by Emma Straub
The store Porter liked most, Secondhand News, was up the block from the Clapham train station. Unlike Boutique Etc? and the other stores for women who had reached the chenille-tunic stage of life, Secondhand News was cool. It was small but packed, in an old Victorian house, with furniture and housewares on the first floor and clothing—faded T-shirts and gunnysack dresses and polyester disco gowns and vintage Levi’s—on the second. The real reason that Porter wanted to take Cecelia, though, was that she was friends with John and Ruth Sullivan, the best-dressed couple in town, and she knew that their son was also going into the eighth grade at Clapham Junior High. Maybe “friends” was a stretch—John had been in Elliot’s class in school, though they hadn’t been friends, and when John turned into an interesting adult man, with an even more interesting wife, Porter found she didn’t always know what to say, but they always smiled and greeted each other warmly and sometimes that was enough. Everyone in town wanted to be friends with John and Ruth.
Porter pushed Cecelia through the creaky door of the shop and heard the little bell tinkle, announcing their arrival. She had emailed to say they were coming—it was her first attempt at a setup, and she wanted to make sure August would be there. It was funny, to think about people roughly her age having teenage children. Nicky had been so young when Cecelia was born, and it had happened so completely by accident, as if he and Juliette had no clue how human reproduction worked. They hadn’t thought about how fully it would transform their lives, and then somehow it hadn’t—yes, they’d had a baby strapped to their body at all times, but they’d taken her everywhere, to dance performances and museums, to parties and restaurants. By the time she was three, Cecelia had slept in more bars than a lifelong alcoholic. If Porter had had a baby when she was young, it wouldn’t have been like that. She would have been measuring ounces of milk and counting diapers and calling the pediatrician every time the baby sneezed, full of anxiety, the way God intended. That was the part that Porter was ready for now, even if it meant saying goodbye to the freedom she’d enjoyed her adult life thus far—she had five months left. Not that it was death row, but still—it was a line that she was going to cross, and once she was on the other side, there was no coming back. Porter looked at Cecelia’s pink cheeks and remembered how it felt to feel simultaneously embarrassed and taken care of by someone else.
“Hello?” Porter called out. The store smelled musty and sweet, and even though the shades were all open, the house was perched in such a way that it was still cool and dark inside.
“Hey, be right there,” John called from somewhere invisible.
Cecelia wandered toward a lone rack of dresses in the center of the room, and Porter lingered nearby. Everything about how a woman approached clothing came directly from her mother—if she loved it, if she hated it, if she knew how to iron pleats or tie scarves. Astrid was functional and sartorially conservative and so Porter was functional and ridiculous—she wore nubby fleece zip-ups and corduroy pants, socks with cartoon characters on them. She dressed like a preschooler, really, much to Astrid’s chagrin. Juliette shopped like a French person—though she’d never had money, she always looked like she did. Because her body was the same as it had been when she was a teenager, her clothing lasted forever, while Porter’s closet was littered with mountains of things she no longer could wear, the way a snake’s shed skin littered the bottom of its cage. Porter watched Cecelia pull dresses out to look at them, and then push them back in. She wasn’t a magpie like so many little girls, just drawn to shiny things. Juliette’s maternal influence was still there, inside.
There was a clump-thump-clump cascade of steps on the stairs, and then John was in the room. He was wearing glasses that Porter thought he didn’t need. It seemed like a professional hazard. In addition to running the store with him, John’s wife, Ruth, volunteered for the Clapham Chamber of Commerce, planning the village’s various festivities and fairs. Ruth and Porter worked together every year on the Clapham event where all the summer people came back for a crowded weekend full of apple picking and cider donuts, and where Porter would set up a booth for Clap Happy to give away samples of all her varieties, on Costco Triscuits and tiny bamboo spoons.
“Hi, John, yay,” Porter said. “This is my niece, Cecelia, remember? She’s starting at CJHS. I thought August might be around?”
“Sweetheart!” John kissed Porter on the cheek and then hollered in the direction of the stairs. “Come say hi!”
