Shout Her Lovely Name

by Natalie Serber

  “Hey, ladies. Can I buy you a drink?” A boy with a foam mustache held the keg nozzle toward them. He sucked at his upper lip and revealed a wispy blond mustache underneath, then gestured toward the corn dogs. “You should have seen the guy at Wienerschnitzel. They had to get the manager to unlock the freezer.” He handed them each a cup. “Pretty righteous . . .”

  Zellie smiled and Nora asked where the parents were.

  “Mexico.” He smiled with protruding lips, either imitating Mick Jagger or still protecting his lips from long-gone braces.

  Another boy was taking jars out of the refrigerator and dumping them into one bowl—mayonnaise, relish, three different kinds of mustard, ketchup, and Major Grey’s Chutney. “For our feast,” he said to the corn-dog girl. This party had been under way for some time.

  At the kitchen table, people slammed back shots of Jose Cuervo and sucked on grapefruit sections. A boy with hairy knuckles and a golden retriever smile held an eggcup full of tequila out to Nora. She leaned against the doorjamb and drank it down like it was a job, like taking out the trash. She’d tasted her mother’s tequila and orange soda. Ruby and her girlfriends drank them summer afternoons, greased up with coconut oil, sunbathing nude in the backyard with an Indian bedspread flung over the clothesline as a gesture toward privacy. Nora kept her eyes closed to hide the tears that sprang up with the alcohol burning down her throat. The same boy pressed a grapefruit section to her lips. She smiled around it, bit down on the flesh. When she opened her eyes, Zellie and the boy had grapefruit smiles as well, and heat lit up her insides. They tossed the peels onto the kitchen floor with the wrappers and corn-dog sticks. He grabbed their hands, pulling them into the living room. Someone’s sweaty back rubbed up and down Nora’s arm. She let herself half dance, half be bounced by the crowd. “Bounce!” She yelled it twice before Zellie heard her and laughed. The boy heard too and he started bouncing and all three of them did and then it spread across the room like a wave and everybody bounced to Mick Jagger singing “Lies.” They danced through three more songs before Randall popped up, wrapped his arms around Zellie, and she was gone.

  Hairy Knuckles, whom Nora recognized from somewhere, brought his lips to her ear. “Beer?” he yelled and she nodded. He filled their cups in the kitchen and returned to her with a handful of tiny pickles and a corn dog, the stick between his teeth like the stem of a red rose. They leaned against a speaker, watching the dancers, watching their beer jiggle along with the bass line. Nora ate pickles from his cupped hand, and when he held out the dog, she took a bite, swallowed it down with beer. It tasted bad, like wet rye bread and sugar, but when he held it out again, she took a second bite.

  A joint came by and he put the lit end in his mouth. He blew evenly and a turbo stream of pot smoke came off the back. Nora leaned close, held her lips in a tight O, and breathed it in until she couldn’t hold any more. Then they switched and she felt the heat of the cherry just above her tongue as she blew into Hairy Knuckles’s mouth. It was mean, thinking of him as Hairy Knuckles. She was glad not to have to stand alone now that Zellie had found Randall. She stared at him, pleasant brown eyes, thick eyebrows, and no pimples. His front teeth overlapped at a jaunty angle, like someone tipping a hat.

  You okay? he mouthed, and she shook her head no, because just then, she felt incredibly dizzy. He led her outside, where the cold air felt fresh and clean on her face and she could breathe deeply. They stood beside a night-blooming jasmine. He plucked a flower and held it beneath her nose.

  “I’m Nick.”

  “You are not,” she said, trying to focus on the white blossom.

  “Okay?” He cocked his head to the side like he was trying to figure something out. “Who am I then?”

  She burst out laughing. “I’m Nora.”

  He smiled cautiously. Clearly he’d never seen The Thin Man. “I know.” He said he remembered her from school, though he had graduated last June.

  “Do you go to college?”

  “Community.” He asked if she’d ever been to another party here. She shook her head no and saw two white blossoms and two sets of brown eyes bobbing before her face. The jasmine smell was sweet and strong.

  He threaded his arm through Nora’s. “Let’s walk.”

  She asked if he had a dog named Asta and he still didn’t get it, but he listened to her laugh and didn’t seem to mind that she had her own joke. They shared a cigarette, and her head swam.

  “I think I’m pretty drunk.” She leaned against his shoulder.

  He smiled with his eyes as if he had all the time and shoulder space she would ever need. “Hey, don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve got you covered.”

  Nora thought, Hairy Knuckles is so nice.

