by Heather Abel
Rebecca, he thought, this is the mitzvah of not taking skits too seriously.
Rebecca, he thought, of course I remember the pier.
Caitlin rose, laces tied. “Do I what?” She sounded frightened. A rash had spread on her pink face. She was only eleven, a little young to be a shtetl bride.
“David, your line.”
“Do you . . . ?” He raised the broom high, until its straw mouth kissed the willow roof, and he thought about adding a mitzvah of the willows to his list.
This mitzvah originated on a day that remained, in his calculation, as the greatest day of his life. It was the second summer of Llamalo, when Caleb had started to expand into the high desert across the irrigation ditch from the house; before that, they all slept in the alfalfa field. Caleb decided that campers needed some shade near the Gathering and asked only Suze and David to help quarry the sandstone for the floor of the patio. They spent hours slamming rock into the truck bed, but once they were done, the truck couldn’t move. There’d been this hysterical camaraderie, David just swept up in Caleb and Suze’s love for each other. She would tease them both, kiss Caleb, mess up David’s hair. The sun had set by the time they’d unloaded half the rocks just to get out of Escalante Canyon. Drove back in the dark, all three of them in the front seat of Caleb’s truck. The next day, they brought the rocks up to the Gathering in wheelbarrows and laid the floor as if they were solving an extremely heavy jigsaw puzzle. They dug postholes, secured the posts, placed supporting beams, and cut willows at the Upper Escadom Reservoir to rest across as a roof. At the start of every summer, Caleb and Suze and David—and then just Caleb and David—returned to the reservoir, slicing out a new covering with army knives.
“David.” Shauna fanned herself with the clipboard. Most kids couldn’t handle the summer’s deep heat like David could. “You can’t space out like that.”
David came to and handed the broom to his wife. “So, do you love me? Or have we just succumbed to the diminishing lust that plagues every marriage? Staying together out of habit, for the children, for society’s sake. Society!” He raised a fist.
Matthew snorted. Nicole sighed, “The actual line.”
A midsized girl ran breathless onto the patio, explaining that they needed more Dektol for the photography shack. Nat, who was supervising photography, didn’t know where it was, and someone said David would know, and someone else said David was here, and so, did he?
David nodded, pleased. He knew everything about this place.
“Can you tell us?”
“I’ll go get it.” The bottle of Dektol was kept in Caleb’s office, and David had few opportunities to visit that off-limits sanctum.
Shauna blew her bangs. “Now? Curtain rises Friday night.”
“What curtain?” he said, heading off into the sagebrush. A few minutes later, he saw, in the distance, a shape that might be Rebecca. But all shapes looked like Rebecca now.
He remembered how after he ran into Rebecca at the Santa Monica Pier, it was awkward as shit between them. David would be guilted into going to the Silvers’ with his mom for a potluck. Rebecca would talk to the adults loudly, flaunting her familiarity with the political terms of the conversation, in a sort of analog to the perfect spelling tests she used to leave out, and he’d try to disappear into the couch, attuning his vibrations to that split-pea smell.
The Rebecca shape resolved itself into Rebecca, her hair bouncing along.
It was strange to talk outside the barn, their faces in full color. In a manner that he hoped conveyed thoughtfulness, he put a hand on his chin to cover a small constellation of zits. “So, hey there.”
“Oh, hi.”
“Last night! Was it everything you hoped for?”
“Fun, actually. Really, really, really fun.”
Two “reallys” would’ve been plenty. Even one got the point across. “Yeah, well, it’s good I didn’t come. Caleb really needed the help around here.”
Really, really, really needed.
“So, I’m kind of in a hurry,” she said. As if he didn’t know the taste of her spit. She gestured to the woodworking shack, half of which she’d converted into her newspaper office by thumbtacking various quotes to the walls: never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, etc. Rebecca had started a camp paper here a few weeks earlier; of course she had.
“Bye then.” He didn’t move. Her spit tasted like Rebecca.
“Actually, I was just thinking about the, um”—she flung back a hank of her hair—“the barn.” Just like that, the Rebecca of the barn, a bold and coy Rebecca, was out here in daylight.
