Complicated. What a totally unsatisfying word. It was a politician’s word.
“There were your exams, your senior paper. Then graduation crept up on us,” Christina continued, holding up her hands plaintively. “I didn’t want any of your special things to get overshadowed by this news.”
“Were you going to tell me before it was born?”
Reasonably, Christina looked hurt. “I was going to tell you this weekend.”
“Do you know what kind it is?”
“You mean a boy or a girl?”
Carmen nodded.
“No. We want to wait to find out when the baby is born.”
Carmen nodded again, knowing as she did that this baby would be a girl. It just had to be.
“So I guess it’s due around…” Carmen had already calculated the baby would have to be born near her own birthday, but she left the space open for her mother to fill.
“Around the end of September,” Christina supplied slowly, the look of dread intensifying.
Carmen knew, intellectually, that this was happy news on a lot of levels. Christina had a whole new life ahead of her. From about seventh grade onward, Carmen had feared the day she’d leave for college. She imagined she’d be leaving her single mother alone to defrost food and eat by herself night after night. Instead, this September, she’d be leaving a happy couple bursting with a new baby.
And besides, Carmen was finally getting the sibling she had always professed to want. If she were a big and good person, she would be able to feel and appreciate this happiness. She would be able to congratulate and even hug her mother. But she wasn’t a big or good person. She’d dashed too many such opportunities not to know the truth about herself.
“It’s kind of convenient, in a way,” Carmen stated, sounding robotic, like she didn’t much care. “Because you can just use my room for the nursery, right? I’ll be going just before the baby comes. Good planning.”
The corners of Christina’s mouth quivered. “It wasn’t good planning. It wasn’t planned like this.”
“And you can even combine birthday parties. What a funny coincidence.”
“Carmen, I don’t think it’s funny.” Christina’s gaze was earnest and unwavering. “I think it’s serious, and I know you must have a lot of complicated feelings about it.”
Carmen looked away. She knew she was being spooky. She could tell by the worry in her mother’s eyes. Carmen was well known to whine and complain and lash out destructively. Christina’s posture, much like that of a person girded for the arrival of a hurricane, indicated that she was ready for just such a lashing.
Carmen didn’t want to give her mother anything, not even that.
Yes, Carmen did have feelings, and they were damming up behind her face, generating a mammoth pressure somewhere around the back of her eyes. Carmen was afraid her face might explode if she had too many more of those feelings just now.
Silently she handed her mother her vitamins and stood to leave. Earlier she’d debated telling her mother that they’d fallen in the toilet, but as she strode out of the room she figured she would just let her mother go ahead and eat them.
Carmen hated herself right now, but she hated her mother a little bit more.
Oh, Carma,
I, of all people, won’t dare congratulate you or anything. I swear I won’t remind you how you always said you wanted a brother or sister, like all those *%$-all people did to me. I feel your pain. I mean, couldn’t they have just gotten a dog?
I hope the Oreos provide comfort for at least an hour—just eat the box and think later. I got the kind with extra stuff in the middle, because I love you extra.
Tibby
The air in the dining hall of the Prynne Valley Soccer Academy was charged in a peculiar way. Bridget felt goose-bumpy and alert. She had an idea, but she didn’t want to have that idea—to give it words or a picture. Or maybe she did want to have that idea but didn’t want to want the idea. Maybe that was it.
The room was knotty pine from floor to ceiling. Wide planks for the walls, medium for the floor, skinny for the ceiling. It was filling up slowly with coaches, trainers, administrators, and blah blah blah. The campers wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow. Every stranger looked like someone she knew. Her intensity made her invisible; she was seeing so hard she forgot about being seen.
“Bee?”
Diana’s voice was behind her, but she didn’t turn. Diana was a real friend, but she wasn’t telling Bee what she needed to know. So Bee would find it out for herself.
There was a long table to one side. On it were sodas and an industrial-sized coffeemaker and a few plates of store-bought cookies. Oatmeal with bits of raisin.
