“What are you looking at?” Taylor asked me.
“Nothing.”
I had told Taylor a lot lately, but not everything.
I hadn’t told her about my list. I hadn’t told her about my mother. I hadn’t told her it was my fault that my mother had died.
“No, really, what are you looking at?” Taylor nudged me with her elbow.
“You have nice nails,” I told Taylor, “that’s all,” and we headed to our homeroom.
*
When I got home that afternoon, my dad was outside checking the groundwater situation. The grassy fields that led directly to the river were saturated. My dad stood in the path he himself had cut and shifted his weight from foot to foot. He looked like he was on a seesaw you couldn’t see. He was grumbling again.
The septic. Damn. The well. Damn it.
Whatever that river was carrying, it couldn’t hold much longer. The ground was full, the water was as high as it could get, and eventually everything would spill out, like stories that have to be told.
Chapter 27
It was Saturday. Mrs. Tyler had agreed (way in advance) to pick me up from my house after lunch and then drop Taylor and me off at the college. My dad was going to pick us up after we went swimming, after he was done with his classes, and take Taylor home. My dad even had to talk to Mrs. Tyler on the phone about all these plans. Which he did. And Mrs. Tyler was right on time.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Mrs. Tyler asked twice, even though the words SUNY NEW PALTZ MEMORIAL GYMNASIUM were nailed to the wall of this huge, brick building.
“You’ve been here before?” she asked. “You’ve done this before?”
“Millions of times,” I said. But to be perfectly honest, I hadn’t ever gone to the college gym without a grown-up before.
“We’re fine, Mom,” Taylor said firmly. We both got out of the car.
Taylor had to wave to her mother again from inside the big window of the gym, and finally Mrs. Tyler drove away.
I hadn’t even been swimming here in probably two years, not since my dad used to take me and Ian on hot summer days, before they built the new town pool out by the high school. I was hoping, I was praying, I would remember where the women’s lockers were and wouldn’t look like I didn’t know what I was doing.
When my dad took us, he used to take me into the men’s room and shuttle me right out through the showers to the pool. We always came already dressed in our bathing suits. But the last time I came with my dad and Ian, I insisted on walking through the women’s room to get to the pool. (Or rather, I refused to walk, or even run, through the men’s locker room.) The thought of naked men horrified me, and Ian told me those college students always walked around naked like nobody’s business. “It is something that happens to you when you get to college,” he’d said. “You lose your fear of being nude.”
I thought of that as Taylor and I headed for the women’s locker room. I somehow remembered the right direction: down the steps, to the right past the squash courts. The vending machines were new. Taylor must have been a little nervous, too, or she picked it up from me. She walked a little slower as we got near the door.
WOMEN’S LOCKER ROOM.
Just as I reached for the handle, the door swung open and a college woman came out. We nearly banged into her.
She seemed startled, but she didn’t say anything. Her hair was combed but totally wet. She smelled of soap and chlorine as she passed by. She looked so grown up, and I imagined she had been naked just a few minutes before. If I thought about this too long, I was going to chicken out.
“Go ahead,” I said, holding the door for Taylor.
Inside, the smell of chlorine was even greater. The warm steam from the showers and cold air from the hall met right at the position by the door where Taylor and I stood. Women of all sizes were walking around—women in all stages of getting dressed and undressed. Breasts bobbed and bare bottoms walked by.
I started straight down a long row of lockers and benches and found an empty corner close to the pool entrance. We scooted far down the bench against the wall.
I knew if I looked at Taylor I was going to laugh nervously and loud and the whole locker room would echo. All around us metal lockers banged closed and reverberated. Showers ran, toilets flushed, wet footsteps padded. None of the women were talking much, but it was hollow and loud with locker-room noise.
Both Taylor and I began undressing in that girl way, which I learned last year in fifth grade when we had to change for gym. At first I had to watch the other girls getting into their gym clothes; arms pulled out of shirts but still completely covering their bodies, shirts covering their legs while they pulled off their pants. I wrote it down on my list. Now I, too, am able to completely change my clothes without being undressed for a single moment.
“Where do we put our clothes?” Taylor asked me. She was in her bathing suit with her oversized towel tightly wrapped around her waist. It hung almost to her feet. I was busy covering up my own body, wearing a big sweatshirt with my swimsuit underneath.
“In any locker that’s empty,” I said.
Most of the lockers had padlocks dangling, but we each found an unused one, stuffed all our things quickly inside, and slammed it shut again.
“Ready?” I asked.
I had my bathing suit from last year. I hadn’t thought much about it when I grabbed it from my drawer that morning, but now it felt tight.
“Leave your sweatshirt here,” Taylor said. “Just use your towel like me. I’ve got to use the bathroom first. Where is it?”
I pointed. At least the stalls had doors on them that closed.
“Wait for me,” Taylor ordered as she shut the swinging door and I heard the lock slide into place.
I reopened my locker, slipped my sweatshirt off, and threw it in. I wrapped the towel around my waist as Taylor suggested and I stepped out from the bench aisle to wait for Taylor by the bathroom. I heard her struggling to pull down her suit.
There were mirrors at the end of each row. I caught a glimpse of myself as I waited. Since no one was around, I dropped my towel a little. I dared to take a tiny look at myself. Maybe I could see if my hips were starting to get big. I faced backward and tried to twist my head all the way around and see myself from behind. But that hurt my neck too much. I straightened myself out and looked again.
Something looked wrong. My bathing suit was tight, but that didn’t account for the soft skin visible below both shoulder straps. Flesh that had started as the small beginnings of breasts now reached up toward my underarms. And the material of my bathing suit no longer covered it.
