Authors: Emma McLaughlin
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Coming of Age, #Contemporary Women
“I know. Can you imagine? Every morning we’d have had to dig ’em out like a car.”
“When I got my promotion I decided to splurge and put in a bathtub.” Rolling my eyes at the memory, I extend my hand from under the blanket for the bottle as the fire snaps, “So I leave the plumbers doing their thing and head to work. When I come home my toilet is sitting in the middle of the living room.” Sam and Todd start laughing, the creases around their eyes deepening. “When I asked the guys what the story was they told me it didn’t ‘fit’ anymore, but that was okay—I could use my ‘other’ bathroom until they could get a smaller one. I was like, okay, that closet door, there, that does not go to Narnia. This is the whole apartment. There is no other bathroom.”
“Oh shit,” Sam snorts, “What did you do?”
“For a month I pretty much lived in my office. And I cut my liquid intake waaay down.”
“When I had my place in L.A. redone”—At the first sound of his voice in a good hour, I loll my head on the metal bar to look over at Jake.—“the designer put in this koi pond that flows right into my studio ’cause it’s supposed to be good for my creative energy.” After discussions of skyrocketing car insurance rates, the looming financial burden of aging parents, and DIY, he finally relates. “So, the day it’s done, they fill the pond and drop in the fish and it looks great and we have people over and everyone loves it and we all go out to dinner. Right?” We nod. Yes, dinner. We do that. “Anyway, I get home around four in the morning and, I don’t know, there was a leak or something, some drainage problem, but the water was almost completely gone and the koi are just flapping and gasping.” He flails his torso, mimicking koi in their death throes. “So now I’m shitty drunk and running around trying to find bowls, but I don’t know where they keep the bowls, so I’m racing back and forth in, like, total circles just trying to find a bathroom on the ground floor. See if maybe there’s one with a tub. But I can’t find one. And at this point I’m losing it. I’m trying to get my assistant on the phone. I’m convinced I can hear the fish suffocating. So then I pass this wall of, I don’t know—these huge antique Asian-looking container things and I start running them over to my office and trying to get the fish in them. By the end I must have had fifty of them on the floor, just filled with the most fucking grateful fish you’ve ever seen in your life.”
The fire sputters; we sit in the near darkness. The draft renews its strength, filtering in between the planks in the walls and floors, winter restaking its preeminence.
“Early Japanese bronze hand warmers,” Todd volunteers.
“What?” Jake asks, extending his legs and brushing off his jeans.
“You put the fish in your nineteenth-century bronze hand warmers,” Todd explains, peeling off the Jim Beam label. “You have the largest private collection in the U.S.”
“I do?”
“Architectural Digest.”
He rolls the gummy paper into a tight scroll between his palms.
Gap-mouthed, Sam stares at Todd, incredulous.
“Michelle subscribes.” Todd shrugs.
“Eden must’ve bought ’em.” Jake recovers. “She’s always buying shit and not telling me. You know.”
“Yeah, I hate it when I send Laura to Wal-Mart to pick up a few things and she comes home with a trunkful of Japanese hand warmers.” Sam tosses his beer on the last anemic flames and we listen to the sizzle. Stymied, Jake stares into the gray smoke. Todd taps the rolled label into the neck of the emptied bottle.
“Okay, time for a skate!” Jake abruptly swipes the last beer from the floor and throws open the wood door, racing down the steps and across the snow. As we slowly make our way to standing we watch through the doorway as he kicks across the powder to where the lawn slopes, scampering sideways down the bank to the edge of the ice and sitting on the old dock to strap on his skates. He pushes out onto the frozen surface, his legs propelling him away from us. Without breaking stride, he pops open his can, an arc of spray glowing blue in the moonlight. He whoops with joy, his arms wide, spinning, his face turned to the dark sky.
“It’s beautiful!” he exhorts.
Todd heeds the siren song, shuffling outside to the car to grab his skates from the front seat before scrambling down the bank. Sam turns his attention back to a mess of equipment in the corner, walking over to lift a deflated inner tube halfheartedly from the floor. I pull the small chain at the base of the nearby buoy lamp, its pool of light enumerating the cracked canoe oars and abandoned swimsuits. He picks up one of the umpteen compressed bottles of Coppertone and shakes it.
“Here,” I say, pointing to the corner where Jake has left the lid up on the splintering wooden trunk. Brushing aside the cobwebs I hand off a pair of men’s skates.
