Authors: Patricia Engel
These fights would go on till a neighbor called the police, till one of us quit, dropped to our knees in apology, till one of us began negotiating or proposed some semiplausible reconciliation plan, till we fell into each other again and admitted ownership as if there were no other choice but to keep this calamitous opera in production.
Just when I’ve beaten the night, I feel his arm on me. Lou shaking me from my half sleep, his muscular fingers tugging my skin. The darkness breaks with the glow of the street, spots of car lights on the walls, shining right through Lou so he looks as if he has a halo. He turns on a lamp. He’s got a guitar hanging from a strap on his back and another, which he hands to me. I sit up, let the quilt become a pond around my waist. Take the guitar from him and run my fingertips over the fat metal strings.
I think maybe he wants to talk, but when I ask him what’s wrong he puts his finger to his lips and shakes his head. We run through chord progressions. Play a few songs. In a couple of months, Lou has given me a small repertoire.
If you didn’t know better, you might think I have talent. A real miracle worker, that Lou, teaching the unteachable.
We stay like this for a while. Lou, shirtless and shiny like porcelain, in black drawstring pajama pants, holding the guitar in his lap like a child. And me, in my university sweats, letting him lead me. Then I see Olive on the edge of the room like it’s her curtain call and she’s the sleeping princess who’s come out for applause in her gauzy nightgown, sleepy-faced, pillow-bruised cheeks.
I stop my strumming and Lou looks behind him to see why.
I apologize for waking her, though I know that’s not what she came for.
She doesn’t say anything. Just stands there, and Lou gets up, tells me good night. He follows her down the hall and I hear the door click shut behind them.
Once we went to Coney Island and Nico got his teeth knocked out by some locals who didn’t like his swagger. They were following us for a while, cooing that I had a hot ass and asking how much. When we were leaning on a railing sipping slushies, the guys came up close. Nico told them to fuck off and next thing you know they had him on the ground, his fly busted open, blood on his face, eyes shut like a smashed-up
newborn. We were only together a few months by then, but that was the clincher. We’d laugh about it later, especially when his replacement teeth came loose or fell out while he was eating, say that that day was like a scene out of
The Warriors
and I was the girl in the leotard dress whose nipples are popping throughout the whole movie.
“The punches I took for you,” Nico would say, like it was a debt to be paid.
I used to say: Why can’t we be like normal people? Go to the bookstore, the movies, eat meals in restaurants and have conversations about things other than our latest love war, communicate in a language beyond screaming and screwing. We could be friends with other couples, have brunch, and hold hands at parties instead of eyeing each other like cannibals.
We could talk to each other, listen to each other.
We could teach each other things, make each other better people.
I used to say: I wish we met ten years from now. Maybe we could be something. Something other than what we are.
In the morning, I pretend to be asleep until the whole family is awake. Lou leaves to get the newspaper and Olive flounders
around the kitchen making eggs for the boys with such little finesse I wonder if she has ever prepared a meal in her life. The twins are still in their pajamas; mussed blond tuffs of hair, sleep crust around their eyes. They’re telling Sierra a story about Martians and marshmallows, wizards, and blizzards, and I try to follow, but there’s no chance.
I ask Olive if I can help her out.
“Sure. Beat some more eggs for me. These kids eat a lot.”
I go to work on the scrambling, and she leans against the stove, so close the back of her jeans might catch fire. Again, she has that blurry gaze, like she’s both here and living in another city at the same time, with another family.
I decide to go the extra-polite route.
“Thanks again for letting me stay here. I really appreciate it. It’s nice to be around a family in a time like this and you have such a lovely home.”
She lifts her top lip. I guess it’s supposed to be a smile.
“You don’t have family?”
“They’re in Jersey.”
“You don’t have friends?”
I rotate the fork so quickly in the bowl that the eggs pull into a perfect open blanket. I move past her to tuck them into the frying pan.
“I just came out of a relationship.”
“You’re a grown-up when you realize no one’s going to take care of you.”
“Right.”
