Seven

So of course my mom is thrilled that Jordan is going to try to get me a job at the board shop. She comes home looking a little worn out, but as soon as I tell her the news, it’s like an extra light gets flipped on. Maybe it’s the job prospect that makes her happy. But I don’t think it’s just that … the way she pulls her hair over her shoulder, braiding it loosely and then shaking it out, the way she arches her back to stretch and seems to grow taller, brighter, more alive … .No, it’s not just the idea of me getting a job. It’s that Jordan is getting me one. Because she wants it.

“We should celebrate,” she says. When she calls Jordan to invite him along with us, she doesn’t have to thumb very far down her recent call list to find his number.

We decide to go out for Chinese, and my mom disappears into the bedroom to get ready. She skips a shower to give me time to take one, and feeling sullied by the hot day, my job hunt, and summer school, I do the whole thing—shampoo, conditioner, body wash, and shaving—all of it.

I’m not the kind of girl who gets lost in the shower, the way my mother does. She practically moves into the bathroom sometimes, lighting candles and oiling her bathwater, putting on just the right music. It’s like she’s romancing herself, the way she tends to her body.

My mother helped me shave my legs for the first time at thirteen. All my life, I had watched her shave hers—unbroken strokes from ankle to hip, sliding the razor across the bend of her knee, up her thigh, unflinching. The oil she used, the razor—an old-fashioned man’s razor, heavy and silver, with replaceable blades—not a pink plastic “women’s” safety razor. The way she sat in the bathtub and balanced her toes on the edge of the sink, pearlescent toenails like seashells all in a row.

She bought me a pack of three safety razors. “There is nothing wrong with the hair on your legs,” she told me one last time, almost like she hoped I’d change my mind, but when I rolled my eyes and said nothing she sighed and broke open the package.

“Always soak first,” she said. “Use warm water, and don’t press too hard. Okay?”

I sat in the bathtub, the water made murky by the oil she’d dripped in. I was naked. I remember the razor in her right hand. She kneeled by the tub and held my foot in her left hand. She pressed the blade just above my ankle. She paused, waiting for me.

“Okay,” I said, and I watched her hand guide the razor up my leg, scraping away the cream she’d rubbed on, leaving behind a shiny trail of hairless skin. It was beautiful.

“Now you try,” she said and handed me the razor. “Be gentle with yourself.”

As I shaved, one row and then another and then another, she sat on the floor of our tiny, steamed bathroom and gazed up at the ceiling. She was wearing this long silk patchwork skirt, and she ran her fingers along its hem as if looking for some answer in the stitches. She was in a nostalgic mood, I could tell. Then she said, “My mother didn’t let me shave my legs until I was sixteen. And she told me never to shave above my knees. Of course I didn’t listen to her.”

I traced the razor along my knee and then above, shaving all the way to the top of my thigh.

“I got pregnant with you thirteen months after I started shaving my legs,” she said with a smile. “That’s what I get for shaving above my knees, I guess.”

The razor slipped a little on my next pass across my anklebone, and I felt the sharp sting of cutting myself. A thin red line appeared where the razor had cut me, just a tiny thing. I splashed water over it and the blood went way, but it came back.

My mother didn’t notice. She stood and kissed my hair. “Best decision I ever made,” she said before she left the bathroom, leaving me to finish my legs. She didn’t say which decision.

Now, I am efficient. I shave in the shower, standing up, my leg against the wall. Short strokes. Like sketching. Sometimes I spread some shampoo across my skin before I shave, but that’s about as fancy as I get.

I don’t know why I’m in such a good mood when I emerge from the bathroom. Maybe it’s the prospect of the spending money a job would generate. Whatever it is, I’m actually not too annoyed when I emerge from the bathroom to find my mother wearing her red silk dress.

Now, normally it would be pretty stale to wear a Chinese dress to a Chinese restaurant, especially if you’re not actually Chinese. But my mom can pull it off. She’s had the dress for years. She picked it up at a thrift shop, and it’s one of those long, straight column dresses that doesn’t fit anybody right because it’s got these darts on the chest, and on lots of women those either hang like limp pockets or cut across the boobs all funny. But my mom isn’t anybody.

The dress is also sleeveless with a deep slit up the right side.

I mean, come on. Right?

