We cut ourselves a slice and went upstairs.
"Mr. Basketball and I haven"t boned since last Wednesday," Janice said. "I think he"s embarra.s.sed that his d.i.c.k fell out of me when he turned me on my stomach and he couldn"t get it back in."
"Janice," I said. "G.o.d."
"What?"
"What if Mr. Basketball finds out you are saying this stuff about him?"
"He knows it"s going to happen eventually. He knows what he is doing."
"Okay, Janice. You aren"t actually sleeping with Mr. Basketball."
"How would you know what I was actually doing?"
We nibbled on our bread quietly until Janice became embarra.s.sed by the silence. She continued telling me about the rest of her day. Mr. Basketball said that T. S. Eliot once compared women to menstrual blood. Alex Trimble pulled his pants down in gym and cried, "Oh, G.o.d! The Martians!" Joseph Kimball shot half a carrot out his nose. On purpose. He proclaimed it his one profitable talent. Was going to major in it at college. Richard accidentally killed Mr. Kraft"s cla.s.sroom guinea pig Mickey by squeezing it too hard. Everyone called him Lenny. They shouted at him, "Stupid Lenny, you"re so nice and sweet but so big." Since Mark and Richard had started snorting cocaine over Christmas break, Richard stopped going to English cla.s.s and had no idea the joke was a reference to Of Mice and Men. He had no idea what was what anymore. He walked around the halls with Mark, kicking empty soda cans. He wore T-shirts with the faces of smashed cartoons and cracked skulls, and when people asked him about the burn running all the way up his arm and his chest, he told them to "eat vag." Then he laughed. Richard thought everything about him was funny, even if he didn"t understand why anymore.
Janice smiled the whole time she told me what happened in cla.s.s, and I laughed hard, harder than I had in weeks, because what we didn"t know was that Richard would die four years later in a s...o...b..arding accident, or that people would go to his funeral and n.o.body would cry, but instead laugh about the time he got so high he jumped off the roof of Stop and Shop, or that his virgin girlfriend in a fit of grief would scream out, "We never even had s.e.x!" or that our new science teacher genuinely loved the guinea pig Mickey.
Richard loved Mickey as well. I saw him standing by the cage while I was walking past the cla.s.sroom one day, petting Mickey"s fur so softly, as though it was a body full of cotton, and he saw me too, held my gaze, and then said with unexpected honesty: "I"ve always kinda liked you."
"Oh," Janice said, continuing. "Also. The Other Girls decided we should start calling you Shiny Forehead."
13.
My forehead was so shiny, my biology cla.s.s had joked about using it as a light source all semester. Ms. Nailer was gone; she had not been fired, but rather "deselected" after the Annie incident. My half sister Laura had started eating solids, Richard had a crush on me, used to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e to my fifth-grade photo, and X was the subst.i.tute for the unknown number.
"But how does adding X make it any less unknown?" I asked Ms. O"Malley, my algebra teacher, during extra help. Ms. O"Malley crossed her long, smooth legs and sighed.
At home, my mother hadn"t changed clothes in four days.
"The tiger lilies are dead," my mother said after school on our porch, while she sipped wine in the cold. My mother was not wearing earrings. She was never wearing earrings anymore. She was always on the porch, always in a robe.
"How many gla.s.ses is that?" I asked her.
"Just two," she said. My mother was the kind of woman who looked worse when she was relaxed.
"Just two," I repeated.
"Look at all the dead vegetation," she said.
Everything was covered in snow and my mother seemed to blame my father for this, even though it was February, even though I was sure I loved him more than ever now that he was gone. Because how could you blame a man for dead flowers when he was the one who planted them in the first place? He was obsessed with keeping the tiger lilies alive while he lived here, always trying out new systems. Once, I came home from school and caught him p.i.s.sing on all the plants, laughing. "To keep the deer away," he said.
It was impossible to hate a man who had planned all of your vacations, who drove us through the corn farms and the honeysuckle beaches of Bridgehampton, Long Island, toward the ocean and asked, "Emily, what crop is that?"
"Beans! Potatoes! Ice cream!" I"d shout.
"No. Corn! What flower is that?"
"Honeydew!"
"Close."
"Mildew."
"Farther."
"Honeyflower?"
"Honeysuckle!"
"How do you always remember that, Dad?"
"I bet you there is nothing you know that I don"t know!" he said, turning the wheel.
And there wasn"t. Not until I started studying Canadian geography at school and I asked him, "What"s the most northern province?" He shook his head and said, "Come on! That"s not a fair question."
