Authors: Nic Brown
“I don't know,” Maria says. “I haven't done anything.”
Jack nods, as if all is as expected. He retrieves his hat and spins it upon a finger.
Maria hangs her drawings. They are immaculate and precise and so much better than anything else in the class that Professor Rigby has, more than once, told the other students that compared with Maria's, their drawings all look like seismograph readouts. She has always excelled at the transformation of life into line and color. Youth for her was a continual preparation for art school. She started private lessons in fourth grade, spent two summers at North Carolina School of the Arts, attended Governor's School the previous June. During each summer vacation to Beaufort, a small town on the coast, she spent her days not sunbathing or surfing or volleyballing in the sand, but instead painting seascapes.
When Maria was in high school, Rigby told her several times that she should apply to Yale. It is where he went. He seemed to think it was obvious she should just go there too. Maria was embarrassed to even ask if he thought she might stand a real chance of admission, although she wanted to, good God she wanted to, she wanted to qualify for her dreams, because something like Yale is indeed what she dreamed ofâa flight into a studio not in North Carolina, not populated with sorority girls lovely and soft and fine, but with others whose dreams like hers seemed in search of some cosmic travel agent. But when her mother grew sick, Maria knew that Yale was not going to be an option. Maria's father died when she was two, her grandparents passed away long ago, the University of North Carolina is in her hometown, and tuition is discounted for children of faculty. And so she is here. The decision was never even a decision.
A red bandana dangles from Jack's back left pocket as he leans in closely to inspect her drawings.
“Damn you're good,” he says.
In each drawing, Maria appears at a three-quarter profile, Hello Kitty mask turned to the viewer, small bare breasts catching the light from her upturned desk lamp. Jack stares in silence for a moment, then says, “Hot dog, Sweetcakes. I miss you.”
“You're a baby,” Maria says, proud of the sudden magic worked by this rendering of her own body.
Jack removes a ballpoint pen from the front pocket of his red plaid shirt and gently takes Maria's forearm in hand. The nib tickles her flesh as he writes on it. When finished, a full sentence crawls across her
skin. It reads
I carry you through the threshold and do my duty, happy ending Sleeping Beauty
.
It sounds remotely familiar but Maria cannot place it.
“That's what?” she says.
“Dumas,” Jack says, then points at the quote and nods. He whispers, “I'm serious. Or like, the way I wish it was. I know I'm a failure.”
“I hear Dumas?” Maria's mother says, stepping closer. She traces her finger along the words on Maria's forearm. Maria is embarrassed at the touch. Her mother laughs and says, “All my live brothers is locked down with high numbers.”
“Damn,” Jack says. “You're right.”
“Care to let me in?” Maria says, as Jack and her mother share a smile. Maria resents even the briefest exchange between the two that she cannot follow and again feels the time apart from Jack emerge in this new and confusing sound bite. “What are you right about?”
“That's not Dumas,” her mother says, looking Maria in the eye. She squeezes Maria's arm softly, as if testing for ripeness. “That's the Wu.”
“What?” Maria says. She hears her mother speaking the confusing code of Jack.
“You getting into it?” Jack says.
“It's like taking my brain to the gym,” Maria's mother says.
“The Wu-Tang Clan?” Maria says, invoking the name of one of Jack's favorites, a group of rappers that makes Maria wonder about the hordes of people who understand something about music that she apparently cannot. She cannot quite believe her mother is quoting the Wu-Tang Clan. But she is.
“What about it?” her mother says.
Jack shrugs and flips his thumb. “Yeah,” he says, “I just dumped some on her iPod.”
AFTER DINNER, MARIA
goes to Rite Aid and to Whole Foods. She picks up her mother's prescriptions, fish oil, a gallon of milk, four bananas, a seven-grain loaf, six eggs, kale, and quinoa. Maria's carefully negotiated guardianship of her '96 Volvo wagon is contingent upon these deliveries. Her mother no longer drives. Before delivery, Maria returns to her dorm. In the past two weeks, since she's known she was pregnant, she has delivered her mother's groceries late, after her mother is asleep, so as to avoid contact.
When Maria arrives in her dorm room, she finds Jack sitting at her desk. She calmly places the shopping bags on her bed.
“So you buddies with my mom now?” she says.
Jack removes one orange pill bottle from the Rite Aid bag. He squints at the label, then reads aloud: “Talwin.” He smells the lid. “It work?”
“I don't know,” Maria says.
Jack shakes two pills into his palm and swallows them with a mouthful of old coffee. Maria closely inspects the pill bottle. There is a warning about drinking alcohol. That one should not operate a motor vehicle. That women who are pregnant should not take it. She is suddenly afraid of the container, astonished to have found herself in any category that can now thus be poisoned.
“Seriously,” she says, putting the bottle back into the bag. “Why's my mom listening to the Wu-Tang Clan?”
“Why not?” Jack says.
“She's sixty-three.”
“She asked me what I was into.”
“What are you into?” Maria says.
“That thing on your arm?” Jack says. “I'm serious as shit.”
“You're immature,” Maria says. “And irresponsible.” She feels her words dissipate like so much breath into cold air. She has longed for Jack to appear to her like this, but now that she has him, she can think of nothing to say. In a desperate effort to connect, she conjures the Wu. “Vivid thoughts,” she says, “devils resort to trick knowledge. They kick garbage, lust for chicks and quick dollars.”
“You rapping?” Jack says.
Maria nods. Yes, she is rapping.
“Come on,” Jack says. “You don't even like them.” He takes Maria's hand. “I know what you're saying, though. I do. Put on Hello Kitty. Seriously. No, I'm just kidding. But seriously, though. Yeah, put it on.”
Maria lifts the Hello Kitty mask from its perch on her bedpost and places it on her cold face. Jack pops the elastic on the widest part of her skull.
