Honestly, We Meant Well

by Grant Ginder

  Will says, “Maybe you should let Ginny talk.”

  She looks up at him, then back at Dean. Watching her eyes twitch, he finds himself hoping that she launches into one of her diatribes. Some impassioned speech about misogyny, and the sanctity of the female body, and the inherently patriarchal foundations of language, and—God, what else—Ophelia, maybe, yes, Ophelia, and how, like Ginny is now to Dean, she was a pawn in Hamlet’s game, a casualty of his incessant and dizzying madness.

  Instead, Ginny holds the can of Fanta to the side of her neck.

  She says, “I feel like I’m going to be sick.”

  Dean reaches over and rubs her back. Ginny doesn’t wince, nor does she turn away.

  “Look, Will, I’m begging you,” he says, his voice now soft and breathy. “Your mother can’t know. Ginny’s agreed to spend the rest of today and tonight at a hotel in town and fly back to San Francisco tomorrow afternoon. When we get back on Monday she and I will … well, we’ll discuss the necessary next steps.” At this, Ginny begins to quietly cry. “In the meantime, your mother—God, this would just kill her. This needs to be our secret. Okay, kiddo?”

  “You want me to keep a secret from my own mother?”

  “That’s what I’m asking, yes.”

  “She’s my family, Dad.”

  “Yes! Exactly! And what is family if not a bunch of secrets we keep from each other? Look, this will … this would be nuclear, okay? It would seriously destroy us, and just when we’re starting to get back in a good place.”

  “I’m going to have to disagree with you, Dad: this place looks very, very bad.”

  Dean picks up his empty wineglass and, frowning at it, fills it with a little of Ginny’s grape Fanta.

  “And what if I do tell Mom?” Will asks. “What if I don’t keep your secret?”

  His father thinks.

  “I’ll call Claudia Min,” he says. “And Chip Fieldworth. I’ll tell them the story you turned in as your thesis was mine.”

  “So now you’re blackmailing me. First you publish a bestseller with my work—”

  “I don’t mean to split hairs, but I did some substantial editing to that prose.”

  “—and then you kill me off—”

  “Fictitiously!”

  “—and now you’re fucking blackmailing me.”

  Dean sips from the wineglass. Purple soda coats the stubble of his mustache.

  He says, “I think I’d prefer to think of it as mutually assured destruction.”

  “You know, he isn’t wrong, Will,” Ginny says. “I took History of the Cold War sophomore year—this is mutually assured destruction, but without the nukes.”

  “Shut up, Ginny.”

  “I’m just trying to be helpful.”

  “Well, you’re not. You are not being helpful.”

  Ginny looks down and picks at a loose thread on her shirt.

  She says, “I’d also like to point out that ‘Anatomy and Physiology’ and ‘Unpublished Stories’ are both really bad folder names. You are both so … so incredibly bad at this.”

  Will buries his face in his hands. He strains to hear something from the outside world: the distant honk of a horn, maybe, or the short, hard rattle of a warbler. He’ll take anything that’s not the hiss of his father’s breath or the quiet gargle of Ginny’s tears. How bizarre, how laughable it is to think that, not even an hour ago, he was moping about Dio and the death of a romance that, really, wasn’t even a romance at all. He tries telling himself that there’s comfort in this—that while you’re staggering through one tragedy, it’s important to keep things in perspective and remember that it’s only a matter of time until a bigger one swoops in to take its place.

  Uncovering his eyes, he says, “I’m telling Mom, Dad, because she deserves to know. And then, after that, I’ll own up and tell Claudia Min about the story myself.”

  Dean begins to argue, but something stops him: a sound unlike anything that he or Will has ever heard. Something that’s half siren’s wail, half banshee’s shriek—a pitch so high it rattles the windows in their frames.

  Ginny, throwing her head back and screaming.

  Ginny Polonsky

  August 3

  Aegina

  The first thing that made Ginny Polonsky feel stupid was a pink Easy-Bake Oven.

