She smiled coldly, in her own kind of rage. She bounced on her toes, as if about to waft away. I managed, at last, to get to my feet. I don’t remember what I said—it’s confused with what I wanted to say and what afterward I wished I’d said—but it was more or less this: “I want to believe you don’t mean it. But if you do and you’re our friend, I think you owe us.” When it was clear guilt wasn’t working, I tried logic. “Or maybe you don’t owe us anything, but you could at least explain why you want to do something so…so final?” And then I was pissed. “It’s just cowardly!”
“If you say so.”
“Would you quit saying that?”
She arched backward till her hair and then the flats of her hands met the ground, and her body made a bridge. The slender bones of her rib cage stood out under her tube top. Prima donna is what my mother would have called me if I had made that move (my real mother, not the steplady). Not that I could have.
“What do you want us to do, stay and watch? Take pictures?” I said, though it was already dawning on me that we were irrelevant. Rising from her backbend, she looked at me from what seemed a sorrowful distance, as if she were already gone, in some heaven or fifth dimension. I was crying then, but I threatened to call her priest (it was all I could think of; Saint had the same priest). I tried to shame her into telling the rest of her story, as she had shamed me. “We told you,” I said like a ten-year-old.
“If you try it, I may have to kill you,” said Saint.
“To be or not to be. It’s the central human question. At least according to Camus?” said CJ wonderingly.
We were all goofy in our different ways, and we stood before her—a goofy barricade—all determined to save her from herself, physically if need be. “You can’t,” I said. “We won’t let you. We need you.”
“It’s true,” Saint murmured, humming low in his throat.
Then her mood changed, or seemed to. She sat down again and crossed her legs like a kid in a kindergarten circle. As if we had no will of our own, utterly bound to her movements, we sat as well. She giggled eerily. “How much do you need me? Could you bear living without me?”
For the past three years I’d known her better than I knew anyone. And she knew me. At the mere thought of life without her, I felt myself growing dim to myself. Actions pointless. Gray days everlasting. I saw myself walking the earth like a zombie, cut off from the source of light and life. It was how the priests described limbo, hell for pagan babies, the soul cut off from God. “I couldn’t stand it,” I said. “I would die, truly.” Which sounded false to my ears, overstated but lame, but the guys were nodding, and it seemed to touch something in her. Her body started to vibrate, not quite trembling, as if mild electricity were coursing through her. “I can’t believe you mean it. But if you do, if it’s true what you say, then maybe”—her teeth were chattering now—“maybe you would all like to…” The words “join me” hung before us in the air.
This was not my idea. It was not anyone’s. Saint’s hands were extended, either to hold her here in the world with us or to plead for our lives.
“All of us?” CJ giggled nervously. “Ooh, messy. Spilled on the beach. Picture it,” he said, and I did: the plummet, the crash, our broken bodies.
I was shaking my head, no, no, but made no sound. As if it were still possible that her words didn’t mean what they seemed to mean.
We were pleading now for our lives along with hers. “Do you want people talking about us behind our backs?” said CJ. “I mean, I’m sure they already do, but like we belong in the loony bin?” He put on a female voice: “That sweet Kay Campion, if only she’d asked for help! Like mother, like daughter? But I for one never trusted that witchy DeVito. And poor St. John, he might have had a chance if he hadn’t gotten involved with what’s-his-face, you know, the weirdo kike?”
Saint and I nodded concurrence.
“Seriously,” said CJ, “think of the headline. ‘Tragedy at LJHS. Teens Die in Deadly Pact.’ ”
I thought of my stepmother and stepsister; they might feel bad but not that bad. I thought of my father, who had managed to replace my mother. Wind hit the leaves of the tree overhead, and the rustle softened the sounds of the words in my mind. Far below us, waves clawed at the beach, hsssh hsssssh, like my mother, whom I remembered clearly, perfectly, humming me to sleep.
“You know that dance I did in the grass?” Vera said. “It’s famous. It’s called ‘The Dying Swan.’ It looks nifty, but it isn’t that hard.”
