| | | Summer Fiction No. 3 with stories from Alissa Nutting, Ottessa Moshfegh, Marcy Dermansky, and Danya Kukafka. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | August 29, 2017 | Letter No. 101 | | | | | | | | | | | | Dear Lennys,
Welcome to the summer fiction issue! I'm coming off some time spent with family in San Francisco, where an average summer day clocks in at 65 degrees. I always relish my August visits there — a break from the New York heat, but also an early reminder of the reset we feel when summer turns to fall. I'm certainly ready for the new beginnings that September seems to bring.
A lot of people in my life have been in transition this summer: breakups, new jobs, girlfriends moving in with boyfriends, a little frenemy drama. I've been thinking about the consequences — both good and bad — of the things we say and do, which is something our authors and their characters are navigating in this week's issue. How do you react sensitively to someone's pain, even if you shouldn't get involved at all? Would you feel more grown up if you decided to commit a crime on a teenage whim? How do you find happiness with yourself when you can't even pull off glitter makeup??? Getting lost in fiction is helping me settle with the unrest summer tends to stir up inside me.
There's no better time than August to disappear into stories — here's a little more about what you have to look forward to in this issue:
—Made for Love author Alissa Nutting gives us Alice, who is navigating her coming-of-age with a hands-off mom and her best friend Spike, who seems to know more about femininity than she does.
—In "The Man in the Sky," Ottessa Moshfegh's protagonist faces the numbness of being a self-serving and lazy son.
—Marcy Dermansky's "Very Nice" tells the story of a careful flirtation between a Pakistani professor and his American student.
—Girl in Snow author Danya Kukafka writes about the tangled moments between girlhood and womanhood in "Glimmer."
I hope you enjoy!
Yours,
Molly | | | | | | | | | | | | The Expectation of Anywhere | | | | By Alissa Nutting | | |
The moment they became friends, Spike started begging Alice to let him give her a makeover. She knew she needed a new look. One that would help her get out of town, and maybe even inspire Spike to love her. But Alice worried about him seeing that she still looked forgettable and wrong, no matter what he tried. In her heart, she knew this would be the outcome.
He ended up calling it off after just five minutes.
Weird, Spike muttered. It's like makeup doesn't work on you. The experience was traumatizing for him. His trembling hands fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette and lighter, which Alice slapped away. Not in my room, she'd sighed. Mom will smell.
But this was just Alice being grumpy — her mother, Mary, wasn't home and of course wouldn't care; she was a permissive sort who parented on autopilot now that Alice was in junior high. There were a few anemic rules. There were zombie rules that would occasionally resurrect, fiercely insist upon themselves with an unwarranted hunger, and then disappear as quickly as they'd come. But nothing thrived under her mother's roof, and rules were no exception.
I know you're going to do the drugs and the sex, all of it, her mother liked to say. Life's a bore; why wouldn't you? Mary's boyfriend du jour, a sunburnt construction worker who was always bare-chested, plus or minus a reflective yellow vest, sometimes voiced disagreement. Too lax there, hey, Mary? Go a bit strict. If you say "No kissing," then it's like a thing in her mind when she's kissing. Some guilt, see, and if she goes further, she feels like a real tart. He'd look down at his belly button, extract something that was lodged inside. When you're all, "Sure, try a threesome and heroin," think about how far she has to go to rebel, huh? You've got to take psychology into account.
Pigshit, her mother would respond. Life is trial and disappointment. Vice gets stale once you've had a taste. And the boyfriend would make a lobotomy face and start thrusting his crotch back and forth into the wall, and Alice would walk away with her mother's cackling laughter filling her ears.
But other than her room, there was nowhere for Alice to go, really. Occasionally she'd wander over to the apartment of their elderly neighbor Patrice, who always left her door open. She was nearly blind, but the way her enormous prescription glasses magnified the thin liver spots on her cheeks made her appear to have additional eyes. Whenever she addressed Alice, she'd look far beyond the borders of Alice's physical person to enter a conversation with a radiator or a long-retired lamp. Patrice always wanted her to smell things, and Alice got the smells completely wrong. Isn't this lilac? she might ask of a bottle of ancient perfume that had pickled to the odor of warm ammonia.
Once, she opened up a tin of baking flour and reached out to grab Alice's wrist with urgency. Tell me true, she asked, her whisper barely audible. Does this smell like a cat? She pressed the tin too close to Alice's face, dusting her nose a heavy white. The other day I thought I smelled it, Patrice confessed. Wet cat on the bread I made. For the rest of the visit, the tin took on a macabre relevance for Alice. She had to leave because she couldn't shake the creeping irrational thought that it wasn't flour at all. What if the tin was full of the cat ashes of Patrice's former cremated pets? What if there'd been a horrible kitchen mix-up?
After her failed makeover, as she and Spike walked to the gas station, he talked about how they were a natural pair, like two birds in the wild: he was bright and colorful; she was camouflaged to blend in with the underbrush.
She didn't find the metaphor comforting. There was something bird-like, though, about Spike. The first time she'd seen him, he'd reminded her of a tall, pierced, rubbery swan whose body stretched to shift shape. Bones? she could imagine Spike saying. Yeah, I don't have them. Spike could do small things, like dye his hair a different color or wear one long earring, and completely change his face. His current hair was a back feathery plume of mohawk.
