“I’ve always wanted to have a boy in Brooklyn,” Lucy says and sighs, overly wistful.
“So you can be like everyone else?” Kyla asks. “Do you know how many times I have heard people on the subway or on planes or even out in L.A. say they have boyfriends in Brooklyn? Too many times.”
In their friendship, Kyla plays the role of Marlin Perkins from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, motioning for Lucy to pet the cheetah or tranquilize the rhino while Kyla waits in the Jeep, talking to the camera about how dangerous each animal is. They met at birth—their mothers had met as teenagers—but hadn’t become anything other than “family friends” until Mrs. Denillo’s seventh-grade homeroom. Kyla had hugged Lucy—the new girl—hello, introduced her around, and then prodded Lucy to ask the teacher what the word intercourse meant. Lucy did, got sent into the hall, and listened as the laughter dissipated and order was restored. Kyla can convince Lucy to kiss someone, or consume caloric coffee beverages, wear her least flattering pants to the high school reunion, or try bull’s balls—Rocky Mountain oysters—and swallow them whole.
The truth is Lucy used to think she followed Kyla’s advice because Kyla knew more, that she had universal knowledge of love or beverages that put Lucy to shame. But now Lucy’s pretty sure she does what Kyla says because she is so much happier than Kyla. She can afford the risk. Kyla doesn’t eat wheat or gluten or dairy or meat anymore, but she smokes Camel Lights and coughs like an eighty-year-old emphysemic. Kyla doesn’t really do anything, Lucy thinks. What Kyla enjoys most is watching Lucy do things, especially when Lucy trips up. Kyla laughed harder than anyone when Lucy’s shorts fell down during the baton race in high school track finals, even though Lucy crossed the finish line and her team won. But when Billy Kingsman dumped Lucy on the big, spongy pole-vaulting mat behind the gym, Kyla’d been heroic, blowing off play practice to let Lucy cry on her Fiorucci shirt. The winged cherub decal on Kyla’s chest looked up at Lucy and smiled while she snotted and sobbed until the skin around her eyes was enflamed, swollen as if she’d been stung.
The friendship worked best when they saw each other infrequently, when Kyla had no real idea what was happening in Lucy’s day-to-day life. The year Kyla was away at graduate school in New Hampshire was closest they’d ever been, talking on the phone nearly every day. Kyla told Lucy all about the boys and the woods, the food she’d learned to cook, the affairs she’d had. This was before Kyla’d been diagnosed with celiac disease and cut out so much from her diet; back then she’d seemed fuller, more content.
When Lucy had visited her up there, Kyla hadn’t suggested she do anything to make an ass out of herself, not even when they’d gone to the bar in town or when she’d brought Lucy to class with her. Kyla sat Lucy at the desk next to hers and wrote her notes about her classmates, then, afterward, introduced her as if she’d lugged her in for show-and-tell. One guy, whom Kyla had a crush on, Justin, had come out for a beer with them, regaling the girls with stories about fishing, about his dream of being the teacher everyone loves at some boarding school. He even had the right dog for a boarding school position, a yellow Lab who panted, tongue lolling on the bar floor, as the girls drank pumpkin ales and tried to chuck stale popcorn into each other’s mouths.
Lucy thought Kyla might have ended up with Justin, but they’d lost touch after Kyla’d returned to the city, leaving the foliage and few friends she’d made in New Hampshire behind. Justin and Lucy, however, had exchanged addresses, and every so often she’d get a postcard from him that she didn’t show Kyla, just in case she felt funny about it. Now Kyla talked about going to L.A., to be a production assistant or a party planner—something with accessories—and Lucy couldn’t for a second picture her with Justin. Sometimes, Lucy found herself silently narrating her life to Justin, waiting for his response; she couldn’t tell if this meant psychologically she was trying to be closer to him, or if this was her mind’s way of wrestling with Kyla’s slow shrugging out of her life.
“Wait, don’t look,” Kyla says, tilting her head down toward the table but making her eyes go to the coffee bar. “He’s looking over here.”
Lucy looks. The coffee guy ignores her. “I don’t think so,” she says.
“Yeah, he was, I just saw him,” Kyla whips back. She undoes the coffee lid and licks the foam from the cup edge. “This drink sucks. How’s yours?”
