The Basic Eight (6 page)

Halfway up the hill, however, Kate tapped me on the shoulder. “I’ve been calling out your name for an hour and a half,” she said. “You walk extremely fast.
Quickly
, rather. Didn’t you hear me?” “Well, for most of an hour and a half ago I was home, across

town, so no,” I said.

Kate rolled her eyes. “Hey,” she said, “did you invite Adam to our dinner party last night?”

“No,” I said, “and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“OK,” she said, lining up a new subject like the next bullet in the chamber. “I wish to attend an extremely modern event tonight, with you if you’re free: the cinema.”

“What’s playing?”

“It’s Benjamin Granaugh’s new movie.
Henry IV
.” Kate was the only one of us who could successfully pronounce
Granaugh
every time.

“Of course I’ll go. Want to do dinner beforehand?”

“Sure. And speaking of dinner, do you want me to invite Adam for you? Not to discuss the undiscussable.” But discussing it anyway.

“I guess you’d better. We shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for me to make a move.”

“Well, suit yourself.” By now we were at the side entrance, which is closest to Kate’s homeroom. The PTA had placed a welcoming sign there which said: “WELCOME! HOPE YOUR SUMMER PREPARED YOU FOR A YEAR WHERE YOU WILL BE PUSHED TO THE

LIMIT ACADEMICALLY, ATHLETICALLY AND SOCIALLY!”

framed by smiling faces drawn in Magic Marker. I’m pretty sure it should be “a year
in which
you will be pushed.” Kate leaned against the doorway and absentmindedly poked one of the faces in its eye. “It will be a shame, though, if Adam gets stolen by somebody who writes
love letters
to him over the summer. To in- troduce yourself like that over the summer, when nobody can do anything about it, is so tacky, don’t you think?”

“Speaking of love lives,” I said, plowing on, “do you know if Jenn is seeing anyone?”

“That’s one of my missions for today,” Kate announced. “Do you know that she cut class yesterday and went to the lake? Gabriel told me. If she was meeting somebody, it must be some- body
very interesting
if she doesn’t want us to know.”

“I was with Gabriel,” I said, eager to be considered a primary player in all this intrigue. “She acted really flustered when Gab- riel and I ran into her. She was definitely meeting
somebody
. I can’t believe
you
don’t know who it is yet. Are you losing your touch, Mata Hari?”

“
Certainly not
,” Kate said, archly. “I just found out about this lake incident late last night. Give me time.”

The bell rang. “Time is something I don’t have,” I said. “I’ve got to run to my date with Lawrence.”

“
Who
?” she shrieked after me, but I didn’t look back. You’re always guaranteed more attention from Kate if you keep her on the edge of her seat.

Saturday September 11th

Waking up this morning felt like a logistical problem, but though I haven’t solved it I have identified what the

problem is. I am large. No, Flannery, say it outright: I am
fat
. I forgot to pull my shades down last night so morning came on like gangbusters. The sun reminded me of that woman riding six white horses in “Comin’ round the Mountain.” Then I began to feel like the mountain. I moved one leg, then the other, to the floor. Gradually I became aware of how much room even half my body took up in this bed. It was startling: I remove half my body from the bed, and my bed stays full. Now either Archimedes was wrong and none of us really take up any space at all or I just hadn’t noticed my full load lately. If only half of me fills the bed, I wondered to myself sleepily, is that because I have small legs, or is it for some other reason?

Small legs–fat chance. I walked into the bathroom and the scales simultaneously rose beneath my feet and fell from my eyes. I’m not going to write down the number here in this expensive Italian leather-bound journal, but rest assured, for those who crave sta- tistics, that the sum of my parts is truly elephantine. All that bullshit I was crowing to Gabriel down by the lake–how there’s no attraction between us–all that isn’t rooted in some achieved platonic ideal, it’s rooted in my own generous thighs. Nobody wants me because I’m large and ugly. I looked at myself in the mirror, naked, and assessed myself like the headmistress of a girls’ finishing school. I’m large and ugly.

It’s funny, you’d think that ugliness is pretty much innate and that there isn’t anything you can do about it, but if you think about it logically that’s not true. After all, I’m not just ugly; I’m also large. If I were smaller, there wouldn’t just be less of the largeness, there’d be less of the ugliness, too. And if someone has less ugliness than they did before, one could just as well say they have

more beauty. Kate called me to ask which Bradstreets we were supposed to read, and I ran my theory by her.

