Back Talk

by Danielle Lazarin

  She sits on his lap one Sunday afternoon in his dorm room while Lucia is out in the woods, smoking with Patrick’s roommate, and he says, “It’s okay,” because he can feel her hovering, worried about letting her weight onto him. He pretends it doesn’t matter, and so she does, too. Her heart thumps. He hums a song she doesn’t know. The smoking spot is a good fifteen minutes from the dorm, but it’s taken ten minutes to just make it to this point, and how much time do they have? He touches her back through her shirt, a warm hand on the nubs of her spine. He is moving slow; he is waiting. But she’s never asked him to. She will have him wait forever. She will never kiss him. She feels him hard under her leg, and she wishes she didn’t, that she had never agreed to be gathered into his arms on this futon, but the power. The power of her vibrates.

  • • •

  The next weekend, Patrick visits the city, which has been sieged by rain. He throws Franny, at her request, over and over, onto Lucia’s bed. Her body compared to his is small, collapsible. One time, her ankles hit the wall. She cries out in pain, in laughter. Lucia gives them looks from a chair across the room. No, she doesn’t want a turn. She says she has a headache, puts her hand over her eyes. Patrick and Franny go outside under a single umbrella and buy her junk at the drugstore: a pair of neon green slippers, a pack of watermelon-flavored gum, a magazine for girls who love horses that they laugh so hard at in the store that Franny’s muscles are sore the next day. When they get back to the apartment, Franny crawls into bed beside Lucia with the bag, which, wet from the rain, drips water onto the blanket.

  It is nearly midnight in June when, over the phone, Patrick tells Franny he’s in love with her, and her silence is so long and so deep she falls into a quick sort of dream, a half-conscious flash of her backyard in winter. He is done with school; she still has three more weeks of ninth grade. He is two years older but only a grade ahead; this was the only way the school would take him, on repeat. Her dream is broken by his asking, “You still there?”

  How is she supposed to respond? She loves riding in the car he drives (his mother’s), the windows down, silent except for a tape he’s made for her, though he doesn’t say this exactly, doesn’t say it’s for her, but he knows it and she knows it so she listens extra hard. They don’t tell Lucia about that weekend, during Patrick’s spring break, March. Lucia was away, visiting her grandmother, the one she and Patrick don’t share. Patrick parked at the end of a hiking trail they’d not worn the right shoes to walk, their car the only one there. He suggested they smoke a joint, but Franny, suddenly worried, said no. “It’s okay,” he said, “not a big deal,” and opened the sunroof, and popped their seats back, wiggling his eyebrows at her above his sunglasses. When, after a few minutes of watching the clouds, he asked her what she was so afraid of, it was a genuine question. She tried to answer, but the best she could do was to say, “I don’t know.” She considered laying her head on his chest. She saw that he wanted to rip her open, and she was afraid of his body, of what it might mean to allow him to show her everything she did not yet know.

  On the phone she says, “I’m here,” and he waits, as he often does, for a more complete answer.

  Wish You Were Here

  They heard that cows like to be sung to, so one night during that week at the rental house in Vermont, on their way back from the dairy barn, they take their ice cream to the fence and fight over which song to sing.

  Lucia wants to sing “Happy Birthday,” but Patrick refuses, so then she suggests a song in Spanish—one that Franny won’t know—and Patrick shoots that down, too.

  “I got it,” he says, and makes the last of his cone disappear in one bite, then hooks his arms over the fence. They are scratched from where he climbed into some raspberry bushes earlier that morning, his arms marked by a combination of dots and dashes, freckles and the light scrapes from the thorns. The cows are far out in the field, clustered together.

  So . . . so you think you can tell . . . Patrick’s voice is shaky, deeper than Franny has ever noticed it when he sings along in the car. At the end of the summer he will be a junior at school; he will date a girl from Connecticut, with shiny dark hair and her own credit cards, who Franny will never meet.

  “What song is this?” Lucia asks.

