She started to think about it herself.
She said to herself, “Suicide,” and mulled the word over, and thought, “But how would I ever do it?” And after three weeks of thinking about it, she knew how. She’d walk off a bridge. She’d kill herself just like that.
After that month of suicide thoughts she had three of the best days of her life. She met a boy, fell in love, lay out in the sunshine and held his hand and kissed, and fucked behind a video store, and after those three days she had the worst year ever, the worst year of her whole entire life, a year she would look back on when she was eighty and still think, “Yep, that was the worst fucking year of my whole entire life.”
Every day she was sick and green and every day she woke up with a foul smell in her nose, which ebbed in and out from morning till night, and her glands swelled up and she cried and cried, and her friends started calling more and more often, then stopped. And her belly swelled up and her hair sweated down her back, and her mother yelled about money and her future, and she ran into walls, and she fell down stairs, and she was disoriented, and lost, like a girl gone blind.
She came out of that year very skinny and very tattered. Almost all of her bones had been broken or cracked and she had welts and bruises everywhere, especially on her face, and there were dark black circles under her eyes. And the thought of parading around campus with a joke flag made her quiver with nausea and resentment.
That was it. She came out of it. She never had such a down as that or such an up as the three days that preceded it, not ever again in her life. The rest of her life was like a long thin line with little diminuendos and tiny little crescendos, and friends visiting from out of town.
She had a big, bright, curly head of hair that made her look like a clown, and nobody ever told her.
THE MOON MONOLOGUE
NOBODY EVER ACCUSED me of being bright, which I am glad for. You see, all the really bright people I have ever known have been involved in elaborate drug deals, and I’m not one of those people who believes that drugs are just a part of life.
I am very much against drugs, and I think the people who do them are foolish. I have seen the way they make people act, and I am not a space case. I am a genuine human being, and I express what I’m feeling.
So when it happened that Bobby, that night in the cellar, touched my breast with the palm of his hand and fell back as though electric-shocked and said, “You’re bright, Marie!” I thought he was the biggest goof ever, and I said so.
“Nobody’s ever accused
me
of being bright, Bobby,” I said with pride and a bit of anger. I got up and went straight to my room to watch the sun rise, but there was another hour still to go. I just sat at the window then, and looked out at the lawn and thought it was a pretty confusing world, which it is, if you look at it the right way.
So much for that.
It wasn’t two days later before I began meeting people on the street who started asking me questions; questions about where the world was going to, what would be happening with plants in the future, and would pets be obsolete soon?
Strangely enough, I had all the right answers for these people.
It was like they had put the ideas in my mind with the questions they were asking. “Sure,” I said. “There’s all sorts of things that’ll happen in the future.”
“Like what, Marie?”
“Well, I’ll tell you. Tomorrow I’m going to a party and I’m going to be the hit of that party. I’m going to wear a dress and make out crazily with all the boys. The boys I know are pretty sly but they can’t pass anything over on me. If I see Bobby I’m just going to ignore his face.”
Anyway, it turned out some kind of expedition was coming up and they wanted three pretty girls from our town. It was to colonize a new community, somewhere in the middle of the ocean where no people had ever been. I’m not one of the prettiest girls, not even in my school, but I decided I was going to go. If everyone else was going to go.
Just so turns out I did go, and guess who was chosen? Me and two others! Two girls I didn’t know but who said to me privately, like in confession, that they thought
I
was the prettiest of the bunch. Well, imagine that! Me with my misshaped tooth and my hair of straw. If that wasn’t the craziest thing I’d ever heard!
Just so happened that we went and ended up staying three whole years. When we got back Bobby was married to that slut from the prom. Turns out they even had a kid on the way. When Bobby saw me he pulled me by the hand into a little parkette and said, “Look at you. You’re miraculous.”
I had gotten a bit of confidence in that time, and I said, all cheeky and indifferent, “I know.”
Now it so happens that Bobby is making me his lover on the side. I’m having a real good time fucking him and all. I learned all sorts of crazy things in the colonies, and one of them is about fucking, about how asses really matter.
One day I’m going to the moon, and when I go, I’m going to bring back a teaspoon of sugar.
THE PARTY AT HER PLACE, WITH HER PIANO
THE GIRL PLAYED the piano as everyone found their corner, or their spot in the alley out by the house, and the neighborhood women leaned through their windows to yell, lights on, curlers in their hair. The girl had a famous piano-playing brother who she never stopped thinking about, even in moments of relaxation, and never let her friends stop thinking about, even when buying drugs.
When she went to the front door after her set, climbing over bodies, spilled beer, all that, she met two boys. One she had known from an old friend’s breakup, the other she had never seen before. He was tall and lanky with mystery in his eyes, a cigarette in his hand, and the perfect entrance, and she fell instantly in love and forgot about her brother.
“Hello,” she squeaked, then scurried away.
The boy walked in tall and smooth, did not climb over anybody’s legs, and made his way to a wall upstairs to pose against while the other one found a circle of friends to show off his drunkenness to.
The girl was lost for several minutes. No one knew where she had gone. When the music returned she was found back at the piano with no audience waiting, and the boy she had been preparing for was nowhere to be seen.
She ran downstairs and out the door. There he stood in the alley, smoking a joint with several guys and two pretty girls, who laughed and huddled; their own little party.
The boy looked over and she forgot her successful brother, who was not only successful but gay, and successful at that too, and probably fucking right now, and she looked down at her boot and stammered, “Oh, nothing, nothing,” and jolted her body and shook her head and walked inside.
