If Only

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Downstairs is their regular family doing all their regular family stuff like homework and television and video gaming and I really do think there is a meat loaf in the oven and maybe mashed potatoes happening on the stove.

  This is why she keeps me around, I think, Claire. To cut the regular.

  Today I’m on my belly, feet in the air, and I’m just thumbing through some of Claire’s photo books for ideas.

  “I know we’re supposed to use student work, but don’t you think this pic of these twins would be awesome?”

  Claire pads over from where she’s sitting at her desk and looks over me.

  “Freaky,” she says.

  “It’s either this or this photo of ripples in a puddle strewn with leaves. Called Reflection.” I hold up a grayish photo with just that.

  She makes the universal symbol of gagging, which has always made me feel like gagging myself. “There’s some good stuff, don’t you think? Somewhere?” Claire keeps thumbing through the images.

  “Doesn’t have to be a photo, does it?”

  Claire sits on the bed and starts paging through the books. “Something weird,” she says. “Edgy. Like, look at this.” She holds up another shot of two old ladies having lunch or tea or something together. I instantly love them.

  “Is that edgy?” I ask. “Or just old-fashioned?”

  “Look at the lipstick,” Claire says. “Edgy.”

  I sit up. So fast I’m dizzy for a second. She has a sloping attic ceiling up here and I practically knock my own head off. Claire is staring at me, full on. “What?” I ask her.

  “Let me draw you,” she says.

  I shrug. “Sure thing. You’ve drawn me before. It’s not such a big deal.”

  “I know,” she says, getting up and going to her desk drawer, taking out her many nubs of charcoal and her artist pad. The big one. “I just feel like this will be a good time. You seem sort of you today. Very Ivy.”

  I don’t ask her what that means. I’m not sure I want to know. Instead, I sit and she cocks her head this way and that. Holds up the pad, sketches. Looks at me, looks at the pad, looks back. It’s really like a parody of someone drawing someone but I try not to laugh and I don’t say anything about it.

  I can hear Dominick, her brother, playing video games downstairs, screaming at the screen, or himself, who is to say. No idea what game he’s into. I’m not allowed to play video games. I mean, at home. Which means I don’t play them out because I suck. So that’s a thing that just completely got away from me. That’s another thing Patrick and I have in common. He wasn’t allowed to have a phone until freshman year. We are both video clueless.

  Claire draws. “Stay still!” she says.

  I have my shoes on her bed, which would drive Mom insane, but she doesn’t seem to care. I futz with my laces, look out toward the window. I sigh. I brush dog hair off my jeans. I sigh again. I hadn’t realized how much I sighed. Do I do that in general? Or just when I’m trying to be still?

  What is it, twenty minutes of sitting?

  Something like this.

  “Okay,” she says, erasing, using the side if her hand to brush off that rubber eraser dust. There is a final cock of the head. Final look and then look again. I can see her writing now. And then Claire turns the pad around to face me.

  It’s shocking, really, though I can’t say why. It’s not perfect or anything. I’m cross-legged, as I am now, criss-cross applesauce, and I’m looking down at my Converse. But I’m also sort of looking out at the same time. You can see three-quarters of my face. My hair is pulled back like it is now, and there is a lot of hair escaping, frizzing out, really, though it looks cool and spiderwebby in the drawing. My fingers are pulling absentmindedly at the laces of my shoes.

  Ivy, Searching it says in cursive beneath it.

  I look up at my friend. She wears one of those adultlike apologetic smiles. She’s on her knees and her hands are in her lap. “You,” Claire says.

  I look back at the drawing. It feels so strange to be looking at yourself. Is that me? Not exactly, I don’t think, but she’s got something in there that feels precisely right. My eyes, I think.

  Or something inside. Something you can’t see.

  I look like her, in that photo. Just after I was born. The side of my face. The slant of the nose. The eyelashes even. They belong to her.

  I touch my cheek.

  You know how when you look long enough in the mirror you become a stranger? Like, you’re not you anymore. You look for yourself, but you’re just not there. It’s like you’re lost to yourself the more you look for you.

