by Jen Larsen
“So,” she said. “Let’s say I am starting here with a clean slate. I know what you want to study, and I know that you want to do it at Harvard.” When she tilts her head her bob swings against her cheek. “Tell me about yourself, Ashley.”
“Okay,” I said, and there was nothing. Nothing in my head, nothing in my throat, nothing on the tip of my tongue. I opened my mouth as if something might come tumbling out but we both sat there for a full minute, looking at each other. She took another sip of tea and set the mug down, folding her hands on the table.
“You must be nervous,” she said kindly.
“I’m cold,” I said, and she laughed.
“That too. Well, why don’t we start with an easy one. How long have you wanted to go to Harvard?”
“Always,” I said.
“That long, eh?” she said, and smiled.
“As long as I can remember,” I said. “My mother—” I thought of the Harvard T-shirt in my suitcase. It was supposed to be for sleeping in but I couldn’t make myself dig it out last night.
“Yes, Harvard tends to become a family tradition. I hope my daughter will attend, though she’s not particularly interested in medicine,” she said wryly. Her lipstick was a perfect dark red that matched her blouse, and she had a double strand of pearls around her neck.
I nodded.
She said, “What made you decide to choose the medical field, Ashley?”
“My grandmother,” I said. “She’s a surgeon. Was a surgeon. She pioneered laparoscopic surgery at her hospital. She retired. She was the first woman in her class at Stanford. She volunteered for Doctors without Borders. She volunteered for the Red Cross. She volunteers at clinics in L.A.” I’m ratatat-chattering but I can’t make myself stop.
“And that’s what you want to do?” Dr. McGillicuddy said.
“Yes,” I said. The train hadn’t pulled into the station yet. “I want to change the world. I want to be an agent of change. I want to be the change I wish to see in the world,” I said. “I think health care is a universal human right. I think physical well-being is the essential foundation of a healthy world and the first step toward actually making a difference.”
“A personal responsibility to design and continually perfect ourselves and our institutions as tools for social development and justice,” Dr. McGillicuddy summed up.
“Exactly,” I said, sitting stiffly, speaking quickly. “It starts at home, it starts here, it starts with my own body. I’m scheduled for weight-loss surgery when I return home.”
She looked surprised. “Gastric bypass? Which procedure?”
“The one that makes you lose the weight!” I said, and laughed, and she laughed with me. I gestured to myself. “I need to be a role model. I need to demonstrate that I understand my responsibility and take my own personal, physical health seriously.”
“Aren’t you on the volleyball team?” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Yes. I was. I wasn’t really a great player? But I am a superior strategist as well as able to influence, encourage, and motivate as a team player.” In my head I heard Coach saying, You think you might want to let someone else score a point?
“Leadership qualities,” she said.
“I like to think so!” I said, and we both laughed. I kept opening my mouth, and the words kept spilling out, piling up on the table between us, face up. Nothing I could take back. Emptying out my brain of everything I ever heard come out of Grandmother’s mouth and watching Dr. McGillicuddy nod along with the up and down of my jaw as I talked, and then she was gone and I am sitting at the table alone, wondering why it wasn’t buried under a pile of bullshit.
There is dread in my chest, expectation smothering me. Weight-loss surgery suddenly seems real and unavoidable. A feeling like I’ve just buckled myself into the first car of a roller coaster and it’s too late to scramble back out.
I sit there until the bell over the door rings again and a whole army of students comes pouring in, all of them wearing red and yellow scarves, pink-cheeked and shouting at one another. All of them so bundled up, bodies obscured, wrapped in layers and layers of insulation, I don’t know how they could tell each other apart or even remember what their own selves look like. The whole place is filled with their noise and the zipping whisper of waterproof fabric as they move and my peppermint thing is getting cold. I stand up and shuffle back into my coat, try to sidle my way around the edges.
