Avi lets her fall back into his arms with her eyes closed—quickly, before anyone else sees and thinks it’s the opening exercise. Jenna sits near the door again, in her chair, but feels good, as if she’s got something none of the others has. Andrea crouches next to her.
“Titian and I wanted to ask you something,” she says. Titian gives her a thumbs-up from his position near Avi. The two men are addressing smaller groups on the appropriate way to be open in a nonemotional setting. Jenna nods. She thinks Andrea will ask her to stay. They want her to live with them, maybe Avi, too—and his wife and tons of children. She won’t need her own, she could just help with Avi’s, and maybe try to sway Titian into wanting one. Jenna thinks that maybe she will say yes, that then she will have to call Jay, then her father.
“Now,” Andrea says, “don’t be freaked out, okay? We’ve never asked any of the cooks this before.”
Avi starts a new game in the middle of the room. He’s giving directions, but Jenna can’t hear them clearly.
“I’m ready,” Jenna says, looks at Andrea.
“We’d really like it if you’d consider making pumpkin soup.”
Jenna has to have her say it again.
“Pumpkin soup,” Jenna repeats. The words sound foreign, feel twisted on her tongue, as if they’re gibberish.
“It’s labor intensive, but we had real positive feedback last year—especially with some organic cinnamon—and maybe one of the Emotives would help you with the scooping.”
Jenna just stares at her. “Oh.”
“Oh, don’t be upset. Really. You can even use our kitchen.”
Jenna has not heard the directions of Avi’s game, but she and Andrea are herded over to join.
“Kangaroo,” an Emotive says, then says various words that Jenna hears only some of. She can’t live here. She has to see Jay. Did she ever tell him what it felt like to be kicked—pleasantly—from the inside? Did she give or just think of giving her father the recipe for the asparagus dip? Jenna can feel herself about to cry. She holds back, listening to “Apple, bracelet, canned corn, dreams, elephant, friends, Gregorian chants…”
She figures the alphabetical aspect of the game out. “I’m going on a trip and I’m bringing…” she starts. She has to come up with an m word, then trace back, remembering everyone else’s choices. “I’m going on a trip and I’m bringing…” She falters, then says, “A map of the area.” It’s the first thing that came to her mouth; it won over melons, marshmallows, mice, mother.
One of the Emotives interrupts. “Wait, Avi, I thought you said it has to start with the actual letter.”
Avi looks at Jenna. “Yes, well, technically, it would be ‘map of the area,’” he says.
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Jenna says. “Grammatically. No one says ‘map of the area.’ It’s a map of the area.” She begins to cry, hard. “Isn’t it?”
They all sit there. The whole group of Emotives, and Titian, Andrea, Avi, and Jenna. Who will explain it? The talking, the fine points of speech, the looseness of something leaving you?
By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Gone
Refilling the ketchup bottles takes the most time. After hours, Heather sits with her hair lolling onto the tabletops, not minding that she will later reek of spilled beer, ash, and garlic from the Dockside Italian-style happy hour that came with appetizer scampi and rolls delivered frozen, shipped by the hundred crate.
By the bar, two late-night drinkers alternate watching Heather’s methodical squeezing of the ketchup and keeping track of the news on television. One of the drinkers is checking her out; she’s aware that either he recognizes her from her prior child stardom or he wants to get her number, or—most likely—both.
The television is hoisted in the air, attached to the ceiling by L-bolts, angled like one in a hospital room. A week after the event and the local news flaps back on itself, revisiting the drowning. Heather remembers the way Matt hugged her while he kissed her, how sure he seemed that they had something worth keeping, how he said he hadn’t seen her movies but he’d rent them if she wanted him to. After Matt had left her, bra still undone, out back by the loading dock, she’d repeated a line from one of the movies. The scene had earned her national praise for comedic timing and wordless emotive skills; in it she is sneaking away from a summer camp, leaving the other girls asleep in their bunks, the counselors unaware; she cannot find her shoes.
