by Miriam Cohen
He brought her into the bedroom, where there was a pile of dirty laundry stacked high enough in one corner that it was possible, from a distance, to mistake for a soft chair. She dead fished it on the bed, head to the ceiling, a little floppy on the bumpy mattress, but basically still. He unhooked her bra, idly twirled his fingers around her nipples. He told her, as he always did, that she had great boobs. She told him, as she always did, that she really preferred he call them “breasts.” He moved in to suck.
“Okay,” she said. “Good work. That’s enough.”
He wanted to know what the problem was. He always wanted to know what the problem was.
But what was she supposed to say? Don’t remind me of my baby, who’s not real? Don’t be a man who’s not my husband, who’s also not real?
“You just seemed sort of like a vampire for second there,” she said. “Also, you’ve got a water stain up there shaped like an amoeba.”
He needed to turn over to see the ceiling. He didn’t say anything, but then he laughed, a little, haltingly, like it was his second language. He told her she was a piece of work, one weird girl, did she know that?
Her students had already been briefed by the time she returned. The guidance counselor had given a talk, Sophie Bloom told Ms. Perry in a voice soft as powder. Ms. Perry had perfectly prepared the story. She’d practiced. But they would not ask her how it had happened, what had been said. They sat at their desks like the students she’d imagined before she began teaching, moveable pieces of chess. They sat and stared at her, some with little girl legs spread unwittingly apart, others already crossed at the knees or ankles. They seemed simple and small enough to hold. And there was Amelia, gray pouches under her eyes, looking sad and understanding.
OLD FOR YOUR AGE,
TALL FOR YOUR HEIGHT
No one dared reach for a cookie. They were on diets, they said, politely. Because they could imagine—Victoria’s mother, bent pragmatically over a bowl, the sticky mound rising up from the spaces between her fingers, slickly sucking. It gave them, seriously, the chills. They murmured their thank-you-anyways. She didn’t say anything, just still stood there, arms outstretched with her cookies on a tray. The way she was looking at them, they three might have been the cut-outs of movie stars or Olympic ice-skaters with which their bedroom walls were plastered, Karin’s held in place by folded-over Band-Aids, because her family was forever out of tape.
Victoria’s mother smiled without her teeth.
And yes, it was sad to see her standing there, smiling, but Karin thought Victoria’s mother’s life was easier than their mothers made it out to be, back in their houses, where they flipped through a rolodex of how-would-you-likes and could-you-imagines, and Stella’s mother, who was always having one or another breakdown, spat selfish-selfishs after them, catapulting perfectly as Molly’s brothers’ softballs.
“You girls don’t need to be on diets,” Victoria’s mother said, and put down the cookies. She wrapped her hands in her skirt.
They ducked their heads with no answer for her. They weren’t really on diets. The bottoms of their backpacks were right then padded with smashed chips wadded in plastic, tightly tied. Store-bought sandwich cookies they knew how to turn exactly, like clocks, for all the cream to stay on one side. They only even knew about diets vaguely, from their older sisters, who, on grim-faced nights before school, stuffed Tupperware containers with lettuce, making off with their mothers’ bottles of vinegar.
Karin had once walked in on Amelia in the bathroom, where she sat, knees to chin on the toilet, eating turkey slices with her fingers. She lifted each clammy piece from its center, shoving the folds of turkey in her mouth all at once. Karin didn’t talk about it with them. Their sisters were not quite theirs to discuss. They used other bathrooms if it came to that, and together only compared the goose bumps they got thinking of Victoria, where they cut lines into the dustings of hair, made them stand almost straight. Except for Molly’s arms, since she’d shaved them, on a dare, or not on a dare. Her arms, before, had been hairy as her brothers’.
Victoria’s mother’s smile shifted just a bit, as if some photographer had asked her to arrange it this way, please. “Victoria is always so happy when you girls come. She’s been looking forward all day.”
Improbable, and their cue. They fell over each other to stand up. Some of the frizz from Molly’s ponytail landed on Karin’s lips, a whisper of a spider web that made her flinch, as though Molly’s hair belonged to a stranger. They trotted out of the kitchen, enough behind Victoria’s mother not to seem like they were following her, really.