“Nice hat!” a person says, nodding at me. They are a perfectly spherical column of tiered down. They push back their hood and I see they’re wearing a hat too. Their face is broad-boned and appealing and I like it.
“I got it at the airport,” I say stupidly, and they laugh.
“Good deal,” they say, and turn away, pulling off their mittens.
It is too cold outside to be alive and it’s only early November. I shuffle down the street in my flats and wonder how I will survive this. I think about all the clothes I’ll need to buy. I realize I’m planning for the future again, that it includes Harvard, that everything is going the way I planned, but my stomach is too full of liquid and I can taste the peppermint creeping back up my throat. I squint my eyes against the flurries and I keep hurrying, though I don’t know where the T stop is and I don’t know where I’m going.
When Laura gets back to the hotel, I want to pretend to be asleep. I put my pillow over my head instead and feel her leap onto the bed, bouncing it.
“You didn’t answer your phone,” she says, shaking my shoulder. She smells like cold and wind and I can feel how icy her hands are even through the covers.
“Oh my god don’t touch me you are so cold,” I say.
“By which you mean gloriously alive and totally wide awake! I love snow, Ashley. It is beautiful and mesmerizing and hypnotic.” Her enthusiasm is as lovely as ever, and I am smiling.
“Mesmerizing and hypnotic are the same thing,” I say.
She ignores me. “It glows when it’s dark out, did you know that? It covers everything and then it reflects the light so that everything seems brighter and more lucid. Lucid is a really good word for it I think. It’s a clarity that is just overwhelming, Ashley, I can’t even stand it.”
I sit up. “Where have you been? What time is it?” I feel around in the covers for my phone.
She shrugs. “I took the train into town and I’ve been just walking around and thinking about art and things and life. Kind of my own interview, except with myself and the world.”
I snort. “We have been at George Love Academy too long.”
She says, “Don’t laugh! I was digging down deep to figure out what I really want. What I really need as an artist, you know? But I don’t want to know where I’m going. I want that to be the end result, not the goal. I want to have now, and not be worried about later.”
“That sounds terrible,” I say without thinking. But she laughs.
“It is awesome, Ashley,” she says. She’s still wearing her coat, a pink designer duffel with fur on the hood that her stepmother had left over from ski bunny days. Laura’s eyes are shining and water droplets are sparkling in her halo of hair and she bounces on the bed once, twice, and then hops up. “I haven’t ever really thought about the future before. Not like you. I understand why it’s important to you now,” she says. “And that’s why I need to take my time, you know?” She shrugs out of her jacket and tosses it on the chair.
“Hang it up so it dries,” I say to her.
She spins around. “Your interview! How did it go? Do they love you?”
“It was fine,” I say.
“Just fine?” she says. “I am going to guess it was actually totally spectacular and you are sitting there thinking too hard about all the things that are the most likely to go wrong and how they’re going to go wrong and how terrible everything will be when they do.”
“No,” I say. “You know I never think crazy, irrational crazy things like that.”
She sits down on the bed and grabs my hand. “Okay,
what happened?”
She looks so serious that I want to tell her. I have wanted to tell her that the idea of weight-loss surgery won’t go away. That the more it sits with me, the more it seems almost possible. Every moment of this trip, all the way from when she and her brother picked me up on the way to the airport, when I opened the back door of Brandon’s car and she twisted around in the passenger seat and said, “Boston! We’re going to Boston!” I have wanted to tell her. How terrifying it is, the way bullshit can suddenly sound plausible if you keep turning it over in your head.
But then I’d watch her eyes get huge when she realizes what I’m saying and then watch them narrow as her mouth twists into a knot and then she unleashes all the things I should be saying to myself, every word I should be shouting at myself.
I say, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and she huffs at me, kind of the way Soto does when I won’t sit down and let her climb into my lap and fall asleep. Laura stands up. I burrow into the blankets and drag them up to my chin.
She says, “I’m going to take a really long hot bath that I might never ever emerge from, and when it is checkout time you will have to come fish a raisin out of the bottom of the tub.”