Cecelia froze. “Is this a setup?” she whispered to Porter. “You said we were just going shopping.”
“We are,” Porter said. “We’re shopping for clothes and friends.”
“August is very nice,” John said. “I promise.”
“What do you need, you think, Cecelia?” Porter asked, moving next to her niece. “Jeans? I kind of love bell-bottoms again; is that weird, John?”
“You know how it works,” John said. “If you’re old enough to have worn it the last time around, it’s probably ready to come back. The nineties were a fertile time for sailor jeans.”
“I’m old. You’re telling me that I’m old.” Porter mimed strangling herself. “But, really, I like them.” She had worn bell-bottoms on her first day of high school, with a shrunken baby-blue T-shirt that read SKATEBOARD on it, even though she’d never ridden a skateboard in her life.
There was another set of footsteps on the stairs, and then August appeared with a weightless leap. He was all arms and legs, like a puppy with comically large paws—his body, like Cecelia’s, was still in the midst of figuring out what it looked like. His face was just like Ruth’s—he had dark eyes and a pointed chin and eyebrows like em dashes across his pale forehead. His hair swung out from behind his ears, and then settled onto his shoulders like a medieval prince in slow motion.
“August, this is Cecelia, Porter’s niece. Show her around?”
August mimed irritation with an eye roll, which made Cecelia’s shoulders contract into her body like a pangolin rolling into a little armored knot; Porter watched it happen. But then he nodded amiably and tugged her on the elbow. “Let’s start with T-shirts.” He spun on his heels and headed toward the stairs, Cecelia following behind like a person being sent to death row.
“We’re going to run across the street and grab some coffee,” John said. “Okay?”
“Okay,” August said.
John patted Porter on the back. “It’ll be easier without us, trust me.”
She had so much to learn from him. Porter would have stayed to shop, but apparently that wasn’t what parents did.
* * *
—
“Want to look at clothes?” August said, not unkindly. “Come on.” He was so comfortable in the space that Cecelia had no choice but to pretend she was too. She’d never really been friends with boys, not since she was in preschool. Even then, there always seemed to be a threat of kissing, or being punched, like boys had no agency over their own bodies and were being controlled by tiny aliens who lived in their brains. Of course, now the girls were even worse, and the boys at her old school now seemed like stuffed animals in comparison, docile idiots for whom pizza solved any emotional difficulty. Maybe it was time to give boys another try. Upstairs, August flipped quickly through the racks. Cecelia wondered if she should start making a list of all the times in her life that she’d felt left behind. How long would it take to run out of paper and ink? The bell tinkled again downstairs, which meant that she was now alone again, with this new person. She watched him from behind, his thin fingers moving so quickly they were nearly blurry. He didn’t turn or acknowledge her presence for a few minutes, which actually made Cecelia feel better about the whole thing, as though he might have forgotten that she was there, and she could slowly back out the way she’d come.
“Try this one,” he said, slipping a shirt off its hanger and tossing it over his shoulder.
Cecelia stumbled to catch the flying cotton ba
ll, and then unwound it to look. It felt like it had been washed a thousand times, as soft as a piece of clothing could get before total disintegration. There was a drawing of the Statue of Liberty, and underneath, in script, NEW YORK CITY.
“I love it,” Cecelia said, Lady Liberty waving at her from home. They—her parents—hadn’t said how long this would go on, their little experiment, removing her from her native environment to see if she would grow roots or wilt in the new soil. A year, she guessed. But they hadn’t said. A tear began to form way down at the base of Cecelia’s throat and she swallowed and swallowed until it disappeared.
“I’m good at this,” August said. “It’s my summer job. And my fall job. Et cetera. If a job can be something you don’t get paid for.”
“That’s so cool,” Cecelia said, and then wished she hadn’t. She didn’t understand what made something cool, but she did understand that calling something cool instantly undid whatever magic had been at work. August turned to look at her and raised an eyebrow. “I mean, if you’re into, like, wearing stuff.”
