Girls of a Certain Age Read online

  There was no way I could adequately prepare for my brother’s arrival. I had to take the second of the two pills the following day, on the first full day of his visit. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could time conveniently. Kill pills, I thought, shaking the bottle so I could hear the lone pill knocking up and down, trying to escape. That second pill was the one that really did it, the ultimate Undo button. For a moment it seemed easy to get rid of something you didn’t want.

  My roommate, Cherry, was gone for the weekend, to this cabin in Vermont. She had brought along about five books on edible mushrooms, and I kept imagining the dramatic scene in which she would be poisoned and I would suddenly and miraculously get to live alone.

  We’d never gotten much furniture. The living room doubled as my bedroom, with the couch as my bed. We used books piled high as bedside tables and shelves, topped them with knickknacks and water glasses and my red-eyed alarm clock. There was no way to make the room presentable, so I moved on to the more manageable kitchen, where I balanced my laptop on top of the fridge and played “Stairway to Heaven” on repeat while washing the dishes.

  When I heard the heavy knock at the door, I was half asleep on the couch with my yellow plastic kitchen gloves still on, my hands hanging off the edge so that a puddle of water had formed on the wooden floor beneath them.

  I opened the door and for the briefest moment I wondered what this uniformed man was doing here looking so stoic, but of course it was Will, straight from the wedding. He had our father’s broad, sloping nose and our mother’s thin, rectangular mouth.

  “Someone let me in downstairs,” he said. “You’ve got to be careful with that.”

  I threw out my arms for a hug, but he held out a hand to stop me.

  “Not in uniform,” he said.

  I directed him to Cherry’s room. There wasn’t much floor space, so he tucked his suitcase neatly alongside Cherry’s painted burgundy dresser.

  “I’m sorry it’s so small,” I said from the doorway.

  “It’s like…a barrack for hipsters,” he said, glancing around. The word “hipster” sounded remarkably Southern coming out of his mouth. New York had already worked the twang out of me.

  He changed in the bathroom, emerging in gray sweatpants and a T-shirt. “Now?” I asked, giving him a hug. When I brushed my teeth later, his uniform was hung carefully from the hook behind the bathroom door. It was so flat and unwrinkled that it didn’t seem like anyone had worn it at all.

  The next morning Will was up long before I was, and when I looked at the alarm clock there was nothing I had to account for. I could hear him in the kitchen, washing and drying my dishes, clinking them quietly on top of one another and humming a little. I wondered if he was humming for his own benefit or for mine. In our childhood, no matter how mercilessly he had been torturing me not hours or minutes before, he would know when I was really upset. Sometimes he would simply retreat, but other times he would switch the game to something gentler and start humming songs in his own version of Name That Tune.

  When I was in eighth grade, a classmate I’d known for many years was hit by a car while riding her bike. Three days later, she died. When they told us this in the morning at school, I was unable to assimilate the information. I walked around all day in quiet, silent denial.

  But that night, I started crying and couldn’t stop. I cried until my brother entered my room without a word, began scratching my back and humming. He hummed just one song and I didn’t try to guess what it was. Hours later, my mother found us both sound asleep, my arm flung gently and haphazardly across my brother’s waist. She woke us up, shaking me by the shoulder. “You have your own beds,” she said in a whisper. “Use them.”

  I ambled into the kitchen without bothering to brush my teeth or look at my face. My brother was still in his sweats, but he looked wide-awake. He hummed around the kitchen, stacking dishes. “You don’t need to do that,” I said. “I’ll do it later.” But he kept on stacking, and before I knew it a plate of eggs was staring up at me.

  “Want some?” he asked.

  I didn’t want anything, especially not eggs. “Sure,” I said. I took a giant bite of egg, the yellow bursting in my mouth. A book about military strategy was spread upside down on the table. I could see all of the dots of the i’s staring up at me from the blurbs on the back cover. The egg swam around in my mouth until I finally swallowed it.

  If you separated us into our different environments—me in this messy apartment, him in the desert wearing fatigues or at home with his wife—you could no longer tell that we had come from the same place, but neither could you determine when we’d diverged, what choices we had made or what choices had been made for us.

