The Careful Undressing of Love

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “I can’t believe Angelika got into her head,” Mom says. “I always thought Delilah was the strongest of you all.”

  If Delilah was the strongest, who was I? And who am I now?

  “Those reporters should take pictures of those batty ladies, if they want a real story,” Roger says, always making light of the things that feel heaviest to me and Mom.

  We don’t laugh.

  • • •

  They leave my hair long. They line my eyes in black and it’s stark against my too-pale skin. They make my lips pinker and an hour later I’m me but not-me. The stylist flips through my closet and picks out my heart sweater and my gray leggings and asks me if I have “a few of those keys, like the other girls.”

  I slip on the one I always wear, and they exchange a look that tells me we are living up to expectations.

  “You’re all so pretty,” the makeup artist says. She has a streak of pink in her hair and bronze eyeshadow. “Must make it even harder.”

  “I usually wear sunglasses,” I say, showing her mine. They are large and dark and rimmed in blue. I put them on. She puts a finger to her chin.

  “Mysterious,” she says. “I like it.”

  When I look at myself in the mirror, I wish the sunglasses hid more of me. The shape of my face and my long hair and the way my lips part are all too distinct.

  “Are you an Aquarius?” the stylist asks. Each of her fingers has at least two rings on it and the way she moves her hands makes me think the rings are heavy. I wonder if it’s a choice she made so long ago that she can’t get out of it now. I wonder if she’s happy with the choice to be this girl versus that girl.

  I guess that’s the question Mom’s been asking in her head. Who would we be if we lived on the beach, if it were seventy degrees every day, if no one knew who we were.

  “Nope,” I say. “Leo.”

  “Thank God,” the stylist says. “Aquarians are supposed to have an awful month. And you all have been through enough.”

  “The bad things happen anyway,” I say. I’m quoting my father but she doesn’t know that. She nods seriously. This is another funny thing about being Affected. Strangers think your grief makes you understand something bigger, more profound.

  The reporter, a Puerto Rican woman with shiny hair and tailored clothes, writes down my words.

  “Good stuff, Lorna,” she says.

  I don’t want to be quoted in the magazine saying my father’s words. I don’t want to be anyone’s oracle. But it’s too late. The words are out there and I’m looking like someone’s idea of a Devonairre Street Girl and soon we’re all at the garden, crowded around the bench, the lot of us prettier and bigger eyed than usual.

  Delilah doesn’t wave hello.

  She removes herself from the rest of us, standing under the tree where Angelika declared her In Love. It’s something the reporters would eat right up, but none of us say anything about that afternoon. Angelika’s getting her picture taken, too, over on her stoop, holding a candle and a lemon, surrounded by her adoring followers.

  “Didn’t she have a great look?” the photographer asks the man positioning the lights.

  “Absolutely perfect,” the man with the lights says.

  We all rub our foreheads and wish the day away.

  • • •

  Cruz stands by the gate of the garden. He’s not meant to be part of the shoot, but he’s here, maybe for Charlotte, maybe for me, maybe for the faded idea of LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla. He has a bagel and sad eyes that won’t stop looking at me.

  I’d like a bagel, but it wouldn’t fit with the image of Devonairre Street Girl.

  “No one wants to see you eating or laughing or doing homework,” the reporter says when I ask if we can do something aside from sit here. “That’s what regular people do. We’re here to capture something special.”

  “You, with the braids?” the photographer says, pointing at Charlotte. “You sit on the right side of the bench.” Charlotte nods. They’ve let her keep her braids but they’ve painted her lips a dangerous red and she’s wearing one of her mother’s hippie dresses— it’s low in the back and lacy in the front and too big around her middle. They’ve cinched it onto her with a leather belt that she would never wear. She looks the least like herself. I think maybe they didn’t like Charlotte’s conservative collared shirts or thin lips or worn-out sneakers. Those things don’t fit in with the idea of romantic, dangerous, untouchable, sad, sad girls.

