“I feel happy today,” I say to no one. A lady walking her dog stares at me. I’m sure she thinks I’m crazy, but I don’t mind at all.
There’s a pretty park out here called Snug Harbor. I sit near an elaborate fountain, open my notebook, and examine the question I wrote on the way here. Dari is part of what is different about me, but he’s not all of it. If I wasn’t evolving, I would have never had the courage to talk to Dari in the first place. No. It’s me. I jot some of my observations down (so I wasn’t totally lying to Mom). As I write, I sense that I’m being watched. I try to ignore the feeling; this is New York and somebody’s always staring. But I feel a chill that has nothing to do with the weather. I look up and lock eyes with a woman. A woman I’ve seen before.
“Hello,” she says.
“Uh, hi,” I say, but I really don’t want to have a chat. I just want to write in my notebook and be alone with my thoughts.
“I remember you,” she says. At that moment, I know exactly who she is, and seeing her here is super weird.
“Yeah. You’re the lady from the window,” I say, making her sound more like a Dutch prostitute than a psychic. “Do you live around here?”
She shakes her head. “I like this park. I like it on cold weekdays because typically I have it to myself.” She studies me closely.
“I’m never here and I won’t be returning,” I tell her, as if to assure her that she won’t have to share her park with me again.
“You’re getting closer, but you’re still holding on. Get rid of the things you don’t need,” she instructs, and then she pops one of those freaky e-cigarettes into her mouth. She sits near me, not too close, but close enough for me to hear her without straining.
“I don’t have any money.” I don’t know if she’s trying to corner me into paying for her services again or what.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m not staying long.” She stares at the water fountain, or rather she stares through it.
“I don’t usually do this, but I could feel you calling out to me long before you acknowledged me. If you’re interested, you’re in a good place right now. Everything takes time, but you’re going in the right direction. Just don’t depend on others for your happiness. People are slippery.”
“Slippery? Like con artists?”
“They slip between your fingers if you hold on too tight.” Her olive face turns a ghostly white for a moment and then goes back to normal. “Be careful. Your rage is a powerful thing. Keep it in check.” She then stands up and heads down toward the road. No “good-bye” or anything.
“Wait a second,” I yell. “What do you mean rage is a powerful thing? Am I in danger? That’s so vague!”
She turns to face me and her eyes narrow on mine.
“I said your rage is a powerful thing. That is specific.”
Tara’s freshly pummeled face appears to me in a flash, and I blink it away.
“So are you haunted or something? Did you go to sorcery school or have a supervillain-type accident in a science lab?” Why I need to be a smart-ass about her trade is beyond me.
“Runs in my family. Like cancer,” she replies.
“How do you know?”
She glances out at the water toward the dock and all at once, seems terribly exhausted. Maybe I’m annoying.
“My grandmother and my mother predicted their own deaths. Date, time, and location. If that’s not proof, I can’t give you any.”
“So? Do you know when you’re going to die?” I ask.
She smiles sadly. “My dear? I know when you’re going to die.”
I can’t speak. I just stare as she continues down the hill to the road and is soon obstructed by the trees. I am curious to know when I’m going to die, obviously, but she didn’t seem willing to share any more, so I let it go. It’s also possible that learning any concrete details about my death might terrify me. I sit back down and tell myself that I don’t believe in clairvoyance. That it isn’t at all strange that I just ran into the random psychic reader we found on “yes night” and that she’s probably just a sad lady that likes to go around scaring people. I reach into my bag and I pull out the gray sweatshirt. She just said I should get rid of things I don’t need. Did she know what I was planning to do? No matter. I’m not really taking her advice if I thought of it first.
I follow her path down to the road and inch closer to the water. Last night I could’ve done this in the ocean. Would’ve been way more dramatic and fitting, and Dari would’ve been with me. But this is good enough. I unroll the shirt and try to forget about how happy it made me when he first gave it to me. How I couldn’t wait to wear it, and got a strange thrill knowing I could never wear it to school. Then I think of Bobby from today. Not the Bobby of last year or the Bobby in my memory. This Bobby is a gross little man who I suspect is completely useless now that the schools won’t have him. His life is depressing. This helps. With no more nostalgia, I drop it into the water, watch it darken with moisture and then sink below the murky surface. I feel nothing. I feel fine.
I do feel like he’s gone. From me. He doesn’t exist anymore. I never thought I’d be able to feel that. The happy rush from earlier has settled. I don’t feel overjoyed or especially sad. Maybe sad for all the time I wasted, but mostly I feel nothing. On the ferry, I try to focus my thoughts on last night. I loved last night, but even that won’t take hold of me. I open my notebook and write: I think I love too much. Then I cross it out and I write: I think I love too hard. Then I sigh and cross out the words I think. I don’t want to replace Bobby with Dari. Dari is special and deserves better. I glance outward as we pass Lady Liberty and imagine she’s me for a second. She’d be smarter. She would use her head, and I bet her head is filled with logic. She would probably slow things down with Dari. Even though she doesn’t want to, she knows that things that get too hot, too fast have a tendency to blow up in her face. She’s been through a lot, Lady Liberty.
