Girls of a Certain Age Read online

  Grace is an expert. How many evenings, before we even lived together, had Grace finagled herself into my bed, claiming she was too exhausted, too drunk, too cold to go home? Flip off the light, turn on the fan to blur the city sounds. There in the dark, humming, dreamlike night, Grace’s small, delicate hands would creep across my tingling skin, gently trace the scoop of my waist, the broad curve of my hips. But I’d wake in the blind-sliced morning light and find her curled up so far on the other side of the bed she was almost falling out of it.

  After a few months of living together, our periods sync up and we spend days crying in tandem about our lives and our bodies. Grace leaves pieces of chocolate around the house, and I sniff them out like a truffle pig. We lie on the couch head to foot using chairs as side tables, hot-water bottles resting on our stomachs, reading women’s magazines, pointing out the clothes that would fit us worst, commiserating about our terrible, dead-end jobs and the much better lives we were supposed to be living.

  But the secret is, as we sit side by side in bed watching TV on my little whirring laptop, huddled up close to make out the sound from my cheap speakers, the computer warming us, and the light shining on our faces as if we are staked out around a campfire, alone in dark woods, far away from anyone who cares what we do, sometimes then I think I’m just a finger’s width away from the life I am supposed to be living.

  For Grace’s twenty-sixth birthday, I bake a devil’s food cake and then slather it in vanilla buttercream frosting. We are eating it before dinner to be sure to fit it in, and then Darren will come over for dinner. We sing “Happy Birthday” together, Grace’s face golden in the flickering birthday-candle light, a colorful confetti of wax dripping onto the frosting. When we finish singing, Grace takes a deep, considered breath and blows out the candles, sending us into the dark.

  “Happy birthday,” I whisper. She grabs my hand as if she’s about to fall, though she’s sitting perfectly still. I squeeze it. She seems about to say something, but then her phone lights up and begins to trill.

  “My parents,” she says. She lets my hand go, jumps up, flips on the light.

  Through the phone, I hear the muffled, off-key, Midwestern voices of her parents singing the song we just sang alone.

  In pictures, Grace’s parents are always drinking translucent cocktails next to terrible things like horses or politicians or rosebushes.

  I cut us pieces of cake. Grace puts the phone on Speaker to free up her hands for eating. I point to myself—should I announce my presence?—but Grace holds a finger to her lips, indicating quiet instead.

  At the song’s end, everyone claps except me. I am busy, anyway, scratching out little pieces of wax from the frosting with the tines of my fork.

  “Did you get the check?” her father asks.

  “Yes, thank you,” says Grace before taking a silent bite of cake.

  “Are you getting along with your roommate? What’s her name again?” asks her mother.

  “Sophie,” says Grace. “Thick as thieves.”

  “We got the pictures of your new place,” says her mother. “It looks very nice.”

  “Even though it is all the way out in Queens,” says her father.

  “We aren’t sure why you decided to live all the way out there,” says her mother.

  “You’re looking quite healthy too,” says her father.

  Grace freezes mid-chew. “How healthy?”

  “There are men who like that sort of thing,” says her mother.

  I take a giant, spiteful bite of cake and then begin washing the dishes. Grace switches off Speaker and finishes the conversation in her room.

  I think of Grace’s parents and wonder if I’m better off with mine. My father has been calling more frequently. Ever since Grace moved in, he has shifted from asking me questions about how to do certain things in Gmail to asking me about my sex life. My mother vaguely blames my sexuality on his lack of boundaries. “No wonder you’re turned off by men,” she says, though clearly he hasn’t had the same effect on her—she is busy in Boston with a new husband and a trio of pale, grown-up stepsons whose names all begin with B.

  My father’s main flaw is boundless, childlike curiosity. He can find out more about a stranger in ten minutes than some people know about their own siblings—I once overheard him talking to a JCPenney employee about her abortion. But he hardly goes out anymore, and he is lonely, much lonelier now that my mother has taken her half of the furniture. He mutters around our big, empty house all day like a ghost searching for evidence of his earthly existence, pointing at where things once were. “That table,” he says. “Where is that table now?” “There’s no coatrack anymore. What will people do with their coats? What does your mother expect me to do with their coats?” I tell him to buy a new coatrack. “I want my coatrack,” he says. My mother doesn’t have this problem. Her house is overcrowded with furniture: half of the furniture from her marriage with my father, half from the new husband’s old marriage, and a selection from the sons, stacked along the walls in the basement.