The gas station didn't sell gas, but somehow this didn't disqualify it from the title. Everyone called it the gas station. Its actual name was some string of monosyllabic words that seemed like a phrase for emergency-response protocol: Stop Shop Save. Spike liked to go there to flirt with guys and try to get people to buy him cigarettes, to steal candy or warm cans of fruit punch that made the inside of his mouth look like he'd just thrown up red paint for an hour.
She didn't like going there; Spike was too good at making new friends. Whenever they went to the gas station, she came home alone.
Can't I just try sleeping with you? she finally asked Spike, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. For practice?
His eyelids were glittery and his fingernails were glittery; she knew that all she had to do to be so close to the glitter that she glittered herself was convince him.Spike paused, looked into the sun. I've never done it with a girl sober, he said. I don't even know if it would work.
What if we watched something while we did it? On the Internet?
Spike gave her a look of amused sympathy. Girl, he smiled, I didn't know you were so hard up.
That evening, in the dark, the muted cries of men on her computer were a helpful chorus cheering her on. The pain between her legs was a guiding rope, a lifeline she clung to in the hopes that it might pull her elsewhere.
When he finished and she looked down at the blood, she tried to interpret it as a spent catalyst, a sign of transformation, but ultimately could only see the truth. Which was that she'd opened another window only to look out on the same landscape. She'd been thinking of sex as her best chance at a journey that could take her somewhere other than back to herself, back to herself alone, and it hadn't. "But maybe Spike will feel differently now?" she thought, and seconds later, when the delusion of what she was telling herself sank in, she felt as though she'd spit upon her own face.
She still continued to fantasize about Spike having a change of heart. But it was a very manageable sort of optimism, a low-running engine in the boiler room of her chest. It acted up occasionally but usually responded to a hefty beating against the pipes with a wrench.
When it did flare, cutting sometimes felt unavoidable. Spike both hated and loved to watch, and Alice liked him watching. There was a martyr effect, good for her own peace of mind even if he was oblivious: Swan, look, I bleed for your Mohawk. She enjoyed the horror on his face, his exaggerated expressions of pain and empathy. She liked to pretend he wasn't looking at her cut at all, but seeing an average day of her life and reacting appropriately.
In her room, Spike's favorite thing to do was go through each of her drawers very slowly, halfheartedly scanning their contents like a disappointed thief. Today he pulled a sanitary napkin out of her bottom drawer. This is, like, the size of a shoulder pad. Why don't you use tampons? They look so much cooler in their little individual packages. Like cigars.
I think tampons are creepy, she told Spike. Like, too participatory. Too "come on in."
Why? The way they feel?
The way they don't feel. You put it in and then you can't even tell it's there. It seems deceptive. Like it's tricking my radar.
He held his hand out in front of her. She liked the way he did this, with great authority, like an international stop sign that all bullshit had to obey. Untrue. Radar is for pain. You can't feel your spleen right now, can you? That's good. That means it isn't about to burst.
A tampon is not an organ. He was right though, about pain and radar. For Alice, cutting was like a loud alarm that went off, even loud enough to drown out thoughts. It drowned out the imperceptible hush inside the house when she was home alone, the sound of the walls reminding her that things could easily be better, but weren't.
We have to move you forward, he sighed. Try a tampon. I'm sure your mother has one. If you try one, I'll have sex with you again. This was now a reoccurring barter in their relationship, always wielded by him instead of her. She tried it once, and he'd laughed and said, That's OK, I'm good,and she'd thought she was going to pass out; she'd felt an insane amount of sweat building up underneath her arms and in the creases where her legs joined her torso, as if the glue that held her limbs onto her body were melting. So now she waited for him to want something and offer, every time.
When Mary's breakup with the construction worker happened, Alice did hope Spike might see the additional misery Alice was under and extend some masturbatory pity. Breakups meant that for weeks, her mother would do nothing but lie on the couch and watch the TV. There was a certain detergent commercial that featured a talking stuffed animal holding a handful of helium balloons and rising up with them into the sky. Whenever it played, her mother would start weeping.
Until the funk lifted, Mary would forget to go to the grocery store. She'd also forget how much cash was in the zipped quadrant of her purse, and Alice could take some money every few days without its being noticed. It felt like earned wages, because Alice would sit with her for hours, feeling like it was somehow wrong to change the television channel even when the programming shifted to an infomercial. Well, was all her mother occasionally said. Her voice sounded gravelly and dangerous and gave Alice the distinct impression that her mother's breath must smell like a campfire. I didn't think it would end so soon.
That night, at nearly 3 a.m., Spike climbed into her room through the window. He threw himself across the floor dramatically, like he'd just survived a shipwreck. I met the most amazing boy, Spike squealed. I think he might take me with him to Europe.
Shhhh, Alice said. Mom broke up with Larry. She's got the house locked down in tomb mode.
Do you have food? Spike asked. I'm beyond starving.