  She stumbled on a crack in the sidewalk and he caught her by the wrist, and then wrapped his arms around her so she fit right into his damp armpit like a jigsaw-puzzle piece. He kissed her neck, said maybe they should rest in his car, and then they were right next to it and he was helping her into the back seat and shutting the door. They eased back onto the seat, facing each other. He kissed her again with slack lips, and Nora felt as if she could tumble right inside his mouth.

  I am kissing Nick. Nick Knuckles. Nick Knuck. And she kept saying that over and over in her mind while they kissed and she felt the ridge of his crooked teeth against her gums. She thought about a time in the future when they’d be eating lunch together and she could tell him how she’d called him Nick Knuck. She would tease the hair on his fingers when she said it. Perhaps even plant a row of kisses across all five.

  Nick’s tongue gently explored her mouth. She tasted grapefruit in front of other flavors, corn dog, smoke, tequila, and something else, something lush and warm. She wondered and worried over her taste, thought of her diaphragm, left at home between her mattress and box spring, and how she wanted to have a lot to tell Zellie later. Nick pressed against her and she felt herself pressing right back, facing him in the dark, her legs tangled with his, his hand reaching beneath her sweater; he tried to jiggle down beneath her waistband. She sucked her stomach in and felt, at one and the same time, regret and relief that she’d worn the tight jeans.

  “I didn’t expect this,” he said softly.

  She wasn’t sure what Nick meant—the luck of meeting her, or the inconvenience of her pants. A seat belt dug into her back and she was acutely aware of where she was—alone with a boy in a car.

  He kissed her again, more deeply, and his hand worked its way down toward her ass. The jasmine smelled sweet, and Nick’s weight felt good. Over his shoulder, the windows fogged, and Nora believed they had done that together. No one passing by would see them inside. She had wanted this to happen to her, though things weren’t exactly as she had imagined—they both still had their shoes on. But the air in the car was warm and thick as blankets. Nora untwined her arms from his neck and unknotted her pants. She loosened the rainbow shoestring and peeled her jeans down. As she revealed them, her hips and legs glowed in the amber light. Her thighs looked supple, firm. Nick never took his eyes off her, determined and grateful. Even in the time it took to get the jeans off, she didn’t change her mind.

  It was after. Back at the party, with wrappers now strewn across the living room carpet and the music blaring. It was when Nick looped his finger through the shoestring in her pants, pulling her toward him, that she changed her mind. She’d seen gestures like that, a slap on the ass, a tweaked nipple, a man pinching a cigarette from between her mother’s lips and putting it to his own. Those gestures, like Nick’s finger wrapped in her shoestring, were flip, cavalier, possessive. Her mother flourished under them. When Nick held his beer to her lips and said, “Drink up, baby,” she felt something rise inside her that she didn’t want to swallow away. He smiled at her with his crooked teeth, only they didn’t look jaunty anymore. They looked as if they were crowding toward an exit.

  “Who’s this Asta you were talking about? Isn’t he the dog on The Jetsons?” Nick asked.

  She sh
ook her head. “That’s Astro.”

  “Right.” He showed his teeth again.

  “I’ll be right back.” On the porch, everyone belonged to the kissing clan now. Nora wanted a cigarette then realized they must be in Nick’s car. She started toward it, down the stairs. They should have stayed in the car, just the two of them. Perhaps there, behind the fogged windows, she wouldn’t feel so vacant.

  “Nora?” Randall and Zellie smiled down at her over the porch railing. Two round, pale faces hovering from the planet Couple.

  “Hey.” She looked up at them. “I think I’m going home.”

  “What a good girl you are.” Randall said it like it was a compliment. He had his arm around Zellie, their shoulders and hips touching.

  “I’m going to stay with Randall. Cover for me?” Zellie asked.

  Nora nodded. “Don’t forget the Bounce.”

  Her mom’s Rambler was parked straight, an indication Ruby hadn’t been drinking. Nora took a deep breath and opened the door.

  “How was the movie?” Ruby called from her bed, her tired voice barely audible over the drone of the TV.

  Nora pretended not to have heard. She hadn’t even thought about what movie she was supposed to have seen and now she tried to remember what was playing.

  “Come talk to me.”

  “I have to pee.” In the bathroom she wadded up toilet paper and stuck it in her underpants. She felt raw, pulpy. She pushed back thoughts about her clean and cornstarched diaphragm, useless in her room.

  Her mother, cross-legged in the center of her bed, her faded kimono cinched loose around her waist, stabbed at the adding machine in the center of the silver tray. Her grade book lay open next to her, and a trail of white paper snaked over the quilt and onto the floor. Nora braced herself for questions about the pot.