  I dial my father, resting the phone between my shoulder and my ear, and hang a mug that says REPUBLICAN in an ugly serif font upside down on the drying rack.

  “You’re living with a woman,” he says, without pleasantries. I can hear his voice echoing through our old house.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Then you must be sleeping with her.”

  “Do you sleep with every woman you meet?” I say.

  “I would if I could,” he says. “How can you stand it?”

  “I’m not, like, a straight-up lesbian,” I say.

  “Amazing,” he says. “The modern world is astounding.”

  I suddenly notice Grace leaning casually against the doorframe, perfectly still, wearing something I’ve never seen before, a sleeveless, cottony A-line dress with red and white pinstripes. She looks like a pinup. The vertical lines curve gently in at her waist, the fitted bodice frames a subtle shadow of cleavage. She glides up next to me, listening in.

  “What’s it like to make love to a woman?” he asks. “As a woman, I mean.” I look at Grace and roll my eyes, but her eyebrows are raised as if to say, “Yeah, what’s it like?”

  “I have to go,” I say, and end the call.

  “You didn’t have to hang up,” she says. I have told her about my father—she wants a landline so she can answer the phone and assess for herself.

  I point at the REPUBLICAN mug. “I don’t like this one.”

  “It’s supposed to be ironic,” she says.

  “But your parents are Republicans,” I say. “They call gay people homosexuals.”

  “At least,” she says, “my parents have gotten us these dresses.” She puts her hands on her hips, turns her head sideways, and shrugs a shoulder up toward her chin in a profile pose. She freezes for a moment, as if waiting for a camera to flash, and then comes back to life, pinching the skirt of the dress between her finger and thumb. “There’s one for you.”

  She leads me through the maze of chairs to her bedroom closet, where the red-striped dress hangs, tags still attached. At its side, three more pairs of matching dresses—that makes eight new dresses in total—in other colors, all low-cut and high-hemmed.

  I am a little stunned by their sudden appearance, by the stealth with which they have appeared. “When did you get these?” I ask. I touch the one that’s light pink, silky and smooth as Grace’s skin, on the verge of negligee.

  “Here and there,” she says vaguely.

  The tailored seams, the fine fabric—they are obviously well-made. But even so, they look almost tawdry hanging there in duplicates.

  “Am I seeing double?” Darren asks when we open the door.

  Grace throws me a satisfied glance. “Guess!” she shouts. “Guess which one I am!”

  For dinner, I’ve pulled two of our extra chairs into the kitchen, one for me to sit on and one for my plate, so that Darren and Grace have seats at the table. Grace and I sit side by side in o
ur dresses, matching except my dress is two sizes bigger than Grace’s, and on me the pinstripes look less sex symbol and more circus act. Still, we seem to work as a pair.

  Grace spends the meal moving her shrimp fettuccine to different parts of her plate. She’s eating her salad, leaving her bowl with a layer of walnuts, cranberries, and cheese. She has no problem draining her wineglass. Darren pours us all more as Grace flings her fork between Darren and me, asking us questions as if she’s a quiz show host.

  “Your first kiss?” Grace says. She points her fork at Darren and almost hits his wineglass.

  “Tina. Second grade. Swing set,” says Darren.

  “You?” she says, pointing at me with one hand and now gripping her wineglass with the other as if it contains the elixir of life.

  “Miss Scarlet. Kitchen. Candlestick,” I say.

  “That’s not a real answer,” she says, pouting.

  I shrug. There’s no reason not to tell the story, but I don’t want anyone else to own it, especially not Grace. Grace’s things have found their way into every crevice of the apartment, Grace herself has found her way nightly into my bed, and I sit wearing a Grace-prescribed dress, which is to say, I want to keep a little something for myself.

  Darren reaches both of his hands across the table to squeeze ours. “You two look glorious tonight,” he says earnestly, gazing at our matching outfits.

