Well. We drove home in a tentative silence, as if cringing and waiting for another blow. In the front hall my mom hugged me extra-close and I said, “Ah! Ah! My neck!” and she said, “Oh, my sweet baby girl.”
* * *
—
Not until the next morning did she ask, “So, what were you and Leo doing driving around at one in the morning?”
I was lifting my cereal spoon high, so that I wouldn’t have to bend my neck; I must have looked like a toy soldier. Without turning my head I said, “I was giving him a ride home.”
“Where was Lacie?”
“She didn’t want to go to the party. She had a headache.”
My mom sat down at the table and looked at me a long time. Not like a police inquisitor, but rather in a camera’s searching pan. Wondering where her daughter had gone. I didn’t mind. I was wondering the same thing. According to our usual script I should be psychologizing why Lacie had skipped the cast party, and how that had made Leo feel, and why I had gone, and how I had missed that curve, and why we were so lucky. Between my mother and me there usually existed an abundance of words, but I had scared myself, stepping into this new skin. I was too frightened to speak from it.
* * *
—
At school, reaction was surprisingly mute. A minor car accident that didn’t involve drugs or alcohol or serious injury simply did not interest anyone, though Lacie, who had been mostly ignoring me, came up long enough to say, “I’m glad you’re okay.” As if by agreement, Leo and I ignored each other.
The pain in my neck was exquisite. Any tilt or lean set off shuddering spasms. If I made a sudden turn, I saw stars. I looked fine, though; the pain was private. I kept thinking darkly that the doctor had been wrong, that I had injured my cervical spine in some invisible, permanent way. No one could see the damage I had done. But I knew it was there.
So things might have stayed—simply put, no one seemed that interested in the circumstances of our accident—had The Swarthmorean not run a small item in its police blotter the following Friday:
EMTs responding to a 911 call found an immobilized vehicle on the side of Yale Avenue at approximately 1:12 A.M. early last Sunday morning. The driver did not appear to be intoxicated, and a passenger, treated for minor injuries at Crozer-Chester Medical Center, was soon released.
The following day, my mom came back from the Swarthmore Co-op with a funny expression on her face.
As she slung the milk onto the fridge’s top shelf and tumbled apples into the crisper, she kept darting glances over to the couch, where I sat ramrod-straight, gingerly turning the pages of A Delicate Balance. Finally, folding a canvas bag, she announced, “I saw Janet just now.”
“Yeah? What did she say?”
“Actually, she didn’t talk to me.”
“She didn’t see you?” Lacie’s mom and my mom were not exactly friends, but they were friendly.
Deliberately, my mom stacked the remaining canvas bags in a lumpy tower. She petted them as if they were alive. “Honey. I don’t know how to say this. But if there’s anything you want to tell me, I’m here to listen. It can feel so terrible to hold things inside.”
“Did she ignore you? Like, on purpose?”
She faced me. “I’m not saying that. I’m just saying, if there’s anything you need to tell me. Or maybe there’s something you need to tell Lacie? Is that it? It might make you feel better.”
From the couch I pushed off like a rocket and began to pace. While my mom had cooked for me these past seven days, I had just sat there. While my mom had put away the groceries, I had just sat there. I had let her take care of me, and now her insinuations felt like a second violence.
“It’s really beautiful, how you’ve been friends for so long….”
“Okay. I get it, Mom. Stop.”
She took a deep, shaky breath. “I’m just saying. This is a significant time in your life. So you might want to think about what kind of person you want to be.”
* * *
—
Knocking on that cornflower-blue door with its tatty wicker wreath of soft cotton flowers, I felt all the years of my knocking run through me. This is home, too, I thought, and not even the open dismay on Janet’s face erased the feeling.
“Luce!” she called, her eyes fixed on me.
When Lacie appeared, hair damp with grease, sweatpants food-stained, face smushed from sleeping, her arms were crossed. “What?” she said. “I’ve got nothing to say to you.”
We stared deep. It was weird to think of her becoming a stranger. Yet she already looked strange to me. New creases in her face. A new stain on her incisor. “Okay,” I whispered.
A silence like the silence of a wave before it breaks. If she had invited me in at that moment, I would have wept; I would have sat on her bed and told her everything, and I know, I know, she would have listened, and told me it was all right. I think—I like to think—we could have found each other in that moment.
But instead her gaze hardened. “I heard the party ended early.”
“Yeah, we ended up not even going—”
“But wasn’t the accident at one in the morning? That’s what the paper said.”
I didn’t move.
“Huh?” She wiped away a tear. “What were you guys doing all that time?”
She jerked back into the dark of the house and, real quick and neat, slammed the door. The brass knocker landed a beat behind the door with a dull thud. I stared at the cornflower wreath, gently rocking, then pulled loose a stalk of ersatz straw. All the way home, I mangled it in my pocket.
* * *
—
Our senior year, we didn’t talk. We didn’t sit together at lunch. We had one class together—Social Studies—and we sat on opposite sides of the room.
