What I Had Before I Had You (9 page)

I am showing Pam my darkroom. When I first told her that I'm into photography, she said that photography is not an art because “there are insufficient fumes.” She paints with oils because, she says, acrylic is for pussies. Your art should literally kill you, she says. So now I lead her to my jars of developer and fixative to show her the depth of her error. She sniffs at them, wrinkles her nose, and concedes my status as a fume-plagued artist. She says, hushed and reverent, that Rembrandt died of fumes.

“Who?” I ask. She goes slack-jawed and digs in her backpack for a big square book: paintings of the Dutch masters. She actually has it with her. She watches me like she's worried it might make my head explode, the beauty of it. I spend a long time on my stumpy Salvation Army sofa—the legs sawed off so I could fit it down the basement stairs—examining the girl with a pearl earring, and when I look up, Pam has spread a number of my prints across my door-desk and is moving them around, making piles.

Among the photos she is looking at, the ones she has not piled up and pushed aside, are the photos of my sisters on the beach. I drag over a wooden stool to sit opposite her and look at the upside-down photos.

“Who are these girls?” she asks me. “Why did you take so many of them?”

“You don't know them?”

“No. Why, should I?” She looks more closely. I taste blood and try to stop chewing the inside of my cheek. It is terrible to see my sisters exposed like this, but it is also a relief, like I have been alone in a room for months, and now Pam has opened the door and walked inside.

She picks up the one where Courtney is airborne, curled in a downward-facing C shape, and Laura is kneeling, reaching out, about to be collected into Courtney's fall. “These are really good.”

Pam trips over to the sofa and collapses, produces a dime bag of weed, dangles it out in front of her enticingly.

“So you've never seen those girls?” I dare to ask.

She shakes her head distractedly, feels her pockets. “Shit,” she says. “I forgot my lighter.” I want the fact that Pam doesn't recognize my sisters to mean something, but I'm not sure it does. My new friends have failed to notice plenty of living girls. Me, for instance, until quite recently.

I run upstairs to get some matches, and my mother is in the kitchen running a glass of ice water, which means she has an overheated client. Possibly she has told someone very ill that he will soon embark on a great journey. I open the fridge and rummage, since I can't go for the matches until she leaves the room.

She starts to go but then turns back. She has been careful of me for a few days, and I'm not sure why. I am a fragile piece of china.

“I want you to know it's all right with me.” She gestures at the basement stairs with the water glass, the ice cubes clinking. “You two.”

“Hmm?”

“Whatever you feel is okay with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that I support you. I like Pam.”

I cough and bend over, watching the swirling kaleidoscope of floaters inside my eyelids. I don't want her to see me laugh. I cannot resist saying, “Such clairvoyance,” as I close myself back into the basement stairway without any matches.

“Pam,” I say, exploding with mirth as I barrel down the stairs. “From now on we're lesbian lovers, okay?”

She looks at me flatly, and I blanch. “Or not. My mom just thinks we are.”

“Okay.”

“We have her blessing,” I say, dissolving again into giggles. Pam stands up and approaches me dramatically, dragging her steps, crossing one foot in front of the other, and inclining her head in an attitude of mock seduction. Then she stops a foot in front of me, lengthens her pale neck, puckers her lips, and closes her eyes. I laugh. She opens her eyes and says, the corners of her mouth twitching playfully, “Fucking chicken,” so I take the step in boldly and I kiss her. Our teeth bang together because we are laughing. Very close up, I can see the tiny soft hairs on her jawbone, swirling and snaking up to meet the dark of her hair. The vague craters on the hollows of her cheeks are like topographical maps.

For the next few weeks, whenever Pam drops me off at my house, we kiss on the lips, my mother watching through the living room blinds. I bite my lip to keep from laughing; one time I bite
her
lip. Pam tells me I have to open my mouth more or it won't look real. “Come on,” she says, “fake better.” I find this game hilarious, and it won't occur to me for years that Pam doesn't.

When I go into the house, my mother pretends that she was at the kitchen table, paging through L.L. Bean the whole time, but she looks at me with a wild relief, and later she will bring me a mug full of ice cream or a cinnamon bun she has made from scratch and chat forcibly, as if to prove that we are okay, that everything is going just as it should.

