Ordinary Girls

by Blair Thornburgh

  “Yeah, so, I can’t just be like, she was coming over to take a shower,” Tate said. “It would not look good.”

  “Well . . .” I pursed my lips. “Well, that sort of . . . thing is obviously not an issue here.”

  “Obviously?” Tate said, and put a hand to his heart. “Ouch. You’re saying I’m not hot?”

  He smiled a smile that hit me in the stomach. My sweater was too hot. I felt desperate to crack a window.

  “It has nothing to do with you,” I said. “I just . . . I don’t.”

  It practically goes without saying that no one would not find Tate Kurokawa attractive—physically, of course, and assuming they were of the sexual orientation to do so. And although I did not know much, if anything, about sex firsthand, I did know that attraction had to be mutually expressed in order for anything satisfactory to occur. And plenty of people would not find me, Plum Blatchley, attractive.

  Ouch, indeed.

  “Mhm,” Tate said. He threw his arm over the back of the barstool. He was always doing that, like some kind of nervous tic. But it didn’t make him seem nervous; it made him seem only ever more relaxed. “You never answered my text, by the way.”

  “What?”

  “I told you happy New Year. You didn’t want to say it back?”

  “I thought it was an accident,” I said. “I assumed you’d been drinking.”

  “Nah.” Tate stared at me. It was so quiet in here, without the TV on in the other room, without anyone home. “Peach, you don’t like me very much, do you?”

  “When did I say that?”

  “You didn’t. I can just, like, tell.” He leaned forward. “Is it ’cause my friends are dicks?”

  I said nothing.

  “Is it ’cause I’m a dick?”

  “It’s neither of those,” I said.

  “But you still think we’re dicks.”

  “No,” I said. “Well, maybe. They are.”

  “No shit,” Tate said. “I’d say they’re good guys if you get to know them, but . . .” He shrugged. “That might not be true. For any of us.”

  He looked at me, just sideways this time.

  “I don’t think it is,” I said. “We’re just different. You’re . . .”

  Tate held still.

  “You’re experienced,” I finished, and immediately regretted it. Only someone with a true dearth of experience would use something as obtuse as experienced to describe what I meant.

  Tate grinned, but not in a way that made my skin crawl. “What, like with girls?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about?”

  “Yeah,” he said slowly. “I’ll say. It’s all been an experience.”

  “So I don’t know if you respect them. Us. Girls. Women.” I sat up straighter. “That’s all. That’s why I don’t . . . I can’t . . .”

  Tate nodded. “Peach, you are too good for me.”

  He must have been inching over, maybe unintentionally. I hadn’t realized it; I had stopped thinking so much when we sat next to each other, it had become so natural. Tate was alarmingly close and yet I was not alarmed, not until I looked over and registered his closeness, how near he was and the warm foreign-familiar smell of his skin and the cotton and his shirt collar.

  I want to kiss Tate Kurokawa on the neck.

  The thought jarred me. I wanted to jump back from it, or bury it in a lead casket, or drop it into the widest ocean and let it sink forever. But no sooner had I thought that than I thought it again, and picked it back up in my mind like something precious and impossible not to touch.

  “That isn’t true,” I said softly. And in that moment I was ready, I would do it, if he only acted like I knew boys like him would act, I would do the foolish thing and let him have me.

  But he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. He stood up and gathered his books.

  “You deserve the kind of guy who respects you, Peach.” His hair fell in his face as he spoke. “Don’t settle for us assholes.”

  Alicia Feingold formerly Kurokawa née Tate was a quick emailer. I was in the backyard, splitting logs for the stove because no one had bothered and the kitchen counters were like blocks of ice that would freeze your skin dead and gray as soon as you touched them, when Ginny came bounding out of the house, revived.

  “Guess what?” she said.

  “What?”

  “I have it. An interview.” She beamed. “Did you know that Benji Feingold’s mom works at Penn? She reached out and said she heard I was applying. And if I wanted she could get me a supplemental interview with someone. And maybe that could boost my chances of getting some aid.”