Alice tiptoed to her mother's bedroom and found her ridiculous, giant purse. It was patterned with cartoon images of citrus fruits engaging in acts of flirtation: a rambunctious orange made eyes at a shy but interested lemon; an oversized lime, whose circular, slightly askew eyes hinted toward its naïveté, was oblivious to the fact that it was a third wheel.
Alice returned with a wad of small bills. Seeing the money, Spike leaped up off the floor and began a series of celebratory jumps that made her smile. For a moment, they both stood and looked at it in awe. It almost felt like a ticket to anywhere, to the rest of their lives.
They walked to the 24-hour McDonald's, Spike sashaying, men occasionally leaning out of car windows and calling animal sounds out to him. You know, he said, if the moon were always full, I think everyone would be dead by the age of 30. It was bad, Alice knew, how she wasn't close to 30 but already felt dead.
The place was packed with intoxicated people speaking loudly. Of course Spike wanted to be in the middle of it all, but since she was buying, he agreed to a back booth where they could chat about Spike's beau of the evening, who was apparently a small-time DJ. When he grabbed one of the softer French fries, the soggy ones that she liked, he'd briefly stop talking and feed it to her. Lately, I feel like I should really leave here, Alice said when they were done, as Spike looked into his compact mirror and touched up his makeup. But then I remember that I don't have beauty or money to help me make it out. She stared out the restaurant's large window. A guy was trying to do a headstand on the back of a car. When he fell, a laughing girl hugged him. Or love, she added.
Spike closed his compact and lowered his eyes, staring at the carnage of empty sauce packets and wrappers on their table. "We've expended all our resources together," Alice thought. "We're done." Finally, he started loading their garbage onto the tray. Almost as an afterthought, he turned as her neighbor Patrice might, looking near her but not at her, and said, You'll make it. I mean, it'll be hard, but you don't expect a lot, and you're not easily disappointed. That's an advantage.
And then, to her great surprise, as Alice stared at Spike's mouth in the restaurant's fluorescent light, something happened. The colorless outline of her reflection suddenly appeared in his lip gloss. Except it wasn't quite her; it was the smiling ghost of her future self. An image of Alice, several years older, like time travel. It stayed for a moment. Just long enough to let Alice know she wasn't imagining it, that Spike's words were true. When the image disappeared, Alice told Spike she agreed with him.
Alissa Nutting is an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College. She is the author of the story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, as well as the novel Tampa. Her new novel Made for Love is published by Ecco. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Man in the Sky | | | | By Ottessa Moshfegh | | |
If you're curious about my mother, know that when I drew her picture, yellow lasers shot out of her from all directions. That is what she looked like every morning standing in front of the just-drawn curtains. But most of the time, she dressed in dull colors, moved around the house in loose-fitting slacks and T-shirts, or else she wore thick cotton blouses and apronish skirts with stockings when she had places to go. Her hair was always short and dyed. She never let the real smell of her body out. She liked colognes.
My room was at the top of the stairs. This was in the house from before I started keeping track of anything happening to anyone anywhere except inside the house. Somewhere, upstairs, I had a sister.
In the mornings, my mother set a plate in front of me and combed down my hair with spit while I ate. But besides the spitting, my mother didn't talk much. What I got from her were even-penned, misspelled love notes in my lunches, which were many-coursed and came in beige plastic bags from the supermarket. She wasn't from this country, I knew that. The words she taught me were mostly wrong. She said my blood was rich with the fat of kings and that one day I would stand for something perfect, high above the clouds. She had spent some time on the wording of it, I could tell.
As for the house, it was a narrow brick affair set up on a high mound of yellow grass. The kitchen floors were wood and swollen and usually dusted up with flour. My mother loved to broom. I think it drew on some latent talent she had had once, like dancing, or training horses.
As for my sister, she was set on music, but she smoked. The most I saw of her were thin, flipping hands when she threw trash or cigarette butts out her window. If I was out there in the yard, she took aim: cherry pits or fat, hairy wads of bubble gum; squashed-down cans of soda. She lived in the attic, and when she wasn't home, I unlocked her black wooden box and read through torn-out pages of magazines that told stories of the darkest choice encounters of the flesh.
Besides that, her bedroom was just bare-bulb-lit, scrawled-on and broken walls, with nail clippings sprinkled here and there, sweaty clothes tossed into the corners. But her bathroom was special, wallpapered in old-fashioned red flowers and butterflies, and on the toilet seat she had painted a brown, winking owl. Sometimes there were words written on the white bowl itself, like love or good, words I recalled throughout the dinners my sister refused to sit in front of. My mother disappeared up to her in the evenings with bowls of soup and came down bashfully to my room afterward, made up in scarves and lipstick, to nod good night.
The school was squat and brick and twice daily visited by short-pantsed mothers and their gleaming pastel station wagons. My mother parked in the shade of a tree and kept the engine running while she waited, watching for me in the side-view mirror. Her car was a rubber-scented, rusted-up screaming black thing, the seats lined with brightly colored blankets and smeared, silvery newspaper. When she yelled out my name, it was like a dying man clearing his throat one final time. I hurried to her, humiliated.
