Very in Pieces (3 page)

“I would die pale as ivory with rose-red cheeks and lips. Snow White in the flesh.”

“Snow White in the ground.”

Nonnie's room is cast in shadows, the only light coming in through slim gaps in the curtains. The radiation treatments bring on migraines, and she's never been one for bright light anyway. Still it seems I can see every angle in her face. Everyone knows the iconic pictures of her: dark brown hair in a pixie cut, white blouse, tailored black pants. Like Audrey Hepburn only sharper, and the cancer has made her edgier. In contrast, her hair is growing back soft as a baby's and is starting to curl over her ears. “You need a haircut. Do you want to go to the salon or just have the woman come here?”

“That woman is so dreary. I much prefer the gay man.”

“Carl.”

“Yes, Carl.”

She doesn't precisely answer my question and instead returns
to her perennial topic: her impending death. “No one else will talk about my death with me, Very. Not your mother. Not your father, though that would hardly be worth trying. Ramona won't talk to me at all.”

Mom says Ramona is like a snake in its old, dusty skin, but when she sheds it and emerges full of brightly colored scales, watch out. I say she's being a petulant little brat who's breaking our grandmother's heart every day.
Po-tay-to, po-tah-to
.

“I'll talk about whatever you want, Nonnie.”

She raises her penciled-in eyebrows. The radiation treatment stole those along with the hair on her head and hasn't returned them yet. She doesn't take the bait, though. Instead she says, “It's coming. Sooner and sooner.”

I don't tell her that doesn't make sense, that time doesn't bend like a function that curves up toward the axis of the graph but never quite reaches it.

“Professor Winslow visits from time to time,” she says, picking up our old line of conversation. “He just sits and drums his fingers on his pants as if they were his piano.” Professor Winslow is in the music department with my father and had a brief, unsuccessful stint as my piano teacher. “And Anton came by a few days ago.” Professor Anton Dixon is the chair of the English department at Essex College, where my grandmother has been poet in residence for ages. He's been her nemesis since the day she started at the school, at least from her perspective. She says his class is where poetry goes to die. And his breath smells of liver and onions. “He said, ‘We need to talk about your death.
How you want it handled.'”

“You should have told him you plan to go into his class and perish there just like all the poets he's killed before you.”

She laughs, which turns into a cough. “I said I wanted a museum in my honor. The Imogene Woodruff Museum. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?” She lies back against the pillows and closes her eyes as if she is dreaming of that museum.

“Are you tired?”

“I'm always tired.” Her eyes are still closed but I can see them moving underneath her eyelids. “It's strange, Very, to watch yourself decay. I hope it never happens to you. When I was young my girlfriends and I would ask each other if we'd rather be pretty or smart. I always said pretty because pretty girls might not realize they aren't smart, but smart girls always know they aren't pretty.”

“Can't you be both, Nonnie?”

“A bit of both, perhaps, but not devastatingly both.”

“You are,” I tell her. “You and Mom.”

“Don't be a sycophant, Very.”

I yawn.

“Boring you?” she asks.

“I had that thing last night. Mom's gallery opening.”

“I wish you wouldn't use the word
thing
, Veronica. Banish it from your vocabulary.” Nonnie always uses my full name when admonishing me about language. “It's my dying wish,” she adds.

I roll my eyes at her. “I wish you had been there. I had no one to talk with, and nothing exciting happened.”

“You know how I hate those parties.”

I agree, but I know she's lying. Nonnie loves any event with wine and admirers.

“Mom and Dad quizzed me about the art. I got it wrong.”

“There is no wrong and right with art,” Nonnie says. “It's not like your mathematics.”

“Mom and Dad don't seem to think so. Or Ramona. But Nonnie, you should have seen it. It was just squares painted on canvas.”

“Now I'm doubly glad I missed it.”

“Ramona said it looked like the ocean.”

“She did always love the ocean.”