But the thing is, my mother looks … charming in it. And with her long copper hair in loose waves down her back and her amazing lips darkened to red, she is so beautiful. Not ironic or anything.

My first thought isn’t that she is dressing up for Jordan. Because my mom and I, whenever we go out to celebrate anything, she’s always dressed up. Always. And I used to as well. I’m not really sure when I stopped or why. It has something to do with how uncomfortable I began to feel about people looking at me. It used to be that I was like an extension of my mother. I mean, she was the showstopper. I was just this goofy kid hanging on her arm, wearing a dress in a color that matched hers, but not the main point, you know.

Then I got older. And still, my mother was the star of every outing, but rather than an accessory, I became more of a sidekick, and people started saying things like, “Watch out! This one’s going to be trouble!” and “She’s going to grow up to be a heartbreaker, same as her mama!”

And like I said before, I don’t particularly like attention. Not that kind of attention. Plus, all these strangers who seemed to feel that they had the right to comment on us, they had it all wrong. I’d never seen my mother break anyone’s heart. I certainly had no intention of ever doing so. We had between us two whole hearts, and back then, as far as I knew, that was plenty for both of us.

***

Jordan is predictably impressed by my mother’s red dress. He says, “You look nice, Seph,” but without really looking at me. The way he looks at her—the intensity of his desire—almost makes me lose my appetite.

Almost. The promise of kung pao chicken has a way of rectifying most things.

***

The restaurant is packed, but that doesn’t matter. We’re with Rebecca Golding, and even waiting for a table is good times. The whole place comes alive when we walk in, and it goes from being this disparate collection of strangers to The Rebecca Golding Fan Club.

We don’t have to wait all that long, and when it’s our turn to be seated, I feel the eyes shifting to watch my mother walk by. There’s a guy with his average wife and average kid who might be sleeping on the couch tonight after the way he eye-fucks my mom; there’s a table of college-age guys, one of whom literally raises his glass in salute when she walks by.

We slide into the vinyl-upholstered booth in a row: me, my mother, and then Jordan. I wonder if she feels it—the competing pulls for her attention from all of us—the restaurant patrons, the waiter, Jordan, and me, always me. That’s how it is with my mother. Everyone wants a piece of her. Everyone wants her eyes on their face.

Mom has turned her body not away from me exactly but undeniably toward Jordan. And they are drinking together, some kind of Asian beer with Chinese letters on the sweating paper labels.

I’m not drinking, of course, because even though Jordan is technically more of my generation than hers, he falls on the other side of the invisible line of twenty-one, so he and she are the pair and I am the kid at the table.

We’ve placed our orders and the egg rolls have come and soon the main course will arrive. I try not to feel like I’m sitting at the wrong table, but it’s hard to be totally comfortable when she and Jordan are laughing about some running joke from the reggae concert and I have no clue what they’re talking about.

My mom finally notices that it’s been a while since I’ve said anything right around the time my kung pao gets to the table. She smiles at me totally, sincerely, and I know she doesn’t mean to exclude me. Jordan doesn’t, either—he’s a nice enough guy—but let’s face it, I don’t belong at this table. There are ensemble scenes, and then there are date scenes. Supporting cast is supposed to fade into the background when the music gets all romantic and the lights begin to dim.

“How’s your food, Seph?” asks my mother, and she turns to me in an obvious attempt to make me feel included. After all, this dinner is supposed to be about my newfound (potential) employment.

Right then my phone vibrates in my pocket.

I look down at the screen, and they pick up the conversation where they left off. I recognize the number, even though I haven’t saved it in my phone or assigned a name to it. I stare at the bright screen as it vibrates like a rattlesnake in my hand. After a moment or two, it stops. Then another moment passes and it vibrates once more, letting me know that he left a message.

Now that desire that I’d felt earlier, back in the apartment—to have fun—is completely gone.

“Hey,” I say. I have to say it again before either of them hears me. “Hey. I think I’d better go back and do my math homework.”

Jordan looks—for a flash, before he rearranges his expression—like he’s won a prize. Then he does his best to look sorry that I’m leaving, but come on.

My mom fakes it a little better. “You’re not even going to stay for fortune cookies?”

“I’ll grab one on the way out,” I tell her, and I do, in case she’s watching me leave, but I throw it in a trash can just outside the restaurant door without cracking it open. Minor players don’t have destinies.

