Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, page 4
I started to read my summer reading book, Oedipus the King. But when the chorus began to sing things I did not understand, I looked up to see Peter Heart sitting on the other side of the pool, also reading Oedipus. Peter was a Red Person, too. Peter clearly did not belong at the pool. He looked severe under the awning in a black T-shirt that was wet and slick like sealskin. I felt embarrassed each time Billy walked by him. Billy, who ran around the pool deck, shirtless and solid, a Greek statue coming to life under the sun.
“I can’t believe he was my boyfriend,” I said.
“When did you have a boyfriend?” you asked.
“You don’t remember?” I asked. “In the first grade.”
“Oh, the first grade?” You laughed. “That’s not a real boyfriend.”
I felt that flash of anger I got whenever you did not take my life seriously. I pointed to Peter, as if to prove something to you. “Him. See? He’s real. He’s right there!”
“Sally,” you said. “Stop pointing at him. He’s looking right at us.”
I stopped. I picked up my book again.
“He’s still looking at us,” you said. “I bet he has a crush on you.”
“No,” I said. “Peter doesn’t like anybody. He’s incapable.”
“Just because you don’t like Peter, it doesn’t mean that Peter doesn’t like you.”
You put on one of Mom’s extra big hats to cover your face.
“I’m bored,” you said. “Hot.”
It always felt like my fault when you were bored, for some reason. “Let’s go swim.”
“No,” you said. You looked at my book. “I remember that one. It’s good. It’s all about sex.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. It was about a king who was murdered. Another king, who was trying to solve the murder. And a whole city that was sick with the plague. “It’s for school.”
“Exactly,” you said. “School is all about sex.”
I had no idea how someone could make such a claim. School had nothing to do with sex. School was all about who won World War II and how were amoebas different from paramecia and who can build the best roller coaster out of pipe cleaners? I looked at Mom, a former teacher, who would have backed me up on this, but she was too far away to help me. I had abandoned her for you, and now she looked asleep under her big hat.
“How is school about sex?” I asked, but you didn’t answer. You were done with the conversation—and I hated that you got to decide things like that. You flipped up the floppy brim and you looked like one of those dogs with the big fluffy bangs. You were never the person I expected under the hat, different each time you met sunlight.
“Who cares?” you said.
You put your head down. But a few minutes later, you couldn’t resist. “Is he still talking to Lisa?” you asked.
“Yes.”
“What’s she doing?”
Lisa was laughing at something he said. Then, she started walking away, through the pool gate.
“She’s leaving,” I said.
“Good,” you said.
But Lisa didn’t go to her car. She stood on the other side of the pool fence and pulled out a cigarette. And it looked wrong, smoking in a bikini.
“Actually, she’s not leaving. She’s just smoking.”
“I feel like the lifeguard shouldn’t be allowed to smoke,” you said. “She’s supposed to be saving lives.”
I didn’t know why anybody would smoke. Smoking was stupid. That’s what we heard every year in the auditorium when the nurse wheeled out the black lung in the glass case and pointed at it. Kids, she said, this could be your lung one day.
“Yeah, well, Lisa is kind of stupid,” you said.
Lisa was in your history class last year, and she didn’t know who Gandhi was. After a week of your teacher talking about nothing but Gandhi, she was like, “I don’t know. I heard of the guy. I just can’t remember why.”
Everybody in class laughed. You didn’t understand why it was cool for some girls to be stupid and embarrassing for other girls to be stupid. You didn’t understand why everybody made fun of Melissa Frank for being slow and not knowing how to spell her own name, but everybody applauded Lisa for not knowing who Gandhi was.
“There’s a rumor,” you said, “that Lisa gives all the guys on the swim team blow jobs after they win.”
“What’s a blow job?” I asked.
“Seriously?” you asked. “What are you even learning at school?”
Things I had been learning at school: The hottest place on earth was not Death Valley. Tigers are not native to Africa. And the water that fell from the sky gathered in lakes and puddles and pools and slowly, invisibly, evaporated back up into the sky to become rain again. And it was amazing to me that water disappeared from the ground and returned to us again and again. Open your mouths and taste the rain from two thousand years ago! Mrs. Felmore had commanded during science class.
Things I had not been learning at school: blow jobs.
“I’ll tell you later,” you said and put your head back on your towel.
I resumed watching Billy, who seemed to get busier as the day got hotter. But every once in a while, when he had no customers, when he was just sitting there eating M&M’s tapping his thumb to the beat of the music, he glanced over at us on our towels.
“He’s looking,” I said.
“Stop looking at him then!”
“How’m I supposed to know if he’s looking if I can’t look at him?”
“You’ve got to be sneaky,” you said. “Like a spy.”
I liked the thought of being a spy for you. A soldier dressed in casual swimwear to fight the Queen’s war. After you fell asleep, I made another trip to the snack bar.
“I’ll take another Jolly Rancher, please,” I said, with the seriousness of a woman much older than me. “Watermelon.”
“One watermelon Jolly Rancher,” Billy said. “Coming right up.”
