Lizzie stares at Margaret and then at James and then back at Margaret again. She swallows. “You know, in Smash! they tell us that’s a sin,” she says. “Timothy 2:22. ‘Run away from anything that makes you feel horny and instead pursue stuff that makes you want to be a good person.’ I signed a chastity pledge, you know.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Lizzie,” says Margaret.
“Don’t take God’s name in vain or else He’ll get mad at you,” says Lizzie, before turning on a pruned heel and disappearing back into the garden, toward the house. In the distance, they hear Lizzie slam the French doors.
“Crap,” says Margaret.
“I didn’t know your sister was a religious nut,” says James.
“She wasn’t last month.”
James shrugs. “Fuck this place,” he says. “It makes people weird. Just think—by this time tomorrow, we’ll be drinking dollar Coronas in Tijuana.”
Margaret knows that an enthusiastic response is appropriate, but her mouth is too dry and gummy to form words. She swallows twice and offers him a weak smile instead.
After James leaves, she stays in the pool shed for a half hour, trying to sober up. Eventually, she rouses herself to go inside and dig through the refrigerator. The house is quiet except for the high-pitched buzz of the downstairs television. En route to the kitchen, she pauses at the door to the family room: Lizzie is curled up at one end of the couch, eating a candy bar. At the opposite end of the couch, a half mile away, is Mark Weatherlove, wearing a blue wind-breaker. They are intently taking in something on the television screen, but from where she stands Margaret can’t see what show it is. She takes a step forward into the room, causing Lizzie and Mark to turn their heads in unison. They gape at her with identical expressions of alarm, and Lizzie frantically jabs at the remote with her thumb. The television snaps off.
“What show…?” begins Margaret, hoping somehow to patch things up with Lizzie, but she is interrupted by her sister, who emits a hysterical shriek: “Close the door!”
Margaret pauses, then shrugs and leaves, pulling the door closed behind her. Curiosity about what they could be watching drifts through her head, but she’s too exhausted from her own afternoon to really care. She feels ill, her hands shake, and she is very, very thirsty. Dehydration from the pot, probably. She stands at the kitchen sink and drinks three glasses of water in a row. It is only after the third that she remembers that she never asked James whether he knew what was wrong with her mother.
margaret finishes off the day with a long, unsettled nap. When she wakes up it is dusk. She lies in bed, naked except for a tattered pair of panties, overcome by the memory of the events of the afternoon. Just a few hours ago she was having sex. Sex. For the first time in—God, five months? Has it been that long since Bart broke up with her? Bart had been an aggressive lover—there was something jolting and abrasive about having sex with him that always left Margaret feeling bruised. Sex with James, by comparison, was kind of like swimming in the Caribbean, warm and liquid.
She closes her eyes and sees the azure sea. The white sand. The hot yellow purifying sun, high in the sky, unimpeded by smog. And her new lover. Her new lover who she is going to Mexico with. Her new lover, a stoner slacker who is hauling her to Mexico to grow dreadlocks and live as a minimum-wage barmaid. No, Margaret thinks—that’s the old mode of thinking. She’s going with her new lover, a free spirit unfettered by bourgeois mores, to live in that yellow sunshine, far from the excesses of American culture, free from the judgments of Western civilization, out of sight of the collection agencies. It’s all so much, so fast. The enormousness of her afternoon washes over her, and she isn’t sure if her quickened pulse is the result of excitement or panic.
The house is silent. Stretching, Margaret forces herself to rise out of bed. She stumbles to the window for fresh air. Her left foot tingles from sleep.
She looks out the window over the backyard. The summer fog has finally arrived, creeping in from the ocean in the late afternoon, bringing with it gray sky and temperatures that hover just below comfortable. The garden looks unappealing in the flat light, the roses past their bloom, the flower beds on their last legs. Tabloid magazines sprawl in disarray on the patio furniture, and a Snickers bar wrapper lies abandoned in the middle of the lawn.
She gazes out farther, to the pool, and stops, not quite sure what she’s seeing. She squints through the evening gloom and then freezes.
Lizzie floats facedown in the center of the pool, arms spread-eagled to the sides, her legs sinking slightly. Her body drifts slowly across the surface of the water, generating tiny shock waves in the otherwise still surface. She clearly hasn’t moved in some minutes.
Margaret’s heart seizes. She fumbles with the window latch, pushes the screen aside, and screams, “Lizzie!”