  But when you let your best friend draw you?

  Then, you become exactly yourself. You become absolutely who you are.

  You are found.

  Bridget

  June 2000

  I wish I could take away that night. The night we said, oh, screw it, ha-ha, I get it, it felt so good. So, so good. But gosh, if I could take it away and just be hanging out with Dahlia deciding what we were wearing out tonight and who would be there and if it would be a bonfire or the broken-down house in the woods or maybe someone’s parents would be gone again.

  It’s only afternoon anyway. Summer days are not the same anymore, that’s for sure.

  “Let’s take a break, go to the reservoir,” Dahlia says.

  I imagine it. The tiny shore we’d sit on in our bathing suits last summer, pretending it was by the ocean. Even white white me had a good enough tan that summer. Now I shrug.

  I would give myself over forever to have what I’m doing tonight be what I was deciding right now. To be leaning into the mirror to put on my lip gloss and throwing myself a kiss before I turned to walk away.

  Things I do need to decide: get a summer job that does not involve a bathing suit or seeing anyone I know, clothes that will fit, parents for my baby. That’s it! This is what I’m thinking when we get down to the reservoir and who do you think I see there splayed out on the rocks in her red bikini, smooth as a cat, but Rosaria? Baylor’s next to her, smoking a blunt. I can see them from above. Like bird’s-eye view, and I grab Dahlia’s sleeve. She shakes me off and scrambles down our usual way but, hello, I’ve got this extra weight and in that weight is a baby and I have to be careful now. Or not, I think for a horrible second. I could fling myself off this giant rock and be done with it, with her, but who knows what would actually happen? Then or later. There is always a punishment, seems to me. I will never go unscathed.

  I used to be so good on these rocks, scramble, slide, climb, sit here and watch the days go by, all the ages I ever was here, growing up, watching my life go and go.

  “Hey-ho, look who’s here,” I say loudly to Dahlia.

  Baylor sees me and pretends it’s no big deal, but I could mess some shit up for him and fast if he doesn’t pay some attention. To me. You pay attention to me, boy, you understand me, I want to say, which is something I have never thought to say to a boy, not ever.

  Rosaria, man, she is so gorgeous, she slides up to sitting. No flab. I don’t know how her smooth stomach can make room for her to sit. There’s nothing there. And when your skin is that golden you can’t see anything but shine and glow. I hate my pasty white skin right now, the cellulite forming all over me in little cottage cheese chunks. And big ones. I am a mess. I know I would never look like Rosaria, but in a perfect world I could look, I don’t know, like I’m from Paris or something. Like white cool, skinny, good, interesting clothes. I know my hair looks crappy, too. Rosaria’s is long and black and shining. What is she even doing with Baylor Atkins?

  “Hey, Bridge. Hey, Dahlia,” he says, calm like Baylor always, always is. It’s a guy’s way, isn’t it? No high-anxiety pyrotechnics. Not unless there is another guy there. Then it’s all brother shit and crazy hugs and handshakes, almost like they want to touch each other as bad as they want to touch us.

  Wanted to.

  “Don’t hi me,” I say.

  He rolls his eyes.

  “How are y
ou?” Rosaria says. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like you give a shit,” I say.

  “I do,” she says. “I give a shit. How are you feeling. I mean you don’t have to be a bitch to me about it but I do feel bad for you.”

  Dahlia puts a hand on my shoulder because she knows that will set me off.

  “Don’t need your pity,” I say. “So do not.”

  Rosaria nods. “Heard.”

  “Baylor, I’ll tell you later about shit, but you’ve got to ask, like there is some serious shit going down here.” My voice wobbles. It always does now.

  “I know,” he says, all contrite.

  Yeah, right. “So why don’t you call me and ask me?”

  Baylor stands. “Because all you do is yell at me.”

  “When have I yelled at you? You came to meet those people once and that was it. That’s bullshit. I don’t yell at you,” I yell. There, I can hear it, okay I get it. But it’s not like I don’t have a reason.

  “Exactly,” Baylor says. “Meeting those people? Those freaks? No one asked me anything. I just sat there like a freakin’ moron.”

