Nothing Can Hurt You

by Nicola Maye Goldberg

  “Jesus.”

  “Isn’t that awful? She actually had to go to therapy to deal with it. I mean, it’s possible that your friend was a sociopath, but even if he was, it’s not like you will ever be able to figure it out. It’s better to just let it go.”

  Something about the way she said you was so derisive, so unlike her.

  “Are you drunk?” he asked, irritated.

  “What? Maybe a little.” She shrugged. “We’re celebrating your homecoming, aren’t we?”

  “You’re not really paying attention to what I’m saying.”

  To hear himself talk like that was infuriating. He sounded like the idiot husband in a sitcom. Jocelyn giggled.

  “Not paying attention?”

  “Yeah. Like you’re thinking about something else. Something you think is more important.”

  “And what could be more important than you?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying—come on, Jo.”

  “It is, actually, exactly what you’re saying.” She took a bite of her steak, chewed and swallowed primly. “When you want me, you want me to be yours, completely. And when you’re busy, with work or your family or some other woman, you want me to cease to exist, so that you don’t have to worry about me, or feel bad. It’s OK. It’s not a crime. I think it’s what all men want, to some extent. You just need to know it isn’t really possible.”

  He stared at her. She took another bite of her steak and washed it down with what was left in her wineglass.

  “I just need a moment,” she said, and got up from her seat. For a second he thought she would leave the restaurant, but instead she tapped on a waiter’s shoulder to ask him where the bathroom was. Bits of her hair were coming loose from her braid, falling around her neck like worms.

  Gemma

  Gemma, her husband, Frank, and their daughter, Karla, live in the kind of town other Americans fantasize about. It’s only an hour’s drive from the Pacific Ocean, with low crime rates and excellent public schools. Its downtown shopping area resembles the small Maine town Gemma grew up in, except fancier, and earthquake-proof.

  The Carson-Bailey School, called Sea-Bee by everyone, is in a gold-rush-era mansion, complete with an indoor pool and a ballet lawn. This morning, in the thick fog, it resembles a castle from a fairy tale.

  Frank attended Sea-Bee when he was a child, and his fond memories of the community garden and interpretative dance classes convinced Gemma to send Karla there. Despite what Gemma sees as the profound silliness of its whole ethos, Karla seems to be doing well and is learning to read and tie her shoes as well as she would at a normal school. Gemma’s worries were more or less assuaged until this week.

  Gemma got a call from Karla’s teacher, Lucia (all the teachers go by their first names at Sea-Bee), on Monday evening, and they scheduled a meeting for Tuesday afternoon. Gemma wanted to figure out the situation before alarming her husband. Lucia had referred to an “incident,” but knowing Sea-Bee, that could mean that Karla had failed to properly appreciate her classmate’s finger painting of a rainbow. Still, the tone of the teacher’s voice made Gemma nervous.

  They had agreed to meet in Lucia’s classroom after school while Karla was in rehearsal for the school’s expertly neutered version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Karla, along with at least seven other first graders, is playing Mustardseed, clad in flesh-colored leotard and lots of yellow chiffon.

  The classroom has a distinctly spa-like vibe, despite the claustrophobic array of art projects and writing assignments decorating the walls. As she enters, Gemma can smell lavender and sage. Because the holidays are approaching, the whole campus is covered in adorable secular decorations. Lucia’s students have been making their own snowflakes out of cardboard and glitter glue. They hang from the ceiling with yarn. Gemma looks for her daughter’s but can’t find it.

  It’s cliché to talk about California’s lack of seasons, but it really can mess with you. In the first few years she lived there, Gemma felt that she was losing all sense of the passage of time. She feared that if she closed her eyes, she would open them to find that she was three years old again, or eighty, or dead, or someone else entirely. After six years, the sight of trees in full bloom decorated with Christmas lights still made her slightly queasy.