Lizzie doesn’t show any sign of life.
Margaret is out the door before she can stop to realize that she is wearing only her panties. She takes the stairs three at a time and runs out into the cool evening air, imagining Lizzie’s head cracked open by a shallow-end dive, an accidental overdose on the pills in the medicine cabinet (Vicodin?), a freak brain hemorrhage. Suicide? Margaret stubs her toe on the paving stones, emits a garbled screech of pain, hops the final ten feet to the edge of the pool on one leg, and plunges in. The pool is bathwater warm from a long summer. She feels the friction from her dive tug at the stretched elastic band of her old cotton underwear. She paddles frantically toward the deep end, gulping down water as she tries to keep her head in the air.
Blinking from the chlorine in her eyes, Margaret struggles to see Lizzie’s floating body as she swims, looking for bubbles coming from her mouth. She realizes that there is something strange about Lizzie’s head, something bulbous and distorted. When she is just a few feet away, her sister’s body moves. Lizzie rights herself and looks at Margaret, an expression of astonishment on her face.
It is only now that Margaret can see that Lizzie is wearing a swim mask. They stare at each other through a filter of thick plastic.
Lizzie unpeels the mask with a moist thunk and pushes it up to the top of her head. She has a purple ring across her forehead from the pressure of the plastic, and her lashes are clumped together with water. She gazes at Margaret and wipes spit from the sides of her mouth. Dizzy and near hyperventilation, the chemical-laden water burning her nose, Margaret stops swimming but continues floating toward her sister from sheer momentum. She is overwhelmed with relief and, for a moment, fears that she might start sobbing.
“You’re not wearing a shirt,” Lizzie observes, with an infuriatingly blasé expression on her face. “Or a bathing suit. Better hope James doesn’t show up or he’ll see your boobs. Oh wait, he’s already seen them.”
“I thought you were
dead,
” splutters Margaret, her sympathy waning in the face of her sister’s antipathy. Did Lizzie miss that there was a heroic rescue taking place?
“Nope, not dead,” says Lizzie. “I’m surprised you even care, anyway.”
“Christ, Lizzie. You scared me to death,” says Margaret, hearing the plaintiveness in her own voice and struggling to recapture her composure. But her heart still palpitates wildly, stuck on the thought of her sister dead in the deep end. “Don’t do that again, okay?” she insists, her voice a little too forceful. “Mom would have had a heart attack if she’d seen you like that.”
Lizzie pouts. “You don’t need to get so bossy about it.”
Margaret paddles to the edge of the deep end and hangs on to the tiled rim, trying to catch her breath. “You spend too much time in the pool, anyway. Your fingers are probably about to rot off from all the chemicals in here.”
Lizzie rolls her eyes. “You know, if you close your eyes and just float on your stomach it kind of feels like you’re suspended in space,” she says. She treads water in the middle of the pool, waggling her arms back and forth to keep her head above water. “Did you know that they have these things called sensory deprivation chambers and they charge you, like, a hundred dollars to climb in these crazy dark water tanks and just float in there? You can’t see or hear or feel anything. I saw it on TV. People, like, freak out in them and go insane. They say it’s like being dead.”
“What’s
the matter
with you?” says Margaret, her breath finally slowing down. “You’re fourteen, for God’s sake. Stop being so morbid, you’re too young.”
“Just because Bart dumped you for Ysabelle van Lumis doesn’t give you the right to tell everyone what to do. Or
lie
to them about everything.”
“He didn’t dump me for Ysabelle. It was more complicated than that.”
“Whatever,” says Lizzie. She swims toward Margaret and stops just out of arm’s reach. “I didn’t see
your
picture in
Us Weekly.
But the point is, my life sucks, too, you know.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“You have no idea.”
“Lay it on me.”
Lizzie looks at her balefully, her eyes rimmed in pink from the chlorine, her lower lip quivering. It’s almost painful to watch her trying to stay afloat; her waterlogged skin is as puckered and plump as an infant’s. Lizzie’s chin dips below the surface, and she spits out a mouthful of water. “I’m pregnant,” she says, and then she bursts into tears.
In Margaret’s head, the hot yellow purifying sun of Mexico sets swiftly, unexpectedly, plummeting into that azure ocean and vanishing completely out of sight. In the pool, the fingers of fog have blotted out the last of the day’s light. Margaret finds herself instinctively reaching forward, gathering her hysterical baby sister’s soft body into her protective embrace.
