About a Girl Page 3

  “You should,” he said, mollified. “My mom made sushi last night, you want some leftovers?”

  “Do I ever.” His parents were neither of them ambitious or enthusiastic cooks, but once in a while his mom would go on a tear and spend all day constructing an immense platter of variegated sushis, with which we supplemented our more habitual fare of bologna-and-Velveeta sandwiches on Wonder Bread.

  I spent the whole day at Shane’s house. “Sleep over,” he said when the unholy June sun had gone down at last, lessening slightly the unseasonable heat. “You never do anymore.” He undressed in front of me, careless as we’d always been, and I had to look away. The T-shirt he gave me to sleep in was a faded New Order shirt, so ancient its band logo was nearly illegible, which I thought might once have been Raoul’s or Aunt Beast’s. I turned my back on him to put it on. “What’s gotten into you?” he asked, finally noticing. “You’re, like, the least modest person in the world.”

  “I finally hit puberty,” I said faintly.

  “You look the same to me.” Therein lies the rub, I thought. The shirt smelled like him; it was all I could do to keep from burying my nose in my own armpit. I could hardly tell Shane that the reason I never slept over anymore was because it had become a project freighted with peril to lie next to him in his narrow bed, acutely conscious of every accidental touch of his body, the soft curve of his hips, the dirty-sweet smell of his unwashed hair.

  Oblivious to my suffering, he put on Jack’s tape again before he crawled into bed. The rough, low voice was so rich, so near, that I could almost imagine the singer was in the room with us, the quiet sorrowful chords of his guitar bringing a veil of starlight through the window and casting a spell over us so heady I nearly forgot I was a fraction of an inch away from the person I most wanted, and was least able, to touch. The song went on around us, all the sadness and hope and longing in the world constellated into that single voice, that single guitar, and I thought, This is the moment when it all changes.

  You were the bullet in my gun, Jack sang,

  the needle in my vein

  however far we’ve come

  you were ever the only one

  and when the song came to an end at last I let out a deep, shuddering breath, and Shane wriggled around and worked one arm around me. I froze in terror and then let myself pillow my head on his shoulder.

  “I don’t want to grow up,” I said thickly.

  “We don’t have to.”

  “Everybody has to.”

  “Not us.” He kissed the top of my head. His shirt had ridden up, and my hand somehow found its way to his bare belly, and I moved my chin, just barely, and he tilted his head on the pillow and then his mouth found my mouth, or my mouth found his mouth—whose mouth found whose, I don’t know, it didn’t matter, we were kissing, kissing like we had neither of us kissed anyone before in our lives, kissing like the world would end in the morning, kissing like we had invented it, his chapped lips tasting of Blistex and pot, his hands tangling in my hair, cupping my cheeks, tracing a line down the ecstatic length of my spine and up over my hip again to find its way between my legs, gentle at first and then more insistent as I arched my body up to meet him. My breath catching in the dark, the feel of him even more tantalizing, more deliciously new, than I had hoped for; his musky boy-smell heady as wine, his sweat-salted skin under my tongue, his mouth at my throat, between my breasts, moving down the curve of my belly to meet and match the work of his hand—oh dear god, I thought, I believe this is why people have sex—the tape had flipped over, Jack’s rough low voice filling the room as I buried my face in Shane’s pillow lest his parents overhear my wails of ecstasy—all that Nintendo had done tremendous things for his manual dexterity, it was a wonder any of the girlfriends had let him go—and it flipped over again more than once before we fell asleep at last in a tangle of sticky limbs, just a few hours before the hot sun rose into the merciless furnace of a new day—

  No, sorry, we don’t have a public bathroom, try the Starbucks—

  —but in the morning nothing was different. I woke up alone in Shane’s bed, my eyes crusted over with sleep, his shirt bunched in my armpits and soaked with my sweat. I blinked at the watery light, disoriented, unable to place for several moments where I was or why I was looking at a poster of Iggy Pop and not my own pale walls, before the memory of what had transpired in the night flooded in and I gasped aloud, trying to assess what kind of damage I’d done. Or not done. The close, hot, boy-reeking air of his room was overlaid with an unfamiliar, animal scent that I realized—belatedly, and with horror—was the heady aroma of sex. Oh god, I thought, oh god oh god oh god. I considered climbing out Shane’s window and fleeing into the anonymous morning, but we lived on the fourth floor. At last I kicked away the covers, pulled on my shorts, and stumbled into the kitchen, where his mom had made us coffee and where he sat, staring sleepy eyed into a bowl of cereal. He did not look up when I came into the kitchen.

