EMMA RATHBONE is the author of the novel The Patterns of Paper Monsters. She is the recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Grant in Fiction, and her work can also be seen in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Losing It
Emma Rathbone

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Adam

This is the heat that seeks the flaw in everything and loves the flaw.

Nothing is heavier than its spirit, nothing more landlocked than the body within it.

—Jorie Graham, “Tennessee June”

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Acknowledgments

Copyright

One

I sat at my desk and stared at a calendar with a bunch of dancing tamales on it and played with a little piece of paper and thought about the fact that I was twenty-six and still a virgin. There was that, and then there was the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Chelsea Maitland. She was my first friend to lose her virginity. She was fifteen. She told me about it one afternoon on her parents’ remodeled back deck after school. The railings were made of a bright white vinyl material that hurt my eyes. It was when she’d gone to visit her sister at college, she said. They’d gone to a frat party, and there was a guy there who had been a counselor at a summer camp she’d gone to. She’d always had a crush on him, and they ended up getting drunk and walking to a lake together and one thing led to another.

“How did it feel?” I asked. I focused on a laid-back ceramic frog with an outdoor thermometer in it. We lived in San Antonio, that’s where I grew up, and fixtures like this were common. “I couldn’t say,” said Chelsea, with a little smile, her face folded and smug, like she was in possession of a secret I couldn’t possibly fathom, and she had to crowd around it and protect it. Chelsea Maitland of all people. We’d been friends for almost eight years, since we were kids, but the implication beneath our friendship had always been that I was the special one. That I would always be the one to get the thing.

The phone on my desk rang. It was my boss.

“Hi, Julia,” she said. “Can you meet me for a quick chat? Sorry, are you in the middle of anything?”

“Oh, no, no,” I said. And then, before I could stop myself, “I was just staring at a calendar with tamales on it. That someone left here. I think. It’s not mine.”

There was a pause. “See you in ten?”

“Sure!” I said.

I shoved the calendar into a drawer and brushed off my desk and picked up and stared into my pen jar and put it back and just kept sitting there like that.

Then there was Heidi Beasley. We all found out at a sleepover when we were sixteen, on a rare weekend I wasn’t away at a swim meet, that she had lost her virginity. What was it about her? I thought later, curled in my sleeping bag, staring at a wooden sign that read “Heidi’s Bistro” in their finished basement. I’d known her forever, too. I remembered one afternoon in the activity room of a church—this was when my parents were going through their Christian phase—she’d cried because she was trying to thread a bunch of jelly beans into a necklace and they’d all fallen apart. And now her face was always soft with daydreams and she would thoughtfully chew the end of a lock of hair and stare into the distance. I’m sixteen, I thought at the time. It wouldn’t be long before it was my turn.

I swiveled around and looked outside. I was on the twelfth floor of a glass building in a new development called Weston Corner in a nondescript suburb of Washington, D.C. I had a view of the plaza below where there was a fountain surrounded by large concrete planters, all deserted now because it was raining. A sandwich board fell over in the wind. In the distance was a half-completed hotel, and then beyond that, fields, nothing.

Danielle Crenshaw. She was on my high-school swim team and so we were at a lot of meets together. One afternoon we’re all lingering, taking longer than usual. She’s in purple leggings and a big floppy sweater and she’s doing her favorite thing, which is to show off her sex moves via a little hip-hop dance. “Ya gotta get down on it,” she said, rolling her chest forward and squatting. “Ya gotta get down on it.” Everybody shrieked with laughter, including me, but really I was marveling at her authority with the subject matter. To have gotten down on it so many times that you could confidently riff on it like that without being afraid anyone would doubt your experience.

“Julia, I’m glad you stopped by,” said my boss, Jodie. Her blond hair was pulled back into a burst of curls. Her desk was covered with papers and envelopes. She slammed her palm down as if they were all going to slide to the floor.

“Yup,” I said, sitting down across from her. “Well, you asked me to.” She shot me a look so I said, quickly, “I like it,” and pointed at a decorative chunk of quartz on her desk.

She rolled her eyes. “Not my idea. But thanks.”

Her phone rang. “Hold on,” she said, and answered it. Sometimes Jodie could seem so distracted it was like all her features were swimming away from one another. I stared at a lipstick-stained coffee mug. “Quartz Consulting,” it read in a casual handwriting font.

She put down the phone, laced her fingers together, and leaned forward. “The reason I asked you here—have you looked at Education Today lately?”

“Ha,” I said. “Yeah.” I thought she was joking. Education Today was the company’s blog, and it was my whole job to run it and update it. I was supposed to comb the Internet for articles on higher education and trends in online courses, and then re-post them with the author’s permission.

“I’m serious,” she said. “Have you looked at it? Like a casual viewer?”

“Yes.” I shifted in my seat. “Definitely, sure.”

“Because on Monday you posted an article extolling the benefits of one of our main competitors.”

“Oh my gosh!” I said, as if we were gossiping.

Her smile hardened.

“And I noticed the posts have been lagging,” she said. “You’ve only put up two things this week.”

“That’s right.” I cleared my throat. “It’s been sort of a slow week in education news, so I thought I’d kind of see what happened and catch up towards the end.”

“I guess I’m just wondering if there’s anything you need to work at a slightly faster clip.”

“Sure, yeah,” I said, nodding quickly. “No, I’m fine. Just a little behind.”

She leaned forward and rested her head on her palm and squinted at me. She smiled a searching smile.

I smiled, too, and raised my eyebrows, and recrossed my legs.

