Everyone Knows How Much I Love You

by Kyle McCarthy

  Then the lifeguard blew her whistle: eeeet! eeeet! She dove: fingers together, toes together. I looked again into the rippled turquoise swirl, the flash of pink flailing down there, and then the guard emerged, elbows hooked through Lacie’s scrawny arms.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t dream of water often but when I do it haunts me. Subway tracks brimming with black liquid. Creek beds meandering silver and brown. Diving deep into a swimming pool—something cinematic about this one, slowed down and hushed, always girl bodies, white bubbles, blown out in a stream.

  * * *

  —

  To all the questions of What were you thinking? Leo and I hung our heads. When the manager at the pool, a middle-aged woman pleasantly weathered by sun and cigarettes, exclaimed, “She could have drowned!” Lacie, wrapped in a towel, piped up, “But I didn’t. I’m fine,” and faced with such nonchalance, the manager had no choice but to let us go.

  Leo spun off to find the other boys. In a careful silence Lacie and I walked to the picnic grove. I had three quarters in my hand; I was going to buy her whatever she wanted from the vending machine. I squeezed the coins so hard they became slick and warm.

  “You were going to save me,” she said finally.

  “I couldn’t reach.”

  “You tried to save me,” Lacie said again, this time with more conviction. I was embarrassed for her; it had been awful to see her hopeless in the water, but she didn’t seem ashamed, or even that shaken up. “You’re a hero,” she added, and though she was kidding, she was also serious. I said nothing. The ridged edges of the quarters burred my finger pads.

  Like most twenty-first-century American writers, I have a slightly tortured, carefully hidden, somewhat abashed but ultimately bedrock belief in destiny. Probably all writers, in all historical moments, do. To tell a story, you need to believe things happen for a reason.

  So when Lacie texted me to ask me out just as I was bustling around my cousin’s apartment getting ready to meet Tony for the lease-signing, it seemed like a sign, something destined, meant to be. She wanted to know: Was I by any chance free tonight? Like, in an hour? She had two comps to see a theatrical production of Mrs. Dalloway, and Ian had canceled. This she followed with another string of inscrutable emojis: eggplant, praying hands, lightning bolt.

  This wasn’t a real invite. I knew that. I was merely the person in her phone least likely to have Tuesday-night plans one hour before Tuesday night began. Still, it made my heart jig.

  A round of Google mapping revealed what I had suspected: minus the ability to teleport, there simply wasn’t enough time to drop off the check and still meet Lacie. Could I call Tony? No—we hadn’t exchanged numbers. Either I showed up with the certified check in forty minutes, or that sunny studio would go to the next Katrina Vosges who came along.

  I started to type back a polite refusal. Then backspaced. Tried again, this time capitalizing “love”—“I would LOVE to, but…” It sounded fake. Insincere. I tried a few different versions (thinking, all the while, of Lacie staring at her phone, watching those mysterious bubbles), before realizing that anything less than immediate, enthusiastic acceptance would read as snapping her olive branch over my knee.

  All the way down the block I pretended to myself I was headed toward Park Slope. Even texting Lacie to suggest a quick pre-show drink, I was congratulating myself on my maturity. Then, at the last stop in Manhattan, I got off.

  * * *

  —

  The cocktail lounge beside the theater was silky and hushed, with a red velvet curtain to shut away the vulgarity of the street. I spent a lot of time arranging myself on the stool, trying to find a hook under the bar, stuffing and restuffing my cardigan around my purse so it wouldn’t hang onto the floor.

  When she rushed in I thought: Lacie. In smart black booties and a wild floral wrap dress, she was her own weather system, kissing me on the cheek, slipping her purse easily onto a hook, cooing, “Thank you for coming! I know, it was so last-minute, I could kill Ian for canceling, I mean”—she lowered her voice while sliding onto a barstool—“I hear the show is terrible, but whatever. How are you, how’s the hunt?”

  My stomach clenched. Was I being an idiot right now? But sitting together with Lacie in public pleased me so much that I couldn’t believe it was a mistake. Quickly I told her about the places I had seen, the elevator that smelled of piss, the studios that smelled of mold, the crumbly brick and half-renovated disasters renting for north of $2,000. Carefully I omitted any mention of Tony.