He leaned forward to give me the candy. But he held it in his hand for just a second before I could take it.
“Promise me that you won’t sue me if you actually turn into a Jolly Rancher,” he said.
“I promise,” I said. It was then I would have swept the hair off my shoulders, if it touched my shoulders. He handed me the candy. “Thanks.”
“No sweat,” he said.
And then it happened. Billy Barnes winked at me.
* * *
“He did not wink at you,” you said when you woke up. “Why would he do that?”
“Maybe he just winks at everybody,” I said.
“No,” you said. “Nobody winks at everybody. That’d be a creepy thing to do.”
“Well, he winked at me.”
“Why would he wink at you? You’re just a child.”
“I’m not a child,” I said. “I’m thirteen.”
Turning thirteen felt like a big deal when it happened in May. Mom made a birthday cake and you lit the candles and Dad said, “Speech, Sally! Speech!” and I didn’t know what to say about being thirteen. I just turned thirteen. I had no thoughts or grand conclusions about it yet. And definitely no speech. Why hadn’t I prepared a speech? I started to cry right there, over the cake, and you said, “He’s just joking, Sally. You take everything so literally.” Dad gave me a lecture after, about what it meant to be a teenager. About how I couldn’t just go around crying over everything. The more the girl cried, he said, the more pitiable the girl became. He said he spent years watching his own mother shrink in this way. And I didn’t know what this meant, but I knew I didn’t ever want to be accused of shrinking.
“Exactly. You’re thirteen. You’re just a child,” you said. “I’m hot. I’m going in the water.”
Finally. I got up to join you, but you said, “Don’t. Follow. Me.”
So I just watched you walk into the water, and studied you, as if I were trying to figure out something crucial. When did your hair get so long? When did you get so pretty? And had you always been bowlegged? Your legs curved outward, like a warped table, making it so that your thighs never touched. Watching you walk in the water in your bikini was enough to reveal the errors of my morning outfit choices. It made me question every little thing I had ever done in my life. Like why was I wearing a swimsuit with a giant three on the back like I was a member of some sports team, when in reality I played no sports at all?
You sank under the water, and I felt silly sitting all alone, so I went over to Mom, who was no longer alone. She had been joined by some women I didn’t recognize. Women, I was sure, from her various committees. Women with children scattered somewhere at the pool. They were drinking things out of red plastic cups. I could hear bits of their gossip in the wind as I approached.
“James Green is getting rid of his thyroid, you know.”
“The Hamiltons are harboring an illegal chicken in their basement.”
But it quieted as I neared. “Hi, Mom,” I said.
Mom poked my shoulder. “You’re getting pink,” she said. “Sally, put on some more sunscreen.”
No. I hated sunscreen. Sunscreen made me feel like a Red Person.
“The sun’s not even out,” I said.
The sun was setting and Billy had just closed up the snack bar window. Lisa blew her whistle. Adult Swim, she called, and went to smoke through the fence again.
“Can we go?” I asked.
“Not yet, honey,” she said. “I’m just talking here with some friends and then we can go.”
But I didn’t want to sit back down next to Mom and her friends. I didn’t want to pick up my book again, either, because it was upsetting. You were right—it was all about sex. It was all about how Oedipus had been sleeping with his mother, so he gouged his eyes out with his mother’s hairpins.
I felt like I needed to do something drastic. Something a Red Person would never do. I walked over to the high dive. I climbed the stairs and walked to the edge and stood there like a Green Person. I felt good up there, and I looked around to see who was watching me, until I realized that nobody was watching me.
Lisa was looking at her cigarette. Billy was looking at Lisa’s fingers, which he was touching through the fence. And you were looking at Billy. The only person who was watching me was Peter, which made me feel sad, for both me and Peter, and the next thing I knew, I lost my balance. I fell hard off the diving board. I hit the water, which is the last thing I remember.
When I woke, there was Billy’s face.
“Sally!” Billy shouted, and it was amazing. Nobody, to this day, has ever looked at me directly in the eye and shouted my name like that. Not even you. “Sally!”
“She’s alive!” you screamed, appearing behind him.
“Are you okay?” Mom asked.
I wasn’t sure what had happened. I felt a crushing weight in my lungs and a rawness in the back of my throat. But I could breathe. I could see them all standing before me perfectly fine.
“I’m okay,” I said.
But you cried. And Mom cried. “Thank God!” you said, and you and Mom took turns hugging me. Mom was so grateful, so grateful, thank you thank you thank you, she kept saying to Billy.
“Yeah, of course,” Billy said.
“You’re not even the lifeguard!” you exclaimed. “How did you do that?”
Do what? I wondered.
“Where is the lifeguard?” Mom asked.
“I’m right here,” Lisa said. Lisa looked at me. “Sally, are you sure you’re okay?”
Up close, I could smell the smoke on her breath. She didn’t look like a slut at all. She looked concerned, and so I almost told her the truth: Actually, I have a splitting headache.
“I’m okay,” I said again.
“We’ll have to thank you somehow,” Mom said to Billy before we left. “Let us have you over for dinner this week.”
