How to Breathe Underwater

by Julie Orringer

  There was the white Cadillac at last, rolling long and smooth into the driveway. It had once belonged to Melissa’s mother, but now it had daisy decals on the hood and a Barbie dangling from a tiny noose on the rearview mirror. Lucy watched Melissa climb out, tall and lank in a short white skirt and sling-back shoes, her hair caught in a high ponytail. There was something about the sheen of her legs, the slowness of her walk, that made Lucy sick with envy.

  Lucy went downstairs and tiptoed to the door. Through the peephole she could see Melissa practicing nonchalance, swinging her keys on one finger and moving her hips from side to side as if to music. She tilted her head back, blew a pink gum bubble, and sucked it in as it burst. Lucy opened the door.

  Melissa leaned forward coolly and kissed Lucy first on one cheek and then the other, European style. She smelled of nail polish remover and black-cherry lip gloss and beauty salon shampoo. At her feet was a large black shoulder bag stuffed with clothes.

  “Where are your parents?” she said.

  “Gone,” Lucy said. “Neighborhood Watch meeting.”

  “Good.” Melissa brushed past Lucy and led her upstairs as if this were her house, as if she owned Lucy’s room and everything in it. She threw her bag on the bed and opened the doors to Lucy’s closet, flicking her way through Lucy’s shirts and pants and skirts. Every now and then she would extract a garment and regard it with distaste, then replace it on the bar and shove it aside. “You have no clothes,” she concluded.

  “Don’t remind me,” Lucy said.

  Melissa sat down on the bed, just inches from the place where Lucy had slept with Jack Jacob, and then she opened her overnight bag and pulled out something that looked like a clot of black yarn. When she unrolled it, Lucy saw that it was a crocheted dress with short sleeves and no back.

  “I couldn’t wear it over here,” Melissa said. “Your parents would freak.” She peeled off her shirt and skirt and tossed them to Lucy. She was wearing white stockings that ended at the thigh with a band of elastic lace. These too she took off and tossed to Lucy. “You can wear my clothes if you want,” she said. “Don’t spill anything on them, though.” From her bag she pulled out another pair of stockings, black with lace at the top, and put them on. In stockings, panties, and brassiere she posed in front of Lucy’s full-length mirror, bending forward to look at her cleavage. She was the only girl Lucy knew who actually loved her body.

  Lucy pulled on the stockings and stretched them up to her thighs. They were a tight fit around the tops. She struggled into Melissa’s skirt and shirt. When she looked in the mirror, she thought she hardly looked like herself at all.

  “Much better,” Melissa told her. “Though you should have straightened your hair or pulled it back or something.” She herself was cool and lean in the black crocheted dress, the tops of her stockings and her pale thighs visible through the fabric. “We don’t have time now, though,” she said. “Do you have your stuff?”

  Lucy had packed an overnight bag. In it was a pair of satin pajamas she’d bought without telling her parents. She imagined entering Jack’s room in those pajamas, his eyes traveling over her, Melissa looking at her in envy. Was it possible that Melissa could envy her? Maybe when she told her what had happened.

  They’d become friends at last year’s Regional Convention, when Melissa had told her about the date with Adam Moskovitz. She and Melissa had found themselves sitting next to each other in the synagogue social hall during a long panel discussion about Tikkun Olam, which meant Healing the World. Adam, a senior and the vice president of Midwest Region, had been one of the panelists. Every time he made a point about how important it was to spend time helping out at your local soup kitchen or collecting clothes for Russian immigrants, Melissa would roll her eyes and make a little sarcastic huff. Finally she took Lucy by the sleeve and they went to the ladies’ lounge. This was a big Cincinnati-synagogue ladies’ lounge, with tailored chintz sofas in a pink-carpeted anteroom. It smelled of rose soap and ammonia, and the plumbing hummed in the walls. Melissa unfolded herself onto a sofa and closed her eyes. Then she told about the date with Adam, how he’d taken her out to a Japanese restaurant and then to his parents’ private box at the symphony, where he’d shoved a hand under her skirt and told her he wanted her right then. He’d pulled her up against the wall, in a tiny space between the box door and a velvet curtain, and he lifted her skirt and did it, not even using a condom. Melissa cried a little as she told the story, though the way she described the sex itself, with anatomical details and language that sounded like a porno magazine, made Lucy feel as if she were bragging—or lying.