I would always obey my mother, for to obey anyone else would have been a betrayal. So I was bad at school. At least once a week, there was a note in my book bag that attempted to describe for my mother just how much the school disrespected her mothering. I knew she had little skill in decoding the American crudity of adult cursive, so I read the notes out loud, declaring great successes by way of spelling contests and geography bees. According to school records, I was not coordinated. I talked at a wrong volume. I made messes. I tore my homework to shreds. On my report cards, the set of boxes named "unsatisfactory" got all the checks. My mother had no idea.
On the walls of the echoless school corridor, there were stars full of names. My last one was often misspelled, letters backward, stray marks floating in magenta marker as though to signify some wrongdoing of my forefathers. But I didn't care. I didn't know anything about my forefathers.
In fifth grade, my spine, it was discovered, was crooked. A doctor photographed my bones and then strapped me into the thing he said would straighten me out for good. The gown the nurses had me wear allowed me to flash my buttocks at the worried mas and pas; the X-ray lady always tied a lead apron around my gendered area; each time the doctor took my mother aside, it was to pass some judgment on the progression of my adolescence, talking about my skeletal maturity, saying that somehow the responsibility of growing up correctly had to do with bracing oneself, that there was indeed virtue in sitting up straight. She nodded and dotted her nose with a tissue, understanding nothing.
On weekends, maybe to console me, my mother took me to the city — an antiquated brick and glass deal that would have been dull and unfriendly-feeling had it not been for the docks, and the boys and girls in their red and yellow T-shirts jumping into the harbor and pulling themselves up on the frayed, rotting ropes that coiled shyly on the water.
I was and never would be one of those boys and girls — fearless, sunburnt creatures who, at night, roamed the streets, warming themselves, it seemed, under the soft yellow lamplight on the city corners, hugging the stray dogs, pocketing what they wanted from candy shops and sharing their pennies with the bums. The city was the kind with lots of swinging chipped wooden signs advertising warm-weather food and beer. Sometimes there was music, roller-skating. Sometimes long-haired men, their arms slung around girls in striped jerseys and jeans, strode up close enough that we could smell the sweat that shone on their shoulders and the golden hairs raised on their necks.
I am mentioning all of this because I want to make it clear how terrible it was that when I walked down the streets of this city, my mother's hands gripping my shirtsleeve and her purse respectively, there was quite literally a shield of hard, white plastic around my body that, with every breath I took, pressed against me the fact that no matter what I imagined my life to be, it was always going to be in there, trapped, and not out on the street, or out in the water, or in anybody's arms.
By high school, I had developed a method of living that allowed me to equate the comings and goings of the house with the ins and outs of my own body. Suffice it to say that I left the house rarely, and when I did, it was only to reexamine what awful nonsense I was so smartly avoiding by never leaving the house. I became accustomed to my slantiness, but preyed on the hours spent in the tub, braceless, where I slung my hands around the so-assumed depth of my soul and imagined all the power and loathing I was sure I fostered escaping with every goopy expulsion I could muster.
When I was not occupied in the tub, I was locking myself up in books, adhering to the non-gloriously subtracted life summaries of black men. It was the softhearted dignity I loved in those books. And I could relate to their pain, I thought. It was hell in school. I sat with the theater people at lunch and ignored them in the halls and on the bus. I did not fall in love at all. My mother became more of a landlady, parceling out the food, sweeping out my room, grunting absentmindedly when she passed me on the stairs.
I will be lazy here. My later adolescence is unimportant.
The years I spent enduring higher education were demarcated by haircuts and seasonal colds. My best memories are of walking down the concrete paths between the library and the gymnasium. It was at these times I came up with the truths that I felt necessarily allowed me to keep doing what I was doing, oftentimes inspired by whatever taste I was burping up or something to do with the physical sciences. For example: Torture in moderation keeps a disciplined mind in need of good, unfulfillable desires. Or: The innards of a man are most entirely made of fat, and that is why he likes a woman, whose preoccupation with her fat exterior keeps fat in the open and the man's fat secret safe.
I remember my college classmates by the questions they asked me before class: Give me a buck? How about it? Guy or girl?
After college, I took a room in a boardinghouse, mopping floors and pulling weeds in exchange for rent. I still went home to my mother to take my meals.
But I was not without ambition! Daily, I sent out typewritten letters to companies whose advertisements in the newspaper called for people with expertise in areas I wasn't at all familiar with. I applied to be a florist, a loan officer, wet nurse, lifeguard, beekeeper, bartender, machinist, social worker. I had grown tired of what used to ail me: a not-worth-mentioning habit of finding use for weights and measures, adding and taking away the forces of nature in my mind until, when I put myself to sleep, the only thing keeping me from plummeting up into the cosmos was a terrible fear that I would simply explode up there. I must sound crazy. I prayed for distractions. I started keeping track of current events: the weather, local crime, the economy, international affairs, cults, celebrity gossip, oil, laws. At lunches and dinners, my mother slid over a manila envelope full of ones. Take it or leave, she would say. So I took. This went on for years.
