Very in Pieces (8 page)

“Are you mad?”

I shake my head, but of course I am.

“I know I shouldn't have said what I did about your grandmother.”

“I'm not mad about Nonnie. I'm mad because you aren't answering the question. All I'm trying to figure out is if you think personalities are set in stone.”

He chews on the metal part of his pencil where the eraser is attached to the wood. I can practically taste the aluminum just watching him. “Well, there's what you do and who you are.”

I nod. Now we're getting someplace.

“And I know who you are, Very. You're my girl.”

This should be the final straw.
You're my girl.
Who says that? It's like we're caught in this old movie where guys and gals went steady and shared sodas. It's a world that never existed. I cast my glance toward the carpet, the place we first had sex. “What I'm saying is that who we are, maybe it's all constructed for us. By genes and our families and people's expectations, and it all gets built up around us. What if none of it is real?”

“Genes are real,” he tells me.

“But they aren't everything. All that other stuff. The stuff other people put on us right from the start. We might not even know it happened. People get this sense of us and it's hard to tell if that's really who we are or if we've just been told it so many times we have to believe it. We're certain it's true. But then maybe someday someone lifts a curtain. Or there's a hairline crack. And we decide to just throw off the whole cape, and underneath there's a new us all pink and raw like the skin beneath a blister when it pops.”

Christian wrinkles his nose at that. “I think you'd better leave the poetry to your grandmother.”

I sigh and lie back down.

“What?”

“Nothing. Let's just get this done.”

I go back to writing out the chemical equation in my notebook. I bet Nonnie never even took chemistry. She would call it ghastly, a real bore. She would be right. Who cares about atoms and molecules?

“I'm two problems ahead of you,” he says, grinning. “Keep up!”

This is not normal flirting. I have a hard time imagining Hunter and Serena sitting around doing their homework, and I'm pretty certain that joking about it doesn't constitute their pillow talk.

I slide over so our sides all the way down our bodies are touching; not just shoulders but hips and thighs, too.

“Hey, you can't copy my work.”

I tilt my head in toward his neck. I'm doing an experiment of my own. I'm more interested in how he will react to my coming closer than I am in actually doing the deed. A few months ago, my meaning would have been clear. A few months ago, he would have tilted his head to mine, kissing would have commenced, and our homework would have been forgotten.

“That should be a negative charge, Very,” he says, pointing at my paper with his pencil tip. “You have it as a positive.”

“Right.” I slide away and erase the work I had done on the problem.

It doesn't feel like a rejection. Maybe it should. It's more like a nagging. A pit in my stomach telling me that things are not
quite right. This feeling rises and falls throughout our relationship, and each time I have to convince myself I'm being foolish. Because I am.

Maybe, I've decided, maybe this is what love feels like. Comfortable. Because I am comfortable with Christian—not as comfortable as I am with Britta and Grace, but close. And he is good-looking, even with his skinny, hairless legs. His eyes are deep and brown and comforting as a chocolate Lab. He can calm me down when I get riled up about school or life. He doesn't even have to say anything. He just wraps his arms around me, and I feel better. So maybe that's what love is. Or perhaps passion is limited to a select group of people—people like Ramona who seem to approach their entire life with intense emotion. Maybe wild, passionate love just isn't in my personality. Maybe it's not who I am. Or what I do.

v.

Back at home I follow the sound of laughter to find Mom and Dad on the sofa, and I stop short. The light on them is perfect. It filters around them from the Tiffany-style lamps that dot the room, casting a glow on them like the world's softest spotlight. It makes their skin look golden. Mom puts her drink down on the floor beside her. “Is everything okay?” she asks.

“You look like a painting,” I say, and they both laugh.

“Middle Age, At Rest,” Dad suggests for a title.

“Speak for yourself, old man,” Mom jokes back. “I prefer something like Interior Domestic, Number Two.”

“What was number one?” he asks.

She raises her eyebrows and they giggle.

“Ew,” I say, because that's what's expected of me. “But you should paint the two of you like this, Mom. As part of your sabbatical project.”

