Perennials, page 4
“The on-again, off-again. Her knowing about my situation, us literally shoving it into her face every time I’m around. The sneaking behind her back, which she definitely knows about. I just think…I think a strictly platonic relationship between you and me is healthier for her.”
She fought it; she cried; she pawed at him and said hurtful things about his wife, about who he was as a person. Uncharacteristically, he sat there and took the flak, which also meant that he meant it this time.
But she knew he was right. He loved their daughter. He loved her so much.
Denise got out and slammed the door without saying goodbye. She starting walking toward the glass door of her apartment building and then, instinctively, turned around. She could see that he already had his hand on the gearshift, but she tapped on the passenger-side window before he could drive away.
He rolled down the window and looked at her.
“I’ll pay you back,” she said adamantly.
He shook his head. “No you won’t.”
“That was the deal,” she said. “Not a dollar for me.”
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t pay me back. I’m saying that you won’t.”
“But you don’t—”
“You are an adult woman, Denise,” he continued. “This is not a matter of being ‘too busy’ to pay speeding tickets. You have responsibilities that you do not take seriously.”
He had always taken care of her, but there didn’t used to be this hardness.
“Frankly,” he continued in that patriarchal tone, “it’s worrisome.”
“I’m paying you back,” she said again. “And don’t fucking talk to me like that. I’m not your daughter.”
Denise looked into his face. Rachel got those long eyelashes from him.
3
Helen Larkin wasn’t paying attention in biology. She was writing her name in bubble letters in the margins of her Five Star notebook. She figured a person paid attention to the things she wanted to pay attention to, and there was a reason for that.
It was March 1, 2006. As her creepy teacher, Mr. Browne, droned on, she counted the remaining days in the calendar at the back of her notebook. One hundred sixteen to go until camp. Her last summer at Camp Marigold, as it would turn out.
Perhaps it was better not to count.
There was a diagram of a human heart on the board, and Mr. Browne was using his long, skinny pointer stick to identify different parts. (“Of the four chambers, the left ventricle contracts the most forcefully.”) He had a perpetually glistening forehead and kept a dirty handkerchief in the pocket of his crinkled khakis, always pulling it out, wiping his brow, putting it back. When he got excited about something, he crumpled it into his hand, squeezing it and shaking his fist with the disgusting thing inside it.
Helen rarely heard the words he was saying. He spent the end of the class talking about what can go wrong with the heart: murmurs, irregularities, diseases present at birth. But Helen wasn’t paying attention.
—
She had forgotten to bring clothes to change into for gym that day. She sat on the bleachers watching her classmates chase after a plastic orange ball with their plastic hockey sticks.
Marla Steinberg, who never changed for gym, was sitting a few spaces away from her on the bleachers, keeping time with the stopwatch the teacher had handed her. She had a purple streak in her brown hair and safety pins pierced into her infected-looking ears. Their teacher had put them in charge of time and scorekeeping, and Helen turned over a laminated number on the small flip chart in front of her each time one of the teams scored.
Helen turned to Marla, who had large breasts—the largest of any girl in the seventh grade—that bounced prominently with her slightest movement. “Do you know when this period’s over?” Helen asked.
Marla shook her head and made a tsk sound. “Fuck. I know. I once had that shit for three weeks.”
“What?”
“How long’s it been for you?” Marla leaned in. Her boobs bounced in her low-cut tank top. “Cramps? How bad?”
Helen shook her head. She hadn’t gotten her first period yet. “I said, do you know when this period is over? Like, the game period.”
Marla burst into a cackle. “Oh my God. You said this period!”
Helen waited for Marla to finish laughing.
Marla finally looked down at the stopwatch. “Two minutes and thirty-two seconds,” she said. Then she considered Helen as if she hadn’t thought to look at her before. “You’re really pretty, you know.”
“Thank you,” Helen said, trying to strike the appropriate mix between humility and self-awareness. At twelve—almost thirteen—years old, she had already been called pretty enough times to know that one couldn’t act too clueless or too conceited in response. She of course also knew that she was, indeed, pretty.
“What are you doing after school today?” Marla asked.
Usually Helen walked home with her neighborhood friends, Kayla and Kelly and Kim. They had been her friends since nursery school, friends that always seemed to be ready to spend time with her.
“Nothing,” Helen said.
After ninth period, Kayla waited for Helen at her locker. “You wanna come over and do homework?” Kayla asked. “My mom made blondies.”
“I have plans,” Helen said, and left to meet Marla Steinberg and her friends in the woods behind the gym.
They were all pierced and dyed—a nose ring here, a streak of pink there. They lived in Mamaroneck, the town over from Larchmont. (“The other side of the tracks,” Helen’s dad called it. Helen had protested that no train ran between the towns. “It’s a matter of speech, Helen,” he’d sighed.) They were smoking a joint, which Helen had seen only once before, at a party at Matt White’s house. The party was awkward, because although only Helen and Kelly had actually been invited (Kelly was sort of boring but very pretty), Kayla and Kim tagged along, and Helen felt like they expected to be taken care of the whole time. She was interested in having more friends like Marla—girls who could take care of themselves.
