Cartwheel (9 page)

So yes, Lily was familiar with the concept of mortality. What was newer, maybe, was this acute sense of awareness, of aliveness, of gratitude. It was Argentina that had given it to her. The feeling had started on the airplane, when the rust-colored light wheeled through the windows, illuminating the blond hairs on the arm of the flight attendant as she poured the wine, and Lily felt her life beginning to open. She’d grinned idiotically right through losing money at a criminal exchange rate at EZE, right through a startlingly pungent Subte ride, and right through the first day and a half with the host family, the Carrizos. The Carrizos were perfect: Carlos was in real estate and Beatriz stayed at
home, though she dressed well and always seemed busy, and they were both charming and, crucially, gently incurious about Lily’s whereabouts. They understood English, but Beatriz pretended not to, so Lily got to practice her Spanish whenever they spoke, which she loved. She loved, as it happened, almost everything. She loved her room, which was small and sunny, even though it was in the basement, and had a bunk bed with bright green sheets. She loved the huge, sagging house next door, which just had to be haunted. She loved the chorizo sandwich—with its smoky-tasting egg and salty, seeping cheese—that you could buy and eat on the street. She loved her academic schedule—a Wednesday morning political philosophy seminar, a creative writing independent study project, and a midday Spanish-language class that was widely viewed as optional. And most of all, maybe, she loved how close the Carrizos lived to Avenida Cabildo, where you could catch a bus to anywhere in the city. Already, Lily could feel herself expanding to fill the new space the world had afforded her; already, Middlebury was turning back into the collection of catalog snapshots it once had been—explosively autumnal trees, international relations textbooks, laughing groups of friends of improbable and, as it turned out, wholly unrepresentative racial compositions. Everything about Lily’s life there—Harold the economist, and those awful Hawaiian parties thrown by the coed social houses, and the hissing of the radiator in her formal logic class, and her articulate, bespectacled women’s studies classmates, doomed to eternally debate gender versus equity feminism—began to seem less real. All of that was the detritus of a shallow, conscripted life; all of that had merely been preparation for this: getting off a plane in a new country, in a new hemisphere, and emerging from the chrysalis of academia to fly off into the bald, stunning sky of reality. For a day and a half, Lily was thrilled. For a day and a half, Lily was free. And then Katy arrived.

Katy was Katy Kellers, the roommate. The informational email Lily had received from the program in December had revealed only that Katy attended UCLA and studied international finance, and this second fact, in particular, had left Lily unprepared for how distressingly
beautiful Katy would be. Katy Kellers, it turned out, had dusky blond hair and preposterously even teeth and eyes that seemed somehow more dimensional than was normal. The day she arrived she wore a tight-fitting brown turtleneck—the kind of thing that could only flatter someone who ran very long distances recreationally (Lily had gone shopping with Anna often enough to know)—and, even after fourteen hours on a plane, did not appear to be the slightest bit tired.

“You’re Katy?” said Lily, holding out her hand.

Katy’s hand felt exactly like it looked. “And you’re Lily,” she said, and smiled. Those teeth! Lily was going to have a hard time getting over those teeth. Lily’s own mangled teeth had been hammered into relative normalcy by a series of truly gruesome procedures during high school (this was why she’d experimented sexually so much early in college, she’d explained to Anna once—because her teeth had been so bad for so long that her self-esteem had taken a while to iron itself out). Lily’s teeth were fine now, but not like Katy’s. Katy’s teeth were like the Platonic ideal of teeth.

Katy bent to unzip her suitcase and began rifling through a polychrome array of sweaters. The most feminine muscles Lily had ever seen toggled in her arms.

“So,” said Lily, climbing to the top of the bunk bed. “What brings you here?”

“Here?”

Lily swung her legs out over the side. “To Buenos Aires.”

Katy shrugged. “I wanted to go to Barcelona—actually, I was supposed to go with my boyfriend, we were supposed to go together, but then—”

“You broke up?”

Katy bit her lip—actually bit her lip! “We broke up, right, and so I decided to go somewhere else.”

“And by then all the other programs were full.”

“Well,” said Katy. “Not exactly. I could have gone to Senegal.”

“Oh,” said Lily.

Katy brushed her bangs with her fingers, even though they didn’t really need brushing.