“What’s wrong?” Taylor had come out and stood beside me.
I wanted to hide, but there was no place to go. I looked at Taylor’s body beside me in the mirror. Her chest was still flat, her torso square; no flesh softened her angular ribs and slipped out for the world to see.
“What?” Taylor said again.
I didn’t want to call attention to something she hadn’t noticed yet. My first thought was to put my shirt back on. Make an excuse and never go swimming again as long as I live. As I stared at myself, I began to look more and more wrong.
For the second time since I had known Taylor, she did something remarkable. She put her arm around me and asked again. Softly.
“Gabby, tell me,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
So I told her. And standing in that locker room looking into the mirror, neither one of us could figure it out. “Well,” Taylor began, “let’s look around.”
“No way!”
“Just casually,” Taylor instructed, “like we’re just taking a little walk to the sink to wash our hands.” She lowered her voice.
So we walked casually over to the long line of sinks. I turned on the water. Two women walked behind me. One in sweats and the other in a bathing suit. The one in the bathing suit was tall and very muscular, but just around her arms and chest she was round and soft.
Another woman walked by wearing nothing on top at all. I looked away as fast as I could and then looked back. She was very round and jiggled and had white, round flesh from her breasts to her underarms. It was not grotesque. It was not a deformity. They were women.
We watched a few more women, fat and thin, flat and large breasted, big and small, and it seemed that for some, this skin was an extension of their breasts. When we were at least partially satisfied that I was at least nearly normal, we decided to head for the pool.
Neither of us said a word. We immediately jumped into the shallow end, without even testing the temperature of the water. Without the usual squeals and screams that come from dunking one toe in at a time.
“God, my hands are shaking,” Taylor said, emerging from a dolphin dive just next to me.
“Why? If it was you, you could have just gone home and asked your mother.” I wiped the water from my eyes.
“My mother!” Taylor practically shouted. “My mother! My mother says she’s ‘having a visit from her friend’ when she has her period. When my Aunt Judy was pregnant, my mother couldn’t even say it. She told me Aunt Judy was ‘in the family way’!”
“A visit from her friend?” I started laughing.
“My mother has to run the water in the sink while she’s peeing so nobody can hear! My mother won’t let me see her underpants in the laundry”
I was laughing; pool water was dripping from my hair.
“So you see, YBF, it’s not what you think. I really couldn’t just go home and ask my mother,” Taylor said. She tipped her head all the way back and let the water neatly comb the hair off her face. “Anyway, my mother does all the asking in my family.”
“Well, at least you have a mother.” But even as I said it, nothing seemed as clear as it once had.
I bent my knees and I let the water swallow me up. My body felt weightless, as close to flying as I could ever be. When I came up for air, Taylor was looking right at me.
“Gabby, tell me what really happened to your mother,” she said quietly, swimming toward me.
Chapter 28
So I finally told Taylor the story about my mother, because that’s all it was. A story.
I told Taylor that my brother and I got up one morning and couldn’t wake our mother up. We were really little then, so neither of us can really remember her. We went down in the elevator to the doorman, but it is only a vague memory, I told her.
I told Taylor that my mother’s accident was an overdose of sleeping pills. My mother had wanted to sleep a little more in the morning, and since I was so noisy and loud she needed to take more, but she took too many more by mistake. So it was partially my fault.
That’s the story. She died.
“So where was your father?” Taylor asked right away.
“What?”
“Where was your father? Didn’t he know something was wrong? Why did he let you and Ian go by yourselves in the elevator?”
I didn’t have an answer for this. My father wasn’t part of the story. It was just as I told it. My brother and I tried to wake our mother up and we couldn’t. We rode in an elevator. That’s the story.
“Didn’t you ever ask him?” Taylor went on.
“Who?” I asked. I was feeling a chill from my wet hair as we sat on the curb outside the gym and waited for my dad to pick us up.
“Ask your dad. Didn’t you ever ask him what happened? Where was he?”
“Why don’t you ask your own self questions?” I snapped at Taylor.
“What do you mean?”
“Like where was Richard all that time your parents were married and buying real estate. Didn’t you say you’ve known Richard from before your parents got divorced? So your mother knew Richard while she was married to your dad, didn’t she?”
Taylor looked at me, with confusion in her face. And hurt. At least she wasn’t asking any more questions.
That afternoon, as Ian predicted, the Wallkill River flooded its banks. The barricades went up. We had to drive home the long way around.
*
I stopped writing in my list journal that night, forever. The things I needed to know to be a woman were more complex than I originally had thought. It was more than how to train your bangs or how to cross your legs. It was more than I knew, or even Taylor knew.
I stuck my list journal under my coloring books (the fancy kind of coloring books, of movie stars and famous women, not the baby cartoon kind) and left it there. My last entry was the one about fingernails and powdered gelatin.
*
My dad was getting more and more agitated by the flooding river. He got up in the middle of the night with a flashlight and checked everything. Each and every thing. He came into my room, to check on me, I suppose. I wouldn’t have even known he had been in my room except that in the morning I saw the clothes I had left on the floor hanging over the back of my chair.
It reminded me that Cleo must have come into my room when I was sleeping to tear that page out of my red book. And then to top it off, I had a really bad dream that night.
I dreamt that I was running across the flooded ground flapping my arms wildly. Just when I thought I was about to take off into the air, I suddenly got stuck in the thick mud and I couldn’t move at all. I couldn’t run and I couldn’t fly.