The First Time She Drowned (9 page)

Suddenly my mother reached over and hugged me.

“Oh, Cassie,” she sobbed into my hair. “I’m gonna miss her so much. She’s my best friend in the world.”

She clutched me hard against her just as I had longed for her to do, but all at once I felt smothered and trapped. I squirmed out of her grip. Her tears stopped. She looked at me with surprise. I stood up and went back inside.

IN THE HOSPITAL,
when I had one of my nightmares, I could wander out into the hall, take rare comfort in the presence of the night nurses who were more lenient, letting us stay up past curfew and watch late-night TV if we couldn’t sleep. But in the isolation of my dorm room, even after I turn on the lights, the ghosts remain. I want to call James again, to hear the familiar sound of his voice, to talk to someone who knows me. I want to ask what he thinks about that strange call with my mother, her plan to visit. But I can’t keep calling the hospital, can’t keep looking to James to make me feel better. To do so would be a step backward, proof that I can’t make it on my own.

I stare at the door and imagine Zoey sleeping soundly just across the hall—close, and yet not close enough to feel the protection of another. I wonder if I should have accepted her offer to move in.

In the morning, I hear her leave her room, presumably to go to class. It’s been over two weeks now and I still haven’t gone to any of mine, but when I imagine the stress of getting ready and then walking out among all those strangers and trying to find my classes on the sprawling campus, I tell myself I’m still not well enough, pull the covers over my head and go back to sleep.

At around 3:00
P
.
M
. there is a knock on my door.

“You in there?” Zoey says.

I have no makeup on, so I tell her through the door that I’m not ready to see anyone yet but that I’ll stop by in a little bit. I can tell by the way she says “okay” that she thinks it’s weird that I won’t just open the door.

When I’m dressed and ready, I find her door wide open, music floating from her room into the hallway. I knock on the frame.

“Come in, Kermy,” she says.

“Kermy?”

“Do you prefer Kermit?”

It takes me a second. Then I remember her saying how green I looked when I first showed up at her door. “Oh right, the frog. Ha.”

In contrast to the barrenness of my room, Zoey’s walls are plastered so thickly with pictures that not a speck of paint seeps through. There are curtains on the windows, and a pink-and-white-checked quilt covers her bed. There’s a phone and a hot pot and a small TV set, making the place feel as homey as a bedroom. I imagine Zoey and her mother shopping for all this stuff, picking out all the things that would make her feel safe and comforted in her new life.

Zoey is sitting on her bed, hunched over and appearing to do surgery on a cactus plant. She holds up a broken cactus arm. “I accidentally put too much water in,” she says, “and this part rotted.”

“Can’t you just throw that piece away?”

She shrugs. “I could. But I like fixing things. Besides,” she says, digging her finger into the soil of a second small pot and placing the broken cactus arm into it, “they’re resilient little guys. It just needs to be replanted and it’ll start to grow again.”

“Cool,” I say.

She puts the newly planted cactus on her windowsill and smiles. Everything about her is colorful, from her school-bus-yellow hair to her bright red mouth. She is a human version of Ms. Pac-Man, eater of ghosts. I eye the empty bed across the room from hers.

“Don’t just stand there. Come in. How are you feeling?”

“Better,” I say and then start coughing, which makes her laugh and wince at the same time. “Thanks so much again.”

I move deeper into the room, taking in the proximity of the bed to the door, to the window, to the other bed, marking my exits. I examine the pictures on her wall and on her dresser. “That’s your mom, right?” I pick up a framed photo of the two of them at Christmas, leaning into each other and laughing, wearing hideous matching Christmas sweaters. “You guys look alike.”

Zoey nods. “Thanks! She’s the best.”

“Yeah, mine too,” I say with a big lying smile. I turn back to the photo, trace the image with my fingertips.

“Time for a music change,” Zoey says as I sit down on the bed across from her. “Whaddaya want to hear?”

I shrug. “Anything.”

“Anything? Great! I’ve got hours of my mom and me doing karaoke . . .”

“Except that.”

“No?” She stares at me with mock shock. “Okay, your loss. How about Taylor Swift?”

“Not much of a country fan.”

“Seriously? Who doesn’t love T-Swizzle? This does not bode well for us. How about—”

“Yes!” I say, before I even know what it is.

“Going old school. Guns N’ Roses.”

Yikes.

She raises her hands in victory and then, because I am closest to her laptop, she points at me. “Fire it up, Kermit!”

I search through her files until I find the band, then pause and turn to her. “Must that really be my nickname?”

“You don’t like Kermit?”

“I guess I just always hoped for something a little . . . cooler.”