“Don’t worry,” says Margaret to the top of Lizzie’s soaked head, as they cling to the edge of the pool. “I’ll help you.” Lizzie nuzzles into her sister’s clavicle, snuffling as her sobs subside, and Margaret, still stunned, thinks that she has never before felt so old.
lizzie sits in her swimsuit, at the lavender lacquered desk in the corner of her bedroom. On her right-hand side lies her
Bliss! Bible,
looking a bit chewed around the edges, its pages warped from a dried slick of spilled Coke, a chunk of Snickers bar gluing the pages of Mark and Luke together. On her left sits the dog-eared pamphlet she found shoved under her bedroom door when she woke up this morning, presumably by Margaret. On the front, in inch-high pink letters, it reads, “Choice: It’s a Womyn’s Right.” Below is the cartoon face of a girl with a ponytail, her ears decorated with enormous hoop earrings, one hand raised defiantly in a fist.
Lizzie flips open the pamphlet and reads the top paragraph: “77 percent of anti-choice leaders are men; 100 percent of them will never be pregnant. The government has no right to meddle in a womyn’s womb any more than it dictates what a man can and can’t do with his penis.” She turns the page: “It’s your choice. For thirty years, the United States Supreme Court has defended the right of a womyn to decide what to do with her own body. Don’t let the anti-choice propagandists distract you from this fact with their lies.” And farther down: “Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures provided in the United States today, no more dangerous than getting a tooth pulled.” Below is a picture of a smiling doctor with a stethoscope around her neck.
Lizzie drops the pamphlet and picks up her
Bliss! Bible.
She flips to the appendix at the back of the tome. At the top of the page it reads, “What does God think about…?” Below it lists a series of hot-button issues: “Premarital sex?” “Masturbation?” “Cheating on math tests?” “Being rude to your mom?” and “Swearing?” For each, it denotes the Bible passages where you can glean God’s personal point of view on these matters.
The word “Abortion” is right at the top of the page, and only one passage is listed underneath: Exodus 20:13, page 133. She flips to page 133 and reads the verse: “Don’t kill!!!” This sentence is underlined in red.
It makes her head hurt. Lizzie gives up and picks up her tweezers, focusing her attention today on the hair that grows on her toes, hair that is promisingly coarse and bristly. She yanks out one hair, and it feels like someone just jabbed a needle into her big toe. Her eyes water. The offended follicle turns bright pink and swells satisfyingly. She yanks another, and watery mucus starts to drip from her nose. A peacefulness descends. The only sensation she can feel is the burning in her foot. Thoughts about the fate of her pregnancy drift away; so, too, does the unpleasant memory of the video she watched with Mark the day before, images from which flashed in Lizzie’s head all morning despite her best efforts to push them out, until she wasn’t sure whether she felt so peculiarly swimmy because of what’s growing in her belly or because of the flickering movie in her mind.
She finishes the first foot and is beginning on the second when there is a knock at the door. Lizzie drops the tweezers into a drawer and limps to open it. Margaret is standing there. Her terry-cloth dress is fraying around the bottom, and the fabric that was traffic-cone orange at the beginning of the summer is now a blotchy and inoffensive peach. She clutches a dog-eared book under her arm. Lizzie twists sideways to read the spine:
Your Body, Your Life: A Feminist’s Guide to Reproduction Rights.
Lizzie has never really understood Margaret’s whole feminist thing—like, what’s really the big deal? Even the word “feminism” has a certain musty quality to it, more of a vocabulary word from a history test than a term applicable to Lizzie’s own life. As far as she can tell, women have it pretty good in the world; they get to wear cuter clothes than men, for example. She doesn’t mind if boys open the door for her every once in a while. She actually kind of wishes they would.
Margaret marches into the room, pushes Lizzie’s crumpled comforter aside, and arranges herself on the edge of the mattress. She leans forward and folds her hands together over her knees. “So,” she says. “Let’s talk.”
“Okay,” says Lizzie with trepidation, as she sits beside her sister on the bed. She can see, in the brightness of Margaret’s eyes, a lecture coming on. Lectures mean expectations that Lizzie will need to live up to, and Lizzie is not at all sure that she is in a position to please anyone right now. Let alone her sister, who has been acting like a total bossy, lying bitch all summer.