Marshall is at school all day; he already had his spring vacation. Aviva plans to rise early each morning and walk
him to the bus stop, but when her alarm clock goes off she feels a brutalizing heaviness that makes her turn over and sleep again. She stays in bed until eleven o’clock, sometimes noon, then goes to walk along Clark Street, looking at the shops. The weather is sunny and brisk and helps her waken at last. She buys herself a late breakfast at the Parthenon Diner, even though her bank account at school is running low and she is afraid her father will not send her May allowance on time. Last month he was ten days late. She stops in the little stores where she used to spend her pocket money on dangling earrings, embossed pencils, decorated mugs, stuff that seems like junk now. Some of the salespeople are the same as always and they greet her.
On her second day home, Aviva walks into a hair salon that has a cleanly swept window and artful head shots at the front and asks a hairdresser who’s free to give her a short cut. The woman takes three steps back, studying, then comes forward to heft Aviva’s curls in one hand. She lets them fall. “Are you sure?” she asks.
Aviva is sure.
The woman gives her magazines to look at, asking her to choose a picture. “This would be cute,” she says. A young woman is seen in profile, the tips of her dark hair, which reach no lower than her earlobes, plastered against her cheek.
“All right,” Aviva agrees.
It causes some notice in the salon. Other customers comment on the long black ropes on the floor.
“Well, it’s more modern,” says one.
“You should save a lock,” offers an elderly woman. She produces a Baggie from her purse.
Aviva watches herself in all the shop windows as she walks home. She appears, disappears, appears again. She likes the haircut. Her head looks sleek and clean. She looks like someone who cuts to the chase, who doesn’t overthink or waste time. She smiles at herself and catches the smile in profile. People are watching her move down the block with such certainty, such intention.
“Whoa!” Marshall shouts when he arrives home from school. Suddenly Aviva doubts herself.
“What do you think?”
“Whoa
whoa!
”
“That bad?”
“No! You look like a model. Only you made such a big deal when I shaved my head.”
“Well, you did a terrible job.”
“It’s better now, isn’t it?” he asks anxiously. His hair has pretty much grown back in, although unevenly, and is for some reason darker than before.
“Much.”
“Why did you do it?” he wants to know.
“Why did you shave your head?”
They look at each other.
“Will Seung like it?” Marshall asks her.
“I don’t care what Seung likes.”
The hunger that she flew home with is gone and she can no longer eat her meals. The cereals and biscuits in the
pantry make her mouth go chalky. Now that Dotty isn’t around there is little fresh food and no cooked dinners. Mrs. Rossner catches meals on the fly—a bowl of cereal, peanut butter on crackers—or forgets. In the evenings Aviva makes herself and Marshall scrambled eggs or tuna fish sandwiches. They go out one afternoon and stock up on a few things at the supermarket. But most of what they throw together she can’t put in her mouth.
Their mother is emptying cabinets, going through old boxes shoved to the back of closets. It’s an ominous sign. Is she planning to move? “Look what I found,” she says. She is not a woman prone to nostalgia, yet once upon a time she apparently took the trouble to fix black-and-white family photographs to an album with sturdy black pages. The photographs are held in place with little white corners, but many fall loose when Aviva turns the sheets, their backs stained yellow with old glue.
Their father is almost absent from the photographs, as if all that time ago he already anticipated his disappearance. Of course that is nonsense. It is because he was the one taking the pictures. Their mother looks slim and severe, more European than she does now. America has smoothed her out, created a bit of slack in her face and posture. Marshall is a chubby boy with full cheeks and various expressions of inward delight. He seems never completely present, but his absence is benevolent, fond. Aviva appears as the responsible older sister, her hand on Marshall’s shoulder turning him toward the camera, or sitting with him on the rug
holding up the flash cards she’s made, large capitals in thick marker, to teach him how to read.
A couple of days later, after Aviva washes her hair, the cut doesn’t look as sleek and sculptural as it did at the salon. The hairdresser did something special with the blow-dryer and some gel. Aviva can’t replicate it. Her hair stands away from her head, bushy, dull-looking. She ties one of her mother’s silk scarves around it and that’s better. But later she takes it off. She tells herself her hair looks fine the way it is.
