Back Talk

by Danielle Lazarin

  The cab sits in the middle of the block, its back doors open. For a few moments, the only sounds in the empty street are our footsteps pounding off in three directions. And then below the thrum of my heartbeat, I hear doors slamming, and tires squealing, and then the car is behind me, closing in.

  I can’t get out of the streetlights; there is no bridge. I try to turn a corner, but the heel of my beautiful new shoe gives out under me, and my ankle takes a sharp twist; I fall forward into the curb.

  I give up. The knee of one pant leg has split. My chest heaves wildly with my sobs. The cab’s headlights illuminate the street that I planned to escape to, a quiet residential block. When the driver gets out, he curses me in French. Shaking, I offer him the francs I have in my pocket, the remainder of the money my mother gave me. “C’est tout,” I manage, all I have. He bends down, the folds of his fat face gathered up in disgust, grabs my elbow on the arm that holds the francs, and shoves me backward. The coins spill into the street. He raises an arm; he is going to strike me. I cover my face, bracing myself.

  Instead he spits on me, spreading an ounce of thick phlegm that smells like tobacco over my fingertips and hair. “Salope!” he shouts at me before he gets in his cab and drives away. I don’t know what this means, but I can tell from the way he says it that it is something awful.

  When Jill and Jack arrive, their faces are flushed and healthy. “There you are,” Jack says, as if I have pulled off a very good game of hide and seek.

  “What happened?” Jill asks, confused.

  I shake my head. I don’t want to cry in front of them, but I can’t help it. My lungs feel as scraped as the heels of my hands, and I cough before I am able to speak. “He chased me.”

  Jack looks around, sees the skid marks on the street. “With the car?” he asks.

  I nod at their knees; they both stand back from me in the empty street.

  “You’re okay.” Jill bends over to put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re fine,” she says to me, sugar in her voice. I push her hand off.

  Jack’s fingertips encircle my elbow and try to lift me. “Why don’t we walk a little?”

  I don’t answer. I make myself heavy on the sidewalk. Jack looks back at Jill from his crouched position in front of me; I hear her long exhale.

  “We’re just a few blocks from the pyramid. We’ll sit; we’ll have a drink,” Jill says, rubbing her arms in the cold.

  “I can’t,” I say.

  “Sure you can. You’ll feel better when we get there.”

  The shoes dig into my flesh as my foot continues to swell. I am trying not to feel it, but I know blood is pooling in between my toes. I’m filled with a sudden hatred for the shoes; I take them off and put them on the sidewalk beside me.

  “Shit,” Jill says as she notices my bloody pinky toe. Most of the nail has come off.

  Jack sits down on the curb next to me. He puts both arms around me, and pulls me in close. I’ve never been here before, so buried in his chest, but I imagine that Jill has, after a breakup or a failed test or during the divorce. My brother squeezes me with a force meant to bring me back to strength, but the weight of my own foolishness overwhelms me; I hate that I have done exactly as I’ve been told. And while I want most to shove him away, I don’t.

  “We can’t stay here,” Jill says to Jack, her voice antsy now.

  “Give her a minute,” he says.

  I’m still crying into his jacket, the wine bottle in his inside pocket pushing against my ribs, but I sense them mouthing to each other over me, hear Jill’s impatient pacing behind me. I feel his arm lift and she stops. A flash of jealousy stirs in my stomach, knowing they are speaking without even needing words.

  When we were growing up, our mother showed us everything that was magical to children: the mechanical bear that blew bubbles outside the Penny Whistle toy shop, the quiet beauty of night-sledding in Central Park, how to lengthen our shadows in the streetlights across the sidewalks of Manhattan. Mom, Jill, Jack, and I would walk the dogs we’d picked out at the pound after the divorce on Central Park West, and I’d stretch my arms up so far I’d lose sight of my hands in the distance, and give myself long spider legs, thick and lengthy and strong as they weren’t yet. But then Jack would run up behind me and eclipse my shadow with his, and Jill would climb onto his back from a park bench to make it even larger. They became a giant bug with six legs and massive wings; they pretended to devour me. My mother laughed; we all laughed then.