Then with a light hop she was up and running. We chased her, but she was fast. She was at the jagged top of the chain-link when Saint caught her ankle. He pulled, she slipped, he reached up, she fell. CJ and I stood on the outskirts as if paralyzed while they rearranged themselves at the base of the fence. Then she was a little bundle in his arms, held as I had always wanted to be held, and it got worse. He kissed her forehead. It got still worse. “I’ll join you, if that’s what you really want,” he said, his cheek tender against her cheek, his wild red hair and her pale gold, so beautiful I could hardly breathe. “Don’t leave me out!” cried CJ. He fell to his knees and curled beside them like a dog.
If I could have done exactly what I wanted right then, I’d have tipped my head back and howled, for as long and as loud as I had breath. Till glass cracked across town, in windowpanes and storefronts, and someone came to stop this terrible thing. Far too self-conscious to join their embrace, I just stood in front of them, looking for somewhere to rest my gaze. “This is so crazy. Guys, don’t be crazy.” I addressed Vera: “We can’t live without you, that’s the point, don’t you see? We’ll do anything for you. Isn’t that something to live for?”
Now I knew what it meant to be beside oneself. This could not be happening. It was happening. CJ the rational, the ironic, kissed the back of Saint’s hand. All three seemed swept out of themselves, in a genuine rapture. They were transported together, and I was alone. I was a bucket with a hole in it, never to be filled.
What happened next had a milky, shimmery haze around it—so much terror and giddy, exhilarated longing, and even a mystical kind of love, that afterward replaying it I didn’t trust my memory. The three were entwined, breathing one another’s breath. Every once in a while CJ laughed nervously. I watched from outside, from the borderlands. The air stirred, pooled, went quiet. Then Saint reached his large warm hand out to me. “Come on, girlie. Join the huddle.”
“I love you,” Vera said to me. “You’re my sister. My twin.”
“Let’s not overdo it,” said CJ. Then he too reached out.
I will never forget that moment, the sun in the late afternoon turning everything golden—the chain-link fence, the dry grass, our skin. The warm wind blew, waves beat on the rocks, and the weave of my mind began to loosen. Here was an answer to a question I didn’t know I’d been asking. Words spilled out of me, things about myself that I’d never voiced and maybe only half knew, that I came to know as I spoke: I needed love but I didn’t deserve it. I wanted to be better than I was, to submerge my weakness in something strong, to transform everything ugly in me into what was pure and beautiful.
I paused to swallow, and they waited respectfully. When my mother died, I’d willed my soul to leave my body like hers and rise up to heaven. I had asked God to help. Of course nothing had happened, but now again it seemed to be what I wanted and needed. There would be no pain, just the wafting upward of something not quite bodiless. Human life was a sea in which bodies floated like bubbles. Death was the bubble breaking.
I described my vision and they seemed to understand. Saint called me an old soul. Sitting cross-legged, erect in meditation position, he recounted the story of Siddhartha, which was also the story of the Buddha, a prince who gave up power, wealth, and human love to seek truth. I straightened my back, crossed one leg over the other. Vera blew a smoke ring, which swelled, rose, began to dissolve in the cosmos like our human souls. Life and death were illusions, yes? A ripple of peace washed over me.
/> “So,” Vera said, “we have a pact.”
Did we? How to be sure? The sky was so blue. I wanted, actually, to be both alive and dead. To know death while being alive in the knowing. I covered my face with my hands. I said, “Let’s not rush this. We need time to think.”
“About what?” she said.
“Everything. How to be happy.”
“Thinking is pain,” she said. “Right, Siddhartha?”
“Vera, shut up.”
It was the second time that day I’d stood my ground with them, but there was nothing that day that I could have predicted. I’d wanted transformation, and here I was, on the brink. “Aren’t there things you want to do in life? Go onstage and dance? You’re so talented….”
She curved her arms over her head like a ballerina, then flapped her bad hand at us.
“That? It doesn’t have to stop you!” I turned to our friends. “What about you guys? If you had a year to live, or even a month, what would you do?”
“I’d go down to Chicago and see a Cubs game,” Saint said. CJ smirked. “Asshole,” said Saint. “What would you do?”
CJ made a fist and poked in a sly finger. We hissed, but he was unfazed. “With each of you! Or maybe all together?”
