From the library I can see into the sunroom. The plants are looking yellowish, and I think that I should water them, but I always seem to do it wrong. Too much. Too little. Even the plants that can withstand some benign neglect can’t seem to withstand me. Dad tried to teach me how to care for them. I remember hot Sundays in here as he told me the names of the plants—their scientific names as well as the ones he had created for them: Bonnie, Buster, Thelonious.
The plants are better off without me, and I can’t decide on a book from the library, so I go to the kitchen. There, I can see my mother through the window. She’s sitting in the hammock. One long leg hangs down off the side, while the other is extended. She wears oversize sunglasses, like Jackie O, and the blond highlights in her hair catch the sun.
It’s almost five o’clock, which Nonnie has always taken as a dictate for a cocktail, rather than a mere guideline. This is a lesson my mom has taken to heart. So I take out a glass, pour her some blueberry juice, and add a splash of vodka. Summer’s Twilight is a good name for it, or Power Punch. I pour myself juice and water it down. Virgin. With a glass in each hand, I kick off my sandals and head out across the lawn. The air is heavy, and I feel like I’m swimming more than walking.
As I approach, she tucks her sketchbook against her side as if she doesn’t want me to see it. When my sister and I were younger, she used to draw stories for us in her sketchbooks. Fairy tales in which the princesses wore haute couture gowns and the balls were high-society soirees.
“I made you a cocktail,” I say when I get close enough for her to hear me. “Cocktail” sounds so much more sophisticated than “drink.” “It’s a Power Punch. Blueberries have those good antioxidants, you know.”
“Hmmm. Thank you,” she says, raising her sunglasses. I should have gone with Summer’s Twilight. I hand her the glass and she takes a sip as I lower myself to the ground. She uses her foot to rock herself back and forth.
“It’s almost five,” I tell her.
“Mm-hmm,” she replies.
“I wasn’t sure if you knew how late it had gotten.” It is possible that she’s been in the hammock all day, her studio left empty, her paintings unpainted. I know better than to ask if she has anything planned for dinner.
“Slow summer days. That’s what hammocks were made for.” She lets a smile drift across her lips like the brush of a kiss.
“Do you remember the day we pretended to be astronauts and then we had oysters with Nonnie?”
She takes a long sip and considers the question. “I think so.” She continues to rock in the hammock. “Why?”
I look down into my juice, blue like the lines on graph paper. “I just thought of it today, and I asked Ramona about it, and she didn’t remember at all.”
“Well, our little one has an active mind. I’m sure some things just get tumbled together.”
“Are you worried about her at all?”
“Because she didn’t remember one afternoon back when you were kids?”
“No, it’s more than that, it’s like—” But I’m not sure what it’s like, because it’s not like anything. And it’s not just one thing. “It’s like she’s slipping away from us. She’s, I don’t know, drifting.” As I say it, I can see her: we are back in space again, and she has cut the line that ties her to our ship. She floats away with her arms reaching back to me.
Mom lifts her sunglasses up and nestles them in her hair. It’s a familiar gesture; she does it with her regular glasses, too, and I know it means she’s really thinking about things. “Some girls just go through this emotional, creative phase. I’m sure I went through something similar.”
“What if it’s more than that? What if it’s—” But my worries about her are as nebulous as Ramona herself. There one minute and then, somehow, not.
“You don’t need to worry about Ramona, Very. She’s fine.”
We look at each other for a moment, and then I say, “Okay, you’re probably right.”
I gaze down the slope of our lawn toward the bay and the water there.
“I ought to take a shower. This air is so sticky, I feel like caramel. Can you pull together something for dinner?”
“I’m going to Christian’s,” I say, a decision made in that moment. I finish my blueberry juice in one big gulp, and then stand, expecting my mom to extricate herself from the hammock and come inside with me. Instead she lowers her sunglasses back down over her eyes and tilts her head up toward the sky.
Halfway back across the lawn, I turn around to see if she might be standing up, or looking at me, but her gaze is still trained upward. I wonder what she sees there in the clouds. I wonder if she’s looking at anything at all.
iii.
Christian’s family always has way too much food for dinner. His father subscribes to all these cooking magazines and is constantly trying new dishes. More often than not, they flop. It’s better when his mom cooks. She knows all these great Korean recipes, but most of them take a long time, and she’s got a job as a high-powered divorce attorney, so she only cooks for special occasions.
I check on Nonnie before I go. She’s sleeping, but her mini-fridge is stocked with healthy heat-and-eat meals that her doctor recommended, probably because she realized how hopeless we all were. They’re basically TV dinners and milk shakes, and Nonnie calls them her prison food, but she can make them herself, which seems to please her.
When I arrive, Christian and his parents are just sitting down to dinner. His little sister, he’s told me, is at some band rehearsal. I slip into a chair next to Christian, wondering if he might lean over and whisper that he loves me again, right here in front of his parents. It wouldn’t shock me. That’s the kind of relationship he has with them. I bet he’s even told them that we’re having sex. I’m trying to figure out how I would respond to a public declaration of love. Would I repeat it back, affirming him like a woman who receives a proposal on the Jumbotron at a baseball game? Or would I make some silly joke? Quote Shakespeare to confound the table? Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. What would Nonnie do? Probably just laugh it off. He doesn’t say it, though, which is oddly disappointing. Instead he tucks his foot under my ankle so it’s like our feet are hugging.
