I Cannot Get You Close Enough (31 page)

Why does Olivia have to lie about everything all the time? Everybody always knows she's lying. But no one says so and if you do she just faces you down.

Nobody's sprinkling that shit on me. Not this year or next. I'm going out and be somebody. If you know who you are, you don't need some guy telling you you're great and beautiful all the time. Masturbate. Do something. Give it to some dope you couldn't really like but stay away from that lily juice. Stay away from love. So I'm cynical. You have to be cynical to survive. Leon said that when he spoke to us, he said you have to be cynical to think straight. I wrote it on a piece of paper and taped it to the bathroom wall so I can see it when I take a bath.

 

OLIVIA I'm sick of watching Jessie and King moon over each other. My old boyfriend Bobby was twice as much a man as King Mallison. Even if he did live in a trailer. He wasn't nobody and he never had to go to a drug hospital and have his mother pay twenty thousand dollars to get him well. I wish I was making out with him right now instead of up here with all these snotty people. If it wasn't for Andria, I'd be all alone. Andria is great. She's going to really go places in the world. She looks like this great black princess but she's as white as I am. To tell the truth, she could pass for white.

Anyway, we went into town about a hundred times looking for some boys to have over or hang out with but they're all so weird. They talk like this. “Where do you go to school?” They weren't interested. They'd get interested if I got in Harvard. I figured that out. That's about the only thing that would shut them up.

Where was I? I was leading up to us finding the letters from Aunt Anna to Mrs. Chatevin. Oh, my God. Her handwriting. I get this weird feeling every time I touch something that belonged to her, much less her handwriting. It's like the minute I do it's three years ago when I wrote to her and she wrote back to me and my whole life changed. I cannot stand for her to be dead. She cannot be dead.

So the other day we were all out in the boathouse. It's this old place sitting up on sand with lockers in it lined with tin. They are full of tools and ropes and things for when people kept sailboats there. It has a table and four chairs and dishes. We cleaned it up to use for a place to sit and talk. Andria and I cleaned it up. Anyway, we were out there and Crystal Anne was with us and she started poking around in everything. She is so curious about everything. She will sit on her haunches for ten minutes looking at anything she finds.

She is Traceleen's child. She and Traceleen are always together. She tells Traceleen everything. She never tells her mother anything. Well, she tells Andria and me things too. She's crazy about us, which makes it easy for Andria to take care of her.

Anyway we were sitting around talking and Andria and I were drinking rum Cokes. We took the rum out of the liquor cabinet in the house and brought it out to the boathouse and fixed a couple of rum Cokes. We weren't getting drunk or anything. Just fooling around. We had all these magazines and we were planning our fall wardrobes. Crystal Anne is poking around in the lockers, straightening things up.

“I want to concentrate on basics,” Andria is saying. She had on this one-piece cut up on the thighs with strings for straps. Aqua. She looks so great in that suit. “Then I'll get me a big pink linen bag or something flashy in accessories. It's summer all the time down there.”

“I don't know where I'll be,” I was saying. “I might get into Harvard. I'm on the waiting list.”

“I wouldn't plan on that,” Andria goes. “I don't know why you want to stay up here. It's too damn cold. I don't know how people live up here.”

All this time Crystal Anne was being so quiet, then she comes over to me. “Come look at this,” she says. “This used to be in the dining room. I wondered where it was. Now it's out here.” She pulled me by the hand and there inside this locker is a little blue painted chest, very old and pretty. Andria was right behind us and she reached in and took one of the leather handles and I took the other one and we lifted it out and set it on the floor.

“It's got letters in it,” Crystal Anne says. “They're in some satin bags.”

An hour later we were still out there looking at them. Twenty letters Aunt Anna wrote to Mrs. Chatevin. Her precious writing. No one will ever know what it meant to me to find those letters. Like no one ever dies really, do they?

“We have to put these in plastic bags and make copies of them,” I said. “They are very valuable.”