  “It’s just—moving here is hard. Apartment hunting is insane, but you can’t talk about how insane it is without sounding like every other person who has ever moved to New York. But it turns out that knowing it was going to be impossible has not stopped me from being utterly amazed at how impossible it is.”

  She laughed. “No, totally. There are some things you just have to experience. Like, getting choked up at the ultrasound of your baby is totally clichéd, but everyone does it.”

  “Yeah. This is exactly like that, except bone-crushingly awful.”

  Our cocktails arrived, mine in a ladylike punch glass, fragile and ridiculous; hers in a highball glass, sturdy and serious. Instantly I regretted my choice.

  Lightly she touched my arm. “By the way. You were totally right. I moved the loom into the living room, and I’ve been working every night.” A glitter in her eyes as she spoke.

  “Oh, really? That’s great. That’s wonderful, Lace.” Carefully I hoisted my brimming punch glass. “To feeding the beast in the corner.”

  “To feeding the beast.”

  We clinked. When I met her eye, there was something live and febrile there. A dark warm river flowed between us.

  * * *

  —

  Still, sometimes I think that if we hadn’t seen a truncated, experimental Mrs. Dalloway that night, it might have gone differently. But when they got to the part about Sally Seton—dark, large-eyed, untidy Sally Seton, with the power to shock—sentimental feeling swelled in me.

  Her way with flowers! The actors twirled about the stage. They all wore funny hats with flowers and stiff brims. Cut their heads off, and made them swim on the top of water in bowls. Extraordinary! they exclaimed in their horrible British accents, swinging around the beams of a framed-out house. They really got going with the flower bit. Cut off their heads! Made them swim in water! Hollyhocks and dahlias, flowers never seen together! Extraordinary!

  It was honestly ridiculous, more like a spoof of experimental theater than experimental theater itself, and yet I found myself thinking how we, too, had once been mere children, loving one another in the deep, dumb way of the young. Memories began speaking brightly to me, a smear of warm light: our high, childish voices, our childish pleasure in having bodies, in using them. Riding bikes, walking on curbs, skipping rocks. Prank phone calls, epic sleepovers, endless summer days at the pool. It had all vanished. But I didn’t. I’m fine.

  Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw Lacie raise her hand. Delicately she dabbed her eye. My spine lit. Careful not to turn my head, I watched as she rubbed out the wetness on her cheek.

  * * *

  —

  When the lights rose we gathered our bags in that special bubble of silence that comes after shows. She didn’t turn to me and ask my thoughts, or make some wry dismissive comment. Carefully we edged our way up the aisle.

  Out in the lobby, Lacie hooked her purse carefully over her shoulder. “Well.” She looked bedraggled, as if she had just walked a mile in strong wind.

  “That was incredible.” I shook my head. “Just—incredible.”

  She nodded gravely. “There’s such a sense of—worlds dissolving. It’s just like—Peter and Clarissa, they love each other, you feel their love is more perfect than what’s between Clarissa and Richard, but it’s untested.”

 
Ushers were locking the doors to the house and beginning to sweep, but she made no motion to go. I looked at her. Did she mean that we were untested? But the problem was that we were tested. Tested, and broken.

  In my lungs there was still this kind of shattered feeling, as if a rib had gone somewhere it shouldn’t, as if the air wasn’t going in and out right. Before I could think too much about it, I found myself saying, “Actually, I was thinking about us, for a while, in there.”

  She smiled shyly. “Yeah, me too.”

  “Really?” I looked at her. Something real ticked between us.

  “Yeah. All that crazy stuff we used to do.” She laughed awkwardly. “I don’t know. I hope I haven’t been acting too weird or anything. It’s actually really nice to see you again. It was surprising. But it’s actually really nice.”

  * * *

  —

  Out on the street, in that soft gray, fuzzy New York night, we began walking north. At a crosswalk I stopped. “Lace?” The light changed, but she stayed still, watching me. “I’m sorry.” I pushed the hair from my face. “I’m sorry for what happened. I want you to know that.”