Marshall will turn thirteen the week after Aviva returns to school, so they have a small celebration, with cupcakes Aviva bakes but cannot manage to eat. Marshall says now that he’s going to be a teenager he will become responsible and good all the time. He will do all his work and be interested in his classes. Mrs. Rossner says that is wonderful news if true. Marshall is going to summer school after all, to do catch-up work in English and social studies especially. No summer baseball for him this year. For a gift, Mrs. Rossner has bought Marshall an enormous book of baseball statistics, which makes him leap around with delight. Aviva, with careful budgeting, was able to buy him a Walkman. Surprised, awed, he throws his arms around her.
They sing a round of “Happy Birthday” for Aviva, too. Her birthday is not long after Marshall’s, on the sixth of May, and she won’t be home until June. Marshall says he’ll send her present in the mail, once he figures out what it is. In the past he’s given her a painted snail shell, three of his beloved Plastic Man comic books, a poem with stanzas
praising her best qualities, one for each year of her life, and, back when collecting these was the center of his existence, a package of Matchbox cars.
A few days before the end of Aviva’s vacation, she and Marshall make a trip downtown to see their father. Edith is on a visit to her sister’s in New Jersey, but the apartment is still magically filled with the scent of her perfume. Although Aviva and Marshall have not mentioned their mother, Mr. Rossner announces that he prefers not to talk about her, now or in the future. It was time for things to come to an end, that’s all. He’ll always be there for them. He takes them to the enclosed pool on the roof. The air is cold under the glass dome but the water is supposedly heated. There’s a lifeguard with floppy blond hair who crouches alertly over the vacant pool, ready to address any misfortune. Muscled, anchored, he looks maybe twenty or twenty-one. Someone masculine and competent who can’t be bothered with college. Aviva feels his eyes on her ass and legs as she places her things on a lounge chair. She’s glad she didn’t put on a bathing cap. Marshall is white and flabby and unhappy in his red trunks. He sits at the side paddling his feet in the water, and pronounces it cold. Aviva bends down to test with her hand—he’s right. Their father retreats to a chair at the back to read some radiology reports.
Aviva stands at the deep end and pretends to be Seung, imagines the way he positions himself in a crouch and then plunges into the water without hesitation. She is aware too of the lifeguard’s interest and wants to look confident. She
dives. The cold clamps around her, knocks her forgetful for a moment. She kicks to the surface, startled, having briefly lost her sense of direction. For a moment panic flits through her as she instinctively feels what it would be like to turn and turn under the water and never find
up
again. It’s okay, she thinks. I’m here—
above.
Very quickly her body warms, and she swims the way Seung taught her, each arm wheeling up straight and strong, each kick tight and clean. She is surprised at how quickly the wall comes forward to meet her, how fast she moves. How strong she is. She counts sixty laps and then hoists herself to the deck, tingling, content.
Marshall is still dithering at the shallow end. “I’ll pull you in,” she warns him.
“No!” He shrinks back, genuinely horrified. She is sorry. You can’t spread happiness, can’t force someone into your pleasures.
She looks around the atrium. “Where did Dad go?”
“Back to the apartment to do some work. He said see you for dinner.”
Her hair is weightless; she roughs it up with her towel a few times and it’s nearly dry. As she tosses the towel into the hamper by the door the lifeguard trots up to her and says, “Hey.” He smiles and hands her a piece of paper. In the changing room she opens it. He’s written down his name, his phone number. She folds the paper and slides it into her jeans. For the rest of her Chicago stay she carries it around and looks at it, thinking about his desire for her, imagining the solidity of him, how he might come inside of her and
put an end to the awful spell that keeps her lacking, but she knows she won’t call him. No one thinks she’s a good girl, but she’s more loyal, more chained, than anyone knows.
