Thanks, he told me, after a while. Thanks for the lesson in courage. And friendship.
He stood, grabbed his coat.
“Leaving so soon? Why, our little party’s just beginning.” And I gave the Wicked Witch laugh. But Danny wasn’t smiling. “Uh-oh,” I said then. “You look really pissed.”
“Well, maybe I am.”
“At little me?” I meant it to be humorous, but it came out sounding feeble, petulant. I wanted to take everything back, including my own birth, but the hot-cold sweating feeling inside my head took hold again, and I forgot how.
Danny shoved his arms into coat sleeves. “Yes, I’m mad at you, Ellie. It’s time for you to grow up around this stuff, you know. I mean, I’m sick and tired of being your official guide to gay life. If you love someone, you have to let them know how you feel. It’s the biggest, most important thing in the world. It is the greatest gift we ever give.” He jammed fingers into each glove perfectly, deliberately. His voice was almost quiet, very controlled. But I could tell how mad he was, and I hated him for it, and I was surprised that his thick call used fingertips didn’t come ripping through the gloves. “Tell her! Find out where she’s coming from herself! And if she freaks out, then the hell with her—you don’t want to know her, anyway. Life’s too short.” He pulled his scarf out of a pocket, swung it around his neck once, twice, deftly. A nice tartan wool. It looked like a present. “I mean, I never thought that I would be standing here, you know, saying this—but since I met Gary things feel really different to me. And I am not going to be on call to sit and hold hands with you on a Saturday night while you mope around feeling oh-so-sorry for yourself that you’re queer. Because I don’t think it’s, like, any kind of a tragedy! I think it’s great! And you ought to at least have enough self-respect to think so, too.”
There was this weighty, muted stillness between us. The fever rattled in my head, white noise blurred the TV screen. We stared at each other. We were both pretty shocked, I think. He was all bundled up, ready to leave, but somehow didn’t look as if he wanted to. So he just stood there, like he was some kind of delivery boy waiting for a tip, and then all the words I didn’t even know I’d wanted to say exploded out loud.
“I’m really tired of you telling me how I ought to be, Danny. You think that just because you’re getting laid you suddenly understand the secrets of the universe or something. And that you, like, have some kind of right to give me this great sermon on love. Well, maybe I’m not quite the same as you—okay? Maybe I have a life and feelings that are really different from yours. Even if we’re both gay; maybe that’s where the similarity starts and maybe that’s where it ends. Because, quite frankly, I don’t think we have that much in common with each other. You don’t know my dreams! You don’t know how I want to touch someone—how I want to kiss a woman, and everything that it will be for me—I mean, because you just cannot relate. And to tell you the truth, I can’t relate to the way you love, either. And since you met Gary you haven’t really been much of a friend. So if you want me to show some self-respect, I can start right now. Go away and leave me alone, okay? And don’t come back until you’re ready to understand me instead of just bossing me around. I’m sick of it, Danny! In more ways than one!”
We stared at each other, he all muffled in his coat with his face pale, only the angry dark eyes shining out; me in my T-shirt and sweats, my skin bright red with fever. For the millionth time that day, I started to cry. But stopped myself. I turned to grab a tissue and blow my nose and by the time I turned back the door had slammed, and he’d gone.
*
To make a lengthy tale of misery short, the next two weeks were a haze of illness and medicine. I had the foresight to call my teachers and tell them, and reschedule midterms. But the first meet of the year could not be rescheduled.
Not that it was some kind of disaster without me. We won by a handy cluster of points. I heard that Babe wiped out her competition in the 100, and the 200, and that her breaststroke leg of the medley relay put us so far ahead that, in the end, the anchor almost coasted in. Coach took the kid to task for coasting. Unacceptable attitude during competition, she said. But she must have been pretty pleased with the win.
Actually, she’d been kind over the phone. Told me not to worry, just get better. Said there was plenty of season left. But inside, I think, she knew what I knew: it was over for me, kaput, my mediocre swimming career had squeaked me through a mediocre college education by the skin of its very thin teeth, and would end with a whimper. The sooner the better, as far as I was concerned.