  Jill finally sits on the other side of me. She takes off her shoes, uses the hem of her shirt to wipe mine out, and puts them on her own feet, broken heel and all. “Here,” she says, sliding hers toward me. They are half a size too big, but I put them on. “Let’s go,” she says a final time.

  Before bed, I notice my broken, bloodied shoes in the closet. I throw them into the trash, taking satisfaction in their thud against the metal bucket, and go to sleep. When my mother asks about the scrapes on my hands at dinner the next night, I tell her I tripped in my new shoes coming out of the Metro, and neither Jack nor Jill says a word.

  • • •

  I am scheduled to leave Paris on a Sunday night. Jack has already gone back to Boston; he muttered an apology as he hugged me good-bye, and while it felt like he meant it, I couldn’t look him in the eye as we separated. I decide to take a walk in the morning, the apartment feeling too full of people still. My mother is sleeping in; the library is shut all day, even to her. Jill is packing in her room when I put my coat on. She sticks her head out the door, asks me where I’m going.

  “Just a walk.”

  “You want company?”

  “Not really,” I say. Maybe what I see on her face is hurt, or a kind of apology; I’m not sure she’d ever let either show.

  “I might not be here. My train leaves at noon. Will you be back?” Jill is heading to London to see friends. She hasn’t said so, but I suspect there isn’t much waiting for her in New York except me and Dad.

  “Probably not.”

  “I’ll see you when I get back, then?” She puts her arms out for a hug.

  “Sure,” I say into her ear as she squeezes me, but I don’t expect her to call.

  It’s not ten yet, but near Notre Dame there is a crowd gathering for Mass. I weave through the swell of the devout the way I learned to as a child of New York, trusting that there is an open space just beyond the bodies moving against the direction I want to go in. When I get there, to a small street on the Île de la Cité, I hear the bells calling people in to services.

  I keep going till the streets get quieter and emptier. When I find a small cathedral at the end of a narrow street, its simple gray facade is a relief to me, and I pull open the door without asking myself why. I’m wearing my American sneakers; they’re silent in a sea of Sunday shoes clicking on the stone floor. It’s cold in the church, and I can see my breath in the light coming through the stained-glass windows. The service hasn’t begun yet, but the church is full of people settling into their pews, pulling their coats tight around them in the chill morning air.

  I stand off to the side in the nave and look for the saints I know—the ones my mother has taught me—in the stained glass, but they are not there: not Lucy, not Agnes with her lambs, not even Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris. What my mother says has always fascinated her about the saints is the basic question of their existence, how little proof the faithful needed. Some saints didn’t really exist, except through art and images and stories, through the collective imaginings of those who wanted to believe in them.

  The things I want I can’t will into existence: a version of my family that never was, a place we can all agree on as home. And maybe I am like my father, not built for this, not built for siblings, or family, or Jack and Jill. Perhaps it’s a gene, a predisposition. When I think of it this way, as a malfunction, it doesn’t hurt so much, though it seems like a waste of t
ime, all these years of me trying to fit into them when I cannot, not by my nature, not by theirs. I understand what my parents have known for years: I am the proof, the last to verify that this thing we tried to make a family doesn’t work; I am the piece that belongs in a different box, that comes from a different puzzle altogether.

  As the service begins, a young woman slides over to make room for me in her pew. I hadn’t planned to stay, but I nod my head in gratitude. And even though I don’t believe, I take a seat.

  Weighed and Measured

  Birdsong

  The summer she is fourteen, Franny doesn’t want to do much at all. Everyone else she knows is away at summer camp, but she has never much liked camp. She can’t sleep with all those other girls close by, breathing and turning in the dark, the sounds of their sheets, of their jaws moving in dreams. She doesn’t like bugs or the outdoors or dividing into teams. She likes the empty heat of the city, the bad luck of an un-air-conditioned subway car, the routine she and Lucia fall into by the second week of July: making plans they abandon by midmorning on account of a thunderstorm or the humidity or money, instead often wandering from Lucia’s parents’ apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, where Franny is permitted to sleep over two nights a week, toward the park for some shade. Both girls are only children whose parents work full-time. Good girls. Of course Franny’s parents say yes to her spending the summer this way.