Victoria’s mother opened the door to her room with such care.
“Vee-vee,” she called, sweetly. “Look who’s come to see you.” And, pitched so high, because maybe still this way was easiest for Victoria’s tiny ears to process, “Your friends, darling.”
Victoria was standing up in her crib, fists wrapping the bars. Her hair was gathered in a wispy puff of half-pony. She had the oversized head of a regular baby, the nearly eye-reaching cheeks, the satin skin. Her elbows and knees were creased in slight rings when she didn’t move them to kick or reach. There was something glaring that made her not look like a regular baby, but nothing they could ever point at or to. Looking at her made Karin feel almost dizzy with wanting, and absolutely not wanting, to blow a raspberry into Victoria’s belly. It wasn’t right! Karin was forever on the edge of screaming out. Hands a fan in someone’s face, Hello?
Victoria was their duty. That much they understood. She would have been one of them, their mothers were forever saying, impervious to their thrown-back heads. They meant, Victoria was their age. She was she was well within the cut-off, an April baby. She would’ve been in their class, no question. It made Karin think, in a hazy, wrong way, of her father’s back from parent-teacher conference joke about her sister: “Well, it’s just your run-of-the-mill case of being old for your age and tall for your height.”
But nonetheless, Wednesdays, Victoria days, woke in them, each time, a kind of frustrated wonder anew: Why them? Why now? Because hadn’t they, for years, been the age everyone said Victoria was? They were old enough, was all their mothers ever said, pressing them out their doors, lunch bags ready or not. They ought to.
So there they were, Wednesday after Wednesday.
Victoria stared up at them now, as she always did, before opening into a smile that showed her teeth. They were real, adult teeth, ridged at the bottom like their sisters’ saltine crackers.
They called out their pleasantries. They were nice girls, weren’t they? Karin’s mother was always checking. When they went out? The three of them? It made Karin proud to be asked, as if they were another kind of group, attracted to one another despite circumstance, and because of some quality she couldn’t in general define. They’d come together, instead, through the hard work and social sieving of their sisters, who were friends for reasons she’d never thought to analyze, any more than she’d ever wondered why her parents were married to, of all people, each other. They’d never had to approach each other and ask for a mall date, or however other girls did it. Never had they lain in their beds, eyes trained to ceiling, wondering, with white-knuckled, bit-lipped austerity, Does she like me? They were all just there, scenery in the rooms of their sisters. But sometimes their mothers forgot, Karin’s especially, and mistook them, maybe, for their older sisters. They wanted them, foreheads lined, to be nice. As if the choice was theirs to make!
They stood on tiptoe and cooed.
Stella’s mother picked them up. They weren’t allowed to walk anymore, because of all the freshly cropped-up signs about the predator on the loose—sexual, their sisters had sing-songed when their mothers left it just at predator to their fathers. The complex of houses they thought of as just Victoria’s, especially, was a better-not-to. Just beyond the cheerfully painted, ruffled-curtained houses was a forest where, it was common knowledge, teenagers went to do their drugs, and bad things could happen.
/> It was only ever Stella’s mother or Karin’s mother picking up, because Molly’s mother worked and also there were nine children in Molly’s family. “She’s not doing anything a rat can’t do,” Karin’s mother always said after Molly’s mother had another baby. The latest baby was a boy. Gabriel Gabriel Gabriel. Karin sang it in her mind like a song.
Stella’s sister was switching seats with her mother when they got in the car. “Thanks, now I’ll never learn to drive,” she said to them.
Stella leaned all the way forward. “You’re welcome.”
The winter sun caught Stella’s hair at the part and made Karin feel proud. But then, no, she took the feeling back: That hair was Stella’s, and hers was something different.
Stella’s mother said, “Seatbelts, or your mothers will kill me.”
Not really. Molly and Karin looked at each other.
Their mothers, all together, were always saying, Isn’t it nice, Aren’t we lucky, and, The way all our kids get along, but then in their cars, there would sometimes be these other things they said. Their mothers’ eyes might get narrow or wide, their voices high and girlish, or very low, so they almost had to lean in to hear.