  “Pink Floyd,” Franny says, and joins Patrick at the fence. She starts singing, too.

  Lucia holds her ice-cream cone but doesn’t eat it. “I don’t know this song.”

  We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl . . .

  The cows haven’t even turned an eye. Their tails swat away the flies. Patrick’s and Franny’s voices barely fill the space between them.

  Lucia throws her cone over the fence. She wipes her hands with the small white napkin she still holds. “They’re not coming. They don’t care,” she says before she starts walking toward the house, dropping the napkin to the ground. Franny and Patrick stay; they finish the song. Franny picks up Lucia’s trash, crumpling it in the palm of her hand.

  “I got this,” Patrick says to Franny, before he catches up to Lucia, who he challenges to a race. Franny watches them run ahead, anticipates the moment when Lucia extends an arm to shove her cousin aside, even though she could beat him without it. “Cheater!” Patrick yells as he tries to push her back, but she’s out of his reach already. “Asshole!” Lucia yells back, three leg lengths ahead of him.

  The three of them fall asleep in one room, on the two twin beds the girls have pushed together underneath the window, Lucia in the middle, her hair over her face. The lights are already out when Patrick reaches one of his long arms over to tap Franny on the crown of her head. Franny lifts her head, mouths hello. They snort with laughter. The bed shakes, but Lucia doesn’t wake up, not for the next hour while they talk over her sleeping body.

  The next morning, Franny wakes to the cousins fighting in the living room, yelling that Franny can’t untangle the meaning of. Neither one looks at her as she enters the room. Patrick’s mother is in the kitchen cracking eggs into a metal bowl, a pile of eggshells on the counter next to it. Patrick’s nostrils flare in annoyance as Lucia leans into him, her bare arms crossed at her chest. “It’s not your choice,” Lucia says. Lucia’s mother snaps at them in Spanish and they stop.

  “He doesn’t understand,” Lucia says, in English.

  “Oh, I understand,” Patrick says.

  He stares Lucia down till she goes outside. He looks right past Franny as she follows her out, carrying a sweatshirt that she drops onto Lucia’s head by its hood. She doesn’t ask her why she is crying, or what they were fighting about. She hooks her arm through Lucia’s and they start walking out into the field behind the house, though they are both still in pajamas. The grass is wet with dew; Franny wishes she had shoes on.

  Lucia stops walking to put her arms through the sleeves of the sweatshirt.

  “He can’t get everything good; he can’t have it all to himself.”

  “Of course not,” Franny says, but she doesn’t know what Lucia is talking about; her friend has to work her way backward to it, to the fact that she, too, has just been offered a spot at Patrick’s school.

  “It’s not like I won’t have my own life,” Lucia says.

  “You will,” Franny says, and tries not to cry herself.

  Dog Walks

  Sixteen was the last year to be weighed and measured, to bend over and touch her toes in the pale pink exam room of the pediatrician, birds of the world poster at the level of her nose, her waist. Her spine examined, her knees tapped. Franny’s mother sat with a book in the waiting room, only there to pay the bill, to get her daughter back to school afterward. An adult doctor would do soon; a gynecologist was in order, too. Her growing more or less done. Beautiful, the doctor said in her office afterward, scanning all of Franny’s numbers over the rim of hot pink reading glasses, as she had since Franny’s parents first brought her in, at the start of the charting, the p
erfectly rising curve. So smart, the doctor said during those early visits, after hearing Franny speak and, later, read and interrupt her parents to give answers she thought she had. How many words? Fifty? A hundred?

  Franny remembers when the body was beautiful just because it worked. Three and four and six and nine. She remembers where she could fit. On her father’s shoulders; on the dog, the little one, dead for over five years now, straining on the leash in front of them as they walked around their block weekend afternoons; on her mother’s lap, their legs a jumble. Each place outgrown.

  When a boy about her size unzips her pants and his own late one night at his apartment, yanking her underwear at the bumps of her hips, Franny says no, asks what he’s doing. It’s ten o’clock on a late summer night, and the boy’s parents are out of town for the weekend. Another only child. As she gets up from this boy’s bed, her back hot from being pressed against his comforter, she feels stupid for having wanted to be here in the first place. She doesn’t know what she was after.