  If they are hungry, they stop at the pizza place on Ninth Avenue, taking seats as far from the oven as they can. They get cold sodas on their way out the door. Lucia pops hers immediately, but Franny waits till they are in the park. Today, she leans against a tree trunk and puts the cold can between her fairly recent breasts inside her shirt. “Gross,” says Lucia. “You know where that’s been? There’s rat shit on those cans.” She will only drink out of a straw. Lucia’s breasts couldn’t hold up a penny, but when she talks about them to Franny she calls them tits. Lucia likes to make her laugh.

  “There’s rat shit everywhere in this city,” says Franny. “What do you think you’re sitting on now?”

  “Uh, duh, the grass.”

  “Trust me, a rat has shit there, too.”

  “I can’t wait to get out of here,” Lucia says, sucking the last of her Sprite up through the straw.

  Franny shrugs. She listens to Lucia talk about the other places she wants to be, the not-here, a vague soliloquy about air and quiet. The grass that won’t have rat shit or dog pee or beer caps or empty dime bags on it. It will not have anyone you don’t know or want within inches—feet, yards, miles, if you are lucky—on it either.

  “Birds,” says Lucia.

  “What’s so great about birds?” Franny asks. “They have no arms. They freak me out.”

  “They sing.”

  “They sing here, too,” she says. “Listen. Close your eyes.”

  Lucia makes a face but does it and they hear them, they do, but also sirens and some kid having a tantrum in a playground Franny thought was farther away. The loop of the ice-cream truck’s song, which Franny’s mother says will drive her to homicide. Whistles and thwaps and everything in contact with something else.

  “I only want the birdsong,” Lucia says when she opens her eyes.

  Franny is about to say that where Lucia wants to go sounds a lot like camp, but then she remembers Lucia saying her parents wouldn’t ever spend the money on that sort of thing. She said Franny was crazy not to go.

  Why would you stay here?

  Camp’s not that great.

  The girls were always nice to Franny, but it’s not the same as it is with Lucia, who she can say anything to, who she can sleep next to peacefully.

  Sounds great.

  Next summer, you pretend to be me.

  Next year, we’ll go together.

  How easily Lucia would fit in there, how good she is at assuming she belongs everywhere.

  They go back to Lucia’s apartment and take turns in a cold shower, after which they try on each other’s clothes in pursuit of what feels the lightest against their skin. Lucia borrows a dress of Franny’s that’s short on her, but she is all legs, and doesn’t mind that they are exposed, that if she steps over a sidewalk grate at the wrong time, the dress might lift up. The bust is loose where it hugs Franny tightly, enough so that she thinks she should just give it to Lucia, and she does, but Lucia returns it when the summer is over, and neither one wears it ever again. On that day in her room, Lucia tugs the hem down in front of the mirror, and turns back to Franny. Then she fans herself between her legs. “This is what I need. Air up in here.” Franny snorts.

  Franny wears the same denim shorts she wore earlier—she laid them on top of the air conditioner while she showered, and they are deliciously cold against her thighs, for now. She borrows a T-shirt of Lucia’s that is soft and light and large—too big, Lucia says; she only sleeps in it, but Franny likes how it hangs, not so big that she is lost in it, but safe. Later that night, as they are walking down Seventh Avenue, Lucia will say it is her cousin Patrick’s, and that Franny will like him. He is coming in August, from upstate, staying with them for a few weeks while his mother moves back to the Bronx. The girls walk all the way to the East Village, hunting a coolness that they give up on, that anyone who is left in the city in summer gives up on. Lucia’s hair curls at her brow, but she doesn’t—on this night, at least—complain. Almost back at the apartment, Franny’s heel blistered from wearing sneakers without socks, men make noises at them like the old women make to get the pigeons closer. One of the men calls out to them in Spanish. Lucia’s face goes hot.