“I’d lose weight,” I said. “I know it’s vain and pathetic and means nothing in the face of really terrible things, but I’d buy a two-piece bathing suit and go to the beach. I’d walk along the sand in front of people. I’d sit down on my towel and put on suntan lotion. I would so love that.” Tears were rolling down my cheeks but I didn’t care. “Could we wait six months?”
No one answered. We sat in our patch of shade, the sun bright all around us. Backlit, my friends looked like gods. Vera was Hera, the queen; CJ was Hermes, the lightning-quick messenger; and Saint of the lion’s mane—he was Prometheus, who gave fire to mankind and suffered for it.
Then Saint looked at me. Our eyes locked and a beam of light seemed to pass between us. And I felt beyond doubt: There was no beauty in the world without him in it.
“How about a month? Or two weeks?” I said. “I have to read Siddhartha and lose weight, and I have no willpower!” I was trying to be funny. But Vera’s face was wet. Vera, who never cried.
“What’s the matter, Vee?”
She shook her head from side to side. “I can’t believe. You’d entertain the thought. Even for a second.”
“It’s just love.” As I spoke, I knew it was true. “I would die for you. For all of you. Like those monks who burned themselves in Vietnam.”
Vera held out her hand and I was pulled into the group. I felt as if I were ten years old again and a girl I’d liked from afar had just invited me to sleep over. Saint took my other hand. Tears poured out of me but without choking or sobbing, without pain or shame, sweet on my face and in my throat. I wrapped my arms around Saint’s thick arm, I entangled my legs with everyone’s. It was like a four-way marriage had been sealed, a pact like the covenant between God and Noah that kept the world alive. I loved these people. They loved me. God ran through them and through me, a circulatory system of friendship feeding all of us. “It’s like we’ve already died and this is heaven.”
We laughed ferociously. A compromise had been reached beyond our individual wills. For the next two weeks—exactly, only—we would make it our project to do everything we had ever dreamed of. Then, five days before the start of our last year of high school, on what was also, fortuitously, Vera’s seventeenth birthday, we would climb the cyclone fence by the bluff, hold hands on the tippy-toe edge, scream, “Fuck you!” at the sad, silly, illusory world, and jump.
A pledge, it had to be inscribed. Vera dictated; CJ honed the word choice; I made a copy for each of us, on my college-ruled loose-leaf notepaper.
We, the undersigned, parts of a nearly perfect union, do hereby swear upon the Sacred Bond of Friendship that on August 29, 1968, before light from the rising sun hits the lake, we will leap together from the bluff at Lourdes Metropolitan Park, consigning our futures to such forces as may wish to govern them. The decision is ours alone and not the misdirection of any third party. We celebrate our will, our love for one another, and our sacred honor.
Katherine “Kay” Campion
Vera DeVito
St. John Scully
Christopher Joseph Walker
We had fourteen days.
2
Vera
It was dinnertime, but Vera stayed in the park. Pledge or no Pledge, the rest of us had to go, Saint to work, CJ and I to what Vera called our swank pads. We had pre- and post-dinner chores and, in between, the family dinner table. We would meet later at Hamburger Heaven when Saint’s shift was over.
CJ drove me home, and in the car beside him I pictured Vera alone under our tree, maybe leaning against the trunk. The park had been emptying, moms assembling their children. When you know people the way I knew my friends then, you know what they’re doing when you aren’t with them, or you think you do. Words they uttered last year or an hour ago, their jokes and opinions, and sometimes their thoughts about things, including you, flit around your head like little demon butterflies, counterpointing your own thoughts, shaping the muddle of your day. Even years later I can see Vera in the park that evening just before sunset. She’s feeling pretty good after all that solidarity, everyone’s arms around her.
Then her good feeling starts to fade. Maybe it’s confabulation, maybe I’m putting my own neurotic self into her, but it’s getting dark and she’s thinking of me in my air-conditioned house, with my family that, for better or worse, eats dinner together. She pats the back pocket of her cutoffs for the slight bulk of her copy of the folded Pledge. As if, she thinks, Kay would actually honor the Pledge when it came due. As if anyone would.