  “Did you and Zellie argue? I thought she was spending the night.”

  “She changed her mind.” Nora stayed in the doorway, far from her mother’s prying gaze. On the TV a team of lions chased a herd of gazelles across a landscape of dry grass. “What are you watching?”

  “I was watching Johnny Carson.” She kept a finger placed along a column of numbers, someone’s grades, and stared steadily at Nora, whose breath slowed, became deliberate and loud.

  A lioness, tawny, all muscle and bone, leaped from a boulder onto a lone gazelle’s back. If anyone could intuit what Nora had done, it was Ruby. That she’d done it, she was glad. She thought she was glad. She had something to tell Zellie. She could cross it off her list. That was all good. “What are you staring at?” Nora finally asked.

  Ruby held the grade book out to her. “I’m on Mark Cavanaugh.”

  When she was little, Nora helped her mother grade twice a year. They would stay in for an entire weekend and have potpies and candy bars while Ruby corrected stacks of papers and then read out the scores. Nora keyed them into the calculator and wrote the final tally like a prediction of someone’s future. That’s how she used to feel about her own grades, that they meant something.

  “Nora, are you okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Ruby sighed, fished through her nightstand for a cigarette. “Tylenol helps.” The match flared bright and blue. Through the cloud of exhaled smoke, her mother still watched. Nora realized she must reek of tequila. She took a plum from the glass bowl on her mother’s dresser. Outside, beyond the bedroom windows, faint screams rose from the roller coaster.

  “Are you happy?”

  It was such a weird thing for a mother to ask.

  Rate My Life

  The industrial mixer gleamed in the clean light, its paddle raised in friendly greeting. Reliable measuring cups, mixing bowls, and cake stands lined the shelves. Croissants in various stages of development—frozen hard as pale stones, thawed to tender puffy crescents that reminded Nora of babies’ arms, and baked to a worn penny shine—rested on the solid bakers’ racks. She transferred trays from freezer to proofing case to oven to racks, everything happening in the right order. Her mix tape—Pink Floyd, Billie Holiday—set on loop, her hair pulled into a tight ponytail, apron snug around her waist, Nora sang and worked, periodically slipping her hand into her pocket to touch the mysterious note. Your shoulders. They’re sexy and amazing.

  Before leaving the apartment, Nora had leaned down to kiss Thad’s shoulder and smelled gin, cigarettes, and a whiff of the acrid bike grease that never washed from beneath his fingernails.

  “Tylenol?” He emitted a pasty old-man click with his tongue. “Refrigerator water?” It was one of the differences between them: he liked his water chilled, she liked hers room temperature. He liked sleeping with the window shut, she liked it open a crack, to let in the salty air. Apparently he also liked sitting up late and drinking and smoking cigarettes with her mother, while she liked going to bed early and leaving before sunrise for work and then classes.

  Nora tiptoed through the dark living room to accommodate Thad’s request, still in her socks so as not to wake her mother. It seemed strange, Nora sleeping in the double bed beside a man with a hangover, while her mother curled up alone on the narrow couch. When had this happened, this switching of roles? Thad cupped the Tylenols in his palm and gave them a shake, like a pair of dice, before popping them into his mouth. “Come back to bed, chicken.” His voice was raw from smoking or husky with desire. Either way, Nora again did not feel a quickening near her spine, the plummeting-elevator sensation she used to feel when Thad called her chicken. Stroking her arm, he offered a low-luster smile, cuffed her wrist in his callused hand. “That’s some mother you’ve got.” She twisted free, and then, in case she’d been too brusque, hooked his pale hair behind his ear.

  Nora slid the last tray in the oven, set the timer, and pushed through the swinging doors from the kitchen to the empty bakery café. Streetlamps and the just-breaking day cast frail ashen light into the room. Chairs upended on café tables sent leggy shadows across the floor and up the walls. She paused in the room’s calm center. When she was little, the television, always on, erased this kind of quiet. Last night, she’d lied to her mother, told Ruby she’d been denied her request for the day off. The truth was, Nora hadn’t asked. What she didn’t want to miss was exactly this: the unruffled mornings at the bakery, the relay between the walk-in, ovens, and industrial sink, the smell—butter and sugar baking—that conjured for Nora seasons and traditions, snow and bulky sweaters, cold milk and flag football, a pair of golden retrievers, leaves to rake and a checkerboard. It was a smell she imagined belonged on the Kennedy compound or in the pretend world of an L.L. Bean catalog.

