—Joan of Snark, thank you. What a chivalrous thing to do. You know how rare it is to find a chivalrous woman in the world?
What’s funny is how I remember almost everything up until that point. After that my memories are little blots. Driving through the Top of the World community, the light blue sky interrupted by trees. I don’t remember talking. In the home of his dead parents, I do remember an old-fashioned wet bar. It was the coldest place I’d ever been. All the furniture, polar to the touch. We drank brown liquor in thick glasses with giant ice cubes. There were low leather couches the color of the cordials in my parents’ liquor cabinet.
I don’t think I chose not to be afraid but maybe I did. Maybe his hands did not frighten me because they were the only warm things in the place. I know that he helped form my body into the certain position he wanted, which was on all fours, on the mustard carpet next to a gold-edged glass coffee table. But I knew from HBO movies how to hold myself. Also because of HBO, I’d already been having orgasms for over a year. Watching steamy scenes and riding a balled-up comforter in the early morning while my mother made breakfast. As long as I could hear the spatula against a pan and the fridge opening and closing, I moved heartily toward a sensation I could barely comprehend.
I don’t know if the decor of the house comes from my memory or from the movies I saw. Maybe it’s both. I don’t remember if he ever went inside of me but I do remember feeling pain. Sometimes I could see very clearly the way he licked every part of me above the knees and below the belly button, like a mother animal bathing its young with a wide tongue. He never took my bikini bottoms off, just uncovered the fabric section by section, looking for unlicked strips of flesh. I stayed very still. There was no music, no sound at all, except the sound of his tongue.
I was back at the Top of the World Pool by four. I went into the deep end, sinking myself down to the uneven aqua floor and sitting there for as long as I could hold my breath, which was a very long time.
By the time my father arrived at 4:29 I was inside the gate, exactly where he told me to wait, holding two books and drying my wet hair in the yellow mountain sun. The man had left the number for the landline of his parents’ house on the first page of Tropic of Cancer.
20
ELEANOR STOOD AND STRETCHED HER arms, extending the barrel of the gun at me.
—You have no idea how you fucked up my life! she screamed, and the walls of windows rattled in the hot house. You know my fucking baby brother is dead! Do you?
—Yes. Your mother told me.
—Did she tell you she’s pretty much the reason!
She cocked the gun.
—Please, I said, and I didn’t know where the next thing I said came from; it came from beyond me, from the seat of my stomach. Please, I lied, I’m pregnant.
—You’re what?
—I’m pregnant. I found out last week.
—What the fuck!
The gun began to shake so much in her hand that it dipped toward the floor. I pictured it falling, going off, and opening a cherry hole in my belly. One of those accidental deaths, the specialty of toddlers in Walmarts.
I imagined Alice at my funeral. Big Sky, too. Then I imagined him seeing her. She would be in a black tuxedo. She would lay a red rose on my gleaming coffin and he would get an erection.
—Is it my father’s!
—Yes.
—Are you fucking sure!
—Yes.
She found the wall with her hand and slumped down against it until she reached the floor. She cried and the gun shook in her hands. I was not one to comfort other women. I never embraced them or ran after them when they cried.
—Eleanor—
—Fuck you, don’t talk to me!
—Okay, I said. I wanted to get up and clean some dishes. But I knew she wanted what everybody wanted—for me to remain in the same place forever. My rigidity reminded me of the way I used to still my body when I’d finally reached my mother’s bed, afraid to make any moves that would wake her so that she might tell me to go back to my own room.
The girl was trembling. I saw the ant-colored hairs piercing through her white skin. I’d stolen from her. I was a very careless thief who didn’t even want her plunder. I’d been stealing my whole life. I’d walked out of bookstores with armloads of books, carried whole lobsters thwapping about in their sturdy white bags out of supermarkets. I’d stolen truffle honey, truffle salt, two-thousand-dollar dresses, twenty-dollar dresses, bras and underwear and shoes, headphones and batteries and flatware and Sharpie markers. I’d never in my life bought a container of Advil. And I’d stolen this child’s father and then dumped him off. By proxy, I’d stolen her little brother.
I thought to move toward Eleanor, to kick her hard in the face and take the gun and call the cops. But she kept her eyes on me even through the tears. Anyhow, I didn’t trust myself to do those things.
Her face was so remarkably his, it was as if he were right there. We sat for what seemed like a half hour and I had the time to recall the things Vic told me he’d done for her. Out of the blue he would write to me, I’m going to be busy a little later, kid, if you don’t hear from me, I have to fix Eleanor’s car. Eleanor has a deadly banana allergy so I’m going out to stock up on about ten thousand more EpiPens. Or in conversation he would say, I’m buying Eleanor a pony for Christmas. Many of the things he said he was doing for her I knew he was telling me so I’d see what a devoted father he was. That he had the money to buy a horse, the skill to fix a carburetor.
One night after I said I wanted ruby-red slippers like Dorothy’s, my father stayed up very late to glue red glitter onto a pair of ballerina shoes. In the morning the shoes were at the foot of my bed, twinkling like fire. They were very hard with glue and when I put them on they scratched my skin. I was enthralled with the love behind the effort, the sweat on his brow. I loved him even then as though he were already gone.
—I remember that day I met you, Eleanor said. At the office.
—I remember, too.
—You ate half of a grapefruit, cut into sections, with a spoon. I started doing that, too. Basically I wanted my father to see me eating grapefruit like that.
I nodded. I didn’t remember eating grapefruit in the office.
—When my mother was pregnant with Robbie, she found out from the doctor that he had a one-in-three chance of having trisomy twenty-one. And she didn’t tell my dad. Because she knew, or she thought, he would have made her get an abortion. When Robbie was born, that’s when he found out. When he saw his face as he came out of my mom’s stomach. That was the moment Dad left us, that was the moment we lost him. It wasn’t you. You’re nothing.
—Eleanor, I said, I’m sorry.
—Don’t tell me you’re sorry. You’re a piece of shit.
She transferred her weight from one foot to the other. She wiped her nose with the side of her arm.
—If you’re telling the truth, then you’re carrying my baby brother. His second chance.
It was hard to believe Vic had a child who could believe a thing like that. Eleanor had been brought up by a religious mother and a devout grandmother. Vic hadn’t been much for religion, though he took his wife to church every week. He christened his children. But the notion that Eleanor thought an unborn child might be her brother reincarnated was a bridge too far. On top of that, I wondered how she could be so sure that my fake pregnancy was a boy.