“I thought you loved the glorious cold, full of clarity and marshmallow candy drops,” I say.
“For a little while,” she says, pulling her sweater over her head and dropping it on the floor. “Everything in moderation, you know. Everything parceled out in neat packages.”
My laugh sounds a little like a shotgun blast and she grins at me and disappears into the bathroom with an armful of pajamas. I feel like I’ve given up moderation, which is ironic because isn’t that what weight-loss surgery is supposed to force you into? Your body scalpeled into pure and perfect medically verifiable control.
Weight-loss surgery.
It’s like I’ve stepped off the top of a cliff and I’m trapped now in the longest empty space between seconds, hanging between immobility and a fall. I don’t fall asleep for a long time. The water in the bathroom keeps running, and it’s the last thing I hear.
She’s up long before me this morning, banging around in the bathroom and leaving the lights on in the closet, and I peer at my phone from under my pillow. It is just seven in the morning and we don’t have to check out for five more hours and I am good at math so I put the pillow back on my head and don’t realize she’s gone until I sit up fast when the alarm on my phone goes off, a blaring air-raid siren that wakes me up angry every time.
WHERE R U, I text but she doesn’t answer.
LAURA.
WE R LATE WE HAVE 2 GO
My fingers pounding against the screen with audible thumps. WHERE R U.
AIRPORT, she texts back. She doesn’t answer the phone when I call as I’m stomping through the lobby to the airport shuttle parked outside, my suitcase banging against my knees.
R U KIDDING WHAT IS WRONG W U
She doesn’t reply. She’s not at security, or the other side of security or the gate, and I keep calling. I go find the security desk to have her paged. I ask the surly woman behind the gate counter if Laura’s checked in but they can’t give me information about other passengers.
“It’s an emergency,” I say.
“I doubt that,” she says, and turns to another passenger, who is yelling about gluten-free food on the plane.
I run back to the security line with no plans in my head—I have to find her, and I’ll wander all of Boston and Cambridge and whatever the hell else is in this place until I stumble across her. I have my suitcase wrapped in my arms and I’m dodging slow walkers who pause in front of places called Dunkin Donuts and I’m getting a stitch in my side and my hair is sticking to my forehead and when my phone rings I stumble and drop my suitcase which explodes open and I trip over it and land on my face on the airport carpet. I’m scrambling for my phone, which has tumbled out of my pocket and the suitcase is broken and my clothes are everywhere, all over the concourse. People stop to help me gather my things but I say, “My phone, I need my phone.” It isn’t ringing anymore. I dig through the clothes that people are dropping back into the broken bottom of the suitcase and then it starts ringing again. It’s all the way across the hallway and under a chair in a Chili’s To Go. I dive for it, stab at the button, and I can hear the shriek in my voice. “Where the hell are you what is going on,” and she says, “Ashley, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, calm down you’re going to miss the plane.”
I sit down hard. A Chili’s Too patron is sipping his giant margarita through a tiny straw and staring at me through the railing. There is a beer suspended above his glass with a metal contraption and I think about how many things are wrong in the world.
Laura says, “Ashley? Are you there?”
I say, “Where are you?”
She says, “I’m sorry.”
I say, “Where are you?”
“Boston,” she says. “I’m not going home. I’m going to take a bus down to New York and stay with my mom. I’m going to figure out my future. Like I was talking about.”
There is an endless silence while I try to understand what I’m supposed to feel about that. What I’m supposed to say.
I close my eyes. “Okay,” I finally mumble.
“You’re not going to yell at me?” she says.
“You’re going to do what you want,” I say. “You don’t listen to anyone. You don’t have to listen to anyone.”
She’s silent for a moment, and I can hear traffic behind her.
“You’re not going to tell me I don’t have to listen to anyone either?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “You know what I think.”