She stayed like that and held the silence and I was right about to point to a small decorative watering can on her desk when she finally said, “One more thing.”

“Sure!”

“How’s the Yacoma spreadsheet coming along?”

“It’s getting there,” I said.

“You must be, what, halfway through?” she said. “Three-quarters?”

“Yes,” I said.

The Yacoma spreadsheet was a mountainous data-entry project where I had to enter payment information for every one of our hundreds of authors, going back six years. I’d barely started it.

“Great,” she said. “Because Chris is going to be needing that pretty soon for the audit.”

“Right, of course,” I said.

“Glad you’re on it,” she said.

“Yup,” I said. “I am.”

“Good.”

Back at my desk I sat down and looked around. Everything had a matte gleam—my chair, my computer, the door, the desk, the building itself. Someone’s ringtone went off down the hall.

Senior year, there was Kimmy Fitzgerald. People liked Kimmy because she was nice to everyone. She always wore a winter coat that she allowed her grandmother to sew little bits of fabric onto, so that it made a kind of hideous patchwork, and she somehow got away with this due to a grave, dreamy manner that repelled criticism because you could tell on some innate level that she wouldn’t care what anyone said.

One night a group of us girls were at an all-night Greek diner that people from our high school often went to. We were talking and picking at waffles and drinking coffee. At the booth next to us was a group of boys from another school being loud and stealing looks at us. We made a show of ignoring them. One was wearing a boxy black button-down shirt, like a waiter would wear, and had greasy blond hair, and a broad face with wire glasses that were too small. On first glance he looked pinched and insolent, like a bully. But then when we were leaving the diner, out in the parking lot, this same guy came up to us. His friends were hanging back, embarrassed, as he got down on one knee and presented to Kimmy a flower he’d made out of the paper place mat. “A rose for a rose, m’lady?” he said.

We all laughed in a mean, choppy way and rolled our eyes, although you could see—in that gesture, where he was putting everything to the front, you could see the way he was brave and openhearted, even though he wasn’t handsome or wearing the right clothes. Any one of us would have ignored him, but Kimmy didn’t. She saw the happiness that was leaping out at her, and she took it. She stepped forward and, to everyone’s surprise, said, “Why, thank you.”

They started seeing each other, and sleeping together pretty soon after that. He came to the science fair at our high school and they both sat in front of her project, which was a display of little bits of charred carpet. They drew doodles and played with a calculator and laughed. He became more handsome, like you could see the best version of him because of her.

I opened a drawer and took out a pencil and started scribbling on a Post-it note, trying to see how dark I could make it. Jessica Seever came in and poured herself into the chair across from me. She worked at the front desk and was my only friend at the office. “Crazy night,” she said, referring to the previous evening. We’d gone to a bar together and sat in uncomfortable silence until her new boyfriend showed up. Then they’d had a theatrical fight that they both seemed to enjoy.

“Kidman does like you,” she said. Kidman was her boyfriend.

“Okay,” I said nonchalantly, “sure.” I opened a folder on my computer, suddenly finding, with Jessica’s presence, the will to work on the spreadsheet.

“I’m actually—” I pointed at the screen with my pencil.

“Things just got a little out of hand,” she said, proud of herself.

“Uh-huh.”

“Look, it was me.” She put her hand on her chest. “I started it. I always do! It’s like Kidman says, I get some tequila in me, I go crazy.”

“Right,” I said.

“He’s like, ‘You’re crazy, girl!’”

The first time we’d met, Kidman had barely acknowledged me, and then spent the whole night flirting with Jessica and looking around like he was really restless. Jessica and I were friends due to the fact that we were both unmarried and roughly the same age and had immediately established a mutual dislike of squirt-out hand sanitizer, which had not, in the end, reaped the conversational dividends I had hoped for. We spent a lot of time together poking at our drinks with our straws. She liked to say things and then gauge my reaction for approval or admiration.

“You know what they say,” she said, tracing the arm of her chair. “Make-up sex is the best.”

Her eyes roamed over my face. “Totally,” I said.

“After you left we went out to his friend’s apartment complex—have you ever done it in a pool?”

“Yes,” I said. “A bunch of times.”

In about four hours I would go back home to my apartment, microwave a dinner that would burn the top of my mouth, then float facedown on the Internet for a while before going to bed even though I wasn’t tired.

“We were, like, up against one of those, like, floating things, with the tube? It was shaped like a turtle?”

“A pool cleaner?” I said.

“I guess. But he was behind me, and I was holding on to a ledge. We were in that position? And it kept bumping into his back and he was like, ‘Get it away!’ and I was like, ‘Threesome!’ And he was like, ‘You are so bad.’”

“Yikes,” I said to Jessica, trying to muster the same wry glint in my eyes.

At the science fair, Kimmy and Jason had touched each other with total ownership, like it was just a given that they had access to each other all the time. At one point I saw him lift her hand and place it in his palm and study it like it was a precious jewel. I’d never had anything like that. I’d graduated from high school, gone to college, graduated, gotten my first job, and I’d still never had anything like that. Not even close.

“So good,” said Jessica. “So hot.” She looked at me for a reaction.

I swiveled around and stared at the empty town center. Sometimes, thinking about those two—Kimmy and Jason—I felt a sense of loss in my own life so drastic it was like the wind was knocked out of me.

“You want to come out tonight?” said Jessica. “We’re going to this new place.”

“No,” I said quietly. I turned back around. It’s funny how a decision you’ve been making in difficult increments can suddenly seem like the simplest thing in the world. “I’m leaving.”

