“I’m sorry,” Anabelle told him, placing the dandelion crown over her bouncy ringlets. “I don’t know what to say. I guess I care about you, but I don’t want to always have to take care of you.” She looked like a princess. Some kind of earthy goddess.
Matt’s throat started to burn. It was a feeling he’d gotten used to during his parents’ divorce—it came from swallowing his tears before they could leak out of his eyes. “I’d take care of you,” he said, trying to control the quake in his voice. “Whatever you needed. Whenever you needed it.”
“But I don’t know if I’m ready to make that kind of commitment to you. And I’m not sure I want you to make it to me either.” She said it completely calmly and stony-faced.
It was clear: she didn’t want to make this work. She’d made up her mind, and if he kept trying to convince her that there was a solution, he’d just sound whiny. And yet, he couldn’t help but whine. “What about us getting married?” he asked. They’d been planning on doing it right here at the little chapel in the cemetery the summer after she graduated Oberlin. A small wedding, only them and their families.
Anabelle just looked at him. Serene, elegant, and poised, like a sixteenth-century marble sculpture.
And then, he couldn’t help it: in one big exhale, the tears let loose. It was as if a dam had broken behind his eyes. “What about Mount Desert Island? I’ve got the cabin booked.” His voice sounded like some half-feminine version of himself.
“We should cancel it,” she said simply.
He lifted the neck of his shirt and wiped his eyes as the thunder kaboomed straight overhead. “You know, I’ve actually been thinking we should break up,” he lied. “For kind of a long time:”
“Really?” she said, cocking her dandelion-crowned head.
“Uh-huh.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he said, “you make me too happy. And I can’t create when I’m happy. No artist can.”
“Oh,” she said, sucking in her lower lip. “Well, I wouldn’t want to hold you back.”
There was something about seeing her hurt that made him able to stop crying so much. As if now they were even.
A few tiny raindrops fell on the grass in front of them. And then, within seconds, the sky completely opened up.
It was the kind of rain that made it impossible to see anything more than five feet away. But on their bench under the trees, all they felt was a little mist.
Matt leaned over and picked a dandelion from the grass. One of those fluffy ones that looked like a tiny globe of snow. He handed it to Anabelle. “Make a wish,” he said.
She shut her eyes and held the dandelion under her chin. The rain whished. She blew.
The white airy seeds parachuted out into the storm.
Anabelle reached over to his eyelashes. “Hang on, one didn’t make it.” She pulled the seed off of his face and blew it away.
Then she picked a dandelion for him. “Your turn,” she said.
Make this a good one, Matt told himself as he closed his eyes. He sat there for a second, letting the seeds tickle his lips. I wish that we get back together someday, he thought, huffing at the flower as if it were a birthday candle. There was something really romantic about the idea that this wasn’t it, that they’d suffer for a while without one another and then realize that they just couldn’t bear to live apart. Like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
“So this is really happening?” Anabelle asked.
“It’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“I guess. But it’s so hard.”
Matt grabbed her hand and squeezed it three times. Once for I, once for love, once for you. She waited a beat, then did the same back to him.
She leaned in close. “Can I, um ... can I kiss you one last time?”
He answered her by pressing his lips to hers. It lasted through the next three rolls of thunder. The rain pounded down harder, creating a curtain all around them.
Matt ran his fingers along the bottom of Anabelle’s belly. It was warm and soft. “Can I do this one last time?” he asked, creeping his hand up higher and higher under her shirt.
She nodded, pushing her hand inside the elastic of his boxers. “Can I do this one last time?”
“Uh-huh.”
They weren’t really doing anything, just holding each other in places where nobody else had ever touched them.
“I can’t imagine doing stuff with anyone else,” she said.
“I know, me neither,” he said.
“Can we just sit here for a while?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. It’s not like they could go anywhere else right now without getting soaked.
Matt looked out at the headstones, darkened from the rain. There were the couples, the families. And then there were a few sad ones all off on their lonesome, their names worn off.
