by Kim Green
They kiss deeply, tongues sliding against teeth, fingers exploring the hot dampness of cleft and crevice. He tastes better than anyone—anything—I have ever tasted, Rachel finds time to marvel.
The young lovers roll around on the blanket until the sun abandons them, cooling the horizon with its departing emerald glow. Rachel feels herself grow raw, punch-drunk, with glad yearning. This is it, she thinks as she stands in the warm breeze, letting sand granules fall like sugar from her damp body while Loren folds the blanket. I am finally going to fall in love. I am finally going to be fucked senseless. This is my last night as a callow virgin from the suburbs.
Skip ahead two and a half months. School drifts gently by, riding the trough between midterms and finals. Loren has spent the night at Rachel’s twice. By some unspoken alchemy, they do not have intercourse. Rachel is frustrated but relieved: She does not want her first time to take place within earshot of her roommates. She does not want witnesses to what she is sure is going to be an explosive mating of mammoth passions. The specialness of it, the rarity, demands restraint. So they simply turn out the lights and spoon, exploring each other in the benevolent glow of the candlelight, leaving their imminent consummation hanging like a bulging Christmas stocking.
“Thad’s going home next weekend,” Loren says, running his hand across Rachel’s forgiving but not too fleshy belly. No roommate means he’ll have the pillbox, beachfront one-bedroom to himself. He hooks his fingers under her white cotton bikini underwear, a style Raquel likes to think he imagines her in for years to come.
Rachel presses herself against him, relishing the cocked-gun sensation of him. She does not respond; her answer is the involuntary parting of her legs beneath his hand.
The day in question unfolds unremarkably except, perhaps, for the pulsing glow that envelops Rachel like mist at the bottom of a waterfall. She is vaguely aware of being suddenly, happily more visible than she has ever been, of men’s eyes following the sweet curve of her legs as she skips across the street to buy wine for the evening’s dinner, which Loren is preparing in the small but renovated beachside apartment.
A few facts: The $4.99 bottle of cabernet is drunk. Dinner, however, remains untouched, the mossy aroma of mushroom risotto saturating the drapes so deeply that Loren’s roommate Thaddeus Park eventually has to take them down and have them professionally steamed.
“I’m here!” Rachel calls as she lets herself in. For her deflowering, she has modeled herself after Sophia Loren in Two Women, all tawny cleavage and thinly smocked abundance awaiting ravishment.
Here’s where things get fuzzy.
Ren must have entered the living room from the kitchen at that point. How else could we have migrated to the bedroom so seamlessly? In the years since that fateful encounter, I have repeatedly gone over the minutes that followed my arrival in my mind, worried them into vacant smoothness, so that I am no longer sure what is real and what is the product of bitter disenchantment. I know we never started our meal. That Ren, correctly forecasting delays in consumption, turned off the oven, I am sure. It is likely we did not exchange a word before Ren stripped off my flowing, cinch-waisted, forties-style dress, the miniature print daisies piling up like dirt on snow. I don’t remember if we pulled the covers back or lay down on top of them. Were the upstairs neighbors playing the headachey narco-rock they favored, or were they mercifully out? I can’t recall. Where the condom came from is a mystery.
If I close my eyes now, peel back the layers of time and disappointment and peer at Rachel and Loren’s first—only— attempt at sex with as much cool detachment as I can muster, I see this: a fumbling hand, shaking as it draws the rubber column down over the reddening shaft of penis (it sticks up higher than Rachel expected, pointing toward the sky as if it were attached upside down). I see a grim stream of yellow light seeping under the door to the bathroom, mingling with the weak glow of streetlamp that slices the venetian blinds. I see Rachel hurrying Loren into bed so that she can conceal herself under his comeliness. I see male shoulders silhouetted against the night, arching over the cradle of a young girl’s hips. I see two bodies trying to join, banging against each other futilely while a teakettle screams next door. I see the man’s body coming down to rest against the woman’s, rigid with thwarted effort. I see the girl turning away as tears snake through her moisturizer, scenting the pillow with the stench of dead flowers. I see them disentangle their bodies and get dressed, maybe already, at that early stage of angst, gravitating toward tertiary existences. I see glasses filled with wine and a young woman walking home on legs not nearly wobbly enough for peace.