Is it too late to tell you that the desires I had for most things were entirely made up? Or that in the boardinghouse kitchen, between meals at home with my mother, I defrosted a brick of spinach or sliced potatoes only to eat half of it and refreeze the rest? Because if this is going to be a confession of anything, shouldn't it be of the sort to answer the question of what I was getting at after so many years of mashing the food on my plate with my fork until I could just lick it off and wash it down with a glass of milk I had named Alice or Sue or Carly? I mean, shouldn't I make myself out to be something special? Because it is not enough of me to say that I had fallen into habits like just anybody in the world, or that there is something about the lonerness of a man that tempts him into certain ways. I will be lazy here, too. The things I used to feel for broke off and became simply things I would look at when I had to look at something.
And then one day I found my mother dying on the kitchen floor from what she kept terming the brokedness of a no-thank-you-ed, dried-up heart. I sat down and ate the soup she had been cooking and listened to her tell an all-too-self-martyring story of her life. This is what she sounded like: "Blah blah blah blah blah." You have to imagine this all coming out of a mouth dripping with stale, still-war-torn saliva. I walked out and left the neighbors to contend with her body. That was how I showed my love for her: I pretended she had just disappeared. Maybe she hadn't been real at all. I never once visited her grave.
Like most people, I tend to downplay the days up until a certain point. Case in point: by the time it was already too late to start anything afresh, I took a job shadowing an old woman who otherwise lived alone in a two-bedroom apartment in a part of the city sectioned off for greasy bakeries, black-market pharmacies, and cold, too-brightly-lit bars serviced by altogether lackluster however large-titted girls in their 40s.
The old woman was the fearful, stubborn type, with a wheezy, cotton-mouthed rag of a dog and a middle-class son who lived across the river. She talked about death as an absentminded city clerk, some kind of shortchanging, briefcased schmuck not too honest for her to outsmart. I was part of a plan, hired to watch her sleep and stop traffic on her walks to and from the post office, where she visited the contents of a safe-deposit box, whispering god knows how sweet nothings into fists clutching a gold watch and matching ruby tennis bracelets. We didn't care much for each other. Each night after supper, we watched the same evening news on separate televisions. As a replacement for my mother, she outdid herself.
And then she croaked. Like most people have croaked. Like I will. And you. And everyone you've ever seen or heard of.
So if I have any complaint to make, it is that I am far too typical. When I cut off the tops of bottles, it is to pour in something else without spilling. Am I right in assuming you can relate? Am I wrong in guessing that this is all too familiar? I can say quite absolutely that there is nothing left for me, that nobody gives a damn, and it is not out of self-pity that I say this but out of a stern unknown-ness that I've held on to because I never in my life gave a damn about anybody else.
Except for my sister, I should say. I think I loved her.
Ottessa Moshfegh is the author of two novels, McGlue and Eileen, and a book of short stories, Homesick for Another World. | | | | | | | | | | | | Very Nice | | | | By Marcy Dermansky | | |
I didn't think, the day that I kissed my professor for the first time, that he would kiss me back. His lips were soft. He tasted like coffee. The coffee I had made for him.
"That was very nice," he said.
My professor smiled at me. Though hesitant at first, he had returned the kiss.
My professor, my creative-writing teacher, had asked me to watch his dog, Amira, for the day. It was the last day of the semester. He had a standard poodle. A large dog with apricot-colored fur. I loved standard poodles. I had grown up with standard poodles. Sometimes, my professor took his poodle to class. He loved his dog.
My professor lived in New York City. He commuted up the Hudson River to campus. He took Metro North. He had been sick most of the semester. A virus, he said, a flu that would not go away. He was incredibly beautiful, my professor, like his dog. Together, they were a breathtaking pair. My professor had long eyelashes, big eyes, brown skin. Silky hair. He was tall, thin, too thin. He was from Pakistan.
My professor had published a novel that had won all the big awards the year it came out. I had tried to read his book, but I couldn't. A sentence was as long as a paragraph. A paragraph was as long as a page. At a reading on campus, I asked him to sign a copy of his book. Though I had not been able to read it, I told him that I thought it was beautiful.
"So are you, Rachel," he said, looking up from the book, looking into my eyes.
The compliment had come out of nowhere, blindsided me.
The professor was in my house off campus when I kissed him.
We were sitting in my kitchen. My roommates were at the library, studying for exams. My professor was drinking the good coffee I made him. His beautiful dog, Amira, was sitting at our knees, and we both petted her, our hands almost touching. He seemed agitated, my professor, agitated in a way I had never seen before.
"I couldn't get a seat on the train," he said as he entered my house without even waiting for me to invite him in. He accepted the cup of coffee I offered him, nodding as I poured in the half and half. "There were open seats, several, but no one would make room for me."
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because of my skin color, of course," he said, bitterly.
I stared at him.
"Because people think I am a terrorist," he said.
"You are a writer," I said. "A famous novelist."
My professor shook his head. "I had to ask the conductor to ask a woman to remove her bags. The trip takes over an hour. I was not going to stand. I had asked her, twice. I knew I should just move on, but I was tired. I am tired today. I am angry, too. This is not the first time. Normally I am used to it, but today, it was too much. I am just a person trying to go to work. I am dressed well, am I not?"
My professor was wearing faded blue jeans, a worn blue button-down shirt that looked soft to the touch. Loafers. His hair was growing long, wisps of hair covering his ears, bangs over his eyes.