Mom picks up her glass and shakes the ice cubes. “Pour me another, love?”

I take the glass from her and go to the bar cart, where I pour gin over the melting ice cubes, but the tonic bottle is empty. “We're out of tonic,” I tell her.

“I guess I'll drink it straight,” she says. “You know I've heard that tonic has more sugar than just about any soda. I'm better off without it.”

Dad strokes her arm. “You don't need to worry about that.”

I hand her the glass. “Did you know that gin and tonics came from when the British were in India and they took quinine to prevent malaria? They thought it was so disgusting that they added gin to cover the taste. And limes.”

“Now, that is an interesting bit of history,” Mom says. “That is history I can get behind. They teach you that in school?”

Grace had told me, though I wasn't sure where she had learned it. I shook my head. “I'm a woman of endless trivia,” I say. “A trivial woman.” That's something I'll have to tell Nonnie: she'll be proud of me. It's just the type of word coiling she so admires. “Do you want anything, Dad?”

He holds up his microbrew. “Still have plenty here.”

“Move over,” Mom says. “Make room for Very.”

Dad slides over, pushing the old, red afghan out of the way, and I sit down between them. Dad throws his arm over the back of the sofa so it's behind my shoulders, and I tilt my head and look up at the exposed beams of the ceiling.

After a long sip out of his bottle, Dad says, “I was looking at the Stanford website for you today, jelly bean. You couldn't do much better than that school. I got lost in some of the pictures. The campus just dwarfs Essex College's.”

“Everything dwarfs Essex,” Mom says.

“Their music department sounds amazing. Their webpage says they're ‘vigorously engaged with the technological and artistic evolution of sound.' I wrote that down. ‘Vigorously engaged with the artistic evolution of sound.' Got me thinking about how sound does evolve, and tastes, too. It really got my head spinning.”

“If I end up going, I'll be sure to take a class.”

“Are you sure everything's okay?” Mom asks. “You look—” She waves her hand and doesn't finish the thought, as if the gesture is enough. Evidently I look like a flitting hand feels: disconnected and purposeless.

I could tell them that I'm not so sure about Stanford anymore, but that's not what's bothering me. It would be impossible to explain the lingering sensation to them, the feeling left behind after seeing Christian. Their love is not typical. It's storybook. They met, of course, at a New York
City gallery. They bonded over the art—early-twentieth-century minimalists—and went from the gallery to a bar to dinner to another bar and closed the place down. Long ago I realized that most likely the night had not ended with a kiss on the cheek and the exchanging of phone numbers.

It's a Manhattan fairy tale through and through. They went for walks in Central Park. They visited the galleries in SoHo. They went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Smalls Jazz Club. Each day they fell more in love, though it seemed impossible that their love could get any bigger. At the end of the summer, Dad started working at, coincidentally, Essex College. Mom came home to do her art and, eventually, began to teach at the college, too. It all fell into place so easily it was as if it were fated.

And the love hasn't faded. All these years later, and it's just as intense.

“How long have you been together?” I ask.

Dad stares up and to the right, and Mom looks down at her hands, counting on her fingers.

“Twenty-three years,” Dad says.

“No, Dallas, it's nineteen.”

“Right,” Dad says. “I never was good with math. That's your strength, Very, though who knows where you got it.”

It doesn't matter if it's nineteen years or twenty-three. It's a miracle that they still have so much to talk and laugh about. It's Guinness World Records book worthy. It's not normal, but it's beautiful. Nothing like what Christian and I have. Or
Christian's parents, who seem like partners in Mrs. Yoo's law firm. Or Grace's parents: her father watches each of Grace's mom's transformations with bewilderment.

“And you knew right away?”

They exchange a look.

“Not right away, right away,” Mom says.

“Well, I knew right away. I knew before we even spoke. There you were standing in the doorway, books in your hand.”

Mom stretches her legs across me to kick Dad. “Dallas,” she says in a singsongy way. “I had an inclination,” she says to me. “I had a hope.”

“I knew,” Dad assures me. “And by the end of the night, she knew, too.”