After we dock and I make my way out into the station with all the other passengers, my legs begin to carry me in the wrong direction, wanting to get back on line to ride the next one again before I can stop them. Probably out of habit. My old dance teacher would call that “muscle memory.” It’s been programmed. That’s all over now. I have no reason to ride this ferry ever again if I don’t want to. And I don’t.
It’s lunchtime and I feel like walking, so I start going north, grab a Papaya Dog along the way, then a milk shake. I just keep going. Before I’m fully aware of my surroundings, I realize how close I am to the big, beautiful old library on Fifth Avenue. Maybe I’ll make a stop there after all.
* * *
4:10. Feels like a good enough time to head home. My phone rings just before I go underground to catch the train. I look at it and read the name that flashes across the screen in disbelief.
“Hello?”
“Hi. Lily, I just want you to know that I am sorry if I came off as . . . uncaring yesterday. I am deeply concerned about you and only want the best.” Jackie says all this slowly and deliberately as if she’s reading from a teleprompter.
“What?”
“I am going to make an effort from now on to be more sensitive and”—she pauses for a moment—“less judgmental. Your life is your business. I don’t have any right to interfere.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
A pigeon poops on the wrought iron gate separating Bryant Park from Forty-Second Street while Jackie and I say nothing.
“Why did you call?” I ask.
“I was worried. I didn’t want you to fall into a bad place or do anything rash cuz of me.”
“You were afraid I’d tried to end it all because you were being snotty?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know how fragile you are! I don’t want to be a negative contributor in your life.”
“Oh my God. Jackie, I’m still a person. You treat me like I’m nothing more than a psych ward patient.”
“That’s not true,” sh
e protests, but she does not sound convinced.
“It is! You didn’t call me because you actually want to talk to me. You called me because you feel guilty.”
Jackie is completely silent, quite possibly for the first time in her life. I feel a crazy boldness right now. Something about today just makes me want to be totally honest, and I do not care about the consequences.
“Jackie? I am breaking up with you.”
She gasps, then laughs. “Wait. What? What?!”
“You know how in life people sort of grow apart? We’ve already done the growing bit, now we need to just stay . . . apart. Please.”
“Seriously? You’re doing the friend equivalent of dumping me right now?”
“Yeah. It’s time. I wish you the best,” I tell her.
“Whatever, Lily. I hope you’re being heavily medicated!” And she hangs up on me.
The train is crowded, so I have to stand. Otherwise, I might pull out my notebook and write something about this occasion, which feels significant. I might write something like, I am officially no longer friends with Jackie and I don’t feel bad about it at all. It’s so much more satisfying to unfriend someone in real life instead of on social media.
I enter the apartment and the living room’s empty. I grab a celebratory handful of gummy worms from the kitchen and shove them into my mouth. As I chew, I walk back toward my room and notice the light bleeding out from under Mom’s office door.
I open the door and stop.
I open the door and everything stops.
They stop. They, they, they.
My senses dull and fail me. I think I’m having a stroke because I can’t feel my hands or my feet and I can’t have just seen what I’ve seen. I can’t have heard what I just heard. They. Them. Someone says “no” three times, four times, a hundred times, and that someone is me. Water mysteriously gushes into my ears from somewhere. All I see and hear blends into an underwater blur. With no actual water. There is movement, but I can’t interpret it. None of this can be real. My mother’s mouth is flapping up and down and all I hear is water. I saw it. They. Them. Her hand on—Her Star of David tattoo on her lower back.
“Lily!” She screams my name. I hear her clearly now. Everything comes into sharp focus. I can’t be here. I run.
I saw her lips. And his lips . . .
I don’t wait for the elevator. I run down the stairs and he’s right on my heels. I can’t breathe. I can’t find the air. Where is the air?
“Lily! Please listen,” he cries.
There is no listening. There is no explanation. There is no nothing. My mother has always been very beautiful. Dari will always be beautiful. Why didn’t I see it before?
I run out into the street. I just keep running. I want to run until I die. Run until my lungs explode. Run until the world comes to an end. My mother. My Dari. Who are they? Why?
The sick thing is . . .
They look like they belong together.
[A BRIEF DETOUR: THE BALLAD OF LILY & BOBBY]
Spoken, NOT sung! Like Lou Reed:
I was alone
Sometimes it got so bad
You grabbed me by the hand
Cuz I didn’t have
A dad.
But you messed it up, man!
Like a psycho in a van
You’re just like Peter Pan
Wanted me to be your fan.
That sucks. Hard. Trying again.
Sung, NOT spoken! Like Anne Wilson:
You dreamed you were my drum
Kept me under your thumb,
This is so fuckin’ dumb!
There. I tried to write it out in song, but I can’t. Lyrics are hard enough without trying to come up with some about the worst year of my life.
Sooooooooooooooo. This is kind of awful, terrible, stupid, but I guess I’ll give this telling-my-story thing a try.
