About a Girl (4 page)

“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.” Raoul 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 Anzald
ú
a: “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 something 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.”

“
To
Shane?” Henri echoed, alarmed.

“
With
Shane,” I said, kicking at the floor, where one of our tattered old rag rugs was slowly decaying into bits across the wooden floorboards. One of us should have thrown it out ages ago. There was a silence.

“Ah,” Raoul said. “I see.” Henri caught on a second later.

“
Oh,
” he said. “You know we’re here for you if you—if you need anything.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ll muddle through it. But thanks.”

But I was not accustomed to muddling through; I had never met a problem I could not solve with brisk efficiency and diligent application of my tremendous intellect. The possibility that the calculus of the heart might differ from the formulae with which I had successfully plotted forces and velocities was not one I elected to allow. That night after dinner I helped Henri with the dishes. “Let’s set up a hypothetical,” I said conversationally to the soapy water.