Karin slid her fingers under her thighs. The leather was warm but dry, because of how cold outside was. She loved being in the car when it was like this. The smell was lipstick and pine air freshener.
“How’s the baby,” Stella’s mother said.
Karin got both elbows, cheeks hot against hers, scratchy with winter hats and scarves, and their breath. They were all probably picturing Victoria, the way they’d sat for the hour they were supposed to, filling her in on the weather, the way Karin knew how the most from grandparents who came from far to visit, and then on jokes they’d heard, mostly from Molly’s older brothers. They imitated their teacher and the quiet way she paced the classroom, the seat of her slacks perennially stained with chalk. In their neatly arranged semi-circle of chairs, they held themselves stiff, scoliosis-preventative-straight. They reached under their blouses to make their armpits fart.
And, in between, they tried to tell themselves: Our age. Our age. Or, Baby. Baby. Each required a kind of heartbeat of convincing. Neither was true. What girl their age, what tiny, drooling baby, would require a mother at the window, veined forehead peeking in, every so often, always?
Stella’s mother looked back at them in the mirror.
“Molly’s baby,” she said. “My god, girls.”
Molly breathed in to speak, but Karin was bored of listening to the same old we-can’t-sleep, He-wakes-up-five-times-a-night. The lampposts and telephone poles were all marked with mimeographed warnings. She couldn’t read them as they breezed past, but she had them memorized. They were to be careful of: phone calls from people they didn’t know. Stopping for strange cars with rolled-down windows. Being out alone. Especially if they were girls.
In the sketch his hair was droopy and straight, a spider plant fallen over his forehead. His eyes glinted with small white flashes—“To make him look all the more nefarious,” Karin’s father had said, winking elaborately at her mother. And then, “No, no. Probably his terrible powers know no limits.” Smiling, his hand a quick sandpaper rub to stubbled chin. Karin’s mother had laughed in a fake, mean way. “Tell that to the parents of Allison Eve Johnson.”
Allison Eve Johnson was on papers also, a real, smiling picture. “MISSING” was lettered just above the sharp part in her scalp where someone had made her braids. At first Karin couldn’t understand why she would be smiling so hard in the picture. It wasn’t so bad, if she could smile, and Karin felt a desperate kind of misunderstanding. Why was it so bad? Why, if she was smiling? Amelia had looked at her like she was a headache crept just behind her eyes. That picture was from before.
They dropped off Stella’s sister on the way. She got out of the car without looking at them, ponytail wagging between her shoulder blades, like a finger saying, Don’t come here, but really, Come here. Her boots left perfect tracks in the snow.
“Awfully quiet over there, Karin,” Stella’s mother said. She found Karin’s eyes in the mirror. Spittle or toothpaste crusted her lips, just at the corners. Karin would have been embarrassed if she was her mother, but she wasn’t her mother, and so Karin loved her.
She shrugged, smiling. “We told her we were on diets.”
“Told who?” Stella’s mother squinted in the mirror. “You girls are dieting?”
Stella brought her knees to her chin. Molly was examining the holes in her arms where the hair used to be. No one, they said. No.
The rest of the week lobbed slippery variables at them, a cascade of ifs and thens, questions disguised as comments, tests at every corner to fail—When were their bedtimes, Sheila Heller, on Friday wanted to know, cheeks illuminated as if with fever, arches delicate in their side-to-side wobble, and when they proffered, proudly, their fabricated answers (would they were girls with bedtimes!) she ponytail-bobbed away, laughing, screeching, Babies!
But on Wednesday the flickering tendons in their necks went tight. They became hard-knocked prairie girls ducking their heads in deference, clutching aprons in modest curtseys revealing the most sturdy of boots, laced. They wiped their palms ready. And if their siblings didn’t understand? If their parents saw them only from the corners of their eyes, shadows to the wall, if, say, in Molly’s house, the baby was red with crying and the toddler was too, and in, say, Karin’s house, her mother and Amelia were fighting over the ladder of bones poking through her sister’s back—because unlike the others, she never broke her diet—and Karin’s father was joking, and Stella’s mother, in her house, was pacing for the possibility of a child out in the rain without adequate gear? If that? They had their duty. Carried to their chests like flowers at a wedding, not yet ready to be thrown.