“Now say something,” he says. “No rapping. Say it in Maria.”
“You're a piece of crap,” Maria says.
Jack kisses her neck.
“I tell you to pull out,” Maria says. “And you what? You don't pull out.”
Jack pushes her onto the bed. Maria adjusts herself so that he may lie more comfortably atop her.
“I should put razorblades inside me so that your wiener shreds if you ever do me again,” she says.
“I know,” Jack says. “I know.”
“You read my mom's books while I cry in Art History and everyone fucking stares at me,” she says.
“I know,” Jack says. “I know.”
“I am so stupid,” Maria says. She cries under her mask, thrilled and confused with desire. “This is so messed up.”
“I know,” Jack says.
“What am I going to do?” Maria says, running her hands inside Jack's shirt.
“I know,” Jack says.
“I
asked
you,” Maria says.
“Don't think about it,” Jack says, kissing her neck. “We have time.”
They make love for more than five minutes. Afterward, Jack says, “Jump in. The Talwin's perfect.” He licks his lips and runs his fingertips across Maria's eyelids. She considers revealing that, unlike him, she actually read the label and cannot in fact take the drug even if she wanted to.
MARIA'S PHONE RINGS
. It is close to 1:00
AM
. Calls at this hour are not uncommon. With chemotherapy, her mother's sleep schedule has become erratic. But the phone has been silent since Maria told her mother she was pregnant. It is a pattern her mother repeats often, falling silent for days when confronted with decisions or complex family drama, trusting time as the best tool for perspective. The pregnancy has triggered the latest stretch of silence, but it has all been expected. Maria has been avoided, and has thus avoided back. This phone call now signals the resumption of normal relations.
“It was so good to see you today,” her mother says. “I have to know what you did.”
“Now's not a good time,” Maria says. “Jack is here.”
“He should know too,” her mother says. “Have you been to a doctor?”
“I don't even know how to make an appointment,” Maria says. The years of her life stretch away before her, definitively parentless and adult.
“What does Jack think?” her mother says.
Jack lies on the bed, ash falling from his cigarette onto the pillow. The cell phone is loud enough for him to hear Maria's mother's voice, tinny and bright and insistent.
“'Sup, Dr. M,” he says.
“I don't know what he thinks,” Maria says.
“Look,” her mother says. “We've been talking about it. He says he'll do whatever you want.”
“You've been talking about it?” Maria says.
Jack shrugs and exhales a spiraling ring of smoke.
“Then you tell me,” Maria says. “Both of you. What do you want?”
“I want to have a thousand grandchildren,” her mother says. “I want to go back to the beach. I want to live forever.”
“I want whatever you want,” Jack says.
Before falling asleep, Maria closes herself into the bathroom. She sits on the toilet and presses her fingertips into her stomach, kneading the flesh that Jack once swore felt exactly like biscuit dough. She imagines what it would feel like to be propped in bed, holding a sleeping baby. But there is no precedent. Maria has no nieces or nephews, no babysitting experience at all. It then occurs to her that the scene she has just conjured is set in the dorm room on the other side of the wall. But there are no family units available in Student Housing. Maria
cannot even successfully imagine a space where holding her own child might seem possible.
THURSDAY'S LIFE DRAWING
is the self-portrait. Maria stands a full-length mirror beside her easel. A wig of curls borrowed from her mother tumbles onto her shoulders. She shakes the prosthetic hair and imagines herself as a musketeer. She cannot conceive of successfully creating what the others here call a self-portrait. Every drawing of herself she has made, and there are many, looks like someone definitively not her. Only in a costume does her identity ever harden. Musketeer, Hello Kitty. In place of what should be her own image, these she lets stand in for herself.
Jack is working from a printout of a nude photo that Maria took of him in her dorm room. He is not ashamed. The photo is taped to his easel. Before class he smoked a joint that looked like a limp palm tree and swallowed another Talwin. He bobs his head to music no one can hear.
“Your proportions,” her mother says. She spreads her fingers and places her hand on Jack's drawing, measuring the distance between shoulders. She then twists her hand to compare the torso, placing her thumb on the drawing of Jack's crotch.
“Weird,” Maria says.
“Don't act like a child,” Maria's mother says.
“You're thumbing my boyfriend's privates,” Maria says.
“You her boyfriend again?” Maria's mother says.
Jack drapes his arm around Maria and lightly cups her rear end. Maria nuzzles into the lightning bolt tattooed on his neck. His pulse taps insistent and fast against her cheek and she considers the fact that
both he and her mother are on the same drugs. Since Tuesday, Jack has ingested more than a dozen Talwins. Maria feels confident that by now he has so much of the stuff coursing through his veins that his own blood would be enough to poison their unborn child.
“She used to call her teddy bear her boyfriend,” her mother says. “And she always put a diaper on him. I should have taken more pictures.”
“Put diapers on me,” Jack says.
Maria's mother smiles. One of the pigtails on her wig has come undone. Graphite is smeared across her forehead. Maria does not remember putting diapers on her teddy bear. She does not remember calling him her boyfriend. Her mother's brain is like a museum of Maria's childhood, its archives unexplored and now rotting.
THREE AM. MARIA
is Hello Kitty. Jack is doing the twist. Sam Cooke is on the stereo. Jack says he's the newest he's ever been, everything is the coolest it has ever been. Maria's phone rings.
“Sweetie,” her mother says over the line. She sounds panicked. “You there? You get my pills, sweetie?”
Maria did not get the pills. She did not go to Whole Foods. She did not go to Rite Aid. She went back to her dorm room and lay naked in bed with Jack. Now Jack stands behind her and holds each of her protruding hipbones like handles. He twists her body with his as Sam Cooke sings
we're having a party
.