Anabelle leaned her head on his shoulder, her hair brushing the underside of his chin.
He was already imagining the poetry he could write about this moment, the paintings he could make. The sculptures. It was going to be a busy year.
{ CHIN Deep }
mary-tyler singletary
For the twenty-fifth day in a row, Mary-Tyler woke up imagining she was in a coffin.
Tucked tightly in her sheets, she lay on her back, listening—and heard absolutely nothing. Her eyes fluttered open and she saw the same pitch black as when they’d been shut. It could’ve been five A.M. or two in the afternoon; she didn’t know and she didn’t care. That was the freedom of being in a lightless room.
She could never keep it up for too long, though, because eventually she’d convince herself that she really was trapped in a box deep in the earth and there were all sorts of things up there in the living world that she’d miss: swinging on a rope over a stream; flipping on a trampoline; going on that salt ‘n’ pepper shaker ride at the little amusement park with the funny name. She had to get on that thing before her life was over.
Mary-Tyler took out her earplugs. And there was her dad’s voice, somewhere outside the blackness: Get a whiff of that honeysuckle! Is that to die for or what? Then, the crisp snipping sounds of garden shears. She stood up and felt her way along her bed, and then the wall, until she reached her closet. She opened the closet door and groped around the inside, running her fingertips over a panel of buttons, and pushed the top one. The automated blinds whirred, first letting in pinpricks of light, then long stripes. Mary-Tyler squinted as the sun flooded her room and watched the blinds rise to the top of her two expansive windows—one on either side of the corner.
Down by the path to the beach was her father, all pudgy and balding and sucking on his water bottle with the little nipply top. As usual, he was standing beneath the gardeners’ ladders, pretending he wanted to make small talk but really making sure they didn’t miss any spots—that they got the giraffes’ necks just right.
Mary-Tyler groaned. She’d asked her father several times to let the gardeners do their work in peace. Last week she’d even made him a Bloody Mary—his favorite drink—and set it on a table by the pool, along with the Wall Street Journal, which she’d opened to the stock pages. But he’d just picked up the drink and the paper and carried them with him as he trailed the gardeners, eyeing their work while they shaped the elephants’ tusks and the monkeys’ tails; it was the thin, delicate parts he worried about most.
Once her eyes had adjusted to the light, Mary-Tyler threw on her fluffy white bathrobe to protect her legs from the arctic-cold air-conditioning and walked down to the second-floor bathroom, her flip-flops clapping against her soles. She undressed, trying not to catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror-lined walls and ceiling. It was impossible, though, to avoid seeing her body in reflection upon reflection upon reflection. She grabbed a handful of her stomach, wishing she could squeeze the blubber right out of it and—prestos!—she’d be thin. Standing in the whirlpool tub, she turned the showerhead to its highest pressure setting and let it pelt water at her scalp like a ba
rrage of BBs.
As she lathered up, she eyed her razor. She hadn’t shaved her entire time here. It’s not like there was a point; she didn’t see anyone besides her parents. But maybe, she thought, just maybe if she did it today, it would give her motivation to venture away from this place, to be seen in public. She squirted a glob of pink shaving gel in her palm, then rubbed it into a foam over her armpits and legs and slowly scraped it off. After she’d rinsed and shut off the water, she felt a sharp stinging in both of her Achilles tendons. She knelt down to find blood trickling down her heels. Blade must’ve been too sharp. Or too dull, maybe.
She stepped out onto the floor and dragged her feet along the tiles, tracking trails of blood behind her—and in the never-ending reflections. She wondered what would happen if she’d cut her wrists instead of her heels.
How long would it take for her parents to realize she was lying in the tub bleeding?
Mary-Tyler headed down the hall in one of her many black bathing suits—an athletic racer-back-type thing, to keep all her stuff tucked in neatly. Though, again, why did it matter if only her parents ever saw her? One of these days, she thought, I should buy a two-piece. Nothing too risqué—a tankini or something. Maybe she’d do it today, even, to go with her freshly shaven armpits and legs.