“So you see what you love in paintings like that?” I ask. And if so, what would I have said? The bay behind our house? The blue of Nonnie's veins as they shine up through her skin, letting me know that she's still alive?

The seconds tick by on the clock.

She moans and resettles herself on her pillows. I think she has fallen asleep: her breaths are coming ragged but even.

“You know, there was only one art opening to which I ever looked forward. One of Andy Warhol's. He used one of my poems in a painting. ‘Word Art,' he called it. All the words were silk-screened onto the canvas in different colors and sizes. I thought it was a bit gaudy, but he adored it. It was going to be a fantastic party.” She opens her eyes and they are glinting. “Mick Jagger was going to be there. But then that crazy woman shot Andy and the opening was closed, and the
paintings never saw the light of day.”

“So sad for the paintings,” I say.

“Sad for the crazy woman. Valerie something. Solanas. Ugly name.”

“Valerie sounds like Very to me.”

“You have a lovely last name. One of them anyway. She was a pretty woman in her way. Interesting-looking. She wanted to get rid of all men. Andy was as good as any to start with. He was a bit of a prick. That's a good slang word. Sounds just like what it is.” Then she says, “This is the last day of summer vacation, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“So what are you doing spending it with me?”

“You're who I want to be with, Nonnie.”

“What about that boyfriend of yours?”

“He just got back from Lake Winnipesaukee yesterday.”

“Ha! There is someplace else you would rather be. I'm your fallback.” She coughs. “And that was yesterday. Where is he today?”

“He had to go to some leadership seminar this morning, and then I had my math class at the college, and then he had to take his sister to get her clarinet fixed.” We had joked about it on the phone:
Well then I guess I'll pencil you in for three months from next Tuesday.

“Sounds like he leads a thrilling life.”

“I would rather be with you anyway.” It's true and I try not to think too much about what that means for our relationship.

“Can't we call him Chris? Christian is just so . . . Christian. That's not even his religion, is it? He ought to be called Buddhism or something.”

“Just because he's Korean doesn't mean he's Buddhist.” I wonder what she would think of a boy named Dominic. “I like the name Christian. It suits him.”

Nonnie snorts. She has never thought much of Christian. It took me a while to come around, too. Christian pursued me in a sweet, almost quaint way—writing me notes, leaving a daisy taped to my locker, telling me that he had scored a goal in a hockey game just for me—but I kept putting him off. Nonnie had been diagnosed the month before. I was tired. And there was Christian, day after day, with his daisies and his sweet smile. So, I had given in to him, and we'd been together ever since. It was the first real relationship for either of us, and we prided ourselves on doing it so well.

Nonnie waves her hand at me. “You find me dull.” Before I can reply, she says, “And you should. You should have something better to do than hang around your dying grandmother.”

It's not Christian I think of. Or Britta and Grace. Instead it's Dominic's annoying, sexy smile that fills my mind. “Oh I do. I'm just sucking up to you for the inheritance.”

Nonnie waves her arms around at the shelves of books. “There it is. Take it now for all I care.”

The books, I know, are all that really matters to her, not the money she's amassed. They say poetry doesn't pay, but my grandmother made it work. She and my mom had this
boho existence in New York City. They shared a one-bedroom apartment and got themselves invited to fancy parties for their meals. I guess Nonnie was socking money away the whole time, right from when she first came up from West Virginia and got a job as a chambermaid at the Chelsea Hotel. By the time they moved up to New Hampshire, she had a huge stash. Nonnie took the job at Essex College and had this big house built, designed by some famous architect too esoteric for any common person to have ever heard of. It's ridiculous and over-the-top, and if anyone but Nonnie had built it, I would probably hate it. But I love it.

“I remember being seventeen. On the Tuesday after my confirmation I went down to the pawnshop and sold my rosary beads for seven dollars. Seven dollars! And you know what I bought with it? A copy of
On the Road
, Emily Dickinson's collected works in this little paperback edition, and a pair of pedal pushers. Then I went and got my hair cut just like this. I wanted to look like Jean Seberg, the girl in
Breathless
.”