“What?” She looked at me, perhaps for the first time, with genuine interest.

“I’m quitting,” I said. “I’m quitting this afternoon.”

“You are?”

“Yes.”

“Awwww,” she said, staring at her fingernails, a million miles away.

It hadn’t always been like this. Before I got the job at Quartz, before I moved from the Southwest to the East Coast, into an apartment complex that was next to a glinting four-lane highway and had a view of a storage center, before all that I’d been a competitive swimmer. I’d started at the age of twelve, when my mom signed me up at the pool so I’d have something to do while she was at her GRE prep, and I immediately found I had a knack. I remember thinking, This is all you have to do? Just try to keep pushing as hard as you can against the water? Stretch your arm farther than you did the last time and keep doing that? I kept going because I was encouraged and because I became addicted to the approval I saw in the eyes of my coach. I had an instinct, too, that I noticed others didn’t have: how to time your first kick after a turn, the arc you sculpt with your hands in the water to get the most pull, minor adjustments that give you just enough of an advantage. I just knew what to do and it felt good.

By the time I was thirteen I was a two-time record setter at the Junior Nationals. I went on to get second and third place for the backstroke at the Nationals in consecutive years. I competed internationally, and when I was only sixteen years old I was ranked sixth in the 100-meter breaststroke at the World Championship Trials in Buffalo. Do you know what that’s like? To be sixth best at something in the whole world? I’d lie in bed and think about it. Sixth. The sixth fastest female swimmer under the age of eighteen. When you took into account the caprice of fate, the random way things jumbled and settled, couldn’t sixth, in another variation of the universe with slightly reassembled factors, have been first? Maybe I could have ranked higher—if it wasn’t for a kink in my shoulder, and a determination that unexpectedly caved in, one regular morning at college.

It was a Wednesday my junior year at Arizona State, where I was on a full athletic scholarship. I was sitting on the bench, waiting for Coach Serena to write the day’s practice sets. I had a queasy-sick feeling from being up so early, something I’d experienced since high school and never been able to overcome. I was in a daze, licking my thumb, staring at the way my thighs pooled on the wooden bench. My shoulder had been clicking. It was a small feeling, something minutely out of place when I brought my arm above my head. I thought it had to do with the angle of my palm in the water and so that week I’d been trying to adjust my stroke. Candace Lancaster was next to me, her head between her legs. I looked at a poster (“LET THEM EAT WAKE”) on the wall of the pool room and contemplated whether I should stop by the cafeteria on the way back to my dorm after practice. A few of the other girls walked in from the locker room. There was bulimic Erin Sayers from New Mexico. There was snake-tattoo Kelly from Pennsylvania, and then behind them was someone I’d never seen. She was tall but she looked so young—like a middle-schooler. We made quick eye contact and then she stared aloofly at her nails.

Her name was Stephanie Garcia, and she was a backstroker, like me. I’d worked hard to establish myself on the team, to make myself indispensable. I couldn’t believe it when, five minutes later, she surged by in the lane next to me with what seemed like appalling ease. She was like an engine running on cool, mean energy that would never be depleted, a new model that makes you see all the clunky proportions and pulled-out wires of everything else. I tried to catch up, I really tried, but I couldn’t.

Five hours a day, six days a week, gouging it out in the hours before school started; the cracked hands, the chlorine hair, the shivering bus rides and random hotel rooms, the fees, the dogged effort of my parents, the year I didn’t menstruate, all of it to just be really, really, really good at one thing. And then someone strides in with a kind of poured-gold natural ability; someone who hits the clean, high note you’ve been struggling for with an almost resentful nonchalance, and the game is over.

You could feel the coaches, even that morning, readjusting their focus, reassembling the team in their minds. I could see how it would all play out—how hard I would have to work, how many more hours I would have to put in, just to maintain my place. Older, shorter, I would never be as good as her. Plus there was my shoulder. I’d been ignoring it, but it was there—a light popping that couldn’t be worked out—a button caught somewhere in the works. It would only get worse.

Mentally, I quit that morning. A part of me wondered if I’d been secretly waiting for something like this to happen, or if I wasn’t as determined as I always thought I’d been. But it wasn’t that. It was an immediate understanding of what was now before me. A lifetime of knowledge and observation served me in one life-changing assessment. I guess I can be grateful that I just knew and didn’t delude myself.

It took me a week to say something to Coach Serena. She was the kind of clean, windswept older lady I hoped to be one day. But her manner during our conversation, though perfectly pleasant, confirmed my instincts. She said she was sorry to see me go, and I believed her, but she didn’t try very hard to convince me to stay. I stared at a decorative bronze anchor hanging on the wall of her office in a low-lit subbasement of the Memorial Gymnasium as we made the sterile small talk—so different from the years of barky, feral encouragement—that would be our final interaction.

With a year and a half left of college, I found myself beached on a communications degree I had no interest in. When I’d had to pick a major, I’d gleaned from other swimmers that it would be the easiest, but I’d still barely coasted by. I graduated by a hair, and, not knowing what else to do, I moved in with my friend Grace. We had a small one-story house in Tempe. I got a part-time job at a cell phone store—long, silent afternoons behind a counter, or assembling cardboard cutouts of buxom families on their devices. I started coaching, herding little kids in their bathing suits with their big stomachs, talking to parents who lingered after practice. It was all the chaff of the swimming world I’d once dominated, and I realized I had no interest in being on the sidelines. I wanted to shuck it all off.

