Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (27 page)

We heard you laughing in your sleep last night.

You did?
Lucy avoided Carly's gaze.
I don't remember what I'd been dreaming about.
She looked at Natasha. Natasha took out a wand of mascara and gave herself big, gluey eyelashes, twisting the wand like a miniature orchestra conductor.

Every day, Natasha had driven her sisters to school. Then she'd tell her sisters,
have the best day,
a compulsion stemming from elementary school, when they'd reported to the same schoolyard. Ever since her first day of third grade, when Carly
started kindergarten and Lucy was in first grade, their parents entrusted Natasha to see her sisters off at school.

She'd hug them and say,
have the best day.
Sometimes she had the urge to kiss her sisters on the lips and both cheeks and in the parts of their heads of hair. And sometimes she wanted to hug them both so hard she would knock them over and even maybe hurt them accidentally. Sometimes she wanted to hurt them because they were so much smaller than her. Because she could.

On Natasha's first day of third grade, she saw her two little sisters off in their matching yellow jackets and satchel backpacks. The instant was historic.
- They could get hurt so easily. -

- At lunch, somebody could spill their juice. -

- Somebody could push them. -

- Somebody could break them. -

Man, they were small. She was supposed to protect them.
Wait!
They turned around. Carly was wearing shorts, and Natasha could see her goosebumped shins.

This is the very last second we'll all be together before you start school.
Natasha picked up two rocks in the schoolyard, one zeppelin-shaped, one jagged. She handed Lucy the long stone and Carly the rough stone. Then she picked up a tiny pebble. She placed the pebble in her pocket, a house for her irresistible feelings.

Keep these in your pockets.

When her sisters left for the second time, Natasha took her pebble out and placed it on the ground. She kicked it around. She felt sweat conglomerate at the V of her T-shirt, as perceptible and delicate as raindrops or a string of pearls.

In high school, Natasha still smiled at both of her sisters and said,
have the best day.
But she couldn't hug them anymore. She wasn't in school anymore. She was in purgatory, better known as the real world.

I love you, Tash,
her sisters both said at once, like they were one girl.

Me too.

As they all grew up, Natasha had felt it hard to contain her love for her sisters.

I love you so much I could eat you.

I love you so much I could kill you.

I love you to death.

Words so devoted they were hideous.

As the eldest sibling, Natasha felt the closest to being a parent, with the imperialistic gift of hurt-love. Her sisters were there when she felt most irritated. She had the most expectations for them. At any time, she was able to pick them up and hurt them. She was given a power she felt nobody deserved to have, even a type of god.

C
laudio and Mathilde let Lucy take the Long Island Rail Road into the city for a Saturday afternoon with her sisters.

I wouldn't want to live in the city,
said Carly.
Too much crazy stuff going on.

Sometimes the craziest things happen in the suburbs,
pointed out Natasha.

Like a kid getting sick and dying.
Lucy said the thing they were all thinking.

That could happen anywhere,
Carly said.

They took the E from Penn Station to the West Village, and saw a woman lying on the floor. Next to her was a bucket filled with garbage. The whole train smelled of cleaning solution. She was crying.
They're coming! The plane with the suitcase full of gods lands in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one,
she bawled.

This is a World Trade Center–bound E train,
said the automated conductor. The doors closed and the train sighed.

That's eerie that they still call it that,
said Lucy.

Why not? They were there once. That means they're there,
said Carly.

I want to give her money,
said Lucy, pausing for concern, tilting her head in the direction of the woman, which was also the direction of the floor.

Why?
asked Natasha.

Because doing good's a muscle,
said Lucy,
and I'd like to bulk up.

Don't give her money,
argued Carly.
She'll spend it on drugs.

Why do you think it's drugs that are making her crazy?
asked Lucy.
Maybe drugs are the only things that can keep her sane.

No amount of money we give could really help her,
pointed out Natasha.
We aren't her parents.

But didn't you hear the story about the homeless man who fell upon some hard times, and then he went on the radio, and people donated a house to him, and now he does voice-overs for radio commercials?

There are two kinds of true,
said Natasha.
Stories, and everything else.

I want to believe the story's true.

That's your problem,
agreed Carly.
You're stymied by hope.

Once I gave money to a homeless kid on the subway,
said Natasha.
I was on the six train with Molly, and we had just come from one of Mom's shows, minding our own business, when this kid with uncut hair started begging. He looked and sounded like a normal kid. He could've been one of our friends. He said he wasn't really trying to bother anyone, but he didn't have a family who could help him out. So I gave him ten dollars.

That's not fair,
said Lucy,
to older people.

Hey,
said Natasha,
life's not fair.

What is life,
asked Lucy,
anyway?

A song by George Harrison,
said Carly.

He was just a kid,
repeated Natasha.

The worst part about crazy people is how they're everybody's problem, you know?
Lucy rehabilitated their discourse.

Even so,
said Natasha,
I can't imagine what it must be like to be crazy. You may be the entire world's problem, but
your
problem is the entire world.

T
he night of Lucy's seventeenth birthday, her sisters threw her a secret party in their basement. Claudio and Mathilde went out to dinner in the city, giving their daughters the house for the evening. They probably wouldn't be home until at least midnight.

The Simone basement was 1970s style: shag carpeting, Claudio's record players and vinyls in the corner. Another generation arrived through the boxes filled with teen magazines from the early 2000s, that maudlin decade when “Dubya” Bush was in office and Paris Hilton ruled the media. The three sisters collected
Seventeen, YM, Teen Beat,
and
Tiger Beat,
and they saved them all. Occasionally the girls still thumbed through the publications, nostalgic for
The O.C.
references and advertisements for Smuckers chapstick. Antique periodicals.