  A log dropped off the stump with a thud.

  “Cripes,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  The interview was set for that Saturday afternoon, which meant that that Saturday morning had to be scrubbed free of obligations so that we could all submit to Ginny’s extensive toilette. Mom reminded Ginny that she had a whole stock of single-serving makeup packets to avail herself of. Almost-Doctor Andrews made spinach omelets. The dogs were secured in the TV room, lest they commit any last-minute mischief. I was called upon to braid her hair.

  “I look good, Plum,” Ginny said, tilting her head to and fro in the kitchen mirror. “Or I think I do.”

  “Hold still.” Her hair was clean and slippery and not easily subjugated, and the stool she was sitting on made her almost too tall for me to reach the crown of her head.

  “What do you think I should say? About my accomplishments, I mean. Do you think she’ll ask about accomplishments? Or will it be more specific to their rigorous course of study?”

  Concentrating as I was on the six crisscrossing segments of her hair, I did not have time to formulate a response before Ginny plunged on.

  “She’s going to ask why I want to go to Penn. I need to know why I’m going. I need a good answer. What should I say?”

  “If you answer honestly, you’re just going to end up saying, ‘My mother is determined that I get a real job and not become some kind of failed artist.’”

  “I can’t say that,” Ginny said, aghast. “It’d be like going to a job interview and saying you want the position so you can garner a paycheck.”

  “But that’s why people get jobs,” I said. “And go to college, I suppose, to get there in the first place.”

  “Capitalism,” Ginny said darkly. She closed her eyes and breathed in a robust breath. “It’s exhausting, this whole courtship process. You have to look respectable and give the proper answers and never actually act like yourself. And yet the whole purpose of the process is to show who you really are. But they don’t actually care who you really are. They just care that you’re a few points better than everyone else on some invisible scale.” She opened one eye. “How can I lie to them about becoming a scientist? Is just generic science good enough or do you think they’ll want to know about specific research interests? Maybe it’s better to be interested in a lot of things, right? Should I seem more focused? Do I look like I haven’t slept? Because I haven’t.” Ginny shook out her hand. “I’m trembling, Plummy. I have a distinctly waxen pallor in my cheek.”

  “It’s just the caffeine,” I said.

  “I’m sunken. I’m ashen. I have some unspecified wasting disease, like I’m in an opera.”

  “Which opera?”

  “I don’t know. Any of them.” Ginny sucked in her cheeks.

  “They’re always getting wasting diseases in operas,” said Almost-Doctor Andrews from the soap-filled sink. I rolled my eyes.

  “If I died of a wasting disease,” Ginny thought out loud, “I would never have to go to college.”

  “Do you want to have a wasting disease?”

  Ginny paused.

  “I don’t know,” she said at last.

  “Well, you’d be dead,” I said. “And you have to get regular TB shots to go back to TGS, so you’re likely not dying of one anyway.”

  Ginny smiled weakly.

  �
��I’m sorry, Plum. You’re being an agreeable lady’s abigail and I’m being imperious.” Ginny smoothed out the top of her skirt—which was my skirt, I realized, a knee-length blue pleat from a sixth-grade Sailor Moon costume I had never fully constructed. Of course it would still fit her.

  “Perhaps Madame would like a bracing glass of brandy?” I said drily, darting the final strands of hair into a tail. I rolled the elastic off my wrist. “Or a calming dose of laudanum?”

  “No!” Ginny cried. “Not laudanum!”

  “It’ll put you right.”

  “It’ll be the end of me! She’s trying to murder me, do you hear?”

  “I . . .” Almost-Doctor Andrews rinsed the final dish. “Isn’t laudanum some kind of poison?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Well, it’s actually a sedative—”

  “But we kept reading about it in this one book when we were kids, and I was terrified I was going to take some by mistake,” Ginny said. “I think I thought it was sold in drugstores or something, maybe in those gummy vitamins.”

  “So for a while you could scare her just by saying laudanum,” I said.

  “It’s my number one fear,” Ginny said.