“Lou is not the cheating type, you know.”
I wonder if we’re having the same conversation. As far as I can tell, she has no reason to be wary of me, but if there’s anything I’ve learned in my life, it’s that I am usually wrong about everything.
“I can tell. He adores you. He talks about you all the time.”
“That’s right. He does.”
And then, “You want some advice, Bean? That’s what he calls you, right?”
I nod.
“Guard what’s yours.”
I don’t say anything. Just finish off the eggs while she watches like I’m her employee, the lines of her home clearly drawn.
I eat with the kids. I don’t even like eggs but I chew them, slowly, feel them glide down my throat. Lou returns with the paper but puts it away so the kids won’t see the pictures or headlines. After I help clean up the breakfast mess, I slip into the living room and pull my bag out from behind the sofa.
I tell them I’m leaving. Thank them too much for their
hospitality. Act like they saved my life but, really, I just want to run.
Lou insists on walking me to the corner. It’s all I permit even though he offered to take me all the way back downtown, make sure everything is okay at home. I don’t want to look him in the face and I feel bad for that fact. He’s been good to me.
“Once it calms down, we can start your lessons again.”
I smile, yeah sure. Though I’m obviously out of a job. My workplace doesn’t exist anymore. Won’t be able to afford those late-night sessions.
He goes for a kiss on my cheek but instead hits the curve between my nose and lip, and I drape an arm around him quick, give him the hug he wants, then pull off and cross the street before the light changes.
On the way home, fellow pedestrians are mute, shock-eyed, and I long for noise. At Union Square, the park is transformed into a shrine lined with candles and posters of the disappeared. I feel inappropriate. We’re supposed to be mourning and all I want is to scream.
There he is.
Nico. Sitting on my bed, writing in a notebook. I forgot he still has a key.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he says.
“How did you know I was coming back?”
“You weren’t on the list of the missing. I checked.”
He tells me he’s been in New York all along. The stint in Los Angeles was brief and pointless and he’s been living in Green Point ever since. He walked across the bridge right after the planes hit, made his way to me. Must have arrived right after I left with Lou.
We look at each other a long time. There is no big conversation. No more questions. No push for repentance. For once we’re calling it even. I’m here. You’re here. That’s all we need. In spite of everything, and because love stories never end when they should, I believe we still have a chance.
We tuck into each other like origami, fall asleep like captive hamsters, our lips touching, pretending we’re each other’s reasons for surviving the cataclysm. We’re good for a while, too. Build a pretty pattern of peace—me cooking us dinner, Nico playing with my hair and counting all the ways we’re perfect together, starting with the fact that we wear the same size jeans.
I think this is it: the near-death experience we needed to make us work.
For a moment, I’m happy.
It will be months, and most of the wreckage will have already been cleared, before we admit it’s not enough. It will
be uneventful, the way most life-changing moments are. You don’t see them happening.
An April morning. Getting ready for my new job. I will be making my coffee the way I like it: dark, bitter, thick mire with no milk or sugar. He will come up behind me, press his naked chest to my back. He will slip his hand around my mug and take a sip, make a spitting sound and ask how I can drink this shit—say, “Leave it to a Colombiana to ruin the coffee,” push me out of the way, “Let me show you how it’s done, baby.” And I will decide without his knowing, without ever saying, with only an amended gaze that he will never notice, to let the story end.
GREEN
Your mom just called to tell you that Maureen, the girl who tortured you from kindergarten to high school, who single-handedly made it so that you were never welcome in Girl Scouts, soccer, or yearbook, is dead. Maureen, who said you weren’t invited to her ninth birthday party because you were too tall and your head would bust through the roof of her house. Maureen, who said that your skin was the color of diarrhea, that your Colombian dad dealt drugs, that boys didn’t like you because you looked like their maids, is finally, finally dead.
