Chris was scared, she was sure of it. Chris had vomited twice while she’d held her hair, her chest heaving afterwards, and she’d come back to the world enough to be afraid. Her mascara had dripped down her face, smeared across her cheeks.
A dog barked. Rosie turned back to look at her grandparents’ house, and behind it, the bay. It had stopped raining, everything slick and wet; the moon’s reflection bounced on the water, faded and soft, and dark clouds moved across the sky, as if they, too, were rushed. John Wayne sat cross-legged on the roof, watching them. She waved her hand, but he didn’t respond, even though she was sure he saw her.
They sprayed the mud from their legs and feet, using a coiled hose at the side of Chris’s house. The house was dark, and Chris took this as a good sign: “Maybe Walt is asleep. Maybe he isn’t waiting.”
Chris opened the front door with a key from under the mat. She shut the door quietly, and flicked on a light by the couch. Two sleeping bags were arranged next to the fireplace in the living room. “They must want us to sleep down here,” she whispered. “I’ll get you something to wear.” She tiptoed upstairs, turning on the stairway to look back at Rosie, her face a blur. She was gone, and Rosie stared around the house. The furniture seemed to be watching—couch, chairs, kitchen table, curtains—alive, breathing.
Chris returned, handing her one of two long T-shirts with “Chuck Boyle’s Tennis Academy—Everyone Is a Winner” written across the back. They used the bathroom, splashing cold water on their faces, brushing their teeth, wiping away the night. They changed quickly, silently, wadding their muddy dresses into balls, and leaving them under the sink, next to the trash can. They arranged themselves in the sleeping bags. The house ticked and creaked; the refrigerator hummed and was suddenly quiet. Rosie could hear Chris’s breathing—Chris was not asleep because her breaths were alert.
And then Rosie fell asleep, the sway of alcohol overcoming her: dreams and images hovering. She heard a loud smack and woke to find Walt standing over Chris. A tangle of nightmare and reality, she gagged back the acidic taste of alcohol and swallowed. Chris was pleading: “Please don’t. Please don’t.” And Walt was yelling over her words, his face jumbled and tight, the whites of his eyes and teeth flashing.
“Stop,” Rosie heard herself say, and her hand went to her mouth. She tried to look back at Walt and not cower, but she cringed, believing he might go after her as well. She’d never seen someone that angry.
His arm went back. “I—told—you”—and he slapped Chris again—“not to be late!” Chris’s head swung to the side, and she stopped herself from going down with a hand to the floor.
“Goddamn whores,” he said, lifting Chris beneath her armpits and shoving so that she landed on her sleeping bag. He looked helpless then, bleary and sad, and he turned and walked back up the stairs, muttering under his breath.
Chris was crying and Rosie tried to comfort her, her own heart racing, as if she’d been running. She put a hand on Chris’s back and decided to leave it there. Chris’s pillow stifled her crying, but it was the kind of crying that can’t be helped.
Finally, Chris spoke into the pillow, muffled: “You can’t tell anyone. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Promise?”
“Yes. I promise.”
Chris rose and turned on the lamp beside the sofa. “I’m going to tell you something else,” she said, wiping her face with her T-shirt. Without looking at Rosie, she went to the kitchen. She returned with a package of frozen peas pressed against the side of her face. She sat on her sleeping bag, and Rosie rested her back against the couch.
“You’re good at secrets,” Chris said.
Rosie nodded, even though it wasn’t a question and she knew Chris was going to tell her no matter what. “He used to touch me,” Chris said.
A whirl of nausea sprang inside Rosie. She was sure she didn’t want to hear this.
Chris set the frozen peas on the sleeping bag. Her long T-shirt hung at her thighs, and her fingernail polish was chipped. Her eyes were serious, fixed on Rosie. She bent her knees and stretched the T-shirt over her legs like a tent, tennis racket elongating. “He doesn’t think I remember,” she said.
“God,” Rosie said, looking away, toward the window. It had begun raining again, the glass wet and misty.