  Earlier that day, Lucia left for boarding school. That first year away, she will fall in and out of love with two different boys. She will try to explain it to Franny in letters, and for a few months over the phone, but Franny will understand Lucia less and less; she will find it hard to remember what she is like, what they were like. On her end of the telephone, Franny will feel the pressing of the secrets she’s keeping from her, including, now, this one: how the boy made her think of Patrick, the game they played, him lifting her up and dropping her down onto the bed, her sudden understanding of how a girl can have something taken from her.

  She loses Lucia’s number, Patrick’s, too. Loosens them from her mind the way she loosened herself from Patrick’s lap that afternoon in his dorm, sliding back to a more innocent place so that when Lucia came in, her cheeks pink with the cold of the Connecticut woods, she didn’t even ask what they had done while she was gone, why Patrick was in a mood, looking out the window. The rest of that weekend, Lucia was on Patrick’s case for being so serious, for not introducing them to any of the boys down the hall like he had said he would.

  Sweetheart

  She’s eighteen the first time she has sex, with a boy named Eric. She’s twenty-two by the time she thinks she loves someone. His name is Will. She tells herself she can love him without wanting anything from him. She knows if she wants something—her lips against his bare biceps, his feet hanging off the edge of the twin bed she still slept in in that first apartment (Washington Heights; three roommates)—she will want everything. A cascade.

  There are the years when she thinks the only answers are the body. The spring she is twenty-five, it is Benji’s body she thinks about the most, but they’ve never touched. In the school where they work he walks by her desk five or six times a day, sometimes with his class of third-graders, sometimes on his way to the faculty lounge, which she knows is quicker reached by a different route. When no one else is there to see, he taps his fingers on her desktop in greeting.

  In the corners of rooms where he talks to her, in the hours they spend in a bar, before his live-in girlfriend finishes her workday, Franny calls him sweetheart. She wants him to imagine, just for a moment, that she owns him. She wants to plant that possibility in his mind, even if he dumps it out immediately. “Yes, honey,” he says back, sarcastically, but he does not mean it. She doesn’t touch him, but for the hours afterward she imagines she did, then his fingers on her, inside her. “Fuck,” she says aloud in the elevator of her apartment building, when she is finally alone. She imagines the relief of not wanting him anymore, the end of the pain of wanting pleasure.

  In this, she can’t help but think of Patrick, how long he bore what she now knows is unbearable. Sweetheart. She never could command her body to want his; the way she loved him would never have been enough. She could control her desire for him just as much as she could the tears Lucia wanted when their friendship was ending, that she went so far as to ask for, in a letter Franny kept for a month and then just threw away, never writing back. How come you never cried when we fought? Did you just not care? Franny now is a rare crier, and does so silently, so if she ever had, on the other end of a call with Lucia or Patrick, they might never have known it was happening at all.

  American Men in Paris I Did Not Love

  Andrew, who finds me reading on the floor of the American Library, in the corner where two stacks meet. At my feet, near the toes of the boots I have spent too much money on, four or five books, of no real interest to me beyond the fact that their pages are filled with English words, and I am already tired of French—of collecting new words, of the steps it takes to understand it, of how, when I choose not to, there isn’t a silence but a loneliness, the low hum of a life that never will be second nature to me.

  Andrew, older, both in years and in worldliness. The American university we attend is his third school in five years, punctuated by travel, by an indecisiveness I, not knowing any better, admire, covet, even. Andrew picks up the books, passing them from one hand to the other, feigning his interest in the pages. He taps a closed one against my knee gently, says we should get a drink sometime. And when we do, at a bar in an arrondissement farther out than I’ve yet been brave enough to venture, we talk about the lit class we are in together, where I am the youngest, two months into eighteen.

  “How did you get in?” he wants to know on the Metro on the way over.