  Grace smiles. She gets up to start on the dishes. “No, no,” I say, getting up too. She inches close to me, so we are face-to-face. My heart races with schoolgirl giddiness. She presses her hand into the small of my back, drawing me into her, though she is looking at Darren. I follow her gaze: he is wide-eyed, slack-jawed. She kisses me slowly, showily.

  “Goddamn,” says Darren. I think of Grace’s legs glinting with lotion in the sunlight of her empty apartment, Darren watching from the hall.

  Grace inches her finger up and down, beckoning him.

  We are all adults, I realize daily, realize once again. We can do anything we want.

  The evening exists out of time and space. As a pair, Grace and I are magical, shining and buoyant. We are Siamese twins with a shared brain and separate tongues. We are making love with extra limbs, we are making love in a room full of mirrors, we are a shout and an echo, the answers to questions and the questions themselves. We are sharing so much it feels like a blacklistable, communist offense. My bed pitches like a raft at sea. We know that above us—above the ceiling, the roof, the gray wash of smog and clouds—there are sequiny stars, and we feel they are guiding the way.

  But when I dive under the covers, I am all alone in the dark, a deep-sea explorer without compass or map to show me the route. It doesn’t matter: I know it by instinct. I inch my tongue up between her legs, suck the soft, sweet oyster from its hard, gray shell. “Oh, oh, oh,” I hear her say, a siren’s song traveling down from the airy surface, where Darren gets to look into her shocked, pleasured eyes.

  In the morning, I take two Excedrin and see Darren out, and then get back in bed and snuggle up close to still-sleeping Grace. I wiggle my fingers across Grace’s stomach, but she doesn’t acknowledge them. “My head,” she says, and rolls away from me, to the edge of the bed.

  “That was amazing,” she says. She opens her eyes. “Let’s do it again.” For a moment I think she means us, me and her, right now, let’s do it again. “His expression,” she says. “He was so thrilled!”

  The two of us? We don’t do it again, not really, not yet. After Darren, Grace seems distant, distracted. She doesn’t touch me in the dark. When I try to touch her, she skitters away. An exception: One night we are both drunk and there is no moon and I slip my hand in her underwear and she makes no move to acknowledge me but arches her back against the pulsing curve of my finger, and then stiffens and sleeps, all without a word.

  The morning after, I wake up to her looming above me, poking her finger into my shoulder over and over, acting as if nothing ever happened. “Let’s start running,” she says. It’s still dark. She’s wearing an ensemble that’s so neon it seems to glow.

  “Now?” I ask.

  “Obviously now,” she says. “You think I’m wearing this to work?”

  “This is about your parents,” I say.

  “Who cares?” she says, and she throws some neon spandex in my face.

  This is how we end up running down Northern Boulevard each cold, dark pre-breakfast morning, yellow headlit cars whizzing by, my stomach cavernous, my eyelids heavy.

  When we get home, Grace opens the fridge and stares into it, as if it’s a museum painting she longs to touch.

  My father calls, waking me up from a dead sleep. “What’s the matter?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” he says. “Did I wake you? I thought you were up all the time.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “You’re looking very good,” he says matter-of-factly.

  “How would you know what I look like?” I ask.

  “You sent a picture,” he says.

  “No,” I say, but when I look back at my text messages it’s there, Grace and me that afternoon in our running gear.

  “You know what your mother took?” he says. I can hear him pacing around the house. “All of the recipe books, plus the shelves they were stored on. I don’t have one recipe from all of our years together.”

  “But you don’t cook,” I say. “At least she left the microwave.”

  “That’s not the point at all,” he says.

  “Dad, it’s two in the morning. What is the point?”

  “I do have a question for you, since you have pleasured both men and women—”

  “Jesus, Dad,” I say. “Come on.”

  “Never can tell with you, kid. Sometimes you want to talk about it, and sometimes—”

  “I don’t ever want to talk about it,” I say, and hang up the phone. But I’m not mad, not really. He’s like a toddler who’s drawn on the walls to test out the crayons. I wonder, sometimes, if all his questions aren’t really just the same two questions appearing in different forms: What makes a person love a person? What makes a lover leave?