  “Laudanum,” Almost-Doctor Andrews repeated.

  “Yes,” we both said.

  “And Salieri’s manservant,” I added. “Don’t forget him.”

  “Plum!” Ginny shrieked. “No!”

  “Salieri?” Almost-Doctor Andrews said. “Like the Italian composer?”

  “It’s Amadeus,” I said. “The movie. There’s just this one manservant that Salieri has, and he comes back and says—”

  “‘That lady is here again, sir,’” Ginny interjected.

  “Right,” I said. “And he’s just . . . I don’t know. The way he says it?” I looked at Ginny. “Why is this even so funny?”

  Ginny couldn’t stifle her giggles. “‘That lady’”—she snorted—“‘is here again, sir.’”

  Almost-Doctor Andrews smiled, the kind of smile you give to Gizmo when he’s trying to eat a glob of spreadable meat stuck on top of his own nose: kind, amused, faintly impressed at the intensity of the endeavor.

  “You girls are too much,” he said. “Makes me wish I hadn’t been an only child.”

  Dishes clean of omelet, he retreated back to the carriage house, and Ginny turned herself back to the mirror.

  “What else do you need?” I asked. “Lead powder for your face? Tighter corset strings? Or can I go now?”

  Ginny cinched her hands around her waist as if she were actually considering.

  “Do I look okay? And do I sound okay, or do I sound dumb? This is going to go fine, right?”

  My patience was wearing thin. The dogs needed to be walked, the fish given their flakes, Kit Marlowe cajoled into gumming down some wet food. “Why are you asking me all these questions?”

  Ginny frowned. “Because you’re my sister, duh.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything,” I said.

  “Plum, you’re certifiably brilliant.”

  “Ginny, stop,” I said.

  “It’s true!” She reached backward and up to squeeze me, awkwardly, on the shoulder. “I need every ounce of insight you can muster.”

  “I don’t know anything,” I said. “I have no insight.”

  “Oh, Plummy.” Ginny rose, eyes on her reflection, and smacked herself once in the cheeks. “You really ought to learn to read between the lines.”

  I spent the afternoon watching Home and Garden Television. Ginny came back around six o’clock, whirled through the door, stormed up the stairs, and slammed a door.

  Mom was at the kitchen table, hand-lettering invitations for the silent auction. Almost-Doctor Andrews was baking focaccia in our oven, since it had a wider door than the one in his kitchenette. He looked at her, and she looked at me.

  “Was that good?” she asked.

  The strains of the Duruflé Requiem seeped through the ceiling. Ginny must have had it on at several thousand decibels to penetrate this far through the house.

  “Honestly?” I said. “I don’t even know.”

  The night before the English midterm I sat on the kitchen bookshelf and stared into my books. I wouldn’t even have particularly thought of it as the night before the English midterm except that I was thinking about Tate. Not thinking about him qua thinking about him; thinking about him taking the midterm. If he failed, I had failed as a governess. But if he passed—and passed well—I would have no reason to return. I would have to pack my metaphorical bags and set sail for India with St. John. It was a frustrating line of work indeed, where your professional success was contingent on an idiot sixteen-year-old boy not spelling Gatsby incorrectly. And it was frustrating, I realized, when your entire entrée into said profession was based on handwritten notes that you hadn’t even made.

  The memory made me glum. I half-heartedly thought about themes, underlining a verb or two, and made it about seven pages before my thoughts drifted. I was, I realized, in a distractible state, spurred by my unwelcome and intrusive thought at Tate’s house. If things were not otherwise, one could say I was infatuated.

  Of course I had thought about potential romantic partners, in the abstract. The right boy for me—a theoretical boy—would be one who read books, and could talk knowledgeably about art, and perhaps left poetry in my backpack. I imagined him in sweater-vests. He would not be loud. He would not be experienced—well, more so than I was, but not by much; just enough to evince some virility. Tate was simply not the right kind of person to inspire those thoughts. We matched nowhere.