  Isla is in her blue dress and she has a dozen keys clattering around her neck. The photographer keeps telling her to stop fidgeting.

  Delilah is all in black. Her Afro has grown and they stuck a sprig of lavender near her ear.

  We don’t quite fit into the new dress code. My collarbone is showing and so are Isla’s knees. Charlotte’s exposed, too. Only Delilah is covered up the way we’re supposed to be now. I can feel her eyes on my neck; I watch her swallow hard at the bit of Isla’s thighs that are on display.

  They seat Isla on the left side of the bench and ask me to sit in the middle. My heart sweater itches. So does my made-up face.

  They let Delilah stay a little separate, standing a foot to the right of us all. Her back is straight and her gaze is, too. She stares right into the camera, like a challenge.

  “Make sure you get the back of the bench,” the reporter calls out, and we’re asked to turn around and face the camera as it moves behind us, our faces now framing the proclamation Love Was Found Here.

  I’m sweating.

  Cruz won’t move and more of the ladies are gathering by the gates to watch. Whenever I shift I elbow Charlotte and when Isla’s legs cross, her heel kicks my shin and we’re already bruised enough.

  “I can’t do this,” I say when the sun’s in our eyes.

  “Wide eyes, wide eyes,” the camerawoman says, her voice high and persistent and terrible.

  “It’s really sunny,” I say because the rest of the girls are zombies and everyone watching has forgotten we’re people, I think.

  “Blink in between shots, okay? We’ll get it. Wide eyes, wide eyes.” I squint under my glasses. I look to Charlotte and Isla and Delilah, but none of them will look at me. I don’t recognize any of them anyway. We’re not ourselves. We’re someone’s idea of what the Devonairre Street Girls might look like.

  “Can we get a break?” I ask.

  “Just be yourselves,” the photographer says, but what she really means is the opposite.

  I float up high and watch us from the one tree in the garden. We don’t look anything like ourselves. We look exactly the way someone might picture us—exaggerated ideas of what girls might be. Delilah’s face won’t move from a frown and every part of her is stiff, every muscle tensed like if her left pinkie relaxes she will fall apart. The rest of us are slump shouldered and slippery with makeup and sweat and something else—submission.

  I’m aware of my skinny legs and powdered skin and the curve of my back and the hearts on my sweater, so loud and ridiculous I can’t believe I let them order me into it.

  No one seeing us now would know the way Delilah smells when she’s crying or how Charlotte wrinkles her nose when she kisses Cruz or what noises Isla’s boots make when they hit the Devonairre Street sidewalk. They don’t even know that underneath my sunglasses I am looking only at Cruz.

  It’s amazing, what they’d see if they really looked.

  19.

  I don’t take off my heart sweater and I stay in the garden long after the reporters and photographers and the hungry, cruel ladies who have watched me all day have left. My hair is tangled and in my face so I tie it back, and Isla and Charlotte and Cruz hug me before they eventually go, but the gesture feels ghostly.

  Delilah lingers, like maybe she has something to say now that the others are gone. But she stays quiet and heads to the gate. When I ask where she’s
going, she tells me she has work to do.

  “You remember what Jack said about leaving early?” I ask, thinking of the smirk he used to get when we’d break up a party to get sleep or do homework.

  Delilah looks at me funny, like I’m not supposed to say his name.

  “Jack used to say leaving early was the saddest thing a person could do. That leaving a good time was a tragedy. Then you’d always say it was as sad as a butterfly in a net.” I keep my voice quiet, because memories are quiet things. My throat closes a little around Jack’s old words, but I’m happy to have remembered one more thing about him. I think maybe Delilah will soften, too. She looks up at the sky like she often does.

  “When I said that, I didn’t even know the meanings of words like sad and tragedy,” Delilah says. “A butterfly in a net. God. I was . . .” She pauses, looking for the word. Brilliant, I think. Lovely. Charming. Perfect. “Silly,” she says with a sigh.