“Like?”

“I dunno. Maybe Ace or something.”

She bursts out laughing. “A cooler nickname like . . . Ace?”

“Never mind.”

“Oh no.” She is absolutely cracking up. “I’ll call you Ace if you want.”

I click on the first song and turn up the volume so I can drown out the self-mockery taking place in my head.
Ace? Ace?! What kind of loser comes up with Ace?

We listen to a few songs, chatting over the music.

“So, do you have a boyfriend?” she asks, and even though I know it’s not what she’s saying, what I hear is, “Does anyone love you? Does anyone find you worthy of love?”

I hate that I hear that. “Guys are a pain in my ass,” I lie. Then I think of the actual boyfriend prospects I’ve had over the past two and a half years and determine it’s not entirely untrue. Dating a guy who hears voices and thinks there are policemen in his top desk drawer, for instance, probably would be a bit of a pain in the ass.

“I wish I felt that way. I love boys.” She sighs and falls back on her bed.

We are about a third of the way through the album when Zoey declares the next song her favorite and orders me to turn it up
before it starts. As the previous song bleeds out, she sits perfectly still and waits. Then as if keyed into some soundless cue, she raises one hand dramatically above her shoulder and at the very same moment that the music starts, she strikes down on the imaginary chord of an invisible guitar. The song is slow and pretty at first, and Zoey moves her body like stirred water, her arms undulating in small circles above her head, her torso following in a wider arc.

As the music becomes faster and more maniacal, she jumps up onto her bed and slams her body wildly against the air as her mouth works itself silently around the lyrics. The song hits a musical interlude and she shouts, “Oh yeah,” and laughs and returns to the air guitar, her blond hair flying while her fingers work the chords, all of it exaggerated for my amusement.

I can feel myself watching her with my mouth open, astonished by her lack of self-consciousness, her ease with her body, her expectation of acceptance.

She opens her eyes and laughs, clearly enjoying my undivided and awed attention. “You’re not going to leave me onstage all by myself here, are you?”

I lean back coolly on my elbows. “That’s exactly my plan actually.”

“You’re no fun,” she says and closes her eyes and goes back to jamming like a lunatic.

I light a cigarette and Zoey’s eyes flash open. “Dude, you can’t smoke in here! You’ll set off the fire alarm!”

“Oh shit, I forgot!” I say as I scan the room frantically for a place to put it out. Two seconds into a new friendship and I’ve already ruined it with my cluelessness.

“Open the window at least,” Zoey says.

I go and open the window and stick my head out as much to hide my humiliation as the smoke. I wonder if I should just leave, if she wants me to. But when I turn around, I see Zoey already back in musician mode, dancing with her eyes closed. I think about her saying I was no fun and now I am torn. I want to make up for my stupidity, want so much for her to like me, but I don’t know how to
be fun
, how to relax without revealing more than I want to, without revealing myself. I sigh and start to play the drums in my lap, feeling safely hidden from her closed eyes. After a while I close my own eyes and let the music take me a little bit more.

“What’s going on over there, Ace?”

I open my eyes and see Zoey now donned in full rock-star gear, her hair wrapped in a bandanna, T-shirt sleeves rolled to her shoulders, dark shades covering her eyes. She is paused mid–air guitar and looking at me like I’m the one who’s crazy.

“I’m playing the drums!” I say.

“Oh, thank God! I thought you were having a seizure!”

I shove my hands between my knees, feel my face get hot. Zoey sees my embarrassment, but it just makes her laugh harder.

“Awww,” she says, looking at me like I’m a broken cactus plant. Then she proceeds to mimic me, thrashing about like a fish in a boat. I bring my knees to my chest and hide behind them. The more embarrassed I get, the more she exaggerates her imitation until I can’t help but laugh. Zoey joins me, and before I know it we are both beside ourselves, curled up on our respective beds and laughing hysterically.

This idea that a flaw can be funny is new to me. I turn it over like something shiny.

“Maybe I should take drums and you can have this.” She throws me the sunglasses and the imaginary guitar. “Go on. Let’s see whatchya got.”

“I think I’d rather just be the audience. I can light my lighter and throw underwear at the stage.”

“Ace! Ace! Ace!” she chants.

I laugh and say, “Please stop,” but the chants just get louder, coupled with fist pumps and encouraging nods. Reluctantly, and if only to silence her, I put the glasses on and then wiggle my fingers out in front of me, trying to imitate her moves. Immediately her teeth clench, her nose scrunches up and she shakes her head.

“No?”

“You look like you’re playing the harp.” She falls on her back, laughing all over again.