I went to a career counselor at Alumni Services and she convinced me that the determination I’d exhibited in my swimming career, as well as my communications degree, made me a perfect candidate for some kind of vague position in the business world (she mentioned something like “account manager” and “verticals”), and that moving to the East Coast, where I didn’t know anyone save a cousin who bore for me a mutual dislike due to years of forced hanging out at holidays and family reunions, was not a terrible idea.

My second mistake was not doing more research and finding a good place to live. I was moving to a big city, a place I didn’t know, but I didn’t realize there were neighborhoods where young people were supposed to live. I believed the website of the apartment complex I ended up moving into, called Robins Landing, that said it was a mile from the charming downtown of a sub-city called Arlington. What they didn’t tell you was that it was an unwalkable mile of overpasses and parking garages, part of the never-ending Washington, D.C.–area sprawl.

Still, when I first started, I liked the job. I liked the rituals of the working business world, all new to me. I took satisfaction in my painstakingly selected svelte new professional clothes, and striding across the rain-soaked walkway and through the glass doors of the building I worked in. And other little things, like shaking a sugar packet in the break room, and then pouring it into a mug of coffee. I saw myself doing that from the outside, efficiently shaking a sugar packet in my pencil skirt and quarter-inch heels. This is what people did, I thought. They got jobs. They went to meetings. They made friends and exchanged knowing and humorous comments in the hallways about all the same TV shows.

I did hang out with Paula, my cousin, a few times, at her massive house in Silver Spring, Maryland. I’d balance a glass of wine on my lap and sit in the excruciating silence I remembered from our interactions as kids. “Nice bowl,” I’d say, pointing to the one on her coffee table. “Is that— Did you make it? Is it made out of clay?” “No,” she’d say, wiping something off the corner of her mouth, her red hair scraped back into a bun, her old-man’s face as usual just never giving an inch. “It was a gift from Danny.”

“Danny …”

“Kinsmith. Your other cousin? If you ever called him he’d tell you he’s taken up ceramics.”

I got cable and high-speed Internet. I said hi to my neighbor, a Syrian refugee named Joyce, while getting the mail. I inched forward on the parkway every morning in my car. I bought a lot of frozen dinners and microwaved them and dealt with all the packaging—plastic film and cardboard and compartments that needed to be pushed down in the trash. I sorted through credit card offers and bills and junk mail with the meticulousness of someone with too much free time. The complex had a game room with a pool table and a flat-screen television and sofas, and now and then I’d take a book and go sit and spy on the other tenants, the few who ventured in to watch sports. Or I’d idly sketch the fake holly branches coming out of a vase in an alcove in the wall, and then my hand would pause on the page and I’d look up and see myself from the outside and wonder just how I got slung into this padded room on the damp East Coast, and I couldn’t tell if every decision I’d made up to this point, every link that had led me here, had mattered a lot, or hadn’t mattered at all.

Back up in my apartment I’d lie in the middle of my living room and toss a small pillow up and down, and think about my virginity, and wonder if it subtly shaped everything I did. Was it possible that people could tell on some frequency, like that pitch or tone that only dogs can hear? Were the un-lubed, un-sexed wheels and gears in me making my movements jerky? And would that quality itself ward men off? I could already feel that happening. Out at a bar, when a guy started talking to me (not that this happened very often), all I could think about was where it was going to go. I wouldn’t be able to get into the flow of conversation because I’d imagine the inevitable moment when I’d have to tell him, and how fraught it would then become, and how strange he’d think it was that I’d picked him. Or maybe I wouldn’t have to tell him, but was it possible to just play it off? But then my hesitation would read as disinterest and the whole thing would derail from there. I could see what was happening—that the more I obsessed, the more I veered off track. But I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t relax. And so here I was, twenty-six and bottlenecked in adolescence, having somehow screwed up what came so easily to everyone else, and I couldn’t put my finger on when this had started happening.

Eleanor Pierce: We’re at another sleepover. We’re sitting in a circle and talking about sex and who’s done it and who hasn’t. It’s about half and half at that point. Blissfully confident in my youth, I tell the truth, which is that I haven’t. “Me neither,” said Eleanor. “But I’ll kill myself if I’m still a virgin when I’m twenty.”

“There’s something we’ve been meaning to tell you,” said my father over the phone. I was standing in my kitchen, staring out the window at suburban Arlington. Silvery, overcast light came in. In the distance, I watched a man in a blue polo shirt push a dolly of boxes along a path through the storage complex next door. He stopped, put his hands on his hips, and looked up at the sky. “Climate Control! U Store U Save First Two Months Free!” it read on the side of one of the units.

After I’d put in my two weeks at Quartz, I’d decided: I was going to move home. I was going to go back to Texas and live with my parents for a little while. I would start over, reassess. At least I knew people there, people who could help me meet other people. I pictured the bright plaza at San Antonio Tech where I used to wait for my mom while she worked on her business degree, the hot benches and spindly trees. Maybe I could take some classes. I thought of the dry, bright air, our sunny kitchen and backyard and the prickly grass, and the smooth, warm stones that lined the walkway up to the shaded porch in the back.

“Your mother and I have decided to rent out our house this summer. We’re going to Costa Rica. There are some things we need to work out.”

“What?” I said.

“We found a tenant. A nice guy. A carpenter.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“What don’t you understand?”

“Any of it.”

My dad was silent.

“You guys never do stuff like this. And who just rents a random house in a random neighborhood?”

“We found a guy, he’s a carpenter.”

“You said that.”

“People rent things all the time,” he said. “You’re renting an apartment, are you not?”

This kind of indignant, sideways logic that it was always hard to refute in the moment was my dad’s calling card.