  It was hard to tell when people grew up, exactly, or why. When had my brother decided to stop tying my hair to the kitchen chairs? To stop locking me in the bathroom? To stop shooting rubber bands in my face?

  “What happened to your lip?” Will asked, taking my empty plate to wash.

  “Anxiety,” I said.

  My brother and I rented a movie, the way we used to do when our parents were both out of town and he was supposed to keep an eye on me. We were never a more united front than when our parents left us to our own devices. I took the second pill before the movie while my brother was at a lamp, picking off ladybugs and putting them on the face of the building just outside the window.

  I lay on the couch, and my brother took the rocking chair.

  “Are you sure you want to watch a war movie?” I asked.

  “Every movie is a kind of war movie,” he said. “Everyone’s fighting for something.”

  “Everyone’s fighting against something,” I corrected.

  As usual, I couldn’t figure out who the enemy was, but I was pretty sure that Will could, though he was tipped forward onto the front of the wooden rocker in what might have been suspense. As the bodies piled up, I wondered if a life was more or less important to a soldier than it was to someone else.

  I thought for a moment about Ben/Tom, who had unknowingly embedded half of his genetic information inside my body. I wondered if it was the half that had smiled so charmingly across the bar, or if it was the half that didn’t like to read. I thought of Hugh, who I hadn’t heard from since our last conversation, who I had vaguely hoped would stop by, call, send an email.

  Just as gunfire broke out onscreen for the third or fourth time, my stomach gave a violent lurch and then felt as if it were being tied into tight and intricate knots. I tiptoed to the bathroom around the back of the rocking chair, where Will was still leaning intently forward.

  Some time later, maybe the credits were rolling, my brother’s voice came through the bathroom door. “Are you okay in there? Hey, are you okay?”

  Maybe I groaned a little.

  When he entered, I was curled in a ball, grabbing my shins with both hands. I felt like a sponge being squeezed dry. I could feel liquid pooling around me, which I knew was blood. I wondered about that little dot, that mysterious possible future, expelled somewhere on the bathroom floor. That was what I had wanted—I didn’t wish myself on anyone.

  “Oh my God,” said my brother. He had seen all kinds of people with blood all around them, but they had never been his sister on the bathroom floor. “Where are you hurt?” he asked, on his haunches beside me.

  I wanted to reach out and touch my brother’s kind, warm hand, but instead I just folded myself together tighter so that my knees felt the thump of my own heart. It seemed to me that whenever I wanted to reach out to touch another living being, I just knocked what I wanted further from my grasp, and all I would ever end up feeling was the terrible pulse of my own pumping blood.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Was this one of those things his wife had been getting donations for, to save these little bunches of cells? Behind him, I could see the starched sleeve of his pristine uniform. I couldn’t look at him. “It’s not important,” I said to the floor. “It’s just a little thing.
”

  I lay on the pulled-out bed, facing the arm of the couch, my wet cheek on my wet pillow. Will had made the bed and he’d walked me to it slowly and wordlessly as I was hunched over in pain. Now I could hear him walking around Cherry’s room—was he packing? Pacing? I pictured his thin, rectangular lips and wondered what expression they betrayed.

  I don’t know how long I’d been crying before I finally heard him at the doorframe. “You okay?” he asked in a near whisper. I couldn’t bring myself to say yes, but I didn’t want to say no, so I didn’t say anything at all.

  I heard him come toward me. I felt the bed shift, a hand spread out gently across my back, the fingers wide the way one might carefully palm an infant. I felt it first, through his hand, the slow, plaintive hum, so deep that it seemed to reverberate through me, seemed to enter every corner of my body the way a noise might echo through an empty church. I had never heard him hum that deeply and didn’t think there was anyone else who could. I cried harder, but only because he was so kind, my brother, to lie at my side, wanting nothing more than to comfort me.

  Elegy

  Age 35. With them absent now for years you find yourself standing straighter, aching less, running faster. You sleep prone. You can do the military crawl. In the park women run past with neon sports bras, tanned stomachs. Little girls skate by, halter tops almost falling off, no thought of boys.