  “What did he say?” Franny asks as they step under the awning of Lucia’s building.

  Her friend shakes her head.

  The air conditioner in Lucia’s room is out, so they sleep with a window propped open, one fan whirring. Franny listens for the birdsong, but Lucia is right; the city is all traffic and music from speakers, all the human noises that scare the birds.

  Are You Experienced?

  Lucia joins the cross-country team that fall; early on Saturday mornings, Franny goes with the cousin, Patrick, to the meets. Before the race starts, the team stretches. In between stretches they clap hands, but their timing is never perfect, so it’s like an echo, a chain of noise in between their murmuring, in between bends and rolls and hands on each other’s shoulders as they hold their ankles to their waists. Hamstrings, quads, hips, shins. Franny watches Lucia shake her legs out on the starting line, her friend looking like someone else, like a girl who wants something she can see in the distance, hungry, maybe; mean, like she isn’t in real life. And then, in a moment, catching Franny’s eye, smiling, and again she is like who Franny knows she is.

  They watch Lucia run into the woods, and wait for her to come out of them, twenty-three minutes of the cross-country course where she can’t be seen. Franny and Patrick walk the outer edge of the park together while Lucia’s parents wait at the finish line, drinking coffee with the others.

  One Saturday, Lucia takes fifth in the meet, making her the fastest on the school’s team, and she’s only a freshman. After, in the backyard of a house in Yonkers that belongs to Patrick’s mother’s boyfriend, Lucia untangles Franny’s necklace for her, a silver chain with a single cursive F charm, without even looking at her long, thin fingers at work. Patrick and Franny are talking about camping, about stars, about wild animals. Lucia lowers the necklace onto the lap of her skirt between her thumbs and pointers, the chain a single knot from done. “Where I come from—” she starts to say, but Patrick cuts her off: “You were born at Montefiore; you come from the Bronx.”

  It’s then that Franny, on her way to the bathroom inside, steps on a bee. “Fuck,” she says, over and over, each one a little softer, till it’s just a whisper. Patrick stomps on the already-dead bee with his sneaker. Lucia gets ice from the house, which she holds against Franny’s swollen heel while Patrick stands over the
m, hands on his hips, looking for something to do. He catches Franny’s eye. “Who needs wild animals?” he says, the small space between his incisors showing in his smile. Franny holds her own ice and Lucia finishes the necklace and puts it on for her, lifting Franny’s hair and letting it down again.

  “Gracias,” Franny says.

  “De nada, chica.”

  There is dinner, inside, because of the bees—even though Lucia prefers, always, to be outside, the mothers have decided, and there are no arguments about it. The way the women are together is its own foreign country; they move around each other like extensions of a single body, their voices and laughter entangled. For a few years, the sisters weren’t speaking, but that’s behind them now, a story Lucia promises she’ll tell Franny but never gets around to. All summer Franny and Lucia claimed to be sisters, cousins sometimes, though who would believe it: Franny blond and green-eyed and compact, edgeless; Lucia, long limbed and straight-faced, her hair black and wavy. Around Lucia’s and Patrick’s mothers Franny understands that what’s between her and Lucia can always be broken, that it will.

  On the weekends when Patrick doesn’t come to the city, they visit him at boarding school, where he is on scholarship. Patrick is Puerto Rican, like Lucia, but no one at school believes him, because he is tall and lean and freckled, like any other prep school boy, his hair almost red in the fall sunlight. Plus, his name. My father’s Irish, he’d explain, and maybe he is, but no one except his mother knows that for certain, and she won’t tell him anything he wants to know. For what, she asks, would it do you any good?

  One visit, before Patrick’s and Lucia’s mothers take them out to dinner—a tacky Polynesian place two towns over they all love, with its dry-ice volcanoes and plastic mermaids in the drinks—Patrick takes off his shirt in front of the girls, his long, pale torso something Franny wants to turn away from but doesn’t.