Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, page 17
“Please translate, insidias nautae heri non tolerabas,” he said.
“Yesterday, you did not tolerate the treachery of the sailor,” I said.
“Please translate, stultus vir mala belli laudat.”
“The dumb man praises the evils of war.”
“Please translate, populus multam pecuniam filiis Romanorum dat.”
“You don’t have to say please translate each time, Peter,” I said.
“Huh?”
“You say please, like you’re actually the teacher.”
“I’m just being polite,” Peter said.
“Fine. The people gives much money to the sons of the Romans.”
“Correct,” Peter said. “And why does the verb in Latin come at the very end of the sentence?”
“Because it makes it more suspenseful,” I said. “Because you don’t know what the subject is doing until the very end.”
And then, we closed the books, and Peter and I made out on his bed. Yes, Peter. Peter was my boyfriend senior year—but I didn’t call him in the middle of the night to talk about my nightmares. Peter was a student athlete. Captain of the tennis team. Homecoming king. Student body president. Vice president of Latin Club. President of the Honor Society. He had a lot to do tomorrow, Peter always said before we got off the phone at ten. He always had a lot to do tomorrow. He needed his sleep.
So, most nights, I woke up and sat alone in our room, staring up at the dark ceiling. I heard the tree branch tap against the window. I heard the creak of the radiators. I translated Roman myths into my notebook, stories about terrible things happening to nondescript girls. I stayed up so late, translating, which was ironic, because then I overslept for school. “You’re late again,” Mr. Prim would say—and then continued his slideshow on the ruins and excavations of ancient cities. The city of Pompeii, he said, destroyed by a sudden volcanic eruption in 79 AD. The people died fast—“Thermal shock” is how Mr. Prim described it—killed in the middle of whatever they were doing. He showed us slide after slide of the things found in the ruins—a pair of earrings, a bronze lamp, and the dead bodies, which were not really bodies, just casts of bodies. Impressions of the dead in their final positions: A couple, kissing. A child, kneeling to pray. “A complete city scene, a vision of Ancient Rome in motion, a historian’s dream!” Mr. Prim said. But my nightmare.
“Seeing the dead just seems scary,” I said to Mom.
“It’s just Kathy, golfing,” Mom said.
“Golfing?” I said. “But Kathy didn’t golf.”
Mom turned off the car.
“Well, I guess she golfs now,” Mom said. “Jan said Kathy was swinging a golf club. She wanted Dad to know that his swing would be okay. It would get better. And how would Jan know that Dad likes to golf?”
“Everybody in Connecticut likes to golf,” I said. “That’s what people do here. They golf.”
“Now that’s just not true,” Mom said. “I don’t like to golf. Grandma didn’t like to golf. And when was the last time you golfed, huh?”
She waited, as if I would actually answer that.
“That’s what she saw, Sally. She saw a young girl swinging a golf club.”
“Dad’s swing is always off,” I said. “And why would Kathy come back all the way from the dead only to talk about Dad’s golf swing? I mean, really, who cares? She definitely didn’t care.”
“She liked to joke,” Mom said. “Maybe she was joking. Teasing Dad. Jan said she had a silly grin on her face when she said it. Remember her silly grin?”
Mom did a “silly grin,” and when I didn’t laugh, she said, “See, Jan knows you’re like this.”
“Like what?”
“Angry. Unwilling to laugh.”
“Maybe that’s because I don’t find this very funny,” I said.
“Maybe you’re just hungry.”
We got food from Sbarro. Pizza and salad. And some of those garlic knots. Mom watched me eat. Mom said, “Eat, eat.” Jan was worried I was not eating.
“How does Jan know if I’m eating?” I asked.
“Jan says it has something to do with a boy.”
“What boy?” I asked.
“She didn’t say.”
“Peter?”
Mom didn’t say anything.
“What’s wrong with my boyfriend?”
“Sally, nothing is wrong with Peter. But you’re too young for boyfriends.”
“I’m almost eighteen!” I said. “Kathy was sixteen when she had her first boyfriend.”
