What I Had Before I Had You (8 page)

 

6

I
T'S THE FOURTH
of July and I am sprawled in Jake's father's Sunfish, six of us weighing the little boat dangerously low in the water. We watch the fireworks, lying in a human basket weave, our heads on one another's stomachs, passing a joint. Pink rain, silver flowers exploding. I tip my head back over the side of the boat to watch our wake: moving lines swimming in and out of contact, drawing moon-hued diamonds and chevrons on the black water. Jake puts Pam at the tiller and scrambles over us to the bow, where his own personal fireworks stash is in his backpack. His calf grazes mine as he passes.

Private fireworks are illegal in New Jersey, so Jake is drawn to them, as I will come to understand he is drawn to all forbidden things. The soar, the glittering violence, the chemical heat. Tonight, Jake is the source not only of the boat and the after-fireworks fireworks but also the weed. This is why I have seen him biking so frequently, following his delivery route to drop off dime bags with stoner kids at the arcade, the park, the public library, and why I have seen him hanging around smoker's row in the wintertime, the strip of property across a driveway from Burling where all the bad girls smoke between classes, off school grounds.

Pam passes me the joint, and I take a deep pull. Weed, like so many things, is a welcome surprise of the summer, though it is incidental to the higher highs of friendship and of secrecy. But it makes the fireworks explode in a slower way; I can see their insides as they bust apart. For a few hours, it lets me relax into my mind and trust myself, where my mother's doubt has made me edgy.

Kandy's head is on my stomach. She watches Jake recede and then turns her head up to mine and blows out a mouthful of air. We regard each other across the minor obstructions of my breasts. “Jesus Christ,” says Kandy. “His
eyes.
” It's true, they are fabulously blue. Blue like a gas burner. By some trick angle of moonlight, you can see them from here when he looks back to stern. I imagine him signaling ships to port. Lighthouse man. I consider his worthiness of Kandy: He is a little haggard, a little skinny, but utterly composed, like somebody who has seen another world and walks through this one with pitying understanding.

Kandy closes her eyes and looks tragic. I don't get it—if she wants Jake, he is right there. I am pretty sure this has nothing to do with the tiger of love or the flea of sex. I have always pictured crushes, instead, as fat, undetected woodland ticks, buried under girls' ponytails, sucking away their strength and resolve.

“Just go fucking do it,” I tell her. I have learned where to place my curse words for best effect. “Don't be a pussy.”

She makes a face at me but gets up happily and goes after Jake, helps him set up the roman candles and send the first one screeching into the sky. She shifts her weight closer to him, and the boat yaws. My stomach gurgles from the weed and the weight of Kandy's skull and now from the dark biting drink someone has handed me in a plastic cup. I go to Pam and drape myself across her lap. She runs her fingernails across my scalp, and sleep comes at me sideways.

When I wake up, we have tied up to a buoy, and everyone is swimming except Pam and me. “Why are you such party poopers tonight?” Kandy asks, shivering, her chin above the side of the boat.

“Olivia fell asleep, it was too cute,” says Pam. I am cared for. Kandy drops and surfaces slick, calling for us to come
on
.

Later, Jake sets off the rest of the fireworks from the boat, and we huddle together, trembling under thin towels, looking up. I think how we must look from space, a tiny bobbing spark at the edge of an interminable darkness.

“WANT TO GO
for a walk?” Jake asks me in the marina parking lot as I pull on my jeans over sandy-wet skin. Some kids have split for a diner. Others peel out of the lot in someone's parents' wood-paneled station wagon. I don't want to go home to my mother and her ghosts; I never want to go home anymore.

“Okay,” I say. He hands me his hoodie, and I put it on, though I'm not cold.

Pam stands in her open car door. “You coming?”

Jake yells back, “I got her.” Pam slides into her seat and watches us recede in the rearview mirror.

I babble as we walk down the beach, like there is something I want to say but it is at the bottom of a box full of trivia. I wonder what I was drinking earlier. I talk about a teacher Jake and I knew from the craft workshop, how he won't let his kids do Halloween, how his boxers always show above his belt: hearts, chili peppers. We keep going past the last pilings of the beaches that are good for swimming, and I take off my Keds to walk on the wet sand, farther from the green glass shards and the sand-submerged diapers and McDonald's cups. We pass the beginning of the boardwalk and all the screaming lights and the people and the powdery mess of funnel cakes dropped on the splintery boards, and then we pass the end of the boardwalk and keep going, past the private beaches, all the way down past the public housing development where Kandy lives, past a city of orange-roofed storage units between which I think I can make out the dark, indefinite shapes of people standing still.

Jake leads me to the skeleton of a house, up at the edge of the sand dunes where the beach becomes the land. Tar paper flutters from naked studs, and tall beach grass grows between moldy fragments of plaster, some faint yellow-diamond wallpaper that might float away on the next high tide. I know without asking that Jake lived here, by the way he navigates between former rooms, creating a hallway where you can no longer discern that a hallway once was. He lights up a cigarette and blows smoke at the ocean, watching me angle and squint at the house, wishing for my camera. We stand where the kitchen must have been, and mud squelches between our toes.

“Come on.” He leads me to the back of the house. A staircase spirals up into the darkness, missing five steps out of twelve. I climb up after him, wincing at the creaks of the old, dried, and salted wood of the second floor. The room we enter is more of a room than anything on the ground floor, with two intact green-papered walls and a rusted metal bed frame still supporting a salt-stained, waterlogged mattress.

“This is my bedroom,” he tells me as we settle cross-legged on the floor, face-to-face.

“
Was
.” I have it from Kandy that Jake lives in an upscale housing development a mile inland.

“Yeah. I don't like the shit I sleep in now. It's, like, Barbie's Dreamhouse or something.”