Marla passed Helen the joint. At Matt White’s, Helen hadn’t tried it. Now she took the flimsy, damp thing from Marla and pinched it between her thumb and pointer finger as she’d observed Marla and her friends doing.
There was pink lip gloss around the tip of the joint. Helen put her lips over it and inhaled. All she could taste was strawberry pink lip gloss.
“You have to pull harder,” one of the girls said, her eyes already bloodshot.
Helen nodded and sucked in the smoke as she’d been instructed. She felt it fill her lungs and an astonishingly fast rush to her brain, and she coughed, her eyes watering as a bitter taste came up through her throat.
Marla laughed. “Atta girl.”
They leaned against the base of a large oak tree. The girls discussed how pathetic the boys at school were, their terrible parents, their plans to run away to California. The weed seemed to make them animated, energized. But Helen felt like she was thinking twice as slowly as they were; every time she was ready to add something to the conversation, they had already moved on to another topic. She would laugh whenever the other girls laughed at something, trying to disguise herself as a member of their group, but once she heard herself laugh right after they had finished, and they looked over at her, entertained. Then they went back into their conversation. She was grateful for that, their not calling attention to her inexperience.
Being outside with the girls as it started to grow dark reminded her of camp, when rain pounded on the canvas of the platform tent at night, and wind pulled at the bottom sails and sent a cool August breeze through the tent, and she felt the need to melt farther into her flannel sleeping bag. It was a feeling of deep contentment and safety—it was something that could not be reproduced anywhere else. She loved being so close to the elements that she could almost taste them, flirting so much with being in the rain that she could see the canvas covering of the tent swaying slightly in the storm. Being safe and inside but just barely. She couldn’t feel like that in a house with a roof and walls.
“Living outside changes everything,” she said then.
“The girl’s a fucking poet,” said Marla.
Leaving the girls on the mossy ground, Helen used the lowest branch of the oak tree as a ledge and propelled herself up two more levels of branches until she landed on the perfect one, long and wide enough to lay her whole body on. If Kayla and Kelly and Kim were here, they would have yelled, “Get down, Helen!” But Marla and her friends watched with amusement from below and lit a second joint. Helen, high enough already, let a gust of cold almost-spring breeze run over her and closed her eyes.
—
“You’d be amazed at the amount of activities people did just to get in,” Fiona told Helen at dinner a few weeks later. “One kid I know has his own patent for some glue he invented. It dries extra fast.”
“Cool, Fiona.”
“Whatever. It’s not my problem if you don’t get into college.”
“You’re right. It’s not.”
“She’s in seventh grade, Fee,” said Liam.
Fiona was a freshman at a small college in Pennsylvania; she had always played the role of uppity older sister to Helen. Liam was a junior at Yale: smart, quietly confident. Fiona’s work ethic had enabled her to graduate in the top 10 percent at Mamaroneck High School, but she would never, despite her most laborious efforts, have anything close to Liam’s sharp wit or near-photographic memory.
Fiona looked around the table for support, her face considerably more swollen than it had been six months ago. She had definitely gained the Freshman 15. Their father was working late, closing an important case that had to do with the stuff inside diapers and whether or not it was flammable.
“Helen, you do have a lot of free time these days,” their mother said, getting up from the table and walking into the kitchen to refill her glass from the magnum bottle of Barefoot Chardonnay in the fridge.
“I do not!” Helen called from the dining room table. “Seventh grade is really hard.”
“Maybe you would have more time for homework if you spent less time with Marla Steinberg and all of those girls,” Fiona said.
“She’s a really good person,” said Helen.
“She’s a slut,” Fiona hissed quietly, so their mother wouldn’t hear.
“Just because you’re a prude doesn’t make everyone else a slut,” Helen hissed back.
Fiona tried to burn Helen with her eyes but didn’t have anything to say in return.
“Too far, Helen,” Liam said.
Their mother returned to the table. “What about lacrosse?”
“I hate lacrosse,” Helen said. Liam and Fiona played lacrosse. And Helen did not do anything she didn’t want to—that had been clear since she was an infant, when she would let only Liam hold her, unless she was nursing. Passed to Fiona, to any other relative, or even to her own father, Helen would scream her throat sore until she was returned to the only person who could calm her. That was eight-year-old Liam’s role in 1993—caretaker for his youngest sister, his thin arms tentatively cradling her into the night.
After Helen was born, their mother got her tubes tied. At the time, the kids had pictured plastic cylinders inside her body that babies traveled through, like the suction tubes in the ball pits at the Discovery Zone.
Without Camp Marigold, Helen and her siblings wouldn’t exist. Their parents had met there when they were nine, a fact that was unfathomable to Helen. It seemed utterly impossible that she could have already met someone—four years ago—that she was going to spend the rest of her life with.
Liam hadn’t gone to Marigold since he was eleven, when he replaced it with lacrosse camp. This upcoming summer, Fiona would be a counselor at Marigold with her own tent of campers.
“I think it’s terrifying that you’re going to be in charge of a whole tent of nine-year-old girls,” Helen told her sister later at dinner.