“My point exactly.”
“I’m an adult,” I said.
“Not yet.”
“In two months, I could actually marry Peter if I wanted to.”
“Do you want to marry Peter?”
“No!”
“Well, if you don’t want to marry Peter, then why are you dating him?”
“I’m just saying…”
“What are you saying, Sally? Are you and Peter thinking about marriage?”
I started to laugh, right there, over my pizza at the food court of the mall. No, Peter and I were not thinking about marriage. Peter and I were just starting to think about different ways to touch each other. Peter was always suggesting something new—why don’t you take off your pants? Why don’t you spread your legs a little more? And I was the one saying, Like this? Like this?
“If I were a seventeen-year-old back in Ancient Rome, I’d have two kids by now,” I told Mom.
“You sound like your father.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“Then aren’t you glad you don’t live in Ancient Rome? Aren’t you glad we spared you that?” Mom sighed. “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”
When you start applying for college senior year, people start saying this to you a lot. Mom and Dad said it during dinner, guidance counselors said it at the end of meetings, and the doctor said it when he put a stethoscope up to my heart during my last physical. “You’ve got a long life ahead of you,” he said, like it was good news, and it was. I had a normal heartbeat, clear lungs, a spine as straight as a pencil. There was no excuse not to start thinking about my future, so Valerie and I spent the fall visiting colleges and taking quizzes during lunch to see what we should become. A nurse. A doctor. A farmer!
“A farmer?” Valerie said, and we laughed. “No offense, but I really can’t see you as a farmer.”
“None taken.”
But then I sent in my college application for Villanova, and felt guilty, like I was running a race that was over, stomping over your body to cross the finish line and go to Villanova.
And Peter! That felt wrong sometimes, too. We did things we shouldn’t late at night on Mom’s white couch. Peter put his hands up my shirt, his face in my breasts, and said, “I just want to bury my face in them and die there,” and it was still funny to me that Peter (Peter!) could say these kinds of things to me now. And that I could say these kinds of things now: “I feel like that’d make for an awkward obituary. Peter Heart, age eighteen, died facedown in some girl’s breasts.”
“Oh, is that all you are to me?” Peter asked. “Just some girl?”
“Are you being serious?” I asked.
“I’m very serious.”
But he was joking. He knew what he was to me.
“You’re my boyfriend,” I said, and I loved saying it. Peter loved hearing it. I was his first real girlfriend, and Peter was my first real boyfriend. But Mom didn’t understand.
I pushed my pizza around the plate.
“See?” Mom said. “You aren’t touching your food.”
Mom was like a detective that year. Like we were on Jillian Williams and the theme was What Is Wrong with My Daughter?
“This isn’t food,” I said. “We’re at the mall. And for the record, I am eating.”
“But what are you eating?” Mom said. “Pizza! Oreos! Which is exactly why Jan says you should be taking vitamins.”
Jan had suggested zinc. Iron. B6. Omega-3 fatty acids.
“Is Jan a doctor, too?” I asked.
“No,” Mom said. “She’s just very smart.”
Mom pulled out a tape recorder from her purse. Apparently, Jan let Mom record their sessions. “That’s how authentic she is.”
“Right,” I said.
“I’ll play you the tape if you don’t believe me,” Mom said. She held it up, put her finger on the Play button.
“No!” I shouted.
I didn’t believe Mom. I didn’t believe Jan. I really didn’t. And yet, still, I couldn’t bear to listen to it.
“We’re at the mall,” I said.
After, we went from store to store, from nice dress to nice dress—now that’s very nice, Mom said, but then she tugged at the fabric. She pulled out a measuring strip from her purse and wrapped them around my boobies. That’s what Mom kept calling them, as if that made them smaller.
“Sally, we’re going to have to do something about your boobies,” she said.
“Like what?” I asked. “Cut them off?”
Mom laughed.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
I looked at myself in the mirror. I thought about how surprised you’d be to see me this way.
Sally? Is that really you? Jesus. What happened to your tits?