My professor had told me once that I could be a good writer if I were to let myself write. Most assignments came and went, and I did not turn anything in. I wanted my work to be brilliant, which meant it was impossible for me to write anything at all. I would be getting an incomplete for the semester, in a class where everyone got 4.0s.
"That sounds horrible," I said. "She sounds like a horrible woman."
"I am sure she doesn't think of herself that way. I am sure she gives money to Planned Parenthood and votes Democrat. She doesn't even know she is racist. She is the kind of woman who says that she likes Indian food but won't eat cilantro."
I wanted to tell my professor that when I made salsa, I used lots of fresh cilantro. That while I often put my knapsack on my seat, hoping that no one would sit next to me on the train, whenever it was crowded, I always made the seat available, before I was asked. I told my professor this.
"Of course, Rachel," he said. "Of course you would do that. You are a beautiful person."
He looked so sad, my professor, and this was the second time that he had called me beautiful, and so I kissed him.
At first, he did not return my kiss, and then, just when I was about to pull away, he did.
"You thought it was nice?" I asked him. "Very nice? You thought it was a very nice kiss?"
Once, early in the semester, I had turned in a short story and he had deleted all of the verys.
"It is the nicest thing that has happened to me in a long time," my professor said.
He had crossed out all of the reallys. All of the justs. There was not much story left.
"Really?" I said.
"Really." My professor took another sip of his coffee. He sighed. "If you don't mind, I would like for you to kiss me again."
"Is that OK?" I asked him.
"I don't know," he said. "Honestly, I am so fucking law-abiding. I don't even cross the street until the light changes. Right now, I just want what I want, and I would like it if you would kiss me again."
And so I did.
This time, I put my hand on the back of his head, my fingers in his hair, and I leaned in, not letting him go. I considered putting my tongue in his mouth but decided against it. It seemed possible that at any moment my professor might change his mind. I did not want him to reprimand me.
Finally, my professor pulled away.
"I am going to be late for class," he said, looking down at his watch.
It was a beautiful watch. It looked like an antique. It had Roman numerals; the brown leather band was soft and worn. I wanted to touch his watch, but I restrained myself. I did not want my professor to think that I was strange. I did not want him to know that I loved every single thing about him. That I loved his blue shirt. I restrained myself from touching his shirt. "I have class in ten minutes," he said.
My professor stood up. Amira also stood up, but he was leaving his standard poodle with me. He had brought a rawhide bone with him for her to chew on.
"You be a good girl," he said.
I walked my professor to the door, Amira following us. I didn't want my professor to leave. I wanted to wrap him in my arms. I wanted to protect him. I felt afraid for his safety. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm really sorry."
"What are you sorry for?"
I didn't know. "For making you late," I said.
My professor shrugged. He did not disagree with me. But even then, he didn't seem in a hurry to leave. The tips of his fingers brushed my side. He had long, beautiful fingers.
"I'll bring Amira to your office at six," I said.
That was the plan we had previously agreed on. I would keep his dog for the day, walk her, feed her, play with her. Up until now, my professor used to take her to class, but there had been complaints. A student claimed to be allergic to dogs, which was ridiculous because Amira was a poodle, hypoallergenic. And then there was another student, a girl who claimed that Amira had growled at her. I didn't think it could be true. Amira was the nicest dog.
When my professor had asked me how much I wanted to be paid, I said that I didn't want any money. He told me he would pay me twenty dollars. My professor did not want to take advantage of my kindness. He did not want any appearance, he said, of impropriety. That had been yesterday.
At 5:30, my professor appeared at my door, his hands at his sides. It had started to rain unexpectedly and he was wet.
"Do you want to come in?" I asked him.
I took his hand and I brought him inside. Amira was resting on the living-room floor. She thumped her tail, but she didn't get up. I had taken Amira out for a long walk. We had played ball. I had tired her out.
I had looked my professor up on the Internet during the day. I read his Twitter page. His job at my liberal-arts college, a two-year writer's residence, was ending today. His health insurance, it also ended today. His second novel, long overdue, was only half-written. His advance, already spent. My sad and beautiful professor had laid himself bare on Twitter. I had learned a lot.
"Would you like to have a glass of wine?" I asked him.
"You are too young," he said, shaking his head.
This, of course, was ridiculous. I had been drinking wine since I was fifteen years old. I also realized that there was a line my professor did not want to cross and that it did not matter that somehow we had already crossed it. I would not contradict him further.
We walked upstairs. My professor smiled when he saw my bedroom. The art posters on the wall. My music stand. My flute case. I was in orchestra.
"Do you know what Amira means?" my professor said, sitting down on my bed, taking off his shoes.
I did not.
"It means princess," he said.
It made sense. There was something regal about my professor's dog. She crossed her front paws when she lay down on the floor.
I sat on my bed, next to my professor. I also took off my shoes. I felt happy, even though I understood that my professor was sad. I realized that I would probably not be able to make him happy, but that I would still try.
"I am going home tomorrow," he said.
"New York?" I thought he was going back that night. Catching the train.
He shook his head.
"Pakistan."
"You are?"
"My grandmother is dying."
"Is that a good idea?" I asked him.
