"Want one?" she yells. I shake my head as Jen coughs on her first drag and then I take a further step, trying to balance myself on the slimy moss-covered stones. I look back at Jen and she gives me a crusty smile. Her eyes are turning yellow from blue bruises, and there's a small cut on her cheek. I know it's probably not very Christian of me but I'm glad Jen has black eyes. Glad I'm not the only one with battle scars.
"I'm sorry about your face, Jen."
"Well, my mom only yelled for about half an hour and then she didn't have the heart to ground me, so I guess it worked out all right." Jen skips a rock upriver: one-two-three-four times the charm.
"Mine too. Jen?"
"Yeah?" she says, blowing out blue smoke.
"Who's he got starting next game?" I miss playing with Jen, the way our bodies find each other on the court like two crazy-in-love tango dancers, the way we can pass and defend each other blindfolded and nearly always score.
"Practice sucks without you, Hoi," she says, pulling on a pair of sunglasses.
"Yeah."
"How's your sister? Still skinny?"
I nod. Jen throws a rock at my ass, then another, and starts laughing. I step back to the shore and pull myself up the hill and start pitching leaves and garbage at her. I think about how next year Jen's going to be joining all her sisters and cousins and Italian friends at high school and how I'll fit in, or not. Then Jen teaches me Italian swear words and we laugh, counting the ducks that go by.
"How come your parents never taught you Polish? Or Hungarian, or whatever you are. Manga."
Manga. Manga-cake. Only the Italians aren't mangas. I shrug and wipe my wet feet on Jen's bag. "Giselle knows a little."
"Maybe they wanted to forget, have their own secret language."
"Maybe."
. . .
When I get home Giselle is lying under a pile of blankets on the living room floor, sweating. When I touch her forehead it feels like she has a fever. She opens her blanket and I coil up next to her and whisper, "What's wrong?"
"Me," she says.
"Yeah, what's wrong with you?"
"My stomach hurts . . . I think I ate too much."
I place my hand on her slight belly and put my hand on her forehead.
"Are you OK? Should we call someone? Take you to the hospital?"
She groans, collecting herself into a ball. "No, no hospital, I think it's just cramps or something."
"You're doing so good, G., we're so proud of you."
Giselle doesn't say anything, only wipes her nose on the blanket.
I have so many things to say to her I can't even get the order straight. I want to ask her: why did you spin so far out when there isn't even that far to go in this bastard world?
At night, when the house is dark and I can't sleep, I pray for her body to grow strong. I pray for her soul to stand straight up, for the end of her nightmares. I pray even though I'm past praying. I call on Jesus though he never calls on me.
When I was stupid in my ears, when I stuffed my hands into the mouths of growling dogs because I couldn't hear, she'd grab me, just in the nick of time, always a second before the blood and tears flew.
Because Giselle put thoughts in my head and letters in my mouth when no one had the patience. She thinks I don't remember but I do, sitting on her lap, hour after hour, going over it, till I had it perfect. A B C D E . . .
It was always her voice that sounded clear when everyone else's faded or tweaked so loud I had to lock myself in the bathroom.
I uncover her face so she can get some cool air. Her skin is hot. She looks like a dishevelled angel, with the white duvet-wings folded over her shoulders. I want to tell her about this image but she says, "Everything feels like a struggle, Hoi, why is that?" Her question makes me forget that my sister is a hippie-angel and then suddenly I have another picture in my head of Jesus holding his bloody, thorny heart in his hand: Mercy.
. . .
The next day I see my father's ghost. He's disguised as a little boy, a six-year-old wearing a striped shirt, but I can tell it's him. I recognize his baseball cap; it's the same one I saw him in at the track.
After Mom leaves for work, I'm doing the dishes when I look out the window into our yard and see him, the boy, standing there, in the middle of our overgrown lawn strewn with old dandelions. He's doing yo-yo tricks and stops every once in a while to look up at me as he winds up the string. His hat and yo-yo are both red.
