by Mandy Berman
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. “You just look so funny.”
“What are you doing here?” He swayed a bit on his feet.
“Aren’t you happy to see me?”
“I told you I would call you when I was done.” His eyes were bloodshot.
“You’re high, aren’t you?”
“Why aren’t you with the girls?” The paint was starting to mingle with the sweat on his forehead, and it was running down his face, clownlike.
She shrugged, took another sip of the beer. “It got boring.”
He looked at the area around her, the beer, the pot.
“Did you go through my stuff?” he asked. “Did you smoke my weed?”
She giggled.
“I can’t handle this right now.” He ran a hand through his hair, also soaked in paint, and turned his back to her. “I have to shower.”
“Brandon!” she called at him as he began to walk away.
He turned around again in the doorway, hands slack at his sides.
“Do you wanna order wings?”
She swore she detected a small smile on his face, which quickly turned into a much more sinister expression.
“No. I do not want to order wings.”
“Geez Louise.”
“You know what I really want?”
“What?” She thought he might say pizza, or subs from Antonio’s.
“I want you to leave.”
“What?”
“You can’t walk into my house, come into my room, and go through my stuff when I’m not here.”
“You were here. You were just—”
“I said I would call you. I was going to call you when I was ready. I wasn’t ready.”
“I thought you would like being surprised,” she said quietly.
He let out a groan so loud it made Liv jump.
“You’ve been making this really hard for me.”
Her insides lurched.
“Making what hard?”
He gestured between them. “This. Us.”
“I don’t get what’s hard about it.”
Now she started crying, and his face softened into empathy, or pity. She couldn’t tell if there was a difference.
“Oh,” he said, in a sorry voice that matched his expression. “I’m gonna get in the shower, and then we’ll talk.”
She listened to the water running, still confused. A month ago, he would have liked this. He would have wanted her to surprise him. How had the tables turned so quickly? How had she gone from being the one who held all the power in this relationship to the one who was now at his mercy?
He came out in boxers, rubbing his hair with a towel, and sat down on the edge of the bed, next to her, and took her into a hug. His chest was warm and damp. Then he pulled his face away and looked at her.
“I do like being surprised,” he said now, seeming to choose his words carefully. “But you’ve been doing that a lot recently.”
“Doing what?”
“It feels like you are so scared to lose me that you will find me at all hours of the day without thinking about the fact that I might need to actually study, or hang out with my friends, or sleep, when I say I’m going to do those things. I’m really not trying to be harsh. I love you. But I am also worried about you. And about, you know, about the family stuff. I think they might be related.”
“Oh, great, here comes the psychobabble.”
“Do you really think this is psychobabble?”
“You’re not a doctor.”
“Do you want to talk about this like adults or not?”
She thought she was talking like an adult. She didn’t know how to talk about things the way he wanted to talk about them. It felt like he spoke a language she didn’t have access to.
“I think there are some things you still need to work out,” he said.
“Why is it all on me?”
“It’s not,” he said. “But it has to be a little on you. There is shit that…that you need to take care of. And I can’t do it for you.”
“Are you breaking up with me?”
“No. No.”
“Because it sounds like—”
“I’m not breaking up with you. But I think, I think we need to take it slower. We’re still so young, you know? Like, maybe…maybe it’s too soon to live together. In New York.”
She began sobbing now, and couldn’t stop. She was a puddle, mouth agape. Why didn’t she have any say in this relationship anymore? Who was the child, really? She couldn’t talk to him anymore. Everything she said got turned around in his mouth, made wrong. He made her words meaningless, or made them mean something other than she’d intended. How could she live with someone who didn’t hear her? Didn’t believe her? She’d wanted to surprise him; that was all.
She stood.
“Where are you going?” he said.
She walked out of his bedroom.
“Liv!” she heard him calling from behind her. She didn’t turn around, and he didn’t come after her. She walked down the wide stairway of the Zeta house sobbing uncontrollably while the brothers, covered in paint and barely fazed by her, were walking up them.
19.
IT WAS A little chilly for May, but at least it wasn’t raining. All week it had been drizzling, and the last thing they wanted was for their college graduation to be inside the gymnasium: all that fluorescent lighting, all their parents complaining about how untimely the rain was, as if having spent nearly $40,000 a year on their children’s tuition should have bought better weather, too. Liv, Lula, and Marley had gone to pick up their caps and gowns a few days earlier; it was clear they were trying not to talk about graduation inside the house, but after a certain point, it became impossible to avoid the fact that the three of them were leaving. Fiona was staying in the house that fall, with three junior girls—one she knew from French classes, and two of that girl’s friends, who were essentially strangers to Fiona. It didn’t matter; she only had to live with them for one semester, and then she’d never see them again.
Things started to slowly disappear from the house—a throw pillow here, a cutting board there—and the graduating girls began to deconstruct their bedrooms, wrapping picture frames in newsprint, stacking books in boxes that they’d picked up from the liquor store. Fiona kept offering to help, to no avail.