I don't know who she means, and anyway, my mind is half somewhere else, thinking about what I still need to get ready for the first day of school. “So what were you like before that?” I ask because I have to ask something.

“Well, Veronica, I suppose I was just like you.”

Nonnie might as well have picked me up in her frail arms and turned me over, like I'm an hourglass that she flipped before all the sand had finished passing through.

v.

Well, Veronica, I suppose I was just like you.

I'm trying to trace the path backward from the woman who writes poems about sex, who won't tell anyone who my mother's father is, who once climbed over the fence at the top of the Chrysler Building to raise a New Year's toast to all of New York City, how to get from there all the way back to a girl like me. Or for a girl like me to get there.

Just the thought of someone knowing I'm having sex makes me want to burrow under the house never to come out.

As I walk down the stairs from her room above our garage, I try to picture Nonnie with longer hair, maybe even with a ribbon in it, going to the store, doing her homework, studying for tests, sitting with a boy in the movie theater and moving his hand when he tried to put it on her knee.

Ramona is loitering at the bottom of the stairs. She's slouched against the wall of the garage like some hood outside of a convenience store. A rake hangs above her head, giving her a menacing look.

“Going to see Nonnie?”

She shakes her head. “I'm looking for something.”

Looking generally requires moving about, but I don't feel like calling her on this point. “She would like it if you went to see her.”

Ramona glances toward the garage door as if she's considering running away from me. Instead she kicks her toe into the
ground, sending an ant scurrying. “I'm busy.”

“Oh yes.” I keep my voice as serious as possible. “That's quite clear. So busy standing in the garage. I don't know how you even have time for this conversation.”

“I don't,” she replies. “Actually.”

“Why won't you go see her?”

“I didn't say I wouldn't.”

“But you haven't.”

Another glance at the garage door. She tugs on her long hair. “I will, though.”

I don't tell her what we both know: that there isn't a whole lot of time left. “Fine, Ramona. Dinner's at six.”

We both know this is wishful thinking at best. We haven't had a family dinner in forever. Dad used to bring things home from the market—ready-to-go meals that he would dress up to feel homemade—but somewhere along the way he just stopped, and now we all fend for ourselves.

“I'm not hungry.”

“You sure look hungry.” Her wispy frame seems to be getting slighter by the day.

“Drop it, Very.” Her voice is hard.

“Suit yourself.”

“And I don't think I'll need a ride to school tomorrow,” she tells me.

“Someone else going to pick you up?” I wonder who this might be. None of Ramona's friends are old enough to drive yet.

“Maybe I'll walk.”

“It's over five miles.”

“That's not so far.” She's still wearing that same T-shirt of Dad's, and her Mardi Gras beads, which she pulls from side to side as she speaks.

“I don't mind driving you.”

“I know.”

“It just seems silly,” I say.

“Maybe I'll take the bus.”

“The bus?” No one voluntarily takes the bus.

“Big. Yellow. The wheels go round and round.” She smiles at her joke, but I'm annoyed. Like it's some big imposition on her to get in the car and ride with me to school.

“Whatever.”

“Exactly,” she answers.

That about sums up the current state of our relationship.

i.

WHATEVER IMPULSE LED RAMONA
to contemplate walking or taking the bus is gone by the next morning, and she meets me on my way out the door. She hasn't showered, I don't think, or taken off the Dinosaur Jr. shirt. This time she wears it with a pair of jeans.

“It's going to be hot today, you know,” I tell her as we get into the car.

“Okay.” She answers without looking at me, without looking at anything, really.

I have a basic policy when it comes to first-day-of-school clothes: dressy, but not too dressy. So on this, the first day of my last year of high school, I'm wearing knee-length shorts and a red top that has all sorts of embroidery around the neck. I think it's supposed to look South American.