  “Tally,” his mom chirped, “I haven’t seen you in ages, look how tall you are, my goodness.” I looked over at Shane, who would not meet my eyes, and felt a hot flush start on my cheeks. Yuki Weiss was not the most perceptive person in the world, but even she would notice if I had a panic attack in her kitchen. Oh god oh god oh god oh god. Shane hated me, I hated me, he would never forgive me, I would never forgive myself—I am a scientist, I thought to myself in fury, I am rational, I am empirical, I am not set to ruination by brain chemicals, for god’s sake, but it was no use. “Look at Tally,” Shane’s mother said to him briskly, “so pretty, such a good daughter, so obedient, why can’t you be more like her? You spend all your time in your room, with your terrible haircut—”

  “Mom,” Shane said.

  “My daughter,” she said to me, “I don’t know what to do with him, I tell you, not even going to college—”

  “Mom,” Shane said. “Come on. Leave me alone.”

  She gave an exaggerated sigh and rolled her eyes dramatically. “So unappreciated, your mother, after everything I do for you, your father works his fingers to the bone, we save for years and years to give our only child a better life than the one we had and this is how you thank us. Tally, why don’t you sit down and have some cereal and coffee, no reason we can’t be civilized in this family.…”

  “I should probably go, Yuki,” I interrupted, edging toward the door. “Thanks for the offer, but I have to—help Raoul. With his—poetry.” Raoul had never needed help with his poetry a day in his life. “I’ll see you later,” I whispered, and fled, not waiting to hear if Shane responded, not wanting to see whatever it was that would happen if he finally chose to look at me. The door closed on the sound of his mother’s voice. If I had known that was the last time I would speak to him, would I have stayed? I don’t know, gentle reader, I’m only just at the end of seventeen.

  I went into my room and lay down on my bed and put my face in my hands, pressing against my eyelids until I saw green sparks (this effect, interestingly, due to manual stimulation of the photoreceptor cells, a fact that was little use to me in my present state). Dorian Gray wandered into my room, leapt onto the bed, and clambered heavily onto my back, where he put the tips of his claws into my flesh and purred happily. “Ouch,” I said, and propped myself up on my elbows to dislodge him. He thumped to the floor, shooting me a dirty look before sauntering away with his tail waving jauntily. I rolled over onto my back and looked at the ceiling, dotted with yellowing blobs where, years ago, Henri had helped me painstakingly re-create the wintertime Northern Hemisphere night sky in glow-in-the-dark paint. I heard Raoul call my name. “In here,” I said miserably.

  “Oh dear,” he said when he saw my face. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Ask me in a couple hundred years,” I said.

  “I’ll make a note in my calendar. Can I come in?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Can I do anything?”

  “Distract me,” I said. “Tell me about the poets.” Raou
l had a book coming out with a collective poetry press based in Brooklyn; the poets, according to his reports, were an astonishing and erratic group of entities, prone to sending late-night drunken emails, giving away all their books in fits of sporadic generosity, publishing enraged philippics on highly specialized points of semiotic doctrine in competing literary journals, and sleeping with their interns. He did not seem as alarmed as I would have been to have his manuscript entrusted to the poets’ care, but he was happy to recount their various—and, to my mind, increasingly bizarre—exploits for my amusement. He had once taken me to one of their parties, where there were a lot of white people with beards and thick-rimmed spectacles and leather patches at the elbows of their coats, and where the poets’ chieftain, a slim, ageless sprite with pale blue eyes, had got very tipsy and for some reason gone round with a fez perched askew on his head, talking to people animatedly about conceptualisms.