  She had received it for her ninth birthday—it was the only thing she wanted. Even now, she remembers the thrill of opening it. The way she knew what the gift was as soon as she picked it up; the wonderful, fateful ease with which she removed the wrapping paper. For a week, she kept it in its box. Her family thought she was crazy, but Ginny didn’t care. She liked the way it looked, sitting among her other toys—a pink treasure, protected by cardboard, framed by a harem of stuffed bears, unicorns, and lambs. Then, one day, her sister convinced her to take the next step. “The point of having an Easy-Bake Oven,” Elsa said, “is to actually bake something.” And because Ginny was young and didn’t yet know that some boxes are best left closed, she listened to her. She removed the oven and shed its packaging, and then she and Elsa went about making brownies, stirring together one of the grainy mixes her parents had bought her. When they were done they tasted awful, nothing like anything her mother had ever made. Upset, Ginny began to worry: For the rest of the oven’s working life, would she be expected to make things with it? Cookies with burnt, brittle edges; cupcakes whose insides were doughy and undercooked? When she wasn’t using it, would her parents ask what was wrong with her? Would they question buying her future toys she coveted? She imagined them whispering that she was lazy or ungrateful; that in wanting to admire the oven as opposed to bake cute things with it, she was shirking some crucial duty she had as a daughter.

  And so, two nights after the brownie disaster, once she had dutifully cleaned the oven, she went about dissecting it. She wanted to see what made it so different, so entirely inadequate, compared to the oven her mother used. Opening the pink door and removing the device’s feeble little tray, she was confronted with a curiosity: a lightbulb, small and round and splattered with a single glob of brownie batter. Her mother’s oven had no bulbs—rather, upon inspection, Ginny found an elaborate series of tubes, a heating element powered by such adult forces as fire and gas. Kneeling on the kitchen’s tile, she felt duped and dumb: she had thought she was so old baking with Elsa, so impossibly mature. Really, though, the world had tricked her. It turned out, she was nothing but a kid, turning on the same kind of light that topped the princess lamps in her room.

  There were more disappointments after that, more opportunities to feel stupid and naïve. They ranged from the small (saying nauseous when she meant nauseated; having to pretend to understand the latest Pynchon) to the momentous (not getting into Smith; thinking November 8, 2016, would turn out differently). Each of them she recalls vividly, perfectly, as if they’re specimens she’s preserved in jars. Here’s when she just missed getting into the National Honor Society; and here’s when her aunt Sharon died. Here’s when she overheard her mother tell her sister that she’d always be the smarter one, and here’s when Ginny started to believe it. Little balls of anguish and despair, neatly contained and turning yellow in jars of formaldehyde. A history, she likes to think, presented like a display in a house of oddities—a whole life tracked by its enduring regrets.

  Which means that none of this should be new to her. She should be able to compartmentalize the sinking feeling in her chest, the way her knees suddenly feel light. She can’t, though; every time she tries to screw the top onto this new jar, it pops off again. The reason, she suspects, is Dean’s book—or perhaps, to be more specific, the realization that Dean’s book is not actually Dean’s book at all, but a forgery, a lie. What does that say about Ginny? She loved that book—it was, in so many ways, the map that steered her through the last ten months. And now she finds out that the thing that saved her is basically a cheap act of theft—the literary equivalent of a Katy Perry song. This realization leads her to other, more trouble
some territory. She thinks, for example, of the things she did to him in that diner bathroom and, in turn, the things she let him do to her—the ways in which she inserted herself into the Wright family. At the time, she had found it thrilling; she was, in many ways, living the plot of so many bawdy novels: the aloof literature professor falling for the promising (she is, she still holds, promising) nubile writer. The fact that this particular aloof literature professor was married didn’t register to her—or, if it did, it appeared as a blip, a dot that flashed across her radar when she felt her life needed a little narrative tension. She told herself that any obligation she felt to Sue Ellen as another woman was contrived, a reinforcement of the patriarchal standards she so vocally abhorred. After all, how many times had she read about the ease with which men commit adultery, only to escape the consequences? By forcing herself to adhere to some cosmic feminine allegiance, Ginny was giving men another pass—a chance to fudge the rules while she was bound to some unattainable sisterhood. Real freedom, she decided, was allowing herself to do whatever the fuck she wanted. How stupid that had been, though—how terribly and unfathomably stupid. She had invested her faith in a mutable philosophy instead of a basic sense of compassion. She had preferred the easy protection of an ism to the complications of other people.

