“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I probably should have learned my lesson about marriage the first time.”
“Thanks for the warning.” I nodded at my engagement ring.
“I bet he’s a nice guy,” Allison said. “Is he a lawyer too?”
“Jason’s a journalist,” I said. “And I’m not a lawyer yet. I just graduated.”
“Still, look at you now. I always hoped you were doing well. Our grandmother would love it.”
The way she said it, it sounded like an accusation and a compliment at the same time. I waited for her to tell me why she’d asked me to come. To fill the silence, I told her a little about school, about Jason, about the sample bar question essays I’d written out and read into a tape recorder that I played so often I could hear it in my sleep.
“What are you doing these days?” I asked finally.
“Other than slitting my wrists?”
I flinched.
“I teach music,” she said. “We tried to make a real pianist out of me, but I was never quite good enough. My heart wasn’t in it.”
“ ‘We ’?”
“Grandma and I,” she said. “Grandma more than me. My parents gave me to her after that summer, you know. They put me in a place like this for a few weeks, and when I came out they said they simply lacked the knowledge to deal with a child with those kinds of issues. They moved to LA the next year.”
“I know,” I said. I had known, but hearing it out loud still felt like a slap. “I never understood why you told them. You could have said I’d fallen. I never told them you pushed me. I never said that. I wouldn’t have.”
“I could have said a lot of things,” said Allison. “I thought my parents would come get me and yours would come get you. I thought if anyone got in trouble, it would be our grandmother.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We were kids. We didn’t know what we were doing.”
“It took me all these years to figure out that she didn’t know, either. She had the next decade of my life scheduled before my parents were on the plane. She was so scared to mess up again that I was barely allowed to leave the house. I think I got married the first time just to get away from her. She went on and on about my first husband being trash. Her favorite thing to say when I messed up was that I took after my mother’s side of the family, and water seeks its level. I guess it never occurred to her I hadn’t seen my mother in years, or that it probably didn’t say much about her that I had decided that moving into a trailer with a man who sold cheap souvenirs in the Everglades would have been better than going back to her house.”
“But you went back,” I said.
“I didn’t know where else to go. So I lived with her until I got married again last year. He was grandmother-approved, but that didn’t stop him from sleeping with our next-door neighbor. Maybe I would have been better off staying in the Everglades. Lots of snakes there, but most of them are harmless. Sometimes seeing one would startle me, and I would think of you.”
I closed my eyes. I thought about all the things I’d accumulated since I’d last seen Allison, and how absolutely useless they seemed right now.
“Maybe you just need to start over someplace new,” I said. “Get away from all of this. You could stay with me for a while when they let you out.”
She parted her lips a little, like she was going to laugh, but she didn’t. I tried to picture it in my head: the look on Jason’s face when I told him I was bringing home a suicidal white woman who had almost killed me once; Jason and I converting the study into a bedroom for her, getting a piano, her getting settled in Connecticut. I imagined our kids growing up together, the way she and I had thought we would.
“Maybe I’d like that,” she said finally. “I never thought of you getting married without me. Remember, we were going to be each other’s bridesmaid?”
“I remember,” I said. “I was going to pick mint green dresses, because that was your favorite color, and you were going to pick orange, because it was mine. Jason’s sister is being a pain in the neck and doesn’t want to wear the dress I picked out. You should be a bridesmaid instead. I’d even change the color for you.”
“You would,” she said. “But I just wanted to see you. I just wanted you to see me. Take care of yourself. I really am glad you’re happy.”
I looked at the clock again, then back at Allison. It had been an hour; I was ready to go, though still uneasy about why I’d been sent for in the first place. I reached for her hand and squeezed it by way of good-bye. She didn’t ask me to stay. I felt like somebody ought to stop me from walking out, like there was a rule that you couldn’t leave behind such palpable need.
In the waiting room, my grandmother still sat. I was struck by how open she looked, the way her grief pulled her out of herself the way most people’s tucks them in. I felt bigger than her for the first time in my life, but I couldn’t feel good about it. I thought of saying something to her, but I didn’t know where to start, how to explain who I was now, or what she’d had to do with it.
“I hear you’re really something these days,” she said when I stopped in front of her. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” I said, before I had time to regret it. I turned my back to leave, waited for her to say something else. I only heard her breathing.
My mother was still in the car outside. When I knocked on the window to be let in, she jumped, then seemed relieved to see it was me.
“I’m sorry you had to do that,” she said as I got in the car. “You’re a better person than I’d be, in your shoes.”
“I’m not,” I said. “It wasn’t a big deal. It was a long time ago.”
“ ‘A long time ago’—Tara, we almost lost you. Maybe you don’t remember, but to me it’s like yesterday. Like yesterday.”
“How could you possibly remember?” I said. “You weren’t there.”
The tone of my own voice surprised me. My mother looked stung and I was sorry, but not sorry enough to apologize. She bit back tears.
“Tara, don’t. I mean, not now. Look, I wanted you to have your own life and me to have mine. I made a mistake, putting you there that summer. But I loved you, you always knew I loved you?”