“This is different,” I said. “You know what I mean.”

“No I don’t. If you’re so set on leaving D.C., you could always go stay with your aunt.”

“What kind of carpenter? Is he in some sort of recovery program?”

“What? I don’t know, Julia, but we’ve signed an agreement and it’s happening.”

“What the hell?”

My dad was silent again.

“There’s no way I could stay with Helen,” I said. “She’s a psycho.”

“I didn’t mean Helen.”

“Remember when she painted all those pine cones and flipped out about it?”

“I wasn’t talking about Helen.”

“Or Miriam. What, does she have like five dog-walking businesses now?”

“I was talking about my sister. Vivienne. Remember Vivienne?”

I paused. Three memories came flooding back: Vivienne presenting to me, with quite a lot of fanfare, a framed seashell on some kind of burlap background, and not knowing how I should react; Vivienne getting her hand caught in a glass vase, her fingers squished in its neck like a squid as she developed a fine sheen of perspiration on her forehead; Vivienne’s head tilted back thoughtfully against a stone fireplace. Vivienne. Weird, distant Vivienne.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “How is she?”

“She’s fine. She’s still in North Carolina.”

“Really?”

My father never talked about his family, or his childhood in the South. His father was an alcoholic, he had a sister who died. A car accident. And that was it. When I pictured his upbringing, which wasn’t often, I always imagined a series of sturdy, tired, old people standing next to an overgrown pickup. We’d only ever spent holidays with my mother’s side of the family—all the cousins and aunts were hers.

He muffled the phone. “What?” he yelled. He came back. “Your mother wants to talk to you.”

“Where in North Carolina?”

“Where I grew up, outside Durham.”

“And, I mean, what is she doing?”

“She’s fine. She works. She’s got a business painting scenes on plates.”

“Excuse me?”

“A business. Painting scenes. On plates. She’s actually pretty good.”

“She paints plates?”

My father sighed. “It would be nice for the two of you to reconnect.”

I wasn’t sure where this came from. He’d never cared before if I spent time with his relatives.

“Like, dinner plates? Does she make a living that way?”

“Hi, Julia.” It was my mom.

“Hi, Mom.”

“How are things?”

“Fine,” I said. “I heard about your plan.”

She cleared her throat. “Yes!”

“Dad said you needed to work out some stuff?”

“Yes, well, no, this isn’t … We’re fine.”

My parents had been married for a long time. They’d started their own business together, an online retailer called the Trading Post where they sold used saddles, a niche they’d managed to corner, and that drew on my mom’s know-how from her riding days when she’d been Collin County’s regional gold medal eventing champion. They’d always been dismissive of each other in a way I’d taken for granted and sort of admired. I thought that’s the way it was with married adults; you ignored each other all the time in a brassy, warm way. It occurred to me now that maybe it hadn’t been so warm.

“I overheard,” my mom said. “You’re thinking of spending the summer with your aunt?”

“That was just something Dad said.”

“Well, it might be nice.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Have you seen her plates?”

“No,” I said. “When would I have done that? Why would I have? I don’t even understand what they are.”

“She’s pretty good at it.”

“Yeah, well. No. Nope. I’m not going there. There’s no way I’m doing that.”

One month later I drove down a thin driveway, gravel popping beneath the tires, toward a house with white columns in the distance. All around stretched raggedy green fields, shiny in the late-day heat. I looked at the piece of paper on which I’d written Vivienne’s address: 2705 Three Notched Lane. I had no idea if I was going toward the right place. It had been a while since I’d seen a turnoff, much less a mailbox with an address on it. I passed a large twisted weeping willow. I passed a slumping wire fence. The house, bright in the sun, was on a gentle swell, and behind it was a dark line of trees.

It was only after I’d gotten off the phone with my dad and adjusted to the idea of not being able to go home that the idea of Durham began to take shape. I looked it up and saw that it was a midsize city with a lively downtown area and a historic-district repaving project, and that’s when the idea began to take shape. Scrolling through the stock pictures on the tourism part of the website, I saw one of a man and woman laughing at a candlelit dinner. Another showed a couple wearing bright T-shirts and lounging in each other’s arms and staring at a hot-air balloon in the sky.

I thought, This is where I’m going to lose my virginity. It would be like going to another country; I would be completely anonymous. I could do whatever I wanted, and it wouldn’t be attached to the chain of small failures I’d managed to accrue in Arlington, where I might run into Jessica and Kidman, or in Arizona. I could go to a bar, meet someone off the Internet, join some kind of singles-outing group, whatever. I could be one of these people, walking hand in hand in the sun next to a glass building in a revitalized business district with refurbished cobblestones. I didn’t even care that the graceless plan formulating in my head—of just getting it over with, in some anonymous encounter—was so far from how I’d always thought it was going to be, because I was so desperate to get rid of the albatross around my neck. The new plan also had the added incentive of basically being my only option.

I continued slowly along the driveway. A humid breeze came through the windows. It had been a sticky seven-hour drive that included two wrong turns and lunch at a shopping complex where elevator music stood in the air like pond water. Northern Virginia had been a three-lane highway lined with sound walls, which opened up into strip malls, churches, thrift shops, and gun stores as I got farther south. Then it was pretty, sloping fields, and pastures and farms; small towns with deserted streets and mansions set back from the road and fruit stands and dark, closed-down shop fronts. The way got narrower as I approached Durham, and for forty minutes I trailed a truck with two haunted-looking horses inside.