Mom giggles, and this time I don't say “ew” because it's too perfect, too lovely. And at the same time it makes my stomach turn because it has been six months with Christian—six months!—and as much as I tell myself it's just an arbitrary number (186 days, more or less) it does mean something. It means something that after six months I still don't know what my parents knew after six hours and continue to know after nineteen years. Or twenty-three. Whichever.

i.

IN ANOTHER WEEK, MY
bruise has faded to a bluish green with yellow around the edges. Now Nonnie says it's like a banana bruise and this scares me more than her coughing: that she would resort to fruit analogies twice in row, one of them actually using the word
bruise
. That her words are slipping away from her seems the cruelest twist of all.

It's after school on Thursday and I'm waiting for Ramona. I'm always waiting for Ramona. We've been in school for two weeks now. School time is funny that way. It feels like we've been back for months. The weather is nice now, not as hot, so as I wait, I sit outside on the low wall that leads up to the building. I have my English packet out, and I'm struggling through some Emily Dickinson: “Hope is the thing with feathers”? Hope is hope. The thing with feathers is a bird. And I don't think birds are particularly hopeful. They're practical. Mercurial even.

When Dominic sits down beside me, smelling not quite of smoke, but of something smoky, like he's been spending time in front of a campfire, it reminds me of my grandmother, although she has never been camping, that's for certain. “Hey, Rapunzel,” he says. My hair goes halfway down my back, and I've gotten the Rapunzel comment before.

“Hey, Big Bad Wolf,” I reply, and immediately wish I hadn't.

He laughs. “Truthfully I think of myself more as the woodsman.”

“In some versions the woodsman is no better than the wolf.”

“Fairy tales were all just ways to keep young women in line in the Victorian era. Don't stray too far from the path, little girl, a wolf might get you. Or a woodsman. Don't go poking around the castle, a spinning needle might prick you and make you fall asleep. If you're pregnant and have weird cravings, don't send your husband off to steal lettuce from a witch's garden.”

“What are you talking about?” I put my packet down on my lap and squint over at him.

“Rapunzel. That's how she got into the tower. Her mother wanted leafy greens when she was pregnant, so her dad went to steal them, and when the witch caught him, he promised her the baby. Then years later the prince came along to Rapunzel's tower and figured out that he could call out ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,' and she'd invite him up. So then they had lots of sex and she got pregnant and the witch figured it all out and chopped off her hair and banished her. Then the witch tricked the prince and when he came up to see Rapunzel,
instead he found the witch, and he jumped off the tower and landed in the thorns that blinded him—”

“You're making this up.” This is nothing like the version I remember.

“No. This is the original. Don't worry. It ends happily. Eventually they find each other in the woods and her tears of joy make it so he can see again.”

“That's the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

“That's love for you,” he replies.

A group of freshmen come tumbling out of the school, howling and giggling. I recognize some of them as Ramona's friends, but she's not with them. One of them looks over at us, elbows another girl, who turns to look, too. I know what they are staring at. Very Woodruff sitting with Dominic Meyers: that was a combination they'd never expected.

“So, what, you just sit at home reading fairy tales?”

“Beats sitting on this wall.”

“I'm waiting for my sister. She's late. As usual.”

“So why don't you go?” he asks.

“I can't leave her here.”

“Why not?”

“She needs a ride home.”

“I'm sure she'll figure something out,” he says in a way that makes me wonder if he knows Ramona. “And if you leave her, you'll be teaching her a lesson.”

I smirk. Teaching Ramona a lesson is a feat worthy of Hercules, or maybe Sisyphus. Few have tried, none have succeeded.
“It's easier to wait. I have homework I can do anyway.” I hold up the packet and hope he gets the hint that I want to get back to reading it.

“Emily Dickinson. I like her.”

Of course. Everybody but Very gets Emily Dickinson.

“She was a shut-in, you know,” he tells me. “This guy in town broke her heart and she locked herself in her house.”

Nonnie had mentioned this to me, how it was starting to seem like a good plan. But Nonnie could never shut herself away like that. “Sounds pretty stupid to me.”