“Really good,” Lucy says, then feels bad and adds, “But in that sickening way.”
She wonders if Kyla misses bread, if she has dreams about pizza dough, or muffins. When Lucy asks, Kyla says, “No. There’s plenty of stuff I can have—rice flour. Fairway sells wheat-free, gluten-free mixes. I’m not going hungry, believe me.”
On the way to the bathroom, Lucy surreptitiously pockets a handful of wooden stirrers. The action goes unseen by Kyla, who is too busy studying her own reflection in the wall-anchored mirror to her left.
By the bathroom door, Kyla waits for Lucy. Inside, Lucy does a thigh lunge, an ode to her mother’s germ worries, so she won’t touch the urine-speckled seat. Even though Lucy is not an employee and therefore not required by law to do so, she washes her hands for a long time, dries them on her shirt, and prepares to leave the room looking even more crumpled than before. Before she changes her mind, Lucy takes a wooden coffee stirrer from her jacket pocket and dashes her number onto it. When she’s out of the restroom, she slides the stick across the counter to the coffee guy. He raises his eyebrows at Lucy and hands her a mint from a pile on a cake plate, as if this is his way of saying, Yes, he will call her, they will go out, and they won’t tell Kyla.
“What were you doing?” Kyla asks, having wandered around the store picking up free flyers, then leaving them on the counter near the trash bins.
“Getting a mint,” she says, holding it up for proof. “My breath smells.”
“Yeah, probably from that fattening drink you had,” Kyla says.
Outside, they walk a half block without talking and then pause at the corner at one of those pizza places that claims to be the original. They look at the wrung-out dough, the thin disks of pepperoni, and the red sauce being ladled onto some deep dish.
“And you’re telling me you don’t miss that?” Lucy puts her pointer finger to the window glass. In the reflection she watches the blurred cars and people disappearing from view as the pedestrians walk past and slip around the corner of the window. Lucy can feel the extra stirrers in her pocket, how the tiny corners are already poking her thigh. Kyla turns, looks at Lucy, and says, “I don’t miss anything.”
A Map of the Area
From the back of the yurt, a clapping of hands.
“Okay, now,” the leader says. His name is Tim, but he goes by Titian these days, knotty auburn hair and goatee to match.
Jenna looks around and notices that the Emotives Mates have gathered in a circle, standing. One dangles a hand down to her, but she backs up, does not accept the dewy palm.
“Life is a circle,” Titian bellows, then he whispers the same thing. The whisper hushes the Emotives and inspires a couple of people—Jenna thinks of them as the Sandalman and Breasty—to repeat the leaderspeak.
Out the flap door, Jenna can see the yellow dome of the kitchen hut, where she is employed for two months, and then, farther, the cabin where her father has subsidized her board so she doesn’t have to sleep under the blue tarp with the Emotives. Just the cook, Jenna is neither part of the leadership nor one of the hemp-clad enrollees who’ve signed up to learn how to express themselves better while communing in natural fibers. Jenna, in her off hours, is allowed to watch the exercises but not to speak.
“Emotion is fluid, powerful like water. Harness the energy force of the current.” Titian’s female counterpart, Andrea, nods and rubs hers hands together. She’s come in from the late September cold, and her cheeks prove it; they are red and shiny as a tricycle.
Andrea has been the only one so far to pay any attention to Jenna. Now, even during the Emotivation Circle, the two seek each
other out. Jenna does not yet know why. She has vague notions of Titian’s desire for a threesome in the yurt after the newly expressive folks have gone to bed, tired from trust games and talking. But Jenna’s lack of physical impulses is stunning; she doesn’t remember a time in her life when she wanted less contact.
Jenna has lost her twenties, two pregnancies, the handful of friends she’d kept clustered around her at various points, and, most recently, her mother. Her father litigates, grows asparagus in the warmer months, allows himself a teaspoon at a time of the jam and canned foods her mother left. Shelved in the pantry are syrupy apricots, lavender mustard, jellies ranging from fig to blackberry, and chutneys. Jenna has tired of watching the food supply dwindle at her parents’ house, each month without a mother or wife marked by a missing jar of sweet pickles or pepper marmalade.