“You can’t tell anyone,” Chris said.
Rosie looked back at her, saw a birthmark on the inside of her ankle: the size of a nickel and shaped like Africa; her tennis socks normally hid it, her feet paler than her legs.
“I want to kill him,” Rosie said, iciness around her chest and stomach.
“Don’t worry,” Chris said, pressing the peas against her face, watching her closely. “I just wanted you to know. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me.”
They didn’t speak for some time, their thoughts filling the room. The visual of Tate instructing Sean came to her. Beneath was a darker fear that had to do with her connection: what she’d witnessed and her silence. She thought briefly of telling B about Walt, but the idea was hopeless, and she abandoned it.
“It only happened once or twice,” Chris said finally, and Rosie knew that she was lying, but that she had to believe her anyway.
“He never had sex with me. He just touched me and he liked to look. He didn’t with Caitlen.”
Chris’s face was blotchy, but her eyes were steady. “I didn’t tell you because I wanted you to make it better. I just wanted you to know. But you can’t tell anyone. Ever.”
The next morning, Caitlen ate her cereal while Rosie and Chris rolled their sleeping bags. Rosie saw Caitlen lifting the spoon to her mouth, milk dripping; she heard the slight crunch crunch of Caitlen chewing. Doris was in the kitchen scrambling eggs, the smell drifting through the house.
“Caitlen hates eggs,” Chris said.
Caitlen finished her cereal, carrying the bowl to the sink. She turned on the television in the living room to cartoons.
“Breakfast,” Doris called.
Rosie and Chris sat across the kitchen table from Walt and Doris. Doris fidgeted with her napkin, squeezing it in her hands. Chris wouldn’t look at her parents, the side of her face streaked—three fingers—raised and red. Not knowing what else to do, Rosie took her knife and started buttering her toast.
“Show some respect, young lady,” Walt said. “We haven’t said grace.”
Tears worked their way to the surface, but she forced them back, thinking that Chris would prefer it. I hate him, I hate him, I hate him, she thought. A helpless shame similar to when Tate and Sean had left the bedroom—calm, talking and laughing.
Chris’s head was down, but she rolled her eyes for Rosie’s benefit and passed a secret smile, leaving Rosie both elated and scared. A silence gathered, and when Walt finally did speak, it was as if he’d been planning exactly what to say.
“You do realize,” he said, staring at Chris, “you’re going to the school we talked about. One last strike”—his hands made a small motion, as if hitting an imaginary baseball—“you’re out.”
She got the letter two months after Chris left. B set the envelope on her pillow, with her own note beside it, scrawled on notepad paper from one of Will’s prescription drug companies:
I hope this helps, Rosie. I really do. We love you, even if we’re not the best at showing it. Please know that. Always.
She opened the letter and read it right away. She folded it and put it back in its envelope, carrying the letter with her in her pocket, now and then touching the soft edge of the envelope with her fingertips.
Rosie and John Wayne walked to the beach two nights later; she’d told him that she wanted to say a final goodbye to Chris in her own way. He arranged wood and cardboard in a fire pit. His hair was in a braid, held together loosely with string. Tucked behind his ear was a joint. He used his Zippo to light a thin stick, and he lit the fire with trash he found from the beach. The waves hit the sand, released, steady, one after another; the motion calmed her. He s
tuck a board into the fire, fanned it, and wisps sparked loose. There was no one on the beach, except for a couple tucked under a blanket near the lifeguard stand, but they were busy, that was obvious. Though she had the letter memorized, she read it one last time by the light of the fire. John Wayne didn’t ask her what it said, or tell her to read it out loud. He looked at the fire, but she felt like he was reading the letter with her.
Dear Rosie,
They want to sell you small dreams. That’s the problem. Don’t let them do that to you. I’m not dying anymore. I met someone at school. We’re hippies. I guess that’s what you’d call it. On weekends we drive places you’d never believe existed. The states are tucked close together. You can drive an hour and be somewhere else. He has a truck with a camper shell. It’s brown and old.