  In comparison, Lucy’s night with Jack would sound plain and undramatic. She had wanted to do it, first of all. She’d known Jack since she was twelve and had always thought he was nice and not unattractive, though maybe slightly greasy, with his hair gelled back and his dance-club shirts in every color. He was even famous, in a small way: He’d been in a movie, Streets of Detroit. In his one scene, Jack, the troubled younger brother, had gotten shot by mistake. Still alive, he lay on the sidewalk looking tragic and vulnerable. The stricken older brother knelt beside him. Jack looked up at him, eyes clouding. It’s not your fault, Tommy, he said.

  The problem was, Melissa had always liked him too. It was obvious she couldn’t wait to see him tonight. Lucy had never seen her acting so nervous. As she drove along I-94 toward Detroit, she did not sing with the radio or talk to Lucy. She drove with one hand on the wheel and the other clenched around a small pearl-gray box in her lap. The way she kept opening it just a little and peeking inside seemed calculated to create mystery, so Lucy forced herself not to ask what was in it. Instead, she leaned over and turned up the radio. It was DJ Baby Love, at WLUX.

  “The stars are shining bright above Motown tonight,” said DJ Baby Love in his plush baritone, “and it’s Diana Ross with ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.’ ” Lucy sang along, making up lyrics when she didn’t know them.

  “You’re loud,” Melissa said. “And bad.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Lucy rolled her shoulders and sang with Diana.

  “You are so not black.”

  “But I’m beautiful,” Lucy said. She tried acting carefree and fifteen, entirely uninterested in Melissa and that pearl-gray box. She had other things to think about, things of greater importance. Somewhere beneath the stars of Motown, Jack was waiting.

  That night with Jack, she’d known exactly what was going to happen. They’d gone to see The Birds at the Michigan Theater, and they’d shared a bowl of mint chip at the Home Dairy. And then they’d gone back to her house and sat in the driveway in Jack’s Continental for what seemed like hours, taking burning swigs from Jack’s silver flask. She hated the taste of whatever it was, so most of the time she was just taking pretend swigs, tipping the flask up to her mouth and blocking the liquor with her tongue. She tried acting like she was getting a little drunk. Jack had a hand on her thigh, just in the same place, for a long time. It was early June and cool, the crickets making their shrill dry sound in the box elders beside the driveway. Upstairs the light in her parents’ bedroom was still on. Jack told her about California, about the women at the fitness club in Bel Air where he taught Pilates and weight training. A few of the women had offered him money for special favors, which he’d declined to perform. He talked about trying out for sitcoms. He talked about looking for an agent. He talked about living in a shitty bungalow three blocks from the beach, and about going to Compton on Saturday nights with a black friend from Detroit, and almost getting his ass shot off, and consequently having to buy a gun for self-protection. It was a double-action Kel-Tec .32. He had it with him, in fact, and he showed it to her. It was brushed steel, blunt-nosed, small enough almost to disappear in his closed hand. He pulled the slide back to show her a cartridge in the chamber. This gun had no external safety, he said, so she should never touch it unless they were in Detroit some night and she had to protect herself. She’d held guns before, had taken rifl
ery at summer camp, but it frightened her to see this small sleek pistol in his hand, right there in the driveway of her house. She didn’t want to touch it. He put it in the glove compartment, and she tried to forget it was there.

  She told him about how she was volunteering at a shelter for runaway teen girls and their babies, a place where her parents would never have let her work in a million years. She’d lied to them, saying she was working as a candy striper at the hospital, and her father would drive her downtown and she’d go into the hospital and wait until he drove away before walking to the shelter. She told him about finding packets of crack stashed in diapers, which hadn’t actually happened to her but to Lynette, one of the other volunteers. Jack removed his hand from her thigh.

  “You’re too serious,” he said. “You should try to act like a fifteen-year-old sometimes.”