“Right,” August said. “And Clapham’s nudist scene is really coming along, I don’t know if your aunt told you.” He tossed something else.
“What?” Cecelia said as she caught it.
“I’m joking.” He moved on to the next rack and pulled a few more things off hangers, placing the empty hangers in a neat pile on the floor. “Here, try them on.” August shoved aside a heavy velvet curtain and put the things on an overstuffed chair. Cecelia waited for him to leave before she walked in.
It had been six months since Cecelia’s best friend had met someone. Met someone. As if that was a normal thing for a seventh grader to do outside the confines of school or gymnastics class or someone’s birthday party. Katherine was the first to get her period, first to get a bra, first to get a phone, first to kiss a boy in Truth or Dare, first to get her own Snapchat account.
The guy said he was in high school at Brooklyn Tech, which was only a few blocks away from their school. He said this in her DMs, and then he said it to her in person at the coffee shop on Fulton Street, and then he said it to her again at his apartment by Prospect Park, an apartment clearly occupied by a single adult man with no parents in sight. Katherine had told Cecelia this in the same tone that she’d used to tell her about stealing a Juul from a Starbucks bathroom, where she’d found it resting on the lip of the sink. She was excited, as proud as a peacock fanning its stupendous feathers.
Cecelia looked at the pile of clothing August had left for her—T-shirts, mostly, plus a few mystery items. He kept thrusting things over the metal curtain rod, and they fell on Cecelia’s head like enormous snowflakes, if snowflakes smelled vaguely of mothballs. She peeled off her T-shirt and stood there in her bra, looking at her reflection in the cloudy mirror. She was taller than she had been at the beginning of the summer. She had a mole on the left side of her stomach, which she thought made it look like she had two belly buttons, like someone from a realistic science-fiction movie, where the world was mostly the same except that people had extra body parts and machines could talk. Her boobs were still pathetic and, Cecelia was pretty sure, disfigured. Her mom’s nipples were brownish little polka dots on her boyish body, but Cecelia’s were soft pink, hardly darker than the rest of her skin, and that just seemed wrong. It also seemed wrong that a boy was standing right outside the dressing room and knew that she was at least partially naked. Sometimes Cecelia had fantasies about moving to rural Pennsylvania and living with the Amish, canning fruit and making pies and swimming in a floor-length dress. Covered up. That sounded so much easier. Maybe a burqa.
She reached down and grabbed the first thing on the pile. It was a vintage jumpsuit, flame red with orange stripes running from shoulder to wrist. Cecelia stepped into it and zipped it up. It fit her perfectly and made her legs look three miles long. She turned around to admire the gathering in the back. She could do a karate kick. She could jump. She could fix a car, or fight crime, not that she knew how to do either of those things. Cecelia looked like a badass, which was not something she’d ever looked like before. Cecelia thought about her body as a thing totally disconnected from her brain, a tadpole with feet, only halfway to where it needed to go. The jumpsuit made her feel like a whole frog. She could even leap. Cecelia pulled aside the curtain and August bowed, pleased.
“See, that’s cool,” he said. “Like, David Bowie. I mean that as a compliment.”
“Thanks,” Cecelia said. She knew that her mother loved David Bowie but Cecelia didn’t know any of his songs or what he looked like, and so she just tried to put on a neutral expression.
“I made my best friend, Emily, try that on, but it didn’t fit,” August said.
“Oh,” Cecelia said, surprised to discover that it felt like she had been poked in the abdomen with a stick.
“She always comes to visit during the year. She lives in Westchester, Dobbs Ferry. We go to camp together. It’s been, like, four summers. Her parents are therapists and love to talk about feelings and sex and stuff, but, whatever, they let her sleep in my room.”
“Oh,” Cecelia said again, hoping that her face made it look like she’d had even a smattering of the life experiences August had had, and that she absolutely understood his situation. “Cool.”
“So, you live with your aunt?” August asked. He was putting things back on their hangers, and Cecelia hurried back into the changing room, to try on the rest of the pile, and to make sure she left everything hung up and folded. She didn’t want to leave a mess, she wanted to help.
