The Careful Undressing of Love

by Corey Ann Haydu

  I don’t know who leans, but one of us leans and the other follows and we’re kissing.

  A Devonairre Street Girl wouldn’t kiss Cruz like this, not now, but I kiss him even harder because I don’t know that I ever signed on to be a Devonairre Street Girl.

  I am Lorna Who Kisses the Boy Next Door and I am Lorna Who Looks Like Shit in Makeup and I am Lorna Who Gardens Without Worrying About How Messy It Can Get.

  I am Lorna Who Doesn’t Care That the Street Is Busy, That We Will Get Caught, That Someone Could See Us.

  Cruz’s hands are on my face. I wonder if I taste a little like peonies or garden ground or sticky all-wrong lipstick.

  I forget to breathe, so we have to break apart for me to finally inhale.

  I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. I’d never do that with Owen; it would feel rude or gross or something. But with Cruz it’s fine. It was a messy kiss and we both know it and it was a great kiss, and we both know that, too.

  It was a secret kiss, and Delilah loves secrets. Maybe she can sniff them out, the way I have an extra-strong sense for my mother’s heartbeat.

  “I knew it.”

  It’s Delilah’s voice at the gate of the garden. Cruz and I leap apart from each other but it doesn’t matter, she’s already seen.

  They’ve both seen.

  Angelika and Delilah are shoulder to shoulder at the gate. They are holding lavender and lemons and I can tell from the looks on their faces they’ve seen everything.

  Delilah said she knew it, and I think I knew it, too. Knew that she’d catch me, knew that she didn’t trust me, knew that we needed to stop pretending things could be okay.

  Delilah stays back but Angelika rushes forward, her hands finding my face, her nails digging in. As always they are cool, they are worn, her ring hits my cheekbone. It hurts.

  “It’s not anything,” Cruz says. “Whatever you think—whatever you saw—we’re tired. This isn’t—”

  “You’re tired?” Delilah screeches like something has come loose inside her throat.

  “You shouldn’t have made them do the pictures and interviews—” Cruz keeps stepping farther away from me. And I don’t know what Angelika’s finding on me, but I know what I see on him.

  Fear. Actual fear.

  He covers his face with his hands. Delilah covers her face, too, all of us hiding from the things that are happening.

  “Secrets are only bad when they’re not secrets anymore,” Dad said once, not long before he died. He seemed sad and sure. He hadn’t shaved and I remember thinking that he sounded like he was talking about something specific, but I didn’t ask him what.

  I should have asked him what secret was making him so sad.

  “Not there yet,” Angelika declares, giving my face one last squeeze before letting it go. She reaches into the bag she is always carrying and takes out a gray scarf. She wraps it around me, and I let her. I am so used to letting her tell me what to do, I don’t know another way.

  “I’m sorry,” Cruz says, and they all look at me like I’m supposed to apologize, too, but I’m in too much shock from hearing Cruz apologize to say anything at all. “I love Charlotte,” he goes on. “This was—I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m with Charlotte.”

  Her name is a slice on my skin, a thing that shocks and hurts and burns.

  “You’re not sorry, Lorna?” Angelika says. She drops the lavender and steps on two of the newly planted peonies. “You’re too good for us? You think you’re above all of this? You forget your father? You forget the pictures of my Chester, or Dolly’s Harold, or Betty’s Richard? You forget them all? You think I don’t know what your mother’s doing, trying to tear this community apart? You think you can leave here and leave us and have some happy life?” Angelika is shaking and growling. Her finger is darting around, pointing at me, at Cruz, in the direction of our building, at the peonies, at the sky.

  “We haven’t—I didn’t—I did what you asked today. I did what you wanted.” I am speaking so quietly it’s a wonder she can hear me.

  “You’ve forgotten everything that’s ever happened, everything we’ve ever taught you. You and your mother.”

  “I haven’t forgotten anything,” I say. Angelika must have soaked herself in Aramis, must have bathed in the stuff. It’s all I can smell. It’s choking me.