  “How?”

  “You could kiss me,” he said. “You could climb right onto my lap.”

  She laughed. “Is that what fifteen-year-olds do?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And then what would happen?”

  “And then I’d take you inside and make love with you. Nice and sweet.”

  She said she’d think about it. She was trying to act casual, though really she’d been thinking about it for nearly a month, ever since she’d gotten the postcard saying he was coming back from California for a visit. She’d even taken condoms from the shelter. So she was ready to do it, and here he was. Her parents’ light was off now. They’d have to be quiet. She climbed into his lap and kissed him.

  Later they went inside and upstairs to her room, where she locked and double-locked the door and got undressed, folding her clothes neatly on a chair as if she were at the doctor’s office. She listened for movement from the direction of her parents’ room and heard nothing, so she crawled into her bed and waited. She expected it to be painful and brutal, like the unprofessional extraction of a tooth. But when Jack was in bed with her, breathing quiet into her hair, touching her everywhere, getting her to touch him, she forgot to worry about the pain.

  When it was over, she felt good. Not a virgin anymore, but better. He kissed her goodnight and went to sleep on the couch downstairs. The next morning he thanked her parents for their hospitality and took Lucy out for pancakes and eggs. As they were leaving the diner, they passed a plant nursery where tiny fir trees stood in a row along a wooden fence. Jack said he wanted to buy one for Lucy to commemorate their night together. She laughed, but he said he was serious, and so they bought the tree and planted it beside a rock garden in Lucy’s backyard. The whole time she moved as if through syrup, feeling warm in all her limbs. Now he was planning to leave for California sometime that week. She hadn’t thought it would make her sad, but it did.

  She’d been waiting to tell Melissa the whole story in person, but now she didn’t feel like talking about it at all. How could she describe it, anyway? She didn’t want to use the kind of details Melissa had used when she’d talked about Adam Moskovitz, and she didn’t want to make it sound romantic, either. But she wanted to talk about it. She wanted to say his name.

  “What do you think Jack’s doing right now?” she said, trying to sound bored.

  “I don’t know,” Melissa said, rubbing the pearl-gray box with her thumb. “Showering, maybe. I’m always asking myself that same question. I’m always like, ‘I wonder what he’s doing right now?’ I think about him all the time.”

  “You think about him all the time?”

  “There’s something I should tell you, actually,” Melissa said. “Something important.” With a serious look, eyes flinty and small, she put a hand on Lucy’s arm. “You have to swear you won’t tell anyone about this.”

  “What?” Lucy said. Her scalp prickled with sudden cold.

  “I mean swear. Not your parents, not my parents, not the police. Even if they torture you.”

  “Okay, I swear! Just tell me!”

  “Jack and I are getting married,” said Melissa. “We’re leaving tomorrow morning to drive out to California, and on the way we’re getting married in Vegas. And then we’re getting an apartment in LA and he’s going to introduce me to this magazine guy he knows. I’m going to get this job working at the magazine. I’ll be a model at first, but later on they’re going to teach me how to do design and layout.”

  Lucy stared. A semi blasted by, rocking the car.

  “We don’t care what people say about us being too young,” Melissa said. “We’re in love. Plus I have a fake birth certificate saying I’m eighteen.”

  “But you can’t marry him. You’re not even going out with him.”

  “We are,” Melissa said. “We hooked up a couple of times before he went out west, and he’s been writing to me. We didn’t want to broadcast our relationship to the whole world.”

  Lucy thought of how he’d gone into her, deliberate and quiet. He’d waited forever, just on the verge. Then she’d raised her hips and they were rocking together.

  “It won’t be easy at first,” Melissa said. “But I had to get away from home. I couldn’t stand it anymore, with my step-mom treating me like I’m in elementary school. And always making me baby-sit for her own kids, those brats. And acting like she owns my dad. And everyone pretending like my mom doesn’t exist anymore.” Melissa paused, giving Lucy the dare-you-to-pity-me look that came on whenever she mentioned her mother, who’d left the family three years earlier for a Minneapolis real-estate entrepreneur. “I can get my GED out there, and when I start learning graphic design I can make some money. This magazine guy Jack knows, he’s very artistic. He does films, too. The modeling’s just for a while, anyhow, before I get into the design side.”