Natasha announced they'd start off with a game of spin the bottle/seven minutes in heaven. The spun bottle decided who kissed whom, but instead of a small peck on the lips, the couple would go into the laundry room for seven minutes to kiss more.

The ratio was perfect and intentional: five girls and five boys. Natasha, Lucy, Carly, Molly, and Leora. Stephen, LJ, Matt, John, and Sloane.

John, a ginger with nostrils the size of cherry pits, wore a suit and a tie to the party. John—homeschooled, smug, and nearly mute—was their neighbor from three houses away. Lucy,
in the same way she always assumed nerdy people were really nice, liked boys with no game. He greeted her with an envelope. Then he went around the basement introducing himself.
Hello, I'm John. The thing that you need to know about me is that I wear a suit and a tie to a party in somebody's basement.

Lucy opened the envelope to find a twenty-dollar bill, a ten-dollar bill, a five-dollar bill, and a one-dollar bill inside. He'd spelled her name
Lucie
on the front envelope. This was odd. How could you mistake spelling a name like Lucy? Maybe he thought she would think of him more often, and perchance endearingly, if he made a mistake.

LJ had started dating another girl, Leora, the week of Lucy's surgery. Lucy felt obliged to invite her too, and she came with him. Carly and Natasha joked that she had an IQ of twenty. Lucy knew that they were doing it for her benefit, but she thought Leora was nice and smelled like popovers sometimes, especially mornings before homeroom.

Sloane, with his harsh hazel eyes, walked the walk. He was six-four. Half black and half white,
like a diner cookie,
he liked to say. In middle school, he'd believed that it was not only his job but also his god-given duty to give every girl their first kiss. He never reached Lucy, who at the time wasn't interested. Then, of course, puberty happened.

Birthday girl goes first,
said Natasha.

Lucy thought to herself, -
be cool or something. -
She twirled the old-timey glass Coke bottle, empathetic for the tiny carbonated particles left, clinging in droplets to the side. They'd never be drunk. She gave an exaggerated spin, staring at the knees of her friends who still had their regular Hearts in their bodies. It landed on Carly, sandwiched between Stephen and Sloane.
- Stephen! -
Kitten squirmed vigilantly through Lucy's rib cage. Carly nudged the bottle in Sloane's direction.

Laundry room's thata way,
pointed Natasha.

I live here,
snorted Lucy, annoyed.

That you do
. Sloane, touching her arm, was as handsome as Ricky Ricardo, the type of toxic boy who would probably never have to take a girl on a first date in his entire life. All he needed to do was find a girl and a bed, where they could lie next to each other and talk for hours about anomalous, private things until they fell asleep.

Lucy was still thinking about Stephen, her eyes clouding with sinister energy. -
Be quiet, mind! A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Does thinking that make me racist? You know a mime is a terrible thing to waste. -
She hated her mind. -
What if I die right this second? -
The second ended. She'd been feeling this pathological depression all week: a floating and vaporous foundation, one that seeped through her. Depression wasn't like fear or anger or panic—a body didn't go into alert mode when it was depressed. Lucy's depression was a cold Saturday afternoon with no obligations, and instead of relaxation feeling dread—like wanting so badly something that wasn't there.

Lucy's kindergarten class once had a lesson in floating and sinking, where Lucy's teacher dropped objects into a bowl of water to predict what would sink and what would float. Everyone in the class predicted that the penny would float except Lucy. The teacher kept a tally, and for the
PENNY
row wrote everyone else's name in the
FLOAT
column. Lucy stood alone under
SINK
. Of course she'd been wrong.

She didn't know why she remembered that. -
The brain is interesting
, - she thought. She reflected about how every time she washed her hands she'd sing “Happy Birthday to You” to herself twice, since she heard somewhere that's the suitable length to remove all the germs. Lucy hated germs. -
Happy birthday, dear Lucy. -
She always ended this brain-ditty with -
and many more, 'til you're twenty-four, and your parents kick you out the door, -
like Cody from elementary school, who would always add that tag
and make everyone laugh. She wondered about Cody, who had moved away, and how funny it would be if he knew she thought about him every time she washed her hands.

Your hand's soft,
Sloane said.
Like you've never worked a day in your life.

I work.
These words squirted out of Lucy's mouth. She washed dishes and made her bed and wrote until she perspired.

Did you know that our initials are each other's, but backward?
Lucy asked. She needed her sodden hands to stop and just be her hands. She felt like a good song after being used in a commercial.

You okay, Lucy?
Sloane asked, then accused.
You're nervous!

No I'm not.

-
He'll see my scars. He'll touch my hideous torso. Think comfortable thoughts, brain, -
Lucy ordered herself, like the smell of her sister Carly's scalp when she'd been an infant or the song “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” or her neighbor Mrs. Meyer, who spoke in Yiddish to her husband and who let Lucy pet her pet cat De Pudge, calling it
giving her a snudge.

Sloane tapped Lucy's nose.
Come closer.

What's your favorite condiment?
Small talk failed Lucy in this situation, so she resorted to asking bizarrely specific questions, trying to find the clue to Sloane's psyche, believing creativity to be her only wealth.

Honey mustard,
he said. He didn't acknowledge the arbitrariness of the question in the scope of where they were, what they were about to do.
You're so cute.

Thanks, and you're interesting,
she replied, bewildered. Man, she said the word
interesting
too much. She thought to herself, -
next time I say it I need to put a quarter in a jar. -
She thought again about pennies. She sang the birthday song to herself again and thought about Cody. What Lucy needed was more mental hygiene. Sloane's eyes perfectly fit in his face. Looking into them felt like trespassing. Holy mackerel.