“I'll go tell Momma,” Crystal Anne puts in.

“No,” I said. “Don't tell anyone about these.”

“Why not? She's Momma's cousin.”

“Because there's something I have to tell you.” I had some of the letters in my hand. It was very still and then I said something I didn't know until I said it. “Because she isn't dead but no one knows it but me. I have to tell you but you can't tell anyone else. Promise me.” I stopped talking and they stared at me.

“She is too dead,” Crystal Anne said. “I went to the funeral with my mother. They had this videotape of her on television and Miss Anna and Cousin Helen cried and cried. They all cried and got drunk. That's the first time I saw you, Olivia. Don't you remember that?”

“It wasn't a funeral. It was a memorial service because she drowned herself and they never found the body. Only she didn't die. She went to Switzerland to see this famous doctor who is curing her. I have been dreaming this and then I got a letter and I knew it was true.” I'm not sure I got the letter anymore but I still think I did. How could I make up something like that? Now I tell them it's a lie but I believed it on the day I told it to Andria and Crystal Anne and sometimes I believe it still. If it's a lie that I got the letter, where did I get the idea? Everything isn't black and white in the world. One and one don't always make two.

“I don't believe that,” Andria goes.

“Well, I don't care if you do or not. I'm sorry, Andria, but people like Aunt Anna don't just kill themselves. If you had known her you wouldn't say that. And don't tell anyone I told you this. I wish I hadn't told you.”

“I won't tell them,” Crystal Anne says.

“What did your letter say?” Andria asks.

“It said she wanted me to know she was okay. She wanted to adopt me. She loved me so much.” I was crying then and Crystal Anne started patting me. She is such a sweet little girl. “We have to put these in plastic,” I said. “We have to make copies of them. We have to study them.”

“What for?” Andria says.

“For clues to where she is.” I stopped crying and stared right at Andria. “If we study her writing we can find out how to write.”

“I'd do that,” Andria says. “There's a lot of money in it if you get some breaks. This poet from LSU, he drives a Firebird and he gave five hundred dollars to the scholarship fund. It was his fee for talking to us. He said we needed it more than he did.”

So then we borrowed the car and went to town and made copies of the letters and bought some plastic bags to seal them in and put them back into the chest. Andria and Crystal Anne were with me now. Andria was in it so she could find out how to be a writer and Crystal Anne was in it because she's so sweet and helpful when anybody cries or gets unhappy. She should be a nurse or a psychiatrist when she grows up. I wouldn't mind having children someday if they'd turn out to be like her.

With my luck they would turn out like Jessie. She's about the moodiest person I've ever met in my life. She had a fit when she found out I had the letters from Aunt Anna. She got so jealous it was pitiful. “You shouldn't have these, Olivia,” she said. I had taken her out to the boathouse to show them to her. “They were written to Mrs. Chatevin.”

“So what. She was my aunt.”

“You ought to tell Aunt Helen. She's the executor.” She was holding one in her hand. Just holding it as if it wasn't anything special, just a piece of paper with writing on it. Jessie's been acting funny anyway ever since we got to Maine. She doesn't even look happy with King. She's gotten so serious and her mother's been calling her from England. She always starts acting funny after her mother calls her. “You need to tell Aunt Helen about these letters,” she said again. That's all it means to her to hold one of Aunt Anna's letters in her hand. As if it's nothing. Like anyone could have written it. It made me mad.

“Never mind the letters,” I said. “Just forget I told you about them. You've got what you wanted, Jessie. We have to come up here for the whole summer so you can see your boyfriend and I lose out on a trip to Switzerland. So just do me one favor, okay. Keep your mouth shut about these letters. We are studying them.”

She put the letters down and moved away. “What for?” she says.

“Because we want to. They're about how she wrote poems. They're writing lessons for us.”

“Okay,” she goes. “I won't say anything. But you should tell Aunt Helen. She's the executor.”

