Willa Lang had been particularly interested in hearing a step-by-step account back at the end of ninth grade, and she’d asked Marissa a series of exhausting questions: What was it like? Did it hurt? Did you like it? Did you love it? How would you rate it on a scale of one to ten? They were up in Lucy Neels’ room at the time, all of them piled onto the bed and the rug, the other girls looking worshipfully at Marissa, who had become their de facto spiritual and sexual leader.
She didn’t know how to respond, for she didn’t like the idea of disappointing them the way she had been disappointed. Ralph Devereux, age seventeen, the son of her parents’ good friends, was a senior over in Deer Heights, his skin light brown and touched with old, faint acne scars. He and Marissa had known each other since they were small and their families had frequently gotten together for warm-weather backyard parties. Her mother would light citronella candles and the Clayborns and the Devereux would sit at the picnic table and on lawn chairs until it grew late and Mrs. Devereux reminded her husband that they had a drive ahead of them.
For a long time Ralph had just seemed mildly annoying, teasing Marissa about how thin she was, but once he hit fifteen she noticed that he had begun to lift weights, and his previously soft arms were different. Also, he teased her less, and when he arrived in the backyard with his family, he now hung back, sitting on the redwood glider by himself, watching everyone as if from a great distance. Then, when he was seventeen, he returned to the house without his family, just for the purpose of seeing fifteen-year-old Marissa, which pleased her, not because she particularly liked him, but because the way they might be with each other was potentially private, unrelated to anyone else in either family.
Their first evening together was unremarkable, filled with talk that went nowhere, and occasional jabs at each other about nothing. “So what’s your situation?” he asked as he drove her home from a diner in his parents’ car. He had eaten a fish fillet sandwich, onion rings, and a large square piece of seven-layer cake. She had had a Sprite.
“What do you mean?”
“In school.”
“I’m in honors classes.”
“I mean are you in a relationship?”
She almost laughed. She was fifteen, and relationships were what you heard about from other people. But as soon as Ralph said it, she didn’t want to tell him anything about herself, to give it all up so quickly. “I might be,” she said.
He was going off to Rutgers to study business next fall, and the third time he took Marissa out, he turned to her in the car and said, “I’m going to be working my balls off at my uncle’s paint store this summer, and then I’m leaving for college in the fall. So if you want anything from me, you’d better get it now. Kitchen’s closing.”
“I don’t want anything from you,” she said.
“Okay, whatever, just letting you know,” he said, and then he put an arm around her. Marissa didn’t move away, but sat under the weight of it, trying to decide what she thought. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it wasn’t much of anything either. She would let him keep it there, she decided as he drove them to a defunct overpass and then parked. Ralph looked at her, raising his eyebrows, which was meant to be a question of some sort. She raised her eyebrows back, which, she supposed, was her answer.
He said, “You’re cute,” and put a finger on the tip of her nose. She didn’t move away. Then he said, “Now, we’re on the same page here, right?” and she said yes. “Okay,” Ralph said. Then he nodded gravely and cast his eyes downward toward his fly, which he unzipped with a loud single syllable, revealing an anatomical part that was pretty much as Marissa expected, since she and her friends had been studying them online since seventh grade.
Marissa was shocked by his action, but abstractly interested. He motioned to her, and for some reason she slid toward him. They sat unmoving, and then he nodded again, encouragingly, and dipped his head in suggestion. She understood, and she followed, tentatively ducking down low and putting her mouth on his penis. But as soon as she did this, he put his hands on the back of her head and steered her as if she were a video game console. Within moments he was moving fast and repeating a word that sounded like “jeez,” or “sheese,” or “cheese,” and she understood what this was all about; she picked up the nuances of this episode quickly, the same way she always memorized lines from a play or French verbs to conjugate. The end, the little explosion, was not too different from what she’d thought, and anything she could think about the way semen tasted had already been thought by someone else more descriptive, so she did not even try. After he cried an awful strangled cry—“gaaa”—he recovered quickly, zipped his pants, and said, “Who would have thought?” and then touched her nose again and drove her home. “I guess the kitchen hasn’t officially closed yet,” he said.
“Shut up, Ralph.”
“Okay,” he said cheerfully.
That night, she told a few friends, and they were quietly awed. “It just happened?” Willa said. “I mean, how did you know what he meant when he said that thing about being on the same page?” Marissa couldn’t explain how she knew—“I just knew,” she said cryptically—but Willa also had other questions for her. She wanted to know if Marissa felt very different, and Marissa realized the answer was no, which she supposed was good, because not feeling different allowed you to view sex as a normal part of life. As a reasonable activity that you could engage in with another person whenever you were both in the mood.
She got together with Ralph on two other evenings, and then he thought it was time to take it to the next step. She knew he thought this, because he said to her in a text, “lets be together longer 2nite.”