Was it dread or hope that made her chest pound? Her toes clutched so hard inside her clogs they were falling asleep.
She sensed the presence of a significant body just off her left shoulder. She wasn’t sure with which sense she sensed it. He was too far away to touch him or to feel his body heat. He was too far behind her for her to see him. Until she turned, that is.
Her eyes seemed to go in and out of focus. Was it him? Of course it was him! Was it him?
“Bridget?”
It was unquestionably him. His eyes were dark under dark, arching eyebrows. He was older and taller and different and also the same. Was he surprised? Was he happy? Was he sorry?
Her hand went protectively to her face.
He made a gesture as if to hug her, but he couldn’t seem to bridge the strange air between them.
The time came for her to say something, and then it passed. She stared at him in silence. Socially, she never cared much about covering her tracks.
“How are you?” he asked her. She remembered that he was earnest. It was something she’d liked about him.
“I’m—I’m surprised,” she said honestly. “I didn’t realize you would be here.”
“I knew you would be.” He cleared his throat. “Here, I mean.”
“You did?”
“They mailed out the staff list a couple weeks ago.”
“Oh.” Bridget cursed herself for not reading her mail more thoroughly. She hated forms (Mother’s maiden name…Mother’s profession…), and between this camp and Brown, she’d had far too many of them.
So he’d known. She hadn’t. What if she had known? Would she have willingly tossed herself into a summer full of Eric Richman, breaker of hearts and minds?
It was amazing, in a way, that he occupied space like a regular human being. He was so monumental to her. For these two years he’d represented not only himself but all the complicated things she’d felt about herself.
He was looking at her carefully. He smiled when her eyes caught his. “So, from what I hear, you haven’t gotten any worse.”
She looked at his mouth moving, but she had no idea what he was talking about. She did not disguise this.
“At soccer,” he clarified.
She’d forgotten they were at soccer camp. She’d forgotten she played soccer.
“I’m all right,” she said. She wasn’t even sure what she was talking about. But she said it again, because she liked the ring of it. “I’m all right.”
Your chances of getting hit by lightning go up if you stand under a tree, shake your fist at the sky, and say “Storms suck!”
—Johnny carson
The only adult person in Carmen’s life who hadn’t smilingly congratulated her about her upcoming baby sibling was Valia Kaligaris, Lena’s grandmother. Now, as Carmen sat at the counter in Lena’s family’s glossy kitchen and Valia sat at the breakfast table, Carmen felt grateful for that.
Granted, Valia wasn’t up for chatting these days. As Carmen waited for Lena to come back from the restaurant, Valia glowered at the Cheerios box and then trudged, still in her purple bathrobe, to the darkened den, where she turned on the TV so loud Carmen could hear every word even though it was two rooms away. It was a soap opera. Apparently Dirk had abandoned Raven at the altar the very day before her
identical twin sister, Robin, went missing. Hmmmm.
Carmen could privately ridicule it because it wasn’t her soap opera. Her soap opera (to which she had become progressively addicted since she’d been accepted to Williams early decision in January and stopped doing her homework) was called Brawn and Beauty and it would never have a plot line as dumb as this one. Carmen’s addiction centered on one actor (hailing from the Brawn side of things) named Ryan Hennessey. He was absolutely, explosively gorgeous, and her one true love, no matter how much her friends made fun of her for it. He was a good actor. Seriously, he was. He’d done some sort of Shakespeare thing before he’d gotten the soap gig. At least, that was what Carmen had read in Soap Opera Digest while she was waiting with Tibby to pay for the Diet Coke at the A&P the night before.
The Kaligarises’ front door opened and closed, and Lena appeared with her mother a minute later.
“Hey, Carma.” Lena looked sweaty from her shift at the Elite. Ari was in her work clothes.
“Hi. How’s work?”
Lena rolled her eyes.
“At least you have a job,” Carmen pointed out.
