Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (28 page)

Why don't we kiss?
Sloane suggested, which was about the coolest thing anyone had ever said to Lucy.

Why do we kiss?
asked Lucy.
In AP psych class we learned there's no evolutionary value.
In fact, there were scientists who studied kissing. They were called philematologists.
The most likely theory is that it comes from primate mothers passing along chewed food to their toothless babies.
Evolutionary psychologists had also done tests suggesting that the fluid swap creates a chemical transfer that helps humans better understand if the person they're kissing would be able to better produce viable offspring.

They heard Jay-Z playing through the speakers outside. Sloane drummed the beat of the song on her waist. He massaged Lucy's shoulders with the base of his hands, rolling a finger around her shirt collar. He placed his hand on the skin showing, the color of Brie.
I like this part of you.
He lifted her shirt up to touch the small of her spine.
This part too.
Kissing the apple of her left cheek. Fake flattery. Her parts weren't all hers. -
Does that make Sloane a polygamist? -
she thought. -
If we ever fell in love, he would love another's Heart. Is he a necrophile? Half a necrophile? Brain, I hate you! -

god, I love your body.
Sloane swooned. His bear hugs; his quick tongue swishing around hers. She breathed into his neck and ear, smelling Nilla wafers, fresh terry cloth towels, sweat. This was what he was made of. And Lucy? Her body felt more like a vending machine, with processed snacks, shaken sodas, and spare change inside.

Do you?
asked Lucy.

Lucy looked at his mouth, his bottom lip spooning the top. He said again,
god, I love it.

She thought, -
but how could you? -

L
ucy ushered Sloane to her room instead of back to the basement.
Nice place you've got here,
Sloane relished.

They kissed for almost an hour. The song playing in the next room was “Norwegian Wood
,
” its lyrics misheard by Lucy.
Isn't it good, knowing she would?
He yanked out the chord on the light on Lucy's nightstand. She liked that he felt very comfortable in her room, that he had the audacity.

He took his shirt off. Lucy knew what she was supposed to do next, first with her hands, since she had never done it before. She was supposed to tread slowly like other teenage girls and do only what she felt ready for. She knew all about how her body was her property, and how young she was. Still, Sloane would be a fine friend in bed, and it was lovely not to be alone. Lucy's finely tuned sense of her own mortality only intensified her longing to be normal, to live. He put a cold hand over her crotch. A nocturnal act of mercy, of alchemy.

Be careful,
she said.

I'll treat your body with the highest regard,
Sloane said. That was the spirit. She let him touch her because why not?

P
rogeria is an extremely rare genetic condition wherein symptoms resembling aspects of aging are manifested at an early age. The disorder occurs in an estimated one per eight million live births. Those born with progeria typically live to their midteens and early twenties. It is a genetic condition that occurs as a mutation and is not inherited.

Lucy watched a TLC documentary about progeria while eating dried mango slices in bed. TLC had reality shows about Siamese twins and families with nineteen children. It was just like the freak shows in the circus, only twenty-four hours a day, diffusing from anybody's living room.

- How does living feel to people with progeria? -
thought Lucy, chewing a mango strand with her eyes closed. -
Like that? -
she wondered. -
Intensified. -
They aged in their bodies many times as fast. Like dog years: seven years to every human year. It was the opposite way of living from what she was used to. It would be the opposite way of dying than the way she expected to.

She pictured somebody her age with a face and wisdom of an octogenarian. The wisdom was the stretch: she could imagine someone like Sloane with a wimpled face but not with the matching placid nature. She couldn't imagine somebody her age being okay with dying. Even her hubristic peers who
adolescently theorized,
I won't last past twenty-seven,
their predictions were more glamorous than sincere.

How Lucy wanted to be an old lady, wanted her teeth to loosen in their sockets, wanted a head of caulking-textured hair, wanted a shabby hairline bent like an upside-down smile. She wanted nobody to touch her hair or to even think about it because her husband, god bless him, would be dead after fifty-some-odd years of marriage. She wanted legs practically all vein and frilled age-ripples, senescent skin. She wanted it badly, but eventually.

She even kind of wanted the type of elastic bigotry that old people have about other groups of people, and how she wanted people to forgive her for being set in her ways. She wanted to find children and teenagers irritating, because she had been one and raised several. One by one she wanted her grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles and older friends to drop off gently like smacked flies, and she wanted to say to herself at their funerals, while looking quaint,
see you.
How she wanted it badly, but eventually.

It's never good-bye. It's always, see you later.

She wanted to live until she forgot where she was. Who she was. How she was. Wanted her memory to expire before her body. Until she rambled gnomically and forgot her way home and her huge family of at least three or four children and at least ten grandchildren took her to a nursing home and told her how lovely it was, how beauteous the facilities, how nice the staff. She ached for it. Eventually.

She wanted them to go to bed every night with a tinge of guilt for leaving her there, but she wanted their spouses to soothe their anxieties by bringing up the selling points of the nursing home.
Remember their game nights? Remember the fountain by the side? And the indoor pool. Even though Grandma doesn't swim, should she change her mind, she could do water aerobics any morning she wanted.
Should she be so lucky. She wanted it badly, and she wanted the years in between them more.

P
eople out there got sick, then inspired to become doctors. Lucy felt the opposite and wanted to separate her body from her purpose as much as possible.

You're recovering,
her cardiologist told her.

Lucy had one more month before she was able to return to school. She was bothered by the fact that she hadn't been a sporty girl before the surgery. If she hadn't been in recovery, she could have played basketball, even though she had mediocre hand-eye coordination. Indoor track or volleyball. And was it too late for her to be a ballerina? -
Certainly
, - she thought, clustered with woe.