She walked down the spiral staircase, and when she got to the first-floor landing, she stopped and checked the thermostat. Sixty-eight degrees. Way too cold. She turned it up to seventy-five. No, seventy-six. Why did it need to be so cold in here when her parents spent all day outside anyway?
She punched the warming button up one more degree, then continued through what her mom called the “sitting room,” the “den,” and the “sunroom” until she reached the kitchen. There, she opened the fridge and found a plate wrapped in tinfoil, topped with a Post-it with her name on it. She lifted the foil. Today it was blueberry pancakes with bacon. Plus a glass of freshly squeezed juice, which sat beside the plate. When they were at the “cottage,” Mary-Tyler’s dad was in a constant state of squeezing oranges. That is, when he wasn’t keeping an eye on the workers.
Being in the kitchen always put Mary-Tyler on edge. There were just too many things in there that she imagined could be used to damage herself. Obviously, there were knives, which she could use to chop off her hands.
But then there were other things, like boiling water or hot coffee, which she could dump all over her bare feet. Or the vegetable peeler, which could scoop out her eyes.
Trying not to look at the fancy gigantic corkscrew on the counter, she grabbed her breakfast, plus a bottle of pure maple syrup, and brought them out to the patio table.
The gardeners’ snipping had fallen into a pattern of threes, echoing the call-and-response of the birds around them. There would be a snip-snip-snip from one, then a snip-snip-snip from the other—a waltz over the drone of a distant lawn mower.
Mary-Tyler poured herself a puddle of syrup, then plunged a strip of bacon into it and bit off an end. Cold, but still crisp. Just how she liked it.
“No, see there have to be two of each,” she heard her dad say up ahead of her, somewhere inside the topiary. “Otherwise they can’t reproduce.”
“But it’s bushes, man!” one gardener said. “Bushes can’t do the reproduce!”
“Theoretically, I mean,” her dad said sternly.
More snipping sounds.
“It makes perfect sense!” she heard her dad say. “Haven’t you ever read the story?! If we get flooded, we’re all set!” He chuckled.
No laughter from the gardeners.
Mary-Tyler burst a berry against the roof of her mouth.
“Make sure one’s a male and one’s a female,” her dad said. “Because obviously, that’s the only way it’ll work. Got it?”
He emerged from behind a rhinoceros and shook his head disapprovingly at a row of tree-shaped bushes, which he’d been going on about nonstop last night at dinner.
“They look too ... lollipop-ish,” he’d said.
Of course, Mary-Tyler had to pipe up and inform him that that wasn’t even a word.
“Too much like a lollipop,” he’d clarified.
“I know what you meant,” she’d snapped. “But I just don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“Why you have to make a tree look like a different kind of tree.”
“It’s not a tree to begin with,” he’d told her, with the tone of a scolding teacher. “It’s a bush.”
Tree, bush. Same difference. Whatever words you wanted to use, it was still ridiculous. Beyond ridiculous.
After breakfast—brunch? brinner?—Mary—Tyler spurted sunscreen on her limbs and rubbed it in until it stopped looking cream-cheesy.
She continued with her daily routine and walked across the lawn toward the pool. On her way, she saw something shiny glinting in the sun, hanging on the butt of one of the topiary bears. It had been pretty stormy recently and rain often churned up trash in their yard—yet another thing that really got her dad going. This piece of debris turned out to be a tangled mess of brown cassette tape. She always wondered how tape wound up on the streets in the city and had no idea how it could’ve landed in their yard. Were people in the habit of unraveling their tapes once they broke? And who even listened to cassettes anymore? She left it there, knowing her dad would find it and get pissed off—though hopefully not at the gardeners.
Her mother was in her usual spot by the pool’s edge, sunning her perfectly thin self on a chaise lounge. Mary-Tyler wasn’t sure what good it did her mom to get any more tan; she seemed to have hit her maximum browning potential at least a week ago. Didn’t she get bored of lying around, doing nothing?