“How’s the search going?” Ari asked, pulling a pitcher of water from the fridge and filling a glass. “Anybody?” She held up the pitcher.
“No, thanks.” If Carmen had wanted something, she would have gotten it for herself. The Septembers had broken down that barrier at each other’s houses before it had even gone up. “The search is…uh, slow. I’m kind of, uh, not that much in the mood for babysitting this summer.” Carmen realized that if she didn’t rush onward, she could be questioned on this topic. “But I saw this ad at the A&P to take care of an old lady five afternoons a week. She’s kind of blind, I guess, so the job would mostly be reading to her. I called the number and left a message.”
Ari put her glass down a little too forcefully on the granite counter. Lena turned to look at her mom. “You know,” Ari said, her eyes animated, “that’s strange. I’ve been thinking about that same thing for Valia. I’ve been thinking how much she needs some companionship to help her with her errands and correspondence and maybe take her to her doctor’s appointments. I don’t dare take another afternoon off work this month.”
Carmen nodded.
“I was hoping Lena or Effie could pitch in, but they both got jobs early this summer.”
Carmen kept her expression brightly neutral, so as not to appear to indict Lena.
Ari put her glass in the sink with a definitive motion. “How much were they offering to pay on the sign you saw?” She was getting quite enthusiastic now.
“Eight an hour.”
“How about I’ll pay you eight fifty if you’ll look after Valia thirty or so hours a week? We could make up the schedule together.”
Carmen considered, looking down at her chipped red nail polish. In this minute she could go from having no job, no purpose in life, to having one. The money was decent. It would be a little weird to have Ari paying her. But then, it was more comfortable for Ari to hire Carmen than to hire a stranger. Carmen would frankly rather hang out in Lena’s airy, spacious house than in what would likely be a stuffy, old-lady apartment.
“Well…” Carmen tapped her index finger on the counter. “Okay. Why not?”
“Fantastic,” Ari said.
Carmen hadn’t looked across the counter at Lena before this moment. So she hadn’t seen how Lena had positioned herself with her back to her mother and was facing Carmen, frantically wide-eyed, mouthing the word no and drawing her index finger across her neck, until it was too late.
Lena waited to explode until she’d gotten Carmen up to her room and shut the door.
“Are you insane?”
“Lenny, jeez. What’s the problem?”
“Why do you think Effie and I set up jobs in mid-April? Jobs we both fully hate, by the way.”
“Because…you’re well organized?”
Lena shook her head stormily.
“Because…you are ungrateful and uncaring granddaughters of your recently widowed and helpless grandmother?”
“Because Valia is a nightmare!” Lena practically shouted.
It was a good thing Valia’s hearing wasn’t so good, Carmen thought.
“I mean, she’s an amazing and wonderful woman.” Lena backtracked, looking more serious. “She really is. And we love her. But she’s awful right now! And I’m not saying I blame her for it. She’s miserable about Bapi. She’s miserable that she’s in the States living with us. She hates my dad for making her come. She hates everything about this country. She wishes she were in her own home surrounded by her friends. She is furious at everybody, can’t you tell that?”
Carmen was now feeling stupid and a bit defensive. “Maybe she is. But maybe I can handle it.”
Lena shook her head. “Trust me. You and Valia are not a good combination right now.”
Carmen narrowed her eyes. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”
Now, and for a long time, the best way Bridget knew to settle her mind was to run. Sometimes she felt that the meditative state of the long, quiet miles helped her think. Sometimes she felt that the pure exhaustion helped her not think.
Sometimes she believed that she was running toward some sort of resolution, and other times she knew she was just plain running away. Still, it was what she did.
This late-evening run took her up and down country roads fringed by scrubby, June-green trees. The sinking sun poked an occasional sparkling ray straight into her eyes. When she got bored of the cars honking at her (was she posing a hazard in the fading light, or was it her hair?), she leaped off the road. Another girl might have been scared to run through unfamiliar woods as darkness fell, but Bee wasn’t. She knew she could outrun virtually any human being who might find her. And the bears in these parts weren’t man-eaters, she was pretty sure.