Officially it was some kind of organ failure, but Maureen is dead because she hasn’t eaten in years. You know Maureen went through years of food rehab till her family’s money ran out and then she went into the free experimental programs at Columbia Pres. You know Maureen’s dad died a few years ago of brain cancer, diagnosed and buried within three months. You know Maureen was a little bananas at the
end, because, of all people in the world, she started writing letters to you—not sure how she got your address. You’ve moved a dozen times since high school, when you had your last blowout with her right after the graduation ceremony. She called you a shit-skinned whore in your white dress, miniature red roses in your French twist. She’d only just started losing weight and you shouted back that she was a fat albino midget no diet would ever save, something you will always regret.
You never knew why Maureen picked you to hate. Her brother was a nice person—made it to Yale and was the family pride. He always asked you how things were going when you ran into him in town. And Maureen’s parents were okay people. They even showed up at your grandfather’s funeral, said they knew him from the Rotary Club. But Maureen was a monster in a short, tight gymnastics body, thick ankles and black hair from her Portuguese mom, freckled like a dalmatian thanks to her Irish dad.
Your mom is sighing because it’s really tragic when a girl you’ve watched grow up dies.
“And her mother,” says your mom. “That poor, poor woman.”
She says she’ll go to the funeral and maybe you should send the family a card like you did when the interior decorator’s son drowned in their pool last summer. You didn’t even
know the guy but you liked his mom because once, when you were just passing through the living room, she looked up from the upholstery swatches she’d brought your mom to tell you that you had the eyes of a fairy tale.
So Maureen is dead and your mom reads you the obituary they printed in today’s paper. Maureen Reilly. Aged twenty-four. Beloved daughter, beloved friend. You remember the Maureen you saw at midnight mass a few years back. Even in heavy winter clothes you could see that her thighs were the size of your wrist. Her eyes bulged and her teeth jutted out of her face like those plastic ones you wind up and let chatter all over the floor for laughs. She’d lost a lot of her hair, got more wrinkles than her mom, the queen of YMCA aerobics. She was just twenty-two or so then, already looked like a corpse and had this stupid look on her face, like she was laughing to a comedy playing in her head.
She saw you and waved from her place on the pew next to her family. You tried not to look at her decaying body, tried to be matter-of-fact about it when your family talked about the sight of her during the car ride home, saying Maureen used to be so cute and look at her now. The only recent gossip you had on her was that her high-school boyfriend, a footballer named Kevin, impregnated and married her former
best friend, another ruthless soccer girl named Shannon. You even felt pity for Maureen. You’d just been cheated on for the first time and felt the pain of wounded women everywhere.
A month later, Maureen wrote you a letter. She wanted to get together. She knew you lived in the city now but was hoping you could come out to Jersey. Said she was still living with her parents and was saving up to rent a place in Hoboken or Weehawken. You made the mistake of telling your mom about the letter and she guilted you into going.
You met Maureen at a diner by the train tracks. Ordered yourself a salad and watched her watch you eat it while she ordered herself nothing.
She said, “I’m not sure if you know I’ve got a problem with food.”
You said you had a vague idea. Didn’t say it’d been all over the town wires for years already, how she dropped out of some crap college to get treatment, was working a few hours a week gift-wrapping at a local children’s clothing store. Not to mention the road map of fat veins that looked like they were trying to break out of her face.
She said, “I remember you did, too. Back in high school. You were so thin.”
You don’t know how this ended up being about you. Until then, you thought maybe the world was becoming a place of justice and Maureen was looking to repent for her
cruelty. But all she really wanted were your diet secrets from the eleventh grade when you decided to carve your soft caramel flesh down to its essence. You went from a cherubic kid to teenage flamingo, one who couldn’t go to her tennis lesson without having to endure an hour’s worth of comments from the coach about the freakish length of your legs sprouting from your shorts, but no matter how hard you starved, your mushy, unruly breasts refused to shrink. Some girls find pride in their chest but you were ashamed of yours. The concept of a bra embarrassed you and you wore your brother’s old sweaters to cover traces of straps. Your mom was always saying a woman should cherish her femininity but you wanted to destroy yours—never wore makeup, always bit your nails and knotted your long hair into a bun.