Now, as Heather wipes the sticky condiment residue on her apron, she remembers the original title of that film: By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Gone. The producers had trimmed it to Read This, then changed it completely once the theme song was written. The movie was released as Summer’s Gold.
“My character’s name is Gold,” Heather said time and again in press interviews.
After the ketchup, she starts in on the salt, unscrewing the shaker tops and filling them from the salt box with the little girl on the front. Heather recalls wanting to be that girl, the one kicking through the rain, but as she looks at the girl now, she wonders what the rain has to do with salt and why they didn’t think to put the girl by the ocean. Then she thinks how she is by the ocean, how Matt drowned in it, and how she wound up here, far from the film sets on which she grew up. The lighting is the thing that people don’t understand, how on set actors glow, how flawless they appear thanks to reflecting panels and a team of people to tend to them.
All the salts and peppers are massed together, condiments ready for action. Heather imagines herself among them sitting, legless but full up, just waiting with an army of glass objects, hoping to be held.
What She Was Doing at His Parents’ House While He Was in the Bathroom
In Matt’s bedroom are copies of Let’s Go Europe dating back to when there were still an East and a West Germany. Paging through one while she waits for him to finish flossing and flushing, Lucy notices circled cafés, a youth hostel marked by an X, jottings made years ago. Where was she when the book was new? Was that the high school summer in France, the immersion program in the tumbling abbey meant to increase fluency that resulted mainly in kissing the ponytailed Canadian gardener? Did he fall asleep on the night train from Barcelona with his pack secured between his legs, passport and money slicked to his belly under the rugby shirt she’d found in his closet? She tries to picture each of them younger, in their separate lives and places. Maybe he stared at the Bridge of Sighs in Venice at the same time she served waffle cones and double scoops at J.P. Licks and stared, drip-coated and aproned, at the painting of a cow on the wall. Maybe they both longed for each other then. Or maybe he’d pressed some girl, an American Alpha Gamma Epsilon girl, up against the side of that fountain in Budapest one night and kissed her. Or was he the sort to go for a local, the unnatural blonde in Prague who had a no-shoes-in-the-house rule since she didn’t own a vacuum, the Parisian who then told her boyfriend, the quiet girl from Edinburgh who’d made him consider, briefly, doing a semester abroad there?
When Matt comes out of the bathroom, he finds her crouching, still examining the Let’s Go pages, looking for something.
“Those are my brother’s,” he says and sits shirtless in his flannel boxers on the futon.
Imagined images of him with his T-shirt tan lines and baguettes torn in two, the smooth stones collected from the river in County Cork, the skin-thin airmail letters, all disintegrate before she can think of what to say. She had thought there might be a travel journal somewhere, with sketches or funny incidents, phone numbers of girls he would never call, an address where he should send the five pounds he borrowed from the kind gentleman in the South Kensington tube. Lucy looks a few more minutes at the shelf, hoping to locate this book, a manual somehow, of what Matt or his brother—someone—was like before she got there.
43 Lake View Avenue, South
Upstairs it’s the second night for sitting Shiva. Kyla’s mother, Trishelle, died: pancreatic cancer that kept her housebound, tethered to a rolling IV pole. Heather is the middle neighbo
r, and downstairs Brian and his new girlfriend are watching porn. Every couple of minutes someone bearing a fruit basket or box of hard candies will come in the communal front door and head upstairs, past Heather’s entryway.
When Heather takes her Shepherd-Lab mix, Suspicion—Susie—out for a walk, the leash gets tangled, caught between back leg and fore, and the dog pees on it. Heather’s too busy watching the splaying of naked bodies through Brian’s front window to notice until it’s too late, and back inside she has to rinse the leash in the sink and loop it on the railing outside to dry in the fall air.