“Yeah,” said Lily. “I mean, I think that’s why it’s hard to really commit to one person at our age. I was seeing a couple of people last semester, but nothing really serious, so I was sort of free to do whatever I wanted.”

Lily had made a philosophical decision during sophomore year to refer to her dates in gender-neutral pronouns as much as possible, in solidarity with the gay rights movement. As it happened, all of her sexual partners (four to eight, depending on how conventionally one was defining the act) had thus far been male, but she wasn’t narrow-minded. She’d always imagined she might kiss a girl before college was out. She knew it was cliché, but one couldn’t always avoid being cliché. She was twenty, she was a double major in philosophy and women’s studies, and this much she’d learned the hard way.

“Right,” said Katy vaguely.

“Well, one person, mostly,” said Lily. “His name was Harold. He studied economics. I can’t believe I dated someone named Harold. I had sexual
intercourse
with someone named Harold. He’s twenty-one years old, can you imagine?” Katy’s eyes were flattening, maybe, a little. She zipped her suitcase back up, even though she hadn’t finished unpacking. “What was your boyfriend’s name?” said Lily.

“Anton.”

“Anton, see?” Lily sat on the bed. “Now that’s a name.”

“I really loved him.” Katy breathed in quickly, and Lily was afraid, for a brief, harrowing moment, that she might cry. It was too soon, it was far too soon, for this conversation.

“Well, sure,” said Lily soothingly. She swung her feet back onto the bed and tucked them under herself. “Are you guys still friends?”

“No,” said Katy uncomprehendingly. “We’ll never be friends.”

“No?” This was a matter of some interest to Lily; when she and Harold had broken up, they had solemnly vowed to stay friends. And why wouldn’t they? They were both young and resilient and had had
their hearts broken two or three times already. But soon he’d taken up with a new girl—an accounting major, please!—who’d forbidden him ever to speak to Lily again. This she found crushing; she had very much wanted to stay friends with him, partly because being friends with ex-lovers seemed sophisticated and mature and continental, and partly because it seemed humane, and partly because she harbored a catastrophic fear of losing touch with anyone. It reminded her of death, and she was too easily reminded of death already. Then again, she knew that she had a more acute sense of the passage of time in general—and the swiftness of life, in particular—because of her dead sister, or almost-sister, or whatever. So she’d learned to forgive people their shortsightedness, and be happy for them that they’d lived the kinds of lives that would allow it.

“He cheated on me at a substance-free house party,” said Katy.

“Oh geez.” Lily whistled. “That’s bad. You definitely want substances involved in infidelity.”

Katy looked stricken. “I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “I’m not sure that really matters.”

Lily tried to backpedal. “No, of course,” she said. “But I mean, I don’t know. I don’t really think monogamy is natural for people our age, do you?”

Katy scratched her nose. Somehow this, even this, looked delicate, preordained. “Well,” she said. “I think maybe you can decide it is.”

Overall, Lily knew, the roommate situation could have been a whole lot worse. Katy was neat and polite and she quickly acquired a collection of reasonable girl friends with flatironed hair—none of whom were as beautiful as she was, but all of whom seemed about as nice—and went out with them almost every afternoon. Still, Lily couldn’t shake a feeling of deflating uneasiness—a kind of awkwardness, but with harder edges—whenever she was around Katy. Lily spent hours after classes ended drinking wine in cafés and reading Borges in Spanish,
circling all the words she didn’t know, and when she returned to the Carrizos’ house at night—unhinged and awestruck, rapturous over the scope and beauty of the world—she’d sit down at the dinner table and Katy would say something like, “Lily, you have wine on your teeth.” And that would be that.

Still, Lily loved Buenos Aires; she loved to think of the vast meat of the world—ocean and Amazon and rain forests and drug wars—that separated her from everyone she had ever known. She couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for all of them, now that she was so happy. In her psychology class at Middlebury, Lily had once been assigned to write about birth order in her family and how she felt that she did or did not conform to the postulated birth order personality types discussed in class. Lily had written about how she was technically the oldest, and in some ways she felt like the oldest—she was maybe more adventurous than Anna—but in other ways, she felt like the middle child, because she certainly was lost in the shuffle between the needy poles of Anna (the baby) and dead Janie (also, perpetually, the baby), but in
other
ways, absent Janie only reconfirmed Lily’s status as oldest, because no first-time parents could be as paranoid or restrictive or dictatorial as second-time parents who’d lost their first. And Lily, of course, had had to break them down, remind them that not all colds were terminal illnesses, and not all broken curfews were catastrophes, and not all boys were rapists—you’re welcome, Anna!—and eventually they’d come to some mutual uncomfortable agreement that they were willing to let Lily have something like a life, though they didn’t have to like it.