  “They’ve been fairly tame lately.”

  “I still don’t know what a conceptualism is.”

  “I’m not sure anyone does, to tell you the truth, but it’s a subject about which a very small number of people are extremely passionate,” he said. “Do you want me to make you some lemonade? Bring you Dorian Gray? Put on a movie?”

  “Dorian Gray already abused me under the pretext of consolation,” I said, “but a movie and lemonade sounds pretty good.” I struggled mightily to my feet and followed Raoul out into the living room; he went into the kitchen to fetch the lemonade. I put on Aliens, which my entire family, save Henri, regarded as gospel. I had been raised on its central tenets—loyalty, bravery, self-reliance, resourcefulness, being better than boys at everything—the way other children grew up with catechism and Sunday school. Raoul and I settled in with our lemonades, the living-room fan turned on and directed at our faces.

  Henri came in just as Hicks was demonstrating the use of the grenade launcher to Ripley. “Oh,” he said, with equal parts bemusement and dismay, “you’re not doing this again, are you? It’s the middle of the afternoon. It’s beautiful out.”

  “Shhhh,” Raoul and I said in unison, not looking at him.

  “It is not beautiful,” I added under my breath. “It’s ninety-six degrees.”

  “I can handle myself,” Ripley said on-screen.

  “I noticed,” Hicks, Raoul, and I chorused.

  “You both know this movie by heart.”

  “Shhhhhhhh,” I said. Henri rolled his eyes and sat on the couch next to Raoul, who took his hand without looking away from the screen—

  Sorry, what? You heard an interview with the author on NPR? When was that? Two months ago? No, I have no idea—No, “a woman” isn’t helpful in narrowing it down—Yes, I understand it was a science book, but there are quite a few women who write about science, shockingly enough, we’re many of us considerably more clever than we—Goodbye, then—

  Raoul met Henri when I was young enough not to remember the time before him, and he is so much a part of my life now that I cannot imagine any sort of world that did not have him in it. His parents are from Senegal, and he was born in France, and so, though he has lived in New York since before I was born, he speaks English with a sweet and lovely melody behind it that makes me think of sun on the water. The longest Raoul and Henri have ever been apart was a few years ago, when Raoul took me to Arizona for a month to see my grandmother, Maia, and Aunt Beast’s mother, Cass, and to meet his own family, who still live on the Navajo Nation, where Raoul grew up. Cass and Maia had left the distant wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, where both Aunt Beast and Aurora spent their formative years, for the dubious rewards of a hippie commune outside Tucson, where clothing was (to my utter horror) optional and where the aged denizens, who had constructed their various domiciles out of old tractor tires and bales of hay smothered in dried mud, spent their days in some mysterious quasi-agricultural pastime Cass referred to as “permaculture.” It was not the sort of life I would have ever voluntarily chosen for myself, but Cass and Maia seemed happy enough. “For these noble purposes was this desert watered with the blood of my ancestors and stolen from my family,” Raoul said drily, as we watched a field of naked and wrinkly hippies toiling under the white-hot noonday sun.

  My grandmother Maia was spacey and feeble, from so many years of doing so many drugs. I could see in her face some of the lines of my own: the arch of her brows; the sharp chin; the way she wrinkled the corners of her eyes when she laughed, which was only once. I did not like to recognize myself in her and was glad to quit her company.

  Cass was ropy with muscle, though she must have been in her sixties, and tanned a seamy dark brown that almost worked as a camouflage in the dust-cracked earth around her. She worked every day in the commune’s greenhouse and went hiking in the red hills and seemed as much a part of the desert as if she had sprung forth from it fully formed. She asked if I wanted my chart done, and I said no thank you, I did not believe the orderly movements of the stars contained in them anything other than the natural results of the laws of physics, and to my surprise, she laughed. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  “I’ve read Shakespeare,” I said, nettled. “He doesn’t make a convincing argument for astrology.”

  “Only witches and ghosts,” she said. “Anyway, it’s good to see you’re doing well. Tell my daughter to call more often.”