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it. Cow-y in there.”
“Bovine.”
“It’s always there. It’s there right now. The barn is always in existence.”
“Might be nice there in the morning.”
“The morning, huh? Cooler then.”
“I might be there in an hour or so. Before lunch. Just to look for some . . .”
“Tools” was the obvious word choice, but it appeared she couldn’t make that pun. Or “wood.” Plenty of wood in the barn.
“Rakes?” he suggested helpfully. “Spades? No newspaper office is complete without a full array of garden implements. Well, so, cool. Perhaps I’ll see you there. Before lunch.”
David continued on, smiling like a stoner at the dried grasses and the insects that loved them. Burrs huddled against his white socks. It was the Wednesday of the last week of camp, a week that usually trapped him in anxiety’s mirrored hall. He would tell himself not to think about the ending of camp and rather to appreciate each moment as if it were occurring in a limitless expanse of days at Llamalo. But ignoring the ending was as impossible as ignoring an oncoming train when tied to the tracks, which meant he was always failing at appreciating the moments, and it seemed this failure was actually bringing about the camp’s end and not the inevitable march of time itself.
David felt none of that today. He’d be back in a month. He knew where the Dektol was kept; everyone knew he knew. Rebecca would be waiting for him in the barn. The phrase “blow job” streaked across his phlegmatic mind.
Heading over the footbridge, he saw Caleb crouching to tinker with the pipe that led out of the shower house, and David realized he’d forgotten to include the mitzvah of taking a shower as a subset of the mitzvah of water, which he’d already divided into the mitzvah of potable water and the mitzvah of dishwater. Mitzvot, he was noticing as he tried to record them, branched out like dendrites. Every action, it seemed, could be broken up into even smaller actions, until what? The mitzvah of breathing? Of being fucking alive right now? Of being this happy?
In the office, he found the Dektol in a bucket against the wall, but he lingered. Sweat snaked down his forehead. The room was stifling, but fascinating for being forbidden, with the homey allure of a theater’s backstage. He walked from window to door and back again, as if he weren’t going to sit down at the desk.
Once in the chair, his hands grazed everything. He held a forefinger to the computer screen to feel the static. He pulled a few sheets of curled and strangely warm paper from the mouth of the fax machine. He wrapped his hand around the phone’s receiver. “Hello. Llamalo,” he said, practicing. Noticing an invoice with Caleb’s handwriting on it, he pulled it closer. “Suze,” it said, underlined twice, and a phone number.
So they talked. Standing, as if something were required of him, David held the invoice, put it down.
Of course they talked. There were all sorts of rumors about her. That she was married. That she’d died or joined a cult. Everyone else agreed that she and Caleb hadn’t talked in years, but David never allowed himself to believe that. He knew they were meant to be together—king and queen, male and female, yin and yang—it was only a matter of time. Discovering that he’d been right seemed to demand action. Grabbing the fax as an excuse, he ran to the shower building.
“Caleb? Caleb?”
Caleb appeared in the doorway, his
face brightening when he saw David. “Every week it’s clogged with this foul mix of hair and soap. Why should hair smell so bad?” He jutted his chin toward the paper in David’s hand. “What’s up?”
David saw the flaw in his plan. The fax begged the question: What was he doing snooping? Still, he forged on. “Nothing. I was in the office and saw this. Thought you might need it.”
Caleb laughed. He removed one leather glove and then the other, pinning the pair between his arm and side. “Look at you. You ran here? You need to know that as a rule, faxes are unimportant,” he said with a teacherly tone that seemed to pleasingly reference their future together. “Usually invoices. Sometimes toner-depleting ads for new fax toner. Never an emergency.” He reached for the paper. “But thanks. I appreciate your thoughtfulness.”
David pivoted away and then back again to make it look like his true purpose was actually an afterthought. “Hey, I was wondering. Are you in touch with Suze?”
Caleb studied him. He wasn’t smiling, but neither was he displeased. “I’ve spoken to her. Actually, quite recently. Why?”