She’d gotten an A on the paper.

But in Buenos Aires, for the first time, Lily felt herself stepping out of those roles; she felt herself finally filling out the template of her own autonomous selfhood that she now knew she’d been mapping—in secret, on her own time—for her entire life. Each day after classes—which were academically comical, everybody dead-eyed and hungover, the teachers bored, the classrooms too hot, the city shimmering right outside the window—Lily went wandering out into the enormous afternoons.
She took epic, dusty walks around the city, to San Telmo and La Boca and Palermo, hopping in cabs to skirt the bad streets. She spent an afternoon trying to photograph a certain beam of light on the obelisk. She spent a day taking the train out to the basilica in Luján to try to see what all the Catholic fuss was about. She sat in bars drinking Quilmes and trying to look mysterious; she sat in cafés eating alfajors and licking powdered sugar off her fingers and not minding that she looked silly.

She would be dead one day, but she was not dead yet.

Around her, the air was humid, languid; it made all the other air she had ever known feel thin. Something about the lushness of the city made Lily think of prehistoric times—she half-expected to see a dinosaur with mossy teeth emerge from a swamp. The mosquito bites gave her enormous welts because she wasn’t used to Argentinean mosquitoes; they rose and grew and burst, volcanically, horrifyingly, and then healed into thumb-sized dust-colored scars. Lily documented this entire process on her camera, using American coins for scale. The bugs here were ridiculous, but everything here was ridiculous. The exchange rate was ridiculous. The fruit was ridiculous. Lily took pictures of the bugs and the fruit. She took pictures of the people, too, and sent them back to Anna.

“Do people mind you taking pictures of them?” said Katy.

“I don’t know,” said Lily. “I didn’t ask.”

For the most part, Lily loved the Carrizos, too. She got along very well with Carlos: The two of them drank the most at dinner, and got into good-natured rollicking screeds about George W. Bush during which they congratulated each other on a series of ever-more-implausible theories and opinions. Beatriz was sweet, in a no-nonsense sort of way—and, though she was possessed of a clear preference for Katy, Lily did not like Beatriz any less just because she liked Katy better. It was fine to have each host parent prefer a different study-abroad student. It made them all feel like a convincing temporary family.

On Sundays, Lily and Katy attended church with the Carrizos. Though Lily scorned church with her own family—Maureen attended
a milquetoast Unitarian institution where all possible modes of being were enthusiastically and cloyingly
affirmed
—she felt that church in a foreign country was a different matter altogether, more along the lines of an anthropological investigation, even if it was uncomfortably situated, broadly, within her own abandoned tradition. After all, she wouldn’t
not
go to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, she wouldn’t
not
go to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, just because she didn’t believe these sites were actually sacred. In church, of course, she didn’t cross herself and didn’t take Communion, but this was, in fact, a reflection of her profound respect for the religious beliefs of others. Lily tried to explain all of this to Katy on their second Sunday in Buenos Aires.

“I’m just saying,” said Katy. “A bite of toast, a swallow of wine, and they’re happy. Who cares?”

They were standing over the sink in the bathroom, and Lily was trying to somehow pluck her eyebrows without seeing Katy’s image in the mirror next to hers. Lily and Katy didn’t usually wash up together, but it was the first night they were alone in the house—Carlos was out with his friends, and Beatriz was visiting her sister—and a temporary, lukewarm camaraderie seemed to have grown between them.

“But do you believe that stuff?” said Lily.

Katy made a face and spat a mass of mint toothpaste into the sink. Somehow she did this, as all things, daintily. Lily could not get used to the way Katy seemed to move through the physical world while remaining utterly untouched by it: her hair never discernibly disturbed by wind, her lips never discernibly stained by wine, her clothes never discernibly wrinkled by any amount of movement or exertion. “That’s not even the point,” Katy said. “It costs you nothing.”