They had grown. They were like yours now. And my hips—they were more like Mom’s than Mom’s, heavy and wide like a boat. Most days, walking down the halls at school, I felt like a boat. Like everything inside the boat was real and everything outside of it was a mirage. Every time I thought I was getting close to something real, every time I saw land, and approached Peter’s body, felt his hands all over me, the boat, it wasn’t enough. His hands didn’t change me. They didn’t pierce through the walls. The walls were thick, built to keep out an entire ocean.
“Harder,” I was always saying to Peter. “Bite them harder.”
But Peter moved his mouth away. “That really doesn’t hurt?” he asked. “I feel like I’m hurting you.” He was worried. And I was worried. Because when Peter left the house, when he took his hands with him, I was alone with myself again.
“We’ll just have to go somewhere else,” Mom said. “Special order a dress. There’s nothing here for you.”
“Right,” I said.
I could have told her this.
There had been other boys before Peter.
There was Alex from freshman chem with the lip ring, which was the only thing Mom could ever remember about him. But this was what I remember: He felt my tits for the first time under the bleachers after school and it felt good. It was the first time I didn’t feel embarrassed about them. During the day, at school, people stared at them as if they were inappropriate, like, what was I thinking, bringing these breasts to school! Girls looked at them as I changed during gym, like I was oversharing. And in the hallways, they were always in the way. Sorry, I said, sorry when we were caught in traffic jams at the corners of the hallway. When we were all pressed up against each other, trying to get to class. Sorry my tits are so fucking big. Sorry they’re full of so much tissue and fat and blood. Sorry I’m alive. But there, under the bleachers with Alex, they seemed to be the best part about me.
Then there was Jake, who taught me how to make out at the movies, who kept his wallet chained to his belt loop, something Mom didn’t understand. What’s he got in that wallet that’s so important? Mom asked, after he dropped me off the last time.
“Money?” I asked.
“How much money does he keep in there?”
I didn’t know. That wasn’t a normal question to ask another person, not like Mom would understand such a thing. Mom would ask anybody anything. (“Do you have any dresses for large-chested women?” Mom asked the cashier at Macy’s.)
And then, there was Peter, my first real boyfriend. I know it sounds childish to put it that way, but it’s how I thought of him when he rang our doorbell for the first time senior year. I thought, Here is my first real boyfriend, coming to have dinner with my parents like Billy.
“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Holt,” Peter said.
Peter stood in the hallway, shaking Dad’s hand.
“So, Sally tells me you’re headed off to Michigan in the fall?” Dad asked.
“Yes sir,” Peter said.
“Good school,” Dad said.
“It is,” Peter said.
“They have a great football team,” Dad said.
And then it was like neither of them knew what to say.
“How’s the team this year?” Dad asked.
“Which team?”
“Which team are you on again?”
So many teams.
“Track,” Peter said. “And chess. And tennis.”
“Oh, you play tennis?” Mom asked.
Once upon a time, before you were dead, Mom played tennis. Once upon a time, Mom put on earrings and lipstick and a white tennis skirt and drove to the town racquet club to play tennis with other women. But now, she only left the house to contact you.
“Not really,” Peter said.
Then he explained: His mother was the manager at the racquet club.
“Oh,” Mom said. “Really? Wow. That must be a big job.”
Mom didn’t seem interested, but Peter kept talking. Peter explained how he got free lessons there his whole life. I don’t know why he always added that last part. It would have been better if he just said, “Yes, I am on the tennis team.” But it seemed important to Peter that everybody knew he got free lessons. That he didn’t pay anybody in order to become great.
“Well, come sit,” Mom said. “Dinner is ready.”
That first night she met Peter, Mom was on her best behavior. She even cooked. Mom almost never cooked anymore. Mom ate a lot of Lean Cuisines. But it was nice to see her preparing the salad while Dad was outside grilling burgers. Even though I told Dad not to grill burgers. Peter was a vegetarian, something Dad refused to accept as a fact.
