The Blurry Years

by Eleanor Kriseman

  “So what do you girls like to do for fun?” Johnny said. “You certainly seem to spend a lot of time in the sun… both of you have gorgeous tans, y’know. Both of y’all are real cute.”

  Jazz smiled. “We don’t do much else during the summer. I don’t want to go back to school.”

  “Yeah, school. That’s a bummer. Are you two at Seabreeze?”

  Jazz blurted out, “No, Hinson Junior,” before I could stop her, and I bit my lip. But Johnny didn’t seem to care that we weren’t even in high school. He just laughed and said Hoo boy under his breath.

  “Do you go to school, Johnny?” Jazz said.

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m in construction. Working on one of those new high rises way up on Ocean Shore right now.”

  “Oh.” Jazz sounded impressed, or maybe intimidated, because she didn’t say anything back. We were all quiet for a moment. I didn’t know what else to talk about. He turned to us, looked us up and down like he was trying to memorize our bodies. I couldn’t move. Jazz wasn’t doing anything and if Jazz still thought we were okay, then I had to think so too.

  Jazz slapped her hand on her thigh and I jumped. “Mosquito,” she said, wiping it off on the arm of the couch. “Um, actually, where’s your bathroom?”

  “Here, I’ll show you,” Johnny said, and stood up. He put his hand on the small of her back to direct her. “It’s that door on the left there.” Even though it wasn’t me he’d touched I got goose bumps. Johnny sat back down, this time next to me. The cushion sank under his weight, and I leaned to the left to stop myself from sliding toward him. “So, uh, you two are twins? Fraternal, I guess. That’s cool.”

  “Well, Jazz likes to say that,” I said real soft, picking at my cuticles. “But we’re just best friends. Not twins.”

  Johnny laughed. “So you’re not twins. Anything else you two are lying about?” He raised an eyebrow. “It’s not nice to lie, you know.” Jazz would have known what to say back, how to play along, but all I could do was nod. “Aw, I’m just kidding,” he said. Then he reached out and stroked the top of my right thigh, tracing a circle with his thumb. My tan went white under the pressure of his finger. I bit my tongue. We heard the toilet flush. And then I did something bad. I slipped out from under Johnny’s hand and I ran for the door.

  Johnny called out, “Callie! Wait!” and started to follow me, but he stopped when the bathroom door opened. So did I, but only for a second. Somehow I knew he wouldn’t chase me, not with Jazz still there. I ran to the end of the hallway, and in the staircase I bent over the railing, heaving. I felt like throwing up but nothing would come out. I walked barefoot along the beach back to my apartment, following the receding line of the tide. It wasn’t even dark yet. I turned my head each time I saw a girl out of the corner of my eye, but none of them was Jazz.

  When my mom came home from the restaurant that night, I was still up, watching reruns of Love Connection, holding the phone in my hand and dialing the first six digits of Jazz’s phone number over and over, then chickening out. She flopped onto the couch and peeled money from her pocket, sorting ones and fives, humming along to the Love Connection theme song. “God, Callie, I’m dying for a cigarette. Come downstairs with me?” I didn’t want to be alone, so I followed her to the parking lot. We sat on the hood of our car, the night air like a warm blanket, and I breathed in the smoke on purpose until it made my lungs raw.

  As soon as we got back upstairs, my mom passed out on the couch. I put a blanket over her as she snored softly, then curled up in her bed in the bedroom and fell asleep.

  My body was warm and achy when I woke up. I went to the bathroom to pee and in the mirror I was bright red. “Ooh, that burn looks bad. Maybe you should stay inside today,” my mom said on her way out the door. “You and Jazz can paint each other’s nails or something. I think there’s aloe vera in the bathroom cabinet.” The skin on my back and shoulders peeled off in lazy strips for days. I wondered if Jazz had gotten burned too.