“My grandmother. I mean, for now.” The weirdest part of the whole thing was that for the first time in her life Cecelia saw her entire future as a giant question mark. That was what she pictured—before, it was another year of her middle school, then vying for a spot at one of the good public high schools, and then college. She thought she’d want to stay in the city, maybe, or maybe not. But that was five years away, and five years ago she was eight years old, and so five years sounded like an eternity. Now, instead of any of that, there was just a giant empty space, like her future had been abducted by aliens. A question mark floating in the sky.
“What happened?” August asked, gently.
“I don’t know,” Cecelia answered. It had gotten away from her, that was the truth. “Stuff.”
Downstairs, the bell tinkled again, and Porter called out, “Yoo-hoo! Anybody home?” and Cecelia wondered if her parents would let her sleep at a boy’s house. They probably would, because the notion of it being anything other than a Sound of Music sing-along would literally never cross their minds, or, even more likely, they wouldn’t understand why any parent would say no. Juliette had tried to talk to Cecelia about making love (her words) the day that Cecelia got her first period, which made Cecelia bury her face in a pillow and scream. At that moment, Cecelia was pretty sure she didn’t know anything about anything, and that she was the most pathetic teenager who had ever lived, but at least she knew what she was going to wear on the first day of school.
Chapter 12
Condolences
Astrid made two loaves of banana bread and two trays of turkey meatloaf. It wasn’t exactly summer food but who cared, they were both dishes she could make with her eyes closed and one hand tied behind her back. Barbara had grown up on the Connecticut shore, Astrid knew, but had moved her mother to Clapham a decade ago, when her health began to decline. Lots of people did that, moved their aging parents closer instead of clearing out a room in their own house, the way previous generations had. Of course in a marriage, such decisions were fraught and almost always told you who held the most power. Barbara and Bob were childless, and Astrid imagined that Barbara had made the case for her mother to be their roommate, but maybe she was wrong. It was impossible to know what went on in anyone else’s home, behind closed doors and behind closed mouths.
The Bakers lived on the east side of town, away from the rive
r, in a small yellow house with a Little Free Library in the front yard, a birdhouse-size wooden box where neighbors could exchange books. Astrid peeked inside and saw three romance novels, two self-help books, one spider, and half a cookie. She guessed that Bob had little to nothing to do with it, and that the library would languish and die much more slowly than Barbara herself.
She rang the doorbell and waited, and when still no one came, she rang again. Astrid set the things down on the porch and turned to walk back to her car when Bob pulled open the screen door.
“Hi there,” he said. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans, the waistline of which hung low beneath his belly, Santa Claus in the off-season. “I appreciate it.” Bob stepped backward into the house, propping the door open behind him. A wiry orange cat darted out and ran down the front steps. “She’ll come back,” he said, unalarmed. “They always do. Come on in.”
Astrid waved. “Oh, no, I couldn’t.” But then when Bob didn’t budge, she did, bending low to pick up the dishes and then plodding slowly into the house.
She’d been to the Bakers’ home once, for a holiday party, maybe thirty years ago. It was funny, to think of a house outliving a person, but of course they usually did. All Barbara’s things still sat in their places of honor on the mantel: her basket of yarn and knitting needles, the framed photographs of her and Bob on their wedding day, Barbara’s face thinner and beaming. Women were so much better at this than men—she didn’t know a single widowed man who had cleaned out his wife’s closet by himself. Astrid had kept Russell’s watches and tie clips, his date books and high school yearbooks, his wedding ring, an album of childhood photographs, and that was it. No sweaters, no shoes, no pajamas. Why should she—why should anyone—keep drawers full of clothes that would never be worn again? It wasn’t just sentimental, it was stupid. Not that Bob should have done it already, but Astrid knew that when the time came, and Bob succumbed to whatever it was that would kill him (for we would all be killed one day, one way or another), Barbara’s drawers would still be full of her well-worn cotton underpants and thick marled socks.