When it happened, Marissa regarded the experience of going the distance with Ralph Devereux from somewhere high above, like a hawk circling the car. She couldn’t decide what she thought about it, beyond the fact that it hurt far too much at first for something that was supposed to be natural. With their pants at their ankles and a condom safely snapped onto him, she felt it was a point of pride not to express pain here. He didn’t know whether or not she was a virgin, and she didn’t want him ever to know. That was her business. It was entirely possible that he had never done this before either; his style wasn’t so suave. Willa, of course, begged to know everything again, which not only included the technical parts but also the feelings, the sensations. She wanted a subjective description of sex and a catalogue; she also wanted something poetic.
Marissa couldn’t imagine what she was meant to say, but finally she just coolly said, “That’s kind of private.”
In the summer, Ralph Devereux started his job at his uncle’s store and had no time to come over anymore, which was fine with her. But almost as if she gave off some signal that she was now more available, a boy named Dean Stanley who was a swimming counselor to little kids at the Y, where Marissa had a volunteer job stuffing envelopes, hung around her all the time before and after work, finally asking her to go out with him. “Why would I want to do that?” she asked, which threw him.
“Because you’re nice?” he said hesitantly.
Dean, a white, extremely white, 6’5” swimmer with greenishgold hair from pool water, was forthright in a way that was similar to Ralph; he seemed to enjoy being a young male and all it entailed, and why shouldn’t he? Marissa would probably have enjoyed it too. When he kissed her with a muscley tongue at the multiplex, she let him, and when it progressed from there at the studio apartment he had borrowed from an older lifeguard, she didn’t try to stop it, even though she didn’t feel much of anything beyond the enjoyment once again of having an experience that was hers alone, and that she could master. Marissa knew that most people did not approach sex the way she did. Even Eva Scarpin, who had supposedly been to bed with her father’s business partner, a handbag importer of twenty-seven, said it was “amazing,” though Marissa knew instinctively not to ask Eva the kinds of questions Willa had asked her, like, Did you feel a lot? and, Was it wonderful?—because she was afraid she knew what t
he answers would be.
Once, years earlier, Marissa Clayborn’s toddler brother had had to be rushed to the hospital after eating a dozen aspirins one by one. In the ambulance, their mother had said to him, “Conrad, didn’t they taste bad?” And Conrad had said yes, yes, they had tasted horrible. “Then why did you keep eating them, sweetheart?” she asked. “Because,” he explained as he cried, “I wanted to find one that tasted good.” A rationale that his sister definitely understood.
At age sixteen now, neither of the two boys she had been with so far had tasted good, so to speak. Truthfully, sex bothered her, because it was not nearly as intense as it was reported to be. She liked being in charge of herself, being responsible, being pokerfaced and serious and precocious and skillful; she had conducted herself this way in all other areas, to real success, so why not in sex too? But sex didn’t fill her with a warmth that she had never previously known. Melissa Clayborn was dexterous in sex, she didn’t mind it, and, most of all, it was hers. This was how she felt about acting in plays too. Dean Stanley disappeared after the summer, and he occasionally texted her, but they had zero to say.
So there she was, leaning against the counter one winter night at Froze, reading the Lysistrata script, her mouth moving silently as she committed her lines to memory, when Jason Manousis walked in with his young son. Jason, of the legendary Jason Manousis and Cami Fennig high school pregnancy scandal of several years earlier. He had gotten Cami pregnant and they had immediately left school. Cami had had the baby, and Jason had wigged out about fatherhood and enlisted in the army and gone to Afghanistan, where he was blinded in one eye, and was sent back home looking like this.
“You’re Jason Manousis,” she said when he approached the counter. “You graduated from Elro with my sister,” she added.
“I didn’t graduate,” he said.
“Well, I mean, you were in her class. Tara Clayborn.”
“Yeah, Tara,” he said without recognition. “How’s she doing?”
“Good,” said Marissa. “She’s still out in Palo Alto. I’ll tell her I saw you.”
He nodded, and they both knew that she would say to her sister, Remember Jason Manousis, who got that girl pregnant and then went off to Afghanistan? I saw him. God, it’s extremely sad. There was no way around this outcome, and Marissa already felt guilty about it, as if she had betrayed him in advance, though she had never meant to do so.
“Daddy, I want ice cream,” his son announced.
“If he really wants ice cream,” Marissa said, “I would take him somewhere else. He’ll hate this.”
“We’re fine here,” said Jason Manousis, but it was no surprise when, after he ordered a cup of original regular, the boy spit out the first mouthful with a vengeance, shocked.
“They add the tang chemically,” Marissa explained to Jason. “I’m not supposed to say this, but the taste is basically fake. You’re supposed to think it’s got all these healthy live cultures in it, but it’s got nothing.” She insisted on giving him his money back, and then she sent them on their way, but not before hearing a little bit from him about his time in Afghanistan, where he had taken shrapnel to his eye.
The war was a disgusting waste of energy and time and life, he said to her. “No one can ever win it, and everyone knows that, but there we are, acting like we can,” he said. “The war’s intractable,” he told Marissa. “Intractable,” he repeated, as though he’d just discovered the word. “We had no choice at first, but now we do. We shouldn’t be adding more troops like this. It’s going nowhere. It’s a rotten mistake. It all just sucks, it really does.”