Did my brother-in-law’s penis pierce my body that night? I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. The Gothic taint of virgin’s blood I’d expected did not appear, nor did the triumphant soreness chronicled in doctors’ pamphlets and romance novels.
Did our incomplete coupling qualify as sex? I don’t know. Maybe that makes me a fool, or a denier, or just plain ridiculous, but something makes me unable to apply the label, to boil the ingredients of that night into digestible broth for easy consumption. Also possible: Although I have never completely recovered from the loss of Ren, it is still easier to think I never officially slept with my sister’s husband.
“Did you?” Laurie’s face is purpling. It seems right somehow that this conversation should take place upside down.
Memory offers no clues. I decide on the answer that matches my current level of culpability. “Yes,” I say, the word skipping across the water and plunging like a stone.
CHAPTER 19
You Haven’t Changed a Bit
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Phil says.
How did my life come to this? Yesterday, as per my personal Time Line to Truth, I was explaining the concept of remission to the kids under a fragrant canopy of Nestlé Toll House. Today I find myself defending my moral fiber to my cheating husband before a gaggle of feather-haired, corduroy-flare-clad, Kenny Loggins clones who seem to have been airlifted directly out of 1982. Plus, I have a date, and he’s. . . well, not Phil. Let me be clear: I have a date and He. Is. Not. Phil. It is confusing; the girl who was voted Most Likely to Be Mistaken for a Football Player in a Nun’s Habit should not be attending her high school reunion with a surf god.
“Give us a minute?” Phil says directly to Duke in his sternest teacher’s voice.
“Sure, dude. Whatever.” Duke ambles over to the buffet table and is promptly set upon by Misty Hughes, who seems to have kept up with her tenth-grade habits of stealing other people’s boyfriends and wearing multitiered teal miniskirts.
Phil looks at me. “Nice, Raquel. Real classy. Did you have to drive, or does he have his learner’s permit?”
Ouch.
The thing is, Phil has a point. One I (theoretically) agree with. Bringing your daughter’s surfing instructor to your high school reunion? Tacky. Perhaps even a little desperate. Clearly a transparent grab for undeserved attention. Verdict? Downright embarrassing. In my defense, I’d had no intention of bringing Duke Dunne; Sue was my date. But Sue—wimp! flake!—came down with food poisoning, and Duke materialized just as he’d threatened and . . . let’s say the offer was hard to refuse.
The scene played out something like this: Fortysomething woman prepares for twenty-fifth-year high school reunion. Discarded garments litter room, which has started to resemble post-Katrina New Orleans. Medicinal highball teeters on top of serum jar promising to “radically reduce the ruinous ravages of photoradiation.” Right. Phone jangles. Woman in question hops toward bed, legs pinned by neck-to-toe body stocking. Plumbs pile. Collapses on pile. Finds phone. Listens with incredulity as best friend relays tale of bad potato salad and gastric misery.
“I can’t go alone!” Fortysomething wails. “Everyone will think I’m separated!”
“You are separated.” Best Friend has annoying habit of sticking to facts.
“Who will I make fun of people with?” Almost a bleat.
Best Frie
nd pauses. “Your mother?”
Before Fortysomething can inveigh against the infinite cruelty of such a suggestion, doorbell rings. Fortysomething tells Best Friend to wait and executes lurching crab scuttle toward sound. Realization settles on Fortysomething that perhaps she should have bought recommended girdle size for weight range, instead of more respectable letter two, okay, three letters lower on alphabetical scale.
Opens door. Absorbs shaggy hair, edible complexion, aquamarine eyes, carved biceps, ragged daypack, impish grin.
“Yes?” Uses door to shield Lycra-sheathed body, which bears unnerving resemblance to uncooked bockwurst.
“Raquel? Hey!”
Edible launches self at Fortysomething. Bear hug. Awkward nose bump. Illegal placement of hand on rump. Fortysomething recovers enough to tell Best Friend she’ll call her back and don bathrobe while Edible blithely visits guest toilet.