  “Do what’s right!” Angelika says, her voice rising, hitting the trees and the metal of the gates and the cloudy beginnings of a moon in the sky. “Do what’s right! You have a dead father and a dead friend and still, still you insist on being Lorna Ryder, Above It All! Still you do! You want to be some other person from some other street. But you are this person, from this street.”

  This last part hurts the most, because it’s true. It’s the only part of what she said that I know for sure is entirely the truth—plain and ugly and terrible and mine.

  Right now, right this instant, I would get in the car with my mother and drive across the country with Roger. I would take that money for our building and hope that memories of my father traveled well. I would let Devonairre Street become something different, and hope that I would become something different, too.

  “I see your thoughts,” Angelika says. “Hubris. It is believing you can escape what is. You can’t escape what is.”

  The gates of the garden feel like prison bars.

  I am always going to be Lorna Ryder, one of the Affected, a Devonairre Street Girl.

  I look at the peonies. Angelika has stepped on two more. They won’t recover. They’re not that strong.

  20.

  They title the article “The Ones You Shouldn’t Love.”

  The title hurts, but it’s also wrong. The Curse says that they can love us, we just can’t love them back. It’s somehow sadder. I wonder if the reporters think it sounds more romantic to be unlovable, and more depressing to be told not to love.

  Reporters, I’ve learned, only like the romantic kind of tragedy. That’s why they were so happy we were pretty. That’s why they were so eager to dress us in heart sweaters and lace dresses and dark eyeliner, and that’s why they wanted our hair loose and windblown.

  I am Affected. I am a Cursed Devonairre Street Girl. And now I am the One You Shouldn’t Love.

  I try to imagine Future Lorna again, all free and easy and not anyone’s symbol of anything. But I can’t see her.

  In the same pit of my stomach where I have fear about the Curse, there is a new question, something that has popped up and won’t quiet.

  Is this how it will be forever?

  Is this it?

  I think of the wedding party at Julia’s. The bride in her flowing gown and the girls leaning against their boyfriends, not thinking of what anyone thought of their love. They were my age, on a street not far from mine, in the city that has always been mine, but they were another species. I thought I could be one of them, one day.

  I can’t see it.

  Looking at the article, I understand now that the rest of the world can’t see it, either. No one sees that future for us.

  Mom and I sit in front of the computer and watch comments roll in on the story of our life. It is exactly what the stylist told us not to do. “People say crazy things,” she said, tying a scarf around my neck, then taking it off. “Don’t read the comments. Don’t engage.”

  We engage anyway. Mom pours herself a huge glass of wine and asks if I want a few sips. I don’t want to drink in front of her. I want to be little again, too young for things like drinking and love.

  We scroll by a comment from BronxBomber1978 who wants to know when “the one with the tits” is turning eighteen and by all the women who ask “who’s parenting these girls?” and try to decipher whether they believe. They think we’re hot; they think we’re fame-whores; they think we’re stupid; they think we’re mentally ill; they think we caused the Bombings; they’re angry wi
th us; they think we should control ourselves; they pity us for being Affected, they wish the reporter would cover Serious News and not Frivolous Stories; they think New York City is a cesspool; they think we are privileged and entitled; they think we are what’s wrong with the world; they wonder if we’re in a cult; they want to know more.

  “They’ll forget all about this in a week,” Mom says, but she doesn’t sound so sure.

  Roger is in the kitchen making us stew. The apartment is filling with smells that remind me of cold days and cozy nights. Roger is a comfort although I don’t quite want him to be.

  One window is open, letting the heat from the stew and the overwhelming smell of pepper escape. The kitchen is a little smoky, which means the living room is a little smoky, and up in my loft I’m sure it’s a little smoky, too.