  I only saw Jazz one more time after that, a few months later. She’d started high school that year, but I was still stuck in junior high, so we didn’t even take the same bus in the mornings. I walked out to the parking lot to grab a cassette from the car, and there she was. She had dark circles under her eyes and she looked older, like she could pass for seventeen or eighteen. Jazz spoke first. “We’re moving,” she said, and lifted a suitcase into the trunk. “My mom’s got a boyfriend now and they’re pretty serious. She met him at Caribbean Jack’s, but he’s from Texas. He’s rich. We should have left two hours ago. We’re running late.”

  I hooked my thumbs into the belt loops of my shorts. “Jazz,” I said, but that was all that came out. I meant to say a lot of other things, but I didn’t know how. “Well, write me if you want,” I said instead.

  She smiled without opening her mouth, and shrugged her shoulders. “Yeah, I guess,” she said, and climbed into the passenger side. Her mom shifted clumsily, and the car jerked into reverse. I watched them wait at the stop sign, then turn onto South Atlantic and speed away. I stood there for a long time, in the parking lot of the Bella Vista, until the heat from the asphalt started to burn the soles of my feet.

  11

  I didn’t spend much time alone at the beach after what happened with Johnny. I kept thinking I might run into him, which scared me. But it also excited me a little bit in a way that I didn’t like to think about, a way that made me feel like a bad person. So I went to the community pool instead. It was crowded and noisy in the afternoons, but if I got there early in the morning, it was mostly old people swimming laps, and I had a few hours of quiet before the whole neighborhood showed up.

  I usually changed into my swimsuit before I came to the pool. I hated the feeling of taking off my clothes in open spaces, and in front of other people, especially people I didn’t know. But there was something about that locker room in particular that was calming. It wasn’t like the one at school, bright and grimy at the same time, all shouts and laughter and metallic clangs. It was damp and cool in this locker room, and the walls were covered in navy tile so it was always dark. I liked being around the women at the pool more than the girls I went to school with. The old women changed slowly, almost leisurely. They were comfortable, not fixated on their bodies the way I was. Not ashamed.

  I was constantly, constantly aware of my own body. The prickles on my legs when I hadn’t shaved them for a few days. The pinched skin at my armpits that folded over the sides of my strapless dresses. The sweat that formed on the undersides of my thighs when I sat at the outdoor tables at the Oasis, or the leather seats of the school bus. The way my left breast felt heftier, more substantial than my right one when I cupped them both in my hands. The wetness in my underwear that came on sudden and concentrated, unexpected.

  I remembered how Jazz had asked me, in a rare moment when she wasn’t pretending she knew more about growing up than I did, if it was normal to find white stuff in your underwear sometimes. We were watching TV, and she’d just come back from the bathroom. “Cal?” she said, biting her lip before she asked me. “Does this ever happen to you?” I had been wondering the same thing. I wanted to cry with relief. Nobody had taught us anything about becoming women. We were figuring it out on our own.

  I wasn’t looking at the women in the locker room in a creepy way. I just liked to reassure myself that there were so many ways to be normal. A body didn’t need to be so complicated.

  I chose a locker and threw my flip-flops in, tossing my cutoffs and tank top inside. I was wearing my mom’s black string bikini because I liked the way the top looked on me, even though I obsessively tied and retied the strings on the bottoms because I was terrified they’d fall off. I brought my sunglasses, towel, and an issue of Cosmopolitan out to the deck. I’d found the magazine the last time I was at the pool, wavy and crinkled from sitting in a shallow puddle of pool water. My mom didn’t care what I read, but she never bought magazines. They were a waste of money. Sometimes we stood in the magaz
ine aisle at the grocery store, my mom flipping idly through a magazine while I absorbed every tidbit of information inside as if there would be a test on the contents later on. After a while, they all started to sound the same, but in a comforting way. Like there were formulas to being a woman, and you just needed to be reminded every so often of the right ways to act, the right things to say, the right clothes to wear.

  I found a deck chair with all the vinyl strips intact and spread my towel over it, wincing slightly at the heat coming off of the salmon-colored concrete that made the bottoms of my bare feet prickle with pain. I liked to lay out until I got so hot I felt like I would faint, until sweat soaked my hairline and trickled down the center of my chest. Then I’d jump straight into the deep end. It felt better that way, when I’d denied myself of something for as long as I could stand it before giving in.