“Fuck, why not? I bought the ticket, might as well take the whole ride.” He resigns himself, tossing the plastic bottle into the canoe. “You good?” he asks from the door.
“Fantastic. You?” We look at each other, two distant relatives at a funeral who can’t find the words.
“See you down there?” he finally asks, knocking the doorframe. I nod as he gives a small smile and heads out.
I turn back to digging, lifting skates and snow boots and waders. Then, at the bottom, I see, not just a smaller pair, but the ones with
KATIE
written on the side in faded red Sharpie.
In the few minutes it takes me to get laced up, the guys are already crisscrossing each other, cans in hand, athletic activity and alcohol lubricating their overriding masculine desire to just have a good time, to just have it all be okay, to just have it back to when all any of us needed was the proximity of each other.
I step gingerly out, my ankles wobbling before I can find my stride. Then I start taking even glides on the silvery ice, remembering, remembering, remembering how to do this. It darkens and I look up to see a thick cloud cover the moon. I falter—just as hands close in on my hips.
“Sam, you’re supposed to put it on your lap.” Laura, carrying the soup tureen into the dining room, provides what one would imagine to be a self-explanatory direction for the napkins she and I painstakingly shaped into Mom’s good wineglasses.
Sam shrugs and pulls it off his head, laying the linen over his lap with an extra flourish. Jake laughs, whipping his out of the glass and snapping Sam’s nose before draping it over his cords.
“Boys.” Laura sets the dish on the table and, smoothing her peasant skirt beneath her, sits.
“I’m starving.” Jake looks over the spread she and I have spent the day camped out in my kitchen preparing.
“Music!” I push back my chair and glide to the stereo in the living room. Flipping through Dad’s records, I find the Miles Davis and shake it deftly out. The slow bass fills the house—this weekend—
my
house.
“Nice.” Jake bobs his head as I return to the table, dimming the chandelier on my way, feeling every bit the fabulous hostess.
“If you’re sixty.” Sam takes a roll from the basket.
“I’m going to toast.” Laura raises her wineglass brimming with Zima. We lift ours to her. “To our lovely host. To her parents’ weekend in England. To senior year. To getting through this college bullshit and—”
“Getting out.” Jake clinks his goblet against ours.
“Getting laid.” Sam’s glass reaches out for our retreating rims.
“Sam,” Laura groans to remind him that only one couple at this table has cleared the starting gate. My stomach contorts as I avoid Jake’s eyes.
“Soup’s good.” Jake swirls the creamy broth with his spoon.
I lift my own to my mouth—“Ugh, it’s not.”
“It’s not?” Laura dips into her bowl.
“Way salty!” I reach for my Zima and chug it down to no avail.
Laura’s lips curl. “Four tablespoons?”
“Four
dashes.”
I push my bowl away.
“Crap.” Laura swigs from her glass.
“Four dashes of crap?” Sam delivers straight. “What’s the recipe, I wanna give it to my mom.” Jake cracks up.
“The chicken’s almost ready,” I say, not hungry anyway, the looming chaperone-free night zapping my appetite.
“And crap free,” Laura adds. I join in their laughter as I enviously study her, for whom the hours ahead are already a known.
I drop the last plate into the dishwasher, using the counter to steady myself as I lift the door closed. I dance in front of it for a moment, the warmth of my buzz making the music my own. Eyes closed I hear Laura and Sam laughing from the backyard and I can’t imagine better than—more than, this.
“What are you smiling at?” At the sound of his voice my eyes drift open in the dim light of the stove hood to see Jake grinning by the side door. “I was going to ask if you wanted to smoke with us, but you seem pretty…”
“Perfect.” I sway over to him, opening his jacket and pulling it around me. He nods down, his eyes dropping to a sexy slit.
“You are.”
It’s all I need to curl my fingers into his and, like I’ve seen in every movie, lead him into the front hall and up the stairs. Walk him to my room, not letting the three generations of family pictures break into the scene. Push open the door and stop in front of the bed with my back to him. The height of myself. Warm from head to toe. Spotlit in the triangle of yellow spilling in from the hall lamp. Jake is behind. His hands at the hem of my dress, gripping it, lifting it up over the length of me. I raise my arms and it is perfect as he slides it up, the last of the cotton grazing my nails. I hear a moan escape as he registers that I stand before him in only the white thigh-highs Laura and I painstakingly picked out at Victoria’s Secret yesterday.