His dad made stuffed peppers. “It’s quinoa! Quinoa is the perfect protein, you know.”
The stuffed peppers, though, are not perfect. More like mush with the sides of the peppers collapsing in on themselves.
“That’s some bruise you have there,” his dad says as he passes me the tray.
“It doesn’t hurt much anymore,” I tell them. I untuck my hair from behind my ear so it falls down to cover the contusion. As I do, the ends swing down and brush across Christian’s arm.
“I hope the nurse kept a good record of the incident,” Christian’s mom says. “If you need to take legal action, it’s good to have a paper trail.”
“Mom,” Christian says. “It was an accident. Very is not going to take legal action.”
“I might,” I say. “Stanford’s tuition is over fifty thousand dollars a year. Not to mention books. A big fat lawsuit could really help.” I don’t know why I keep saying Stanford is my top choice college. Once Nonnie got sick, I knew I would need to stay closer to home.
“Very, don’t encourage her.”
I push the pepper plate away from me. “Do you think I should go after just the one guy, or the whole team?”
“You start with the school,” Mrs. Yoo says. “They’ll have the biggest insurance policy. If you can’t get enough from them, then go after the kid’s family.”
“How much do you think I could make?”
Christian rolls his eyes.
“Well, it all depends on how you play it. If you can provide some evidence that your intelligence was somehow diminished—you are a smart girl, after all, that is your greatest asset—you could make a claim that the injury hurt your future livelihood. With your youth and potential, that could be quite the windfall.”
In
determinate limit.
It gets me thinking, though. What if Adam had hit me harder, had jostled my brain with such force that I really did lose my intelligence? Not that it would make me stupid, just average. Or what if it had changed me completely? There was a boy in our class, Logan Whelcher, who had been in a car accident. He’d been kind before, the type of kid who said thank you to teachers at the end of class. When he came back he was surly and mean and had a whole new group of friends. It wasn’t just that the accident shocked him or anything. It flicked a switch in his brain and made him this alternate, inverse version of himself. What if that had happened to me? Who would that girl be?
“I can put you in touch with one of the personal injury lawyers in our firm if you’d like,” Mrs. Yoo tells me.
“I’ll hold off on that for now. I think maybe the injuries weren’t so bad after all.”
“I wish you’d come to the lake with us,” Mr. Yoo says. I can’t tell if he’s simply turning the conversation away from his wife’s litigiousness, but I do know that he’s sincere. Christian asked me to go. His mom asked me. His dad asked me. His sister offered to play taps every evening on her clarinet. Christian once held his phone up to the dog, whose whine crackled across the ether to me. I said I wasn’t able to go because I was taking a Latin class at the college over the summer, but that was only a half truth, one that Christian and his family would approve of. I could’ve gone up for a weekend, but I didn’t want to leave Nonnie. And there was something terrifying about being alone with Christian in the silence of a still lake and heavy trees.
“Maybe next summer,” I say.
“Maybe,” Mrs. Yoo says. “That will be the summer everything changes, though.”
“Mom,” Christian says.
“Well, you’ll both be going off to college. They don’t call it the Turkey Dump for nothing.”
“Turkey Dump?” I ask.
“Mom,” Christian says again. His voice spikes like he’s dropped back into his puberty days, when he was chubby-faced and his voice cracked so much he almost never talked in class.
“It’s basic statistics. If you look at when most relationships end, it’s around Thanksgiving, and the rates are especially high for college freshmen. Tell them, Jin.”
Mr. Yoo does a hefty fake chuckle and says, “That’s not exactly my area of expertise. How’s your pepper, Very?”
“Delicious,” I lie. I take another bite and the quinoa is mush in my mouth. I don’t think he cooked it right. Christian stares down at his own half-eaten pepper like his mom just grounded him or something, but I feel a bit of relief, like she has given us an expiration date. Not that we have to break up next Thanksgiving, but if we make it that long, that’s good enough.
iv.
After dinner Christian and I go down into his finished basement and lie side by side on the carpeted floor, books open in front of us.
This was where we did it the first time. It. An imprecise pronoun, Nonnie would say, but everyone knows what “it” means.
When we first started dating we would kiss and kiss and kiss and kiss until our lips were sore—so sore they’d be raw the next day. It was good. It was fine. He really seemed to like it. Not surprisingly, given the way we got into it, we moved up the chain—around the bases, so to speak—fairly quickly. Shirt off, pants off, oral sex. It was like we were ticking things off of a syllabus, racing to get through the course work. Then we made it to the final: sex itself.