My phone vibrates again, and I yank it out of my pocket. It’s a text, finally, from Marissa. Party at Sal’s. Bring beer, she’s written, ironically I’m sure, because she knows I don’t have money for beer. Or an ID.

So I show up empty-handed twenty minutes later.

The gathering of individuals hanging out on Sal’s mom’s shitty couch doesn’t really live up to the promise of the word party.

There’s Sal, of course, and Marissa, who seems to have forgiven Sal for whatever his latest act of assholery has been, and Sal’s buddy Blake. I hear the toilet flush, and then Darrin comes out, not even pretending to have washed his hands.

“He-y, Seph,” says Marissa, and she unwinds herself from Sal and weaves her way over to me, wrapping her arms around my neck and planting a big kiss on my mouth.

So there were beers earlier.

This is something Marissa likes to do: kiss me in front of an audience. We’ve kissed—I mean, a real kiss, on the lips, like this, with heat and tongue—maybe six times. I’ve enjoyed it exactly twice. Those were the two times we didn’t have an audience.

Tonight is public, not private. Marissa wants this from me, for whatever reason, and she is my friend, my sister, so I give it to her. And maybe it’s not just for her. Maybe it’s the unanswered phone calls, the image of my mother in her red dress, and Jordan’s dogged attentiveness to her. All of it peaks like a wave and crashes. I feast on Marissa’s mouth, feeling her lips soften and spread as my teeth press against them, and I fill her with my tongue. I sense them, the others—the audience—but it’s not for them that I perform. It’s for her and for me maybe too. It feels good to overwhelm her, to give her more than what she’s asked for. I feel her surprise in my intensity as her shoulders tighten and her breath catches before she melts against me, for effect or for real I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter anyway.

My hands go up and down the sides of her body. My leg finds its way in between her thighs. I press up against her, and in a motion that doesn’t feel intentional, she pushes back, grinding into my leg.

I don’t pull away, so I guess it’s Marissa who does, with shocked wide eyes and parted lips, and it’s funny to see her looking like that—off-balance and surprised.

Our audience seems to sense the show is over. They hoot their approval and someone, I think Sal, says something about live-action lesbo porn, and it takes Marissa a moment to pull all the way away from me and a moment more before she finds her voice.

“Didja bring the beer?” she jokes.

“Uh-huh. Keg’s in the back of my Jeep.”

“’S okay,” she says. She takes another step back and smooths her hair. “Drinking beer is kind of gross.”

I refrain from mentioning that she’s clearly had a few already and say instead, “Lots of things people do are gross.”

“But drinking …” She run-skips into the kitchen and holds up a blue glass bottle that I hadn’t noticed before, all of her Marissa-confidence back, “ … vodka? Now that’s some classy shit.” She twists off the top of the bottle and pours more than I would into a couple of glass tumblers.

Giving one to me, she holds hers up for a toast. “To us,” she says.

I clink my glass against hers. “To us.”

***

Normally I’m not a big drinker. I don’t like the spins, I don’t like to throw up, and I don’t like to end up places without knowing how I got there. But sometimes, even if you’re totally sober, even if you think you’ve completely got a situation under control, you can still end up in places you haven’t imagined. That’s how things work.

So with Marissa and the vodka I kind of figure, control is an illusion. And hell, my mom was more worried about my fortune cookie than my homework, so I decide, Fuck it.

I drink the vodka, and I pour us each another.

Around us the gathering begins to resemble something that more closely fits the definition of “party.” People start to show up and the music gets turned up and then there are a few drinking games and even dancing.

Maybe inspired by Sal’s lesbo porn comment, Darrin throws this gross DVD into the Xbox, and the moans and groans augment the party’s sound track. I do my best to ignore the hard jiggling boobs and condom-sheathed cock and bad lighting. I have gotten good at ignoring things.

In my pocket I feel the vibration of my phone three times. Three voice calls, none of which I answer. I don’t even pull the phone out of my pocket to see who is trying to get ahold of me. Marissa is here, playing Quarters with Sal and Darrin and Lolly, who for a change isn’t working any of her three jobs tonight, so she isn’t calling me.