  After the hippies, I thought Raoul’s family would be a relief. They were not. He abandoned me immediately to the scant mercy of his aunts, who observed me in cool silence as we all drank coffee from a pot they had made by throwing grounds into boiling water. They spat coffee grounds in my general direction and each time an aunt spat, I winced. “You should have introduced yourself,” Raoul said afterward, “they’re your elders, it’s respectful,” and I said, “You didn’t tell me that,” and he smiled, and said, “The aunts are a test of your mettle, sweet pea.” His uncles derived enormous amusement from startling me with a butchered goat’s head and insisting I eat sheep’s intestine sopped up with frybread, after which an ebullient uncle shouted jovially, “Look who’s Indian now!” and slapped me repeatedly on the back. “Don’t get any ideas,” Raoul said, laughing. Later he told me that his oldest aunt, who was originally picked by her own elders to be a medicine woman, had gone instead to the off-reservation boarding school, where the teachers had cut off her long braids and burned them in front of her, the same way they had beaten his father for speaking Navajo (Raoul, quoting Gloria Anzaldúa: “Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?”). He told me this as dispassionately as if he had been reporting the average annual rainfall in the desert, and I wondered, for the first time, what it had cost him to leave his family, and what it cost him again to return.

  His family was obviously and enormously proud of him. His mother had at least ten copies of every one of his books, arranged neatly on a special shelf next to a series of photographs of Raoul from infancy onward; his father referred to him a number of times as “My son, the poet”; and his numerous cousins congratulated him effusively on his successes and his life in the big city; but as someone who had grown up in a family made up out of choice and love, not circumstance and biology, I saw for the first time that there were perils I had not imagined to having a place that you came from that both was and was not your home. Raoul’s Mexican grandmother and I fell in love with each other at first sight. She was a full foot shorter than me and spoke almost no English, and I, to my embarrassment, spoke even less Spanish. “Too skinny, too skinny,” she murmured, in the universal language of grandmothers other than mine, patting me on the hand and towing me behind her into her kitchen, where she spent the afternoon trying to teach me to make tamales. She did not laugh at me when my hapless attempts fell to bits in the steamer, instead nodding encouragingly and beaming at me until at last, after much labor, scattering masa everywhere, and somehow managing to get pork on her ceiling, I succeeded in assembling somet
hing that looked almost edible. Her tamales, in contrast, were uniform packets, lovely to look upon, and magnificently delicious.

  Raoul was uncharacteristically quiet for days after we came back to New York, and more than once I wandered into the kitchen late at night for a drink of water or some comestible and found him at the kitchen table with Henri’s arms around him, Henri speaking softly in his ear. I had always been envious of Raoul, who spoke Navajo, Spanish, French, and English with equal facility; who knew the names of generations of his ancestors and the history of the land where he was born by heart; and who made out of the places he had been and the place to which he had come poems that even I, Philistine though I was in matters of verse, could recognize were each like tiny, flawless, self-contained worlds; but it had never occurred to me that trading one life for another might be a passage paid for in loss. But after I went to Arizona with Raoul he told me stories about his family, a subject he had never in all my memories of him broached previously, and despite my blazing failure in the aunts’ arena he seemed happy I had come with him.

  “You’re my daughter,” he said. “They’re your family now, too.” I was not so sure that the aunts would concur on that point, but it made me happy to think of anyway—

  No, we don’t have a public restroom, maybe you’d like to buy a book, since you’re in a bookstore, not a latrine—

  When the movie ended—Ripley, Newt, and Hicks tucked safely in their pods, blissfully unaware of the series of travesties David Fincher would shortly wreak upon their hard-won happiness (Raoul and Aunt Beast and I did not ever discuss the third movie, and preferred to behave as though the fourth installment did not exist at all)—Raoul turned to me. “Are you sure there’s nothing you want to talk about?”

  “Did something happen?” Henri looked over at me.

  “I did something terrible,” I said. “To Shane. Last night. But I don’t think I want to talk about it.”