It was exhilarating, if anything. The forest was young and sparse, cut through every which way by paths. She followed a deep, wide bed where she imagined a river had once lain. She pictured herself striving in this same place when the river flowed. She ran until her thoughts shortened and no longer formed lines. They flashed and blipped. She didn’t follow them around the corner. She simply felt things without any hows or whys. This was how she settled herself.
Now the sun was entirely gone and Bridget knew the light would soon disappear too. The light that stayed on after the sun always felt to her like an empty promise. Ahead of her, on the dirt bed, something caught her eye. It jostled her breath out of its rhythm and sent her brain spinning. It was less than twenty yards away, and it disturbed her. She slowed her pace to keep the distance from disappearing so fast. She wanted to run wide around it, but she wanted to face it too. She was back in hows and whys.
It was a bird, she thought. A pigeon, maybe. It was clearly dead and bent into a wrong set of angles. Its head seemed to stick up from the ground in a pitiful pose. She was nearly upon it. She wouldn’t stop. She would keep going. She would avert her eyes. No, she couldn’t avert her eyes.
It wasn’t until she was literally over the bird that she realized, in a burst, that it wasn’t a bird at all. It was a mitten. It was a lost, grayish mitten with the thumb sticking up and looking very much like the head of a bird.
She was instantly flooded by relief and reassessment. Her mind and body fell back into calm alignment.
But as she ran and ran and the sky turned a dark, bruised blue, she felt sad. And, strangely, even though the twisted body in her path had been a mitten, she found herself remembering it as a bird.
If Lena’s mother’s car had not overheated it wouldn’t have happened. The whole summer would have gone differently.
But her mother’s car did overheat, on Thursday afternoon, so Lena borrowed her father’s car on Friday and dropped him at work on her way to drawing class. It was easily on the way. In fact, as she drove away from her father, who was already sweating through his white shirt, she considered absently that it was only a short walk from hi
s office building to her class. But at the time, it didn’t signify anything.
By midmorning she was deeply immersed in her drawing. At Annik’s instruction, the model, Andrew, took five-minute poses. For the first few poses Lena felt so harried she could barely get a gesture out of the tip of her charcoal. But then those five minutes began to stretch out for her. The intensity of hurrying stayed, but the consciousness of time dropped away. Just as her awareness of the model’s nakedness had completely bewitched her during the first few days and subsequently floated off. (In hindsight she felt ashamed of her juvenile, red-faced self. To the seasoned artists in the class, Andrew’s nudity was about as sexually charged as Lena’s coffee cup.)
Lena now observed Andrew’s body in extreme detail, staring without a vestige of shyness at the hollow inside his hip and the sharp ridge of his shin. When she passed deeply into this creative state, she didn’t really have thoughts anymore. The muscles that controlled her arm bypassed her thinking brain, linking directly to her autonomic system. The usual Lena was just along for the ride.
She jumped when the timer rang out for the long break. A shiver radiated from her shoulders. She hated coming up to the surface like this. She didn’t want to hear Phyllis’s newspaper rustling and Charlie’s heels slapping around in his sandals. She didn’t want Andrew pulling on his robe. Not for the reasons you might think. No, really. (Though the truth was, she did regain the awkward mindfulness of Andrew’s bare skin in that second when he’d pull on the green kimono and again in that second when he’d take it off.) She just wanted to draw. She just wanted to stay in that place where she understood things without thinking about them.
As Lena stared wistfully at her empty coffee cup, she recognized—almost abstractly—her happiness. Leave it to her to detect happiness rather than actually feel it. Maybe it wasn’t happiness, precisely. Maybe it was more like…peace. At the end of the previous summer her peace had been sliced up like roast beef. The tumult had brought with it a certain strange exuberance, a feeling of living more extravagantly than ever before. But it had also sucked.