
In the center of town, Randall drops the car back at the hotel lot, where they’ll pick it up at the end of the hike, when they’ll drive the Golden Circle, stopping to swim in the lagoon. He walks to meet Gabrielle at the food stand by the waterfront, where they order lunch. Each hot dog is the size of a toddler finger, some dotted with cut cubes of pickle, others served with sweet sauce. They sit on the seawall and face the harbor, looking at the boats and the silver-domed dairy processing plant before heading to the bus terminal.
“I can’t believe how empty it seems here,” she says, sweeping her arm back toward the city.
“Not like London?” Randall says.
After the trip, Gabrielle will begin a yearlong fellowship at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, and she looks forward to leaving Baltimore and residency, and moving on. Each place she’s lived ripples out in her mind, ringing her from Texas to Maryland to New York, and Ecuador, where she’d lived half a year to learn rural medicine.
“What’s the population in London?” Randall asks, nudging her until she smiles. It’s an old joke, one from their first trip to Iceland that had resurfaced when they’d met in the leafy quiet of the botanical garden near her medical school in the Bronx, and she knew he’d do the same in London.
During their first trip to Iceland, right before Gabrielle had started her residency at Hopkins, but several months before Randall’s further prostate radiation treatments had been announced, they’d met in the north of Iceland, in Akureyri, and hiked the Súlur Mountain. At the top, snacking between two red marking poles, Randall had quizzed Gabrielle about Ecuador—wanting to know average incomes, the details of importing and exporting, names of the local wildlife.
“What was the population in Ecuador?” he had asked.
She had said, “God, Dad, don’t know. Why do you have to ask like that?”
“How do you want me to ask?”
“In a simple way,” Gabrielle had told him. She picked at a torn flap of rubber on her hiking boot and looked at the fall of her father’s mouth. “Just—something like—‘Was it crowded there?’ Or maybe ‘Did you have a good time?’”
She had wondered then why they both referred to the country in the past tense, as if, since Gabrielle wasn’t posted there anymore, it had ceased to exist.
“Fine,” Randall had said. He’d folded his finished bag of chips into a triangle and held it at arm’s length in front so it lined up with another mountain across the way. “Tell me about how crowded Ecuador was.”
She’d told him of walking, arms pinned to her sides, through Old Town in Quito, the half-paved streets, the jumble of it all; how close the waiters there had leaned in when she’d placed an order. Sooty children, ready to shine shoes came right to her ears, first smelling her hair, then whispering in Spanish, asking her for money or gum. Then, in Manta, where she’d lived for six months, the streets were suddenly vacant except at market time, when men spread out sheets of blue tarpaulin and set on display eels and fish caught that morning. Merchants vased the canahuate flowers in empty coffee tins. The flowers’ large purple stems could be dipped into butter and steamed, or wrung for sour liquid that was mixed with sugar for an after-dinner drink. At the hospital there, when Gabrielle prescribed antibiotics for urinary tract infections or diagnosed pyelonephritis, the attending physician had also recommended the patients drink the canahuate pressings.
What Gabrielle loved most were the seeds that were shucked and sprinkled onto salads. Bags of them swung from hooks on the market stalls next to halved guavas or cluttered rows of bo
rojo brought in from Colombia and prized for their cure-all qualities. Often, husbands brought containers of the squeezed tonic to their wives as they labored, and no matter how many times Gabrielle asked the women not to drink too much, or took the jars of juice away, they would always find more.
At the end of the market, the ice had melted in the stalls, slicked the tarps, and rings of squid had hardened in the sun as hunks of unsold dark fish were hauled away for chum. Along the dusky beach near her apartment complex, there were often loose tentacles and severed crab legs so pink and dried that Gabrielle had taken a couple inside and set them on a window ledge with some shells like collected flowers.
On their descent, Randall had said, “I wish I’d gotten down there to visit you.” This is the closest he can come to apologizing for the secrecy; it escapes him completely that his wife, Diane, with whom he had had an affair, has turned his daughter into the other woman.
Diane, a personal decorator who enjoys travel for its shopping arcades and cheap leather goods, hadn’t wanted to repeat what she considered a wasteful trip to the Galápagos, despite the albatross photo framed in the entryway, so she’d begged off visiting Gabrielle and asked Randall to do the same. He’d thought about asking Diane to take a trip to celebrate Gabrielle’s new status as a resident, but instead he’d gone ahead and booked the Iceland trip as business and not mentioned to his wife that his daughter would be there. Diane hadn’t been suspicious, especially after Randall had sent away for golf brochures that described the most northerly golf course in the world, where every June the Arctic Open was played through the night in the midnight sun.
Of course, Randall hadn’t watched golf but had instead explored Hrísey, an island populated by two hundred people and an abundance of birds, with Gabrielle. Ptarmigans, the most common birds on the island, roamed fairly tame, waddling the roads and gardens of the town in groups. Randall had wanted to sit on the bench that marked where the island’s center bell had stood and tell his daughter that his prostate-specific antigen test had come back elevated, that he’d seen a swirl of blood in the toilet one morning. Instead they’d rested there and he’d described the lupine fields on the western side, the way the domed bell had been used to announce a catch of herring.
The Girls' Almanac Page 11