Every so often I would forget and smile at her in the halls, or wave or say What’s up, and the look that she gave me every time was one of utter confusion. As if she couldn’t figure out who I was; as if she was wondering if I had mistaken her for someone else. Behind her eyes, none of our history.
I could never forgive her for that.
Sometimes I think this was when the trouble started. Sure, I had idolized her before then, but most of us have a friend we admire when we are young: someone just a little bit cooler, a little bit stronger and more daring. Then we grow up, and see through them; they lose their magic when their faults become clear.
But I never got to diminish Lacie. She became instead a glimmer. A dream I could almost remember. I spent senior year looking for her. Listening for her: she was a refrain, the wisp of a pop song, a hook in my head. There she was, walking with Kathy, safety pins up the sleeve of her sweater. There she was, among Grogan and the two Steves. She was wearing more black. She had joined the literary magazine. A photo of hers was hanging in the art wing. Then, one day, with Leo: they had patched things up. All winter I watched them, stewing. Thinking: they have erased me. What we made together is gone, rubbed out like chalk.
I won the playwriting contest; I got into Harvard; my parents announced we were moving away. My father’s firm had given him an option of early semi-retirement, and they’d always wanted to live in the country. After June, I wouldn’t be coming back to Swarthmore anymore.
I suppose that is part of why we didn’t patch things up. But maybe some summer vacation wouldn’t have made a difference. Bad blood between girls tends to stay bad.
ISABEL WEST
College Application Essay
DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS AND ME
There is something called double consciousness, where you are aware of yourself as a normal person but also that people see you in a category like black. It’s like there’s two of you and it’s very painful. WEB Du Bois in his bestselling book The Souls of Black Folk was the first person to note this phenomenon and give it a name. Wh
en I read The Souls of Black Folk I really identified with it. This is because even though I am not African American I am a woman and also Jewish. People put me into categories too.
When my boyfriend asks me why I am being so emotional, is it because of my period, when the theater director at school asks for boys to carry the stage sets, when my parents won’t let me walk around in Central Park by myself, that’s sexism. These are people who see me as a woman. In addition there are things that are not a direct impact on my life but still send me a message about what our society thinks a woman is. Where I live, New York City, there are a lot of billboards with women on them but not that many women in positions of leadership, like the mayor, for instance. What kind of message does that send a young woman like me?
I come from a long line of strong independent women. My mom and dad met at Harvard Business School. My dad says my mom was even smarter than him and got higher grades. They got married and had my sister and me. My mom was not happy in her career so she chose to stay home and raise my sister and me. It was her choice. That’s what feminism is: a choice. She raised us to be strong independent women, and it worked. My sister is going to Columbia.
I want to always follow my path. Right now my path is to go to [insert name of school here], be a premed, and then go to medical school while pursuing my dream of being a model. When I’m a breast cancer surgeon I will also design a line of sportswear for active women who want to feel good and strong even if they have had cancer. There will be swimwear for women who still have their real breasts or reconstructive surgery after cancer and also swimwear for women who have had mastectomies, but choose not to have reconstructive surgery because that was their choice and I will respect it. I also want to get my PhD in history.
I’m going to be honest. When we were assigned The Souls of Black Folk in Social Studies class at first I didn’t want to read it because it seemed boring and like it was written a long time ago (1903). But after reading it I see that there are actually a lot of similarities. Not much has changed. We all want to be free to be seen just as a normal person which is actually a very rare thing when you think about it. To be seen.
Dear Isabel,
Thank you for sending a new draft of your college essay, which I found powerful and moving. I especially like what you wrote about different messages you’ve received about what it means to be female. Do you think you could be even more clear about how these messages affect your sense of self?
Your writing about your mother is beautiful. Have you ever talked to her about her choice?
I think this represents a big step forward for you with your college essay. You’re writing more personally about your individual life experience. Do you know what the word “intersectionality” means? If you want to keep Du Bois in your paper (which I think you should—it’s terrific!), you might want to look up this word. Maybe you can write a paragraph about it for me before our next meeting?
Keep up the good work,
Rose
Dear Rose,
Thank you for sending along your new draft, which was an absolute pleasure to read. You’ve finally found a way to drill down to who Lacie is as a character. I can see her so much more vividly—you’ve managed to capture so many of her quirks. And the scenes from her point of view give the novel real depth. They burn and sing. She has come brilliantly alive.
Another thing I love: in this draft, adolescence, and all the shifts it brings, is even more minutely rendered. The intensity of the friendship between the two girls is finally caught in all its nuance and complexity. Fantastic work.
I think we’re getting very, very close. As a final step, can you elucidate more clearly the narrator’s mental map? To sleep with your best friend’s boyfriend is such a radical act of betrayal. Help us understand her state of mind. I think that will help complicate this tale of feminine backstabbing, and give your draft the final polish it needs.