He spoke in a soft rush, as though they knew each other intimately, or as though the connection with her sister gave them a reason to be talking. Her sister Tara had barely known him; they’d been in the same grade years earlier, but Tara Clayborn had been an academically fast-tracked girl, and Jason Manousis had been a poor student with no interest in anything at the time but smoking weed, and his girlfriend Cami. When Jason got Cami pregnant, the two of them had headed off into life together like two people holding hands and jumping feet-first into a volcano. They soon became a cautionary tale about teenaged sexual activity: Jason and Cami and their mistake of a baby with that mistake of a name, Trivet.
Then Jason had gone to Afghanistan, and now here he was at the mall, no longer a joke, no longer just the duncey young father of a baby he couldn’t even name right. He was a veteran of war with a face that could not be loved unless you also loved the person inside it. And who would do that? Jason and Cami were long broken up and now shared custody of their son, though Cami had apparently proved to be a less than ideal mother, going off on drinking benders from which she could not be retrieved for weeks.
Marissa ascertained that Jason Manousis was on disability, and that he hoped to find a job in electronics. “If you know anything . . .” he said, perfunctorily. His life, described by him without self-pity, seemed as unreal to Marissa as the life of a character in a play. It was as though he was speaking lines that weren’t really true, except there in front of her was the evidence of his partly ruined face, and she couldn’t imagine how to make sense of it. She whose worst problem was not having spending money or free time, for in addition to rehearsals, three evenings a week she had to go to her job. She whose parents were always anxious about money, warning their children that they had to keep their grades up and take part in an inhumane number of extracurricular activities in order to get college scholarships when the time came. There was no wiggle room in the Clayborn family, but of course, with Jason Manousis’s life set into relief against her own, she remembered that hers wasn’t a tragedy.
So began their friendship. She went to work at Froze, and at some point in the evening he wandered in to see her. Marissa noticed that people looked at Jason’s facial disfigurement in a frank and shocked manner, as if when confronted by such a sight they forgot they were adults and reverted to some primitive child-state in which you were allowed to stare and make comments to yourself or your friends, which might be overheard by the man with the half-ruined face.
Jason and Triv returned to the store on Saturday night, when the mall was as crowded as it would ever be—not as crowded as it had been in the old days, but not a ghost town either. Kids from the high school roamed listlessly in packs; from behind the stainless-steel counter she saw Danny Fratangelo and Doug Zwern. Danny had once tried to copy from Marissa’s history exam, and had been angry when she wouldn’t move her hand to give him better access. “Why didn’t you let me?” he’d complained after class, following her down the hall. “I would have let you,” he said, which was an absurd idea. She didn’t remember ever having any reason to speak to him after that. Doug Zwern was known at school as a notorious dealer of J Juice, that liquid drug that made people hyper and gave an animated edge to everything they saw. Occasionally people on J Juice lay back happily in bathtubs or pools and drowned; sometimes they didn’t sleep for days. Mostly they had a good time. The J Juice trade was apparently lucrative lately; it was said that Doug Zwern was saving up to buy himself a car by the time he got his license. As Danny and Doug passed back and forth in front of Froze a few times, like a repeating loop of scenery out a car window in a lowbudget movie, Marissa felt a current of wariness.
Triv said, “Dad, I don’t want this.”
“You don’t have to eat it,” his father said. “We are just visiting with our friend Marissa.” Jason smiled a little, which pulled at the skin under his bad eye. He was challenging her, seeing whether two people who didn’t know each other at all could be friends, could strike up something that had meaning. But why would they do that? What was the point? Marissa didn’t know, and yet they stood there like friends, talking more about the war, and about Kunar Province, where he’d spent a lot of time, and about the other vets he had become friends with, a few who had been killed, and about fatherhood.
Then, as if the details of her life were remotely close in importance to his, he asked her about sc
hool, and being in the play. He emphasized that she should call him if she ever needed anything, and he asked her to enter his number into her own phone, which she did, feeling generous for doing it, for she was as likely to need his help as she was to need an academic boost from Danny Fratangelo. But while Marissa couldn’t imagine needing anything from Jason, she appreciated how kind he was. So much kinder than Ralph Devereux or Dean Stanley. Marissa had her script out because she’d been studying her lines again, and Jason said, “Actually, do you need help with that?”
To be polite, again, she said, “Yeah, I do. There’s this one part where Lysistrata says an oath, and another woman has to repeat the lines back to her. You could help me with that. You could be the other woman, Calonicé.”
“You don’t have a guy’s part for me?”
“This is the section I need to learn.”
“Okay,” he said. “I can deal.” She handed him the script, closed her eyes, and back and forth they went. Her voice, as it always was when she had to read aloud, became full-throated and emphatic:LYSISTRATA: Come, then, Lampito, and all of you, put your hands to the bowl; and do you, Calonicé, repeat in the name of all the solemn terms I am going to recite. Then you must all swear, and pledge yourselves by the same promises: I will have naught to do whether with lover or husband . . .
CALONICÉ: I will have naught to do whether with lover or husband . . .
LYSISTRATA: Albeit he come to me with strength and passion . . .
CALONICÉ: Albeit he come to me with strength and passion . . . Oh! Lysistrata, I cannot bear it!