He reminds me of Egg, somehow, the little kid from Hotel New Hampshire, the John Irving book Giselle's making me read 'cos Sol made her read it. I guess my dad and Egg do have a lot in common. They both died unexpectedly. And Egg wasn't a real person, just a character, and so sort of a ghost in my mind already, I guess.
When I finish the dishes, I hear Giselle stirring upstairs, so I dry my hands and go outside. I know he won't talk to Giselle, that he'll go away if she comes downstairs, but that he'll talk to me. As I approach him he smiles and asks me for a glass of water. I go back to the kitchen and get him one and, on the way back, I use my free hand as a machete, skimming over the grass at my knees. He giggles at this and does it himself before I hand him the water. He drinks it quickly; ghosts get thirsty too, I guess.
"Hi," I venture.
"What? Oh, hi." He continues lopping off heads of dandelions with his small child-doctor hands making chuuuu a chuuu noises until I ask him to show me his around-the-world again. He fits the string on my finger and shows me the proper method of flicking the yo-yo around.
"Just keep doing that," he says, stuffing his hands in his little jean pockets and chuu chuuing his way out of the grass and onto the pavement.
"Thanks for the water." He waves, and runs down the street pumping his little arms at his sides and making rocket explosions.
When I come inside, Giselle is stumbling around the kitchen, still half-asleep, trying to pour milk into a bowl without cereal. I put the yo-yo on the table, in front of her.
"Want some eggs?" I pull a pan onto the front element and motion to her to sit down.
"Sure, thanks." She sits there, rubbing her eyes and moaning for a while as I make breakfast.
"Why are you in such a great mood?"
"Daddy taught me yo-yo tricks," I declare, in our sunny kitchen, as my sister wakes up and looks at me queerly. The yellow yolks bubble as the new day's light blinds us both for a moment or two.
. . .
I'd really like to tell Mr. Saleri everything because I think he would understand and not drag me to some child psychologist. But there's a thunderstorm coming, and my hands are cut open, and it all seems too complicated to frame into words: my Daddy's child-ghost, not to mention Giselle's late-night fried-sardine sandwiches and how they drive Mom absolutely mental.
Still, I'd want to tell him not to worry, because you tell people, that's what you do, you explain weird stuff about yourself and your family to people who love you. Because he loved me, he loves me. Me, fucked-up little Holly Vasco. I know Mr. Saleri sticks up for me when none of the other teachers do. Thinks I'm smart but not in the normal way. Every day I twist my knees for a wing stride till it torches liquid venom on my tongue; he knows, he sees me, counts the seconds of my pace until night folds over our cold, lonely track.
And I want to tell him it's going to be OK. Because I know that he loves me, that he loves me best.
But there's a trick with me: I have to knock my head against the wall sometimes to get it to stop. Sometimes I need to jump fences, throw myself off the edge of this spinning core.
Sometimes I land so hard my head stops making its noise, then the dead go quiet, at last.
chapter 17
Medical students will learn to obtain an accurate medical history that covers all essential aspects of history—including age, gender, socioeconomic status, spirituality, disability, occupation, race, culture, and sexual orientation.
Some days it is as though I go from one madwoman to the next with only Sol in between.
Agnes and Holly are incorrigible lately.
Agnes has a preoccupation with sex, to put it mildly. It's quite unnerving; I have to dress in shapeless, baggy clothes or else she thinks I'm turning tricks when she looks away. Last week a male patient asked me for a cigarette and Agnes's eyes got all buggy, a sure sign that she's going to start in on me.
"Go on, go on and get him, I know you want to."
"Agnes, stop."
Mom's theory is that Agnes's third and final husband, Ken, was the only man who ever loved her, or failed to beat her like the other two. But she's got to stop trying to break in to the men's rooms and calling the nurses whores, because they're getting really upset about it.
And Holly. You can't even look at her sideways without her snapping at you. She's been moping around the house ever since she went back to school. Think she might be in more trouble already.