  I’d never want to live in a big house with my mother. Even if we sell our building and move to California, I hope we live somewhere small and contained. I like that we live identical lives because of the tininess of our apartment. We can’t escape each other. If she smells onions and garlic and sizzling meat, so do I. If she hears car alarms or police sirens or street musicians, I do, too.

  “You okay, babe?” Roger asks. I shiver at their intimacy and hear, for the hundredth time, the echo of his groan. We can’t escape those hidden parts of each other, either, in our tiny home. I can’t un-know that they have sex most mornings. I can’t ever pretend my mother is only Mom.

  “We’re fine,” Mom says. She sighs a different sigh from the ones I try not to hear.

  A noise floats in from outside. I strain to hear, and I’m pretty sure it’s Angelika because it’s always Angelika. I’m not sure who she’s talking to, but I can imagine what they’re talking about. She must be tired of talking about us. She must be desperate to talk about dress patterns or roast chicken recipes or new soil to plant in the garden.

  But right now she can only talk about us. Our shame. Our disappointment. Our rebellion. Our hubris.

  Always our hubris.

  More voices join Angelika. Three, five, eight, and it’s about time to close the windows.

  “What now?” Mom says. She sighs. She’s been taking cabs to and from work. They come to the front door of our apartment and deliver her to the front door of her office building. She asks me to bring home groceries after school, get coffee from ZeeZee, pick up a takeout order from Bistro.

  She doesn’t say that she’s afraid to walk down the street, but she’s stopped doing it.

  She doesn’t know that I’m the one who should be scared; I’m the one who’s been caught with Cruz, like I think they’ve always known I would be.

  There are at least a dozen voices outside the window, but the words are indistinct. The quality of light changes, too. It’s mostly dark outside, but a warm light is reflecting through the window.

  An orange-y light.

  Candlelight.

  “Almost ready, girls,” Roger says from his station at the stove. He has sauce on his mouth, and the counters are covered with herbs and vegetable juices and dirty utensils.

  Dad used to cook, too. He liked to wear a chef’s hat he had from a Halloween costume and he’d slice his finger from trying to show off fancy knife moves that he wasn’t actually very good at. I liked his cooking—it was surprising and weird. I’d think I was eating meat loaf and it would taste like curry. I’d twirl a bite of spaghetti onto my fork and it would be lemony and oily and almost too spicy to swallow.

  Roger cooks plain and tasty, but never shocking.

  Mom goes to the window and I join her. Our entire neighborhood is on the sidewalk below our window. Angelika, Betty, Dolly, Maria, Mrs. James, Charlotte’s mother, the Jonerons, the Chens, a few of the little girls whose birthdays are about to disappear and become one Shared Birthday.

  Delilah is there, of course.

  So is Isla, in her wicked boots and her always-longer hair. I’ve heard she’s meeting boys in the park late at night. It’s a thing being whispered in the halls at school, being talked about online. It’s also a thing I can see on her skin, which looks irritated around her chin and mouth. Her lips look puffy from too much kissing.

  “It’s not love” is all she said when Charlotte asked her about what she was doing every night in the park.

  We live in a world where it’s better to fuck a hundred boys you don’t love than kiss one boy you do. It’s all topsy-turvy, and I want Isla to have both—the sex and the love. I want her to wear her short skirts and tight tops because she likes them, not because she’s trying to be Someone Else. I want her to show her clavicle when she’s in the mood, and to cover up her knees when it’s cold or she’s forgotten to shave and for no other reason. I don’t want gross men and mean girls to look at her and talk about her beauty like it’s something exciting and terrible, like she’s desirable and Cursed in some magnificent way.

  Most of the comments on the article were about her, but they don’t know her. I notice the way they talk about us, using different words depending on the color of our skin, the size of our breasts, the shortness of our skirts. I get off easy, with my blond hair and white skin and B cups. It doesn’t matter that I’m the most dangerous one. They can’t see that. They don’t know any of us.