I didn’t think she meant for it to be a question, so I didn’t answer her directly.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
I looked out the window, watching people at a park through the glass. I thought of saying a lot of things that I didn’t. I didn’t tell her how badly I had wanted her back, not just that summer, but all the years before it; how those days she had lain beside me in the hospital bed, for once mine and mine alone, were among the best of my childhood. I didn’t tell her that every time I took note of the scar on my elbow, I thought she ought to thank me for giving her the way out of her mother’s house that she’d never found for herself, no matter how many times she ran away. I didn’t tell her how I had learned it wasn’t just snakes that could eat you alive. I didn’t tell her what I had told no one in all these years, what I had lied about even to the love of my life, because saying it out loud would unravel so much. Whatever motives Allison had for saying so—whatever she thought she saw a way out of, or more likely, back into, in confession—there had been no push, no one’s hands on my back. I hadn’t fallen, I’d jumped. It was shallow water, and though as it turned out I’d been lucky not to kill myself, at the time it hadn’t seemed like a long way down. Twenty feet and I would have my parents back, I would have my mother forever, I would have years before I had to consider the costs. I’d been, for the second time that summer, less afraid of the fall than what else I thought awaited me. That afternoon above the murky water, which I remembered quite clearly, there had been nothing but me, looking down at my own reflection, and seeing at last a way toward what I wanted most.
Harvest
Eggs. They wanted eggs, and their requests came trickling in daily in ten-point type, through the want ads of the campus paper. Five, ten, fifteen thousand you
could get for doing it just once. More than that if you were experienced. We knew girls who did it over and over and over again, once a semester. Mostly they were girls whose parents paid their full tuition anyway, and the money quickly manifested itself as stuff: cashmere sweaters crumpled on the bathroom floor, new stilettos clicking across the kitchen linoleum, matchboxes from Le Cirque and Nobu, endless overpriced trinkets collected on excursions to the East Side. Sometimes the stuff was more practical: new computers, a savings account for grad school. Sometimes it was just bigger: a brand-new entertainment center that got stolen the next week, and shame on us, because we weren’t particularly sorry when it did.
It wasn’t our eggs they wanted, so we spent the weekends watching burned DVDs and chasing ramen noodles with Corona the way broke college students were supposed to. Columbia credentials be damned, no one was interested in paying us for our genetic material. If they had wanted brown babies who so obviously didn’t belong to them, they would have just adopted. Laura Kelso, who lived in our suite—that was whose eggs they wanted. I was surprised no one had come to our door to recruit her personally; she’d practically stepped out of a want ad. 1600 SAT score, 4.1 GPA, and that only because some professors didn’t believe in A+’s. Then, of course, there was the important stuff: blonde, blue-eyed, five-foot-seven, barely 115 pounds, though we suspected the green pills she stored in a clear plastic bottle with the label torn off were diet pills of some kind. She’d been normal-sized when we met her.
She was making bank, but we couldn’t hate her for it. Absent her new income, she would have been broke like the rest of us: too good a daughter to guilt her single mother into sending more money than she could afford. Laura’s mother was a cashier at Penney’s; what she could afford wasn’t much. For a while that had given us a claim to her. She was a homegirl, a hermanita: we were in this together. Then she walked through the front door wearing Jimmy Choo boots, and we knew we were losing her. Before we knew it, we hardly saw her, and then one day she invited Ellen Chambers, serial donor, and Lisette Hartley, serial bitch, into our common area for some egg donor support group, and they compared paychecks and pain levels and wondered what had become of the little pieces of them released into the universe. We sat in Candy’s room with the door open and faked gagging. Nicole let the back pages of The Village Voice fall open, 900 numbers and round brown asses staring up at us from the floor. She said, “They’re mother material, but who wants to fuck them? If we were hookers, we’d be making twice what they were.”
We did not particularly want to be hookers, and so this was little consolation.
What we wanted was to be a doctor, a lawyer, a spy, and happy. Nicole was the aspiring doctor; she had a love-hate relationship with her bio texts, but a love-love relationship with catalogues of all kinds. Pinned to her wall where Mos Def and Che Guevara hung on ours were ads for designer shoes and clothing, electronic equipment—even the occasional house ripped out of the home buyer’s guide to remind her of the bigger picture, the things she’d wanted growing up but never had. Candy wanted to be a lawyer: she had big ideas about justice and was always dragging us to meetings with her, hoping we’d pick up some of her conviction. Truth be told, Candy could have been Laura Kelso’s dark-haired sister, but we didn’t dare say so. Freshman year at a sisterhood meeting, some girl had looked at Candy walking in and sneered, not quite under her breath, “What the hell is white girl doing here?” Not three seconds later, Candy was all in her face, like: “Mira, my people did not get half exterminated and have half their country stolen from them for you to be calling me a white girl, OK, bitch?” You didn’t mess with Candy; she was going to be one scary-ass lawyer.