Now, from my window, I can see her leaning lackadaisically on a rake in the backyard under the guise of helping Mom in the garden, wearing only her bra and Dad's old pyjama bottoms. She is sucking on a chicken bone, a habit she's had since childhood and that we have been unable to convince her to break. Mom is stooped under the lilac tree ripping weeds out and nattering at her.
"For God's sake, Holly, put some clothes on, what you think this is? A harem? And take that thing out of your mouth. I cook all day and then you go stealing the cat food. From now on if you eat like an animal I'm just buying Purina for you, that's it! Purina sandwich . . . ha!"
She turns to pinch Holly's butt affectionately but Holly jumps away from her and sends the rake flying into the middle of the yard.
"Don't!" she laughs as she disappears into the house.
Holly comes into my room without knocking, sits on the end of my bed, and flips through an anatomy textbook. She throws the book on the floor and slips on one of my shirts.
"I swear to God, if you get that shirt dirty I'll kill you, and please don't throw my books around. Do you know how much those things cost?"
"Relax!" she says, her face twisting into a little teenager-grimace. She extracts the bone from her mouth and holds it in her hand, looking down at it. It's shiny and grey. She does not move or say anything for a while.
"Listen, you shouldn't feel bad about the race, you can still go to basketball camp."
"I don't want to go to that stupid camp."
"Holly."
"Well, come on, it sucks. Besides—" her face softens and she stretches out next to me "—I'd rather stay home for the summer, now that you're home." She is still cupping the bone in her hand.
"What's up?"
"Nothing, I . . . nothing."
"Holly?" I run my hand through her hair instinctively. I stop, expecting her to flinch, or slap my hand away, but she does neither so I continue. She looks up at me and thrusts her jaw out as she speaks.
"What do you and Sol do?"
"What do you mean, what do we do? What are you talking about?"
"I mean, you know, what do you do!' She turns crimson and I realize, incredulously, that she is shy.
Holly, who insists on repeating every disgusting joke she hears at school in a loud voice at dinner. Holly, who unfailingly reports to me the thwarted sexual exploits of Jen and the rest of her teenage friends. Holly, the raucous and crass creature who has always moved in her slim body with swaggering ease and immortal confidence, is shy. She is caught in her own inexperience and longing, and I am, as usual, unprepared.
I feel like laughing although I know it is absolutely forbidden. Sometimes, like now, I get the feeling that there has been some mistake, that Holly is the older one and I am the kid.
"Well, so, what do you want to know?" I say in what I hope is a sisterly way, sitting up and pulling my hand out of her hair.
"I dunno," she mumbles, the tips of her earlobes burning red.
"What it feels like, what you're supposed to do. All that stuff."
"You just act natural. When you're there, you'll know what to do. Don't sleep with anyone, Hoi, you're way too young. Is there someone, someone you might. . ."
She burrows her head into her arms. "No one," she says as if she has just made a decision.
She gets up slowly, stretching as she does, recovering herself as she reinserts the bone into her mouth. I hear Mom screaming her name from the backyard.
"Coming!" she bellows, her brow wrinkling as she returns to her irritated state.
"Yeah, so thanks for nothing."
"What? What do you want from me? Hoi?"
"How will I know what to do if you don't tell me?" she whines in a sudden panicky, accusing tone, before she thumps down the stairs.
Clearly I have failed Holly, and myself, in some intangible way, as I always do when she tries to confide in me. As if in my inability to transmit my experience to her, I had not lived it at all.
And all day her whiny little plea rolls around in my mind like a tuneless song that will not stop, no matter how loud I turn up the radio.
Surgical approach to the heart: Vertical sternotomy is the approach generally used.
Dear Holly:
Heart lesson #3: post-heartbreak survival.
The heart is resilient, I mean literally. When a body is burned, the heart is the last organ to oxidize. While the rest of the body can catch flame like a polyester sheet on a campfire, it takes hours to burn the heart to ash. My dear sister, a near-perfect organ! Solid, inflammable.
Heart lesson #4: the unrequited heart.
You can't make anyone love you back.
Each type of neuron responds differently and has a different threshold for excitation; they have a wide range of maximal frequencies of discharge.