  Lucia is barely five feet tall, clad in red wooden clogs and the kind of peasant dress that was popular in the seventies. Gemma can see hints of tattoos on her wrists and the nape of her neck, little wisps of dark ink at the edge of her dress.

  “Please have a seat,” Lucia says, in a kind, slow accent that suggests she has never left California.

  Gemma obeys, even though the only place to sit, other than the carpet, which is in the shape of a smiling giraffe, is a chair clearly meant for small children. She perches with her knees nearly at her chest and places her purse on the tiny desk.

  “Thank you so much for coming in,” says Lucia, serenely, folding herself much more gracefully into another tiny chair.

  “Of course,” Gemma answers. “What’s going on?”

  “As I’m sure you know, Karla is a very bright child.”

  “Thank you,” says Gemma, even though the compliment is not for her. Something stirs in her mind, and she locates it immediately. “Bright child” was the term adults always used to describe her brother, Blake.

  “Her reading, writing, everything, is on the very high end of what’s expected at this age.”

  “We know.” Frank already has big plans for Karla. Stanford, Harvard, maybe even Oxford. Gemma doesn’t want to be one of those parents, but she’s starting to see how they come into being, how a small clever person can engender these ideas in grown-ups.

  “It’s not totally uncommon for gifted children to have behavioral problems. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary at home?”

  “No,” Gemma answers honestly.

  “Really?” Lucia seems doubtful. “She’s not withdrawn ever? What about temper tantrums?”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “Really?” Lucia repeats.

  Gemma stares at her, her open, pretty California face, and feels a sudden desire to strike her. To control herself, she applies some lip balm.

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  Lucia sighs deeply and pulls out what appears to be a shoebox. She opens it. Inside, on a bed of white tissues, are a number of baby teeth.

  “Are those Karla’s?” Gemma asks before realizing that the quantity of teeth means they could not possibly all be from the same child.

  Lucia’s face is now pale, as if from pain. “She’s been collecting them. From the other children. She pays them.”

  “How much?”

  “What?” Lucia looks startled.

  “Well, I’m wondering, you know, if she’s maybe been stealing out of my wallet,” Gemma says, though truly she is just curious.

  “Ah. I think, ten cents apiece?”

  Karla gets two dollars a week for allowance. That’s a lot of teeth, Gemma calculates. At least a few mouthfuls.

  “Do you have any idea why she’s doing this?” Lucia asks.

  “None,” says Gemma. “Is she in trouble?”

  “Well, it’s not as if there are school rules against this.”

  “No, I suppose there wouldn’t be.”

  “But it’s very odd. It’s unsettling.”

  “Kids do weird things. Didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but—there have been complaints from other parents.”

  At this, Gemma can’t help but bristle.

  “I should think they’d be glad that their kids have found a way to earn extra pocket money.” She’s talking bullshit, she knows. She puts on more lip balm.

  “I’m just wondering,” says Lucia, very carefully, “if this is a sign of something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I honestly have no idea. I recommend talking to a therapist. We have a child psychologist on staff here, of course, but maybe she can recommend someone who is more equipped t
o deal with this.”

  “Which is what, exactly?” Gemma can’t help being so defensive. Wouldn’t anybody, she thinks, if a person was implying that their child was so fucked up she required special expertise?

  “I don’t know. I think it’s best to find out sooner, rather than later. Don’t you think?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Is there any history of this kind of thing in your family?”

  Gemma’s body goes cold. Her maiden name isn’t on any of the documents for Sea-Bee, and even if it were, would Lucia really recognize it? Blake’s story never made national news.

  She really is young, Gemma observes, looking at Lucia’s pretty, anguished face. Do the children recognize that, or are all adults the same kind of infallible, inscrutable creatures to them?

  “I need to talk to my husband about this,” she says, finally.

  “Of course.”

  They both reach for the box.

  “Well, she did pay for them,” Gemma says.

  Lucia opens her mouth, as if to argue, and then, perhaps thinking better of it, smiles sympathetically.