Part of her wants to take something upstairs, a carton of cookies, or a quiche, just to show she understands: that they are neighbors and that someone has died. Kyla, who has now lost her mother and father—is she a daughter anymore?—explained that the mourning ritual will last seven days. Since Heather is apartment-sandwiched between Kyla and Brian, who works the late shift at Conbrin Electric, Kyla told Heather first about the mother’s passing, then went downstairs to tell Brian. This week Brian’s got a girl staying with him from out of town. Heather was there when the taxi pulled up to the house. Suspicion ate dinner—leftover mushroom lasagna—late and had to go out for her night walk close to eleven, just when Brain’s girl rolled her window down and motioned for him to come outside to her. He paid the driver and carried the suitcase up the stairs while the girl steadied herself on the banister. Heather saw that the case was one of those fake tapestry kinds, and even in the dim streetlight, it looked new. Somehow, this depressed her, thinking of this girl buying a new set of luggage just to come see Brian—Brian who watched porn every night and didn’t bother to shut his blinds, Brian whose recycling container was filled with empty plastic nonfat ice-cream sandwich boxes. Why nonfat? Heather wondered. Did he not burn off the calories watching the movies?
Suspicion liked better to lick the washed tins from Kyla’s recycling, the pinto beans and organic vegetarian soups that came in oversized cans. Kyla was even thoughtful enough to put the sharp severed can tops in a separate container so Suspicion wouldn’t slice her tongue and paw the way she did on Brian’s reduced-calorie mexican macaroni mix once. Heather’d had to rush the dog to Blakely Memorial and have them stitch the mouth and foot, which made her late for work at the courthouse. Heather had to keep Suspicion in the car, head funneled off from the rest of her body so she wouldn’t tear at the sutures, while she took her pads and supplies inside.
Heather has a degree in graphic design, and this is the first time she’s put it to use, having been waitress, potter, live-in girlfriend, actress, part-time pet groomer, manicurist in training, barista. Now she works as a courtroom sketch artist and has to get to work very early when there’s a case that’s closed to the cameras. Tucked into some detail of her pictures—a briefcase corner, a fingernail—you could see “Heather” written in tight letters; evidence she’d been there.
One time Heather had to do a road rage case—a guy who’d had a woman pull over on the interstate and then shot her. It was better for Heather just to draw, to concentrate on the charcoal and the way she could get the sticks to move across the colored paper, than to think about the people she depicted. One man testified, looked right at her, and Heather’d had to duck down, shielding herself behind her hair.
The past couple weeks she’d been hired for a case involving a white man who killed some black girls back in the sixties. She’d wanted to tell Brian about it in the entryway but couldn’t really say much for legal reasons, but she could say that she enjoyed the work. To her mother Heather explained what the job made her feel: that she’d become a good judge of when people looked sorry—maybe they were remorseful or maybe just excellent at pretending, but true sorrow pulled at the mouth, the muscles at the tops of the cheeks near the ears, and, Heather said, you can’t fake that.
The first night of Shiva, Heather went up just to bring Kyla some flowers that had been delivered and set on the front stoop. Even though she was only a neighbor, not a friend, it seemed the right thing to do. Heather held the pot of mums as she took the stairs two at a time and wondered if couldn’t they have sent a different kind of flower to someone who just lost her mother. Heather wondered if Kyla knew about flowers, if she’d analyze the delivery that much. Kyla’s front door was open, and she was sitting off in the corner on a low stool while people picked at the side-table food and talked. Kyla nodded to Heather but didn’t get up, so Heather left the plant on the kitchen counter and looked again at the food. Bald white eggs gathered together on a platter like old men, sticky breads sheared of their ends were ready for slicing, and bowls of cashews and nectarines were at the back. Heather didn’t want to take any of the food and didn’t know what to do, so she left and went to her apartment, where she could hear people sounds: a baby fussing, some crying, a cough. Two teenage boys—the dead woman’s grandchildren?—took a seat on the stairs near Heather’s doorway and ate candied pecans. She could see them holding handfuls of the nuts while they talked first about sports and then about a party that had occurred or maybe would occur.
At work, Heather had to produce a drawing about every ten minutes, and she was pretty good at guessing when people might move or rearrange themselves, so she knew beforehand that one of the boys was getting ready to stand up. Before he did, though, he looked over at her, peering from around the corner. He told the other boy to get a look. They both stood up and watched her watching them until some old lady came down and told them to get ready to go. One of them winked at Heather, and the other made some gesture that excited her even though she didn’t want it to.