Potalia dropped by one afternoon. It was the first snow. I’d spent a lot of time just sleeping, groggy with cough medicine, feeling sick to my stomach from the antibiotics. The cough was taking a long time to go away, I thought, and so was the fever. I was surprised to see her. She brought a box wrapped in sparkling gold-colored paper, and a card signed by all the members of the team—one of those funny Get Well Soon things—and inside the box was a custom-made velveteen jacket, with fancy script lettering across the front left breast that read Captain Marks, done in the school colors. There was a bottle of expensive Vitamin C with rose hips in there, too. I wondered, dully, for the umpteenth time, what rose hips really were.
Potalia chattered away, acting pretty friendly. I would have felt a little wary or something if I’d been up to experiencing subtleties at all, but she didn’t seem to hate me any more, seemed anxious to be on good terms again. She said she’d gone through attitude changes lately. Babe Delgado, who turned out to be an okay person after all, was giving her some breaststroke pointers. Things were looking better academically. And, yes, she was still engaged to be married.
I confess that, after she left, I peered closely at every name on the card, and even started to get this sick feeling inside that had nothing to do with pneumonia, until I found Babe’s signature scrawled sloppily under some banal words like Hope You Feel Better Soon.
Most of the team phoned at least once or twice—to talk, try to make me laugh, tell me they missed me, ask how I was feeling—the usual stuff. Brenna Allen called, too—a couple of times a week. Once she called and I was asleep, Jean took the message, came upstairs snickering later on. So stern, she laughed, and yet so competent-sounding. Does your coach strap on a six-gun and walk down dark alleys, Ellie? I mean, talk about commanding!—be still, my heart.
I threw a cough-drop wrapper at her, feebly.
Several times, a few of them dropped by to bring cookies, which I couldn’t eat, and more Get Well cards, which I pretended to laugh at. Nan and Jean played the nesting, nurturing game in between their endless rounds of studying, making me pots of tea, calling upstairs like a couple of screeching mother hawks to see how I was doing. Aside from that, I was pretty much alone. Danny didn’t call or come by. Neither did Babe.
*
The time spent alone got me thinking differently, I guess, and feeling differently, about myself.
One reason was the fever dream. I was lying there in bed, had put Billy Budd down across my chest because the words were dissolving and reappearing, wavering crazily on the page, and it was making me nauseated. I spaced out for a while, awake but not exactly conscious. Shut my eyes and saw little SS stormtroopers dancing along the rim of my nose, calling me, thrusting knives up toward my pupils. I tried to scream, but no sound came out.
Hi, said one, My name’s Dave Heilbronner.
Hello, said another, My name’s Brenna Allen
Then I saw Lottie and Ztscha sitting on my nose, looking grief-stricken, panting as if they’d run a long way, staring at me like I was some kind of stranger. I’m Ellie, I whispered. Your daughter. Remember? But they just kept staring up at me in their stunted, miniature, panicked little forms, unable to move, or speak, or recognize.
I smelled hot cereal, and red Passover wine, and chlorine. Then the smell of something burning—something strange, that I didn’t exactly recognize but thought maybe I ought to—and I bit into my lip and tasted bl
ood. Brenna Allen wavered in the air above me, floating on a rose hip, holding a cat-o’-nine-tails, and my blood was dripping from it. The strangest thing was that she didn’t look mean or cruel, staring down at me; she seemed sorrowful instead, her eyes full of grief and pity, her lips full and soft and kind.
Please, I begged her. I’m too young for this. And your Babe is much too hurt to help.
Or maybe I said: Your baby’s much too hurt to help.
Later, remembering, I wouldn’t be sure.
But I’d always remember what she said to me, next—or rather, what the hallucination said:
You’re alone, Ellie, all alone. And so am I.
I came to in the living room, Nan pressing a cold wet towel to my cheeks and forehead. I looked up at her, suddenly glad, relieved, like I’d been reprieved from death itself, to see her in normal size, the dim flickering light behind her, static buzz of the TV set familiar in the background. Jean’s voice drifted in from the kitchen.