  Grace rolls over in bed. “Who’s that?” she asks.

  “Did you send my dad a picture of us?” I ask.

  “Does he like it?” And even in the dark I can see her smiling that leg-lotion smile I’m beginning to hate.

  One morning when we get back from a run, I fling myself on the peeling white-painted stoop and pant loud as a dog. I raise myself up and half-heartedly lean over my leg, forcing myself to stay down for ten Mississippis.

  When I look up, Grace has her leg slung over the porch railing like a ballerina at the barre, her ass facing the downstairs window where Vinny lives, the point of her chin to her knee. “Mmmm,” she groans into her stretch.

  A strong coffee-and-cat-litter scent enters my nostrils, and I look up to see Vinny, peeking out his door in his black bathrobe, ogling Grace’s ass and shaking his head. “Sorry,” he says. “She just gets more beautiful every day.” Thinner is what he means. She gets thinner every day.

  Grace flings her leg off the porch railing and bends herself in half, her outstretched hands flat on the porch. From this position, she looks back at Vinny and smiles. “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you very much.”

  Upstairs, getting ready for work, Grace appears from the bathroom with a towel swirled around her head and another wrapped around her body. “Do you remember Darren’s face?” she asks. She looks top-heavy. Her head seems very large, like the bright plastic ball on top of a pin.

  “Yes,” I say. “Astonished.” She’s right about Darren’s face. Even a woman who likes women rarely looks at you quite that way—in awe of not just the opportunity, but of the mystery, of the distinct female otherness of your beauty.

  “Like we were fucking angels sent from heaven!” she says. Despite the towels, there’s a puddle at her feet, as if she’s melting into the spot she’s standing in. “We could do it again, you know,” s
he says. “I have lots of ex-boyfriends.”

  “Sure,” I say. I can’t tell if she’s joking. “Let’s make dreams come true.”

  “Let’s change our name to the Make-A-Wish Foundation!” she exclaims.

  “Let’s file as a nonprofit!” I shout.

  “I’m serious, though.” And she is.

  It’s simple to execute. We look up each man online, discuss his personality and pleasant physical features, and then Grace calls him up, announcing the plan as if he has just won Publishers Clearing House. “Are you sure?” he asks. “Is this a joke?” “Should I break up with my girlfriend?” “Am I taking advantage?”

  We come in matching bras with matching mini breastbone bows. We try everything, the full spread, blindfolds and baby oil and brightly colored toys. “There are too many monkeys jumping on the bed,” Grace chants as we play.

  In the morning, we lie skin to skin to skin, like spoons stacked in the silverware drawer. With no courtship, there’s no aftermath. The exit is peaceful and unembarrassed. There’s some strange, beautiful diffusion of responsibility. Swaying home on the LIRR, Grace and I sit side by side, silent and quivering, the sun flashing behind our closed eyes, the shared secret pulsing through us as if we’ve escaped the scene of a crime. When we open our eyes, we see the other people on the train staring blankly ahead. These people on the train, we think smugly, these people know nothing.

  “Are we ruining feminism?” I ask Grace one day. “Are we purposefully turning ourselves into objects of the male gaze?”

  “Objects?” says Grace. “We are goddamn superheroes.”

  And sometimes, when Grace and I are jetting through New York under the guise of night or kneeling next to each other on a carpet somewhere in the metropolitan area, I agree. How did this become a symbol of submission? I feel like Grace and I are the most powerful women in the world. The men thank God, they thank the heavens, they thank the Holy Trinity and their lucky stars and women’s lib and the porn industry. They’d like to thank the academy and the first girl they ever kissed and their parents for giving birth to them. They thank us, again and again. We find thank-you texts on our phones, letters in our mailbox, flowers on our doorstep. Juan, the painter, sends us a perfect pencil sketch of two women embracing. Rob mails matching silver studs wrapped in matching jewelry boxes finished with matching bows. Grace holds the silver earring up to an ear, admiring herself in the mirror. “I always worried they’d forget me,” she says—who are these people who could forget Grace?—“but now they don’t want me to forget them.”