  I watched the old people paddling, slipping underneath the water then surfacing again, pushing off at the edge to head back in the opposite direction. One woman clung to the side, goggles around her neck, catching her breath. Her skin was a deep roasted brown, mottled and folded in on itself like a crumpled piece of paper. I’d seen her in the locker room before, stretching out her swim cap before tugging it on. I didn’t understand the appeal of swimming laps. Nor the appeal of running on a treadmill, which was something my mom constantly talked about wanting. When she was home and we stayed up watching TV late enough, a certain infomercial came on—a woman who wasn’t sweating at all, who wore white bike shorts and a pink leotard, thick white ankle socks and bright new tennis shoes. She walked briskly along the moving belt, telling the camera how exciting it was. But it didn’t get you anywhere. When you were done, you were just back in the same place you’d started out. It was as if you hadn’t done anything at all.

  I stood up, sweaty and sunbaked, ready to immerse myself. My back had been hurting all morning, a dull ache low down, and I was looking forward to the strange but comforting feeling of being held together by water, liquid pressing my body together, keeping it intact.

  But something felt weird, like I’d been walking down stairs and missed a step—that sensation of hurtling into air, your stomach dropping. I felt sticky, not from sweat. I was opening up.

  I sat in one of the bathroom stalls with my swimsuit bottoms down, scrubbing at the crotch of my bathing suit with a damp piece of toilet paper that was crumbling in my hand. I’d never been more grateful for an empty locker room than I was now. No one had seen me rush out of the bathroom stall, fumble for quarters in my bag, retrieve a tampon from the vending machine mounted to the wall. No one had heard me whispering the directions from the paper insert inside the box, as if it would make more sense if I read it aloud.

  It was no use. There was still a faded but persistent brownish-red spot on the bathing suit bottoms I’d borrowed from my mom. I would have to tell her. I pulled them back on again, still damp, and got dressed, smoothing my hand over the back of my butt several times to make sure I hadn’t bled through my shorts, a gesture that would become almost automatic to me.

  On my walk home, I tried to figure out how I would tell my mother. I thought maybe she’d be happy, even though I’d ruined her bathing suit.

  For a brief second I forgot about everything, envisioned calling Jazz when I got home, telling her gleefully that we were on the same side of the divide again.

  12

  “You know, you’re really getting on my nerves,” my mom said one night when she got home from work. She hadn’t even closed the door yet. I sat up, turned the volume on the TV down.

  “You’re always here, just reading or watching TV. Don’t you want to do something? Don’t you have any friends?” It was going to be a mean night. These were happening more and more often now. “I get home from work every night and I just want to be alone sometimes, you know? No offense, but I’m around a bunch of shitheads for hours and when I get home I want to relax. This apartment’s small, I know. But Jesus, Cal, you haven’t had any friends since Jazz moved, what, two years ago? I don’t know what went on between the two of you anyway.” I started to say something, but she held up her hand. “Honestly, I don’t care.

  “The point is, you need something to do—not in this apartment. If you’re not going to go make any friends, I’m going to find you a job. There’s a couple that came in with a baby the other day… not your typical Oasis customers.” She laughed. “I mean, they’re rich as shit. I can tell just from her wedding ring. What a rock.

  “Babies are easy, as long as you can give ’em back at the end of the night.” She stared at me, like it was my fault I’d been a baby once, my fault she couldn’t have handed me over to anyone else.

  “I don’t have a bedroom,” I said, not in a mean way. It was just true. “That’s why I have to be in the living room when you get home. This is my bedroom.”

  “I’m doing all I can for you. All by myself. You have no idea.” She looked disgusted. She unhooked her bra from underneath the Oasis polo shirt, pulled it out from one sleeve, dropped it on the floor. “Why don’t you go take a walk? Go out on the beach. We live a street away from the fucking ocean. My god, take advantage of it!”