I tried to bring up all my memories of Aunt Viv. I kept thinking of us playing the card game Spit in our kitchen in Texas. I must have been ten or eleven years old. I thought of our hands whirring over the table, over ever-building and eroding piles. Viv is wearing a cotton shirt and she has an air of quiet superiority over her. But I don’t mind, because the companionship I felt with her was like being the sidekick to someone immensely capable. I remembered walking slowly through the backyard—she must have been visiting for the summer—and she’s pointing out what different plants are called, satisfied by my interest, a soft tower of facts. The feeling I had about her at the time was that she knew a lot of secrets. That there was a funny helix at the center of everything and she was the only one who was aware of it, and she would convey this with an amused side-glance that only you were meant to be in on.

I pulled up, got out of the car, slammed the door, and stretched. I looked around. A hot, wide, creaking day. There was the echo of faraway hammering. In the distance on each side were the trees and fences of other properties. The house was weather-beaten red brick, with a wraparound porch and a copper roof. Weedy wildflowers dotted the grass along the foundation. Three tall windows on the bottom level looked dark. An overgrown path led to what looked like a storage shed.

I went up the porch steps and knocked on the door. Nothing. I crouched down and looked through one of the windows but saw only heavy-looking furniture and dark shapes. I turned around, shaded my eyes from the sun. In the distance, a pickup truck crawled by on the road. I went back down and walked toward my car and was about to get back inside when I heard the door open behind me. I turned around and saw Aunt Viv for the first time in probably sixteen years. I tried to compose my face in the right way.

She walked toward me, smiling. She was wearing a T-shirt tucked into khaki pants. Her face had a scrubbed-fresh, almost abraded quality. Her long, dyed-red hair was swept to the side over one shoulder and tied in a floppy orange bow with fake berries sticking out of the knot. She smiled at me, a warm, conspiratorial smile.

“Julia,” she said, in a low, excited way. I remembered that from when I was a kid—how her voice could have a thrilled treble in it. We embraced. We pulled apart and regarded each other. She had aged, and there was a jowly heaviness to her face that hadn’t been there before, but you could still see the shadings of the girl she had been, how I’d remembered her from long ago—when she’d been pretty in a sort of game, clear-eyed way. “That’s a pretty bow,” I said, and then for some reason: “Did you make it?”

Her hand shot up, touched it. Something, ever so slightly, dismantled itself in her expression.

“Oh,” she said, “does it look that way?”

“No, in a good way!”

She smiled again, recomposed. “Look at you,” she said. “Come on up. I’ll show you your room.”

I leaned my suitcase against the wall and looked around. I was in a sparse, clean room with faded wallpaper. After we’d made some small talk about the trip, Viv had led me up the creaking stairs. “Well,” she said, “I’ll let you get settled. The bathroom is just down the hall.” She hesitated, then left.

I walked over to the bed and hauled my suitcase on top of it. There were two windows, surrounded by frilly curtains. I opened one. The room bloomed with warm, humid air. The wallpaper was a pattern of beige and pink flowers. The furniture was all wooden and looked antique, handed down. There was a white-painted chest of drawers that let out a musty smell when I opened them, a closet, a small wicker desk, and a night table with a decorative pitcher on it. It all had the feeling of a slightly moldering bed-and-breakfast, down to the little satchels of potpourri leaning against a mirror. I stared at a framed poster that read “The 1976 Newport Jazz Festival,” which showed a flower piping out some musical notes. I picked up a heavy silver jewelry dish with rippling sides.

I unpacked and went to the bathroom. I sat on the squeaking bed and stared straight ahead. Then I lay on my stomach and looked out at the field and the trees in the distance, and the hazy yellow late-day sky, and tried not to feel like a rope had been cut, and I could only tell it had ever been there by the new sense of drifting.

Half an hour later, I wandered down the stairs and found Viv in the kitchen, savagely mixing something in a small bowl with a towel slung over her shoulder.

“Can I help with anything?” I said.

“No,” she said distractedly, and then gestured toward the table. “There’s wine if you like. The opener should be in one of those drawers.”

I busied myself looking for it, rummaging around. I couldn’t tell—should we be talking, making small talk, laughing and catching up at this point? Everything I did seemed too loud. “Here it is,” I said to fill the silence, when I found the opener.

I hovered for a moment, and then wandered into the adjacent living room—a dim area with a cinnamon air-freshener smell and pashmina shawls draped over things. I sat down for a moment, then got up. I looked at a frame with a bunch of seashells hot-glued to it. I thought of our hands whirring over the cards. We’d had a few pleasant, polite phone conversations in the weeks leading up to my arrival, and I wouldn’t have thought it would be like this, like it was fifteen minutes later when we sat quietly across from each other at a long table in the red dining room under a badly tilting brass chandelier. She chewed quickly. Her hair was parted down the middle and tied back. She had changed clothes—she was wearing a shirt with pastel handprints on it. Her nails were painted red and she looked abrasively clean.

“Wow, this all looks great,” I said.

“Good,” said Aunt Viv. She arranged a napkin in her lap. She smiled. I smiled. I took a sip of my water.

“I really like my room,” I said.

“Good, good,” she said. She nodded expectantly, like I was supposed to say more. Like something more was supposed to happen in that moment.

“I was looking at that poster,” I said. “Do you like jazz?”

“You do?” she said politely.

“No, I mean, do you? I was asking if you do.”

“If I …”

“Like jazz. Jazz music. Are you a fan?”

It dawned on her. She tried to shimmy herself into the conversation. “Oh, oh of course,” she said, waving her fork, squinting. “I’ve tried, you know?”