No one will ever know what finding these letters means to me. Her spirit is in me. I live for her now that she's dead. I went out to the ocean one night when it was cool and there wasn't a moon or a single mosquito to bother me. I walked in up to my knees and thought about how close I was to her. She isn't dead because her spirit is everywhere. Her spirit is free because she left her body behind. I could walk out into the ocean and join her spirit. Drowning might hurt for a moment, but so what? It hurts to be alive and have to fight, fight, fight every minute to have people like you. I should go back home but I can't. I can't stand Tahlequah. I want to live with rich people and go to good schools. I want so much and it's so hard to get it. I love Aunt Anna's poems. They are so sad and they know about death. I know about death. I was born in death, wasn't I? I killed my mother being born. I'm lonely for my mother. I want my mother to hold me in her arms. My mother and Aunt Anna might be up there right this minute talking about me and watching me. If I had the courage I could go and join them. If I don't get in Harvard or Duke, then I'm going to do it. To hell with it. What do I have to lose?

Here's one of the poems. It's an unfinished one. In the letter with it she said she couldn't finish it because it was about being “torn in two.” God, isn't that beautiful and sad?

METAPHOR

Three times he built the web across my door,

Two feet wide and intricate as glass, a thousand

thousand strands and joinings.

I admired it so I could not kill him,

though I tore the web down with the broom.

Three times I tried to board a plane

to come to you. Made it all the way to

the airport counter, the last time in the rain,

The rain, the rain, as Cummings called it.

I was going to keep notes on our meetings. Like a journal or the notes for a club but now I'm not going to. It's too important to even talk about. I can't tell you what it's like to read her letters and know she is inside of me, kin to me, made out of the same stuff as me. Of course, we're all made out of the same stuff in the end, but if someone is kin to you you might be able to read their mind even after they're dead. I don't think she's dead. She is always with me now. She tells me what to write. I wrote this poem called “Friction.” It goes

Well, that's only part of it. It goes on for ten pages. She made me write it, she held the pen.

Here is how we set up the meetings. First we lit the candles with a reading of her poems. Then we burned incense and I read some of her stories and we all prayed to be good writers who always told the truth when others were afraid to do it.

ANDRIA They weren't just letters. There were poems and things cut out of newspapers like THE LIGHTS ARE ON FOR ANNA, made out of pieces of words cut out of advertisements. Also, THE GREATEST CREATIVITY IS THE LEAST RESENTMENT. I thought about that for a long time. I think I will write a paper for school about it next year. It only takes one break and you've got it made in the writing business. That's what this teacher Leon said when he taught at NOCCA last year. Look at him. First he was nobody. Now he's on the radio and his books sell like hotcakes.

Well, all that is the real world and this shit Olivia is into in the boathouse is not the real world. I can't even decide what we're supposed to be doing out there. I thought we were going to get in touch with the spirit of her aunt and get some inspiration for our lives or something like that. That was goofy enough. Now I don't know what we're doing. It's getting pretty boring being up here. I would like to get on home and start getting ready for school. I have saved almost two thousand dollars because Lydia gave me three hundred extra she said was to buy some good-looking clothes for school. It wasn't her money. It was money some secret source said to give me. I bet it was Mrs. Chatevin. I heard they had to put her money in some conservancy to keep her from giving it all away. She gave all her silver and china away to the antiwar effort during the Vietnam war. Well, the lives of these people are really complicated and none of them ever have sex with anyone that I can see. I been getting laid off and on since I was fifteen but now I stay on the pill and don't even do it anymore since I decided to be ambitious for my future instead. The next time I get a boyfriend he is going to be somebody and also a stud or nothing. He's going to be a man, like the captain of the basketball team at LSU or in law school or something really hot. It's all or nothing for me where men are concerned from now on.

So the first time we have one of these literary meetings we light some candles and Olivia gets out this jasmine incense we got in Tennant's Harbor last weekend and we start reading the letters and poems. Then Olivia says, “Well, I have to tell you the whole truth. Someone has to know it. It's killing me to keep this to myself.”