Part of me splits off and runs downstairs to tell her that they are perfect, I am perfect, that this is going perfectly. The other part is turned around by Jake who is all warmth and motion and gripping. Then we’re on the quilt, seizing skin till we feel the shape of the bones beneath. Pulling at his belt and zipper and cotton to find, to get to—he sits back, jacket still on, eyes wide as he fumbles with a square package, a string of sweat over his lip.
And then we are closer than it is possible.
And then—“Hi,” I say as we blink at each other. He squeezes his arms around me, wrapping me in his jacket for a second time. I feel him open his mouth against my hair. Car headlights arc across the ceiling as someone passes.
“What?” I pull my head back to focus on his face, his beautiful face, his expression earnest, about to divulge—what? “What?” I repeat.
And I’m hit with a wall of vomit.
I stand in the shower and stare at the curtain, now more sober than it is possible. This is the scene they never show—the newly de-virginized Julia Roberts rinsing puke out of her thigh highs. And what is the perfect thing to do now? What are the chances I can sneak in and wake Laura? What are the chances Laura, herself, is covered in puke? That this is the part of the sex nobody talks about? I’ll just stay in here till I think of something to say. Like, how about getting up from my fucking sheets so I can wash off the contents of your stomach before I have to sleep in them?
I reach my hand out for a washcloth and scream when it meets Jake’s jacket. I pull the curtain and peek out.
“Sorry! Sorry.” Still fully dressed, he steps back uncertainly.
“Have you been standing there this whole time?”
He stares at the ceiling like he wishes it would zap him into vapor.
“I was going to go, but I don’t know if that’s…Then I thought I should stay. Then I came in here to tell you…I don’t know what.”
“Okay!” I nod helpfully, water dripping down my face.
“This…”
“You want to disappear?” I ask, licking the drips as both hands are occupied gripping the curtain in a frame around my head.
“Yeah, yes I do.” He nods at the ceiling.
“Look, it’s not the end of the world.”
“Not the end of the world? We made love and then I yakked all over you.”
“Made love?” I repeat.
“Yeah,” he sighs, shrinking in his jacket. “And I yakked.”
“So what? So, you yakked.” I shrug.
“So, you’ve been in there for like an hour.”
“I didn’t know what to do next,” I say honestly.
“Me neither.” His face contorts. “Shit, I can still smell it.”
“It’s on your shirt.” I point the curtain out at his congealing flannel.
“You want me to leave and never bug you again?” He drops his head.
“You mean kill yourself?”
“Or that.”
“No, Jake Sharpe, I don’t want you to kill yourself.” A smile breaks on his tense face. “You might as well come in here and rinse off while I figure out the right way to handle this.”
“Shit, you’re trying to figure out how to handle me?” He picks off his clothes and drops them into a heap in the corner.
“For years.” I step back under the spray.
“Any ideas?” He opens the curtain and steps inside, pulling it closed before standing like a sad little bronze medalist, shoulders hunched.
“Still in here, aren’t I?” I wave for him to move under the water and we switch sides. “Soap?”
“This is weird,” he says, taking the bar.
“You’re weird,” I say, leaning back against the cool tile.
“Shut up.” He laughs.
“Or what,” I giggle, relaxing. “You’ll puke on me?”
“What’s up with the birdhouses?” Jake asks, pointing to the row of brightly painted seed-filled chalets lining the porch.
“Dad’s gotten into making them since the research center shut down. They give him what my mother calls a productive outlet. Here, hold this,” I say to Jake, handing him the bundled mail as I fumble with my keys on the porch. “See if my Dartmouth application’s in there.”
He flips through the catalogs, extracting an envelope. “Nope, but here’s UVA.” I push the front door open into the almost equally cold front hall and we stomp the snow off our boots. The warble of Judge Wapner greets us from the back of the house as I swivel the thermostat up to sixty-five. “I bet my basement’s really warm right now. I bet it’s toasty.”
“Shut up.” I laugh. “One afternoon here isn’t going to kill us.” We unlace our boots, kicking them onto the mat by the door. Jake goes to hang our coats on the pegs, giving in to his routine compulsion to hold my sixth-grade Venetian mask up to his face.