“Sure, yeah,” I said.

She nodded and went back to her food.

“Dad says you paint plates?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, dabbing the side of her mouth with a napkin. “‘My little hobby,’ right?”

“Oh, no, no,” I said. “He didn’t say it like that.”

She shrugged, and sawed at her chicken.

“But so, you do?” I said. “You do do that?”

“I do, yes,” she said. “I do.” I had a flash of her cracking up with my dad on the sidewalk outside our house as they tried to hold on to whipping and wheeling sheets of poster board in the wind. There are gray clouds in the background. She’s laughing helplessly, her eyes shining, their efforts futile against the forces.

“Do you sell them?”

“More and more,” she said. “I do series, themes, you know. Different things each time. I’m trying to get it off the ground. But for now, for my day job, I still do hospice work.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “What’s that like?”

She shrugged. “Tiring.” She looked around. She had ramrod posture and a large forehead and a feminine, voluptuous face, but there was a shiny hardness there, too, as if there were steel rods beneath her skin.

I turned my napkin over in my lap, took a sip of wine, flicked something off the table. I glanced up at the brass chandelier and wondered about the likelihood of it crashing to the table. The seconds ticked by.

She seemed to remember I was there. She smiled brightly. “What do you think you’ll be doing here,” she said, “for the summer?”

“Well, I have to get a job. But I’m also planning on writing an essay,” I said, surprising myself, the idea having only occurred to me right then.

“Really?”

“Yes,” I said, “about swimming. About swimming culture. What it’s like. I don’t think there’s much out there—or at least I haven’t read much—about what it’s like. And I have that firsthand experience.”

“Of course,” she said. She stared thoughtfully into the distance. “I remember that period of time. Hilary always talked about that. How driven you were. She was really impressed.”

I shrugged and nodded.

“She’d talk about how you’d wake her up, drag her out of bed. You were all ready to go. You just wanted to get there. How you begged them to let you sign up at the swim team.”

“She said that?”

Viv nodded.

“That I begged them to sign up?”

“Yes.”

“But”—I shook my head—“that’s … They were the ones who wanted me to do it.”

She shrugged, chewed.

“I thought, because of Mom’s failed horse-riding career. I mean, she was the one who signed me up, you know, initially.”

I thought of my mom watching me from the bleachers at practice, biting her thumbnail, her face knitted with inner calculations. I thought of the subtle way she’d let me know if she thought I’d done a good job or not: if I could watch television in the living room when we got home, the meted-out dessert portions after dinner, the grade of affection in her voice when she said good night. Had I imagined all that? Everything tilted ominously as I considered that a huge portion of my life may have been based on a misunderstanding.

“Anyway,” I said, trying to figure out how to change the subject.

“Wasn’t there talk of you going to the Olympics?” she said.

“I went to the Olympic trials in Tallahassee,” I said.

She nodded, and I was annoyed by the way she gingerly avoided probing any further, as if it was something I was sensitive about, some huge failure that I hadn’t made it to the actual Olympics. People didn’t know. They didn’t know how good you had to be to even get to the trials. I wrenched apart a roll.

“Do you do a lot of crafts?” I said. “I noticed a few knickknacks around the house. Like that frame, in the living room?” I couldn’t tell if she’d heard me. She was methodically pulling something apart on her plate. “With the seashells on it? Or is that from— Do you travel a lot?” I said desperately.

Viv cleared her throat and looked up. “I took a class,” she said.

“Oh, okay.”

“On frame decoration.”

“I see.” I waved my fork around. “So, they said you could do pretty much whatever you wanted? With the frames?”

She glanced up at me. She straightened her shoulders. “Yes,” she said primly. She repositioned a piece of chicken with her knife and fork. I mashed a pea on my plate.

I looked up at the chandelier and said a little prayer that it actually would come crashing down.

“I did used to travel, quite a bit,” she said. “In fact, I recently went to Orlando.”

“Florida? What was that like?”

“Very lively.” She finished chewing and again dabbed the sides of her mouth. “I stayed with a friend there. A very nice apartment complex. It had balconies with”—she shaped the air with her hands—“flower boxes. And”—she continued shaping the air—“all different colors, as if to get the effect of a village. One evening a young man, he turned out to be divorced, invited us into the courtyard and we had teriyaki, all together there.”

She looked at me expectantly.

I nodded frantically. “Great,” I said. “Cool—so, he was a chef?”

“Yes,” she said. I felt as if I had disappointed her in some fundamental way. “More or less.”

“Great.”

The rest of dinner, we couldn’t find a toehold. I gave her an update about how Mom and Dad were doing. I talked blandly about my old job at Quartz. She perfunctorily told me about her duties at the hospice where she worked, talking to families and dealing with patients. I worked hard to keep her going about this, pumping her with questions, because it seemed like safe territory—work. And it distracted us from what I think she must have been feeling, too. That we’d lost whatever ease we’d had when I was a kid and she came to visit us in Texas.

Back up in my room, I poked around online for a while and then tried to read. At ten o’clock I turned off the lamp and lay there with my eyes open. A breeze came in and ruffled some of the pages of a spiral notebook on the bureau. It must have been two hours before I was finally able to drift off, listening to the shifting, digestive sounds of the house at night, and trying not to feel like I’d made a terrible mistake.

Two

When was the last time you wanted something? Wanted it so badly that the very grip of your wanting seemed to prevent you from actually getting it because you were throwing things off with your need, holding too hard, jarring things out of joint?

The next day I sat in the sun on the front porch, wondering how I was going to do it—how I was going to lose my virginity.