Things were all wrong in America since the election. Immigrants who left were sometimes not allowed back. If you were Mexican. If you were Middle Eastern. Probably Pakistani, too. I was not sure. I wish I knew.
"She took care of me when I was a little boy," my professor said. "I have to go."
I pushed his hair behind his ears. I felt the urge to say my professor's name, but I was afraid I would mispronounce it. I had practiced during the afternoon, his first name and his last name, over and over again, but I didn't want to risk it. I did not want to make a mistake. My professor would not look at me, but I knew what I had to do.
So, for the third time that day, I kissed my professor. This time, it was not that nice. Our front teeth actually clattered. It hurt, even, and I jumped back. So did my professor. My professor, I realized, who had led me up the stairs, was nervous. I wanted to set him at ease. I wanted to let him know that he wasn't doing anything wrong. He wanted what he wanted. That was OK. Somehow, it was OK.
I pushed him gently down on the bed.
"This will be nice, too," I told my professor. "Very nice."
My professor did not correct me. I began to unbutton his blue shirt. It was soft, like I'd thought it would be.
Marcy Dermansky is the author of the novels Bad Marie, Twins, and most recently The Red Car, which will be released in paperback this September. | | | | | | | | | | | | Glimmer | | | | By Danya Kukafka | | | |
It is Sophie's idea to steal the car.
Sophie sits in the passenger's seat of my brother's Honda, gnawing on the straw of a Wendy's Frosty. Her hair sweeps across her forehead, ironed flat, all milky-chocolate breath and runny eyeliner. Friendship bracelets wrap around both of Sophie's wrists, and she wears a tight pair of cutoff denim shorts with a cropped shirt, damp from the mid-summer humidity. The light from the single streetlamp makes her bare collar look like raw stripped bone.
It's Sophie's idea, always.
Three weeks ago, Sophie gave Tommy Hill a blow job in his garage after school. Tommy Hill's garage was made for blow jobs; the couch from the basement had been dragged in, along with a lamp and an old stereo system. The garage was separate from the house, and he could have a whole party there without his mom hearing. Sophie walked over after school, and they watched an episode of South Park on Tommy's laptop before she leaned over and unbuttoned his pants.
"What was it like?" I asked.
Sophie looked at me like a mean babysitter.
"It was exactly like you think," she said, and she licked her lips.
It was her tongue I thought about for the rest of the day, flitting from her mouth like something uncaged.
My brother Joel thinks there's a specific, calculable moment when a boy becomes a man. I heard him telling that to his friends after the senior keg party, when they all came home smelling like sweat and beer and they whispered loud in the kitchen. Joel became a man the first time he had sex with Kelly Robbins. He'd had sex before, but not like that, he snickered, and I watched from the staircase as he made a humping motion in the light of the refrigerator. The next morning, we found vomit in mom's rosebushes.
Now, Joel is at a concert in Miami, and Sophie and I are sitting in his Honda. We are allowed to borrow it under two conditions: no drunk driving, and no nasty shit.
So we idle in an almost-empty Arby's parking lot off the highway. It's two in the morning — we sneaked out through my mom's basement window, crawled under the porch, and pushed Joel's car down the driveway to start the engine in the street. Once, my mom had woken up to the sound of Joel's engine as he sneaked out, and she chased him down the driveway in her pajamas. He was grounded for a month. He's never careful.
The Arby's has been closed for hours because it's closer to dawn than it is to dusk. Hulking shapes of tables and soda machines loom behind the darkened windows. It's too quiet, without any buzzing lights. The chairs are stacked on the tables, and from here, they look like a morose mountain range.
"Check out that car," Sophie says.
It's an old Subaru — the only car besides ours in the Arby's parking lot. The paint is chipped, and the driver's side door hangs partially open. The windows shine beneath the solitary streetlight.
"What about it?" I ask.
"Someone just left it here."
"So?"
"So," Sophie says. "The driver's side door is open. Dare me to get inside?"
I think about Joel and the yellow light of the refrigerator. I wonder if it's the same for girls. If there's a moment where we can say: I am grown now. Look what I have become.
Tommy Hill wasn't the first for Sophie, though she doesn't tell me this. I hear it from the other girls in the locker room after gym class. Jackson McElroy, Dario Rodriguez, and apparently even Benson Harford, who plays the bassoon. Skanky Sophie, they call her. Mostly it's just kissing, though Dario told everyone she took off her bra in the science classroom when they sneaked in during a basketball game. I asked Sophie about this once, and she rolled her eyes.
When I imagine kissing, my mom's old-lady phrase pops into my head. Locking lips. I imagine that's how it goes when you kiss someone: you lock a piece of yourself into them. The shared molecules bind you somehow, and by swallowing — even afterward — you become a part of one another.
Sophie disagrees. It's just kissing, she says.
"Come on," Sophie says. "There's no one here. Why would they leave the door open if they didn't want someone to climb inside?"
This is a stupid question, but of course I don't tell her that. A fruit fly buzzes through the swampy air between the dashboard and the windshield. Sophie kicks the Frosty cup beneath the seat, where Joel will find it later, filmy and gooped.
"I'm so bored," Sophie says.
"Let's go home," I say.
"And do what?" she says sharply, like an accusation.