  Age 34. When you’re bored you dig the point of a paper clip into your arm, sharp and sweet and scarring. Your heart has been rope-burned from moving so fast, holding on so tight. The Man is gone, replaced by a memory like a magazine cutout tacked to your brain with sharp metal. Who broke up with whom, anyway? You had known it wouldn’t last. While he slept, you used to rub little tufts of his red hair between your fingers. Once you chased him with silver sewing scissors. “I need a lock for myself!” you shouted. “I’ll need it to go to sleep!”

  Age 33. The Man has bright red hair. He is prettier than you, skinnier than you, happier than you. You meet in cafés, bowling alleys, movie theaters. You meet in bedrooms, bathrooms, basements. You meet halfway. You meet all the way. You meet crying in the dark. You meet friends, you meet parents, you meet sisters. You meet everyone with red hair. You eat eggs in the mornings, white encircling yellow, circles encircling circles. You hike together to the soft, snowy tips of mountains, your faces blushing red. His hair feels like fire. When you touch him, you think your fingerprints might be burned off. When he touches you, you feel as if you could burn right to the ground.

  You take the pill daily at 4 p.m., on schedule exactly, because just imagine: your children would have his fire red hair and your terrible, errored DNA.

  Age 32. When The Man puts his cool hands on the slight curve of your waist, you take a deep breath, as if about to dive into dark waters. You remove your shirt swiftly, like drawing back the curtain to reveal the lie: the nearly empty length of you, navel to neck flat and white except for those two horizontal flaws—pink lines, double dashes that mark off the missing, inset like the slits of eyes on a swollen face, the skin around them tight and bumpy, squeezing in like pursed lips. He doesn’t sigh, he doesn’t stop, he doesn’t flutter his hands against you in some symbol of acceptance, he just pushes you backward on the bed and whispers in your ear, “What do you like?”

  Age 31. You meet a man in line at the grocery store. You meet another at the laundromat as you carry wet clothes to a dryer. You meet one outside a diner in the rain, your hair soaked and stringy. You want nothing to do with them. You are wearing something plain: a high school swim team sweatshirt, a baggy tee with no logo, a black raincoat. Anything to cover what isn’t there. The men look at you, and you look down at your hands, the bare, white fingers, even whiter where they clutch at the clear container of pointed, pale meringues, or a pocketed white bra, or the white paper coffee cup growing soggy from the rain and too many refills. Your fingers are toothpicky, you’ve always thought; a ring would fall right off of them.

  Age 30. The mirror takes courage. You start high. Your irises are light gray, like the moon, like your mother’s eyes. Your pupils, wide as marbles, wider than most, like your father’s. Everywhere, circles encircling circles. And below your neck, the fresh absence of circles. Frankenstein, you think. A monster, you think. No, no, no, you think, a marvel of modern science. Have you dodged a bullet? There’s the possibility that you never would have gotten sick at all, in which case what you’ve done is cut and run before even being called to battle.

  Body parts and the dead seem to float around you, invisible and heavy, like phantom limbs. In your wallet, a picture that you carry like a membership card. The picture is of you and your aunt and your mother in the backyard, bright yellow leaves poised in the blue-gray air, mid-descent. You are young and pigtailed, your aunt holds you above her head, you hold a shirtless Barbie above yours. You know nothing about your future, about the fates coded inside you.

  Age 29. Before the surgery, you spend days wandering through the grocery store listlessly. Is this what it’s like to be a man? Seeing them everywhere, in the configuration of fruits, on poultry labels, in the curved shape of pink ribbons? They stare up at you like eyes from magazine covers and five-dollar romance novels. You get it now, that men don’t really see the shirt’s neck at all, but what is contained in its inverse.

  You consider the jokes you could make if people didn’t look at you with such pity, something about making a clean _______ of it, getting things off your ______. It’s not really a joke, you guess. Really, your heart hammers in your ______, and sadness rises in your ______, and you think perhaps you’ve always played your cards too close to your ______.