“Are you sure about that shirt?” I ask.

“I like this shirt.”

“Yeah, but, you know, she's smoking on it. I think that might even be against school dress code.”

“Huh,” she says, as if the idea of dress code is a foreign one.

“This is your first day of high school. You want to make a good impression.”

Ramona rolls down her window and lets her hand flop outside in the breeze as we roll down our steep driveway. “I've been thinking about that.”

“Have you now?”

“I don't so much want to make a good first impression as an accurate first impression. I mean, I could come to school on the first day in a plaid kilt and collared shirt. I could come that way for the whole week. And the teachers would have one idea of me. But then what happens when I don't match up to that idea? Everyone's annoyed. So I think it's more important that I come dressed as who I am.”

I turn onto the road that winds its way down into town. “You should come as the best version of yourself, though.”

“The best version of me?” She grabs her hair and twists it into a loose bun at the nape of her neck.

This isn't exactly the first-day-of-school conversation I had planned. I wanted to give her some sisterly advice about starting high school. Like, always do the reading in Mr. Speck's class. Never eat the burritos in the cafeteria. If a senior asks if you're down, the answer is no.

“I just mean you can dress in your own way, but maybe not so aggressively.”

“Aggressively.” She holds the word in her mouth, sucks on
it like the girl on her shirt sucks the cigarette. “Huh,” she says again.

As we drive through town we pass Ruby's Diner. “Do you think we have time for a muffin?” she asks.

I shake my head.

“I really love the muffins there. The way they grill them. And the frappes. Remember how Nonnie used to take us there?”

We're waiting in traffic at the town's one stoplight.

“She stole a mug once.”

“What?”

Ramona grins. “I helped!”

“No way.” But I know it has to be true.

“I was seven. We put it in that purse I had that looked like a poodle. The one with the legs hanging off and the little bell. She slipped it right in and I carried it out.”

“You were an accessory to theft,” I laugh.

“Thug for life, Very. Thug. For. Life.”

When we pull into the parking lot, Ramona unsnaps her seat belt and lifts her shirt up over her head. She's so quick I can't even say anything. It's just a flash of pink bra and smooth skin and then she has the shirt back on, inside out this time. “The best version of me, I guess.”

I grab my bag from the backseat, and when I step from the car, there is Christian. He grabs me around the waist and is kissing me before we even say hello. His lips are soft against mine, and I can taste his toothpaste. He likes the cinnamon kind. “I
missed you,” he finally whispers. “Stupid sister with her stupid clarinet.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Stupid sisters.”

I turn to look at Ramona, but she has disappeared into the crowd as if swallowed up by a wave.

He takes my hand in his. “Senior year,” he says, and hops from foot to foot.

“This time next year, who knows where we'll be.”

“Someplace great,” he says. His whole body is bouncing, like he's a puppy on his way to obedience school, not a guy ready to start senior year. He got his hair cut at some point in time. It looks recent: there's a thin line of pale skin before his tan starts on his neck.

“I missed you, too,” I tell him.

I've forgotten how warm his hand is. Warm and rough. I never expected him to have such callused hands, and it had been a pleasant surprise when he'd first touched me. He reaches to open the school door, but before he can, the door pushes open and Dominic strides out. He sees me, grins, and then brings two fingers to his forehead before tipping them toward me.

“You're going the wrong way,” I say.

“Am I?” he replies. And that's it. He keeps on walking toward the parking lot, and we go into the vestibule.

“Leave it to Dominic Meyers to cut on the first day of school,” Christian says. “I didn't know you knew him.”

“I don't,” I say. “That is, I don't know him, know him. But
we've been in school together a long time. And he was going the wrong way.”

“Veronica Sayles-Woodruff, hall monitor,” he says, laughing.

I push against him with my shoulder. “Hilarious.”

“No, really, it's one of the things I love about you. Attention to detail. Follower of rules.”

I wrinkle my nose, but he doesn't notice.