I’ve decided to become a Catholic. Candles everywhere, incense burning, and the sad old ladies get down on their knees to pray.
I’m learning to play the saxophone. No more tennis. I swear it. At least for now. Not even in my dreams.
Friends Forever,
Chris
She threw the letter into the fire, flames rising. She recalled the disgust she’d been unable to express at Walt’s kitchen table, her helplessness. There was anger in her sadness, as if a decision had been hardening inside her, not to be submissive, not to cower again. She was aware that danger and mystery stretched around her, deep and vast as the ocean, and that she had moved closer to it, watchful and respectful. And she was lonely for Chris, glad and envious of her escape, while at the same time toughened by the secrets she’d been asked to keep. She watched the wood cave in on itself—giving way—and the letter made a soft blue flame.
The Locket
B DIDN’T LIKE to be called Barbara, so only in the brazen emotion and solitude of masturbation did Anne allow herself to say it. Barbara, Barbara—the final syllable an exhalation, Bar ba rahhh. Anne’s voice was a whisper, but it excited and frightened her, as if she were admitting something. She wore a large cotton T-shirt and she adjusted her back because it was bunched beneath her spine. Fingers massaging her clitoris, hand just inside her vagina, bent knees splayed open, making a dented tent of the sheets. Her eyes were closed; she shut them during any kind of sex, even masturbation, mostly because pleasure was better in darkness, allowing a heightened concentration and privacy. She imagined the curve of B’s breast in a bra, seen through the loop of a loose sleeve; the feel of her body when she brushed past; a look she had, both arrogant and vulnerable. Images and sensations, the way B’s tongue might feel or how her hand would uncover her. Wetness, a blur of skin, fingers moving faster, faster, dizziness and heat, her cheeks flushing.
Her body clenched in on itself, falling into black. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, until her orgasm ended. She placed a pillow between her legs, as if it were a person, and turned on her side, allowing herself to sink into numbness. The slightly unbalanced aftermath.
She opened her eyes, vulnerable, as if she’d unwrapped, released, and shared a part of herself with B. The thin curtains above her desk window moved faintly with the breeze, giving the impression of a disapproving stranger in the room, stirring the light material. She rose and shut the window. Back in her bed, pillow cradled between her legs, she whispered the name again—Barbara.
Certain the curtains weren’t moving, she shut her eyes, savoring her loneliness, her private world of desire. Her wishes were best held down, far away, where no one could judge or reject them. She liked the cleanness and simplicity of controlling her yearning, the object of her fantasy unaware but strangely involved. Her desires were most concentrated when she went to sleep at night and when she woke in the morning.
Lesbianism sounds like a disease, B had told Anne yesterday after their tennis match. Anne remembered the sentence when she woke, as she did every morning at six-fifteen, her body an alarm clock. The words came as if they’d been hovering over her while she slept, waiting, more powerful than when B had spoken. As often happened, Anne went over conversations, realizing in retrospect where she’d sounded foolish or where she’d been articulate. Usually she did her remembering while showering, brushing her teeth, drinking coffee; but this morning she lay in bed, the sunlight muted through the thin, transparent curtains of the window above her desk.
“Did you know,” B had asked, putting the last tennis ball in the can, “when you were just a girl that you liked girls?” They’d been playing singles for over three years, the pro at Newport Beach Tennis Club having matched them, and their conversations came easily. B wore her blue tennis skirt, and although her legs were tan and muscular, she was feminine. A heart-shaped vaccination print was on her right arm, near her shoulder. B was so pretty that even in the beginning, before Anne had fallen in love, she would enjoy herself more than usual by just being around her.
