by Mandy Berman
It was better, she was learning, to have no expectations whatsoever, to go on as if you were impervious to hurt or hopefulness. Her not being called after a one-night stand wasn’t specific to Gabriel.
The distinct pain of not being called: one would say that this so-called pain was not really pain at all; it was a sting, a bruise, a pique. To not be called was not heartbreak, let alone tragedy. She knew all this, and still she wanted desperately to share it with someone—to just once be able to cry to Liv or Marley or Lula about her profound and never-ending well of loneliness and disappointment without having to attribute the feelings to her sister. Grieving was not linear or predictable—everyone always said this to her, when she took so long to cry in the first place, to even talk about it. The subtext there, though, was Take your time, but you’ll be sad eventually, about the exact thing you’re supposed to be sad about.
And she had done all that. She still dreamed of Helen nearly every night. She still woke up sweating or crying or screaming or all three. And then, at other times, she was sad about things that had nothing to do with her sister. She was sad to be alone in her body every moment of every day. She was sad when, once again, she realized in the morning that she had been the drunkest of them all the night before; or when she woke up in a strange bed and learned once again that the crash was more painful than the rush was enjoyable; sad when she pretended to not wait for a call. But it was predictable and girlish to care; you were meant to enjoy your freedom, to be happy with casual sex. To crave attachment from a man was desperate and old-fashioned and uncool.
“What about your guy from last week?” Fiona asked. “What was his name?”
Marley furrowed her brow, thinking for a minute. “Oh,” she said. “Billy. He’s been texting me, but I’m not really into it. The sex was pretty bad.”
This, this was the pose you were supposed to take, the way you were supposed to feel. It never even dawned on Fiona to think about the quality of the sex. It was about the being wanted, and continually being wanted, which was proof that you were something, proof that you were not nothing, proof that you existed at all.
Lula slipped out of her bedroom and closed the door behind her, walking into the kitchen.
“Do you have company?” Fiona whispered.
Marley laughed. “Guess someone enjoyed having the house to herself tonight.” Lula often had a rotating cast of girls coming in and out of the house—often girls who had never slept with other girls before. Lula had that effect, of turning them, or at least getting them to stray from men for a little.
“You can invite her to join us, you know,” Fiona said quietly.
“I don’t think she wants to be seen,” Lula said under her breath. “What are we drinking?”
Fiona’s phone buzzed on the counter and she picked it up too fast, feeling caught after her conversation with Marley about Gabriel, after affecting a certain indifference to whether he contacted her.
It was only a message from Liam: “Mom says she hasn’t heard from you all month. CALL HER.”
Well, Fiona hadn’t heard from her mother, either. All the platitudes about death bringing a family closer together, Fiona had learned, couldn’t have been further from the truth. Because there was no way to fill the space Helen had taken up. In the weeks and months following her sister’s death, Fiona had become the revered child. As if, retroactively, everyone had assumed that she and Helen had been close. That her parents had it the hardest but she had it the second hardest: what’s worse for a girl than losing her sister? What no one understood was that their attention was unwanted: it made her feel more guilty than she’d ever thought possible. She was unworthy of it. Fiona had once hated Helen for taking attention away from her, the forgotten middle sibling, but after Helen’s death, Fiona got the attention back. Over time, she’d hoped, Helen would be catapulted into sainthood, forever the youngest, and while this had happened, Fiona, too, had been catapulted into martyrdom, though she’d done absolutely nothing to deserve it. While she had once thought she hated being the forgotten middle child, she would now have given anything to be forgotten again. Being pitied and revered for being “brave” or “courageous” only made her hate herself more for all the ways she could have been kinder and better to Helen when she’d been alive.
Her phone buzzed a second time, a reminder of Liam’s scolding.
Helen was born when Fiona was six; by that point, Fiona had thought she would be the youngest forever. She even remembered asking her mother, when she was around kindergarten age, if there would be any more babies. “No, sweetie,” Amy had answered, smiling, “you’re my baby,” only to start showing a hardened belly mere months later. The memories that Fiona had of ignoring her baby sister were spotty, surely, but Liam and her parents regaled her with them often. How she used to put on shows for them, singing and dancing in costume to her mom’s Elton John cassette tapes, hoping to regain their attention. It was supposed to be funny, how much Fiona was jealous of infant Helen, but the tales made her uneasy, because the sentiments still felt true when they told her these stories during her teenage years.
The clearest of her own memories began around the time Helen was three and Fiona was nine. Fiona was old enough to get herself ready for school, and in the mornings, her mother would go into Helen’s room first, clip barrettes into her blond curls, put her in a pink dress. On her way to brush her teeth, Fiona would often pass the open door, through which she saw Helen in her mother’s lap, her mother playing with Helen’s hair, talking to her in a hushed, singsong voice, sharing secrets only the two of them were in on. Helen made Amy happy in a way that Fiona had long ago stopped being able to. Everyone was so proud of that hair, wondered how Helen managed to be born with curls despite having straight-haired parents and siblings. They had yet to cut it, they were going to keep growing it for a long time—for forever, it felt, to nine-year-old Fiona. Fiona soon realized that as long as Helen had that long curly hair, Amy would come to Helen’s room first in the mornings to clip barrettes into it.
