Last Night at the Circle Cinema (17 page)

I did not enjoy cat purrs or their arched backs or their fur, soft as it may be, but I reached down, and there on the cat's neck was a tiny bell attached to a tiny placard. I squinted to read it but couldn't. I sighed and shook my head, slung my pack on my back, and gathered the animal into my arms.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” I said aloud for Codman's benefit when I was back in the lobby, the parking lot's light illuminating the cat's tabby coat. It was lean and had white paws, which I supposed would be cute for those prone to thinking such things. I looked around. Codman wasn't there.

My heart sank.

For the first time, I thought about graduation, how it was only a handful of hours away. Our caps and gowns would be delivered soon, stacked in the gym by the rising seniors, as was tradition. Bertucci had talked about going naked under his gown. Codman had talked about not showing up. I hadn't thought much about the ceremony, more about what we'd do after. After the funeral, the Millennium Gold just sat there glinting in the sun and it had hit me that all that scurrying around making sure there were platters of cold cuts back at Bertucci's for people to pick at while they mourned, all the discarded programs, all of that was just busy work. All stuff that could be cleaned up. It was the stuff we weren't saying, weren't addressing, that couldn't be swept away in the dustbin. I could picture the black graduation gowns all puddled onto the gym floor as though we were shadows or people who had melted.

Meow
. Now the cat sounded like a cat. How could I have thought it was a baby? I studied the placard. It was one of those first-day-of-school name tags we'd all had to wear for the entire first week of freshman year.

“Hi! My name is SCHRÖDINGER.”

Bertucci's writing had the name in all caps.

“Schrödinger?” I asked. “What the hell kind of name is Schrödinger?”

24

Bertucci

Livvy did sometimes lie, that I knew. Mainly to herself about Codman. But also about me, probably. Definitely about her knowledge of quantum physics—a course I'd taken at the college and that she'd asked me to tell her about nearly word for word, fascinated.

She had cooked dinner—crispy roasted chicken with these shredded potato things and a bunch of vegetables I could identify only because Codman's mom grew them in her garden, and I'd taken to sleeping at their house a lot at that time, even when Codman was off looking at schools. It wasn't just because Bee had died but also because I felt slightly better outside my own house, sort of like stepping outside my skin. Codman's house was the opposite of Livvy's. Where Livvy's was clean to the point of looking almost sterile—objects from their travels displayed in militaristic order on the built-in shelves, the thermostat always a few degrees too cold—Codman's was cluttered with stacks of mail, wooden sculptures of families, tattered quilts thrown on the back of a chair and never folded, medicine cabinets with outdated bottles, the fridge stocked with casseroles and leftovers and kale or chard from the garden.

I wasn't the only one of us who felt an affinity for other people's homes. Despite the cleanliness and organic crackers at her place, Olivia always seemed relieved when she came over to my house. Like she had freedom there. We never had fresh fruit and the furniture had not been updated and the main work of art was my father's empties, but she'd enter as though this was her home. She cleaned as though she could actually make a difference in the kitchen and always arrived with something for my mom: a scented candle or lotion her parents had brought back from some fancy conference hotel or homemade bean dip and celery that would wither by week's end.

But I'd gone to Olivia's that night. Maybe she'd given up coming to my house or didn't want to show up at Codman's. Her room had dark hardwood floors. We sat there, my textbooks and binder opened to show her objective collapse theories. Olivia had flipped through the pages, making fun of me yet again for taking written notes instead of typed. “I mean, what happens if you lose them?”

“How do I lose them?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I don't know. There's a fire.”

“If there's a fire, my notes are the least of my worries.”

She laughed. “Fair enough.” She chewed her upper lip. “If it's ... if it's because you don't have a laptop, we have an extra ...” Her face had apology written on it.

“I'm good. I actually like the writing. It sort of helps get the info to stay.” I pointed to my temple like that's where the quantum physics file was stored.