So I lost my virginity in his basement rec room while his parents were at a neighbor’s playing bridge. We got to the point where I normally said, “Okay, stop”—me sitting astride him, his hands on the bare skin of my breasts. I didn’t tell him to stop, though, and he kept going, helping me to slip off my underpants, struggling to put on a condom (Why did he have it with him? Did he know that was the day I wouldn’t say no? Did he always have one with him?) and then just pushing himself inside of me. He didn’t say anything. I don’t know what I expected him to say. It’s not like he was going to yell, “Incoming!” I guess I just expected there to be some acknowledgment of what we were about to do, but instead it was like he snuck in, like he thought if he just went ahead and did it, I wouldn’t notice. That makes him sound like he’s a bad guy, and he’s not. And I did want it, so I don’t know why I’m making such a big deal out of it.
Moments after it started, it was over. He left to go throw out the condom in the bathroom—wrapped, I’m sure, in layers and layers of toilet paper to hide the evidence—and I lay there sticky and stung. It had hurt, but, of course, I’d known it was going to hurt, just not how—sharp at first and then dull burning. I figured that was the problem. The next time, though, was less painful and no more exciting. I wondered if maybe we were doing it wrong. But no, all the parts went into the places they were supposed to—just like Coach B. had explained in health class. Maybe sex was overrated. He left for a summer at his lake house soon after that. So we’d had sex two times. Two and a half if you counted a misguided attempt on my part at a second go-round that second time. Trying to do it better. Trying to do it right. It had been nine weeks, not that I was counting.
“I’ve been thinking about college,” Christian says.
“Have you? What an odd thing for a young man just starting his senior year to be thinking about.” I laugh and he doesn’t.
“I’m going out to Minnesota for Columbus Day weekend, to look at Macalester College, and I thought—”
“Minnesota? Land of a Thousand Lakes?”
“Actually it’s Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, but who’s counting, right? Macalester has a great political science department and I could focus on foreign relations. They don’t have a varsity hockey team, but they play in a club league that’s really good.” I am nodding my head in agreement. So he’s going to go to the arctic tundra of Minnesota. Good for him. But then he says, “I thought maybe you could come with us. We’re going to go see Carleton, too, and maybe St. Olaf. They’re all pretty close to each other—maybe a little more than an hour. It’s like going down to Boston. No big deal.”
I’m having a hard time making the gears in my head fit together. Why, exactly, would he want me to visit a college he may or may not attend? Although, now that he’s said it, it seems a perfect fit for him. Maybe Macalester has one of those lumberjack teams, and after we break up next Thanksgiving, he’d join it to try to find some solace. He’d learn how to walk on a log as it went down a river. He could fell a pine tree with a manual saw. He’d come back after freshman year with even broader shoulders, and I’d shake my head and say, “I can’t believe I let you get away.” And then maybe he would kiss me and it would be just like in the romantic comedies that Britta watches, the ones where there’s all sorts of missed connections, but everyone winds up paired off in the end. Just like a Shakespearean comedy is what she says.
“I was looking online and I think the math department at Carleton—well, I mean, I think it’s worth your time to look at it.”
“Wait, what?”
“You should look at it. I know you have your heart set on Stanford.”
“I don’t necessarily—”
“Or MIT, I know, but sometimes at small liberal arts colleges you can get more attention, and the faculty is just as strong. And I know it’s stupid, I mean totally stupid for us to plan on going to the same school, but I also think my mom is wrong about that Turkey Dump thing. And it’s just that all these schools around Minnesota are really good, and then we’d still be close to one another.”
“In Minnesota, ya? Do you really think I’m a Minnesota kind of a person?” I say the state’s name again, the way I think people there do—Minny-soh-tah—although I imagine this would sound as false to them as someone attempting a New Hampshire accent does to me (wicked smaht, ayuh!).
“You could be a Minnesota person. With effort and support, you can be whomever you want to be, right?”
It’s one of the corny sayings we had to learn at the training to be a peer counselor
. My personal favorite was, “You’re the best at being you.” Britta and I remind each other of this regularly.
“Even with effort and support, I don’t think I want to be a Minnesota person. You’d be great there. I’ll buy you a lumberjack hat.”
“It could be someplace else. Like if you really want to go to California, there are the five colleges out in Claremont. I could go to Pomona, and you could go to Harvey Mudd.”
“There’s a college called Harvey Mudd?”
Christian sighs and starts turning through the pages in his chemistry textbook.
“I’m not sure we’re Southern California people, Christian. And anyway, I doubt they have a hockey team.”
“There’s roller hockey.”
He’s still looking down at the book, but he goes past the chapter we’re studying. I don’t stop him.
“There are lots of college towns. I mean, lots of places with lots of colleges. Chicago. Philadelphia. You could go to Penn and I could go to Haverford or Swarthmore.”
“It’s just that everything’s all up in the air right now,” I say. “With Nonnie, I mean. I don’t want to leave her.”
“But that’s why you should go look now. I mean she might not even—” He stops himself, but we both know what he’s about to say. She might not even be alive.
Now it’s my turn to look through the textbook, at all the diagrams of molecules and atoms and electrons flying by.
“Very, I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
Our pages make a fluttering sound as we turn through them.
“Here,” he says, and flattens his page. I turn mine to match his.
I pick up my pencil and start copying down the formula from the book.
Christian’s dog comes padding down the stairs and into the room. She sniffs and then, seeing that we have no food, turns and leaves again.
I should be angry, but he’s right. Nonnie might not be here. And then where will I be?
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