“It was a real waste,” he agrees. “She was kind of a dish.”

I think of the pictures I've seen of her: narrow face, hair in a bun. “That's not what I meant. I meant she was smart. She should've just gotten over him and out into the world.”

“Well, now I know who to come to for a sympathetic ear when I need relationship advice.”

I didn't realize that Dominic had a girlfriend, and I'm embarrassed at how this makes me feel.

“Though it would be cool to be that guy—the one she packed it all in for.”

“Ah, yes, every guy's dream—to be the guy that makes a girl lose her mind.”

“Not that. I meant how it would feel to inspire greatness.”

He slips the packet from my hands, flips to the next page, then returns it to me. “This one is my favorite.”

I read the poem, “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” Only three short stanzas. It's more subtle than Nonnie's poems, but even I
can understand the imagery of a ship seeking a mooring. “It's funny though—” I begin. Then stop. For what I was about to point out was that the poem is from the perspective of the ship, seeking the mooring “in thee.” So the speaker seems masculine. I can practically hear Grace yelling. “Insertion! This poem is about inserting a penis into a vagina!”

But of course I can't talk about that with Dominic.

“Never mind.”

I pick up the packet again and turn back to the hope poem.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—

God, that stupid bird. Would it just shut up already? (But in my mind I'm picturing a tiny boat, rocking itself loose at sea.)

“You're not easy to get to know,” he tells me. It feels like an insult. Or a promise. Both, really.

“You're not giving me much choice,” I reply.

“I can go,” he says. He stands up and I'm eye level with the hips of his worn-in jeans.

“I'll see you around, then,” I say. I'm just as bad as that bird.

“Sure you will.” He grins again and strides off into the parking lot, where he gets into a beat-up black sedan and drives away.

I'm trying to figure out why he needed me to drive him to campus if he has his own car when Ramona appears. “You're late.”

“So shoot me.”

“I could just leave you here, you know. Teach you a lesson.”

That makes her grin. “Do what you have to do.” Then she just stands there looking at me like she thinks I might actually leave her behind.

ii.

I ease the car into my parking spot in the driveway. As the engine noise dies down, Ramona coughs.

“Yes?” I ask.

“What?” she demands.

“Did you want to say something?”

“It was just a cough. God.” She coughs again as if I'm unclear on the concept.

“Sorry, Your Phlegminess. I won't make that mistake again.”

Her hair is in a bun, and she lets it down as she gets out of the car, like Rapunzel unraveling her tresses. I wonder if Dominic was telling the truth with that whole lettuce thing. It seems so absurd, but I guess most fairy tales are. I mean, a glass slipper that fits only one woman in the whole town—not to mention the impracticality of dancing in a shoe made of glass. I'm glad Dominic didn't bring that one up. I know the original story there, with the stepsisters cutting off their toes and all that gruesome stuff. Or the Little Mermaid walking on shards of glass. Then again, Rapunzel is just about the only fairy tale I can
think of where the prince gets punished.

I shove my door open and I'm striding toward the house when I see something glinting on the garage, just around the corner from the doors. I walk around to the side of the garage, and about five feet up is a bottle cap jammed into the stucco. It's silver and bright like a beacon. My mind is cycling through possibilities. It fell out of the recycle bin and somehow bounced up there? The wind? Then I see that there's not just one, but many, spotting the outside wall of the house. They fan out from that first silver one I saw, just a few close to it, but more and more as they move along the wall, maybe fifty in all. It looks like a spray pattern, but not so even. Like someone had a jar full of them and threw them at the wall and they just stuck. The twist-off tops are flat and perfectly round, but the ones you need an opener for are bent and scratched. Some are faceup, showing their brands to the world, but others are bottom up, their sharp teeth like mouths ready to bite. By far the most prevalent are the orange caps of Moxie soda, Nonnie's favorite.

“What the hell,” I mutter. I pick at the shiny one, but it holds fast. It's not just shoved in, it's glued.