“Green Zebra, Arkansas Traveler, Box Car Willie, Caspian Pink.” Jenna actually says the words out loud to herself while adding a mix of diced heirloom tomatoes to the chili. Steam rises from the enormous pot in front of her; she stirs with a spoon the length of a yardstick. Jenna can craft five-course meals on just the two burners provided by the Emotives. By now she’s got the menu down, so she cooks by rote; Monday’s meal is brown raisin bread, purple coleslaw, and baked beans. Tuesday brings bread pudding fashioned from the leftover bread, Andrea’s honey, and suspension of the pan over an open fire, which caramelizes the sugary bottom. Chili day signals the middle of the week, though the Emotives brochure rallied against set days, avoided “common terminologies like hump day,” feeling that too much structure makes for emotional blockage.
“Basically,” Andrea had confided in Jenna when Titian had sauntered off with a wad of paper and headed for the outhouse, “we’re dealing with some serious emotional constipation.” Jenna smiled, then waited for Andrea to finish. “But the money’s good.”
Most of the people on Emotive Missions are dot-commers, the suddenly wealthy, or the bored in crisis. “You’ll get your fair share of BICs—but also some true soul searchers; those are the ones you feel bad for, they’re still kind of lost when they leave,” Andrea had explained as she’d shown Jenna the cabin Titian had built for their guests—in Jenna’s case, the hired help.
“When my mother visits”—Andrea propped open a shutter to let in the milky afternoon light—“I have to decorate.” She showed Jenna the closet where matching dishes, a Ralph Lauren comforter, various appliances, and wedding registry items were stacked one to the next. “You know how mothers can be, right? Mine’s…” Andrea thought for a minute. “Mine’s pretty much deaf, you know? But, I just—I like her to have a good thread count.” Jenna wasn’t sure whether Andrea meant her mother was literally unable to hear or just a poor listener, but she didn’t ask for clarification; maybe Andrea meant both.
Jenna couldn’t compare mother stories, preferences for down or Quallofil, because she still can’t get her head around the grammar of her mother’s death. In the past tense, her mother is too long gone—wasn’t she just standing in front of Jenna, explaining the utility of twine, how to pinch her cheeks should rouge not be available? But then, there is no present tense for her mother, either. The recall of her mother’s mouth, the small bursts of bosom that escaped the top part of the bra—in effect creating four breasts—feel still-present.
“Titian says mothers are born to criticize, that it’s through their eyes that we see not what we are but what we could be.” Andrea took Jenna’s duffel from her shoulder and dropped it at the foot of the bed.
“Isn’t that a famous quotation?” Jenna asked. Andrea shrugged and pointed out a tiny portable television stashed away under the comforter in the closet.
“Just in case,” Andrea said. “The batteries are fresh.”
Jenna crinkled her nose and touched the small knobs, the folded antenna. “In case what?”
“I don’t know, maybe if you get…” Outside, the gong sounded. Andrea started to head out the door. “Sometimes, if I can’t sleep or Titian’s bugging the crap out of me, I come down here and watch whatever station comes in. Try channel twelve—you might get one of those skin care infomercials. Or M*A*S*H.” Andrea waved and backed out the cabin’s door. Over her shoulder she called, “I almost ordered one—that cream that makes your face glow? Do you think it’d work?”
Jenna ladles chili into the wide brown bowls and sets each place with a spoon Titian has carved from wood scraps. She makes sure to add a scarce amount of bleach to the rinse water after meals, and when Titian protests, Jenna says, “Do you know how much bacteria love to live in wooden utensils?”
At lunch, quiet chatter. Breakfast is silent, dinner is a discussion led by Titian, Andrea, or a guest speaker, but lunch is a regular affair. Jenna picks at a breadstick, dips it into her chili mug, and eavesdrops. One man’s lost his millions—Jenna questions how he can afford the three-thousand-dollar fee for roughing it as an Emotive. Another younger one came at the request of his new wife—“She says I don’t talk enough. But I do. I just don’t talk about what she wants me to talk about.” A few nods. Titian checks his watch. He will go into town later to pick up Avi, the single-named scholar turned mystic. A young woman adds to the conversation and touches the shoulder of the woman next to her. “Since the IPO—my mom and I—we fight all the time. Not here so much. But at home. Or wherever. So we don’t want to do that. We want to learn…” Her voice gets lost in the chili mouthful. Then the mother reapplies her lipstick, to the obvious disdain of most of the group. “Plus,” the mother adds, “the Golden Door spa was full.”