“The Phaaaaaaaantom of the Opera is here,”
he belts. He bites my neck and I squeal. Swatting him, I deposit the rejected mail, UVA envelope included, on the hall table. “Admit it, you’ve missed the mask.”
Jake circles his arms around me in response, pulling me into a kiss.
Reluctantly I break away, keeping hold of his hand. “Let’s just say a quick hi and then we can go upstairs and study.” I raise my eyebrows suggestively, letting the tip of my tongue protrude from beneath my top teeth.
He makes a low growl as he follows me through the swinging door to the empty kitchen. “Dad?” I call out. The large stainless pasta pot teeters on the stove, its bottom blackening above the flame. Switching off the burner, I grab a dishtowel to lift the lid, a blast of steam revealing that the water has boiled out. The open package of lasagna noodles lays strewn on the butcher block alongside a gummy red ring of paste where the top has been taken off the can. I reach for the sponge to wipe up the smattering of green spice flakes from the open bottles. “Dad!” I call again.
Jake remains by the doorway, hand holding his fist. “The den?”
Darting past him I follow the sound of the television to where Dad’s splayed in the armchair, as if he hasn’t moved a muscle since I left for school.
“Dad?”
He rolls his head to gaze at me, his eyes red-rimmed.
My stomach twists in on itself. “Dad, the water boiled down.”
“What?” he asks dully.
“The water,” I repeat, trying to figure out what it is that isn’t registering for him, my words or my presence.
“Oh.” He looks baffled for a moment before dragging the worn afghan from the arm of the chair and laying it over his corduroys. He reaches for the remote and turns up the volume, but misses the table’s edge as he goes to return it, the device clattering to the floor. The plastic panel breaks off the back, sending the batteries rolling along the wood to my loafers.
“Bugger,” he sighs.
I swipe up the Energizers and broken remote and step in front of the television. “Dad, Mom’s going to be home in, like, ten minutes.”
His eyes drift closed.
“Okay, so Jake and I are just gonna, yeah.” I leave him with the blasting TV and return to the kitchen, greeted by the smell of scorched steel.
“Is he okay?” Jake still hovers in the doorway.
“I don’t know. No.” I go to the window over the sink and push up the pane. “I just don’t get it. How someone can go from being fine, from being a fine person, to…Listen, maybe you should just go home, tonight’s not really—”
“I can help.” He darts to the window by the broom closet and lifts it an inch, a cross-breeze sweeping past me. “It’s not like I’m missing dinner with the Cosbys.”
“Right,” I say, not wanting my father to be the reason he eats alone. “Okay.” I open the fridge and toss him a tomato. He catches it like a fly ball as I pull out an armful of salad fixings.
“What do you want me to do?”
I glance at the stove clock before sliding him the plastic cutting board and a paring knife. “Chop like you mean it.”
I’m dumping the spaghetti into the colander when the garage door purrs open. I drop the pot back onto the stove and jog over to stick my head around the den doorway. “Dad.” Immobile beneath the afghan, he gives no indication of having heard her car or me. I step to the television and hit the power button. “Dad!
She’s home.”
“Hello!” Mom trills. “Something smells delicious.” I swing back around the doorjamb to where, hand gripping her knit hat, she pauses in a teapot silhouette to take in Jake standing over the stove in her apron. “Hi, Jake. Where’s Simon?”
“Here,” Dad answers, stepping heavily in behind me in his leather slippers.
Unzipping her coat I watch her eyes go from his patchy stubble to the rumpled shirt he was wearing yesterday to the jam splotches on his trousers. Without ceremony, he crosses to the table and folds into his chair.
“It’s almost ready, Mrs. Hollis,” Jake says with an enthusiasm that makes me want to marry him, sliding the spatula around the rim of the blue cast-iron pan.
“So how was the Amherst meeting?” she asks, pulling a bottle of wine from the rack along with the opener.
“Well,” I begin as she walks to the table and places the bottle heavily in front of Dad with a dull thud, extending the opener to him. “The school sounds great, but—” He doesn’t move. I look to Jake.
“But by the time the recruiter finished describing it,” he steps in. “It sounded like all twelve students come over to her house every night to have dinner and watch
Jeopardy.”
“It’s small.” Carrying the wooden salad bowl to the table, I pull out a carrot sliver and pass it to her. She pops the orange disk in her mouth, giving me a small smile of gratitude for the gesture as she busies herself with the bottle of Chianti.