She still took effort to dress for her tutoring lessons in her noisy pants and shirts, but everything that handled her body itched her, reminding her how much better life would be if she weren't so frail. Alone in her room, she took off her clothes. Her sutures encrusted in sugary-purple bruises reminded her of a long rain, or nerves.

She whispered prayers every night before bed. These private liturgies weren't long—usually she just needed to say,
bless me, bless my sisters, bless my parents and family. Bless Kitten.
Then she always said five Our Fathers, which her priest told her to say during a recent reconciliation. Lucy had started going to Catholic Mass every week. She and her sisters had been raised
Catholic and received the sacraments but stopped going to church years ago, after they finished religious school and were confirmed in the faith. Claudio and Mathilde were never pious, but they raised their daughters in this community.
Communities get you through. Someday, they might need one,
had been Mathilde's validation to her husband.

She loved the services, the priest and incense and chapel interior, but was still deciding whether or not she could believe in god. She was almost there, except for the times her brain told her -
uh-uh. Not this god, not this one. Not with what I know about science. -
Nevertheless, Lucy took comfort in the confidence that the miscellany of Catholic mores would always linger within her, like vestigial organs.

She told this to Natasha, who told her that
not everyone thinks about prayer.
How prayer probably made no difference whatsoever.

Sure,
said Lucy,
but it fixes my blues.

As a baby, Lucy had a habit of prefacing her sisters' names with
my
.
My Carly, My Tasha,
claiming them. This led to all three sisters marking their territory on everything they loved, claiming certain music the way they bought pairs of pants or jewelry. However, the only kind of possession involved was a type of familiarity, a fidelity. Everybody knew that Bob Dylan belonged to Natasha and that the White Stripes belonged to Lucy (Elliott Smith to the blue Lucy) and Van Morrison to Carly. In terms of the Beatles, whom they all adored equally, they divvied up the albums. Natasha had
The White Album
and
1
and
Let It Be,
and Carly had
Rubber Soul
and
Revolver,
and Lucy had
Magical Mystery Tour
and
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
They shared
Abbey Road
because they couldn't agree whom it was most part of.

After the surgery, Lucy reverted back to these ways, fretfully claiming small spaces in her house, searching for seize-able beauty, like someone with a new camera. Being a poet, she decided, was to do the things that everyone else did but a little
more sensitively. She figured all one really had to do was give a clue to the universe and
voilà!,
there it was—a good poem. And the less fancy one talked, the better, because simplicity had more possibilities.

A poet,
said Natasha.
That's kind of like being a dinosaur.

There are still lots of poets out there,
said Lucy.
Most people just don't read them.

I think people just don't have the attention span for it anymore.

Maybe they're afraid poetry will depress them.

It doesn't all have to be about sadness and darkness,
Natasha told her.
Why don't you write a poem about being healthy?

So Lucy wrote a hale and Hearty poem. She wasn't bad at being happy:

(Inevit)abilities

The verb
to suffer

has vanished!

No more fourteen hours

of sleep a night.

My body

now can be described as having hobbies

other than breaking down, my body

takes up

too

much

space!

I blink once for yes,

twice for no, thrice for always.

My hair is washed, two back-to-back

thunderstorms. I sleep in clichés

like
ear-splitting,
or
eyesore,

remembering too well the amplified splits

and sores and a body that felt like it

was just as good bought or sold

as it would be dead. I could have been

a Chinese fetus, a prisoner's son. Now I feel

fire-splatters in my nerve endings, my body

turning counterclockwise and growing younger,

my awakened lungs, my soft Heart.

She thought of her sisters reading her poem, then crossed out
Chinese fetus.
Having an audience was scary. Her family went to the
Bodies
exhibit last year at the South Street Seaport in Manhattan, an exhibition showcasing dissected humans. Natasha had read in the newspaper that the bodies had all been unspoken for, from the Chinese police. People were wondering whether the bodies had been prisoners executed by the Chinese government.

They aren't exactly known for their human rights,
Natasha had said, staring at the display of the man throwing a football, his preserved system displayed like a platter of hors d'oeuvres. Carly fell into a bad mood for the rest of the day, telling her sisters she was sick of them and that nobody knew what it was like to be her. Which was a widespread conundrum: nobody knew what it was like to be anybody but his or her raw happenstance of self.

It was December 23. Their parents were working late, again. They were always working.
A Festivus for the rest of us!
hollered Lucy. Lucy and Carly were fanatical with holidays. In June, they'd initiate a countdown until Christmas. They also tried to celebrate Hanukkah, Ramadan, Diwali, Tet, and Kwanzaa.

Dinner that night would be latkes, frosted gingerbread houses, reindeer cookies, hamantaschen, turkey sandwiches, pumpkin pie with graham cracker crusts. They ignored what would detach these occasions: religion and time. Carly was wearing a red, white, and blue dress. Lucy was wearing an effulgent party dress, along with novelty glasses that said
2000 Y2K
on them.

You're making a joke out of what a lot of people take seriously,
said Natasha.

Nobody can see us,
said Carly.
We aren't hurting anybody.

It just feels wrong. Is nothing sacred anymore?

You're being old-fashioned,
Lucy said, sizzling potato pancakes in oil.

They played dreidel as a drinking game, opening a bottle of their parents' Pinot Noir. When she landed on gimmel, Carly chugged her red wine with ice, stirring with a red-and-white-striped swizzle stick, sipping from a stripey straw.