  She whitened. She didn’t accept the apology. But she didn’t reject it either. We crossed the street and passed a man sleeping on cardboard. At the subway entrance she said, “Well, thanks for coming out.”

  “Thanks for asking me.”

  She paused a moment more, so that the moment stretched like taffy, almost as if we were on a date, that awkward, sweet moment of wondering whether you will kiss or just walk away, and then she was saying, “This is strange, I can’t even believe I’m saying this, but would you ever want to move in?”

  “Really?” I stiffened, thinking of that bare room, the dark trim and simple wooden desk, the solemn oak spreading its branches.

  “I mean, I thought about it after you left that day. You’re right, I’m not really doing anything with that room. It’s sort of a waste.”

  “Oh my God, really? That’s so nice. That’s so nice of you.” A strange giddiness rimmed my shattered lungs.

  “Yeah, well.” Suddenly she looked uncertain. “It could be fun.”

  So I moved in. I didn’t have much: two suitcases, a duffel, and a cardboard box of old notebooks, all of which I schlepped over on a soggy overcast day in early September.

  That first night was strange. I remember thanking her profusely for taking me in, and apologizing for leaving my suitcase in the hall. We were tentative around each other, overly polite about who should use the bathroom before bed first, quick to wash even our water glasses after use. When I finally shut the door to my room, I was relieved. We were like a couple on our first weekend trip together, plunged into unnerving proximity. I wondered if this had been a mistake.

  The room, though, was perfect, dark and serious, ideal for finishing a book. When I had first seen it, there had been no bed, but apparently Lacie knew someone who knew someone, and by the first night, one had arrived: narrow and thin, with a saggy mattress, but all mine, and for free. When I thanked her, she waved me off.

  As it turned out, Lacie knew lots of people, and they were all shedding furniture or mounting plays or opening tiny group shows in sub-galleries by the Gowanus Canal. She introduced me around, and soon things I needed—not just the bed, but a dresser, and a desk lamp, and a membership card to MoMA—came my way. Supervising this flow of things delighted Lacie: it was like a game to her. Standing in the doorway to my room, she’d say, “God, the overhead light in here is ghastly. Let me ask Sophie if they’re still trying to get rid of that lamp,” and before I could protest, her phone would be out.

  When I timidly suggested that I take the middle shelf for groceries, she gave me her famous head tilt. “For what?”

  “Well, just so our food doesn’t get mixed up.”

  In her eyes, distrust. Clearly this was not part of the plan. “I mean, we could also just, like, keep track?” My voice climbed an octave, hesitant, and yet I was also flaring with injustice: this—sharing a refrigerator—was what made her decide I was not the person she thought I was? She had no idea. Sure, we had known each other as kids, but the quotidian details of my adult self—such as whether I preferred to share food with a housemate—were as yet mysteries to her. I couldn’t already be disappointing her.

  We were standing in the kitchen when this came up, and after my suggestion she slowly turned, as if seeing for the first time the ancient gas stove, the fridge plastered with snapshots, the glass canisters of rice and lentils and beans. Slowly she said, “I thought we could kind of—share food. I mean, I’m always buying too much anyway. And I don’t want to feel like the apartment is divided in half.” Her voice rose, even as she smiled self-consciously at her own sincerity. “I want it to feel like a home.”

  Home. I wanted so badly to believe in the myth of us, in the myth of all female friendships, the deep ones, the lasting ones: that they were more true than romance, more fun than children. That they were a place to live: home.

  “Yeah, me too,” I said. “A home. Let’s do that.”

  * * *

  —

  Turned out, Lacie was that rarity, a single woman who had figured out food. She rarely threw out groceries, and yet there was always plenty to eat. When she came home from the farmers’ market on Sunday mornings, she set about chopping, roasting, broiling, and steaming. Then she stored the cooked vegetables in Tupperware, ready to be tossed into stir-frys or stews. As the days cooled, she became serious about soup: parsnip soup, lentil soup, minestrone. Bread too—dough was often rising above the stove, ready for her to punch it down a few times and then bake at night. Meanwhile, carrots and cucumbers pickled in vast glass jars, labneh strained through cheesecloth, and chickpeas soaked beneath a tea towel.

