“No, I’m not. I mean, I was just thinking about Bee. I wish I could have met her.”
“Yeah, well.” She held my gaze. I knew we were both thinking that I would have met her all those years ago when I was in Cambridge, if not for what had happened. “She had a good life. That’s what everyone says.”
As Lacie returned to her weaving I let my gaze roam around the room, seeing anew the clamp and sewing machine, the glass jars of sequins and corked bottles of wine, the homemade sourdough and drizzly twin candle stubs. It wasn’t just her grandmother’s money in this apartment. It was her whole way of life.
Growing up, Lacie’s trips to Boston had been events, with hushed discussions of dresses and trips to the symphony and high tea. She always returned with gifts that made me sick with envy: a set of 256 colored pencils, a swirly Venetian drinking glass, a white silk blouse. Bee had practiced immigration law, slept with John Updike, and founded a black-box theater. Once retired, she held a weekly salon. There had been a husband, briefly, but she’d built her life around something other than marriage: she’d had theater and art and old china, friends and wine and conversation instead.
But I couldn’t touch these things; I couldn’t tell Lacie I had read the program from the memorial service so often I had it memorized, that I had googled Bee more than once, and read her obituaries. I couldn’t ask her if she’d given up on love the way her grandmother had, though in that moment I became convinced she had. Leo’s betrayal had broken something basic in her. For where was Ian? Why did he never come over? What kind of dating were they doing?
But it was much easier to talk about money, so I said, “Thanks for being chill about the rent. And sorry. It’s so hard to talk about money.”
“Yeah, totally.” She shook her head, relieved. “It’s so hard.”
But hard was not exactly the right word, or money was not exactly what we were talking about. We were discussing debt and forgiveness, what I owed Lacie and what would be repaid, but the currency wasn’t the dollar.
I hung around the couch, finishing my soup and watching her sort skeins of yarn. There was a sort of itchy neediness in me. “Lace?” I finally said. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.” There was exhaustion around her eyes. Talking about her grandmother had upset her.
But I pushed on. I suddenly had to know. “Why did you let me move in?”
She didn’t answer right away, and I braced myself for a dodge.
When she finally did speak, it was in a low tone. “I’m not exactly sure, to be honest. I mean”—this a little defensively—“I’d thought about renting out the room before.”
“But when I came over, it didn’t seem like you had been thinking about it.” Something lawyerly had come into my voice. “And you don’t need the money.”
“I wasn’t. I don’t,” she admitted.
“I feel like in the park you weren’t even that happy to see me.”
“What, in Bryant Park?” She looked up at me, a quick, searching glance. “Well, it was weird.”
“Yeah, it was weird. How could it not be? We’ve never really talked about what happened.”
Her whole face quivered, and then a mask dropped over it. “I don’t think it matters anymore.”
“But—how can it not matter? It happened.”
“Yeah,” she said softly. “It happened.”
Encouraged, I stepped into a fantasy I had had from time to time. “Do you ever think—I mean, if I hadn’t crashed, maybe—”
She stepped to me, and then she did the oddest thing. Tenderly, she cupped her hand over my mouth. “Hush, baby. Hush. It’s okay. I forgive you.”
I squirmed my face away. For the strangest moment I had thought she was about to kiss me. “You do?”
“You were a different person.” Gently she tugged the sleeve of my shirt. “We were teenagers. We were all teenagers. I don’t know if I even cared about Leo that much. It’s just dumb. Can’t we forget it?”
I nodded eagerly. “Yeah. Let’s just forget it.” I thought: I should tell her about the novel. I should just mention it. I should—
But she had her hand by my mouth again. “Shhh, sweetie. I see that little mind of yours whirling away. It’s fine. Just stop, okay? Just stop.”
Behind Swarthmore College there are woods, and through these woods runs a river, though we called it a creek. Fat and sluggish in places, deep and swift in others, it meanders for a mile before cascading over rocks and disappearing underground.