When I saw her shorn like that it struck me for the first time that things weren’t exactly as we had all believed. To see them walking around campus, Seung’s hand shoved in the back pocket of her jeans, to see them in the common room, him stretched out like some sort of pasha, Aviva perched on his hips—they were fully dressed but might as well have been naked—you thought that here were two people completely abandoned to each other, oblivious to anything else. We wanted that, too. We wanted to be drugged by sex; we wanted to be shameless, impolite, entitled. We wanted to worship and be worshipped. How they got away with it, we didn’t know. Why they didn’t get caught, disciplined. In the butt rooms, over dinner, boys would say, “Fuck, who do they think they are?” They’d say, “If I tried that you know it would be the boot for me.”
But the haircut. And she looked thin. Drawn. You don’t hack off hair like that, hair that looks and smells like sex, for
no reason. She held herself almost as though she were being punished. I imagine how Seung reacted the first time he saw the change. She wouldn’t have told him in advance. She didn’t call him on the phone the whole time she was in Chicago. That’s what I imagine. He would have held his hand above her shoulder where the heavy fall of hair used to be, cupped the emptiness. That would be his way. He wouldn’t say anything about it, and no expression would cross his face. He was good at that kind of self-containment; it was bred into him. He’d be the first to acknowledge that. He’d just hold that negative space, feel it, remember. He couldn’t even bring himself to mind the loss. He loved her so much, he still thought she looked beautiful, even with that frizzed, lopsided bush, so awkward and strange.
Seung is preparing. Now that he’s proven himself there’s no reason he can’t succeed with Aviva. One morning during the vacation he takes the train to the city and visits a particular market in Chinatown, where he buys a supplement promised to increase potency. He mixes the foul-tasting herb with a cup of green tea every morning. And he refrains from masturbating. Whatever will give him a little advantage. His erections torment him at night, hard and unsubsiding. Sterne says he calls out in his sleep.
“What did I say?”
“You talked about the high dive. You said, ‘the competition.’ ‘I’ll break my back,’ you said.”
Sterne looks away in the morning when Seung dresses, pretending not to notice. Seung keeps well under the table in class, wears long sweaters under his blazer even though the weather has grown warm. He begins to be confident
that he will possess Aviva soon. After that, the other times will be like false starts at a race; now the whistle will blow and he will blaze out from the wall and claim his victory.
During the second week of May, Aviva’s roommate has to go home to Maine for her grandmother’s funeral. And Seung and Aviva decide that he will come to her room. They’ve never done this before. It’s more dangerous—Hiram faces two other dorms where students come frequently in and out, and Aviva’s not sure that Carlyle and Lena will make sentries as good as Sterne and Giddings. But perhaps a change of place will be what they need. His room is full of their failures.
The day is pleasant and mild, the dormitories hold a leftover chill. After the year’s traffic the linoleum floors are scuffed, the stairwell walls smudged with handprints and pen marks. Aviva waits in her room, uneasy. Her room is smaller and older than Seung’s, shabbier. The one window leaks a wan light over her roommate’s bed. Aviva has never done anything to decorate her own side of the room. Her roommate has a corkboard tacked with snapshots of her friends: on a beach, on skis, making faces. Aviva’s wall is bare. She has one framed photo of her parents and brother on top of her dresser, taken when they went to the Dominican Republic the winter before last. Marshall is propping up the tail of a gigantic iguana. Their father is warily holding the head. Aviva, between them, supports the belly. She remembers that it felt smooth and hard and cool. Their mother stands to the side, gazing at the group rather than
at the camera, as if she is analyzing the scene for an upcoming lecture. A barefoot man on the beach had come up to them with the iguana, offering to take their picture with it for twenty pesos.
Seung slides into the room silently, nodding his reassurance:
No problem.
The door clicks quietly behind him. He is bursting, afraid he will not be able to wait, afraid he will touch her too roughly. When they kiss he counts the seconds to steady himself. He is like a monk meditating under torture, following his breath to keep his mind clear and sovereign. He rolls Aviva onto her back and kisses her neck and belly. She turns her face away, trying not to think. He puts his mouth between her legs. He’s done this a couple of times before, but she always stops him after a while: it’s hurting, she’ll say. She’s wondered if something is wrong with her, that she can’t come this way, only with herself, with her hands or her thoughts. She tugs a little at his hair, to signal that she wants him to come back up, but he ignores her.