  Waiting for the buzzer, she thumbed through an old Cosmo she’d found on the rack out front and stopped when she came upon a Rate My Life quiz. She raced through gender, marital status, siblings (none), age (twenty), best friends (one); hesitated at weight, finally choosing “slightly over.” Ever been in prison (no). Are you employed (yes, hence the slightly overweight: working at a bakery, it was hard to resist). Financially independent (partly. Thad didn’t ask her to help with the rent, but she was paying her own way through college; her mother had given her one semester’s tuition, eleven hundred dollars, and told Nora the rest was up to her. Nora was glad of it, as Ruby had already laid claim to too much of her life). Are you addicted to caffeine, alcohol, cigarettes, junk food, illicit drugs (she could check off only one, caffeine, and felt both pride and regret. Perhaps her life would be more interesting with addictions). Are there one or more people who currently find you romantically appealing—near her heart she felt a flutter, then a jolt when the timer went off. Nora ripped out the quiz and slipped it into her pocket with her note.

  At nine, the baking done, she clocked out and headed to UCSB. Her satire class was held on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in a cavernous lecture hall, two hundred seats sloping toward a podium. Nora, living off campus with Thad, didn’t know anyone. So last Friday she’d been surprised when a boy slipped her a note. He wore dark-framed glasses that magnified h
is eyes, and one peacock feather earring that made his large eyes seem almost violet. “I wouldn’t lie,” he’d said.

  Your shoulders. They’re sexy and amazing. All weekend she had held her back straighter, walked regally, felt as if she had a small red bird perched upon each shoulder. Nora had transferred the note from pocket to pocket, even taking it with her to Sunday brunch at Maple, where her mother and Thad each ordered gin fizzes, plural.

  “Come on, Nora. How often does your amazing mother come for a visit? Have a drink with Dad and me.”

  “Thad,” Nora corrected.

  Thirteen years older than Nora, Thad had been pegged by Ruby as the inevitable father figure and a mistake, not a terrible one, but a mistake nonetheless. When Nora announced that she was moving to be with Thad, Ruby begged her to live on campus and try therapy instead. She said it’d be a cheaper and easier way to deal with Nora’s male-abandonment issues. She’d offered to split the cost, up to a limit. Plus, how can you trust a man with such thin thighs? Nora had to explain again that Thad was a cyclist, but Ruby said, They’re thinner than yours, Nora.

  At brunch, Nora nodded to the waitress; maybe a drink would help.

  “Yay!” Her mother brightly smiled, wrinkled her nose as if she had won, as if she’d convinced a toddler to taste the mushrooms, just one bite.

  The waitress ran a finger under the stretchy band of her watch. “Can I see your ID?”

  “Oh, please.” Ruby rolled her eyes. “Lighten up.”

  “A virgin bloody mary,” Nora said.

  Ostensibly Ruby had driven down during her spring vacation to break in her new car, a used red Celica she’d christened Ann-Margret, and also to see where Nora and Thad lived, take them to dinner, though of course Thad wouldn’t hear of it; he wanted to impress. To be the good boyfriend he had to be extra kind to the mother, and with Ruby that meant a degree of flirting. When Nora brought Thad home to meet her mother for the first time, Ruby answered their knock in a bikini. “So”—she’d leaned against the door, inviting mutual appraisal—“you’re Beanie’s.” Thad’s smile switched from warm to confused and he cleared his throat, an audible question mark. Nora had to explain it was her nickname. She’d brought boys home before, but Thad was a man standing beside her, a tall man with his own business and a tan line around his wrist when he took his serious watch off at night. In the living room, in front of her mother, Thad seemed even taller, and Nora felt at risk, as if she’d been caught sneaking into a movie or using a fake ID and any moment her mom would prove her an impostor in this new life she was making for herself. But Thad-the-man loved Nora. He’d first told her on a Sunday when Nora closed the blinds in the condo so they could pretend it was too miserable to go outside. From Thad’s bed, hungry and lazy, they watched the Frugal Gourmet prepare his roast sticky chicken. While the chef patted a chicken dry, mixed soy sauce and honey and garlic, Thad declared his love for the skin behind Nora’s ears, her inner arms, inner thighs, all the protected places. He described her as winsome and tender and yielding, his words lingering in the air like the great frothy rain clouds that weren’t outside. And Nora said she loved Thad. She loved that she had to look up words like winsome, loved that he would make her roast sticky chicken, that he did his laundry on Tuesdays, that he sat at the kitchen table every evening to open his mail and paid his bills right away. At night when Thad held her, he breathed steadily against her neck.