Spanning this river is a train trestle. Forty feet high, painted a pale, drippy green, the trestle is covered with cocks and hearts. Above the graffiti, out of the vandals’ reach, giant screws weep streaky rust. Beneath the train trestle, in the tall grass, there are big granite slabs ringing an ashy pit, and though by day this circle looks absurd, the monumental rocks haphazard in the suburban woods, at night it is grandly suggestive of an ancient rite. In high school, we went there all the time.
There were drugs at Crum Henge, usually a few joints, whiskey in water bottles, occasionally a forty-pack of Miller Lite carried on the shoulders of some Sibley boys, but the hippies and punks of my school were basically good kids, “independent thinkers” who understood the message of Dead Poets Society and really, honestly, were trying to carpe diem and question authority and live a little, you know? Feel something.
Or that’s what I was trying to do, down in the meadow with the SEPTA trains rattling overhead. But I had a problem. I knew high school was supposed to be the time of my life, but I couldn’t relax. People were always laughing at jokes I didn’t understand. I was scared to smoke pot, and when I did, I became so paranoid I could barely talk. Every flickering light must be the cops. Timidly I toked, convinced I was a criminal.
Lacie came to the fires, too, but she didn’t have my problem. Just three chords from some bearded senior, and she’d launch into the opening verse. When had she learned so many songs? I was getting all A’s in my classes, but Phish and the Dead were beyond me. Lacie was beyond me, moving toward something I couldn’t see.
* * *
—
That night the midges had come out, and we were all swatting. It was the first warm night of the year, the first real warm night, and the fire in the woods was bigger than usual, not just the punks and hippies in attendance, but the student council president and half the girls’ soccer team and, somehow, miraculously, Leo Kupersky.
The strumming guitars kept breaking off abruptly so that the boys could swipe their legs. Not even the campfire smoke was helping.
“Feckin’ bugs,” Lacie muttered, slapping her thigh, a bright, piercing sound.
“Goddamn.” Grogan whistled. “You’ve still got that Boston accent.”
Lacie never had that kind of Boston accent; she was a Jew from Cambridge, not an Irish from Southie, but we all loved Good Will Hunting, and so she obliged us; “feckin’ right,” she said, “pahk the cah in Hahvad Yad.” And then, to Leo: “Remember? You used to tease the shit out of me. You were so mean.”
“Yeah, that was dumb.”
“Hell yeah, it was dumb.”
And they both grinned like fools.
Later, I caught him looking at her legs in the firelight. Whack! She slapped another midge away. Whack! He must have been remembering how he used to smack her, back when we were young.
Collapsing into the black claw of her ergonomic chair, Isabel West, a tiny, perfect pinwheel of a girl, announced: “So this is basically the most important thing I will ever write in my whole entire life. This essay has to be really original, like nothing any college has ever seen before, and the writing has to be really good. The writing has to be”—she lowered her voice—“perfect.”
“Perfect is a great goal,” I said uneasily. “Why don’t you start by getting out the prompts?”
She slid a massive binder over
. “In there.”
I shivered. Isabel’s home was massive, essentially a small suburban house perched atop a boxy wedding cake of a building on Fifth. To reach her “office” we had gone up stairs, a whole flight, carpeted in plush pile so thick and creamy I had curled my toes. (Upon entering I had of course immediately offered to remove my shoes; indifferently Isabel had said, “If you want,” but by now I knew that the airing of my stinky, profane feet was a mandatory part of tutoring’s ritual humiliations.)
Manhattan no longer seemed like a monolithic block of rich people to me; I could slice and dice each avenue, opine about the East Seventies and the West Eighties, Tribeca and the Meatpacking District. I had been in condos and duplexes and town houses, narrow UWS apartments cut from brownstones and sunny corner units overlooking Gramercy Park, but this—with its handful of circling help, and private elevator, and burnished gold banister—was obviously the mother lode of wealth, just as Isabel was the climactic shudder of our culture’s fascination with youth and beauty.