“No boy is a vegetarian,” he said.
“But Peter is,” I insisted.
Peter turned down the burger Dad had grilled (just as I warned), but Dad acted surprised. Horrified. And I could see Peter in that moment through Dad’s eyes and I, too, was horrified. Was this really my boyfriend? This is the one I choose to give my only body to? The vegetarian who doesn’t eat meat not because he cares about animals, but because of inflammation? That’s what Peter said at dinner. He said it wasn’t because he cared about animals.
“I do believe we’re meant to eat them,” Peter said, as if he were giving a public speech. “But I eat less meat and I feel less pain.”
Mom was confused.
“But how do you get all your vitamins?”
Dad was annoyed. Dad said something about meat and cavemen and evolution and our growing brains. Dad said, “Our brains are twice as big as they used to be.”
And Peter said, “Well, there are other factors.”
Dad ate a big bite of burger.
Mom poured herself more wine.
I tried to float elsewhere, detach from my body like the stoics I had learned about in school.
“So, how’d you two meet?” Mom asked, as if there might be some other answer besides “school.”
“We met a long time ago,” I joked. “In fifth grade.”
Peter once put Band-Aids over my wounded lips, remember? Peter once said, Show me your wounds.
“It’s a funny story,” Peter said. “Sally and I have actually been dating since the fifth grade.”
My stomach clenched.
“Oh,” Mom said. She looked confused. “Have you?”
“It’s just a joke,” I said.
“I asked Sally out in fifth grade,” Peter said. “And she said yes.”
But after, Peter and I didn’t speak for years. Not even in Latin class. We mostly just translated sentences together, and then went our separate ways when the bell rang.
But then I joined the school paper senior year and started spending a lot of time interviewing Peter in the cafeteria, because Peter was always doing the most impressive thing. Peter was always thinking of quick and efficient ways he could become a hero to the other guys at school, which is why he ran for student body president: The guys wanted soda machines in the cafeteria. And now, finally, we had them. And everybody loved Peter for it. Clapped when he walked into the cafeteria during lunch. I covered the story for our school newspaper. “How’d you do it?” I asked Peter. “How’d you cut through the red tape and actually make something happen in this godforsaken place?” And Peter just looked at me, confused, like, it was easy. Like, don’t you know who I am? I am the student body president. I am the president of the Honor Society. I am the homecoming king, which surprised me. I didn’t expect the president of the Honor Society to be the same person as the homecoming king. One thing meant you were cool, and the other thing meant you were not.
“Is Peter Heart cool now?” I asked Valerie at lunch.
“I don’t think you have to be cool to be homecoming king,” she said. “I think that’s just a myth.”
The point is: It didn’t really matter who was cool anymore. Senior year was different from all the other years in high school. Everybody started getting invited to all of the parties at Rick Stevenson’s house, because who cares? As soon as senior year started, it felt like we were no longer in high school, because sometimes, on weekends, I was literally at college, visiting with Mom and Dad, walking through the halls of Villanova, with Dad going, “Oh, nice, this is nice.” And Mom going, “A Catholic college? I didn’t think you wanted that.”
I tensed. I waited for her to accuse me of something. Waited for her to remember that Billy was a senior there. But maybe she didn’t know?
“I’m a Catholic, aren’t I?” I said, which seemed to satisfy her.
I admit, at first I wanted to visit Villanova because I thought I might run into Billy. I kept searching for him in every room. I kept scanning the rows of students, the rows of beards and baseball caps to see if he was among them, but he wasn’t. It was just random strangers, sitting in tiny wooden desks, deeply engrossed in each other’s conversations. They looked like they were talking about the meaning of life. But then I heard one girl laugh real loudly and say, “Okay, dolphins so do not gang-rape each other. That’s total bullshit.” I waited for the professor to yell at her, but the professor was just stacking papers on top of papers. The professor didn’t care. And that’s when I knew it must be okay to do things like that in college—talk about dolphin gang rape, and things like dolphin gang rape, that maybe it was even on the syllabus.