“I called Emergency. They said aspirin and an alcohol bath.”
“I’m okay now,” I croaked. And started to cry.
*
The next morning, fever broken, I dragged myself upright and turned on lights and leaned against a steamy bathroom sink to look in the mirror.
The face I saw was changed. Not just so that it looked like shit warmed over—which it did; it was pallid, thinner, with deep sleep creases across the forehead and splotchy gray shadows under each socket—but so that it looked older. The eyes were a little softer somehow. They seemed sadder, but calmer. Who knows why. Dark hair curled around the thin, bony cheeks like rat tails.
My knees felt wobbly. I pulled off my foul robe, which smelled like a few weeks’ worth of sweat, got in the shower, turned it to warm, and had to sit immediately ass-down while the water rained over me. I lurched across the tub for soap and shampoo. Cleaned myself sitting on smudged porcelain enamel, trying weakly to pretend that I was out enjoying a tropical thundershower.
I brushed my teeth. The paste felt thick and unfamiliar, an acidic glue. My lips were cracked and I smeared them with Vaseline. I couldn’t see my own face in the mirror any more—too much steam—which was just as well.
Later, I put on a clean sweatshirt and pair of pants. The waistband sagged around my hips. It occurred to me, for the first time, that I’d lost a lot of weight. I felt my upper arms, and shoulders, and reached in past the loose waistband to feel my thighs. They shivered, barely supporting me. Flesh and bone. Not a muscle to my name.
I went downstairs, taking each step one at a time and pausing to breathe, sweaty palm sliding along the banister, holding me up. There were a bunch of gift-wrapped, ribboned boxes and packages on top of the armchair. I shoved them off and sat, sinking in very little. The force of my body felt extraordinarily different than it ever had before. So much lighter. Insubstantial. Like there was only a thin feathery mass holding me down to earth. The effort of dressing, of walking down those stairs, lowering myself into the chair, had taken everything out of me. I wiped a shining lather of perspiration from my forehead. I shut my eyes until the dizziness passed. And when I opened them, noticed the packages I’d knocked to the floor. Happy Birthday wrapping paper. There were envelopes taped to each, addressed to me. Birthday greetings showing through one envelope’s onion skin.
That’s when it hit me: my birthday. First week of November. How long ago? I didn’t know—didn’t yet know what date it was. But I’d missed it, missed my own birthday. I had turned twenty-one years old, finished the first twenty-one years of my life without realization, coughing through a bout of pneumonia. And I’d woken up later, changed. Was the world going to pull a Rip Van Winkle on me, too?
I reached for a crimson-wrapped box but the movement was sickening and I forgot about it, leaned back, felt my head rest on cushions and my eyes gently close. You are alone, all alone, I remembered. And so am I.
“So I am,” I said.
I’d said it out loud. It echoed faintly in the room, the sound a kind of shock.
Then, quietly and suddenly, it was true but no longer terrifying.
I was basically about half the size I once had been. Pale, gaunt as a homeless dog; sweaty and faint and weak. But sitting there in the worn old armchair I felt like I was also, quietly and suddenly, my very own self; in some way that I had never been before, just me. Not part of Lottie and Zischa’s reconstructed family. Not Brenna Allen’s team captain. Not even a swimmer, necessarily. Nor even just a queer. But something more. And also, in a way, something less.
The me that I was, I realized, was much smaller than the me I’d wanted to be a few weeks ago. Much frailer. Required much less of herself, and of others, and of the world. Could not do all the strong and funny things she had been able to do before. Somehow, though, she was sufficient.
Alive and, even in her weakened state, enough.
*
Start back slow, Nan advised. Choose one thing to accomplish each day. Add a little more activity each week. Get plenty of rest. Drink pure spring water.
The last piece of advice, I figured, I’d do without. But the other stuff made sense.