When she told me she modeled, it felt less like new information and more like confirmation of something I’d subliminally known. Undeniably, you wanted to watch her. She had big doe eyes and pouty, puffed lips, the smooth dewy skin of youth. As she poked at her phone, there was something poignant in her profile. Even as I paged through Isabel’s binder, hunting for her essay, I couldn’t look away.
Between Excel spreadsheets of top-tier schools and professionally typeset résumés, I found a sheet labeled ESSAY PROMPTS: COMMON APPLICATION.
Isabel had circled #5: Describe a work of literature or art that has been particularly meaningful to you. If you wish, you may explain how this work has informed a particular life experience that you have had.
“That’s the most intellectual one,” Isabel explained, but I barely heard her; I was busy having the life experience of seeing, beneath this circled prompt, an “Academic Integrity Form”: Please affirm that you did not receive any outside assistance AT ALL in the writing of your college essay: no tutoring, no help from parents, no help from other students.
In green gel ink, Isabel’s splashy signature.
Isabel puffed out her cheeks. “Don’t look at that,” she instructed. “That’s not important.”
“You sure? It looks important.”
“It’s not. They make everyone sign those. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Got it.” I turned back the page. “So what do you want to write about?”
“Wait.” From her bag she pulled out a glossy Dover Thrift Edition of The Souls of Black Folk. “Do you know this guy?” She consulted the cover. “Du Bois?”
I nodded. She seemed dismayed by this news, as if she had hoped her studies were more esoteric. “Well, so, he wrote this book, which was, like, really important, and he invented this phrase in it, consciousness.”
“You want to write about The Souls of Black Folk.” Neutral was the word for how I hoped I sounded.
“Well, just that particular phrase.” She consulted her notes. “Yeah, double consciousness. I like that. It speaks to me. And schools like it when you’re diverse.”
“Yeah, definitely. So what does double consciousness mean to you?”
A little gray cat nosed aside the door. She was small and light and drawn to high places. All business, she leapt to a perch beside the printer and surveyed us.
Isabel recited, “It’s when you see yourself from the inside, like a normal person, but also from the outside.”
“Right, great.” I bobbed my head. “The only thing I would add is that I think Du Bois was specifically talking about being black. Like, the way that white people see you not as a person, but as a black person. Like, that’s all they see. That’s all we see, I mean. We—us white people.”
While I oh-so-cogently explained the African American life experience to Isabel, she tilted the gray matte screen of her MacBook, examining her plucked brows.
“Isabel? Did you get that? Does that make sense?”
“Can you say it again? I missed it.”
“Well, I—”
“I’m just really stressed out,” she interrupted. “I have a big gala coming up.”
“That sucks.”
Isabel explained, “Yeah, my whole family is going to this gala for this organization that my sister works for. She goes to Columbia. Oh my God, do you want to see these shoes?”
She scurried off to her room, her little feet pattering along the carpeted hall, and then came hurrying back, clutching a pair of red heels, dagger-sharp, all leather and gloss.
“Aren’t they amazing? I love them so much.” She cradled them to her breast. “They cost twelve hundred dollars,” she announced, and gently slid them onto the desk beside her copy of The Souls of Black Folk.
“So what does this group do?” I couldn’t stop looking at the heels. Red and gleaming, they were sex weaponized.
“Oh.” Isabel straightened importantly. “It’s a nonprofit dedicated to—wait. You know that show Law & Order—SVU?”
“I do.”
“Yeah, well, one of the actresses from there, wait, do you know her?”
She said the name of a woman I knew I should know. I shrugged. “Nope.”
Isabel looked at me darkly. “She’s, like, really famous.”
“Yeah. I don’t really know anybody.”
Isabel seemed aggrieved. “Yeah, well, my sister was obsessed with this show, so my dad got in touch with the actress, ’cause he, like, had a connection to her through his work, and she agreed to let Aria intern at her nonprofit.”
Heartwarming, really. “Right, so what does the nonprofit do?”
“Special Victims Unit. Like, sexual assault.”