MID-JULY I DROP
by the grocery store to get some cash. I chain up my bike and wait for the slow automatic door to allow me inside. Through the glass panes to my right, I see my mother in the hallway by the employee break room and the basement stairs, talking to a tall woman with wavy chestnut hair. My mother is gesturing with both hands. The woman reaches out and touches her shoulder. I pause to watch, and the automatic doors close, forgetful of me. The woman's face is handsome but drawn, the skin around her eyes pink and papery. Her loveliness—her straight nose and her dark, bright eyes—seems worried away, like that of an aged ballerina. She is speaking urgently to my mother.

I wave my arms, and when the doors slide open, I walk through the front of the store to join them, past the four cashier stations, down the produce aisle, and back by the approach side of the checkout lines. When I turn the corner to the hallway where I saw them standing, they are gone. I see my mother where I just was, at the front, manning the third register. She is halfway through checking out a customer; how can that be?

“Olivia!” She scans cans of chickpeas in her lazy way, and the customer, a drab khaki man, stares at the hypnotic movements of her hands. “It's so nice when you come see me.” This is her public voice, too bright.

“Who were you just talking to?”

“Hm?”

“That woman back there.” I point to the break room, but she doesn't look.

“Sweetie, I haven't had a break today.”

“But you were just standing over there.”

She hands the khaki man his receipt, and he trundles off. She frowns at me. Her arm snakes out to wrench my head in for a diagnostic forehead kiss. “Do you think you had another experience?”

I know what she means by
experience.
Neither is the subtlety of
do you think you had
instead of
did you have
lost on me. I saw the chestnut-haired woman with the precision of reality, but then, that is how my mother describes her vision of the twins, and that is how I have seen them, too.

“Nope,” I say, loudly enough to turn a few heads. I stare over my mother's shoulder into the store, where women are mothering the produce. They run their fingers over the eggplants, checking for soft spots. They heft cantaloupes and heads of lettuce in their arms. They hold apples up to the light to inspect them for bruising.

My mother hands me a twenty from her back pocket, and I stuff it in my front one. Even this basic transaction galls me. She knows when I need some cash, and she knows how much. And she is telling me that things I see are not there. It makes the whole grocery store tremble like a sheet of water. I don't want to think about it.

“You know, you were right before, about my sisters,” I say, a creeping malice in my heart. “I was
mistaken
.”

“Yes,” she says quietly.

“I'm not like you. I don't see shit that's not there.” If she can hear the talk underneath my talk right now, then she knows the depth of my contrariness, for my interior voice is compelled to speak for my sisters even as I slight them: Don't listen to me! I see you, I know you!

My mother is rearranging a small display box of plastic penguin key chains, making them all face her instead of the customer. “Good.”

“Good,” I say, but it feels like she has won, so I add, “I'm not a fucking psycho.” Everyone in the store looks up.

My mother smacks the moving belt with her palm, and it comes alive, cycling slowly and inexorably toward the end of the checkout counter. Her eyes narrow, her jaw clenches, she sucks herself in and becomes somehow taller. I am struck motionless with a familiar little-girl terror. Having drawn herself up in such a fearsome way, my mother says only, “You are skating on thin ice,” which seems folksy and weak and insufficient to describe the peril I feel in my gut.

Following this feeble pronouncement, her mind closes on me with the slow absoluteness of those automatic doors, and I cease to exist. I punch the slanted shelf of grapefruit on my way out, and my fist is sticky with exploded pink fruit guts. A woman with a shopping basket stares at the mangled grapefruit and then at me. I get on my bike and pump the pedals until I am flying past lines of parked cars toward the ocean, away from my mother, and back out into my glittering, unsupervised life.