On her bed that night, a camper without bunkmate or counselor, Jenna tries to pick an imaginary fight with her own mother. Do her criticisms still exist? She remembers some, maybe a weight-loss issue here, a certain college acceptance there, relationship advice from a woman who’d married her eighth-grade boyfriend.
“Hair back at the table,” Jenna says to her invisible mother. “And stop fidgeting.”
“Why don’t you loosen up?” Fake Mother nudges back as Jenna’s teenage self.
“I’m loose enough already,” Jenna says, then laughs a little, both at what she knows her mother would have said about the word loose and about the whole scene—who thinks she’ll wind up cooking at an overpriced outdoor shithole, pseudocommune, unable to mourn her dead mother?
Jenna’s laugh is abruptly cut off by a sound outside. She sticks her head out the front door and sees if she can identify the noise. Bird? Dog? Coyote maybe. These were things parents taught their children: how to identify animal sounds, tips on becoming financially stable, the proper way to snip a flower stalk at an angle. It occurs to Jenna that whatever knowledge she has right at this moment—whatever her mother has passed on at this point—is it. If she doesn’t already understand how best to prune or pickle, she won’t get any further clues. At least, not the way her mother had. And Jenna doesn’t want to learn by a book, an Internet course; she just wants the knowledge of everything her mother had stored up imparted to her mystically—the way she doesn’t remember learning to make a bow, wrap a present neatly, or give in at just the right time in an argument to get her way; these are things she just knows.
The next day, Titian leads group yoga, each Emotive on a thin blue mat that slides on the cold, dewy ground. Jenna follows the poses, puts her elbows to her thighs, and when he instructs them to do Balasana, the child’s pose, wonders if she’ll ever give birth. So far, she’s made it through the nausea stage of pregnancy, but not to the stretch-mark phase. She knows in another couple of months she and Jay will try again. She will wake with a start each morning, checking underwear or thighs, toilet paper—obsessively—for blood. She will hope her period won’t start, and then, when she tests positive, worry she’ll spot then cramp, lose the heartbeat. Jay will tell her not to think about it. To go about the day as if nothing is happening so that if next summer they stroll a newborn, it will be a pleasant surprise. But Jenna remembers seeing the first clot, the sweat on her lip, the phone call to
the resident on call, who’d said, briskly, “If it’s not a miscarriage, you’ll be fine. And if it is, there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.” That was the first time.
The second time, nearly three months ago, Jenna had been induced; the cervix ripened with prostaglandin rods, then into labor, push, delivering something—someone. She’d left the hospital in her pouchy maternity jeans but with nothing in her arms, no new car seat swinging from Jay’s hand. At home, with no mother to pack up the nursery, Jenna had sifted through the layette clothing herself, packing into plastic tubs the forearm-sized outfits, the gender-neutral yellow-and-white caps, the waffled cotton receiving blankets.
“And bless the sun and the stars, moon and light.” Titian exhales audibly. The Emotives sit up, stretch, go to their tents. Sometimes Jenna thinks Titian could spew whatever words he felt like and he’d have an appreciative audience. The Emotives are so needy that they latch on to anything Titian says as if it’s prayer.
Titian approaches Jenna and puts both hands on her shoulders. She flinches, then feels guilty, then annoyed at both the touching and her response.
“You’re too tense,” he says. “You’re not sneaking processed flour and sugar, are you?”
“Actually, I have a stash of Milky Ways and red licorice in my bunk,” Jenna says, straight-mouthed so he can’t figure if she’s serious.
“Cabin,” Titian corrects. Jenna shrugs, noting how early the competition for Andrea’s attention has started.
“I’m a sucker for Good & Plentys,” Andrea says when she comes over. Titian shoots her a look. “Before—I mean, I used to love them.”
The Girls' Almanac Page 21