“Yeah, right. That’s the show.” She looked at me blankly. “And in real life,” I prompted.
“Oh! And in real life she runs a nonprofit dedicated to ending sexual assault.”
“That’s such a great idea.”
Mistrust blinked across Isabel’s face, but her sense of irony was too incipient to catch the mockery, and besides, why would I be mocking her when she owns those heels? Those fuck-me heels she was going to wear to a benefit to end sexual assault?
* * *
—
Later, as I walked down Lexington in the shortened twilight of an October evening—having done little more with Isabel than wrestle an essay topic out of her—I watched the women with their leather jackets, their delicate boots and gold-chained purses, and thought more about Isabel’s shoes. Her fuck-me heels. God, but how I longed for the days when the terms of the war had been absolute and unforgiving, when feminism hadn’t reclaimed sex and all its accessories: high heels, short skirts, lace. Who cared about femme? It bored me. I couldn’t do it.
Pop culture too. Hadn’t anyone noticed that pop culture was bad? I was tired of people being proud of their guilty pleasures, tired of these guilty pleasures founding nonprofits and ending up in the news. Everyone should go back to being ashamed. Everyone should go back to sneaking their TV on the sly, so that people like me, basic genetic abnormalities unfit to live in the modern age, people like me, whose preferred form of leisure involved reading a paragraph and then staring into space, people like me, who liked the opera and liked even more zoning out at the opera, could again be part of public discourse. For it was too much, I thought as I walked, to know about Damien Hirst and Honey Boo Boo. We were supposed to be conversant in Honey Boo Boo! The internet! Now, there was a thing that really ticked me off, along with fashion and anti-aging cream and the mainstreaming of BDSM. Just the other day Lacie had told me about a friend whose date had ejaculated on her face. What was with people? I was really whipping myself into a frenzy. I hated the world. I missed the ’90s, when everyone was wearing flannel and giant blue jeans. Now, that was a good time.
The thing about the ’90s, which had see
med like a drag but in retrospect was quite nice, was depression. Everyone had depression, and the people who didn’t, did; they just hadn’t realized it yet. We were all very worked up about drugs, and whether depression was normal or something to be fixed, and there were a lot of very earnest surveys going around about whether you couldn’t get out of bed some mornings and how often you thought about death and whether you ate too much or not enough or not for the right reasons, or if you slept too much or not enough or not for the right reasons: any of these, we had been told, could be symptoms of depression. It was kind of great.
Not that I’m, like, into a crippling illness. But weren’t things better when we were a nation of melancholics? In our plaid, with our disheveled hair? Now all we’ve got is anxiety. We’re all sped up. Now it’s racing hearts, racing minds, ragged breath, nervous sweat. Nobody’s depressed anymore. Everybody’s anxious. I find it boring.
To be honest, I was never that great at depression, though I did try. By tenth grade, I had stopped showering regularly or wearing deodorant, the better to advertise my bohemian melancholy. I shopped exclusively at Goodwill, and swam in corduroy pants many sizes too large, belted with gray shoelaces. I wore training bras, little cotton things made for eleven-year-olds, and huge shapeless sweaters. I smelled of BO and mothballs.
There was a phrase, and I don’t know where it came from, that Lacie and I loved: I roll out of bed looking this hot. We’d sex-growl it, tossing our hair, joking but serious, aspiring to effortless beauty, a sort of sleepy hotness. To me, now, no better phrase epitomizes the ’90s, and what it meant back then to be a teenage girl.
But while I shuffled along in shit-colored clothing, my hair a ratty disaster, Lacie found little calico tunics and sweatshirts with wide necks that left her pale clavicles exposed. We were both grunge, but I looked like a golem and she looked like the Little Match Girl, all pale skin, dark locks, and mysterious eyes.
The day she dreadlocked my hair, we had waited in front of the high school after the final bell. “What are these plants anyway?” Lacie kicked the cement planter with her Docs. “I look at them every day.”
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You Page 8