“Listen, I have to go pick up my parking pass. I'll see you at assembly, okay?” He kisses me on the cheek and slips into the front office, where the secretaries go all gaga over him. I take a deep breath and start down the hallway toward the senior corridor.

I want it to feel different, but the hallways still smell like cleaning supplies and old milk, the students laugh and holler the same banalities, and the teachers even seem to be wearing the same clothes. The tiles of the hallway crisscross like graph paper. It's the exact same hallway I've walked down the last three years.

Still, I can't deny a shimmer of excitement. Even people who don't like school in general can't help but be excited by that first day back. It's full of potential. There might be some new student to sweep you off your feet. Or maybe that girl who was nebbishy and quiet at the back of the classroom will come back as a bombshell. Maybe that bombshell is you. You never know. It could happen.

But not today. What happens today is a rush of boys on the soccer team come careening around the corner, passing the ball
and laughing as Mr. Speck, world's meanest English teacher, yells at them to knock it off. They don't. One boy knees the ball and is about to head it when instead of hitting the ball his skull cracks into mine, just below my eye. My body snaps in half, and I cover my eye.

Juggling. That's what they call it when they kick the ball around like that: foot to knee to head. I don't know why this occurs to me.

“Are you okay?” a boy asks. It's Brooks Weston, an all-around all-star. He and Britta are locked in a dead heat for valedictorian, and Britta says it's our society's latent sexism that means that he can be a cool guy, while she's seen as striving and competitive.

“Yeah,” I say, holding my head. “Yeah, I'm fine.”

“Bunch of freakin' Neanderthals!” calls a voice behind me. Grace. I try to smile at her, but my head is seizing with pain. “Step away, step away. Nothing to see here.” As soon as she says it, I realize a crowd has gathered and they are all staring at me.

“I'm fine,” I say again.

“You should go to the nurse,” Brooks tells me. “Adam hit you pretty hard. And that kid's head is thick. Like three layers of the earth's crust.”

He's joking with me, so I smile, and that makes my whole head shatter.

Grace is lifting me to my feet and Adam Millstein, he of the hard head, is gathering my things. “He's right. My head is extra thick. When they measure it at the doctor's they always do it twice 'cause it's off the charts.”

I nod. More pain stars. “Maybe I should go to the nurse,” I say. I wonder if it's a record for the first visit to the nurse at the start of the new year. I bet she's sitting in her office in that rolly chair she has, feet up on the desk, thinking she's good for at least another hour.

As we walk, Grace texts Britta, who meets us at the nurse's office. When we go in, there's already a girl there, lying back on the bed. She's a sophomore and I can't remember her name.

Britta takes charge. “There were nine of them, or eight,” she begins, as if she had been there. “And Adam Millstein with his oversize head slammed right into her. And he may say that his Ronald McDonald hair meant that she should've seen him coming, but that is trumped by the simple fact that those nine boys—or eight, whichever—were breaking a fundamental school rule.”

Fundamental school rule.

Fundamental.

“You put the ‘fun' in ‘fundamental,' Britta,” I say.

“Ha!” Grace says. “Good one.”

“Which only proves my point. Very never makes word jokes like that. Something has been knocked loose.” She raises her eyebrows at Nurse Kimball, who is busy looking at my face. She shines a light in my eyes, the tiny pin of light going from eye to eye. Eye to eye. Then she gets me an ice pack and a printout on concussions and tells me I can stay in the back room for twenty minutes, but then we need to go to assembly.

“You should have seen it, Britta,” Grace tells her. “They were
like a pack of hyenas and Very was one of those animals that pokes its head up out of the ground. A lemur? All skinny and straight, and they just knocked her over.”

“It wasn't like that,” I say.

Britta rearranges the ice pack on my head. “Luckily you have some brain cells to spare.”

“Ronald McDonald hair?” I ask.