  You seem to be levitating in a white room. Blue curtains swing back and forth as if you are on a stage, an opening act. A nightstand fills with cards, a windowsill with flowers. Your mother reads the cards aloud, all of them, word for word, even the words that aren’t handwritten, and then she describes the fronts to you as if you no longer have eyes either. “‘Get well soon,’” she says. “And look, flowers on the front, all purple.” Your father brings you books, the funnier the better. “Look at all of those cards,” he marvels. “Just look at all of those flowers,” he says, rubbing the petals softly between his thick fingers. In your dreams, cards and flowers float around you in circles. They have eyes that glance in all directions but yours. You look around deliriously, trying to catch an eye. “I forget the end of my sentence,” you say. Someone in the room is laughing. “I forget the end…I forget it before I get to the beginning.”

  Age 28. The stars align, misalign, realign. Your horoscope makes claims that never come true. A comet zooms through the sky, sperm-like. Can you wish on those? Your mother waits with you in a cold, pastel pink room that’s full of women wearing scarves, hats, wigs, women whose eyes are bulging from skeleton faces and blackening sockets, a room like where your mother went weekly when she was sick, while you stayed home with a friend, almost gleeful about the free rein, watching TV all evening with a bowl of ice cream the size of your head. You wait, your fingers wrapped tightly around a Styrofoam cup—the tea bag has broken, and confetti flakes surface, forming unreadable shapes. Soon you hold the results instead, pinched between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, the way you might hold a cookie’s fortune. Your mother’s face is as flat and white as paper.

  The doctor is pale with gray hair and a starched white coat. Perhaps he works so often with the dying that he is beginning to take on their colors. “I want them gone as soon as possible,” you say. He puts a hand on your shoulder, explains again that your mutated gene doesn’t guarantee anything, that the surgery’s just preventative, prophylactic, just-in-case. “Take time to think about it,” he says. But you have thought about it. You’ve been thinking about it for years. You’ve had dreams where you were miniature and helpless, sliding down your own double helix, passing through a terrible, quiet darkness, cold and damp like a cave, but worse because nothing could live there, or even try. “Off,” you say
. “I understand,” he says, so easily and without pity, because he knows the other possible futures, and you want to thank him for that, you want to fling him backward on the table and make sure, one last time, that what’s going won’t be missed.

  You sleep in your green-walled childhood room. Barbies stare into space from atop your bookshelf, sitting the only ways they know how, in painful splits or with legs placed properly together. If there were brains in their heads they’d be wondering what kind of woman you’ve become, wondering if you’ve used your body to its full advantage, or if you’ve used it beyond its full advantage and now it’s paying the price.

  Age 27. You are resigned to a fate no one has confirmed to be true. You’ve thought about making an appointment. You begin to wear baggy shirts, your ugliest plain gray sports bras, as if you’ve never worn shirts with necks that V, scoop, drape, plunge.

  Sometimes, late at night, you think you catch a glimpse of your aunt, of her white, gauzy nightgown, so thin and weightless it could only be made of air.

  You open your mouth—it’s empty and dark. Tongues arrive blindly as worms, squirming in and out of the inhospitable darkness, burrowing deep and then departing, depositing nothing, least of all love. You bring home a coworker who is not really your type, but who does what he’s asked without asking why. He likes them more than you do. If you were dating, you could present them to him as a parting gift, like a severed ear.

  Age 26. Your aunt’s cheeks have sunken in like the skin between the ribs of the deer that summer with no rain. You sit by her side relentlessly, like one of those conservationists who won’t leave a condemned tree. Here, you want to say, have my puffy cheeks, my healthy cells, but all you can do is hand her books, water, photographs. All you can do is watch as she becomes smaller, becomes sweatier, begins speaking in tongues. “This picture,” you say, your hands shaking. “This picture of us.” You want her to see how everything is suspended, how the bright yellow leaves seem to hover in the air. Her white nightgown flutters, her arm thrusts toward you with unexpected speed, as when, in the movies, you suddenly realize a body is not yet dead. “Stop,” she says, grabbing your wrist. “Just stop.”