“They wouldn’t have hired me if they didn’t think I was ready,” Fiona said defensively, as if she too was slightly terrified by the prospect.
—
When Helen told Marla about how her parents met, Marla said, “I didn’t think anyone actually met people they married at camp.”
Marla thought the idea of summer camp was a riot, and yet she seemed intrigued by it. She’d never been friends with anyone who had gone, the kids from Mamaroneck tending to hang out only with one another and the same for the kids from Larchmont, and hardly anyone from Mamaroneck went to camp.
“So you pay to live outside? Shouldn’t that just be free?” Marla gestured to the woods around them. They were in their usual spot on an afternoon in April—just the two of them that day—leaning and smoking against that same oak tree.
“Well, you pay for the activities and stuff.”
“What kinds of activities?”
“Everything,” Helen said. “Swimming, boating, theater, sports, arts and crafts. There’s even a radio station.”
“Boating?” Marla said. “Where do you do that?”
“There’s a lake.”
“A lake?” She considered this. “That’s cool.”
They could hear the sports teams practicing on the other side of the gym. Mr. Browne, who was also the girls’ lacrosse coach, was yelling.
“What the hell are you doing, Kayla? You look like a chicken with your head cut off.”
Marla laughed, and Helen imagined her childhood friend, fast but uncoordinated, blushing uncontrollably in front of her teammates.
They continued smoking as Helen and Marla imitated all Mr. Browne’s sports-isms: “Good idea, Kayla. Bad execution.” “ ‘Can’t’ is a four-letter word, Kayla. Watch your mouth.”
“God dammit, girls,” they then heard. “I am so sick and tired of this crap. Five laps of Indian drills around the gym. Go.”
There was a collective groan from the team.
“Ten? You want ten?”
Marla and Helen took a beat and then, realizing they could easily be seen from the side of the gym closest to them, put out the joint, fanned the cloud of smoke that had emerged around them, and began to run deeper into the woods.
It was all thick and undeveloped back there, and Helen concentrated on the ground below her, avoiding upturned roots and fallen branches. Ahead, Marla was laughing; she knew they wouldn’t get caught. But as Helen looked down, she felt a dizziness begin to overtake her—white and purple spots appeared over everything, coloring the wooded ground into a misty pointillist vortex.
“Helen?” she heard. “You okay?”
The woods swirled and twirled and tipped onto their side, as if Helen had entered some carnival funhouse where everything was tilted and distorted. Her sneakers began to lose their traction, and the mossy ground slipped from under her. She felt a lurching in her stomach propel her forward. She accepted it with a sort of grace. Nowhere to go but down.
—
When she came to, Marla was standing over her, waving her hands in front of Helen’s face.
“Blink twice if you can hear me!” Marla said.
Marla walked Helen all the way home, even though it was out of her way, with her arm draped over her friend’s shoulder. She bought Helen a Gatorade from the gas station. Helen had experienced a fall like this before, during gym class when she was in fifth grade; the school nurse had given her a juice box and told her she needed to eat more frequently. She wasn’t sure if she’d fallen this time for the same reason or because she’d been too high.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Marla asked when they got to Helen’s front door.
Helen nodded. “Don’t tell anyone about this, okay?” She was embarrassed.
“Of course not,” Marla said, and they linked pinkies and shook them.
Inside, Helen told her parents the fall had happened in gym class again; she was sprinting after a soccer ball, she said, when she passed out and fell face-first onto the field. A lump the shape of a goose egg, throbbing on her forehead, had turned a deep purple, the color of an eggplant. She would have to steal her mom’s makeup to cover it for school the next day.
“Why didn’t the nurse call us?” Helen’s mother asked.
“She said it was nothing to worry about,” Helen said.
“She’s right,” her dad said. “Low blood sugar runs in the family.” He pulled affectionately on Helen’s ponytail. He made her a strawberry-banana smoothie to drink with her dinner, which she finished in a few greedy gulps.
—
A few days later, Helen and her family went to visit her grandparents in Florida during spring break. She spent her days in the pool at their retirement complex, lying on a float and thinking about Marla. Helen had a best friend from camp, Sarah, but that almost felt like it couldn’t count, because she lived two hours away and so was only really Helen’s best friend two months out of the year. School was where real life was supposed to be, Helen suspected, even though she always felt like a more real version of herself in the summer.
But with Marla, it felt like there was hope for a real-life friendship. Marla was so blunt and a little bit bad, but she also seemed to care about Helen in a deep, unprejudiced way. Helen trusted, without question, that Marla wouldn’t tell anyone about her fainting. The girls she grew up with in Larchmont were sweet, but they were so good. If they’d been with Helen when she’d fallen, they would have immediately called her parents or maybe 911. Helen knew that Marla had a single mother who bagged groceries at the Stop & Shop and an older brother who was on the verge of failing out of high school and that once Marla turned fourteen her mom was going to make her get a part-time job to help with the bills. Her life was not easy; in fact, it seemed pretty hard. But she was a good friend; she laughed with Helen, she took care of her when she was hurt, and, moreover, she seemed happy. There was something to this, maybe: Being sheltered from the bad things didn’t really bring you any more joy. It just made you dull.