You’d have thought I would rush off to see Coach first, or sit on the sidelines at swim team practice. Maybe, before being sick, that’s what I would have thought I’d do. But in fact, on my first day back into the cruel rotten light of the so-called healthy world, I chose to go to lit. class. I don’t know why. Later, though, I was glad—it was a good choice, eased me back into things.
They were all chattering away about some sort of comparative themes in Moby Dick and Billy Budd, I could barely keep up with the ideas. But Brown was pretty decent. He made a big deal about me being back, said to come see him during office hours that week and we’d figure something out about the work and exam and papers I’d missed, and he seemed really glad to see me.
I listened to what was going on that day, drifting mentally in and out. Sometimes, too, I’d stop listening and just focus on his forehead, or his earlobe, or chin. His skin was so dark, so soft looking, and warm. It had this quality of being burnished, mature—ripe in a way that white skin rarely was. I wondered what it was like to be black. Then wondered what it was like to be him, the person, surrounded by all these little white faces. But I gave up wondering. Realized I’d never know; there were these gaps between people, all people, that were basically pretty wide, that you never really spanned. Or, if you spanned them, it happened out of sheer luck, or incredibly hard work, or both. But the way it was to be in somebody else’s body, with all its happiness and sufferings and history, scars, aches, memories, colors—that, you never really knew. What you endured alone, in your body, you were always alone with. In a place and a way no one else could touch.
*
What I cared about, I confess, was losing my scholarship. There were plenty of reasons for them to take it away, if they’d wanted to; team captain or not, I was becoming pretty unnecessary. Especially when you compared me to Babe Delgado—not that there was even any comparison; I mean, compared to most of us she could just about wrap the pool under one arm and take it with her, if she wanted to. She could lap me in the 200, practically break me in half for the 100. Her 200 IM had, in the first meet of the year, set a division record; if worse came to worst, she could do a terrific 400 IM, for sure; and the medley relay was built around her breaststroke. Potalia, who had always been slower than me in the sprints, was at least healthy and certainly in much better shape than I. Anything I might have handled, she probably could too. So I approached my meeting with Brenna Allen with more than a little dread.
But she was cool—totally cool.
She said to be gentle with myself. Ease back into things. Sit out practice for a while, then start slow in the water, stop when I got tired, basically chill, just chill. Then, when I felt better, we would see about competing. In the meantime there was no rush. But my presence was important. People had missed me. She had, too. It would be good for me to come to every practice,
whether or not I swam; it would set a good example. I walked out in a glow. Almost loving her again.
*
I saw Babe that afternoon, after my talk with Coach. I was sitting there in the Donut Hole, sipping a cup of tea and blowing my nose and flipping through a few massive tomes I’d missed out on completely during the weeks of fever. Once in a while it occurred to me that the world had started to look different to me—at least during the past couple of days. I was noticing things like colors and sounds more. And this thought kept blowing through my mind: that the colors and sounds weren’t really real. I mean, they were there, for sure—and so was I—but the way I appeared day to day wasn’t the way I really was, it was just an appearance—and likewise for everything and for everybody else.
I watched lemon-scented steam rise from the Styrofoam rim of the teacup. It was there, sure—for a while; and it was real, sure—in a way; but then, like that, it was gone.
Where did it go?
And what was it, really? A thing that would exist in the same form, anywhere in space? Or something different—something that arose out of something else, changed from second to second, and, after a while, seemed absent? but wasn’t really? or had been absent, from the beginning?
And what in hell was its beginning, anyway?
“Hi.”
I glanced up. She’d lost more weight and gained more muscle and looked great—very fit, very tall and strong, almost slender. Everyone else was walking around with winter pallor. Not her. She had that burnished quality to her face. Or maybe it was just a ruddy exercise flush—I don’t know.
“Hi,” I said.
“How are you?”
“Okay.”
There was a definite pause between us, while all around the Donut Hole people put on coats or shook off scarves, trays clattered against tabletops, highlighters squeaked over textbook pages, and the smell of food frying and the color of slightly dim ceiling lights seemed like they existed somewhere else, outside this weird protective cone of silence that had suddenly come down around the two of us.
The Sea of Light Page 25