Vera was so utterly sure of herself—of the rightness of what she said and did—that it was hard for other people to sense her self-doubt. But it’s so clear now. Swathed in fear and rage, she is moving toward the fence, glaring through it at the lake, at the flecks of light on the water. Fuck this, she thinks. She could climb and jump now, with the low sun shining on the waves and kids whining for ten more minutes on the swings. She can choose, her untold secret a knife to cut through any pledge.
This is what, at the time, we knew about her:
1. That her father was scum.
2. That her mother would be scum if she had enough substance to be wiped off of something.
When the mood struck she told us bits of sleaze:
3. Her father had had numerous girlfriends, currently a young lady in payroll, ten years older than Vera and great in the sack. (He told her such things.)
4. A possible cause of the man’s faithlessness was his crazy wife (his term), who would clean the house from the cellar to the back of the closet in the master bedroom, then get in bed with a library book and a glass of vodka. Who could stand such a woman?
5. It was Vera herself at the root of every bad thing—her birth defect, to be specific, her essential governing symbol. It’s what people saw, or worse, tried not to see. The rare times her mother spoke to her, it was to her forehead or where the wall of a room met the ceiling, far above the region of her hand. When her father enfolded her in his duplicitous, burly embrace or when he paddled her behind (still, in high school), his body would graze, as if accidentally, certain parts of her body but never her defective hand.
6. She had fucked seventeen guys if you counted the twins from New Jersey who were spending a week at their grandma’s cabin. Who both shot off before they got anywhere.
7. At night in her darkened bedroom, wallpapered ten years ago in a repeating pattern of ballerina bunnies when her mother still had some life in her, she put a chair under the doorknob and had sex with appropriately shaped items—the handle of a hand mirror, a bottle of roll-on deodorant, root vegetables. And reached climax—she even told us this—under the imaginary weight of the high school principal, a puffy elderly man with kind eyes. At least it wasn’t her father, never her
father. Nor (honestly) her brother, Garth, who ran away from home on the last day of school and had just returned, suddenly half a head taller than she was. Who still looked so much like her, hair and eyes, that people remarked upon it. They could be twins except for—what a shame!—that poor little hand of hers.
The thing she didn’t say and had no plans to—what she wanted to tell and still held back from us, her friends, who did not hold back: that in the heart of her heart, where the deepest truth lay, she didn’t really love us. Not the way we loved her.
That with Garth yesterday she felt something she had wished for her entire life without having words for it. Garth knew her, body and soul, and he could take her in whole—as if she were whole—without a qualm or the hint of a shudder.
That last night, too revved to sleep, with the dregs of the drug clogging her brain, she tiptoed down two flights of stairs to Garth’s basement room to hear his Sgt. Pepper. And in her nightshirt, shivering in the belowground chill, she got under his summer quilt, just to warm herself up. And—I shouldn’t know this, I never wanted to know—she screwed him, her flesh and blood, a hundred percent brother, sixteen months younger than she, with whom she’d watched Sunday cartoons, Elmer Fudd and Woody Woodpecker, and whom she used to mock and console, her brother who looked up to her. With whom, under whom—she can’t stop thinking about it—her body hairs stood out from her pores when she came.
Now Vera is hungry but she doesn’t want to go home. It’s a problem that wouldn’t exist if she hadn’t signed the fucking Pledge. She takes the document out of her pocket to crumple it, but first she rereads it and mulls over the two weeks she conceded to her friends. She could violate it with no punishment. She’d be doing them a favor. Beyond the chain-link the lake is darkening. A feathery, weightless rain is coming down.
In the shelter of the tree she opens the green canvas Army-Navy Store satchel she calls her purse. Inside is a tiny film canister that Garth gave her yesterday, and inside that a square of translucent paper, which, against the sky, reveals a pale, dime-sized interior circle. You can’t change the world but you can change how you think about the world: Saint said that once, or was it Timothy Leary? Shielding the scrap from the air’s moisture, she puts it on her tongue, a sensation so slight, she can’t tell whether the paper has dissolved or slipped down her throat. Or how in fact she has come to be walking away from the Haight, not home but toward the town center. She rejects hunger. She doesn’t want to go home ever. Two weeks is a long, long time.
Once, in Lourdes Page 3