“Kate,” I said, after reading her some titles and page numbers I had somehow managed to write down, “if one person were less ugly than another, we could also say they were
more beautiful
, right?”

“What are you talking about?” Kate said. “Does this have to do with Adam? He’s coming tonight, you know.”

“I know,” I said glumly. There was no way I was going to be small and beautiful by tonight. “No, this doesn’t have to do with Adam. I’m just asking, theoretically, if a person got less ugly could it be said that they got more beautiful?”

“Well,” Kate said dryly. Kate was saying things dryly, I was saying them glumly. I think these adverbial embellishments make the conversation sound less stark. “This is just theoretical?”

“Right,” I said. “Theoretical. You know, like any intellectual conversation.”

“Well,” Kate said, and this time she said it carefully. “Well,” Kate said carefully, “I would have to disagree with your state- ment. Martin Luther King said that peace was not merely the absence of violence but the presence of a positive force, or some- thing like that, and I think it’s the same thing with beauty. I mean, you don’t look at some vast and beautiful landscape and think,
There’s nothing ugly here
.”

Kate’s well-meaning smoke screen hasn’t foiled my unshakable logic, and I will extend it further. A less fat body makes a more beautiful person, so we need something that makes a less fat body, and of course we all know what makes a body less fat: less food. When I think of all the food I consumed just last night I am sick at my extravagance, and judging from my fat legs, my fat

stomach, even my fat arms, this sort of extravagance goes on all the time. All that Thai food I ate last night for instance, that chicken dish and those greasy, greasy fried egg rolls, the grease of which luckily seems to have found its way to my hair instead of my body. The chocolate-covered mints at the movie. I will hereby dismiss, again, my justification that dieting is some tacky Middle American bourgeois pastime. It is very sensible, dieting. Simply eating less food and thus becoming more beautiful. To no other problem in life is there such an elegant solution. To start my diet I will not eat anything until the dinner party tonight, and then I will only eat sensibly, just salad perhaps. No longer will I allow myself to become as large as any of the obstacles that sep- arate Adam and me from each other. To keep my mind off food I will do some schoolwork, thus also taking care of my other Cardinal Sin besides Gluttony: (Academic) Sloth. I will read Anne Bradstreet, another disciplined woman.

LATER

If there were any seeds of doubt in my mind as to whether I really loved Adam or just some image of Adam, they were all killed by the frost that was tonight’s dinner party. No, wait, that sounds like it was some cold, deadly evening. I mean the opposite. I guess I mean that if the flower of my love for Adam was being stunted by any feelings of doubt, then tonight fully fertilized my seed and allowed it to grow. That works if you don’t think about the fact that fertilizer is made of shit. I guess it’s obvious I’ve had wine, but the evening was magical, magical, magical and I want to write it down before it evaporates into the night air like streams of sensual smoke.

Gabriel gave me a ride to Kate’s, which meant we had to arrive early so Gabriel could start cooking. Gabriel is

terribly, terribly fussy about his culinarities, and never lets us do anything, not even chop, so Kate and I sat at the kitchen table and speculated on possibilities concerning Jennifer Rose Milton’s love life while Gabriel marinated some snapper and chopped red peppers with such ferocity that the off-white tiles of Kate’s kitchen looked positively gory. Gabriel had a pure white apron over a very handsome coat and tie and kept smiling at me.

Natasha arrived, bearing cleavage and brie, and immediately fell into a squabble with Gabriel over how to bake it properly. Kate and I sat basking in the pretentiousness of it all.

“I have a full pound of celery to chop and it’s already a quarter to seven,” Gabriel said, wiping his hands on his apron. They left faint red handprints like the frantic last flailings of a victim. Who could have known?

“I’m telling you, Gabe,” she said, incurring his least favorite of her nicknames for him; he preferred ‘Riel pronounced “real” or Gall pronounced “gall.” “A tablespoon of olive oil. It gives the whole thing some lubrication.”

“To most areas where knowledge of lubrication is key, I yield to your expertise. But
olive oil
on
brie
? This isn’t fucking moz- zarella, Natasha!”

“Hey now!” I said. Gabriel seemed unusually tense, even for a new recipe. “Do I have to separate you two?” They continued to glare at each other and it struck me that maybe there was something going on that I didn’t know about.