“When did you live here?”

“We left when I was twelve.”

“Why?”

“Beach erosion.” The sound of moving water fills the house, and I feel more aware of it, more tuned in, than I have ever felt. This is how the ocean must sound to vacationing midwesterners: rare, enormous, extravagant. Jake flicks ash, and we watch it die in the wet sand. “I mean, look how high the tide comes now. My parents don't even miss it. They think wall-to-wall and fake plants is nicer.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.

“I don't know.” He grins at me, and I relax. This is a conversation in which we don't have to know why we say things. I can do that.

“You know what?” he says, and I don't answer, but I know. I think I know. Something is happening. Jake is looking at me. His hair is dark, and the salt smell of the house makes me thirsty. He tips forward onto his knees, one hand on either side of me, and he kisses me.

“You're something else,” he says in an anachronistic James Dean way that, in this moment,
kills
me
.
Kandy doesn't even cross my mind; I am an inexperienced friend. What I am thinking is this: Here is a boy who wants me. Here is a chance to cross a threshold. And I can feel it, I can feel the pull, his body's heat, an interior quiver. My mother buzzes like an insect in my ear:
He won't be worth it. They're never worth it.

I get up and move to the sodden mattress. I plant my hands behind me and lean back a little. It seems perfect, all the elements of cosmic alignment—there is a bed, the sound of the ocean, and this boy with the beautiful hands, with the lighthouse eyes, wants
me
. Jake comes over and kisses me on his old bed, longer and deeper. We roll locked together, and I can feel a heartbeat between us. His lips are soft, and he tastes as I imagine fireworks taste: cinnamon and metal. I reach to undo his jeans but get only the top button undone, unfamiliar with the mechanics of the button fly, before he pushes my hands away.

“What are you doing?” he asks, muffled, a heat on my neck.

I thought boys wanted to all the time. “You don't want to?”

“I mean, not unless you really want to.” He picks up his hoodie from where I've tossed it on the floor, and drapes it over my shoulders. We are quiet for a moment. I hide my embarrassment. I'm not concerned about my failed attempt (the flea, not the tiger), but I don't want Jake to think I'm strange for trying. I'm sure he doesn't know that I'm a virgin, that I was kissed for the first time only weeks ago—it wouldn't seem likely for this wild, fearless duplicate self I have constructed.

We sit at the edge of the room, dangling our legs over the beach grass, talking, for a long time. We talk about our friends and about the tourists and the stars, about our town and what lies beyond it. Each time I think the house will fall down in a gust of wind, it does not. When we finally climb down, hoarse and thirsty, the tide is up to our ankles in the kitchen. I feel like I am already asleep as we walk the long walk back to the marina. He drives me home and drops me off a ways up the road, because I tell him that my mother is strict.

“How strict?” he asks.

“Strict,” I say, and he holds my hand for a moment before I get out. That sober handholding in the dewy scrub, the rattle of the highway through the trees, the thin gray light—this is the most real part of the night. He is serious about this, about me
.
I don't know what to do with it.

All the lights are off in my house. I climb in through my window and lie in my bed, rolling the whole night around in my dry mouth. Morning comes blue through the slats of my blinds. I wonder if my mother looked in on me during the night. I am a new girl, and she is going to have to see that sooner or later.

JULY WEARS ON,
salty and gradual, like an oven on preheat. My two lives diverge, the old one a straight line: mother, nursery, camera, home. The new one a plunging diagonal: nights in the suite, climbing out my bedroom window, the sweet ache of tequila shots. Loitering, messing with tourists, playing kickball, the sweaty heat of boys' hands on my shoulders, helping me up. And my sisters haunting both, anxious as a headache, strong-limbed teenagers fighting in the sand, bawling infants in my mother's empty arms.

By now I have begun to rearrange the nursery. As I clean, I turn things, reorient them, replace them with very similar things to see if my mother will notice. Sometimes I come back to find that the tissue box I have turned forty-five degrees has turned itself back so that its lines parallel the table on which it stands, but every now and then a change of mine becomes permanent: fake tulips in a mason jar by the window become fake roses, the blankets in the crib shift from the east to the west end, so that my sisters sleep now with their heads to the ocean and the rest of America below the soles of their feet. I dust less carefully, and sometimes my mother fails to notice small triangles of dust and sand in the corners of the room, where I have not bothered to do two sweeps of the vacuum cleaner, but have rammed it with careless geometry against the meetings of the walls.

THE BOYFRIENDS ARE
most active in summer. They take my mother dancing, they bring us buckets of fried chicken, they feel generous, they help with the electric bill. The door to my mother's bedroom is often closed, and I blast Joy Division on my boom box so I don't have to hear what goes on. My mother makes tortilla soup for Terry and me, and after we eat, I watch Terry dry the dishes, his ponytail moving softly on his meaty back, and pretend for a moment that he is my father. He would try to take me camping, I can see it. He would snore and overcook the fish.

“How are the girls doing?” asks Terry carefully, glancing sidelong at my mother.

“They're okay,” she says, stacking blue bowls in the cabinet. “Olivia has been going to a photography camp.” This is the story I've spun to account for my days with Kandy's crowd. I'm taking enough photos to make it plausible.

“And,” Terry pushes, “how are the little ones?”

My mother studies him and then looks down, shy and smiley like a little girl. “Can't you feel them? They're so happy you're here.” She squeezes Terry's hand. “They're so happy.”

MY MOTHER'S CLIENTS
crowd the house. Footsteps overhead, creaking doors, nervous small talk audible through the basement ceiling:
I heard there will be rain next week, the drive was longer than I thought, do you have a restroom?
The divine-energies chart shows a line steadily rising, which is, as always, both good and bad. We could certainly use the money; we've canceled cable and the newspaper, and I want my MTV.