  There are at least twenty-five people on the sidewalk and more pouring out from their buildings. They all have red candles in their hands. Angelika travels around striking matches and lighting the flames. Her shoulders are back and she looks younger every day that passes. The things that have happened in the past weeks have made the rest of us tired, our eyes are pink with dark circles hanging underneath. Our hair is stringy, our backs hunched, our faces gaunt and pale. Grief is supposed to ravage you. But Angelika is rosy cheeked and bright eyed.

  She might be smiling.

  The crowd falls into silence, seeing us in the window.

  We haven’t been lighting red candles. We haven’t been obeying curfew.

  “What’s going on out there?” Roger says. The din of voices has stopped but the light is brighter and Mom and I are stuck to the window.

  “Street thing,” Mom says. She opens the window wider.

  “That’s enough,” she calls down. Angelika looks up, her face alight from the candles, a red glow over all our neighbors.

  “Now, that’s exactly what I was going to say to you, Emily,” she says.

  I see Delilah making fists and scowls. I see Isla. The keys around her neck look heavy. I wonder where Charlotte and Cruz are, and get distracted by the idea of them somewhere together—wrapped up in each other on Cruz’s bed, under his ugly orange blanket, staring at his collection of comic books, the sad plastic basketball net affixed to his door.

  Does he kiss her the way he kisses me? An unexpected pattern of open and closed lips, hands moving from hair to back to hips to neck in a frantic search for the right place to hold on to?

  “It’s too late anyway, Angelika,” Mom says. I kick her. It’s time to close the window, eat stew, let the candles burn down, let the ladies lose interest in their tiny protest. I listen for her heartbeat. It’s steady and loud. It’s ready. “We’re getting out of here,” she announces to the crowd, but mostly to Angelika. “We’re selling. Other people will sell. This place won’t be around forever. Don’t you see that?” She pauses, like she’s not sure if she should say the other thing in her mouth. “You won’t be around forever, Angelika.”

  There is an awful moment where I wonder what Angelika will say, but she doesn’t say anything. She glares at Mom and at our building and at the betrayal of our candle-less existence.

  “We’re trying to keep everyone safe,” Delilah says, “That’s it. It’s our responsibility.”

  “Moving solves nothing,” Betty says, her voice craggly and late-night. “You can’t leave the Curse behind. We’re in it together.”

  “We’re in it together,” Dolly echo
es. It makes my stomach turn.

  I hear Roger turn on the news. Maybe it’s to drown us out, or maybe it’s simply a part of his routine, a thing he does on autopilot.

  “. . . we mourn with the victims,” a reporter says in a too-chipper voice. “None of us will forget.”

  I know the words well, the things people say to feel part of a tragedy. Not forgetting and actually remembering are two different things, though.

  “Please turn that off,” I say to Roger, and he’s kind and easy so he does.

  “Let me look at you,” Angelika calls up. “Let me see your face, Emily. Let me look for love.”

  I look at my mother’s face. She has a pointy chin and small eyes. Her eyelashes are long, and since candlelight exaggerates everything, they are longer still.

  I think I see it.

  Love, near her lips, around her eyes, hiding under her chin, twitching her nose as she smells rosemary and thyme and effort. Love, in her short hair and how far out the window she leans. Love, in the way she talks to Angelika.

  Roger comes to the window and stands behind us. Delilah looks away, like even seeing a man is too much.

  “Yes, okay. I love him,” Mom says.

  Roger tenses up, then reaches for Mom’s hip. He squeezes three times and smiles.

  I feel myself get cloudy eyed. It’s hard to breathe.

  “No,” Delilah says.

  “Emily,” Angelika says.

  “I do,” Mom says, louder than the rest of them, louder than she needs to be. “I’m not scared.”

  And even though I don’t believe in the Curse, even though I’ve never believed and I’m not planning on believing, I want her to take the words back, swallow them down, never speak them again.

  Roger whispers into her ear, not loud enough for the people on the street to hear, but loud enough for me to hear and feel in my veins. “I love you, too.”