  Years of solo living had had the opposite effect on me: I was used to subsisting on cheese and crackers, on cutting open an avocado and spooning out the meat while standing over the sink, on cereal at ten P.M. and cans of soup and frozen burritos. Hunger to me had always been a problem to solve with minimal fuss.

  Still, I tried. Using a recipe from one of her cookbooks, I made lamb meatballs, but they came out both charred and raw. I attempted a salad with a dozen ingredients, but after laboring for two hours, hacking at impossible gourds and slicing the tips off green beans, I devoured the whole thing and still felt famished. Every recipe I tried was incredibly complicated, full of strange, expensive spices and herbs, of which annoyingly awkward amounts always remained.

  Soon I gave up. I still bought groceries, and urged Lacie to eat them, but I couldn’t nourish her the way she nourished me. Every time I ate I felt both guilty and ravenous. Everything she made was so good.

  Without making a big fuss about it, she often happened to be cooking when I got home, and always spooned me an extra bowl. While we ate she listened to me complain about work: the assignment to probe the “semiotic significance” of Huck Finn; the apartment with a yellow neon sign that read MY ASS IS HAUNTED; the sex therapist who dyed his eyebrows black but left his comb-over snowy white.

  I confessed, too, that sometimes when a kid gave the wrong answer, and I didn’t really know how to do the question, I lied and said it was right. “I just, like, have this moment of impatience and exhaustion. I’m just like, Yeah, that’s fine. That’s great.”

  “No, you don’t!” She laughed wildly.

  Then she would complain about her job, explaining the politics of the morning newsletter, the drama of lunch breaks, and what the new ownership meant for the editorial page. In those days we complained competitively, like athletes, spurring ourselves to greater and greater specificity.

  On the best nights she would sit at the loom, clacking the harnesses, and I would sprawl out reading on the daybed, Cat nestled beside me. We could stay like that for hours, lost in our own projects, and yet sometimes I would say a name—Grogan, I’d call out, or
that younger Sibley kid, the one with the freckles—and she’d say, he’s a real-estate agent, he married Morgan, actually, yeah, they’re still together, they live in Swarthmore. Oh, that makes sense, he was always kind of a homebody, I’d say, or, She likes to take care of people, and Lacie’d nod and agree.

  “How’s Ian?” I asked one night, and she nodded eagerly, as if she’d been waiting for me to ask.

  “He’s great, he’s good. He’s working on his show a ton.”

  “Yeah? Have you guys been…hanging out?”

  “Yeah, sure. It’s good.” She looked pensive, and I thought she might divulge something, but she only asked, “Have you guys been talking? He likes you so much, by the way. He thinks you’re great.”

  “Oh, that’s nice.” Through a supreme act of willpower I avoided asking what exactly he had said. “Yeah, we were close at the Barn. We’ve been texting a little, but we haven’t really hung out. He seems busy.”

  “He is,” she assured me.

  In truth I was hurt that Ian wasn’t making time for me. When I had thought about moving to New York, I had counted him among the handful of people who would stop me from imploding of loneliness. But he had farmed the whole job out to his girlfriend. It surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. He could be careless with people.

  I didn’t have a current boyfriend to dissect, so instead I told her about my past, the mild schoolteacher, the Dutch Deleuzean, the contracts lawyer who loved to talk metaphysical defiance and jack off into my tits. I told her, too, about the guy who had been freaked out by my pubes. “He was like, Oh my God, you’ve got hair. As if I were a freak,” and though I was trying to joke, raw hurt snuck into my voice.

  “What an asshole.”

  “I know.” I bugged up my face. “I can’t believe I was with him.” What I really meant was Don’t judge me for being with him. I wasn’t like Lacie, fat with male attention, assured of it, careless with it. I had been grateful this asshole wanted to go to bed with me. But I never could have said that aloud. It would be too pathetic, too nakedly begging for reassurances.