THE NEXT DAY
around the same time, as if to prove themselves to me, my sisters reappear. I brake hard on the pebbly sidewalk. I was headed home for dinner, but my appetite whooshes out of me as soon as I see them. They are in a group of kids I don't know, waiting for the third hole at Peter Pan Mini-Golf. Peter Pan is a few blocks off the boardwalk, a shoddy, bad-dream Neverland. You putt through Tinker Bell's miniature house and past Tiger Lily's forest, where crumbling, wild-eyed plaster Indians lie on their elbows in the grass and shoot retractable arrows onto the green, and finally through the crocodile's great jaws, which open and close on the hand of a giant Captain Hook, his eyes widening over and over in surprise. The course is surrounded by a high chain-link fence, and within that, a wooden split-rail fence, a vestige from a more honest time. My sisters are sitting on the wooden fence, leaning back against the chain link, waiting for their turn to putt past the Indians. They are ten feet away from me, if that. I can see the diamond rumpling of their shirt backs through the chain link, the pink elastic around Courtney's ponytail, the silver hoops in Laura's ears, oval sweat stains beneath her arms. Ghosts don't sweat. Do they?

I feel emboldened by the past month; I am no longer the timid girl on the beach. As I move toward them, I feel almost angry: Stop terrorizing me. Be or don't be. Get off the fence. I let my bike clatter to the sidewalk. There is a little incline from the sidewalk up to the base of the fence, and I take it in a leap. One of their companions, a too-tan blonde, barks a warning “Hey!” that causes my sisters to twist around in their perches and then leap down. I am danger rolling in.

“You're Laura and Courtney, right?” I ask. It's the wrong question, but it's what comes out.

A boy asks them, “You know this girl?” and though they shake their heads, they look at each other, and a message passes between them.

“Where do you live?” I ask. A serial killer's question. “I mean, where do you come from?”

“Fuck off,” the boy tells me, and puts his arm around Courtney. She shivers him off, and she and Laura walk briskly away from me toward the interior of the park. Their putters lean up against the fence. Their hair swings. Their friends shift on the fence and glare at me. My sisters disappear behind the crocodile, where the park office is. The boy who spoke ambles over to leer through the chain link. His nostrils are wide and round, and his lip is hairless. He says, “Weird girl, I'm coming over the fence for you.” He mimes it, tensing his muscles as if to jump. “I'm coming. You better run. I'm coming.” It is beneath me to respond. I can hear him gloating as I collect my bike.

I wait for my sisters outside the gate, but they don't emerge, and soon I see the manager's big bald head bobbing toward me behind the rigging of the pirate ship. He doesn't have to tell me to scram; by the time he gets to the gate, I'm gone. My sisters don't want to talk to me. They disdain me. Maybe they are nothing more than normal city girls on vacation, like the girls who sometimes crash our parties, drink all the beer, and stand in a knot in the corner, laughing. Maybe their familiarity is only in my head, a healthy thing that everyone experiences, like déjà vu. Maybe the best, most sane thing I can do is to forget all about them.

I SIT IN
the kitchen with my summer geometry catch-up worksheets
,
and my mother sits knitting me a cardigan, blue and brown. Blanche lies panting at her feet. I stare at a diagram of an isosceles triangle, and I think of how new everything is, how changed, how many-angled. But here I sit, reeking of kisses and the respect of my peers, grown five foot five, and still, the house is quiet and changeless. My mother hums over the crackle of the radio-broadcast news, and a pot of water for pasta boils over behind her, spitting and seething. If this were a photograph, I could cut myself out and replace myself with five-year-old Olivia, ten-year-old Olivia, any Olivia. I could paste in a picture of Laura, a picture of Courtney, and there would be my mother, knitting blue and brown stripes, ignoring the boiling water. It is difficult to bear.

until this summer, I have submitted to nonsensical obligations, as children must. I have cleaned empty cribs in the same spirit in which I have slapped the roof of the car at yellow traffic lights and worn nylon stockings: just following instructions. And in this spirit, I have submitted for as long as I can remember to church. James picks me up every Sunday in his algae-green Lincoln Town Car and drives me two towns over to St. Michael's Presbyterian, where I absorb very little theology, preferring to make up my own stories to explain the configurations of stained-glass saints on the great, glowing windows. The minister speaks with a cotton-mouthed rasp, and the other kids in the congregation all know one another from years of Sunday school.