  “Well,” I said, raising eyebrows.

  “You know that kid is my kid, too.”

  Baylor points to my stomach and I resist covering it up, to shield her or me, I can’t tell.

  “What you are doing with it matters to me.”

  “Me too,” whispers Rosaria.

  “The baby is not an it.”

  Dahlia says, “She. She’s a she.”

  I can tell it hits Baylor, stomach-style, winded I mean.

  “My cousin has one, you know,” says Rosaria. “A girl.”

  Baylor is nodding. What is this one his, too? But really, I had no idea. “Pam?” I ask.

  “Hmm. No way my grandmother was going to let that kid be taken away from us.”

  I felt that. Pow. Serves me right I guess. She has to see it on my face.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” she says. She’s putting on her T-shirt now. Covering up. Covering over. I want to hate this girl but I can’t.

  I feel the sun. I love the sun. I think of last summer here and of Nelson at camp, the two of us in that big chair. “Got it.” I turn to leave.

  Rosaria stands up. “I didn’t mean it,” she says, coming closer. “Like that, okay? It probably would have been better if she had. I mean, her life is ruined.”

  Baylor watches her. I wonder if they’re doing it. I wonder, what with her cousin and that baby and what with Baylor and his, this, well I wonder if anyone will ever learn. Or at least be safe about it.

  I nod. “Okay.”

  “I didn’t know when we started,” Rosaria says, pointing at Bayl. She slips on her jean shorts. Actually, she has little-girl legs. The shorts are all frayed and perfect and faded like they’ve been drying in the sun, but she has those stick legs shooting out of them. She is young, I realize now. And me, I am getting older.

  “I didn’t either.” He flicks his blunt glumly and it skids onto another rock.

  Dahlia says, “Well, we all know now, don’t we?”

  Rosaria goes to hug me. Her skin feels so warm, from the sun and the warm rock she’s been lying on. And summer. And Baylor’s love, too. That is probably part of it. And I can feel her big boobs and her small waist and she can probably feel my belly that’s growing by the second.

  She drops her hand on my rounded stomach. She grabs Baylor and makes him touch it, too. He resists at first and then he gives in, lets his hands cup my belly. The three of us are all looking at each other. Dahlia also reaches up. And right then, I swear to you, she kicks. For the first time. I feel it and I look at them.

  “Did you feel that?” Baylor asks, astonished.

  I smile. “That was the first time,” I say. “I swear.”

  They all scream and jump back and Baylor goes, “D’oh,” in his idiotic way.

  Then all the hands are gone.

  Then it’s just me. I place both hands on the sides of my belly. Like I said. Then it’s just me.

  If Only

  Lansing, New York

  I’m twirling and twirling and then I fall down. Look up, there’s my father, spinning, looking down on me.

  I giggle and giggle, like I’m little again, and when I realize it, I straighten up. I smile. I smooth out my dress. My dad, all trim now that he’s lost a bunch of weight. It feels different to dance with him. I miss the belly, I think. It’s the way I always saw him but now all the women here look him up and down.

  “Hey, papi, you looking fine now Rosaria get you to the Weight Watchers?” they ask him.

  He pats his belly and roars.

  Rosaria comes up and takes him by the hand. They’re still in love, I can see it. My father would follow my stepmother to the end of the world. Once she tried to leave him and he slept on her mother’s doorstep. She stepped over him on her way to work in the morning. Another night he held up an old-school boom box and played Alicia Keys below her window until a neighbor came out in her pj’s and curlers and smashed it to the ground.

  Those are the stories anyway. Rosaria still sings that song, all the time, while she’s cleaning or in the shower. Some people want diamond rings, some just want everything, but everything means nothing if I ain’t got you.

  The story of their love is always the story of her leaving and him doing something goofy to get her back.

  Like losing all that weight I guess.