They hurried, harried, from their classrooms.
The letdown was always the same. Victoria’s mother, smiling her perfectly lipsticked smile, soft hands at their backs, ushering them inside. How was their day? she wanted to know, like some mother out of the movies. Where was her collie dog and apron? they’d laugh among themselves, sometimes, after.
Victoria’s father had left, years and years ago, though still not just after she was born. Presumably, he’d tried and found it wasn’t for him, this business of being forever an infant’s father. They could understand, absolutely. Stella and Karin joked—Molly’s father should’ve left too! He was also never without a baby! They were allowed to joke like that, mostly. They weren’t friends because they necessarily liked each other, and that was what it meant, they would never say out loud, that they were closest to sisters.
The hallways at Victoria’s were free from family pictures, and what a good thing. A picture might have been taken ten years ago or one and there was no polite way to ask. Instead, Victoria’s mother hung paintings of triangles and squiggles that Stella’s mother said once, to them, Victoria must have painted herself. Karin thought they were kind of nice. She could just imagine a gallery of people peering carefully at the canvases, hands to chins, murmuring, aloud or in thought, Triangles. Squiggles. Oh yes. The exact opposite of Karin’s mother, whose answer to Karin’s questions was every time, “You know, I don’t know.”
This week Victoria’s mother had celery waiting. The logs glistened, shreds of green hanging off some edges. It would be like hair to swallow.
Victoria’s mother opened her hand to the finely water-dappled plate as if revealing some fantastic magic trick. “Since you girls are dieting.”
They had no choice, and never did, at Victoria’s.
Their necks, without even their telling them to, tilted just to the side, just a little, as they called out their thank-yous, you-didn’t-have-tos. They sat around the table, careful to still their knees. Their days were fine. No—they were excellent. They had: Gym! Biology! Their jaws ached as if with too much candy.
“It’s so wonderful, girls, that you come to visit,” she said. And then her lips made just the smal
lest sound. Like maybe the shy first beginning of a kiss. Her jaw moved for her to smile, as if, for her, it hurt and was hard.
“I’m just not sure,” she said. She was looking at the table, where her hands were, knuckles poking sharply from that softly-lotioned skin. Karin noticed a small pale freckle, a floating piece of orzo.
“It’s just that—” her contact lens glimmered in her eye. “Oh,” she said, smiling. Shaking her head. She brought her finger up to her eye. The lens sat on her finger like a tiny bowl of iridescent dew. She looked at her finger, smooth and clean and long.
“It’s just that, well, you girls must have your own lives.”
They were still chewing her celery, strands weaving coolly into the cracks of their teeth, tangling in coils, Karin was sure, around the small brightly rubber-banded squares that hugged each of Molly’s teeth, pressing down.
They reached the decision somehow without speaking. She didn’t even want them. Their nods were quick, breathy sighs out. In the car, when Karin’s mother asked, they chimed, hitting their various notes, Fine. They let the rest of the week dribble away as always, enduring, enduring: The awful indignities of being called up to the board in class, the tentative hands of their teacher squeezing encouragement to their shoulders, garlic breath all through the afternoon, and the general feeling that they might be coming down with breast cancer.
And, slowly, suddenly—Wednesday opened before them like a window. What freedom had fallen to them! The school bus spit them out on Victoria’s lawn. They hoisted their knapsacks onto both shoulders. No one was watching: They could. Really, scoliosis was a fear drilled deeply into them, their having witnessed, with ample pinches of horror, Molly’s oldest sister’s two-year tenure in a brace. Alone and free, they realigned the bones in their backs, commanding, praying, Straight.
The lamppost signs seemed just then to flutter. Again, they didn’t have to discuss it to know. She was a thumbprint over every photograph their minds could make, blurring every image peach. Allison Eve Johnson. They did not dare breathe her name aloud.