  The tip of my pencil made loops in the margins of the book, loops that somehow morphed into hearts halfway through. Then, because it just came out of me, I added a line from Edna St. Vincent Millay:

  My soul is all but out of me.

  I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but I loved the sound of it, relished writing the words on the page. When I was little, I had pictured souls as rectangular, pink, and wobbly, like a sparkling, ethereal Jell-O brick that plugged into your chest. When I had told Ginny this, probably after Sunday school, she’d laughed and told me that souls were wisps of smoke, and I had just assumed that, of course, Ginny must know the truth. She was older; she knew everything back then.

  I read the line again. Maybe Edna St. Vincent Millay did actually write about death.

  “Plum?”

  Mom had wandered in, a slim bundled package under her arms and circles under her eyes. Kit, sensing the presence of the only human he liked, mewed and wove between her ankles. I snapped my book shut.

  “There you are.” She rubbed her eyes. “I’m exhausted. I’ve been working my fingers to the bone for this silent auction.”

  “Yeah.” I didn’t bother to ask what aspect of party planning could cause that kind of injury.

  “Can I enlist your help with the rest of the stuff? Just some favors and name cards and . . . I forget what else. You know.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Ginny, too,” Mom said. “But . . . God. Is she all right?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I tried to ask about the interview, and she just said, ‘Ugh, Mother,’” Mom said. Kit had submitted to being stroked on the back. “And she keeps playing Libera Me over and over again.”

  “Sounds about right,” I said.

  “Did she say anything to you?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I’m sure it went fine. It’s Ginny.”

  Mom straightened and set down her package. “Want to be depressed?”

  I did not, but Mom tugged something out of the package anyway. “Look at this.” A big rectangle of a picture book, with five cartoony, flat-colored mice dancing on the front of it. They were wearing—I shudder to remember—sunglasses.

  “Oh,” I said. It actually hurt my heart to see them.

  “I know.” Mom stuffed it back in its envelope. “This is what they’ve done for the twenty-fifth anniversary. Twenty-fifth! Jesus Christ, I’m
old.”

  “You’re not old! You’re”—I had to think about it—“forty-seven.”

  “That’s old enough.” Mom shook her head. “Don’t waste your life, Plummy. Listen to your old mother.”

  “I’m trying,” I said.

  The kitchen got quiet, except for the rumbling purrs of Kit under the table. Mom sank into a chair and pulled him to her lap.

  “Or don’t. I don’t know. You don’t have to listen to me.” She sighed. “I just want what’s best for you two. I’m not trying to be a helicopter mom. I know I’m not perfect, but at least grant that I don’t do that.”

  “You don’t,” I said. “You could push worse.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing, you know. I’m just a lady who had babies and could never sell a painting.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “You two are the only successful things I’ve ever made,” she said, more softly. “I want you to do better than I did.”

  “You’re doing fine. We’re doing fine.”

  Mom looked back toward the staircase.

  “Well, be nice to Ginny,” she said. “One day I’ll be dead and you’ll be all each other has left.”

  “Mom!”

  “It’s true,” Mom said. “So don’t be so ready to get rid of her.”

  I exhaled hard through my nose. Kit decided he had had enough of being petted and yowled out of Mom’s hands.

  “Anyway.” Mom lifted her arms and let them slap against her sides. “She’s sleeping in your room. Just so you know.”

  The midterm passed without incident, so far as I could tell. Tate never spoke with me at school, and that day, and the week that followed, as with all days and weeks, he didn’t. I did not expect anything from him and would continue not to. Besides, there was an overwhelming amount of activity at home as the silent auction drew nearer. Mom was in and out constantly, panicking about petits fours, and our kitchen had become a repository of crates of expensive champagne, rented tablecloths, and stacks and stacks of invitations. On Saturday, Ginny and I found ourselves conscripted to tying maroon ribbons around tiny bags of chocolates intended as silent-auction party favors. I was pouring the chocolates into the bag, and Ginny was tying, and also sulking. We kept silent, mostly, except for the muffled sound of the jazz coming out of the radio from behind a heap of napkins.