At night in Long Island, my father took us for ice cream in Sag Harbor. We walked the quiet strip to the end of the dock and looked at the yachts. "Can you imagine?" my father asked us, and I was always too impressed by the size of the boats to notice that this was him wishing for a different life. He bought us mocha ice cream cones. All I knew about Sag Harbor ice cream was that it was the most G.o.dd.a.m.n expensive ice cream in the whole country but what the h.e.l.l, we were on vacation, weren"t we? My father said that everything was too G.o.dd.a.m.ned expensive if you thought about it long enough.
"How G.o.dd.a.m.ned expensive is each lick?" I asked, cone in hand. My mother and father laughed until they had to sit down.
My father was always money conscious, and I thought it was because we didn"t have any money. As I got older, I realized my father was only money conscious because my mother wasn"t. Sometimes, my father would sit at the kitchen counter doing the bills and shout out, "We have zero dollars, people! Zero!" This was directed to my mother, who would roll her eyes and say to me, "Don"t listen to him." Apparently, it was okay to have zero dollars. We seemed to get by. We had two fridges, a handful of white leather couches, four beds with memory foam, two electric eyelash curlers, and a blender that could puree a rake.
"You kids don"t use any color in your poems," Mr. Basketball said. "Let"s talk about how important color is. Let"s take a good look at these walls around us."
We would have revolved our heads if we could.
"What color are they?"
"Is this a trick question?"
"Gray," Janice said.
"Right," Mr. Basketball said. Janice smiled, proud she had vision. "And does it matter that they"re gray?"
"No."
"Of course it does," he said. "Because why would they be gray?"
"Why wouldn"t they be gray?" Lillian Biggs asked.
"Good question," Mr. Basketball said. "There are plenty of reasons why they wouldn"t be gray. They could be yellow. They could be red. They could be striped or wallpapered or gla.s.s! They could have holes. They could be made out of papier-mache."
"That wouldn"t make any sense," someone said.
"Why not?" Mr. Basketball said. "Why wouldn"t it be reasonable to paint these walls red?"
"Because school is boring. And so is gray. It makes sense."
"But maybe school is only boring because the walls are gray. Maybe if the walls were red, things would be different."
"Okay!" I shouted after school, barging into the living room. "Let"s redesign the house!"
"Huh?" she asked.
I turned on a brown, dull lamp. "Get up, get up! We"re going to change this place!"
"What? Why?"
I looked around at the room. n.o.body had ever really cleaned up properly after my mother tore down the curtains and threw the books to the floor.
"You can change your att.i.tude just by changing the colors that surround you," I said.
Surprisingly, she agreed. She was ready for a change, too. Like she realized that we needed this, and this was one small thing we could do. We signed up for one of those community interior design cla.s.ses offered by the town at night. "What do you want to feel like when you are home?" the instructor asked us during the first cla.s.s. My mother shrugged. "Like I"m not home," she joked in my ear.
"Foreign," I translated. "Norwegian!"
"Your homework," the teacher said, "is to find out what that looks like."
There were so many ways to live just one life, I found out. I spent my nights researching and drawing models of what our house would look like if we lived in Italy and kept "slow hallways," or in France with checkerboard floors. And when I thought of Mr. Resnick"s broken neck, I thought of the most neutral thing I could and said, "koi fish koi fish koi fish." When I fell asleep, I had nightmares about old men Tasering me in elevators for no reason at all. Richard lifting up my skirt, putting his middle finger inside me. Mr. Resnick on a canoe, looking for a pen. Bleeding out his toe. "That"s where the blood goes, Emily," he said to me in my dream. I woke up in a cold sweat and for a moment, I thought his blood was all over me.
All day long, I sweated. I sweated so bad, I cut out washcloths and safety-pinned them under the armpits of my shirts. Every few days or so, my mother would approach and say, "Please, Emily, wash your hair."
"It"s shinier this way," I said. When I looked in the mirror, it was. I was glad to see the grease coating my hair.
My mother and I stopped going to the design cla.s.s two weeks in, but I continued my plans to redesign the house. I asked my mother for her credit card and went to local furniture stores after school. I bought bright red curtains, gold lamps with braided ta.s.sels. I stored my father"s paintings of random rivers and empty docks in the bas.e.m.e.nt, and hung pictures of koi fish over the television, gingersnap roses over the couch.
My mother looked around at the new decoration and made the soft face she always made when she said, "Darling, you are my angel. Did you know that?"
Her voice lifted at the end of the sentence in an attempt to make it sound like the responsibility was something to be happy about, but by the time my mother"s words reached my ears across the new room, being her angel merely sounded like another ch.o.r.e around the house, a game we had to play where my mother got to be G.o.d and I got to be the celestial attendant. Like cleaning the toilet bowl. Like wiping down the shower after I used it.