  I slipped on some flip-flops and walked out, letting the screen door slam behind me. I didn’t go to the ocean. I walked to the other side of the complex, along the catwalk that connected all of the buildings, until I reached Jazz’s old apartment. The welcome mat outside the door was new, and the sandy shoes outside the door were children’s shoes, bright and tiny. I knew she didn’t live there anymore. But I didn’t know where else to go. I slumped down in the darkness, leaning against the railing across from her old apartment. A tiny dark thought wound its way into my head until I could barely breathe. She was right. I didn’t have anyone. Except for her.

  “Here’s the number of the house we’ll be at, and here are the neighbors’ numbers—don’t hesitate to call!” Mrs. Silverman pointed out a paper on the fridge. “So glad you could make it,” she said. “Our regular babysitter had a date tonight, and I just didn’t know how we were going to make it to this benefit!” She smiled again. “Callie, right? Your mother’s told me so much about you—she’s so proud of your grades!” She’d never told me that before. “And you’ve already taken a class in child CPR—my goodness, you’re quite motivated.”

  I swallowed. I had no idea what child CPR even was. What else had my mother told her? “Yep!” I said, and smiled. “Where is Max?” I asked.

  “Oh, he’s asleep already!” she said. “No nap today—he was out like a light. He shouldn’t even wake up, but if he does, you can let him cry for a minute before you go in. He usually calms himself down. There’s formula on the counter, and a bottle right here. You can give him that if he really won’t fall back asleep.” She hadn’t stopped moving since I’d arrived, pointing out the fridge, and the pantry, where I could help myself, and the television, and the spiral staircase that led up to the bedrooms, where Max was sleeping. “Steve—Mr. Silverman—is already in the car,” she said. “We’re running late, as always. Just have a good night! We should be home around midnight.” She locked the door from the outside when she left. I watched through the frosted glass as her blurry silhouette moved across the yard and climbed into the car. I was alone.

  I had no interest in watching TV, no matter how big or fancy the screen was, no matter how many videotapes they had in the big wooden cabinet underneath the television. The TV was constantly on at our apartment, and most of the time I wasn’t even watching. My mom liked to watch TV, but even when she wasn’t there sometimes I changed the channel to a sitcom or a soap opera, and went into her room to read or stare up at the ceiling, pretending there were people just in the other room, having a conversation, that I wasn’t completely alone.

  I was hungry. I ran my hand along the slab of marble on top of the island in the middle of the kitchen. It was cool under my hand, and felt heavy and expensive. It was light pink, flecked with grey, and I wondered if Mr. Silverman had wanted
a pink countertop. I felt like it was Mrs. Silverman’s decision. I felt like Mrs. Silverman probably got her way a lot.

  The refrigerator was full, but instead of tinfoil and beer and takeout containers, there was fresh fruit, cold cuts, leftovers stacked neatly in Tupperware. Baby food lined up in jars. In the freezer, there were three flavors of Häagen-Dazs ice cream. I opened all of them. Someone had used an actual ice cream scoop, not just a spoon.

  I took out some spaghetti and meatballs from the back of the fridge, and ate it straight from the container, using a polished silver fork that I was pretty sure was only for special occasions. I meant to stop before it was obvious that I’d eaten any, but before I knew it I was twirling the last of the pasta onto my fork. Shit. She’d said to eat anything but I didn’t know if she’d really meant it. Sometimes people said a lot of things they didn’t mean, just to be polite. I washed and dried the Tupperware and hid it in the back of a cabinet, hoping she wouldn’t notice I’d taken anything from the fridge. Then I wiped my hands on my shorts and walked upstairs.

  The Silvermans’ bedroom was huge, and the floor was covered in a white carpet that looked so soft and clean I took off my shoes before walking on it. I felt dirty and out of place in my denim cutoffs and tank top, like I should be wearing something fancy. Everything was white—the sheets, the carpet, the furniture, the pillows. There was a bathtub that looked like a Jacuzzi and two sinks side by side in the bathroom. I wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Silverman brushed their teeth next to each other, if she did her makeup in the mornings while he shaved off his stubble. He probably had a job where you had to shave every morning.