“Does she ever think about coming back?”
“Suze?” Caleb asked as if there might be another “she.” His expression was hopeful. “She didn’t mention it. Although I suppose I didn’t ask her outright.”
“Would you ever?” David said, surprised at his brazenness, as if they were already equals.
Caleb smiled, clearly unbothered by David’s forthrightness, another one of the ways he alluded to their time together without ever actually speaking of it. “I guess . . . well, I guess I’ve always been hoping Suze would get here somehow without me begging her to come. Why? What made you think of this?”
“I always think about Suze. I mean, we all do. I just didn’t know whether she left on . . .” David struggled for the word. “Like, hypothetically, if she were to come, even just for a visit, would you like that?”
“Like it?” Caleb frowned. “I’d be thrilled.”
David nodded, returning Caleb’s frown.
Caleb added, “I wouldn’t get your hopes up, though.”
“Well, okay then,” David said. “I won’t.” And he took off down the alfalfa field.
Caleb removed the cover page and uncurled the fax below, finding it handwritten. Not an invoice or an ad. Caleb let his gloves drop to the floor.
You can’t deny this, asshole. Proof. You were in the Motherlode last night calling my dad a redneck. I heard from a reputible source who was there. He said how you’re buying the Motherlode and planning to kick out all the rednecks just like you kicked us out. Enviro Nazi. Well guess again. I’ll be there tomorrow. It’s time for me to tell all those kids that your a liar. The truth about how you stole this land.
Here the handwriting became very small and hard to decipher. “And all their parents in their California” (the next word might have been “mansions”) “are they going to want to hear that a liar is brainwashing their children?”
The entire last line was illegible, its bottom two-thirds cut off by the machine, leaving behind what looked like a child’s drawing of grass.
Like the two previous meetings of the camp’s newspaper staff, this one was a disappointment. With only a few days left of summer, the kids remained unserious, only wanting to work on word searches, astrology, weather forecasts—fluff and filler.
Rebecca slid her hand over a tabletop welted with wax from batik and candle-dipping and tried to direct them toward the well-traveled path of reportorial curiosity. “If you think about it,” she said, “the true purpose of a newspaper is to uncover and then speak truth to power.”
No luck. A girl shrieked, “Wait, wait! What if I do interviews with animals?”
The others found this to be the height of newsworthiness. The girl laid out her plan: “We’ll answer back in the animal’s voice. Like, what’s your favorite color, lizard?”
Rebecca’s own muckraking was more literal. After the meeting, she scoped the barn to ensure emptiness and stationed herself in the back stall, kicking shriveled cow pies away. The barn turned out to offer little relief from the clamoring heat, and Rebecca had the good idea of removing her shirt. And then, with an unfamiliar gust of self-confidence, she unhooked her bra, peeled it from its mold, so that it became a shapeless piece of nylon falling to the ground. She looked down. Her nipples were courageous; her breasts, lopsided as ever, only the left acquiring the good shape of bra ads, the right listing shyly to the side. But she felt fine about it—sexy, even, for the first time. Topless, in cutoffs, she was finally Californian, which was a relief after spending her whole life in that beachy state without measuring up to its insouciant promise. The sneakers and socks detracted a bit from the image, but below was cow shit.
For a few ebullient minutes, she enjoyed the heat on her skin as well as her newfound audacity, but then problems appeared. Sweat under her breasts made her itch. Should she sit or stand? There seemed to be something desperate about any pose, but she was determined not to get dressed.
When David arrived, he found her leaning against the wall, arms crossed over her chest.
He stopped short a few feet away. “Whoa.” A greedily astonished look on his face. Droplets of sweat on his forehead. She realized that she hadn’t wanted him to make a big deal. She wanted her nudity to seem in character.
“Whoa what?”
Thankfully, he recalculated, eyes rising to her face. “So, tell me. How’s Our Side Now? You read it yet?”
“The thing is, I’ve been kind of busy.”
He was coming toward her. His hands were on her hips. “Really? Busy how?” His hands rising up her sides, thumbs on her breasts, mouth almost on hers. “Because I was hoping you’d tell me what it said, you know.”
