Irony: The only reason I know this is because I took a standing-room-only Buddhism lecture last semester. A lame too-little-too-late attempt to understand you better.
I got an A.
You believe in the economy of words. That's a lesson I could have stood to learn from you, obviously, judging by this letter. One lesson of many, actually. If you had let me.
Love,
Jessica
* * *
the fifth
When I stepped off the bus from New York City yesterday, I was convinced Pineville was the nexus for Armageddon.
“It's the end of the world!” I shouted.
“It's not a plague of locusts,” my dad shouted above the buzzing din. “They're the Brood X cicadas, the ones that only come out every seventeen years.”
“They're frightening!” I screamed, ducking a whirring insect that had nearly flown right into my head.
“You should have heard them a few weeks ago at their peak,” my dad said, brushing one off the door handle of his car. “It was like a bunch of motorcycles revving their engines in the trees. They're supposed to be gone by the end of June, but they just keep coming. They're loud, but harmless. You'll get used to the buzzing. It gets to be like white noise after a while.”
My mother, of course, had a different opinion.
“They're driving me crazy!” she said, swatting at them with her beige Coach handbag.
“How can you tell?” my dad asked. “Between your menopause craziness and your turning fifty craziness and everything else?”
“Forty-eight!” my mom cried.
Dad groaned. “Have you forgotten who you're lying to?”
I was surprised by my father's comments, not by the cruelty, but because this was the closest I had heard my parents come to a direct conversation in a year.
“They've ruined the holiday!” my mother said, ignoring my father. “Bethany said she wouldn't dream of bringing Marin here when she heard the noise over the phone. I wanted to throw one last big barbecue, but who can enjoy themselves with this racket? I guess it will have to wait until Labor Day . . .”
“What do you mean one last big barbecue?” I asked.
Mom looked guilty. Dad kept his eyes on the road.
“Go ahead, Helen,” my dad said. “Tell her the news.”
Mom rearranged her features into her patented “Isn't it delightful?!” face.
“I sold the house!” she said.
“What?”
“We're moving!”
I looked at my dad for confirmation.
“Is this true?” I asked.
“Apparently so,” my dad replied with a weighted-down weariness that I was getting more and more accustomed to hearing.
For the rest of the ride home from the bus station, my mom prattled on about how she hadn't intended on selling the house but she'd held an open house for other Realtors to show off the rooms that she had staged in the hopes of drumming up interest in her fledgling business and one of the Realtors mentioned that she had a couple who were looking for a house in the area exactly like this one, they even had a little infant boy and they would likely pay top dollar for the house if all the furnishings were included and then she heard that Pineville had zoned prime property for new townhomes and when she heard what they were selling for she was stunned and knew she had to get in on it especially with interest rates on the rise . . .
“So, Mom,” I cut in. “When do you have to be out of the house?”
“The unit should be finished in September, so we're in the old house all summer, which is truly a shame because it would be so wonderful to enjoy the summer on the water but I suppose we have years of enjoyment ahead of us . . .” And she was off again.
All of this information before even pulling into the driveway was just too much to process. Upon laying eyes on 12 Forest Drive—with its blue siding, black shutters, verdant sod, blooming azaleas, red door, brass DARLING knocker—I couldn't help but hear Dexy screeching a sentimental ditty in my ear.
“Our house . . . Is a very, very, very fine house . . .”
I went straight up to my fake beige-on-beige-on-beige room and wrote Marcus a letter. Then Hope. And when I was finished, I collapsed in bed, half-wishing that I might sleep as soundly as a cicada. A deep slumber to get me through the next seventeen years.
I got seventeen hours instead.
the tenth
Why am I still here?
I was only supposed to stay here for the holiday weekend. But as Sunday turned into Monday, I just couldn't bring myself to get back on the bus. Back to Bastian. And whatever would happen the next time we were alone together.