  What else? She thinks of Scarlett and her foam cups. She thinks of melting ice caps and overfished oceans and how, no matter how many trees she plants and protests she attends, she will never be able to save them. She thinks of how uncomfortable the flight was across the Atlantic, and what it felt like to have morning sickness in the Frankfurt International Airport. And then she thinks of Dean: the horror and dread that befell him when she told him she was pregnant; the entreaties he’d made to her as, over a bottle and a half of wine, he tried to persuade her to get rid of their child. Or, no—not their child, but her child. Can she regret how naïve she had been about that? Can she regret her child? She looks down at her belly button, poking out from the bottom hem of her shirt. Maybe she could, she thinks; in fact, she probably should. She probably should, but, somehow, she refuses to. She can’t.

  Will and Dean continue to argue, and Ginny looks down at her rucksack. Reaching for it, she runs her finger along one of the patches on the outside flap—an iron-on shield from Greenpeace, which shows an orca jumping over a rainbow. She picked it up at a rally, somewhere near the Embarcadero. It was hardly a year ago, but still she can’t remember what it was about—all she knows is that she wore a black crop-top that said FUCK YOUR DIRTY OIL. There had been chants—there are always chants—but as Ginny joined along with them, she remembers not completely understanding what she was saying. But then, was this so different from the other rallies she’d attended, or the other town halls where she had stood in line behind a microphone to speak? How often in her life had she raised her voice, only to parrot back a thread she had read on Twitter? How many times had she violently committed herself to a cause without ever stopping to consider if she actually agreed with it? The truth, she realizes, is that she doesn’t know what she believes. Rather, all she knows is what she doesn’t know—which, weirdly, feels like more than she’s ever known before.

  The problem, though, is that she can’t put this feeling in a jar, like all her other regrets. Rather, this time around, it’s Ginny who feels like the jar—a vessel that’s been emptied of what is essential. The naïve notion that love lasts in perpetuity, or something. Her youth. Disappointment, meanwhile, is all the stuff that storms around her, throwing her against things like the Aegean, and Greek islands, and the Wrights. Threatening, as it were, to shatter her. Listening to Will and Dean argue about who will tell what to whom (as it turns out, neither of them is very good at blackmailing), she thinks about all this, feels all this: the way the world seems to be pressing against her, wrapping its fingers around her neck, filling her cheeks with a new and impossible heat. And then, because all other options have been scrapped from the table—because, really, this is the only way out, and out is a place Ginny Polonsky would very much like to be—she screams.

  It’s unlike anything she’s ever heard. A guttural, primal roar that starts somewhere near her hip flexors and then travels, gaining volume and collecting little bits of rage, to her throat. At first it terrifies her—her own scream terrifies her—but then she comes to sort of love it. Or, if not love it, then embrace it, clench her fists together and shut her eyes and let her sound fill the room until she’s out of air and the two of them have, totally and utterly stupefied, gone quiet.

  “Shut up,” she says, once she’s taken a breath.

  “Ginny—”

  “I said to shut up, Dean. You are talking. Talking, as you know, is not shutting up.”

  He opens his mouth, preparing to argue, but Ginny lifts an eyebrow. “One more word, and I swear I’ll do it again,” she says. “I swear I’ll make that sound again.”

  From where he’s standing, Will stares at her. His nose, she sees now, is red and beginning to peel: the scorched aftermath of a sunburn. For the first time since he arrived, there’s silence. Ginny takes a moment to center herself, to breathe. Outside, a breeze rattles through the pines, and as she listens, she tries to imagine what wind might look like, if anyone were ever lucky enough to see it. After a minute or so, though, she notices that Will and Dean are still watching her, waiting for her next move. The problem, of course, is that she doesn’t have one; her immediate plan had been to get them both to just stop talking, and now that she’s accomplished that, she’s planless. She looks down at the table, where a faint sigma has been carved into the wood. Tracing it with her thumb, she thinks.