"I mean, I'm bored too." The words tumble out of my mouth, clunky and immature. I am wearing a plastic headband, and it's so tight against my scalp. I catch a glimpse of myself in the side mirror. I look like a little girl.
The only thing we'd ever stolen before was a bag of marshmallows from Sophie's kitchen when we were eight years old. Her parents were drinking wine in the living room — we were limited to one bowl of ice cream for dessert each night, but we sneaked downstairs for more sugar, socked feet silent on the floor. The cupboard creaked as we opened it.
When we made it back to the safety of her bedroom with our prize in hand, we rolled the powdery marshmallows around in our mouths. They were too sweet. When my mom came to pick me up, she asked what was wrong, and I said, "Nothing. Just a stomachache."I had a funny look on my face, she told me. That night, I stood at the bathroom mirror and tried to decipher the contours of my own face — which looked guilty, which looked older, which just looked like me.
"Come on," Sophie says, nodding toward the abandoned Subaru. "Do this one thing for me. We'll just sit inside for a second."
"OK," I tell her. "But just for a second."
Her mouth is wide with a laugh. I picture it wrapped around a popsicle, or a banana, like she jokes sometimes. I have only ever seen a penis in a textbook, and even there, it looked like a terrifying and intrusive thing, alive with its own tense, needy energy. It looked like nothing I'd ever want.
When we get out of the car, Sophie does a cartwheel on the gravel beneath the wide midnight sky, her hair flipping over her eyes and back again.
I follow the tangle of Sophie's ponytail across the parking lot. The clack of her flip-flops is like a song I know every word to. The air outside is choking hot, a damp sort of suffocation — the lush trees around the parking lot steep in their own greenery, looming.
"Are you coming, or what?" Sophie calls over her shoulder.
"I'm coming," I tell her.
Sophie pulls open the driver's-side door, which is already cracked. She slides in, unceremonious, and leans over to unlock the passenger's side.
The inside of the Subaru smells like someone else. Like unfamiliar laundry detergent and stale cigarette smoke. The leather seats are imprinted to fit a stranger's shape. A pine-tree air freshener dangles from the mirror.
When the passenger-side door shuts behind me, I understand a glimmer of what has gotten us here. The thick summer air and the way we breathe it open-mouthed, the round expanse of the parking lot and the universe that flowers out around it, us at the center, us at the root.
"Now what?" I ask Sophie, and her teeth gleam. Straight, flat, white.
The keys are in the cupholder. They glint silver.
My body is a million nervous angles, sprouting in all the wrong directions. I can hear my own traitor heart, slamming ferocious in my chest. I wonder about Sophie's heart. How different it moves.
We watch the keys, as if they might float up by themselves and start the ignition. Sophie's desire pulsates from her body, a livid, dangerous thing. I recognize it. The same desire that wrapped its wet mouth around Tommy Hill, the same desire that gives Sophie cartwheels and me this acute fear — this nauseating sense of time, speeding by too fast.
Sophie moves first, reaching into the cupholder. She cradles the keys in both hands, hungry and precious.
Then, a voice.
"Hey!" someone shouts, invisible in the dark parking lot. "Hey, you!"
Sophie is all motion. Fuck!, she is saying, and she is yelling for me to follow, to get out of the car. For some reason — habit — I have buckled my seatbelt, and I struggle to wriggle out of it, slamming my finger in the plastic handle as I open the door.
We run.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck!" Sophie is saying as we slap across the parking lot in our sandals, the voice running close behind us.
"Hey," the voice is calling. "Stop!"
Nights, Sophie used to pull me close and whisper in my ear, her breath sour and sticky, a child's gasp. Nights, we would press our hips together, touching each other's necks. See? This is how it feels to be close to someone. One of us would turn away, flushed and embarrassed. We weren't ready, not for that sort of close. We had not been watered.
We stumble into Joel's Honda and slam the doors. I fumble with the keys, and the parking lot comes alive in the glow of our headlights. The voice belongs to a man in the distance — he sprints toward us, an apron slung over his arm, strings dragging in the street. He wears a black embroidered Arby's hat.
The stereo turns back on to the station we'd been listening to before, and his voice is drowned out by the familiar beat of a pop song.
We make it to the highway. I drive 90 miles an hour in the direction of home, breathing hard, electric.
"Do you think he got our license plate?" I ask Sophie.
"Please," she says, so I don't speak again.
Sophie leans her forehead against the window. Her hair is stuck to the sweat on her neck, and her Day-Glo nails are clenched in her fists. We pass golf courses, rolling hills in the dark.
Sophie watches the night race by while I watch her in careful glances. It is this, the shape of my particular desire — me and Sophie, together in the car, her sweet dough skin and the smell of her shampoo — it stings like loss. I think of the anatomy-book penis again, that giant aching thing, and I can't imagine wanting anything the way I'm supposed to.
It occurs to me that older is a place I can't see, and Sophie is there, waiting.
The car is hot. I keep the windows rolled up. I don't want to feel the world on my burning cheeks. I don't want this night air to touch me — for anything to touch me — not ever again.
Danya Kukafka is the author of the novel Girl in Snow. She works as an assistant editor at Riverhead Books. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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