You blushed, but Billy shrugged like there was nothing embarrassing about it at all.
“Sure,” Billy said. “I love dinner.”
The veins on Billy’s arm seemed full of blood. The water had beaded on his chest, and his skin looked thick and amphibious, a coat that could never tear.
* * *
The whole ride home from the pool you were upset.
“I can’t believe you asked him over for dinner,” you said. “It’s so embarrassing.”
“I don’t see what’s so embarrassing about it,” Mom said.
“He’s popular, Mom,” you said.
“Do popular people not eat dinner?”
“I highly doubt it.”
“They just survive off their own awesomeness,” Mom said.
“Exactly.”
“Oh, get over it,” Mom said. “This isn’t about you. We’re thanking him for saving Sally’s life.”
“You’ve got a pretty high opinion of your potato salad,” you said. “Thank you for saving my precious daughter’s life. Your reward shall be potato salad.”
Mom laughed. “It is good potato salad. I challenge you to find me a better recipe.”
You kept looking over at me. My teeth were still chattering. I was cold.
“Hey, are you okay?” you asked me.
I nodded. “I could go for some potato salad,” I said, and I meant it seriously, but you both laughed.
“See?” Mom said. “Sally likes it.”
“Sally likes everything,” you said, and I know you meant it as a compliment, but it felt like an insult, like the thing we’d say about our dog, if we had one.
We were antsy in the days leading up to the dinner with Billy. We thought only of Billy and of all the things Billy could be doing right now.
“He could be swimming,” I said.
“That’s boring,” you said. “I think Billy should be doing something better.”
“Like what?”
“He could be saving a small kitten. Or maybe a baby? From a tree?”
“Why is there a baby in a tree?”
“Because that’s where it is.”
Everybody was very nice to me that week I almost died, but nobody was nicer than you. You kept close by my side, and asked me so many questions about my near-death experience, I eventually felt proud of it. It was, I realized, something you had never experienced.
“Did you see the light?” you asked.
“No,” I said.
“Did you see anybody? Grandpa?”
“I didn’t see anything,” I said. “I was just, like, not there. Like sleeping or something.”
“That’s boring,” you said. You hoped for more from death. You wanted to believe there was something exciting waiting for us. You hoped we would all turn into ghosts because if you’re a ghost, it’s like you’re not really dead. And as ghosts, we could do anything we wanted, you said. Go to Paris. Live in a beautiful mansion by the sea. And spy on Billy whenever we felt like it.
“Did you at least feel it when Billy gave you mouth-to-mouth?”
“No,” I said. I couldn’t even imagine it, Billy with his lips pressed to mine. “I couldn’t feel him kiss me.”
You laughed.
“Oh my God, it was definitely not a kiss,” you said. “You have to be conscious for your first kiss to count. Pretty sure that’s a rule.”
“Says who?” I asked.
“Says the law.”
Other requirements for a kiss to be real, according to you: It can’t be because you’re playing spin the bottle. And it can’t be because you’re in some play and a character has to kiss you.
“I’d never be in a play.”
“Good. Because ever since Priscilla got kissed in Les Mis she acts like she’s some expert,” you said. “I don’t count any of my stage kisses.”
You stood up, walked to the bathroom, and stubbed your toe on the ottoman. “Fuck!” you said, and there was Mom as usual, appearing whenever we said a bad word.
“What did you just say?” Mom asked.
“I said ‘fuck,’” you said.
And why? Why would you say that? Why would you say “fuck” when there are so many other words in the English language? Did we even know how many words there are in the English language?
We didn’t.
“A thousand?”
“A million?”
“A lot of people think that,” Mom said, “but they’re wrong. Nobody actually knows.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is, there are so many beautiful words out there.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Oh, let me think,” Mom said, and then began to list them: Vermillion. Sibilance. Halcyon. Mom liked three-syllable words. “So why on earth would you choose an ugly word when you can choose a beautiful word?”
“Because I wanted to,” you said. “It felt right.”
“Yeah,” Mom said. “We’ll see how much you want to after you say it a hundred times.”
* * *
Our punishment: go outside and say the ugly word into each one of these little sandwich baggies. Don’t come back in until all the ugly words are out of our systems and sealed up into these baggies where they belong!
“Mom is crazy,” you said.
But we did what we were told. We went outside and we said “fuck” until it didn’t even sound like a bad word anymore. It didn’t sound like anything. It was just a sound. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. And after a while, it was boring, which I guessed was the point of the punishment. To say a word so many times, you don’t even want to say it anymore. So we tried other words. Shit. Bitch. Dick, which wasn’t a swear, you said.
“What is it then?” I asked.
“It’s just a body part.”
When we went back inside, we handed our shits and fucks back to Mom, and she took them so seriously—Thank you, girls—that we couldn’t help but laugh later up in our room. We couldn’t help but wonder what she did with them all. You started to run around the room, opening drawers. “No shits and fucks in here!” you shouted, and so I opened the closet. “No shits and fucks in here, either!” I said, and by that time, we were laughing so hard, it all felt less like getting in trouble and more like winning a prize.