“Adam Millstein one hundred percent has Ronald McDonald hair,” she says. “He'd tell you so himself, I bet.”

Grace holds up the handout. “This says that if you have a concussion you can't do anything, like not even read or study.”

Britta raises her eyebrows at me. “Yeah, Very will get right on that.”

The sparks are lessening and it's more like a dull pain, a blurriness like when one of the older teachers can't get the projector lens to focus right and everything looks wavy and not quite real.

“How many people saw?”

“Everybody!” Grace says gleefully at the same time that Britta says, “Nobody.” But, of course, Grace was there and Britta wasn't, so I know who to believe.

I drop my head back so I'm looking at the ceiling. I've never been in this part of the nurse's office before, the back room. I've never been hurt this badly: it's self-preservation. When I was little, and I fell and hurt myself, Mom and Nonnie would be clucking around, not really sure what to do. Once, I fell off of my bike, right out on the driveway. I ripped my favorite shirt at the elbow, and blood oozed out of a scrape on my knee. My
wrist hurt from when I'd braced myself, and I couldn't really move it. They'd gone back and forth together.
Is it broken? Do you think it's broken? Well, how am I supposed to know? There's got to be a way for us to tell these things.
They gently poked at my wrist and tried to gauge my reaction. Finally I'd said, “Maybe we should go to the hospital just to check it out.”
Right. Of course. Let me just get my coat. And the keys. Don't forget the keys. Or Ramona. Ramona!

“Does it hurt that bad?” Britta asks.

“Yeah,” I sigh. It does. Worse than my head. This memory makes me miss her when she isn't even gone yet.

“I'll go get Nurse Kimball,” Britta says. “You need some pain-killers.”

“Oh, what do you think she has here? Anything good?” Grace asks, winking at me.

“Yes, she keeps the oxycodone right next to the Vicodin in that cabinet over there.”

They quip now, and sometimes I forget it was me who brought them together. Grace and I met in the faculty day care on campus. There's even a picture of the two of us in our baby carriers side by side, holding hands. She's laughing while I stare seriously at the camera. Britta arrived in fourth grade and was in my class, while Grace was down the hall. We became quick friends since we were always in the same levels for group work: the top ones. When I first invited Britta to one of our sleepovers, Grace almost refused to come in protest, but by morning they were discussing the ins and outs of Harry
Potter, a series I had never read.

“I'm fine,” I tell Britta. “Let's just go to assembly.”

“Are you sure?”

“Those soccer boys just gave you the perfect excuse to miss Mr. Morgan's lost-at-sea speech,” Grace adds.

“Does it look okay?” I ask as I reach up and graze my face with my fingertips. I wince.

“Definitely,” Britta says.

“You look mahvelous,” Grace says. “It's a little pink. You can barely notice it. It will be all the rage by first lunch.”

“Let's go,” I say.

“I'll hold on to that concussion handout for you just in case,” Britta tells me.

Grace picks up my bag and hitches it onto her shoulder. “All I'm saying is that if I ever have a horrible accident on the first day of school, I'm one hundred percent going to let you guys take advantage of it. I mean, I will really milk it. Trip to the ER and everything.”

“That's very generous of you,” Britta says.

“It is,” Grace agrees, and loops her arm through mine.

ii.

The auditorium is mostly full already, but Christian has saved us seats in a row toward the back. I see him and wave. It starts out as this big “Hey, over here!” kind of a wave, but that makes
my head throb, so I drop my hand down and wiggle my fingers instead. A coy wave? Let's call it that.

We have to walk all the way up the right-hand aisle, and it's like walking through a telescope as he gets bigger and bigger. His black hair that he fights into a side part every morning (hair which I—and only I—have seen falling down into his golden-brown eyes), the flannel shirt that he's tossed on over his Essex High Hockey shirt in a way that's meant to look casual, his scuffed-up shoes—all of this comes into focus as I make my way up to him. His eyes grow wide as I sit down. “What happened to your face?” he asks.