“Did I miss something, or did you just show up here out of the blue?” Fortysomething demands upon Edible’s return. She knows she is supposed to sound furious. She finds it hard not to stare. That ice-cut dip where his waist joins his pelvis. . . is it possible that he modified it surgically somehow, to get it to look like that? Iliac crest—the words float into her mind with the annihilating gentleness of an anthrax spore alighting on virgin lung tissue.
Iliac crest.
“Plan change. No bookings this week.” The aquamarine eyes clear-cut a swath down the front of the frumpy robe. Guiltless smile. Hands cross over unyielding chest in supplication. “I know. My bad.”
And this, my friends, is how I reunited with the Class of 1980 on the arm of Duke Dunne instead of Sue Banicek, Phil Rose, or a down-market male escort with a chest wax and a signed photo of Ricky Martin at his bedside.
Now: I straighten my spine and give Phil the oh-how-youslay-me eyeball. “Duke’s just a friend. It’s not like we’re dating or anything.” I pause to enjoy the minute crumpling of Phil’s snarky smile, which begins at the word “friend” and culminates at the word “dating.” “We’re married, remember? We don’t date other people.” I snap my fingers, which, after three Screaming Orgasms—apparently the leading alcoholic beverage circa 1980— is relatively challenging. “Oh yeah. You forgot that one, not me.”
Before Phil can respond, the band segues from its rousing cover of Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” into an almost painfully reverent rendition of “Biggest Part of Me.” That this conversation should take place at the exact moment when David Pack is wailing about the part of himself that is, well, the biggest, is nothing less than I deserve, given my own moral transgressions of the past year.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” I snatch a glass of something frothy from a passing tray and gulp at it.
Phil tugs at the hem of his sweater, a design that would have been passably stylish if not rendered in the same brown worn by San Francisco bus drivers. “The kids,” he says without elaborating.
“The kids?” The idea of his students—products of trust-fund perpetuation, all—coming together to save our dodgy marriage is not only disturbing, it’s embarrassing.
Oh.
In a flash, I realize that Taylor and Micah have, with Phil’s lukewarm acquiescence, engineered this meeting. Our family script has been turned on its head, with me playing the hormone-addled wayward female and Phil taking on the meaty role of wronged husband while our children star as maternal nurturance and paternal discipline, respectively.
“They told you to come here?” Out of the corner of my eye, I see Duke and several of my high school peers flinging back tequila shots. Misty has moved in for the kill, her eggplant mascara fluttering thickly in the ballroom glow like fresh roadkill under a streetlamp.
Phil emits a short stress-relieving burp and pats his tummy. “They told me you’d be here. They said you were embarrassed to come alone and my showing up would make you realize I’m serious about getting back together.” My husband glances at Duke, who appears to be slurping another shot, this time out of—oh no, say it isn’t so—Misty’s belly button. “You do look sort of embarrassed, Quel,” he says with a smile so evil, I actually take a step back.
“Attention! Hey, everybody! Hey! Quiet!” Class president, field hockey captain, and Desert Storm veteran Carolyn Tibbetts has commandeered the onstage microphone. I swear to God, the bitch looks exactly the same as she did in high school: smooth skin, ramrod posture, swingy hair.
War as anti-aging weapon?
“Thank you all for coming. It’s great to see so many familiar faces out there, and so many spouses and, um, partners as well.” Everybody titters and stares at Jeremy Bench and his equally buff, well-preserved boyfriend. Even though there were half a dozen out-of-the-closet gays and lesbians in my liberal Bay Area high school class, none of them was the captain of the water polo and baseball teams and master blow-job technician Christie Mueller’s steady (a fact that seems less inexplicable now).
“Before we move on to the raffle, there’s the little matter of homecoming king and queen, kids. So, we’ve tallied the votes . . .”
I tune out Carolyn Tibbetts’s bossy contralto and try to focus on my husband, who skulks in an ambiguous position between me and a knot of unfamiliar long-haired women in prairie skirts who may or may not be the first documented Bay Area Mennonites. Part of me wants Phil to go away so I can maintain the illusion that I, like Duke, am still clinging to the clammy residue of high school. The other part wants Phil to take me home so we can catch the tail end of Saturday Night Live and finish the last of those brownie bites from Costco together.