  She says, “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen. Dean, I’m going to publish that story with Will’s byline, and you—you’re going to let me. And you’re going to keep your mouth shut about it, because, honestly, that’s the least you can do for both of us.”

  Will shakes his head. He says, “Ginny, I already said that I don’t want the story published. I want to tell Claudia what I did. I want to do the right thing.”

  “Will, please,” Ginny says. “The only thing that’s more obnoxious than a liar is someone who’s self-righteous about the truth. Besides, without that story the only thing the Review’s got is an anecdote about a pair of crickets. Literal crickets.”

  “And what if I don’t let you do that?” Dean says. “What if I call Claudia myself?”

  Ginny doesn’t miss a beat.

  “Have at it,” she says. “I’ll call The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. I’ll get on Twitter and tell the world what a fucking fraud you really are. Which, really, would be a tragedy. That book means something to a lot of people, and just because it’s been ruined for me, that doesn’t mean it should be ruined for them.”

  He thinks she’s bluffing: “Go ahead. No one cares about books anymore, anyway.”

  She’s not: “Nice try, Dean. The internet cares about everything.”

  She’s sweating, which she’s just now noticed. A trickle works its way down her spine to the waistband of her pants.

  “And what about—”

  “About our baby?” Ginny looks down at her belly. “Tell your wife whatever you want. Or don’t tell her, for all I care. I’m not here to ruin lives—you seem totally capable of doing that on your own.”

  She walks to the bathroom to collect her rucksack, and as she does so, she glances at herself in the mirror. Her eyes are ringed with dark crescents, and her skin is pale and clammy. Sighing once, she slaps a bit of color into her cheeks and tries to smooth a few of the wrinkles from her shirt.

  “We should think this over,” Dean says, once she’s returned.

  “It’s not open to workshopping.” Ginny slips her sack over her shoulder. “Now, if there aren’t any more questions, I’ll be leaving. There’s a four thirty ferry, and I plan to be on it. I’ve been here for less than two hours, and already I need to get the fuck off this island.”

  * * *

 
She’s feeling good. That’s what she thinks as she storms out of the dining room and into the foyer: she’s feeling good. Or, if not good, exactly, then better, more in control. Less the girl who cries in Walnut Creek diners, more the woman who knows when it’s time to leave. She knows that there are issues she’ll need to tackle, ranging from the logistical (booking a room in Athens; finding a flight home; pregnancy) to the more emotionally complex (what is she supposed to do now?), but she figures she’ll be in a better state of mind to think about all that once she’s left Aegina and extricated herself from a situation that she—Ginny—has helped to make largely inextricable. She tightens her rucksack on her shoulders and lifts her suitcase with both arms. From somewhere within the inn, she can hear Will trailing after her, begging her to wait and talk and slow down. Ginny doesn’t, though; she just keeps going. She hasn’t called a cab, but she figures she’ll walk to town if she has to. She’s feeling strong. Hopped up on the sort of hard-won clarity that she suspects writers are referring to when they talk about epiphanies.

  Except, she isn’t able to. Walk to town, that is. Because just as she’s starting the trek along the drive that leads from the hotel to the main road, she encounters a taxi, dodging divots as it drives toward her. She pauses and sets down her suitcase as the cab rolls to a stop five yards away. In the backseat, Sue Ellen Wright hands the driver a few euros and opens the door as she waits for her change. She looks younger than Ginny remembers—or maybe remembers is inaccurate, given that for the past year she’s done less to remember Sue Ellen than she has to construct an entirely new and dismal version of her, an awful shrew, which allows Ginny to believe that she’s saving Dean instead of wrecking a home. Now, she watches as Sue Ellen straightens her shirt and scratches the back of her neck. Watches, in other words, as she turns from a convenient trope into someone entirely and undeniably human. Somewhere deep in her gut, Ginny feels a rumbling. At first, she wonders if it’s the baby doing tiny somersaults atop her bladder. Soon, though, she realizes it’s something else: hunger—she hasn’t eaten since Frankfurt—coated with the sticky stuff of guilt.