A Long Thaw (16 page)

‘I should have had you give Hannah the sex talk last week. I felt totally out of my element.’

‘You gave Hannah the sex talk?’

Juliet nods. ‘And I felt like such a hypocrite. Telling her to take precautions I never did.’

‘If only we took as good care of ourselves as we would our sisters and daughters.’

‘Sounds like you do.’

‘You know, I said I’d never had a one-night stand but . . .’ Abby takes a deep breath ‘. . . I slept with Ryan. Christmas Eve.’

Juliet’s eyes widen. ‘Wow. That’s big. And?’

‘And nothing. I think I may have screwed up any chance that we could have been friends.’

Juliet’s face twists in sympathy. ‘Well,’ she says, after a moment, ‘sex with the ex is not the same as a one-night stand. It’s almost the exact opposite. The whole point of the one-night stand is to avoid all those emotional complications.’

‘I can’t really imagine enjoying myself in a one-night stand,’ Abby says. ‘Like feeling comfortable enough to really let go. That’s the upside of sex with Ryan. No fumbling around.’

‘I guess.’

‘Oh, and the other problem with this guy was his name. How could I call out “Ernie” in bed?’

‘Are you a calling-out-names kind of girl?’

‘Oh, yeah. I think it’s good to let them know when they’re doing it right. It’s kind of like the whole concept of “You’re getting warmer, you’re getting colder”.’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever had an orgasm,’ Juliet says matter-of-factly.

Abby’s eyes bulge. ‘You don’t
think
?’

Juliet laughs.

Abby leans forward. ‘Wait a minute. How is this possible? How long have you been with Jesse? Two years?’

Juliet nods.

‘Does he not know what he’s doing?’

Juliet shrugs. ‘I probably shouldn’t have told you. I’ve never told Jesse.’

‘So he thinks you have?’

‘I guess. We don’t really talk about it. And maybe I have. I don’t know.’

Abby shakes her head vigorously. ‘There’s no “maybe” about it. You’d know.’

‘Well, it probably isn’t fair to blame Jesse. I mean, it’s not like he’s the only guy I’ve ever slept with. Although we are kind of in a fight, these days, so we can go ahead and blame him.’

‘A fight?’

‘Yeah. We’re not really talking lately. But it’ll probably blow over eventually. It always does.’

Abby is unsure whether she should pry.

‘So tell me: what does an orgasm feel like?’

Abby settles back into the couch, thinking it over. ‘It’s hard to put into words. For me, it works kind of like a roller-coaster. The way it sort of tick-tick-ticks up to the top of the track.’ Abby uses her hand rising over an imaginary slope to illustrate the concept. ‘That’s foreplay. If you lose momentum, it gets harder to make it over the peak. The orgasm is what happens when you make it past the highest point of the track. It happens on the rush down the hill.’ Here, her hand swoops downwards.

‘Hence all the screaming?’

‘Exactly.’

At a very young age, Abby could tell there was something different between her father and Juliet’s. Uncle Allen was louder. He sat in the living room, in the good armchair, watching football and shouting at the television. Abby’s father never yelled – at the television or otherwise. Once, when she was three or four, he’d found her in the basement playing with matches. He’d spanked her and afterwards he cried. Not the long, racking sobs she’d heard from her mother when one of the dogs died. Her father sat with his head in his hands, silent tears visible on his eyelashes.

Uncle Allen was the first to join a spontaneous game of touch football on the front yard with the neighbours; a family full of sons and grandsons. Abby’s father sat in the back yard chatting with the mothers while the two girls swam in the pool. Uncle Allen told his Navy tales while flipping burgers on the grill. Abby’s father cut up veggies in the kitchen.

The girls followed Juliet’s father around, begging him to pick them up and toss them into the air. They each insisted on a turn. He’d set his beer down and relent with a shake of his head. ‘Abby, Abby, she’s no good!’ he’d shout, throwing her skywards. ‘Chop her up for firewood!’

As Abby got older, Uncle Allen would ask if she had a boyfriend. ‘Soon we’ll have to chase them away with a broom,’ he’d say, and Abby would blush. With his daughters already lost to him, Abby imagined herself standing in for them. And as much as she felt like a surrogate daughter, she also imagined him as a second father. She loved her own father beyond words, in large part because of the ways he was different from traditional men of his generation. Yet somehow the way Allen fit that stereotype was part of what drew her to him.