  The professor read my admissions essays; she asked to have me in the class, usually reserved for juniors and seniors, none of whom are particularly nice to me. Andrew purses his lips, nods his head, impressed. I believed then that a man might be interested in me only for my intelligence.

  He tells me the bar we’re at once sold coal across its zinc bar top. We sit at a table in the center of the room and order a bottle of wine; Andrew says something about how he’ll take care of whatever I don’t want to drink. We finish two bottles. He orders oysters but I don’t eat any.

  “My throat closes,” I explain.

  “Allergic?” he asks.

  “Psychological,” I say.

  A glass into the second bottle I go to the bathroom and he laughs at my face when I return. The toilets are Turkish, and he hasn’t told me for his pleasure at this very moment.

  I shrug. I have spent the three previous years squatting to pee in between parked cars and on the trunks of trees in New York; I do just fine balancing. The difficulty was when I came out of the bathroom and washed my hands at the shared sink. After I shook them off, the towels depleted, a man, far older than Andrew and drunker then either of us would be on that evening, leaned over and put his lips on my neck. I pushed him away with both arms, creating space between our bodies, as if he had fallen onto me by accident, but there was nothing accidental about that night, not for this man, or for me, or for Andrew, whom I part from on the Metro, pretending I am meeting up with friends for dinner when I just want to eat alone, to be alone with my body, which would, that year, always be more interesting to other people than it would be to me.

  • • •

  Sam, my American, sends me packages from his college in Minnesota. They arrive at the university’s student center, and I open them alone, at lunch or on the Metro. He sends photos, silly ones, to make me laugh. At first, they have his arm in them as he holds the camera up; eventually, he gets other people to take them for him. All I can see is that these are the ones I have not taken, that his life is no longer mine, no longer ours. In early December, I’ll get a photo of him standing on a snowdrift, shirtless. I put it on the wall above my bed, next to an old one of us in Central Park, where I set up my camera on a stack of our things late last spring. He covered me with his body in the grass—my teeth are bared, and he calls it the wild dog photo. You are the dog, I wrote on the back of his copy, which he keeps I don’t know where.

  • • •

  Jamie I help move twice that year in Paris. I buy him cigarettes, hol
d them for him, lit, so he can zip up a jacket or pay a taxi driver. When he pays for my drinks I tell him I’m not going to sleep with him and he says, as he clinks our glasses together, “That’s okay; you’re still my favorite.” The girls who do sleep with him are about my age but seem younger: debutantes and suburbanites who, the first time loose in a city, are always falling down stairways and yelling in the streets at 2:00 A.M., in English. Jamie, with his impeccable French, honed at an American boarding school, endures them for a few weeks at a time, collecting them like prizes, each one more beautiful than the last.

  When he leaves one of these girls for the night, he calls me. Sometimes he is nearby and he’s run out of money for a cab; sometimes he pretends he’s locked himself out of his apartment again. He makes a pile of his smoky clothes in the front room. I let him into my bed; I let him lie against my back.

  “So strong,” he says, approvingly, as I try to unlace his fingers from mine, each of us protesting, half-asleep.

  “Come on now,” he pleads.

  “Sleep,” I tell him, and he does. We do.

  When I wake up, we’re not holding hands anymore. He leaves as if he has someplace to be, pinching me to let me know he is going. “I know you’re trying to get me to bite you,” I say, still in bed, “but it won’t work.”

  When he leaves I open my two small windows to get the smoke smell out of the room.

  • • •

  Oliver writes me notes in books he’s had sent from America or buys for me from Shakespeare and Company days after we discuss them. Thought of you, he’ll write, or he’ll copy a quote about friendship, about Paris, about the places we’re from. He has the most beautiful handwriting I’ve ever seen, full of so much care. He never tries to stay the night. He never buys me wine, though I suspect his family is rich, a fact he hides from me by pretending money is nothing at all to him, handing me a roll of film he claims is about to go bad if it isn’t used soon. “I over-ordered again,” he says.