“That’s it! I’m quitting this bullshit band.” I pretend to throw my harp–air guitar on the ground and kick it.

She sits up, eyes wide with an idea. “I know! The sax.”

“The air saxophone?”

She shrugs. “You got a better idea?”

“Do they even have a saxophonist in Guns N’ Roses?”

“They do now.”

I sigh, stack my hands below me, purse my lips and blow.

“There ya go!” she says and gives me a thumbs-up. I raise an eyebrow, and we once again collapse on our sides in hysterics. Still, we manage to play through the rest of the album. Zoey slides to the floor and tortures the chords of her guitar while I sit on the bed and blow air into my sax. Every once in a while in the midst
of this, it occurs to me that I am having a silly college experience with a new friend, and I want to go call James and tell him about it, knowing how much he’ll appreciate it, how proud he’ll be of me, that there is life after death row, just as he always promised.

Someone knocks on the door then, shouts for us to keep it down, and I think of how just over two weeks ago I was all by myself listening to the sounds of others’ laughter.

“I’m exhausted,” Zoey says finally. “This rock-star life is tough on the body.”

It’s only then that I notice it has gotten dark outside. I stand abruptly, certain this is my cue. “Yeah, I should go.” I move to the door, already dreading the return to my room, like stepping out from a warm hearth into a snowstorm.

“What time’s your first class?” Zoey says.

“Don’t know. Haven’t been to any of them yet.”

“Are you kidding? None?” She looks at me with concern. “We need to fix that!”

I shrug. Anxiety kicks up like dust, making the air thick to breathe.

“Tomorrow?” she asks, just as I am walking out.

I pretend I didn’t hear her.

In the hallway, I can feel all that light leaking out of me. I push open the door to my room. The whiteness is a vacuum. The ghosts of memory await me.

IT WAS AROUND
the time that Dora left that I started having trouble sleeping. There were monsters in my room, under my bed and behind my furniture, throwing their great big shadows across my walls. I clutched Betty tightly as I listened to their creaks of movement and felt their hungry, pulsating energy.

One night when my terror was especially great, I called hoarsely to my mother, hoping she would come and deal with the monsters, soothe my fears. But she was with Matthew in his room, the two of them talking and laughing together, and if she heard me, she did not acknowledge me. The sound of my voice hanging unanswered in the air sent new charges of fear through me. I had identified myself to the night, I had announced my location and my aloneness, inviting danger, drawing it to me by daring to exist. I became very still, my antennas tuned to the shadows, and every now and again to the sounds of my mother and Matthew laughing together just down the hall. I wanted so much for her to come into my room and sit on the edge of my bed and talk and giggle with me the way she always did with him.

I pulled the covers over my head and got into a small ball beneath them, but my nightgown kept annoying me to no end, riding up my body every time I moved, scratching at me with its lace hem. I thought that if I were a boy, like Matthew, I wouldn’t
have to wear nightgowns that never stayed in place. If I were a boy like Matthew, I wouldn’t be afraid of the dark. If I were a boy like Matthew, my mother would love me. She would stay and laugh with me in my room. I would be safe from monsters.

I summoned my bravery, got out of bed and ran to my door to turn on the light. Then I went to my closet to look for some pajamas. There I saw all the pretty girly dresses I loved so much hanging silently in a row like bodies. In an instant of decision, I tore them from their hangers and stuffed them in a ball behind my Snoopy suitcase.

I took a deep breath and went to my dolls, all but Betty sitting sweetly side by side at the end of my bed. They had kept me good company over the years, had sat with me while I combed their hair, even suffered some well-intentioned but not-so-well-executed haircuts. I had to force myself to hate them. Boys didn’t like dolls, and although I knew I could never be a boy, I could refuse my girlhood in my heart. In my heart I could be a boy like Matthew. So I gathered them up and dumped them with the dresses, then thought better of it and stuffed them in my suitcase so I would never have to see them and have an urge to pick them up. Betty was the last one to go in. I turned to her, hardening myself against the loss. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I can’t love you anymore.” I shoved her in quickly so I wouldn’t have to see the sense of abandonment and betrayal in her face.

• • •

It was a great stroke of luck that a few days later at school, my first-grade teacher ran out of girls’ costumes for our upcoming Thanksgiving pageant before she could assign one to me. As a
result, I spent the next three days dressed like a male Pilgrim with no plan of ever changing my clothes again. I loved the costume more than anything I’d ever worn. In it, I felt strong and free and brave, like I could single-handedly conquer new worlds and face unrelenting hardships with nothing more than my buckled shoes and my black steeple hat. Dora was gone, I was practically a boy, and for the first time in my life, Thanksgiving had meaning.