  “What modeling?” Lucy said.

  “You know, artistic modeling.”

  “You mean nude.”

  “It’s not porn,” Melissa spat. “Most of it’s just partial nudity, and you don’t even have to touch anyone. You’d never understand, though. No offense, Lucy, but you’re so immature. I never should have told you.”

  Outside, trees flashed lean and dark against the distant glow of Detroit. The corn was shoulder-high in the fields, its tassels ghostly silver. “Ha-ha,” Lucy said. “Right? You’re completely shitting me.”

  “I am so not shitting you,” said Melissa. “I’m so serious I could fucking kill myself for telling you. You’ll run home and tell your mom and everything will be ruined.” She stared ahead at the highway.

  Lucy couldn’t believe it. She kept waiting for Melissa to give her a cross-eyed look and then start laughing. But Melissa was fierce and determined, her face flushed, her hands tight on the steering wheel. “I knew you’d be a baby about it,” she said. “But you’ve got to get your shit together because you’re going to help us. That’s why you’re on this trip.”

  “No, it’s not,” Lucy said.

  “You’re going to be our accomplice,” Melissa said. “We’re going to take his car, and you’re going to drive this one back to my mom’s and leave it in the driveway.”

  “Like fuck I am.”

  “You have to. It’s part of the plan.”

  “There’s no plan,” Lucy said. “You’re completely lying.”

  “I’m not lying,” said Melissa. “Look.” She opened the pearl-gray box. Lucy took it from her and switched on the dome light. Inside was a plain gold band with a Tiffany-style setting. The diamond was clear and fiery and small enough to be convincing. Lucy took it out and turned it over and over in her fingers, feeling the chill of the gold.

  “Okay,” Melissa said. “Give it back.”

  Lucy put the ring back into the box, handed it to Melissa, and turned off the dome light. She looked down at her own hands, which were bare. “If you’re really engaged,” she said, “why don’t you wear your ring?”

  “Are you joking? It’s not exactly stealth.”

  Melissa changed the radio station. On all the presets there were commercials. Lucy wondered what Melissa would do if she grabb
ed the ring box and threw it out the window.

  “He gave me something else, too,” Melissa said, “but I can’t tell you what it is.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because look at yourself. Everything I tell you, you’re like, Oh, my God!”

  “Fine,” Lucy said. “I don’t care.”

  Melissa pulled off the highway toward a gas station, where a red-and-blue sign advertised Icees. She drove up beside a vacant pump and turned to Lucy.

  “Do you have any money?” she asked.

  “For what?”

  “I’ll give you a hint: This is a gas station, where they sell gas.”

  “I’m not giving you money.”

  “I’m engaged,” Melissa said. “This can be your engagement present to me.” She grabbed Lucy’s purse and fished out a twenty, then went to pump the gas. Lucy watched her as she stood against the gas pump and fiddled with the elastic of her stocking. She did a little hip grind to the bass thrumming from a low-slung Crown Vic. The two boys inside, their hair shaved close and their teeth flashing with gold, watched her like zombies. When the tank was full, Melissa went into the convenience store.

  Lucy looked through her purse for quarters. She could call someone from the shelter to come get her—her friend Lynette, maybe. Or she could just grab her bag and hitch a ride home. She imagined herself standing beside the highway in her short white skirt. It seemed like an image from a slasher movie. When she looked through the window, trying to see Melissa inside the store, one of the boys in the Crown Vic waved.

  The pearl-gray box was still on the seat where Melissa had left it. Lucy picked it up and shook the ring out onto her palm. Something else was rattling around inside the box, something heavier than the ring. She pried out the velvet insert and a key fell into her lap. It was a Cadillac key but with a round head: a glove compartment key. Turning it over in her hand, she looked toward the convenience store with its racks of chips and magazines. Melissa was nowhere in sight. She fitted the key into the glove compartment lock. It turned, and the compartment fell open. There, on top of the maps and old Midas receipts, was Jack’s gun.