  “You know now,” I say, because we’re best friends and best friends say the truest things. For the most brilliant moment, I think Delilah sees me again. The thing between us—the crazy bond that comes from having dead fathers and magical rituals and tiny apartments and a Shared Birthday—appears and we’re a yard apart but we might as well be pressed right up against each other. We might as well be one again.

  Then my phone buzzes and I glance at Cruz’s name and a text from him and the answer to the question who’s texting? is all over my face, and like that, the moment’s over.

  “I miss the hell out of you,” I say when she turns to leave.

  She turns back in my direction. She drinks me in but I don’t know what it is she’s seeing.

  “Don’t you want to stop terrible things from happening?” she says after what could be a minute or an hour. Her eyes are shiny and her bottom lip has a little-girl quiver. We aren’t being watched, we aren’t being photographed, we aren’t being seen as Those Girls.

  “I wish terrible things would stop happening. Of course I do. I mean. Of course. But we’re not the answer. We can’t stop the world from happening.”

  Delilah shakes her head. “Jack was here. Then I loved him. Now he’s gone.”

  “You know that’s not—” I don’t finish my sentence. I get distracted by a flicker of a feeling in my chest. A tiny pulse of something I’ve been avoiding.

  Doubt.

  I am so close to positive that Angelika is absurd, that Delilah is heartbroken, that people are desperate but not right. I am close to positive that a Curse is an impossible thing.

  But I am not quite all the way positive.

  I have the smallest little drop of doubt.

  “We love Cruz. We all do. We don’t want to lose him, too.” Delilah speaks in a ferocious murmur.

  “What does Cruz have to do with—” My stomach turns. My eyelashes feel heavy from all the makeup and the exhaustion and something else, too. My face is melting—daylong foundation and shimmery blush and too-pink lipstick sliding down under the Devonairre Street sun.

  Delilah’s melting, too, the two of us shifting from who they think we are to who we actually are.

  “We all love you with Owen. Angelika thinks Owen’s perfect. Safe. Make that work, okay? For me?”

  “I don’t love Owen,” I say, and Delilah laughs. I have missed her laugh the way I miss water when I’m thirsty.

  “Of course you don’t,” she says.

  Delilah was the first person I told when Owen kissed me at the fall dance. She’s who I told when I decided to have sex. I told her about the shape of his calves and the funny lilt in his voice when he talks to his mom on the phone. I like Owen. I like like him. I do.

  But Delilah knows and I know and Angelika knows that I will never love him.

  According to Angelika, you can only really love one person at a time. “Real, true love is singular in focus,” she says. “Real, true love is so big there’s not room for anything else.” I asked Dad if this was true and he handed me a book of Neruda and told me even poets don’t have the answers, let alone Angelika.

  “But you and Mom only love each other,” I said. “You have Angelika’s version of real, true love.”

  Dad paused.

  He squeezed one hand with the other.

  He didn’t answer. Instead he kissed my forehead and went onto the fire escape for a cigarette. The memory hits me hard, something I hadn’t remembered at all until now, when I remember it perfectly.

  It feels out of tune with the rest of the things I’ve been told to remember.

  I want to tell Delilah, but she’s looking at me for an answer, for a promise to stay with Owen, and she doesn’t want to talk about anything but that.

  I give a half smile and a half shrug. “I’ll try,” I say. It’s an empty sentence, and the second I say it, I want to do the opposite. I don’t want to try at all; I want to give up.

  • • •

  The sun starts to set and still I’m in the garden looking like Devonairre Street Lorna instead of Actual Lorna. It’s weird how they used to be the same person.

  There are a few plants that need to be set in the ground, so I start digging. I don’t talk about my green thumb to Angelika or any of the widows. I’m afraid it would somehow be another thing that means more than it is. I want it to be mine, not theirs.

  I dig with my hands. I like to get a feel for it—damp, dry, clumped, dusty—if I can feel it in my fingers I know what plants to put where and how deep to dig and how to care for them. One of the lemon trees—the one with the biggest lemons and greenest leaves—is mine. So is the patch of spinach and a pot of pansies.