  “As I said, she’s an extraordinary little girl.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.” Gemma tucks the box under her arm in order to shake Lucia’s hand. She walks out with her head held high.

  As soon as she gets back to her car, she locks the doors and leans her head against the steering wheel. She has never been a crier, except when furious, and the shaking feeling in her stomach makes her think she will cry now, but she doesn’t. She just sits there for a very long time, until play rehearsal is over, and it is time to take Karla home.

  Gemma dropped out of college when she was twenty and went to live in New York with some friends who were students at Columbia. One of them helped her get a job at a coffee shop on Amsterdam. She hated it, but she hated it slightly less than college. While working there, she met Frank. He was in his first year of a neurology residency. He asked her to marry him after they had been dating for six months. Gemma was worried that her parents would disapprove of the twelve-year age difference, but they adored Frank immediately. She suspected that they were relieved to have her future suddenly so secure. Gemma and Frank got married in 1995, in the backyard of her childhood home. Her mother planned a party so simple and elegant it was featured in several local newspapers and magazines. A year later Frank received a fellowship at Stanford, and they moved to California. Frank was delighted to return to the West Coast. In California, he once told her, it’s practically a sin to be unhappy. It means you’re doing something wrong. He said that like it was a good thing.

  Gemma found out she was pregnant that spring. While her mother was in California, helping Gemma with the baby, they received a call from her father. In an eerily calm voice, he told them that Gemma’s brother, Blake, had been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend.

  Everyone looks at their child and imagines, with horror, the terrible things that might befall them. But Gemma looks at her daughter and imagines that she will be a terrible thing.

  Of course, girls are less likely to be violent—out of ability, Gemma believes, not desire. Still, she was relieved when she found out her child wasn’t a boy.

  When Blake was a baby, Gemma treated him like a puppy or a favorite toy. As he got older, he liked to direct his sister and cousins in plays he wrote himself, which their parents dutifully filmed. He was a beautiful child, blue-eyed and brilliant, before his face was dulled and his speech slurred by the antipsychotics prescribed for him in high school.

  He was off his medications when he killed his girlfriend. She was a sweet girl, until she wasn’t, until she was dead and frozen, her head almost separated from her body, in a shallow grave near a stream. Once, Sara had spent her winter holidays with Gemma’s family in Maine. She was almost silent unless she was answering a question or offering a compliment. Gemma remembered finding her annoying, but not for any particular reason. Maybe Sara had been trying too hard to make everyone like her, or maybe Gemma had just been in a bad mood when they met. She had always imagined her brother with someone a little more interesting—a girl with blue hair who made experimental films, or some kind of radical environmentalist type. There was nothing wrong with Sara, but she just wasn’t special.

  Now Blake lives with their parents, works at the info desk in their local library, and sees a psychiatrist four times a week. It’s not the life any of them imagined for him, but it isn’t prison, either.

  The prosecutor agreed with Blake’s lawyer that he was not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Blake spent sixty days in a mental hospital in Peekskill. Gemma visited only once, giving him a set of jams and marmalades in doll-sized jars. The gift was confiscated, and Blake explained that the staff was afraid he might smash the glass jars and use them to hurt himself or someone else.

  “You’d do that?” Even under the circumstances, the idea of someone using such innocuous objects as a weapon shocked Gemma.

  “No, no, I wouldn’t. But they have to be very careful, you see.” He talked slowly, as if to a child. Gemma never visited him there again. She expected her parents to give her a hard time about that, but they didn’t.

  Of course they still love Blake. That’s their job.

  When she gets home, Gemma goes through her usual routine. She pats their dog, Miles, while she takes off her shoes and leaves them on the wooden rack by the front door. She puts her keys in the ceramic bowl on the kitchen counter. Then she goes to the fridge and pours herself a glass of white wine. Karla is playing an educational computer game in the living room.