“Rachel Schultz, where are you?” Carolyn shields her eyes and peers at the crowd. I feel the crowd of people thickening and pushing at me, clawing at my clothes in a way I’d expect if I were, say, Madonna but, as a normal citizen, only makes me anxious and potentially incontinent. “C’mon, Rach,” someone behind me says. “Get up there, homecoming queen!” “She’s so much thinner than in high school,” I hear someone else whisper. “She probably had plastic surgery,” a voice responds. “I read about it in People. All the celebs do.” “She came with both her husbands,” says somebody else. “More power to her,” says another.
“Rachel Schultz!” Carolyn calls again. “Don’t be shy. Come on down.” Carolyn peers at the card again. “And the 1980, twenty-five-year class reunion homecoming king is Jeremy Bench!”
I stumble toward the stage in a daze. As I ascend, I am reminded of the scene in Carrie where the mean girls, not satisfied with pelting the poor girl with tampons, dump pigs’ blood on Sissy Spacek as she accepts the homecoming-queen crown alongside the spiral-permed guy who played the Greatest American Hero. I don’t think I was that unpopular in high school, but lack of proof or revenge-ready telepathic ability forces me to identify the nearest exit signs.
Carolyn, I see, has a false leg that is made up to look like a real nylon-clad foot and strut, complete with crimson toenails and bulbous field hockey–primed calves. She jams a rhinestone tiara on my head. I make eye contact with Phil, who manages to look proud, appalled, and amused at the same time. I realize with a jolt of intense wretchedness that, along with Sue, Phil is the one I would have liked to share the absurdity of this moment with. He’s the only one who would appreciate, for instance, that extremely gone-to-seed 1980 homecoming king Troy Somethingorother is silently weeping behind a ficus plant, his throne having been usurped by a fag investment banker with a $2.3 million condo in the Castro.
Someone clasps my hand. It is Jeremy Bench. His tanned skin has a Marlboro Man patina. He wears a simple titanium wedding band on his left hand and smells clean and powerfully musky, as if he applied eau de goat’s pituitary directly to his pulse points. I make a note to ask him about the anti-aging benefits of said.
“You look great, Rachel,” he says, doing the Princess Diana wave at the crowd. “I saw your show at the Waxman gallery.”
“Well, thanks.” Does Duke have to stand so close to Phil, or—gawd—slap him on the
back like that?
“How are you doing?” Hushed, awed, “I am blissfully cancer free and you’re not” voice.
“Good, actually. I’m in remission.” Liar, liar . . . hey, what happened to Phil’s spare tire? My (sort of) husband is looking strangely svelte, I realize. Or perhaps it’s the onstage angle?
Jeremy raises my hand in mock triumph and grins. “Revenge of the nerds,” he murmurs.
“Chinese? Thai? Falafel?” I flip through the envelope of takeout menus that has, as of late, come to comprise our four squares.
“Whatever.” Taylor flicks America’s Next Top Model up another notch so that we can all enjoy Tyra verbally bludgeoning the slightly cross-eyed girl from Wichita.
Micah glances up from his calculus text. “Let’s have burritos. I’ll pick them up as soon as I finish this.”
Taylor ups the volume again. Tyra’s gingery weave swirls around her head, which seems to float three feet above everybody else’s. Having dipped my toes into the tantalizing pool of televised celebrity, I think it is entirely possible she spends the entire show standing on a box, or the bit players have conceded to having their feet lopped off to enhance her superior image.
Cynicism, the new black.
“Tay, can you turn that down a bit?” I dump Crystal Light into the pitcher.
The volume shoots upward.
“Taylor! What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
I go to the TV and manually lower the volume. My head is splitting, and I still have to design the fund-raiser mailing I promised Kendall, the BC support-group leader. Taylor has been simmering ever since I got home from the reunion last night. Instead of speculating as to the reason(s), I buried myself in household minutiae, hoping her resentment had nothing to do with me and was just garden-variety teen angst.