By the second week of January, Abby has caught the flu that has been going around the office for the past month. She stays home on a Tuesday, watching talk shows and soap operas. She’s surrounded by used tissues and bowls crusted with old ramen noodles when someone knocks on the door.

Abby looks down at herself in her pyjamas and makes no move to get up.

‘Juliet!’ Abby recognizes the voice as Jesse’s. She fights an urge to ignore it. She can always say she was napping.

‘Juliet!’ More banging.

Abby sighs and goes to the door.

‘Where’s Juliet?’ Jesse walks inside without invitation.

‘Uh, she’s not here right now.’ Abby closes the door.

‘Where is she?’

‘I don’t know.’

Jesse crosses his arms. ‘Are you lying for her?’

‘What?’ Abby takes a step back and looks Jesse over like he might be insane. ‘She’s probably still at work, Jesse. It’s three o’clock.’

‘At work? That’s funny,’ he scoffs, walking into the kitchen and opening the refrigerator.

Abby follows him slowly, keeping a slight distance between them. ‘Why is it funny?’ she asks.

Jesse pulls out a beer, twists the cap off. ‘You don’t know?’ He narrows his eyes at her, then smiles. He’s enjoying this moment, knowing things she doesn’t.

‘Did you and Juliet have a fight?’ Abby asks. She remembers Juliet alluding to this but had assumed things had blown over, as Juliet had said they would.

He shrugs and takes a swig of beer. ‘She got fired,’ he says, watching Abby’s confusion with pleasure. ‘Before Christmas break.’

‘Fired? Why?’

‘She says it was my fault, but you know Juliet. Can’t take responsibility for anything.’

Abby folds her arms across her chest. ‘Maybe you should go. I’ll tell Juliet you stopped by.’

‘I’d rather wait.’

Abby swallows and forces herself to make eye contact. ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

Jesse sighs. ‘I just got back into the city this morning. I have to see her.’

‘If Juliet says it’s your fault she got fired, she’s probably right.’

‘Whatever. Look, I’ll just finish my beer and if Juliet hasn’t shown up by then, I’ll go. Okay?’

Abby steps closer to him, reaches out and takes the bottle from his hand. With a slight pop of her wrist, she upends it over the sink and the amber liquid glugs and fizzes down the drain. She sets the empty bottle on the counter without releasing it. She isn’t exactly afraid of him, but the thought of the bottle as a weapon does occur to her in a distant way.

Jesse shakes his head and smiles. Abby watches him cross the room and pass through the door and then she lets go of the glass bottle and walks to the door, locking all the bolts.

Abby leans against the door frame. ‘I’m not mad, Juliet. I just wish you’d told me.’

Juliet can’t help feeling a bit annoyed at having to explain herself. Having someone to answer to. ‘I know. I didn’t want to deal with all of that while Hannah and Lilly were here.’

Abby nods like she understands, but Juliet isn’t sure. Abby has never faced unemployment because of a pot-dealing boyfriend while simultaneously taking part in the reunification of a long-estranged family. She sighs. It’s hardly something to be mad at her for.

‘I can get you a job where I work,’ Ethan suggests. They are sitting at opposite ends of the couch, holding each other’s feet in their laps.

‘I can’t paint.’

‘Juliet, do you think that’s how I pay my bills?’

‘No?’ Juliet realizes she hasn’t given much thought to how Ethan pays his bills. She has seen his apartment just once, when they were on their way to a movie and he’d forgotten his wallet. It‘s really more of a closet; he shares a bathroom with three other guys in his hall.

‘I’m a telemarketer. I don’t talk about it much since we’re hated more than lawyers.’ Ethan holds a finger to his lips, then points at her.

Juliet pantomimes the locking of her mouth, the tossing away of the key.

‘The hours are flexible so I can pretty much paint whenever I want to.’

‘Maybe just for a while. Until I can find something permanent again in the fall.’ Maybe even a summer programme, she thinks. But it’s unlikely that she can find something in the middle of a semester, even in such a college-rich city like Boston.

‘I wasn’t suggesting it become your life’s work.’

She pinches his heel.

‘Hey.’ He pinches her back. ‘Are you talking to Jesse yet?’

‘No. Well, he calls. We argue. If that’s talking.’

‘Stay strong, sister.’

‘The thing is—’

Ethan groans. She stops but he motions for her to continue.

‘I think maybe I was just being paranoid. I mean, how do I know he had anything to do with it?’

‘You could ask. Your boss.’