And so I found myself feigning a scratchy throat, phoning in a fake diagnosis of mononucleosis to the Storytelling Project coordinator. After all, how many opportunities does one have to watch the apocalypse up close?
My mother accosted me as soon as I hung up.
“Did I hear that you have mono?” she interrogated. “Isn't that the kissing disease? What sort of people have you been kissing?”
I rolled my eyes. “Mom, that's so 1950s,” I said. “These days you should be happy if that's all I've got.”
Her dark roots jumped up in hair-raising alarm. “Why? Do you have something else? Something worse? Oh my God, are you pregnant?”
I find it somewhat amusing that my mother only thinks I'm pregnant at times when it would be physically impossible for me to be so.
“Not unless sperm have found a way to travel telepathically.”
She screwed up her face in the way she does when she has no idea what I'm talking about. It takes a lot of effort, as the botulism has rendered most of the muscles in her face useless.
“Then do you have a medical condition that I should know about?”
“I'm just not feeling well,” I said truthfully. “The city stresses me out. I just need some quality time here at home to rest and relax.”
She liked this argument, I could tell. She liked the idea of her home as a safe haven, so I continued.
“Especially since this is the last summer I'll ever get to spend in the place that created so many cherished memories . . .”
So that was three days ago. And I'm still here.
“Don't you have a job to return to?” my mom asked today while I was on the couch aimlessly channel surfing.
I was about to tell her that they were doing just fine without me when I saw a familiar face on the screen, sitting across from Oprah, chatting about his bestseller.
“Mom! That's my writing instructor from SPECIAL!”
“Oh?” she asked with a mix of curiosity and contempt. “The one who convinced you to turn down your full scholarship to Piedmont?” She focused on the screen anyway, since anyone talking to Oprah was worth a closer look, even in a repeat.
It is not hyperbolic to say that Samuel MacDougall altered the whole direction of my life. If not for his encouragement, and his letter of recommendation, I would not be at Columbia. Period. He was my writing instructor two summers ago at the Summer Pre-College Enrichment Curriculum in Artistic Learning, but has since gone on to literary fame and fortune. He was on Oprah to promote his latest novel, Acting Out, a tragicomic tour de force set in Manhattan bathhouses during the late seventies and early eighties, when AIDS was largely unknown and commonly referred to as “gay cancer.” I know it sounds depressing, but it's actually pretty damn funny, too. Like life.
“I almost read his book, you know,” my mom said.
“Well, almost doesn't count.”
“The premise was so depressing. AIDS! Who wants to read about that?”
“Enough people to put it on the New York Times bestseller list!” I snapped back.
“You know,” she said after watching him chat with Oprah for a minute or two. “Even though his book was all about being gay, he isn't so limp-wristed about it. That's the best kind of gay.”
I cringed, as I often do when I hear my mom embarrass herself without even knowing it, eve
n if it's only in front of her own daughter. And what's worse is she felt the need to continue.
“Why do gays have to be so flamboyant all the time? It's just so off-putting.”
I am so often stunned by my mom's ignorance that remarks like that should fail to shock me anymore. But they do. With nauseating regularity. Here's the Pineville paradox: When I'm at school in the city, I don't feel particularly worldly or wise. It's only when I come back home that I remember exactly why I left.
“So the best kind of gay is when you're gay but don't look or act too gay,” I said, in need of clarification.
“Right,” she said, picking up the West Elm catalog. “Like that gay boy from Pineville who goes to Columbia . . .”
“Paul,” I said. “Paul Parlipiano.” My mom still had no idea that throughout high school I had moistened many pairs of panties fantasizing about Paul Parlipiano.
“Now, he's gay but he doesn't go around advertising it to people.”
“Why should he,” I gasped, breathless with exasperation, “when news of his sexual orientation spread around town faster than you can say ‘fag'?”
“Jessie!” my mom sniped. “Don't use that word. It's offensive.” And then she reached for the clicker and switched to HGTV.