Anne often asked herself, How could this have happened? She was forty-two years old, two years younger than B. When had she crossed the threshold from friendship to love? It was most likely within the murky space of B’s husband’s first heart attack and the second one, six months later, that took him away. Their tennis matches had become longer and sweatier since the funeral, B typically saying, “One more set,” after they’d played two sets. Watching B grieve had finalized it: B was vulnerable, spoke more freely, and along with the intimate late-night phone calls, there’d been all the times she’d held B while she cried. She’d been helping her with the basics: paying bills, grocery shopping, dealing with lawyers. Often she went over and washed dishes because if she didn’t, the dishes would collect in the sink—food remnants hardening on plates and dark tea stains rimming the insides of mugs—until B threw them away.
“Yes; I knew at an early age,” Anne had said, sitting on the bench, setting her racket next to B’s on the ground. Anne took care of herself; her stomach was hard and her calf muscles defined. She wasn’t bad-looking; she thought she was average. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail at the nape of her neck, and she wore contact lenses instead of glasses. She was a foot taller than B. She imagined her expression as eager, like a child wanting to please. She didn’t mind being average: it must be difficult to be pretty and noticed all the time. She preferred doing the noticing and appreciating.
It wasn’t the first time they’d discussed sexual orientation, and she could sense B’s amusement. She often felt that they’d revealed more of themselves than what was actually said—she knew that B thought of her outside their conversations as well. She had laughed at B’s feigned distress, but even then, it had bothered her that her sexuality was a topic of entertainment; and she wondered: if B weren’t a widow, if she weren’t in love with her, would she have let her make light of it? In the privacy of her imagination, she had deeper, more honest discussions with B.
“Or cannibalism,” B had said, sitting on the bench and smiling directly at Anne, her leg brushing against Anne’s, a thin J -shaped scar on her kneecap from a surgery. “Lesbianism,” hands on her thighs, “cannibalism, practically the same.” They both laughed. When they were done laughing, B smiled, and her face looked affectionate and flirtatious.
And then Anne had said that sexuality was a fluid thing, labels and definitions were pointless. She had the sensation that B inhaled ideas, then breathed them right back out. In retrospect, she realized that B was asserting her power, similar to a man reminding a woman that she was on a lower rung with a facial expression or a derogatory comment. But it had another more insidious effect: it kept their intimacy at bay.
Anne stretched her arms above her head and a knuckle hit the headboard. She lowered her arms. The memory of the conversation made her ashamed. At the time, she’d been light-hearted and amused, as if she didn’t mind being compared to a cannibal. Rarely, she thought, were her feelings and actions synchronized.
She had a habit of making herself sound more stupid, and thus more easygoing, than she was. She caught herself mostly during conversations with B—to make B like her, to get her to laugh—a
nd she understood that she came off sounding like a happier version of herself. Who she was, what she talked about, her surroundings, her lifestyle, did not fit with who and what she knew herself to be: introspective, sensitive. She was practiced at safely, calmly, and responsibly being a different, more agreeable Anne.
She got up, took a shower, and got dressed. As a well-known psychologist in Newport Beach, Anne was talented at hiding her emotions. Another thing she hid: after years of studying psychology—Freud and Jung—and years of working with her patients, she’d come to the conclusion that people’s problems and aberrant behaviors occurred for core reasons. Hers had always been transparent—loneliness and shame. But patients wanted the reasons to be more complicated, and she complied. When her patients’ lives improved, the catalyst was usually mysterious, a combination of circumstances, her participation a small contributing factor. Although her reputation grew—her patients were dedicated and often grateful—she had ceased taking credit internally long ago. Sometimes the reward was that she’d listened without displaying boredom. She believed that to learn to live was to learn to accept limitations, and perhaps the most difficult to accept was that daily experience was neither dramatic nor passionate.
Yet in her relationship with B, she was losing control, and she felt both passion and drama. What kind of Anne would she be—what would be left of her—when she lost all control? When there was nothing more to lose? She was meeting B that afternoon to go to the movies. B liked seeing French films, where the characters were bold and lived accordingly, and sometimes that made Anne hopeful, but she speculated that B preferred to watch it rather than live it.
Drift Page 17