My mother believed that everybody had their own personal angel who inspired them to do really undesirable things: taking out the garbage in the middle of a snowstorm when you could only find your open-toed heels. My father"s angel was Mr. Lipson (an accountant who apparently spared him jail time). My mother said my angel was Ralph Lauren, who was the only designer she could think of who made sweaters with proper shoulder lines.
"And I"m your angel?" I asked. "That doesn"t seem fair somehow."
"That"s just how it works," she had said.
In reality, it wasn"t all that difficult being my mother"s angel. Her needs were tangible and immediate. I got the Belvedere, the heating pad. I b.u.t.tered the bread, shelved the Home and Garden. I hung the curtains, dusted them once a week. I didn"t mind. Movement felt productive. But when my mother lay on the new couch for too long and asked questions like, how could a husband get up from the kitchen counter and leave her sitting in the middle of her own conversation, the new couch began to look just like the old couch and I became selfish and fourteen again, more concerned about the state of my hair than the state of my mother, and I said, "Are you sure it happened exactly like that?"
When my mother wanted to know what a woman had to do to make a man fall in love with her again, what a woman did to be completely different without changing a thing, I tried to convince her of how unqualified I was to be an angel. I had lungs and blood cells and undeveloped opinions on floral patterns. My mother"s eyes fluttered shut like she could barely believe the consistency of heartbreak.
When I was younger, my mother used to turn off my light and pull the covers to my chin. I put on my pajamas and wished for stupid things. She rubbed my head and sat at the edge of my bed, telling me to say my prayers. I told her I just said them in my head. She told me I had to say them out loud. "Why?" I asked. Why couldn"t he just read my thoughts if he was so all-knowing? "Your prayers take on more urgency if G.o.d hears them directly," she said. She said there was a whole bunch of people out there just thinking, and did I just want to be one in a bunch?
"Can he hear me over my fan?" I asked.
"Oh no," she said, laughing. "I didn"t mean it like that. Don"t make it that complicated."
But that year, my mother slid into her bedroom each night without saying a word. The only sounds from her room were the pills rattling out of the bottle. Her lights never turned off. "I just can"t sleep," she sometimes said, getting into my bed at night, cold like a fish. "Help me sleep. Why can"t I sleep?"
I was expected to know. "I don"t know," I said. Maybe she should try not sleeping. Maybe she needed a job. Maybe she needed a hobby. Maybe she needed to read a book.
"But I can"t focus," she said. I called my father. He said maybe she needed to go outside. Maybe she needed to go get a coffee. Did she try yoga? Did she try not eating meat? Did she try only eating meat? Maybe she didn"t need to eat so much meat. Maybe she didn"t need to get out of bed as much. Maybe she should try sleeping. Try the hobby thing again. Try painting. Eat meat.
But I told him that she couldn"t try painting because her hands weren"t steady anymore and she couldn"t get a job because she hadn"t had a real job in years. She couldn"t go outside because it was too cold and she got coffee yesterday and she does yoga but stretching her muscles didn"t make the bad thoughts go away.
"What bad thoughts?" he asked.
"I think she wants to kill herself," I said.
"No," he said. "She won"t kill herself. When she tells me that, I say, go ahead! Let"s see you do it. And she won"t."
14.
My father sent me a birthday card from Prague. Happy Bastille Day! I thought my father"s jokes about pretending not to care for me were a lot funnier when he was down the hall, shouting, "Just kidding! I care for you!"
At lunch, one of the Other Girls said, "Hey, Shiny Forehead, isn"t it your birthday?"
I refused to answer.
"Guys!" cried the one who caked herself in so much foundation, bits sometimes fell off into her yogurt. "Shiny Forehead"s parents f.u.c.ked fifteen years and nine months ago!"
I opened my mouth to argue, to defend something, until I realized there was nothing to defend. It was true. My parents f.u.c.ked fifteen years and nine months ago. Should I have been embarra.s.sed about that?
In English, Mr. Basketball got everyone to sing "Happy Birthday" for me in unison. Janice sang the soprano harmony and p.i.s.sed everyone off.
"In addition to memorizing lines from "The Waste Land,"" Mr. Basketball said, "you all have to write a paper. On the origin of poetry."
"What do you mean, origin?"
"Like, the beginning of time?"
"When poetry began," Mr. Basketball said. "How poetry has shifted through time."
The students informed him that was, like, four billion years ago.
"Try to limit the scope of your paper to a particular topic," Mr. Basketball said. "For example, free verse and its beginnings. When did free verse become popular? When did it start? These are the questions you should be asking yourself while writing this paper."