“I’m totally fine!” Liv would say.
“I’m almost done anyway,” said Lula.
“Wanna sit on my bed and keep me company?” asked Marley.
Fiona had wanted to skip graduation, but that felt too cruel. They had all left the house by nine the morning of, so Fiona got ready alone: putting on a pretty floral dress, a cardigan over it, and making loose waves in her hair with a curling iron. She wasn’t graduating but she might as well look nice, like she’d made an effort to be there. It would lessen the embarrassment if she was deliberate in her attendance, rather than attempting to hide it.
The white chairs on the quad, in front of the stage, were reserved for the graduates; behind them sat anxious parents, hard-of-hearing grandparents, unenthused siblings. Fiona had not bought a ticket for a seat, so she stood at the back of the crowd, where underclassmen gathered, the ones who had stayed on campus to watch their significant others or teammates walk across the stage, and some of the professors who lived locally. She smiled at a girl she knew from poetry class, who waited for her boyfriend with a digital camera ready in her hands.
When the band started to play, and the graduates began to walk down the stone pathway toward the quad, everyone stood and turned, oohing and aahing, as if they were watching five hundred brides proceed toward the altar. The graduates moved down the middle of the quad, bisecting the standing crowd and the rows of white chairs. Fiona would not walk when she received her diploma that fall. She had the optio
n to do so the following spring, as the ceremony was held only once a year, but she did not imagine she would come back for that. She knew at some point she’d have to tell her mother that she would not be attending her college graduation ceremony, and she wasn’t sure if this would break her mother’s heart, or if it would bring relief instead. One less thing to watch Fiona do that Helen never would.
Marley grinned and waved at Fiona as she passed, then again at her parents and several siblings closer to the front. They were yelling and screaming her name. Liv and Lula followed, proud and composed and far less excitable, their parents similarly beaming with pride, but not in the showy way Marley’s family was. Lula’s father wasn’t with her mother and sister; Fiona wondered if he was even there.
There were opening notes from the dean, words from the college president. Their keynote speaker, a CNN anchor, was pompous and unfunny, but received many polite laughs. The assistant dean began to read off the names, and each graduate paused for pictures—first shaking hands with the president, then posing at the end of the stage with diploma in hand. Fiona clapped extra loudly when Marley crossed the stage—announced as magna cum laude—and then Liv, cum laude. She wanted to scream out for them, but didn’t want to draw attention to herself.
“Why aren’t you up there?”
She looked to her right, and then up. Professor Ash was in a tie, crisp white shirt, khakis, no blazer. His grayish hair—grayer than when the year started, Fiona swore—was cleanly pushed behind his ears.
She tried to think of something witty to say, but came up short.
“I…uh…”
Fiona could see from the sudden change in Professor Ash’s face as she stumbled over words, from joviality to seriousness and empathy, that he thought the reason she wasn’t up there was a sad or embarrassing one. Then he shifted again into lightheartedness, kindness.
“Too good for it. I didn’t walk at my graduation, either.”
“Really?”
“I hated college.” He put a finger up to his mouth as if this were a secret, as if all professors had to be self-proclaimed lovers of institutional learning themselves.
“Where did you go?”
“Penn. I swear I was the only nonathlete or non–frat boy there. I called myself a ‘GDI,’ a—”
“A goddamn individual,” Fiona finished. “We still say that.”
Lula crossed the stage—gliding, tall, with impeccable posture, somehow managing to make even a cap and gown look glamorous. Fiona clapped.
“How come you stayed for graduation?” Fiona asked Professor Ash. “Shouldn’t you be back in Berlin?”
“Good memory.” He seemed surprised. “I guess I’ve grown nostalgic with age. For the past I didn’t have. I don’t know. Anyway, I fly home tomorrow.”
“That’s nice,” she said. “You must be looking forward to seeing your family.” She would have thought he’d fly home to them the minute his classes concluded.
He was quiet for a moment, as if considering this notion. “I am,” he eventually said, realizing the comment required a response. “You up to anything fun this summer?”
“Actually, yeah. Liv and I are going to Paris next week. Before our jobs start.” Only Liv had a job lined up. Fiona had no idea what she would do during the summer when she returned home.
“You’ll have a wonderful time,” he said. “Paris in May,” he said with a mock wistfulness, and trailed off.
“I’m looking forward to it,” she said. In reality, she wasn’t all that excited. The significance Liv had placed on Fiona’s making a return visit, as a sort of homage to Helen, felt forced and fatuous. And now that Liv and Brandon were broken up, the vacation was turning into a rebound trip for Liv. But it was a trip to Paris, which anyone was supposed to be excited about—and a trip her father’s money was paying for, at that—so she feigned enthusiasm, too guilty to present otherwise.
Professor Ash looked ahead to the stage. They were at the very end of the alphabet—the ceremony was almost over, after which Fiona would find her friends, socialize with their families, then go back to her empty house, change, and drive home to Westchester. She would stay there for the next week, packing for Paris and waiting for the trip to begin.
