Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, page 6
“So Billy says there was this woman from the 1950s,” you said. “She slit her wrists in the pool the first day it opened. People found her facedown in the water. And every year, somebody reports seeing her like that, floating in the bloody water. But when you jump in to save her, she disappears when you turn her over.”
“That can’t be true,” I said.
“Of course it’s true,” you said. “Why would Billy lie about that?”
I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything.
When your junior year began, Billy drove you. He knocked on our door, of course, like a gentleman. But you weren’t ready. You were never ready. Every morning, you tried on a million outfits until you slumped onto your bed like you didn’t even know what an outfit was anymore.
“Tell Billy I’ll be down in a minute,” you said.
I opened the door to see Billy standing there with his hands in his pockets.
“Hey, Holt,” he always said, and at first it bothered me that he addressed me using our last name, but after a few months, I grew to like it. Made me feel like we were on the same sports team, like we had some kind of an understanding.
But then we always fell silent as we walked into the kitchen. There was nothing to say. He put his hands back in his pockets, and I sat down at the table, pretended to be really busy taking notes for class. He didn’t seem to mind the awkward silences, and maybe that’s because it wasn’t awkward for him. Maybe that’s just how cool he was. He was above silence. Didn’t even notice it.
But on the last day of the semester, the Friday before winter break, not even Billy could withstand the awkwardness anymore. He walked over to me as if something had to be done. He leaned over and looked at what I was writing in my notebook.
“What does that mean?” Billy asked.
He pointed to where I had written Philomela: Rape –> Bird.
“Oh.” I blushed. “That’s just the story of Philomela.”
“Who’s Philomela?” Billy asked.
The story of Philomela, according to my English teacher Mrs. Framer: Philomela was raped by her sister’s husband, Tereus the king, who cut out her tongue after so she wouldn’t tell her sister what happened. But then Philomela weaves the truth into a blanket and sends it to her sister, and when her sister reads it, she is so angry that she kills her own son, cooks him, and tries to feed him to Tereus. But before Tereus eats his son without realizing it, the gods miraculously show up and turn them all into birds.
“Man,” Billy said. “That’s pretty fucked up.”
“It’s just a myth,” I said.
“Still,” he said.
And then there was nothing to say again, so I did what I thought you would do. “What kind of bird would you want to be?”
His face lit up. “I wouldn’t mind being an eagle or a hawk. You?”
“I’d definitely be a hummingbird,” I said. It was something I had decided over the summer watching the pretty birds come up to Dad’s feeder on the deck.
“Oh, you don’t want to be a hummingbird. Trust me,” Billy said. “Hummingbirds are insane.”
“They are?”
“Big time,” Billy said. “They’re, like, extremely stressed out. Their hearts beat so fast and they flap their wings a thousand times a second. So fast you can barely see their wings.”
“How do you know that?” I asked, but then you came down the stairs. You kissed as soon as you saw each other, like Mom and Dad. I looked away, but slowly, so I could see the beginning of it.
“What are you talking about?” you asked.
“About what kind of bird we’d want to be,” Billy said.
“Why do you have to be birds?”
“The gods,” Billy said. “They’re going to make us.”
You laughed. “I won’t even ask.”
Then you both left, without saying goodbye, and I was at the counter with Dad, who stirred Metamucil in his water with his finger.
“This, Sally, is the key to life,” he said.
“How is that the key to life?” I asked. “It’s just orange powder.”
“One day, you’ll understand.”
I never wanted to understand anything like that. I walked out the door to the bus and saw you two still in the driveway. You were flipping through Billy’s CD collection, as if the car wouldn’t work without the right music.
I didn’t wave as I passed you—it was too embarrassing. I just kept walking until I was standing at the end of our street with cold hair, with Rick Stevenson, who always wanted to play bloody knuckles that year. He pounded his fists into mine, and that’s when you drove by me. The music was loud, and even louder when you rolled down the window. Billy drove fast down the street, as if you were driving toward something very important. Toward your future. Just before you disappeared out of sight, I saw you put your hand out into the breeze like the Green Person that you were.
“Your sister is hot,” Rick said.
I blushed. I didn’t know what to say. I felt the same way when people told us our cat had pretty eyes.
“Thanks,” I said, as if it had something to do with me.
On the bus, the boys were especially restless, sticking pins in their fingertips and declaring everything in the world gay: the lunch ladies, the Dare Bear, and even the winter, the way it was going to keep them stuck inside every day over break.
Valerie and I made sure to avoid them. We sat up front, played Hangman in my notebook, until we pulled into the school parking lot and the boys crowded around us as we packed up our bags.
“Hey, Sally,” Rick asked, hanging his head over my seat. “How are your two vaginas?”
I thought everybody had forgotten about that. I had almost forgotten.
“Yeah,” another boy said. “Do you still have two vaginas?”
And what did I say?
“No.”
But Rick said, “Prove it.”