  It’s good to have secrets, my dad used to say when I’d catch him sneaking a smoke on our fire escape. Everyone has them. I’ve kept mine close, and I’ve come to hate my father’s. The problem with keeping secrets is that once you’re gone the secrets are gone, too. I can ask the widows for stories about my father every day until the sun goes down, but they’ll never be able to tell me the deepest-down most important things about him.

  I think he’d like my secret gardening, at least. I think he’d like how hard I’m working not to believe and the smile I get when I think about Cruz. He’d like all the things about me that Angelika hates.

  I’ve heard the ladies talk about different flowers appearing in the garden, and they make their own list of reasons for it. Magical reasons.

  It’s only ever been me.

  There’s a noise by the garden gate and I look up. Nothing. I’m expecting Delilah to come back. We have more to say to each other, and she’s always said her favorite thing is to watch me garden.

  “I love the secret side of you that no one else sees,” she said once and it sounded almost romantic. It was maybe more romantic than anything Owen or any other guy had ever said to me. There’s a romance to a real best friend.

  I liked being seen, too. I liked Delilah knowing my secrets, and maybe if she came back to the garden, I’d tell her some of my newest ones. She’d hate them, but I don’t think that matters anymore. I think it’s more important for her to know me than it is for her to approve of me.

  With dirt under my nails. I place peonies in the hole I’ve dug. Peonies are fussy. If they’re planted too far down, they refuse to flower. They are easy to care for, but they can’t be rooted too deep in the ground. And even in the best of circumstances they don’t bloom for very long.

  I like peonies for those same reasons that they drive other people crazy. I like that they want to be in the garden but not too firmly embedded. I like that they can only flourish if they’re given a little space, a little room to move. I like that they won’t flower year round, but when they’re at their best they’re truly spectacular.

  When I plant them, I let them know they can leave this place. I dig shallow holes and don’t pat the dirt tightly around them.

  I thought I was deeply rooted
at Devonairre Street, but now I’m not so sure. I want to be here, but not too far in. I don’t want to go to California, but I don’t want to be only a Devonairre Street Girl either. I remember the people in the airport a few weeks ago, with their futures and their choices and their firmly rooted love and their lives that mattered to them but no one else.

  I try to imagine myself on some other street in some other state. I don’t fit in there, either. I’m not fitting in anywhere anymore.

  Soon I know Cruz is there, all the way across the garden, without looking up.

  “You’re there,” I say, patting the last of the peonies in place.

  “Your mom’s looking for you.”

  “I forgot to tell her I was staying out.” I stand up and try to brush some of the soil off, but it mostly sticks to my knees, my elbows, my wrists.

  I can hear Angelika not far away, walking the streets, telling and retelling the story of how the day went. She’s so close she could hear us, too, if she were listening.

  But I have a feeling she’s not listening.

  “I figured you were here,” Cruz says. He’s caught me planting in the garden before, but we’ve never spoken of it. He’s nodded hello and gone on his way. Cruz and Delilah are different in that way.

  “Do you think I’m like a peony?” I ask instead of a greeting.

  “These things here?” he asks, stepping farther into the garden, closer to me. I nod. He leans down and inspects the pink petals. I like that he’s seriously considering the question even though it’s a nonsensical one. He’s always been that way—jumping on board with the frantic way my mind sometimes works, the strange connections it makes.

  “They’re my favorite flower,” I say. There’s dirt on my neck. I can feel it. Gardening is messy business. My heart sweater is probably ruined forever, but that’s fine by me.

  “I don’t think you’re like anything,” Cruz says. He stands back up and steps closer to me.

  I should step away but I don’t. I already forget what I promised Delilah. I forget the little spark of fear or doubt I feel when I think too hard about Jack or Bombings or Angelika. I forget how clearly I can hear the rest of the neighborhood, Delilah’s serious voice rising up occasionally to ask if someone wants another bracelet. I forget everything as the toes of our shoes meet up.