Juliet rolls her eyes. ‘Right. I can totally imagine that conversation: did you fire me ’cause my boyfriend’s a drug-dealer and he sells on your campus? No? Okay, thanks, never mind.’

‘Mmm. I see your point,’ Ethan says. ‘I guess you’ll never know.’

‘And in the meantime I might be punishing Jesse for no reason.’

‘Nah. I’m sure he’s guilty of something.’

Juliet and Ethan grab dinner in Chinatown and take separate trains home.

When she gets back to the apartment and finds Jesse sitting by the door, she’s glad that it will be over soon. As they argue, it feels like posturing, lines from a play that they know by heart and have to get through even though they know how it will end.

She sits on the couch with her arms folded, her indifference part of the charade. He kneels on the floor in front of her, sliding his hands up her thighs, and her body aches for him in spite of everything. It feels like a fist tightening inside her, pulling the muscles in her arms and legs taut, making her toes curl.

In the morning, he wakes first. He kisses her cheek and whispers, ‘I’ll be back in twenty with bagels.’ He’s on his good behaviour still. He slides the outgoing mail off her tall dresser, saving her from a trip down the stairs into the cold, letting her sleep in.

Juliet curls into a ball under the covers, smiling into her pillow. She thinks of the envelopes to her sisters, regrets that they didn’t meet Jesse while they were here at Christmas. She wonders if Nana will buy them plane tickets to visit during the summer. They could come for all three months. If Juliet hasn’t found a job by then, they could stay at Nana’s house together; there’s plenty of room. They could fill the summer with memories, catch up on lost time. Juliet feels a pang for the flat expanse of grass where the pool used to be. But there’s still the ocean. As she dozes, she dreams of slathering Jesse’s chest with sun-block. He’s fair-skinned and will need a hat. Maybe Nana still has that umbrella. She’ll have contests with the girls, spitting watermelon seeds into the sand and measuring the distance, building sandcastles and flying kites.

When Jesse returns, they sit in the kitchen eating together in quiet domesticity. He’d got her favourite: a toasted sesame bagel and hot chocolate.

Abby shuffles into the kitchen and gives her a look. Juliet ignores it.

‘Jesse,’ she says, as hello. She doesn’t do a good job of hiding the judgement in her voice.

Abby doesn’t understand what Juliet has with Jesse. The way a man can get into your bloodstream, become so much a part of who you are that there’s nothing you can do to shake him, even if you wanted to. Abby dumped Ryan for some intangible offence. Maybe Abby’s too practical for her own good, incapable of true passion.

Abby takes her cereal bowl down the hall to eat in her room.

‘Someone isn’t thrilled by our reunion,’ Jesse says.

‘I don’t care,’ Juliet tells him, and she leans across the table, kissing him to prove it.

It was weird how Abby slipped back into the role of Juliet’s protector. They weren’t kids any more; Juliet could take care of herself just fine. She’d been doing it for a long time. She resented Abby’s need to believe those years hadn’t changed anything. Maybe Abby was the same: she’d grown up insulated and naïve. But Juliet hadn’t had that luxury.

Juliet feels guilty for thinking of Abby this way, her sweet cousin who always tries so hard to do the right thing, give people the benefit of the doubt. Abby would never think these kinds of things about her.

When they’d played house as children, Abby was always the mother, brushing Juliet’s long hair and singing songs she made up as she went along. In all of their adventures, Abby babied her and Juliet had liked it. Especially after Hannah and Lilly were born and got all the babying her parents had had to give. Juliet remembers thinking her father might have wished for a son and she tried to be tougher for him, catching frogs and climbing trees. When she fell, it was Abby who pulled her up again, went for the Band-Aids and took the blame.

In the early summer evenings, the adults sat in the breezeway of her grandmother’s house, screened in and protected. Their low voices floated into the yard. It was easier for them to see out than for the girls to see in past the screen. Juliet and Abby searched the pool water for the inevitable lost dragonfly. The warm concrete was rough against their bellies and worn, tomboy knees. Juliet would watch as Abby slid her hand into the water gently, curling her toes into the dirt. She eased her small hand under the struggling figure – helpless in water but fearless in air. Gradually, she would lift it, water spilling through her fingers. They sat on the porch steps gazing down at the tiny creature as the sun absorbed the water that gathered in the tiny iridescent squares of its wings. Patiently, they awaited the transformation as it eventually got to its feet and walked on Abby’s hand for several minutes, seeming to express its gratitude, before taking flight and disappearing into the summer sky.