My mom's comments reminded me of how clueless I was before I went to college. My mother's parents wouldn't pay for her to go to college, which I'm sure might account for her ambivalence toward funding my education. She, unlike me, wasn't so inclined to pay her own way, for which I can't blame her because it totally sucks. But what's stopping her from educating herself now? Why can't she watch PBS instead of HGTV? See Fahrenheit 9-11 instead of The Notebook? Listen to NPR instead of Lite FM? Why can't she pick up a newspaper? Or read a book in hardcover or hell, in paperback? I'd even settle for a real magazine for Christ's sake, one that doesn't feature suede couches on its front cover, accept American Express, and come with an 800 number.
These are the choices my mother makes and they all say, I CHOOSE IGNORANCE.
Would I be the same if I had never left?
Which, again, begs the question: Why the hell am I still here?
the fifteenth
“Aren't you supposed to be somewhere else?”
Bridget spotted me all sprawled out on the front lawn this afternoon, cooling down. My parents were both out of the house, so I thought I could go for a five-mile run without being pressured to put my not-so-sick ass back on a bus to Port Authority.
“Aren't you supposed to be in New York?”
“I'm convalescing,” I said. “Cough, cough.”
Bridget looked me over in my shorts, tank top, and running shoes.
“It would be easier to believe you if you hadn't, like, just run a marathon,” she said. Her face got serious. “What happened?”
“What do you mean, ‘What happened?'” I replied, shooing away a cicada that had landed on my leg.
“You always fake an illness when you can't deal.”
I didn't bother to argue. Bridget has known me my entire life. She has seen my hypochondria after disappointments including, but not limited to, forgetting to bring in an item for show-and-tell in kindergarten; losing the spelling bee (“Vogue.” V-O-A-G? How could I?) in third grade; standing against the gymnasium wall, forlornly waiting for a boy to ask me to slow dance in seventh grade; finding out about Hope moving away in sophomore year; sucking at the spring track sectionals in junior year; and being cheated on by Len Levy in senior year. If she was bold enough to call out my bullshit, then the least I could do was own up to it when she did.
“I'm just, I don't know, confused about . . .” I hesitated. “Stuff.”
I almost told her about Bastian. But she was so appalled by my hookup with William, I couldn't imagine how she would react to the possibility of me sleeping with a married man.
“I've got some, like, really exciting news!”
I pulled my legs up to my chest. “If it's about Hy's movie, I really don't want to hear about it right now . . .”
“No, no, no,” she said. “That's, like, all caught up in distribution problems. This news is about me.”
“Okay.”
“I got in to NYU!” she said, clapping her hands to congratulate herself. “I'm transferring in the fall!”
I sat up. “Really? I thought things were going well for you out in LA.”
“I hate LA,” she said, sticking out her tongue. “There's no better place than LA for making an aspiring actress give up and become, like, a truck driver.”
“It's that bad?”
“There are hardly any real parts anymore, for shows with scripts,” she said. “I have producers coming up to me all the time and telling me that I'd be just fabulous for all these crappy reality shows, but I'm, like, no way. You have to be retarded if you think that eating, like, snake testicles in a string bikini is going to lead to an Academy Award.”
“Snakes have testicles?”
This gave her pause.
“I don't think so, but you get the idea. Anyway, girls at school tell me I'm crazy to turn down these offers, because they'd do anything to get on TV. But the people on those shows always seem so, like, seriously desperate and starved for attention.”
“Or poor,” I said, thinking about Dexy.
“Whatever,” she said, casually flicking a cicada off her pink polo shirt. “Anyway, LA kind of sucks, and Percy is in New York, so it just seems like, duh, I should be in New York, too.”
I opened my mouth to say something, then shut it tight.
“I know what you're thinking, Jess,” she said, plopping herself down on the grass next to me. “That I hate LA because of Percy.”
She was right. That was exactly what I was thinking.