“Will you write while you’re there?” Professor Ash asked.
“In Paris?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“Your revisions were strong for your final portfolio. I was impressed by that.”
She had worked hard on them, trying to make up for the D from earlier in the semester. “Thanks,” she said. So she had, in the end, managed to impress him.
No more graduates were left to walk across the stage. The dean announced that they were now, officially, graduates of Buchanan College, and the caps went up in unison, came back down in a frenzy, none seeming to return to their original owners.
Professor Ash turned to face Fiona, and put a hand on her shoulder. “Enjoy Paris,” he said. “If you end up making it to Berlin, give me a ring.” She could feel his hand warm and heavy as he held it there, and he maintained his eye contact with her. She felt both excited and uncomfortable. He rubbed the area between her shoulder and neck with his fingertips for a few moments, as if trying to work out a knot in the muscle. Then he removed his hand, said goodbye, and turned. Fiona watched him as he walked across the grass, past the empty Adirondack chairs, down the stone pathway that traversed the campus, and turned a corner behind a brick building.
* * *
All of Fiona’s belongings surrounded her in suitcases and duffel bags. For the week she had at home in Larchmont before her trip, she emerged for jogs around the high school track and for dinners with Ed and her mom; otherwise, she stayed in her childhood bedroom, among the packed bags, clicking away at Facebook, texting with Marley and Lula about how much they missed each other already, talking to Liv on the phone about their trip. The house felt far too big, too empty, for Fiona to spend any time in its unoccupied rooms. Thanksgiving and Christmas had been okay, with Liam and Rebecca around. Now it was only her and her mom and Ed, who spent almost every night there.
Amy had not been thrilled to learn about Fiona’s trip to Paris. They’d had an argument about it over the phone a month earlier, after Fiona told her she had booked the flights.
“And what money will you be using?” Amy had asked, her voice fraught with what sounded like jealousy. Fiona knew she would have to tell Amy now about the money that her father was depositing into Fiona’s bank account each month.
“A thousand dollars?” Amy shrieked. “Who the fuck does he think he is?” Fiona rarely heard her mother swear. “That is so typical. Flexing his muscles the only way he knows how.”
“Well, what else was I supposed to use it on?” Fiona said.
“You shouldn’t have taken it in the first place,” Amy said. “He pays your tuition and your rent. You have a part-time job at school. What more could you possibly need? You’re a college student, for Christ’s sake.”
“Don’t be mad at me for what he did,” Fiona said.
Amy came around and apologized for overreacting, and was now doing her best to act excited for Fiona, though Fiona knew it was insincere. And there was of course the other, unspoken thing: this was supposed to have been Helen’s trip. Wouldn’t it have been nice if Fiona went back with Amy, instead of with Liv, the snooty girl from Buchanan whom Amy had never really liked?
Fiona humored Ed at dinner, though he had so many questions. How were her classes this past semester? What kind of writing did she like to do the most? Would she like him to set up an informational interview with his brother, who was an editor at the New York Post?
“Oh, Fiona, that would be an incredible connection,” Amy said.
“I’m not really interested in journalism,” Fiona said. “You know that.�
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“Still. You have to start somewhere, right?” Ed said.
What Fiona wanted to say was that the Post was a gossip rag at its best, but she didn’t want to insult him. She still did like Ed, after all, and she liked how he made her mother happy, but she wasn’t used to a father figure lavishing so much attention on her. It made her uncomfortable.
“That’s true,” Fiona said, and assented to the idea of the interview, to end this particular branch of the conversation.
“I have something to tell you,” Amy announced on the last night before Fiona left for Paris. “Well, we have something to tell you, actually.”
Fiona stuffed a forkful of salad into her mouth.
“What’s that?” she said, mouth full.
Amy took Ed’s hand.
“We’re moving in together.”
Fiona swallowed her food.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s exciting.”
Both Amy and Ed were looking at Fiona with big, glassy eyes. She took a swig of her white wine.
“Don’t you think the house is kind of big for the two of you?” she asked.
“I’m selling the house, honey,” Amy said, still clutching Ed’s hand. “I’m moving into Ed’s condo.”
Fiona put her wineglass down.
“There’s a spare bedroom,” Amy spoke fast, “so you can stay as much as you want. I promise there will always be somewhere for you to come home to.”
“I thought Ed stayed here all the time.”
“Actually,” Ed said, “your mom and I usually stay at my place, because it’s a closer commute for me to get into the city. But when you and Liam are around, of course we stay here.”
“Well.” Fiona lifted her glass of wine for a cheers. “Congrats, then.”
Amy’s mouth was pursed. Perhaps she’d been expecting Fiona to make a scene. What could Fiona say? The house was of no use anymore. She wasn’t so sentimental as to not understand that.
Amy and Ed looked at each other, and then raised their glasses as well.