  Bored, Gemma goes to their pool house, which is where her parents will be staying when they visit next week.

  It will be the first time they have done so, the first time in six years they have felt that it was safe to leave Blake alone for an extended period of time. They barely know their granddaughter. Understandably, Frank has not wanted Karla to go with her mother when she visits her family in Maine, which she rarely does anyway.

  Her parents’ impending arrival fills Gemma with anxiety. As sad as it has been, she has become used to the distance between herself and them. The qualities she used to admire in them—her mother’s steadfast sweetness, her father’s quiet and unshakable confidence—seem useless, if not ridiculous in the context of what Blake did. They are the parents of a murderer, yet they still see themselves as respectable, regular people, pillars of their small community. At Blake’s hearing, her father wore the same suit he’d worn at Gemma’s wedding. Her mother brought snacks.

  And anyway, she has her own family now. To have her parents here feels like an invasion. But when her mother called to say they wanted to visit, she didn’t know how to say no. She certainly has the space to host them.

  The pool house is twice the size of the apartment she and Frank shared in New York. There is a bed that can be pulled down from the wall, a leather couch, a glass coffee table, and an enormous television. In preparation Gemma has stocked the bathroom with expensive little soaps and a porcelain vase full of dried lavender. It looks great. She lies down on the couch, staring at nothing, and considers her life.

  What does she do all day? She goes to the mall, where she buys clothes for Karla, tiny beautiful things her own parents would never waste money on. She exercises, without enthusiasm, running on a treadmill or doing yoga by herself in her bedroom. She reads a lot, though she can never seem to remember what happened in a book after it’s finished.

  She paints. Her paintings are fine, but no one will ever mistake them for art. They would look fitting in a motel, or a therapist’s office. She uses bright, pretty colors to portray rivers, flowers, and trees.

  Is that really a life? She is always doing things to clear her head, like walking Miles or going to acupuncture. Clear it of what, and to what end? She imagines her brain as a porcelain bowl, bone white and cold to the touch.

  Her phone makes a shrill sound. It’s Frank, reminding her that they’re going to their friends’ house for dinner
and that she’s already late. She apologizes profusely. “I’m on my way now,” she lies. She doesn’t feel drunk at all, but before she leaves the house she sticks her finger down her throat and vomits into the toilet, just in case.

  The last thing Gemma feels like doing is having dinner with George and Melissa. They have just moved into a new, beautiful house and are eager to entertain people. George and Frank went to medical school together. Gemma had liked his first wife, Flora. Everyone had. She had died of cancer two years ago. No one likes Melissa. Gemma feels sorry for her, but she still doesn’t like her. Melissa acted, Gemma thought, like she was a lot younger than she was. Either it was an act, probably to make men like her, which was creepy, or she was actually that stupid.

  George and Flora had a daughter together, Sophie Anne, who is one year older than Karla. She seems to be doing fine, all things considered. Melissa puts on The Lion King for them to watch in the den, which is something Flora would never allow. She would have insisted on imaginative play. But the way the house wraps around, the grown-ups can watch the children watching their movie during dinner, which is nice. Melissa has made some kind of lamb stew, which tastes all right. Gemma goes through the whole dinner on autopilot, drinking glass after glass of wine without feeling drunk at all.

  “So, Gemma, what have you been up to lately?” Melissa asks. Gemma is as startled as if Melissa had stuck a fork through her hand.

  “The usual,” she says, finally, and Melissa seems satisfied.

  They continue to talk about comfortingly banal things, like renovations, vacations, television shows the other couple ought to check out.

  The girls come in to ask for dessert. Sophie Anne is wearing a white dress with a pattern of pink and green roses. It makes Gemma think of a photograph she had hanging in her first apartment. It was by William Eggleston, and it featured a pretty red-haired girl lying on the grass, eyes closed, with a camera in her hand. The girl looked happy and peaceful, but also like she might be dead. The photograph, still in its frame, is probably somewhere in the garage.