“Sure, it would be easier to tolerate it if he were there with me. But the truth is, I hated it on its own. I'm just happy that the solution to my hating-LA problem also happens to solve my missing-Percy problem.”
I hated myself for my skepticism, because I knew it had nothing to do with Bridget and Percy and everything to do with Marcus and me. What if I had transferred to Berkeley? Would we still be—?
“So let's go out!” she said, thankfully interrupting a thought that I didn't want to finish. “Percy and I will take you out!”
Everyone always thinks that getting me out of hiding and back into the world will do me some good. This, of course, makes no sense, when it's the world that makes me want to go into hiding. But remarkably I said, “Okay.”
Partying in general exhausts me. But I've come to the conclusion that partying at college exhausts me, like, existentially even more than parties in high school. High school parties exhausted me because I always felt like I was the only thinking person in a room mostly full of morons obliterating precious IQ points with every gulp of whatever booze they managed to steal out of their parents' liquor cabinets. College parties are exhausting in a diametrically opposite way. They are full of smart, funny people who are all used to being the smartest, funniest person in the room, so they spend the whole party talking over one another, overlapping and overtaking the conversation to prove that they are the smartest, funniest person in the room, if not the entire planet.
I figured that hitting a bar with Bridget and Percy wouldn't be such a burden on my brain, which is how I found myself in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, at a bar called Tiki Tiki Tonga. Triple T, as it's known, is a bar that's got sand on the floor, leering tribal masks on the walls, and wooden torches topped with swirling disco lights. It's a jungle jumble of Club Med and The Rainforest Café.
Obviously, the décor isn't the main attraction. Every season there's one bar on the Cheezeside strip that quickly establishes itself for its lax attitude about fake IDs and therefore becomes the favorite hangout for underage drinkers until the ABC busts up the party. This year, its Triple T. Pineville High has no need to throw a reunion: Its graduating class of '02 could be found there in near-perfect attendance because most of us have yet to turn twenty-one.
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No surprise, then, that we'd barely gotten past the bouncer before we saw none other than Sara and Scotty heading our way. She was still unnaturally brown and skinny, and in a yellow-and-red-striped tube dress, I'll be goddiggitydamned if she didn't look exactly, exactly like a Slim Jim. Sara had trouble making her way through the crowd, so Scotty was putting his pounds to good use by acting as her own personal offensive line, with emphasis on offensive. He wore a T-shirt bearing a message that might have explained what he was doing in her company: LIFE IS SHORT. GO UGLY EARLY.
“I'm so outta here,” I said.
“Come on,” Bridget said. “We've already blown fifteen bucks just to get in the door.”
“I need a strong drink.”
“A bottle of Grey Goose and a straw?” Pepe suggested, on his way to the bar.
“OMIGOD!!!”
I shot Pepe a look that said, Make that a double.
Sara was saying something, but I couldn't hear her over the tribal drums beating through the sound system. I nodded and smiled, hoping it would placate her. But that wasn't the desired reaction to whatever she had said, so she repeated it at a volume that would have otherwise seemed impossible through sheer vocal power alone.
“HOW ARE YOU HOLDING UP???!!!”
Pepe and Bridget returned with my drink. It was antifreeze green and garnished with a gummy monkey climbing a sugarcane straw. I took a sip and six teeth rotted out of my head. I didn't see how such a sweet concoction could possibly get me drunk enough to endure the rest of this conversation. The tribal drums did drop to a more survivable level as I slurped it down, though.
“Take it easy,” Bridget warned.
“Yeah,” Pepe said. “They don't call it the Monkeyfucker for nothing.”
“What?” I asked, smacking my lips.
“TWO OF THOSE AND YOU'LL QUOTE FUCK A MONKEY UNQUOTE.”
Scotty, who had been quiet up to this point said, “Go ahead, Jess, live it up. Drink it down.”
Bridget punched his meaty arm. “You are so obvious.”