I looked at Valerie, but Valerie couldn’t help me. I wanted to run, but that seemed foolish. That seemed like what a person with two vaginas would do. One of them was next to me and one of them held my arms above my head and one of them unhooked my overalls and lifted up my shirt. And I didn’t know how many there were, but it felt like a million hands, a million boys, all who kept saying, We’ll find out if you’re lying. I screamed, as loud as I have ever screamed—I don’t think I had ever really screamed until that moment—and everybody on the bus looked at me like I was a crazy animal, even Valerie, even the boys, who said, Chill, we weren’t going to do it. Chill out. It was just a joke.
I kept my head down as I walked off the bus. Sally, what happened back there, the bus driver asked, the bus driver who always gave us free snap bracelets, which made me afraid of her for some reason. I flinched whenever she snapped the bracelet over my wrist, like it was going to hurt more than it did. But in that moment, I felt that maybe I loved the bus driver more than anybody in the world. Maybe she would make this all go away, cast a spell on the boys, turn them into frogs so I could smash them.
But she looked at me, like any concerned person would, and I knew she couldn’t help, either.
“Nothing,” I said. “I mean, it was just a joke.”
I held out my hand for a bracelet.
* * *
I was going to tell you about it as soon as I got home from school, but you weren’t there. Junior year, you were never home on Friday nights. You were out with Priscilla and Margaret, and if you weren’t with them, you were at the mall with Billy or you were at the movies with Billy and you didn’t come home until after we watched 20/20. Your curfew was eleven on the weekends, which seemed late to me, but apparently not to you, since you came home even later than that sometimes. You came in with leaves in your hair. A glow on your face.
You didn’t even ask how my day was. You just started talking about the movie you saw, and how Bean was kind of a hard movie to make out to, even though Billy tried his best. It was impossible though. Too many people, no privacy at all, which is why he drove you all the way to Watch Hill after.
“You went to make out in Rhode Island?” I asked.
“It’s like, thirty minutes away,” you said. “It’s just across the border.”
You told me how beautiful it was to be there in winter, when the parking lot was completely empty, covered in snow. It was there, in the back of Billy’s car, where Billy slid his hand down your jeans and put his fingers inside you.
“You let him do that to you?” I asked.
“Yeah,” you said. “I mean, he’s my boyfriend.”
“Still,” I said. I was flustered. It felt wrong. To get fingered in the parking lot where we unloaded our beach chairs? “That’s where we go on vacation.”
“Well, where else are we supposed to go?” you said. “Teenagers have no place to fuck.”
You said it with a long sigh, as if it were a national tragedy. As if it were something the president should address in a speech. And was I supposed to feel sorry for you?
“Is that what you and Billy did?” I asked.
“No,” you said. “It’s just an expression. God, you take everything so literally sometimes.”
Then you leaned over to turn off the light, and I realized, in the sudden darkness, that I wasn’t ever going to tell you what happened to me on the bus. It was too embarrassing. It was like you were in on the joke somehow. You couldn’t save me from this world. From Rick Stevenson. You didn’t even care. You rolled over to face the wall, and I listened to the tree branch tap-tap-tap against the window, and for the first time in my life, I wanted to hurt you. I wanted you to feel what I was always feeling. I wanted you to sit up the next morning and wonder where I was.
* * *
In the morning, before anybody woke, I packed a bag. I slipped out of the house and into the dewy darkness of the garage where I hid in the back of Mom’s van. Mom went to the library on Saturday mornings. Some kind of a book group. I didn’t know where I’d go after Mom went into the library, but I would go somewhere. I would walk down the side of the highway until I felt certain you were worried about me. Until I could feel you out there, screaming for me.
But Mom kept driving and driving for so long, I realized she wasn’t going to the library. Mom was listening to a tape called Meditations on Madness and the woman kept explaining that breathing was the antidote to madness. Mom was breathing very loudly, as if she couldn’t quite remember how. As if she were practicing. She kept repeating certain phrases from the tape, like, “Remember yourself as a child,” and then, “Visualize yourself giving that child a hug,” and it must have been sad to think of hugging herself as a child, because Mom started crying, and her breathing became irregular, and it all made me feel so sick. I worried about vomiting every time she took a wide turn. I worried that Mom really was unhappy, and I tucked away this moment in my brain to tell you later that night, which was when I knew I wouldn’t be running away. I would never leave you. I would always return to our bedroom at night to tell you what happened.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, and popped my head up. Mom threw her tube of lipstick in the air.
“Jesus, Sally!” she said.
Mom had spent the whole car ride trying to relax, and now she was tense again. She was searching for her lipstick on the floor.
“Well,” Mom said. “Now you know. Your mother is crazy.”
“I already knew that,” I said.
“You knew that?”
“Kathy told me,” I said.
“That’s good you know early,” Mom said. “No illusions. I didn’t find out my mother was crazy until I became a mother. Imagine that.”
“Grandma was crazy?”
“Oh, Grandma was crazy all right. Grandma legally changed my birthday so I could drive earlier,” Mom said. “She needed another driver in the house. When I became a mother, I thought, That woman must have been really nuts.”