My mother, inspired by my theatrical attire, was sitting at the kitchen table regaling Matthew and me with her singular experience on the stage as an eight-year-old girl. The play she had been cast in was a modernized version of
Cinderella
, and my mother had been given the role of a partygoer with one line: “Please, sir, would you care to dance?” My mother told us she had put her heart and soul into practicing that line, knowing there were no small parts, only small actors. But just moments before her cue, the actor with whom she was to share the scene vomited into the orchestra pit, and my mother, unwilling to be denied her moment, grabbed the janitor’s broom, dragged it onto the stage and proceeded to ask it to dance.

It seemed that the sincerity and commitment with which she delivered this line was too much for the audience, and the roar of laughter that followed left her stunned and staring into the white lights. So pleased was she by this unexpected response that she repeated her line again and again to keep the laughter alive. And it worked. She felt like the star of the show until a small figure in the back of the auditorium stood up, cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted over the laughter, “Somebody get the hook!”

It was her mother.

Matthew and I thought this was just about the funniest story ever told. Immediately we began trying out the line for ourselves. We took turns curtseying to the broom in the kitchen, our small heads bowing shyly as we called out, “Please, sir, would you care to dance?” Each time we looked up to see my mother on the sidelines, playing the part of a crazed director, pacing and scratching her head and wincing in pain.

“No, no, no,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s about intention. You can’t just spit out the words, you have to really connect with the broom. Start over.”

Every time we failed to give a proper delivery, my mother demonstrated again. She pretended to be exasperated, but you could see that underneath she was still that enchanted eight-year-old girl standing in the lights, so pleased to have a new but equally delighted audience.

“Show us again!” we cried, and each time she did, we shouted, “Somebody get the hook!” until we were all getting stomachaches from laughter.

This was the mother Matthew saw constantly, the one whose childlike glee and humor could send anyone over the top with merriment, and every time I was included in the fun, I felt like an overfilled balloon, so happy and excited, I could pop clear out of my skin.

We were still in the midst of this play, my mother toddling around the kitchen with the broom, saying, “Please, sir, would you care to dance?” and Matthew and I shouting, “Somebody get the hook!” when my father appeared in the doorway.

“Well, hello there, folks! Happy Thanksgiving!” he boomed expectantly.

My mother hated when my father called us “folks.”

“We are not ‘folks,’” she told him repeatedly, “we are your family.” But there he was, saying “hello, folks,” and we all looked up, surprised, because we had forgotten he was coming back.

“Oh perfect,” my mother said as the energy of the room flatlined. “The turkey has arrived.”

“That’s right,” my father said with a smirk. “Gobble, gobble.”

Matthew and I giggled, and he winked at us as if we were laughing with him.

“You’ll get a lot of meat off these bones,” he continued, rubbing his bloated belly. “Ho ho ho!”

We stopped laughing. We didn’t want to encourage him.

“At least you won’t need to pluck me. Your mother’s been skinning me alive for years.”

“Okay, Ed,” my mother tried.

“Just make sure you fill me up with a lot of stuffing. I’m hungry!”

My father didn’t just beat a joke into the ground, he dug it a hole so deep you could send it straight to China.

“Somebody get the hook,” Matthew said.

My father, chuckling singularly, turned to me. I glanced over at my mother to make sure she wasn’t looking and then gave him a half smile just to put an end to it, certain that if someone did not give him some sign of approval, he would go on like this for days. The room became quiet then, all of us standing there in silence with my father in the doorway still waiting for the homecoming parade to appear.

“I have good news, folks,” he said. “I have just been informed
that I am the leading candidate to be the next assistant vice president of Robust Plastic Bags Incorporated!”

His eyes darted to my mother and our own eyes followed them. Middle class was the place she had hung her unhappiness, and my father was the prison warden who kept her there. Now it seemed as though we were possibly moving toward the life she was born to, meant for, and we all waited breathlessly, my father with his good news and his eyes saying
love me
.

My mother turned her back, took a dishrag from the sink and began wiping the counter.

“Wait,” Matthew said. “What does that mean exactly?”

“It means,” my mother said, scrubbing furiously at a stain, “don’t get your hopes up. I’ve heard it before.”

I looked at my father, and his smile was high and tight like he was holding himself up with it.

“Okay, kids, let’s get dressed,” my mother said, tossing the dishrag over the faucet and wiping her hands on her skirt. “We have to be at your grandmother’s for dinner in an hour.”

Matthew groaned.

“I know,” my mother said miserably. “But we have nowhere else to go.”