Mary-Tyler kicked off her flip-flops and stuck her toe in the water. Just a little cooler than air temperature. Nice.
The pool was designed to look “natural.” “More like naturally man-made,” Mary-Tyler had corrected her dad when he’d explained the concept to her. She couldn’t imagine where in the natural environment you would find a small body of water surrounded by smooth slate, rocks jutting out around the perimeter as seats, and tiny cascading waterfalls punctuating the surface. And the diving board? How was that supposed to be natural? She was still waiting for an answer.
He’d been a jerk to the pool installation guys, too, lecturing about how the water should be greenish blue, not bluish green. Everyone who’d ever worked on the house hated them, and it was all her dad’s fault. Why couldn’t he see that?
Mary-Tyler descended down the pool steps, into the glassy greenish-blue water. She walked out a few paces, then got on her back and floated—arms to the sides, feet straight ahead, stomach flat.
She felt her chin-length hair spreading around her head, her ears underwater. She couldn’t hear her dad, couldn’t hear the workers. She couldn’t even see them from where she was. All she saw was sky and wiggling tips of willow trees—a slow silent film moving to the sound track of the hollow gurgling beneath the surface of the pool.
On most days, she would look up at the clouds, searching for humanlike forms that she could build out of clay in her studio back at home. There was one formation she’d seen a few days ago that she’d already planned on replicating: a bunch of bodies all heaped on top of one another, and then right beside them one figure curled in on itself.
But today there were no clouds. Just clear, flat blue.
She felt her legs sinking and gave a little frog kick to keep herself afloat. Up above, a parasailer glided by, and she imagined what she must look like from a bird’s-eye view. Lone girl stretched out in a “natural-looking” pool. Around her, a bright green lawn. Weirdo animal bushes. Lollipop-ish tree bushes. And then, off to the side, the ocean, the beach, and loads of people out enjoying the weather. Having fun, making friends, going on adventures. Her entire body filled with envy. She wanted to be out there doing whatever they were doing.
She wondered if maybe tonight “the vandals” would come back. That was her dad’s name for those ki
ds who’d snuck into their pool. Her dad was convinced they were the same people responsible for the rock that had gone through the workout-room window early in the summer. Mary-Tyler didn’t believe they would’ve done that. They were just kids being kids. Kids having a good time. Ever since that night they’d shown up, she’d been staying up waiting for them, hoping that this time they wouldn’t run away. Or that they’d take her with them. She’d hung on to the bowling shoes one of them had left behind; they fit perfectly on her ogre-size feet.
Mary-Tyler let herself sink underwater. Lately, she’d been timing herself to see how long she could hold her breath.
But today she didn’t count. She just blew bubbles out of her nose, wondering how long it would take before she drowned, wondering if she’d even notice it happening. She imagined her parents’ reactions if they found her dead in the pool. Would they realize that this wasn’t an accident? That she’d done it to show them how much they were suffocating her?
No, Mary-Tyler thought. They’d just add it to the list of things I’ve done to hurt them. It would come right after getting a B in chemistry and before not entering a sculpture in the citywide high school art competition. Actually, it might top briefly dating the scholarship kid freshman year—the one who lived in Harlem.
I have to do something, she told herself. I can’t just keep waiting for fun to come to me. I have to go out and find it myself
Besides, she had smooth legs today, dammit.
Mary-Tyler burst out of the pool, wrapped a towel around her waist, and ran toward the dirt path on the lawn, weaving between the oversize animals.
“Where’re you off to in such a hurry?” her dad asked when she passed him. The nipple on his water bottle squeaked as he pulled it from his lips.
“Meeting a friend!” Mary-Tyler said. “I’m late!”
“I didn’t know you knew anyone here!”
“It’s someone from school who’s in town! She just called! We’re going shopping for back-to-school clothes!”
The View from the Top Page 8