We'd stayed there on the floor that Thursday night, me telling her all about my class, all about Schrödinger's equation and his cat as if it was just another night in the life of us. Nothing to look at, folks; just move along. Livvy had her head in her hands at one point like we were already apart from each other as we'd all probably imagined it. I know I had.

I'd been wearing the same gray T-shirt with the dot, and she'd pressed her finger into the dot saying what was printed on it. “You are here.” She repeated it.

“Always,” I said.

My sweater had been on the floor of her room, and she'd slipped it on. “Why is it always so cold in my house?”

“Because you need to borrow my sweater,” I'd said. “Keep it.”

Livvy. I see her now as I did then, in my sweater. In a category all by herself:

Kingdom of females

Phylum of attractive girls

Class of upper—or at least a class beyond my split-level cul-de-sac hyphenated world

Order of girls who probably were in love with Codman

Family of large-breasted ladies who also have brains and thus are even more likely to break my heart

Genus of the able

Species totally unlike my own and yet so familiar it made me fold in on myself when I'd see her walk down the corridors, always at the edges, not like she was avoiding the throngs of guys in their football uniforms or lemming girls in whatever the go-to outfit was then, but more like she'd figured out that the edges of the halls, of life maybe, were the coolest parts.

It was also possible I just didn't know enough girls to make a generalization.

Codman showed up much later but by then we'd put the notes away and were listening to music and playing dirty phonetic Scrabble. I was itching to go.

Probably Olivia remembered what I'd told her about Schrödinger and all that but—as with the case of so much science and theory—hadn't figured out the practical implications of it.

Or she had, but was lying.

25

Codman

To be fair, I come from a long line of cowards. My father asked my mother to marry him through a mutual friend. My sister had been the first and only person to withdraw from her valedictorian post, her fear of public speaking too intense. Dan became a cop because he was terrified of them and of laws, guns, and jail. I could handle dares and exactly two tallboys before barfing and most of Bertucci's big ideas, but that spring he'd become a burden. On the escalators, I was on high alert. Disaster loomed everywhere.

Or maybe I'd had fun and was only putting those feelings on my memories as my therapist suggested. Maybe in hindsight everything was scary, scary because it seemed each action solidified the outcome of what had actually happened. Maybe senior spring had just been plain old fun, but in the Circle it didn't feel that way.

I gave up trying to find Olivia, and when I realized she'd left the CD and the note, I fought the urge to throw up again and instead bucked the trend of cowardice. I didn't want to be the guy who left. The guy who couldn't deal—perpetually—and Livvy's words filled my pockets, making me feel heavy. It had been a mistake to leave her back at Bertucci's that afternoon, to basically go into hiding the past few weeks, to run when I should have planted myself next to her. The thought of such distance between us made my chest heavy.

Had it really only been six months since the three of us had fallen asleep on her bed? Since
Rashomon
? Only weeks since Memorial Day? The days and weeks expanded and then instantly contracted the more I tried to hold on to them. Is that what we were supposed to do, revisit and retell so that there wasn't a clear definition between past and present?

In spring, we'd all gone to Livvy's for Passover. Bertucci, ever the kiss ass, sat methodically folding napkins for the table while I was with Livvy in her room.

“What are you doing?” I'd asked her even though it was obvious.

“Watering a plant, O Observant One.” she said. We were in a phase of calling each other “O ___ One.” O Horny One, O Revolutionary War–Inspired One, O Plump-Gutted One (this last Bertucci had so called me because I'd torn a ligament in my foot running after him on one of his epic night jogs and thus hadn't been running and had been eating Lissa's after-school treats—all bar-shaped).

“But you're way invested in that fern.”

“It's aloe, fuckling.”

“Sorry, O Plant-Genius One.”

Livvy turned to me, her hair over part of her face. I'd fought the urge to tuck it behind her ear—I could have, but what would that mean?

“There's this thing, zakhor,” she'd said. “It's like for Jews there's this sort of collective memory. You should know this, O Half-Chosen One.”

“Like Holocaust Remembrance Day?” I asked.