“Maybe she just really needed another driver,” I said.
“That’s a nice way of thinking about it,” Mom said. “You’re very sweet, Sally.”
Mom unbuckled her seat belt. She looked at herself in the mirror. She started applying lipstick so slowly, one half of her mouth at a time.
“You may have noticed, Sally, but I’m not going to ask what you were doing back there in the car,” Mom said. “I’m not even going to ask.”
Then she blotted her lips with a tissue, unlocked the car doors.
“So wait, how old are you really?”
“Who knows?”
She grabbed her purse.
“Come on,” Mom said. “Inside.”
I got out of the car, straightened out my legs, which were cramped from being curled up in the back for so long.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
We were in a giant parking lot. One of those parking lots that were so big, they always looked empty, the way I imagined parking lots will look at the end of the world.
“The mall,” Mom said.
* * *
I had to go shopping all afternoon with Mom. That was my punishment, she said. She seemed to dawdle, just to make a point. She ran her hands along the Christmas trees on display at Macy’s, marveled at the wreaths hanging from the ceilings. Picked up dish after dish to show me.
“Isn’t this a nice dish?” she asked.
“Yes,” I told her. It was a very nice dish.
“But do you love it?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “But it’s nothing against this dish. I’ve never loved a dish before.”
Then, she put it back. We went through the whole store like that, Mom asking me how much I loved certain objects and me denying any past or potential connection with the object. No, I don’t have any thoughts about the floor lamp, Mom.
“What did you actually come to the mall for?” I finally asked.
“Slippers,” Mom said.
“Why’d you say you were going to the library then?”
“I changed my mind,” Mom said.
“So you lied.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Do you ever go to the library when you say you’re going to the library?”
“Sometimes,” Mom said.
Then it was Mom’s turn to ask questions.
“What were you doing in the back of the car, missy?”
“I thought you said you weren’t going to ask.”
“I’m your mother. I need to ask.”
“I was trying to run away.”
“But why?” Mom asked. She didn’t sound mad or even surprised. She sounded curious, as if maybe I’d be allowed to run away if I had a good enough reason.
“I can’t tell you,” I said. “It’s too embarrassing.”
“The truth,” Mom said. “Is it something we did, Sally? Are we that bad?”
I felt terrible, thinking that Mom thought I was running away because of something she did. It had nothing to do with her. Mom made us pancakes in the morning before school and she quit her job just to raise us and she played the piano on holidays so we could sing and last week, when I had asked her if I would gain weight from not going to the bathroom for four days, she didn’t even laugh the way you had. Mom wrinkled her brow and said, Sally, why haven’t you gone to the bathroom in four days? Then she made me an appointment to go see the doctor. Mom just wanted us to live forever and ever, which is why she demanded the truth. So I told her.
“Everybody at school thinks I have two vaginas,” I said.
Mom laughed.
“Don’t laugh!”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t laugh. But that’s not what I was expecting you to say. I mean, frankly, it’s impossible.”
“It’s not, actually,” I said. “Some women have two.”
“Where did you get that idea?”
“The Jillian Williams Show.”
“Sally, that’s exactly why you shouldn’t be watching shows like that,” Mom said. “They’re fake. They’re not real.”
“It seemed real,” I said.
“But wait,” Mom said. “Why do people think you have two vaginas?”
“I don’t have two vaginas.”
“Of course not. I’m your mother. I know how many vaginas you have.”
“Mom,” I said. “Shh. We’re at the mall.”
“Oh, people at the mall don’t care what we’re saying. Do you think the people here care? No. Sally. Vagina vagina vagina! See? Nobody cares. And that’s something you’re going to have to learn. People don’t care about things as much as you think. People will forget all about the two vaginas. People are people.”
And that was that. Mom stopped dead in her tracks. She gasped. She put a hand over her heart. She walked over to the furniture section, ran her hand on a couch like it was a Persian cat she was petting.
“Isn’t this a beautiful couch?” she asked. “I think we should get this couch.”
“Do we need a new couch?”
“That’s not the point,” Mom said. “This couch is beautiful.”
“I like our couch.”
It was a great couch, which is what Dad said nearly every time he sat down on it.
“But what about this couch?” Mom said. “This is a couch. Look at it.”
I looked at it. “It’s very white.”
“That’s the point,” Mom said.
Mom had always wanted a white couch, she said, like it was some big confession. Aunt Beatrice had a white couch, and she knew, even at a young age, that only a certain kind of woman could keep a white couch. A woman like Aunt Beatrice, who had no children and two hypoallergenic poodles.
I sat down on it. “I don’t think Dad will like this.”
“Trying to predict what your father will and will not like is no way to live, Sally.”
But it was easy. Dad was very predictable. Dad was like me. He was a creature of routine.
“Okay,” I said. “Well, I don’t like the couch. It’s not very comfortable.”
“It’s not supposed to be,” Mom said.
Mom believed that we were growing up; it was time our furniture did, too.