Robert Wright used to teach at my school. He taught English to sophomores and seniors and was the faculty adviser for The Folio, the poetry and arts magazine. He was also my friend. (This is not easy to write down.) It was his idea for me to be The Folio’s editor. First time a sophomore had ever been given the job and I really liked it.
Sometimes I’d stay late after school to work on The Folio and Mr. Wright would be there. This is how I found out that he was a huge Radiohead fan like me. I didn’t know that teachers could have good taste in music. This is also how I found out that he was a guitarist for a Brooklyn band called the Radical Faulkners. He said I could come and see them sometime if I wanted, but he understood if I never did. Their gigs were usually way out in Brooklyn somewhere and he figured I had better things to do than watch my teacher’s band in my spare time. He was wrong about that, but I didn’t let him know. I told him to bring his guitar to school so we could jam. He was very impressed that I played bass and drums, but especially drums, because it’s long been a male-dominated instrument, he said. To this, I said, “Duh.”
A few times we snuck into the music wing when no one was around and we played all kinds of shit. Random old shit I never told anyone that I liked out of embarrassment. Van Halen, Def Leppard—he even knew “Cannonball” by the Breeders. He had eclectic tastes just like I do. He asked me for drum lessons, so I gave him some. He asked me to guide his hands, so I did. He asked me how resonant the average human body was. I said, “It depends.” He said, “I bet I’d make a good drum. You should smack me sometime and see,” and he winked and I blushed harder than I ever have before. I said, “I’d never, ever smack you, Mr. Wright.” (Gag me.) Then he said, “Whenever we’re alone, just call me Bobby.” He said it like it was no big deal, but it was a huge deal for me. It’s so embarrassing now.
When we finished putting together the fall portion of the magazine, he said he’d never met anyone like me before. He wished we had met under different circumstances and at a different time in our lives. I agreed, and I only meant to hug him. Then I only meant to kiss his cheek. He lingered there and when he didn’t show any signs of moving, I kissed him for real.
I have thought about that kiss way too much. Sometimes I wish I could go back to that one kiss and just freeze time right there. Right when everything was wonderful. Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and not hug Bobby at all. I wish I could just nod and say something wise like, Good thing you have a beautiful wife at home that loves you. But I didn’t. I rarely thought about her at all.
I was too busy thinking about the lies I had to keep coming up with to explain to Jackie and Tracy why their third musketeer was suddenly MIA. I told them it was a guy and it was complicated. That much was true. If they’d been satisfied with that answer, I wouldn’t have needed to lie at all. But they asked me questions all the time. “Does he go here?” “Is he in college?” “Where did you meet him?” Because of shit like that, I had to invent a boyfriend they could accept. “He’s a senior.” “He goes to school uptown.” “We met at Starbucks.” “You can’t meet him because he’s really shy and he has this big scar on his face from a car accident when he was little, so he’s super self-conscious about meeting strangers.” The scar bit helped a lot. It made Jackie feel instantly sorry for him and freaked Tracy out. They stopped asking questions. My mom wasn’t as concerned at first. She thought I was entitled to my privacy.
Once I stayed late though there was no reason to. The Folio had already gone to the printer’s. I just wanted to see him and not in class because that didn’t count at all. The journalism room was completely empty, so I just sat there and did my homework. It was cold that day, and someone had left one of the windows open, so I got up to shut it and about had a massive heart attack when I found Bobby there standing by the window, hidden between the wall and the bookcase. He’d been standing there the whole time, not making a sound.
“You scared the crap outta me!”
He just kept staring straight ahead, like I wasn’t there. The air blowing in made the room freezing, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“What’s wrong?
” I asked. Everything about him was freaking me out that day.
He didn’t say anything for a few minutes, so I just stood there like an idiot, doing nothing. When he did, though? Okay. This is a paraphrase or whatever, because I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something like, “There’s no one I can cry out to. No one would want to hear me if I did.” And then he said something about rats chewing the wires in the walls. Nothing he said made any sense. It was frightening. When he finally moved, he turned his head to look at me and told me to go home and said I shouldn’t stay after school anymore. I said sometimes I was going to have to so we could get our work done, but if he ever wasn’t feeling well or needed to be alone, all he had to do was tell me. He just smiled this supersad smile and said he’d be fine and that I should get home. He came away from the window and let me shut it. While my back was turned locking the window, he left without making a sound.
I didn’t see him outside of class for a few days, but when I did, he seemed normal again and apologized.
“What was wrong with you?” I asked him.
“I don’t always take care of myself the way I should,” he said and shrugged. Okay, this is more paraphrasing, but it’s pretty much what he said: “It’s hard to be happy. As you grow, your life is like a collection of newspaper stories and some headlines are great ones that you’re proud of. But there are so many that you wish you could just erase. And you can’t. The things we do stay with us till we die.” This was easily the most serious conversation I’d ever had with him.
“Well. The parts of you I’ve gotten to know so far feel like really good headlines. If it’s any consolation.”
“It is.” He smiled the special smile that he saved only for me. “Wanna go to the Strand? I need the latest Jennifer Egan.”
The Truth of Right Now Page 21