Me, I wanted to be the spy. I liked secrets. Nicole, ever the realist, liked to point out that spies couldn’t be spies on their own behalf, and I had yet to encounter a government or revolution of which I approved. So far I had not accepted the seriousness of this problem. I didn’t like to think about the future, and we were only juniors, so I didn’t quite have to. Courtney was the one who said she just wanted to be happy. Nicole said this was her middle-class showing. Courtney was from one of those barely middle-class black families where the girls are always called Courtney or Kelli or Lindsay or Brooke, and the family forgoes vacations and savings and stock for a nice house in a nice neighborhood in the hopes that the neighbors will forget they are black. Usually what happened was Kelli tried so hard to prove her parents right that she turned into a bleach-blonde, rock-music-loving creature who seemed foreign to them. Lindsay got so tired of being called white girl that she studied Ebonics on BET and started dressing like a video extra, calling herself Lil L, and begging to hang out in the neighborhood they’d moved out of. Brooke, sick of not fitting in, would become anorexic or suicidal or both. We were all proud of Courtney for coming to us relatively normal.
Laura faded from us gradually. We kept our doors shut and she began to keep hers closed as well. We didn’t know whether this was in retaliation or because she wasn’t interested in hanging out with us. We never heard her in the shower, we rarely heard her enter: she seemed to glide. It was like we lived with a ghost—a snowflake, Nicole called her, and though she meant it in the harshly disapproving vein with which we spoke of most girls who were pale and delicate and seemed to be everywhere, in a more gentle sense the word had a ring of truth to it. We were living with something barely visible, something that might have vanished any second.
In tenth grade, I went through a bad-romance-novel phase. In bad romance novels, women always know the moment they are pregnant; the heroine can feel her lover plant his seed inside her, or something equally melodramatic. Perhaps because I subconsciously expected pregnancy to announce itself with some such motherly feeling of omniscience, I completely overlooked mine. Winter gave way to spring, and when I started getting queasy, I thought maybe I was lactose intolerant. When quitting dairy didn’t help, I thought maybe I had an ulcer. Nicole, Candy, and Courtney started to notice something was off, but by the nature of their prying questions, I could tell they were thinking I was bulimic. It wasn’t until I was lying on the floor, listening to Candy complain that her cramps were killing her, that I realized I hadn’t had my period for two months. It had never been regular and I had grown accustomed to red spots on my underwear at odd intervals. There was something almost thrilling about its off-kilter arrival. I liked surprises. When my friends swallowed little green and white and blue pills and marked the start date of their periods on calendars, I thought how boring it must be to have your body run like clockwork. Turning sideways and inhaling bits of dust off Courtney’s carpet, I understood that my dislike of the pill was irrational, but it was too late for all that.
Of course I had a boyfriend. We all did, they were like accessories; we kept them stored at colleges up and down the East Coast and pulled them out on formal occasions or in the event of extreme boredom or loneliness. Mine I kept at NYU, where he was lonely more than I was. I had spent a good number of nights downtown, curled up in his blue flannel sheets, listening to him breathe. He was good at hand-holding and being subtly witty and distracting me when I was on the verge of tears, brilliant in that completely useless way where he could tell you off the top of his head the architect of any office building downtown and the historic relationship between the toothbrush and cultural imperialism, but not what day of the week it was or what train to take to where. I didn’t want to see him yet, so I bought a pregnancy test to confirm what I already knew, and then another in case the first one had been wrong, and then I threw the two sticks with their faint plus signs into the trash can and called my mother.
People who do not call my mother “Mother” call her Isis. Her name conjures up a persona that she indulges with miniature altars and smoky incense when she is not busy being a hairdresser. She was not busy at all when I called, the vague hum of her meditation music in the background let me know that.
“Angel. I was just thinking of you.”
Every time I call my house
, even those times when I am calling because my mother has forgotten to pick me up or call me back or send me something necessary, she tells me she has just been thinking of me. I ignored her and started talking, hoping maybe with some small talk she would pick up on the tremor of my voice. I was lying on the bed in my underwear when I called her, pinching the fat at my abdomen and trying to determine whether there was more of it, looking down at my breasts and wondering if they were any bigger. I looked the same to me. I wondered if maybe I was imagining this. Stupid girls got pregnant, careless girls, girls who didn’t worry about their futures, girls whose mothers had never explained to them about sex.
Laura had been a girl something like that when she’d come to college—not stupid, but naive, uninformed. She’d been sitting in the back row of the mandatory safe-sex lecture, wide-eyed, when we met her. They’d divided us into teams and made us do races to put a condom on a banana and she’d screwed it up, put the thing on backward and had it go flying off somewhere, then blushed a brilliant shade of red and hid her face in her hands. The girls on the other team laughed.
“It’s OK,” Nicole said, putting a hand on her shoulder after we lost. “There are too many hos on this campus anyway. Who comes to college knowing how to put a condom on in five seconds?”
“Don’t say ‘hos,’” said Candy. “Just ’cause somebody likes sex doesn’t make her a ho.”
They argued all the way to the dining hall while Laura and Courtney and I exchanged hellos and shy smiles.
Nicole and Candy were virgins then, too, though you wouldn’t have known it by looking at them. Even on budgets they knew how to dress like city girls, girls who knew their way around—not like Laura, whose wardrobe screamed Kmart and favored the color pink. Maybe that was why we’d liked her right away: her need for us was immediately apparent, and unlike most of the people who needed us, we knew what to do for her.
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self Page 6