Did I know she was Jewish? Sure. Did I fully get it? Not really. I was half, but half meant sort of nothing. It just wasn't something I had fully integrated into the person I knew Livvy to be. Like we all had these mini worlds we belonged to—Bertucci's math and chess, how my brother and I had taken automotive classes for six years and both of us could rebuild a V-6 but I didn't walk around saying so. All these pockets existed in people, and you had to connect them or at least remember them when you were trying to get to know, really know, someone.

“You were here for Rosh Hashana,” Livvy said. I nodded, but she explained anyway, because she knew me well enough to know I might not actually have paid attention. “The Jewish New Year? You know, that big dinner a couple years ago when my grandmother got drunk and said the same toast twice and my mom tried to distract everyone by forcing kugel on them.” I nodded and she translated. “Noodle pudding. Kugel.”

“Oh yeah, that shit's the best. Seriously.” I remembered sitting next to her, my thigh pressing into hers, hers pressing back, and how we did nothing about it later. “With the little plump raisins and the crushed cornflakes ...”

“So that's a new beginning,” Livvy said. “And Yom Kippur's the day of atonement, where you think of the year that's gone by and what you wish ...” She paused and bit her upper lip. “What you wish you'd done differently. Better.” She'd plucked a few stray brown leaves from the plant in front of her. “My grandmother died after that meal. Not, like, right away, but soon.” Livvy touched the aloe plant. “She—Grandma Ruth—always kept aloe on the windowsill near the stove. Good for burns.”

I touched the pointy leaf, which was really an excuse to get my hand near Livvy's.

“Jewish people,” Livvy said to me, but I thought maybe she meant us too, “have this collective memory. And it flows through all the meals, the rituals, the candle lighting at Chanukah ...”

“I love a latke,” I said. Bertucci and I had eaten fourteen potato pancakes each—ill-advised, yes, but delicious—tucked in Livvy's well-organized pantry during her parent's annual Who-Can-Spell-Chanukah Party.

“So zakhor, remember, O Brilliant One, is in the Hebrew bible, but Jews in general are told not to forget.” She broke off a piece of aloe, and we'd watched drops ooze from the stem. She rubbed it on my wrist. “
Zakhor
is an active word, so you go on remembering, telling stories of the people who have died, ritualizing them, your memories, and history, so nothing is really dead.” She slid her fingers on my inner wrist. “As long as you're talking and remembering, the person—or the event—is still there with you.”

I wanted to cry, listening to her, the cadence of her voice, how she'd so obviously thought about this and told me. But what I said was, “So you're telling me you have Jewish plants?”

Which is right when we turned and noticed Bertucci, who'd slinked into the doorway, quiet but hearing, and I felt like such a dick. Why couldn't I have held her hands and said, I understand. Your grandmother is the plant. So you have to take care of it, and you have to tell me about her drunk toast because on some level it's what keeps her from being obsolete. But I'd said nothing.

“Reshaped memories,” Bertucci had said, which covered my assholic reaction and also made him saintly. Of course he'd heard. Of course he'd gotten it, knew what to say. “Like now, at Passover,” he'd said while Livvy pressed the dirt into the pot, tried to angle it in the sun on the windowsill even though it was late afternoon and getting dark. “One of the central dictums of the Seder: in each and every generation, let each person regard him- or herself as though they had emerged from Egypt.”

Livvy nodded, looking at Bertucci the way she had the aloe. “It enforces the fusion of past and present. It's how you get a collective memory.”

“Zakhor,” I'd said, but by then they weren't listening, only I was.

Bertucci surveyed the room—the two of us, the plants. “Like Doctor Who.”

Livvy frowned. “What?”

Bertucci took up the entire doorframe, his hands in the top corners as though supporting the thing. “‘I'll be a story in your head, but that's okay, because we're all stories in the end.'” He paused. “Just make a good one, eh?'”

••••

My chest felt weighted with memory. I felt my wrist as though the aloe stick would still be there. When would that ease?

Heavy and scared as I trekked all alone to Theater 1.