After too much red wine and chocolate mousse, Sol takes me to his subterranean room. We lie on his bed kissing, our bodies shaking with anticipation and sweat. My black dress tears as he leans in and then, as we undress and he moves into me, my head gets whipped up in the familiar hot confusion of sex. It's ironic, but now one of the only times I feel connected to my body, like I am in it, is when someone touches me. When he's finally inside, he reclaims his calm.
"What do you think about, Giselle? When I'm inside you?"
"Nothing," I say, smiling. "My mind is a high blank wall."
"Mine, too."
We sleep a little, and then, as the stained blue summer morning creeps under the curtains, Sol pins my shoulders to the bed. He hovers over me, a shadow of a beard transforming his delicate face.
chapter 18
I have an appointment with my principal, Mr. Ford, a tiny nicotine-stained man. He gets annoyed with us for our slow responses in church and spends at least an hour a week holding special school assemblies to bawl us out for not saying "Lamb of God, have Mercy on us" quickly enough.
He also has rotten teeth and meets with every single one of us eighters in his office to talk about our "High School Career," to discuss whether we are taking the right classes, etc., etc. It's pretty much an excuse for him to talk about God with us, to ensure that we will be good little Christians at St. Josephine's High next year. Besides getting suspended, and besides math, which I'm failing, I have a pretty average record. I'm no nerd, like Giselle, but I do all right. But Ford has it in for me, for some reason.
"Hello, Holly, well, that's nice of you to wear your uniform, seeing as you've missed the last two weeks of school." For some reason, this makes me laugh so I put my hand over my mouth.
"Actually, sir, I started back a couple of days ago."
"Ah yes, Carl, Mr. Saleri, mentioned something about an incident in the schoolyard at lunch the other day."
I grin at him, remembering my promise to Saleri. I need to get through this meeting, Lamb of God, please. I promise to start fresh next year. No fighting, no screwing around, no jumping off stuff (oh God) even if it means being the most stellar nerd for most of next year.
Mr. Ford looks at me with his dinosaur eyes and says, "Mr. Saleri, it seems, worries about you and that's lucky for you, Holly."
&nb
sp; "I know." I smile weakly, watching the seconds tick away on the wall clock next to the crucifix. Then I notice a small, cheap frame of a brown-haired woman and a little boy with their arms around each other. I pick up the picture and study it.
"This your kid, sir?"
Mr. Ford gives me an irritated look but then his eyes soften, "Yes, that's Henry"
"Very cute, sir. How old is he?"
"Four, four and a half actually."
"You must be very proud."
"Yes." I put the picture back on his desk after wiping the line of dust away from the bottom of the frame.
"Sorry, sir, didn't mean to mess with your stuff."
"That's all right, Holly Now, as I was saying, I think you've been punished sufficiently for that incident!' He gives me a smile. How strange it must be to be so close to God and still so far.
"Well, I'm glad about that, sir, really. I'm sorry about everything that went down and I know that . . ."
He closes my folder and opens his shit-eating grin even wider. He seems to enjoy the sight of me twisting in my chair, seems to think it's funny that Mr. Saleri worries. "Well, you're a smart girl, Holly . . . some would go as far to say a little too smart to be caught brawling in the parking lot and jumping off fences."
I can't stop smiling now, it feels like my teeth might fall out of my mouth. "I know, I promise I'll be fine in high school, sir," I say, standing up and shuffling towards the door. "I mean, I wasn't the only one involved and . . . " Remember, I tell myself, no fighting, no screwing around, no . . .
"Not so fast, Holly. You see, there are some things I think we still need to discuss." He fans his palm to the chair across from his desk.
"Oh?"
"Well, to be honest, I'm a bit worried about your soul."
"My soul, sir?"
"Yes, your soul. Be seated, Holly, it's not as if you're missing class or anything like that." The nicotine smell coming from his mouth seems to get stronger, and, as if on cue, he lights a cigarette. I glance at the No Smoking sign on his office door and at the small, yellowed crucifix next to it.