I look over my shoulder at Ramona, who is watching me. “There are bottle caps. On the house.”

“Yes,” she replies, matter-of-factly. And I'm not sure if she's so blasé because she's so far divorced from reality that she thinks bottle caps attached to the house are perfectly normal. I mean, she is wearing that same Dinosaur Jr. T-shirt, right side out, with a cardigan that covers the offending cigarette, and a pair
of jeans, even though it's in the seventies. And she's standing on one foot. So maybe in whatever new reality Ramona has constructed for herself, bottle caps on buildings are just the way things are done.

“Go get Mom,” I tell her.

I use my fingernail to pick at a cap from a bottle of Moxie just to test again that they are really, truly stuck, and it holds.

Ramona steps forward. “I don't think they're going to come off.”

“It looks like they used hot glue,” I agree.

She peers closely. “Maybe. Or some sort of caulking.”

“Why would someone glue bottle caps to our house?” I ask.

“Why do people do any number of things?”

If you were going to go through life with the attitude that people's actions couldn't be explained—well, it's exasperating to think about. I just accept that she's not going to go in and get Mom, so I do it myself. Inside, I find my mother sitting at the kitchen table, working on the
New York Times
crossword puzzle. She looks up and says, “Good day?”

“Sure. Listen, have you—”

“I need your help with this one: mathematics branch that deals with limits.” She taps her pencil on the paper. “Eight letters.”

“Calculus.”

“That works! This is why we have children, to complete the
Times
puzzle.”

“Have you seen the bottle caps?” I ask.

“Bottle caps?” she echoes.

“On the garage? Glued there?”

Mom throws down her newspaper. Once outside, she bends over and tries to pry off a cap, just as I had. “Those little shits,” she mutters. She says it like she knows specifically which shits are responsible.

“You know who did this?”

“It has to be one of Imogene's fans. There's that poem”—she waves her hand in the air—“about the bottles never being with their caps?”

“‘Detritus'?” I suggest.

“Nonnie has a poem about bottle caps?” Ramona asks.

“About all sorts of garbage—the things we throw away,” Mom says with another wave of her hand. “‘Piling up, spilling toward entropy, where only dirt can grow.' And there's that section about how nothing ever matches up, and how the bottles can never find their caps.” She steps forward and rubs her hand over the bottle caps. “This is vandalism. This is trash on our house. How do they even know she's sick?”

Nonnie hasn't wanted us to tell anyone. She just wants to disappear one day.

“I'm sure it can be fixed,” I say, stepping toward my mother.

She rakes her hand through her hair. “That's not the point.”

“It could be a coincidence,” Ramona says. “Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with her. Or maybe Nonnie would like it,” she offers, wiping her hands on her jeans.

“All our life people have—” Mom shakes her head. “This
isn't the tribute Nonnie wants.”

“It's just a little thing,” Ramona says. “Don't be upset.”

“How the hell did they get them to stick to stone?” Mom mutters.

“It looks like hot glue to me, but Ramona thinks it's caulking,” I say. “Either way, we'll have to take them off carefully, or we could ruin the stucco.”

“This is going to make the resale value plummet.” Mom looks heavenward, as if an answer might come from above. “You think we can get it off? We'll hire someone. I'm not messing up the house for a bunch of crazy wannabes. What are they even thinking? Imogene would never vandalize someone else's property. Not someone's private property, anyway, not unless she had some political motivation for it, and what motivation would there be for putting bottle caps on our house? You know I believe in free expression, but this isn't art or politics or creativity.”

“Maybe—” Ramona begins, but Mom pivots on her heel and goes back inside the house. “I'm going up to my studio,” she calls over her shoulder, as if the destruction has inspired her to be creative.

“Wait,” I call after her. She hesitates before turning back to me. “What do you mean about the resale value?” I ask.

“Once Nonnie's gone, what is there to tie us to this place?” She's looking at the ground at my feet, not at me.

“Well,” I begin, but she doesn't let me say anything.

“We'll sell this place, get something more reasonable. Maybe
a condo in Portsmouth, that's almost like a city.”