Once the mourners left, the front hall had only Brian’s boots, a couple of umbrellas none of the tenants used much, and Kyla’s blue raincoat, which was missing its sash. Heather stood out there, listening to the sounds coming from Brian’s apartment. It was difficult to tell the real moans from the televised. She took Suspicion outside and let her have a good dig in the brush, nosing into the fallen leaves, so Heather could look through Brian’s window. Naked on TV, a man held a bare woman upside down so her face was to the bed. Heather wondered if Brian ate the nonfat ice-cream sandwiches while he watched this kind of thing, or if he waited until later. Suspicion barked at a mole or a mouse hunching under the piled dirt by the curb. Heather wasn’t sure how long she’d stayed out there. Each time a car came by, she patted Suspicion or looked to the sky as if she was searching for a meteor shower or was about to comment on the weather.
Today, she saw Brian’s new girl towel-wrap her hair and head across to the market to buy their supper: cod cakes and coleslaw, and more ice cream. The girl went right over there in her robe as if that was what people did, paraded around in their underwear or house clothes, and then came back to where Heather stood sorting the mail. The postman just shoved a rubber-banded pile of letters and flyers into the black box on the side of the house and left them to figure out what pieces went where. Heather handed the girl Brian’s pile, and the girl smiled without showing any teeth before slinging the plastic grocery bag over her shoulder and going inside to watch something on television.
Thursdays, Heather works late. She drives to the courthouse at two in the afternoon and she doesn’t come home until eight, and she’s not allowed to eat while people are testifying. Sometimes as she draws she creates sandwiches in her head, envisioning egg salad on rye with lettuce, or restructuring the whole thing on a sub, swapping tuna for egg. Then she feels guilty for thinking about food while someone’s trying to tell his story to the court.
Sometimes, she’s still sketching in her head when she’s trying to sleep, the way, after having been skiing or on a waterslide, the body keeps doing it even after the activity is gone. Heather feels much of life is like that, already repeating itself. Smells overlap—grape soda from childhood, someone’s garlic breath, low tide—and people’s gestures do, too. The way a May Day parade queen had raised a hand to her in a wave, her mother’s single raised brow, a guy she’d slept with who’d drowned the next day—he�
��d raised his mouth to the soft spot under her chin. Daily, Heather feels the familiarity of gestures, smells, words is so common it seems eerie; isn’t lukewarm a grotesque word? The act of hair growing, isn’t that slightly revolting? And touch—comforting and sickening, both. That guy she’d had sex with had drowned the next day; she’d watched as his body was hauled to shore and hadn’t known where to go or what to do afterward, shattered not so much at his death as at the realization that there was no future with him, that he would never even have the chance to miss her or wonder about her.
In drawing, she’d learned some people are harder to draw than others. Attorneys had certain gestures they did a lot; the hard part was when they wouldn’t face her. It made it tough to get a good sketch. When Heather got to the courtroom super early, and they were already at their tables, taking notes, she’d sometimes do quick sketches of their faces so she could capture them before they turned around. Heather always liked making the judge—she never had to draw below the chest, and the arms were plainly visible.
Through the ceiling, clomping and dragging—of furniture, though maybe it’s a body? It occurs to Heather that she doesn’t even know what they did with the mother’s body. The mother, Trishelle, had died while Heather was working, and she’d come home to a quiet house. Brian slept during the day after he’d had his breakfast sandwich and left the crumpled waxed paper wrapped in the leg hole of his boot. Kyla was upstairs, Heather figured, and a man—her brother, Heather thought, who had the same curly dark hair and full belly—told Heather what had happened. He said Heather should expect some noise when people came to visit for Shiva. Heather asked him what happened later, after the week had passed, and he told her about Sheloshim, the thirty days of mourning when the mourners try to get back to normal activities even though they and everyone around knows about the grieving.
The Girls' Almanac Page 23