In case you don’t know, Quarters basically goes like this: everyone sits around a table with a cup in the middle. The cup is half full of beer, if you’ve got it, or if it’s a shot glass, then something harder. Vodka works fine, as Marissa and the others were admirably demonstrating. Then you take a quarter and try to bounce it off the table and into the cup. If you make it in, you get to choose who has to drink and then shoot again. If you miss, the quarter goes to the next person. If you sink three shots in a row, you get to make up a new rule to add to the game. Anything you want. Like, drink and then take off a piece of clothing. Or drink and then kiss the person to your left. Or anyone who says the words drink, drank, or drunk has to drink. Whatever you want. You lose when you quit or pass out. Last man standing wins.

Not complicated and generally not really my thing, but after I’ve polished off the second vodka, it’s starting to look like fun. I shove my way in between Marissa and Darrin.

It’s Darrin’s turn to shoot, and he misses. Then it’s my turn. I miss too, but Marissa’s killer at this game, so she makes it. She points to me the first time, then Lolly when she makes it again, and drinks the damn thing herself on the third one, just to impress the rest of us, I think, and it works.

“New rule!” she declares after slamming the cup onto the table. “If you miss, you have to drink.”

So pretty quickly most of us go from buzzed to blitzed, because no one except Darrin is as good at Quarters as Marissa.

No one is paying attention to me now, not like before with Marissa when the room’s eyes focused in my direction, and that’s okay. It’s more what I’m used to, and I get to be the observer again rather than the show.

Everyone around me has the lidded eyes of the inebriated and the stoned. They’re staring into their cups or at the TV screen or at each other, the same basic expression on everyone’s face. It’s been long enough now that dinner at the Chinese restaurant must be over. Even if they stayed for green tea ice cream, even if they had another beer, they must be home by now. They must be together, probably downstairs in Jordan’s place, and I see him in my mind, pressing into my mother, his knee wedged between her legs. I see him winding himself around and between and inside of her.

We are all getting drunker. Someone should stop this, and it occurs to me that if I ever sink three shots in a row, I could reverse Marissa’s rule, but by the time I finally do, my quarter plinking as it lands inside the glass, I’ve lost that train of thought. Instead, I call out, “New rule!”

The others look at me: Marissa expectantly, Sal cynically, Darrin hopefully, and Lolly drunkenly. Her blonde braids are askew, tumbledown. I think she’s had enough to drink, but that’s her call.

“Here’s the rule: if you drink with your right hand and someone busts you, you have to tell that person a secret you’ve never told them.”

“I’m left-handed already,” says Lolly. “What about me?”

“The rest of you are righties, aren’t you?” I ask.

They nod. I turn to Lolly. “That’s okay. You’re pretty wasted anyway. Just remember to use the hand you always use.”

Next, it’s Sal’s turn to shoot. He sinks it and looks at Darrin. “Drink, bitch,” he says.

Darrin looks at me full of intention and picks up the cup with his right hand. Now I feel kind of stupid because it’s obvious he’s screwing with my rule, but I say, “Darrin, you have the memory of a goldfish. You’re supposed to use your other hand.”

“Now I have to tell you a secret, right?”

I shrug. “That’s the rule.”

“I’m freaking in love with you, Sephora.”

Okay. Darrin’s drunk, of course, and he’s the kind of guy who’s in love with the idea of love, if you know what I mean. He likes all of it, I think—the anticipation, the buildup, the first kiss, the relationship drama, and even the breakup. The cycle.

So I don’t take him too seriously. I smile and say, “Thanks, Darrin, that’s sweet.”

He looks kind of pissed, but he shrugs.

It goes like that for a while. Most everyone remembers my rule and the new ones too—Marissa rescinds her rule on her next turn, since everyone is obviously getting way too shit-faced. Lolly adds, before she gets too drunk to play anymore, that anyone who drinks gets to choose someone else who has to drink too; and then Darrin says anyone who sinks a shot gets to make out with anyone until someone else sinks a shot.

That’s about when Lolly drops out of the game, probably because she doesn’t want Sal to kiss her when it’s his turn. He gives her that look, and she heads into the kitchen to scrounge for some bread to soak up the alcohol in her stomach.