We’re quiet again, and I know I am angry, or probably angry, but I’m having trouble feeling it. I’m not sure what this is. I’m picturing her in front of the bus station with her roller bag and her hood pulled up, squinting at the sky with the phone to her ear, and I wish, I wish I were standing there next to her and I can’t catch my breath.
This feeling that I have. It feels like good-bye.
That guy’s straw makes that bottom-of-the-barrel slurping noise and I stand up.
“Your dad might actually freak out this time,” I say.
Another long silence. “Maybe,” she says. “I kind of hope he will.”
“Laura,” I say.
“Really, though, no one will care.” Now she’s cheery. I know it’s not real. But then a group of people all wearing the same red T-shirt come barreling down the hallway and my suitcase is spinning in circles in their wake. It smashes into the wall in front of the restroom.
“Shit!” I yelp.
“What?” Laura says.
“Nothing. Listen, they care,” I say, scrambling through the crowd, snatching my clothes off the carpet. My underwear has scattered in rainbow colors and people are stepping on them. I am hot and breathless and my face is burning red.
“When did you become a liar?” Laura says. Her voice is teasing, but my stomach lurches. And I’m dropping everything as I try to hold the phone to my ear, scoop all my things into the crook of my arm.
“I’m sorry!” I say. “I’m so sorry, I have to go.”
“Fine,” she says. “And hey. Figure out your shit, Ashley, okay? Don’t make stupid mistakes. Nothing will get easier. And nothing will be better. Don’t change your mind. Don’t take your grandmother up on this.”
Her words are fierce but her voice is even. Kind. That must be why it feels like a dam has broken and I am being flooded. Crying. She knows. And then she’s gone. I push my phone into the pocket of my coat and rub the tears off my cheeks and gather armfuls of clothes and stuff them back into the suitcase. I’m sure I’m missing half my things but I don’t care because my flight is boarding. I scoop up the broken pieces of my suitcase, turn and trip over my suit jacket, kick it out of my way, and start running.
CHAPTER 19
I know Laura hasn’t called her family because Brandon is calling me as soon as I turn my phone back on when I�
�m finally outside in the smothering hot and humid air.
“Hey, Laura isn’t picking up,” he says easily. “Sorry. I’m in the cell-phone lot. Tell me where to come get you.”
“Sure, okay,” I say, and tell him the gate number and hang up before I have to say anything else. There are no messages from anyone and I don’t bother to call or text Laura. She wouldn’t have thought to tell her family before I got home. She is probably wandering barefoot through the snow and making friends with jackrabbits or homeless people on the bus.
Brandon pulls up smoothly behind an SUV that’s crawling with screaming children in cargo shorts and light-up flip-flops and two moms who are bickering about who spilled the orange juice, and who would give orange juice at this time of the day to a kid, do you know how much sugar is in it, and why don’t we have any more napkins. I jump into Brandon’s front seat with my suitcase in my lap and he peers past me.
“Where’s Laura?” he says, and his brow furrows are so cute a whole family of bunnies should live in them. His eyes are bright, puzzled.
“She—she went to stay with your mom,” I say, instead of all the sarcastic things I want to say. Brandon sometimes struggles with sarcasm.
“Whoa,” he says. “Seriously?”
“When do I lie, Brandon?” I snap.
He lifts his hands from the steering wheel. “Sure, okay,” he says. He shifts and we pull out into the traffic circling the passenger pickup. “Is she okay?” he asks.
It takes me a minute to answer. “I think so,” I say. “Is your dad going to lose his mind?”
He glances over at me as he takes the right turn out on to the main strip. “He trusts us,” he says.
“That’s not what Laura says.”
He shrugs. “It doesn’t matter what my father does. Laura will do what she wants anyway.”
I stare out the window with my phone in my hand, wondering again if I should text Laura, as we turn onto the 101. Everything is green and recognizable, unobscured and snow free, which I realize is a relief. Watching the trees pass on either side is like taking a long drink of cool water. We’re quiet for a long time.