“For God’s sake,” Kate said, and flounced across the kitchen. She picked up the
Palatial Palate Cookbook
and thumbed through the index. The two litigants stood stock-still–Gabriel arms akimbo, Natasha clutching the brie like Hamlet holding the skull, waiting for Kate to render her decision. She played it to the hilt, flipped

pages, flipped pages, flipped pages. Finally she spoke. “Ahem. I quote directly from Ms. Julia Mann in her section on brie baking: ‘The addition of any oil to brie, or any other soft-ripening cheese, prior to baking, is redundant at best, disastrous at worst.’”

Gabriel tried not very hard to conceal a smug grin. Natasha glowered first at Gabriel, then Kate, then for no good reason, me. You could hear a pin drop.

And then a brie. It was wrapped in plastic, so there wasn’t a mess, but the fall to the floor left the cheese looking wounded and misshapen. It was such a pathetic sight that I couldn’t help but giggle, and in one of those magical tension-loosening moments that I believe float aimlessly around the planet, easing awkward situations worldwide, everyone broke out laughing. Gabriel put his arm around Natasha, and Natasha put her arm around Gab- riel, and there we were, all laughing in a circle around a fallen brie, when Adam walked in.

The first thing I saw were his shoes, which were black and thick–the direct opposite of Adam, come to think of it. My eyes just went up his jeans, up the row of buttons on his Oxford, un- even like a lazy fence out in the country somewhere, up his freshly shaven chin to his smile to his bright green eyes, and I felt myself fall right into his pupils.

“The door was open,” he said apologetically, peering over Natasha’s shoulder at the fallen cheese.

“That’s because we wanted you to come in,” Kate said charm- ingly, standing up on tiptoe and kissing him on each cheek. Gabriel snorted and went back to the cutting board.

Natasha picked up the cheese with one hand and extended her other one to Adam. “Hello, Adam,” she said demurely.

Kate returned the cookbook to the cupboard, clearing a path between Adam and Flannery. Their eyes met across the nearly empty room.

“Flannery,” he said, and smiled. “Flannery,” he said, and smiled. “FLANNERY,” HE SAID, AND SMILED. SMILED SMILED SMILED.

Ahem. Not only did he smile at me, he said my name, and there wasn’t a question mark after it, as in “Your name is Flannery, am I right?” nor was it a simple, cold acknowledgment, as in, “I re- cognize you but I’d much rather talk to Natasha, who has cleav- age.” He smiled; I think, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we can surmise he was glad to see me.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m glad you could make it.”

“Me too,” he said. Our eyes met, and locked, and I know it’s corny to say that but what the hell it’s late at night, I’m a little tipsy and besides it’s my own journal so who cares.

Kate coughed slightly and we came to. Adam blushed slightly, even; but his shirt was pure white, so it just made him glow even more. Don’t think I don’t realize the drippiness of this prose.

“Folks,” he said–what a charming thing to say! “Folks!” “I know you asked me to bring wine, but I forgot to ask what we’re having, so I didn’t know whether to bring white or red.”

Natasha looked stricken at the thought of no wine. “So you didn’t bring any?”

Adam walked over and put a mock-comforting hand on her shoulder, then, electrically, on mine. “Don’t worry, my angels,” he said in a Prince Charming Voice, “I have a fake ID. I will run to a nearby liquor store and purchase wine for everyone. Just tell me of the entrée.”

Gabriel turned from a skillet. “Snapper!” he said shortly, and turned back.

“You certainly are,” Natasha said.

Kate stepped forward with a plate of chopped carrots, appeas- ing all with appetizers. “So, Adam, a couple bottles of white?”

“Sounds good. Can I kidnap one of you who knows about wine? If I go alone I’m bound to come back with lighter fluid.”

“Well,” Kate said, extending an arm out. I noticed she had done her nails for tonight. “Natasha needs to bake the brie, and Gabriel needs to cook, and the hostess certainly can’t leave, so would you, Flannery?”

“Would I? Would I?” I said, and everybody laughed except Adam; it was a favorite joke of the Basic Eight God forgive me, but it’s easier to write that nickname than list us all individually. It goes like this: A man loses his job, goes to a bar and gets drunk, and gets into a car accident while driving home. When he gets to the hospital he is told that his eye needs to be replaced with a prosthetic. His recent unemployed status fixed firmly in his mind, he prices several models: an amazingly lifelike and amazingly costly porcelain model, a reasonably lifelike and reasonably costly glass orb and finally the bottom of the line, which he chooses. It’s made of wood.