The drunken boy who had been entertaining was now tired of that and went up to the girl and said, “Hey, come on, play the piano for us. Come on, come on,” dragging her by the hand.
“Who’s your friend? Is he the one you’re living with now? Is he the one you’re living with?” she asked, sitting down at the piano. “He seems awfully shy or strange or something.”
“Play!” he demanded, then plunked himself down and put his hands on the keys and began a song, the tedious song that everyone knows.
“No, come on,” she pushed him off. “Get away.” And she played her own song, and it was not her brother’s; it was low and romantic and moody, and she sang aloud in a halting way. Her voice was into it, trembling and all that, but her soul was looking out for the boy, her heart was searching the room.
Her lyrics were terrible and finally she stopped. No one was listening anyway. She went downstairs and back outside but the boy was gone and so was the group, and she ran inside but found neither of the boys.
“Have they gone?” she asked a girl who ought to have known. “Where’d they go? Did they leave?”
“I think they left. He thought the party sucked.”
“Oh.” She walked outside and looked down the alley, then went back in. “They really left.”
“That’s what I told you. Is your brother in town?”
The girl answered as she had before, looking around. She talked about his plans in LA, who he was meeting, what he would be wearing for his good-bye concert.
And the boys down the block, turning onto the next block, said nothing to each other.
One had nothing in his mind, the other just had nothing.
THE GIRL WHO PLANTED FLOWERS
WHEN SHE WOKE in the morning there beside her was the boy she had dismissed the night before as far too ugly and ingratiating, and on the other side, even more of a surprise, the boy she had dismissed as far too pompously intellectual. And there she was in the middle, and though she thought she was in the house where she had partied the night before, she wasn’t sure, she just wasn’t sure.
She climbed gingerly over the one and went to the window and looked out into the backyard where she saw huge piles of sand, little mountains with peaks, and as she had no idea why or where they had come from, she quickly decided, “I must have blacked out.” Then she went to the bathroom and returned as the two boys were rising.
“Hello boys,” she said lazily, without surprise or enthusiasm. And the boys, first one, then the other, said hello and looked at each other, and as they did not smile or seem to commiserate, the girl took her seat at the foot of the bed.
“I’m hungry,” she said. “Are you two hungry?”
One boy nodded while clearing the sleep out of his eyes, and the other boy looked around trying to figure out where he was.
“Well then, let’s go,” she said. And since they were all in their clothes there was nothing to do but leave.
One boy was taller, and the three moved slowly down the road, and it was cold. It was already November and should have been colder, but still, it was cold, and the girl thought nothing. When the sidewalk narrowed the intellectual hung back, and the ugly boy and the girl walked ahead.
After five minutes they reached a good place to eat. It had eggs, it seemed, and bacon and potatoes and unlimited coffee and no sign that forbade smoking, so they took a booth at the back, and the booth was brown, and the lighting was dim, and the sun wasn’t shining, and they were all wretched and existing in states of humility and banality.
They all ordered the same thing, except for the ugly boy who was a vegan, and he ordered nothing but black coffee and orange juice, and the girl thought drearily in her head, “Oh God, I slept with a vegan.” And the tall intelligent boy kept his eyes on the table and said nothing, and none of them said anthing except the girl, who made comments like, “Are you sure you don’t know what happened last night?” and, “Your name is Dave, I think I remember.”
Eventually she grew irritated with their silent and purposeful ignorance, their childish posturing, and she thought that since they weren’t fessing up to anything or saying anything, probably something like that had never happened to either of them before. But the thought was so terrible she pushed it from her mind.
“Well,” she said, when the food arrived, and inwardly cursed these humorless boys, whose dark moods succeeded in pulling her down with them, and she knew, even then, that it would be much better if they were cocky and glowing and gay.
They ate their food in silence, and the intellectual, she could tell, wanted terribly to go. Before he was finished he asked for the bill, and the young waiter brought it and then left, and the intellectual left while she was still eating. Then the ugly boy gulped down his juice and left, and neither said more than “okay” or “good-bye.”
Now she was alone. She put down her money and realized for the second time that she was out of cigarettes, and she felt horrible and hungover and nothing like a slut.
The girl walked through the city that day, and it was cold and dark, and the sky was uglier than it had ever been, but not as ugly as the boy she had slept with, and she realized that she was twenty-one, and she thought of her life, “What a waste,” and nothing convinced her otherwise.
ELEANOR
ELEANOR WAS FINE, but she had troubles fitting in with the family at first. The young boys looked at her as though she had never had sex, which wasn’t true. When she was nineteen she had slept with her boyfriend many times.
In those improbable days he was always hanging around, pushing her legs up over her head. He was always tying her spread-eagled to the bed, always rolling her onto her front, and if not onto her front, then onto her back. Other times she was pulled up by her hips and made to kneel in a kind of a bridge at the edge of the mattress. He died tragically three years later, and ever after brown-haired men made her cry.
The three young brothers knew nothing of this. They had seen nude pictures here and there, sat across from her at meals as though they’d been through things she’d never understand. They had no idea about her at all. They were naive in the way young boys are about middle-aged women who don’t seem so cool.
The mother was distracted. The nurse was distracted.
The grandmother, meanwhile, insisted that Eleanor was responsible for her stroke. It was Eleanor’s fault, she said, and so she stuck out her cane to trip Eleanor whenever Eleanor walked by, and pointed her chin at Eleanor. Finally the old woman locked herself in her room and complained about it to her friends over the phone: how Eleanor caused her stroke. Eleanor discussed this with the nurse. They agreed that the phone was making her excited, and so they took away the phone.