So, one night after everyone had gone to bed, Fiona took a pair of scissors from her mother’s sewing table, crept into Helen’s room, and snipped all of those perfect yellow coils from her head, guided only by the nightlight next to the bed. Helen was a sound sleeper; she tossed and turned a bit as Fiona snipped the strands, once or twice making a moaning sound, but never fully woke up.
The act of shearing brought Fiona deep satisfaction; wielding the scissors, she felt capable and powerful in a way she never had before. The ringlets fell onto the pillow, rearranging themselves around Helen’s tiny head like a crown. Fiona gathered them and threw them into the bathroom trash, did not even think at the time about hiding the evidence. The act itself was the only thing she’d planned for, having thought about it for several nights before actually doing it. She had not once thought about the consequences, aside from the one she’d been counting on—that her mother would come to her room in the morning first, instead of Helen’s.
Fiona was awoken to the sound of her mother’s screaming, followed by her reddened, tear-stained face above her own bed. She’d never seen Amy so angry. She had not considered this possibility. And there was little Helen, toddling in behind her, crying, too, but mostly out of confusion, her hair cut at all sorts of odd angles, some strands dangling a few inches from her head, others cut almost dangerously close to the scalp. Fiona had not been able to see well with only the nightlight in Helen’s room guiding her.
That was the start of their real rivalry, probably, and the start of Amy’s and every other Larkin’s deep mistrust of Fiona. And Fiona’s own mistrust of herself, too. What other evil was she capable of?
“Who was it?” Lula asked Fiona now. She was holding her phone, open to the message from Liam.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, and put the phone back, facedown, on the counter.
5.
In the
unforgiving light of the morning, I felt ugly. My breath was terrible; I knew there were violet circles under my eyes. I hadn’t wanted her to spend the night, but she offered to stay after I told her about my dad. I assented. What was that about? There’s safety in anonymity, I suppose.
THE PHONE BESIDE Liv buzzed. A text from Brandon appeared on the lock screen: “You coming to party tonight? Sleepover here?” Brandon lived in the drafty fraternity house, with its sticky surfaces and the endless sound of bedroom doors being slammed, either by careless, drunken brothers or by their girlfriends leaving to throw up the contents of last night’s keg. The first time Liv woke up in Brandon’s room on the third floor, with the slanted ceiling and chromatic posters from DMB and Phish concerts on the walls, she found the silence eerie. She’d only known the house during parties from her first three years at Buchanan: a busty girl from her eighteenth-century French literature class retching over a banister, a table of shouting boys in the basement lined up to chug and flip their Solo cups in record time, wooden floors so slick with dirt and beer you could skate on them. At dawn that first morning, needing to pee, her stomach churning from the previous night’s sugary punch, she went into Brandon’s bathroom, which he shared with the overweight boy they cruelly and sardonically called Stretch. No toilet paper, of course. She squatted over the seat and shook the excess urine from herself; she could hear Stretch’s heavy snores from the adjoining bedroom. The inside of the bowl was crusted with the remains of someone’s vomit.
When she left Brandon’s room to head back to her own house, seeing the frat house in that early-September light was stark, depressing. The floor was imprinted with marks from sneakers and high heels, littered with the red cups. Some had been half full; stale beer had spilled from them and seeped into the already stained hardwood. It was a graveyard of collegiate debauchery and regret, and now she did all she could to avoid sleeping there, at least on the nights there were parties.
She put the phone facedown on her bedside table now. Kept reading.
As I watched the girl sleep, I felt certain, not without some self-awareness and apprehension, that I was going to sink all my hopes into her, and that I would, in consequence, take her down with me.
Liv had purchased Dispatches from a Half-Breed at the college bookstore the day after she met Oliver Ash at the department party. She’d read Adolf years ago, and had enjoyed it, though dystopian fiction wasn’t really her style. She preferred classic narrative literature: a linear storyline with compelling plot points; clean, intelligent prose; relatable, fully fleshed-out characters. Often romance was involved. She liked Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, the Brontës. She had read Madame Bovary three times (and for the fourth, was currently reading it in French).
Although Professor Ash’s second novel skipped around chronologically and was narrated by a highly unlikable antihero, it was changing her perspective on what kind of literature she thought she liked. It was largely autobiographical, everyone knew, and dark and sexual and depressive. Maybe she should have known, after seeing him at the party, that no matter what the book was like, she was going to like it. Was going to be turned on by it. He was so broad and imposing despite his shyness, so witty yet careful in the way he spoke, it seemed impossible that any woman could look at him and not imagine his hands on her. She’d had to picture him to finish with Brandon that night, which made her feel deeply ashamed afterward.
And his writing was exactly how she’d hoped it would be: cynical, sparse, adult. Every sentence, even in the scenes that weren’t about sex, dripped with a quiet masculine sexuality, some latent need to lose himself that simmered beneath the surface of the controlled prose.