They kissed in the way he’d taught her the day before, until David pulled away, saying, “So, I was lying. Because I do remember that day. At the pier.”
“You do?”
“Wasn’t my doppelganger that time. Skee-Ball, right? You were standing in front of Skee-Ball with some girls.”
“Mihui and Emily.”
“I was flying. Stoned beyond all recognition.”
“Stoned? You were thirteen.” How much had he done that she never had?
“The age of manhood, according to the Jews. The age of mind-blowing, according to a tutor my parents hired. An intern at OSN, actually. John? Jim? Anyway, he brought me two pot brownies in a ziplock bag. Told me to wait until the weekend and then eat half of one and watch my mind expand. Being an idiot, and also thirteen, I ate both on the bus to the pier. My mind expanded so far I basically dissolved.”
“That’s why you wouldn’t talk? You were weird. You touched the paddle of my yogurt.”
“But let me tell you, it was the most beautiful paddle I’d ever seen.”
She concentrated on his hands on her skin, on her nipples pressing against the cotton of his shirt. “I thought you hated me. Always after that, I thought so.”
He shook his head. “How could I ever hate you, Rebecca? You’re Rebecca. My friend Rebecca. I love you, Rebecca.”
And now, as the past crashed up against the present, another good idea came to her: she wanted to feel his weight on her. But how to make that happen? She didn’t quite understand how two people simultaneously descended from standing to lying, but surely couples did it all the time. She decided to collapse her knees while clinging to him.
“Yikes,” he said, releasing her to catch himself and laughing in a way that made her regret her forcefulness. The straw bit her bare back.
They resumed kissing, but there were new discomforts. His teeth crashed against hers. His left elbow was pinning her right arm. His shins pressed against her sneakers, which seemed painful for him. But the weight of him was more than satisfying, precisely what she’d been waiting for.
Somehow his right hand appeared inside her shorts, but on top of her underwear. And in a gesture of solidarity, she did the same, pushing into his shorts, finding, in he
r hand at last, a dick, cock, penis, soft skin, pleasing. He rolled off her a bit, edged onto his side, and began rubbing, and she followed, a conversation of sorts, with their mouths fixed to each other’s.
He was rubbing too hard, and she decided unhappily that there was no way to tell him without mortification, but then he pulled his mouth from hers to say, “Actually, it’s too . . . um, can you do it gentler?”
“But you, too!” she said, expecting him to be humiliated as she was.
He simply laughed. “Like this?”
For a while, her brain continued its merry analytic work. Was this really, her brain wanted to know, so different than how it felt with her own hand? Sure, his fingers were colder and clearly external to her self, but was it really so phenomenal? Then her brain, skittering as if across ice, wanted to spend a moment remembering where she’d heard the word “epiphenomenon.” And then her eyes were closing, and she was falling more slowly than she’d ever fallen. In fact, she wasn’t even falling—Oh god, oh god, somebody said, maybe her—she wasn’t falling; she was being carried by the only person to ever really see her, the real Rebecca, by which she now meant the wild one, the naked one, the one who was made of straw and air and tits and cunt, and she called out.
Opening her eyes, she found David looking at her with a sleepy, childish gaze, naïvely unembarrassed. She realized she’d dropped out of the conversation, her hand unmoving around him. He began thrashing against it. He closed his eyes. Grimaced. She held on as he flopped against her.
When he opened his eyes, she said, “You were so quiet. Was I loud?”
“Very audible.”
“Fuck, let’s get out of here.” She stood, wiped her hand on the inside of her shorts, proud at her deftness with semen, dressed, and then bent down to his mouth to feel the lick of him again before leaving. The image that she had of herself was of a good fairy—beneficent, life-giving, flutteringly powerful. As she pulled away, she meant to say “Remember, the barn’s always in existence” flirtatiously, but the existence of the word “existence” seemed suddenly questionable. Was that indeed what David had said? Subsistence? Existent? “Remember the barn!” she finally said. Which was not hard to do, because they were still in it.