  My stepcousin comes up, all dressed up in her quinceañera dress, like the top of a really tacky cake, like a model in a store I’ll never shop in. Oh you know, that tonight I’m loving you, goes the music. You gotta have one, Rosaria always teases me. That’s how you become a woman, she says, pinching my cheeks, God’s blessings, she says. I feel bad because Rosaria and my dad just have a son together, my brother, Frank, who is eight, and I’m pretty much her only chance for a party like this, but it’s not right for me. I love Rosaria and I speak almost perfect Spanish now, and she is like a mother to me, but I can’t do what doesn’t feel right. I guess I get that from my mother.

  Wherever she may be.

  Tonight I want all of you tonight. Give me everything tonight, the music says and here comes my grandfather to take me by the hand. He twirls me around, but that’s not really how you dance to Pitbull. “You gotta eat, little girl,” he says.

  The food has been amazing, it’s true, but all that meat makes me feel tired, and I guess he can tell it ain’t happening because he dances away, over to his niece Pam, and her daughter, Georgia, who’s a few years older than I am. We used to do everything together until she got to high school. Now she can’t be bothered with me and I don’t really care because she is the one draped over the steps in C building, where all the fuckups hang. She’s not going anywhere pretty, I know that, but tonight she looks so sweet with her hair all curled around her face, a flowered dress cinched at her tiny waist. The Vasquezes are gorgeous. They make dumb decisions, but they are drop-dead beautiful.

  Outside the window are trees. The lake. You can see to Aurora this winter.

  Dad pulls me up. “Let’s dance, whitey,” he says. He’s a face sweater and that’s happening to him now, which I try to ignore. Tonight, it goes, bass shaking me to my bones. I like my dad in the wintertime, when he comes in from the tree farm he runs, smelling like the cold and the pine needles and that smell of when it’s just about to snow. I like winter dad best. All flannelled and gloved and hatted and far away.

  But I let him hold on to me and pretend to lead me with his little shuffle. All the guys here are awesome dancers and this, along with something about the way he always feels so left behind, makes it seem like my dad is older than other men his age. He just seems so out of step with it all. I guess we both do.

  Or maybe it’s just out of step with this. I lift my head up from his chest. The big banquet hall. The salsa, the disco ball turning and turning. All these platters of cabrito and barbacoa getting cold and congealing with fat. It’s all cele
bration here but that’s not the kind of people he comes from. He comes from angry people. My grandmother sits out front of her crappy house and yells at all the people who cross her lawn. She’s never given me a present. Ever.

  I got lucky, I know, and so did he. We both know it, too.

  Rosaria comes over and pulls me off him. I think she’s going to take him in her arms, but instead it’s me she takes. Like when I was little, being held by Rosaria, looking down, her beautiful black hair that smells like all kinds of flowers. Only I’m bigger than she is now.

  She pulls me away and under the spinning ball and she twirls me and twirls me and twirls me around.

  “Ahhh,” I scream, looking up like I’m catching snowflakes.

  “I love you, my daughter,” she says. “God’s blessings. Quinceañera or not, you are my only one.”

  Ivy

  2017

  Don’t know how, but today after our weekly Crossroads meeting—we voted two poems (“This is Why I’m Crying” and “You are the Sun, the Moon, and my Stars” by a sophomore lacrosse player I didn’t even know could spell and Alex’s poem, “Punk can save your soul and other daydreams”) as well as a short story by a Dungeons & Dragons–playing senior about a girl who turns into a mermaid to go looking for her grandmother’s jewels that were lost in a shipwreck—we end up in Alex’s basement.

  He was hanging around outside the office, waiting to see if his poem got voted in after the meeting.

  “You’re in,” Claire said, and I hit her. For one, the poetry is my beat, and for another, we are really supposed to notify our writers more officially, by email.

  She shrugged. “I love the line ‘Nothing feels good but remembering and singing to you.’”

  Alex grinned.

  Is that a good line? Maybe. I like the feelings it gives me.

  “Song lyrics,” he said as we were headed into the hallway.

  “How cool,” Claire said. “I’d love to hear them sometime.”

  He nodded, but this is the thing with Alex. He doesn’t care. He got what he wanted. The poem in the magazine. Looked at us long enough to make sure that happened and now? Nothing most likely.