The phone beside Liv buzzed again. Brandon was calling now. She let it go to voicemail. The vibrating stopped, and then a minute later, began again. She sighed and picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hey, babe!” In the background she could hear males shouting, the bumping of a bass, tonight’s party already under way. “Whatcha doin’?”
“I’m reading,” she said.
“You gonna come out?”
“I told you. I have too much work to do this weekend.”
“You said you might have too much work. It’s only Thursday.”
“Well.” She flipped over the paperback on her lap to look at the photograph of Oliver Ash. It was an old headshot: his face lacked the pockmarks she’d noticed at the department party; the bags under his eyes were less pronounced, and his head of hair was darker and fuller than the short, graying cut he sported now. His mouth was closed tightly in seriousness, but his eyes flirted with the camera. One more button on his shirt was undone than she might have expected, a hint of chest hair peeking out. “I forgot about this paper due Monday.”
“No you didn’t. You never forget about papers.”
“Okay, I didn’t,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “I’m lying for no reason. Do you think I’d rather stay in than spend the night with you?”
“I don’t know what you’d rather do.”
She let the silence sit there for a minute, unable to come up with a good enough retort. At some point over the last year or so, as she could see the end of college and the start of adulthood nearing, she found herself panicking about being cut loose without a job, without a boyfriend—without any “prospects,” as her mother would say. She knew that she had a safety net in her parents, but that didn’t stop them from putting pressure on her to settle down anyway; her whole life had followed a tidy timeline, and now she was about to graduate from college during America’s worst economic period in nearly a century, as her father never failed to remind her. She had enjoyed her single days, freshman through junior years, when she had the luxury to sleep with whomever she wanted: sinewy soccer players and brooding poets and Parisian university students during her semester abroad and, once, a girl on the volleyball team. Those days were supposed to be behind her now. It wasn’t only her parents, either: in truth, she was also worried about how it would look if she didn’t start getting serious about all aspects of her life. What would she tell people following graduation if she had neither a job nor a boyfriend? What would her parents tell people? She would have never, ever said this out loud. It was incredibly old-fashioned and uncool. But there was something to be said for security. She had never lived a day of her life without it.
And yet: here was Brandon, her PBF (“perfect boyfriend,” a term her mother had lovingly coined), supportive and handsome; and here was Oliver Ash, married and by all accounts a terrible decision. She had never cheated on a boyfriend before, and she was surprised at herself when she first felt the desire to, when she first started to think about the practicalities of it: how she could make it happen, how she could get away with it. It was so wrong, and the guilt she felt ate at her, had kept her up at night over the past week. She tried to find the logic to it: Did she want Oliver Ash because he was a terrible decision? Because there was something exciting about infidelity? About sleeping with a professor? Didn’t every college girl want that? She supposed it didn’t matter, really, why she wanted him, only that she did. It could be one last fling, another part of her reasoned, one last chance to sow her wild oats. And then she would settle down with Brandon for real. Then she would be good.
“I just want to see you once in a while, okay?” Brandon said on the phone now.
This was enough to make her feel bad. She knew how much he cared for her. She knew she had the capacity to break his heart.
Then she thought of the frat house, of waking up in that sad morning light. She thought of how dutiful the sex had felt lately; she kept doing it, insisting she liked it, but was this all sex was, and all it ever would be until the end of time? Him working on her manually, almost clinically, until she had a modest orgasm—never as big as the ones she gave herself—and then missionary style, lying there and waiting for him to finish so she could go to sleep?
>
She thumbed the pages of the book in her lap. She didn’t feel bad enough to stay with him tonight.
“I do, too,” she said, not without regret in her voice. “But not tonight, babe. Let’s get lunch tomorrow?”
He said okay, because what else could he say? She put her phone facedown on the bedside table and opened the book in her lap.
Downstairs, Liv could hear her roommates pulling out chairs, laughing.
“Bye, Liv!” Lula called from the bottom of the stairs, and Liv yelled goodbye back. She wasn’t surprised that the other two didn’t say anything; they would be mad or at least disapproving that she wasn’t coming out. But Marley had been so embarrassing tonight. The undergrad thinking she was fighting patriarchy by standing up to a man she knew nothing about? What a cliché.
With Fiona, it was more complicated. They’d become close at the end of their freshman year, working together on a French project; Fiona was smarter than she realized, humble and self-deprecating about her own knowledge of the topic, but then went on to deliver a nuanced, seemingly off-the-cuff presentation on intersectional Muslim-feminist identities in contemporary Algeria, earning them an A from their Muslim-feminist professor. When they went out together for the first time—to a lacrosse party where they ended up rummaging through the kitchen cabinets instead of talking to anyone, then later drunkenly pealing with laughter over a greasy pepperoni pizza at the late-night campus café—she felt that she’d found one of those friends: the kind you were supposed to find in college, a relationship that felt effortless and intimate and that would last your entire adult life, the kind that she had been searching for in vain all year.