Darrin is the next person to sink a quarter, and it’s no surprise when he crooks his finger at me. So okay, we kiss, and it’s not terrible, not great but not terrible either. It’s nothing like the kiss with Marissa—I let Darrin lead and I follow, and his sweet mushy mouth doesn’t ask for much. It’s nothing like how I imagine Jordan is kissing my mother, full of passion and depth of meaning. It’s nothing like how it had been with Felix. Darrin’s kiss doesn’t melt me at all, which is a relief.

Darrin, I realize as he breaks away and grins at me, all happy and dopey, is the first guy to kiss me since Felix last winter.

“Why’d you stop, faggot?” Sal slurs. I hear a quarter bounce off the table and roll onto the floor. Darrin kisses me again.

I wonder if maybe kissing Darrin can overwrite what I did with Felix, you know, like when you reuse a canvas, painting something new over something else. Except of course whatever you painted before isn’t erased; it’s just buried. It’s still there under the new layer of color and texture. It doesn’t go away. And whatever you’ve done before doesn’t go away either, no matter how purposefully you ignore it, how many new experiences you try to layer over it. Fairy tales are like this too. Disney makes them prettier and cleans them up, glossing over the gory parts and playing up the princess angle. But like with art, the original stories are underneath. They bleed through. With paintings that have been colored over, sometimes restorers strip away what’s on top to reveal the canvas’s first picture.

I guess that’s like what people do in therapy. Right? They try to peel away the layers of action, of reaction, of feelings to get at the original source. The moment that precipitates everything that comes after.

The girl on the screen sounds like she’s crying now, but that can’t be right because this isn’t that kind of porno. It’s just that it can all bleed together, one thing can look like something else.

My workspace has a concrete floor webbed with scratch marks I’ve made cutting apart boxes with my X-Acto blade. Layers and layers of shapes cut into the floor until there is no way to untangle them, no way to say that this came before that but after this. No way to separate one image from the next. And layered together like that, intractably enmeshed, they form their own picture, different from anything I intended, but all me nonetheless.

No one is sinking quarters—it’s like they’ve all agreed to let Darrin have his fill of me—and Darrin is showing no signs of satiety. He runs his fingers through my hair in a move I’d bet he got from some chick flick, and his kiss goes on and on. I let him. What’s the harm? He wants so little from me, just this, my lips, my breath. His mouth is too wet, too soft, more like puppy licks than anything else. One hand drops from my hair and paws at my side, coming as close as he dares to my breast.

Finally, Sal sinks a shot and tells me to drink and, thinking about my studio floor, about lines cut into concrete, about layers of paint and art and painful mistakes, I forget to lift the cup with my left hand.

“Caught you,” says Marissa. “Cough up a secret.”

Maybe this is what I wanted all along.

I finish my drink and set down the cup with an unsteady hand. Then I look deep into her eyes, their dark cobalt waiting with a mix of expectation and humor. The humor fades as she recognizes the weight in my expression.

“Secret,” I say. “I am a horrible person.”

A moment passes, and then her face cracks into a grin. “No secret,” she says. “I already knew that.”

And of course she’s joking, but she’s wrong. I am horrible. I have become a beast, an abomination. A cautionary tale.

It’s only in the absence of sound that I realize the porno isn’t on anymore. I look at the screen, expecting it to be blank, but it’s not; it’s paused. Someone must be sitting on the remote or something, but everyone’s too stoned to notice. The movie is stuck on a shot of the girl’s face, close up, and I think the expression is supposed to be ecstasy, but it could also be pain or some kind of horrible recognition. A word comes to me—anagnorisis—a term I managed to retain from the stupid vocab list in the Greek unit last year. I can see the flash card: “The awareness of the way things really are.”

But then the moment has passed. Someone’s ass unpauses the movie and the others are back to their game and I push back out of my chair.

“You leaving, Seph?” asks Marissa.

Sal smiles at me and rubs his hand up Marissa’s thigh, and he says, “You don’t gotta leave, do you, Seph?” and I don’t think I’m imagining the intention in his eyes.

This party is over, at least for me. “Crandall at eight,” I say. So I leave and they stay and I’ve spoken my truth, but no one cares, not really.

***

And at home, even before I push open the bedroom door to see the still-made bed, I know I am alone. If I stand very still and listen, I can hear them downstairs. The rhythm of their bodies, the rocking of her hips, the cleaving of her tail into legs and sea-deep wetness and warmth.

The shadow on the wall is mine. It must be, because no one else is here.