Really looking forward to discussing this with you!
All the very best,
Portia
I read the letter once. Twice. And then again and again, as if it might dissolve from my screen. I couldn’t believe it. Four years I had been trying this and that, inventing and reinventing, trying to get somewhere, and finally, finally, I had gotten it right. I had scored. She loved this draft. When we talked on the phone, I could hear the energy, the relief in her voice. We were back.
There was only one hitch: Complicate this tale of feminine backstabbing. I wasn’t sure I liked this note. Why did we all have to stand shoulder to shoulder, anyway, like some Dove commercial or Beyoncé video? Wasn’t this injunction to female solidarity just evidence of how generally weak and fucked women were? Only the powerless had to band together.
Besides, the truth was that I liked Ian. What else to say about it? He intoxicated me, just as Leo had, and it’s not that my actions had nothing to do with Lacie, but I was also in the thrall of lust. Why was that not reason enough? A guy who desires madly, who can’t help himself, who commits betrayals and risks everything, is legible to us—why was the same thing either incomprehensible or pathological when it showed up in a woman? Why couldn’t it just be about sex?
No, I thought. This was a note of Portia’s I would reject. No need to clarify my narrator’s “mental map.” It was already so gloriously clear.
Then, just like that, almost too fast, though I had been waiting and waiting for it, Ian wrote. Picking up my phone to see if Isabel had replied, I saw the text for which I’d yearned:
Dinner tomorrow night?
* * *
—
He chose Song, a Thai restaurant in Park Slope so unhip there was no chance Lacie would ever grace its doorway, a fact I pointed out to him not long after we had ordered our noodles and curry.
Ian looked at me carefully. “The way I feel,” he announced, “is that I like Lacie, and I like you. I like both of you.”
“Okay. Congratulations. But that’s not what I asked.”
Steaming plates of greasy noodles arrived. Ian stabbed a big flat fat one and said, “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” I was annoyed, and my annoyance felt good, because it meant we were in relation, two semantic steps from in a relationship. “I was just pointing out that you chose a place where Lacie would never go and her friends would never go.”
“That”—he stabbed another noodle—“sounds like a question to me.”
We ate in silence. I was still so awed by his beauty—I mean, it was absurd, him out to dinner with me—but something about it made me want to outfox him. “Do you get off on this?” I asked.
“Off on what?”
“Cute,” I told him, and that did it: a little smile curled around his lips. I felt as victorious as all the times I’d wrested laughs from him.
“So,” I tried again. “You and Lacie have an open relationship.”
He looked at me, bemused. “Is that what she said?”
“I’m surmising. I’m an optimist.”
“Here is the way I feel.” He seemed to be into announcements, as if he had processed everything, figured everything out. “It’s not like things are open or closed between us, it’s not like we’ve talked or not talked about it. It’s like—she doesn’t seem to operate by those kinds of categories. So I’m not going to either.”
I nodded rapidly. “That makes total sense.”
“I just feel like, if I brought it up, she might look at me like, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I laughed. “Yeah, totally.”
He put his hand on my arm. Oh, the heat. I like Lacie, and I like you. What bullshit. What a delicious steaming hunk of bullshit; how easy everything would be, though, if it were true. How simple. Maybe, for him, it was. Maybe, for me, it could be.
When the bill came, he said what he had said before: “Want to go home?”
* * *
&nbs
p; —
As we were walking down the slope, a light rain began to fall. It misted the cones of orange streetlight and collected along Ian’s hair in tiny sparkling droplets. In the windows of duplexes, there were rooms of yellow and blue light, a woman pacing with a phone at her ear, a man setting down a brown paper bag of groceries. Ian was talking, either about Nietzsche or about his childhood superheroes; I couldn’t tell which. I liked him draining himself of words, draining himself into me.
He lived at the bottom of the slope, right before it crested upward again. Gowanus: the point of the V, where brownstone Brooklyn sours into industrialization before becoming bourgeois again. Now that I wasn’t thick with whiskey I could really look at where he lived: the stoop’s painted red steps and black railing, the building’s long carpeted hall, which smelled faintly of vegetable soup, and the cool gray cleanness of his one-bedroom.
Quick as a lynx he slipped off his shoes and plugged in a strand of white Christmas lights. The tangerine kitchen fell into dappled relief. I stood by the door.
“There’s bourbon in the hutch.” He had his back to me, rinsing out glasses in the sink. “If you want some.”
Carefully I shrugged off my coat and hung it on a hook beside his Carhartt. I unlaced my shoes. Everything in the apartment was deliberate, and it made me deliberate, too, as if I were being filmed.
As I was unhooking the pantry’s latch he came up behind me and pressed against me, his arm around me, his hand cupping my breast. As his other hand slid down my jeans, he nuzzled my neck. I arched against him. “Come on, get the whiskey,” he muttered. “Get it,” and when I leaned forward, he plunged his fingers deep into me.
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You Page 16