• • •

My mother came into my room a short time later, her blond hair brushed shiny and back off her face, her pantsuit drifting over heels that clicked like little hammers against the hardwood floor. Her perfume flooded my room, all ripe fruit and cheerful flowers, a garden wafting from her wrists. I loved seeing her decorated like a parade float, a celebration. I wanted
to eat her, to swallow her whole and hold her inside me, to fill myself up with her beauty. Increasingly, I was becoming aware of our physical differences: me with my thin, mousy brown hair and the newly dark hollows under my eyes, the child who looked nothing at all like her mother, who was an insult to her loveliness.

“You look so pretty,” I gasped as she click-click-clicked over to my bed. But my mother was all business, prepared and contained in her pantsuit, the playfulness of the morning locked up inside her belt. Only her mouth was twitching, a slight tic at the left side of her smile, flickering on and off like a dying lightbulb.

“I laid this out for you,” she said, picking up the frilly yellow dress that had been left on my comforter. “I had to iron it because I found all your dresses in a heap at the bottom of your closet. Any idea how that might have happened?”

I put on my most innocent face. “No.”

She gave me a look and held out the dress.

“I want to wear this,” I said, referring to the black-and-white Pilgrim costume I was still proudly sporting.

“You can’t wear that silly little getup. Now come here and let me put this on you.”

“I can’t climb trees in a dress,” I said, backing away from her. This wasn’t really true but I didn’t know how to explain the real reason I couldn’t bring myself to put it on.

“You won’t be climbing trees. You’ll be eating turkey.”

“It makes me itch.”

“You don’t have to wear it for long.”

“Matthew doesn’t have to wear a dress!”

“Well, you are not Matthew. You are a girl. And girls wear dresses.”

“But I don’t want to be a girl,” I finally confessed, moving back toward her, asking her to understand what I didn’t know how to say.

She looked taken aback. “What’s wrong with girls? Jesus, you’re starting to sound like my mother.”

“Well, how come you’re not wearing a dress then?”

She grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward her. “Stop trying to make my life difficult. Now lift up.”

She tried to raise my arms to remove the top of my costume, but I clenched them firmly against my sides. The thought of being stripped down and forced into that dress made my insides scream.

She slumped down onto my bed and sighed. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately,” she said. “You refused to hug me when Dora left. You don’t want to wear the nice dress I bought for you. I don’t know why you’re so rejecting.” Tears came to her eyes. “All my life, I dreamed about having a daughter. How much she would love me and how I would dress her up like a pretty little doll.” She looked at me sadly, her eyes reaching for sympathy. “I just don’t know why you won’t be the daughter I wanted.”

I stepped back from her with new determination. She stood abruptly and marched to the door.

“Put the damn dress on,” she said.

As soon as she left, I hurled the stupid yellow dress at the door.
But without my mother to witness this act of rage, it didn’t feel satisfying. I scanned my room, looking for something I could destroy. Finally I opened my suitcase. I stared down at all the dolls I had stuffed inside. All at once I genuinely despised their lifeless eyes, their stiff bodies poised like dead people. I gathered them up, and one by one, I pulled off their heads. Their plastic faces popped off like bottle caps. I could hear my mother just down the stairs, and I stepped out onto the landing with the decapitated bodies in my arms. I launched them over the railing in a heap. “Put them in dresses,” I told her. “I’m wearing this!”

I am a Pilgrim, not a doll. And I have a face.

• • •

It was my father who finally managed to wrangle me into wearing the dress.

“You’re upsetting your mother,” he said, moving into my room and placing a handful of headless dolls on my bureau.

I lunged onto my bed and buried my face in my pillow. “She’s upsetting me!”

My father sighed. He was a man stricken in the face of emotion. He cried only once that I knew of, during a trip to Washington, D.C., a visit to the Jefferson Memorial. He wept as he read me a quotation from the Declaration of Independence: “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal . . .’” It was the
We
that got him. He choked on it, had to cough it out like something stuck. The idea of
We
imprinted on a plaque made my father cry. But the day-to-day emotions of others left him baffled and helpless as a tipped cow.

“I’ll give you a dollar if you wear it,” he said finally.

I lifted my head off the pillow and wiped my tears with the back of my hand. “Let me see it first.”

Of course the offer was merely pretense and I would ultimately have to wear the dress regardless. But my father was giving me the opportunity to feel some sense of control over circumstances that neither of us had the power to do anything about.

He extracted the bill from his wallet—crisp and green—and I paused as if considering. He waved it enticingly in front of me, but it was not until the bill was sitting light as a leaf in my hand that I said, “Deal.”