Aunt Viv had left for work before I woke up and I’d explored her home and the yard. I’d found some rubber boots in a hall closet and skirted the perimeter of the land in the back, weeds and tall grass whipping against my shins. A small trail led into the woods, and I went along on it until I came to an overgrown trailer that looked like a dining car from the 1950s. I peered in the windows, which were almost fully opaque with dirt and dust, and inside saw the outline of piles of wood. I kept going on the trail until it went under a fence and I had to turn around.

Back out in the sun, I kept going until I came to a twisted-up oak tree. I sat on the roots for a little while, watching everything in its hot summer stillness, grateful to be in the shade.

I went into the barn, where there were plastic chairs, and a few tables, and a bed frame, and some old wreaths, and sharp slats of light on the floor. There were cans of paint and jars and canvases. Something big and bulky was covered in a dusty tarp. I felt a small sting on the back of my leg. I slapped it and left.

Down the long gravel driveway, at the mailbox, I looked back and forth along the street. In the distance, ivy crawled along the power lines. The day bore down. I walked back to the house, feeling heavy and disorganized with heat. I got some water and then came back out and sat on the porch.

My virginity composed about 99 percent of my thought traffic. I concentrated on it—trying to drill it down to its powder, its particle elements, trying to recategorize it, impose different narratives on why this had happened.

I knew the way it worked, too—that certain attitudes would attract certain things. I knew that if you ignored something, stepped away from it, allowed yourself to breathe, it would come to you. It was like when I worked the box office at San Antonio Stage one summer, and I had to open the wonky combination lock to the safe, and sometimes the harder I tried, the more stuck it would get. But if I gave it a moment, allowed myself to float away, I had that necessary confidence, finesse, whatever that thing is that certain dim athletes and movie stars have—that insouciance that causes all the cogs in your universe to sync, gives you easy passage. The lock would click.

And that was the problem—to want something so badly was to jam yourself into the wrong places, gum up the works, send clanging vibrations into the cosmos. But how can you step back and affect nonchalance?

When I really wanted to torture myself I’d think of Eddie Avilas. He was the guy who, in high school, had most closely resembled someone you could call my boyfriend. And what really stung me about it, thinking back, was his general optimism and knee-jerk decency, how I hadn’t realized what a nice person he was.

I would remember the time he squeezed each of my fingertips on the dusty blue tarp in the middle of the track field. His tiny kitchen and terrifying father. His strange jeans. The beat-up neon-yellow lunch satchel he would always bring to school. (It was only in hindsight that I realized Eddie was extremely poor.) How he would feel like a pile of firewood, all jangly and warm, lying on top of me when we were watching a movie in my basement.

There was the time we were in his small sunlit kitchen with our homework spread out in front of us on the table. We reached a kind of lull, or resting point, in the conversation and he does this thing. I sort of see it from the corner of my eye and then look over, and through some glint of intuition I know that he wants me to see as he tosses his pen up into a flip and then expertly catches it. He looks at me with eyes as hopeful and pliable as a baby bird’s, but there’s also a gleam of pride there. This all happened very quickly, but so much occurred to me in that moment—that he had been practicing this move and waiting for a chance to perform it when it would seem most offhand and casual, like he just had this facility with the world, this capability that he wanted me to see. And in that moment he needed my approval so much that it was embarrassing, and instead of doing what I should have done, which was to just give him that by some flicker of awe or grin of admiration, I ignored him. And he saw me deciding to ignore him. And I guess you could say that it wasn’t a big deal, but a part of me knew that it was in these small transactions that unkindness could be most felling. I would have given anything to go back.

But that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part happened a few months later in a hotel pool in Corpus Christi. Because a few of our friends were going, Eddie and I got roped into a beach trip spearheaded by this Christian organization that was always sponsoring events at our high school. Despite the religious underpinnings, we had heard that the beach trip was basically a free-for-all. It was one of the few weekends I didn’t have a swim meet, so we signed up.

When we got there, however, it wasn’t long before we figured out that it was going to be a super-structured weekend of indoctrination. The second night we were all corralled into a conference room or ballroom-type area at the hotel where we were all staying, and made to watch a Christian punk band play against a bunch of depressingly stacked chairs. Eddie and I managed to sneak out.

We ran through the carpeted hallways. We made out against the empty breakfast buffet in the deserted dining room. We found a sitting area centered around a display of mystery novels and a small tree in a geometric pot. Hopped up on the warm hotel air and sense of escape, we decided to find the roof. Instead we found the pool.

It was deserted, bright, humid, and sultry with a shrine-like stillness and a fake, spiky tree in each corner. We tested the water and it was warm. We stripped down to our underwear and climbed in. Eddie got out, sculpted his wet hair into a Mohawk, and cannon-balled. We breathed into each other’s mouths underwater.

At a certain point, we were kissing against the side, sitting on an underwater outcropping, like a stair or a ledge. Eddie pulled back and said to me, “Do you want to?” He said it without any pressure, as if this was just a one-time thing, a toss-off, the perfect crest to our little escape, and not something we’d slowly, languidly been building toward. He said it with warmth, a sense of adventure.

I spent a lot of time thinking back and trying to trace the exact pathways of logic or reasoning that led me to, after considering it for a few humid seconds, coyly decline. It’s not like I didn’t want to—we had been slowly kissing for a while. It could have been that something about the cold lapping of the water, a less comfortable temperature than it had been before, along with a smudged pelican fixture that seemed to be staring at us from the wall combined to tip the atmosphere just enough the wrong way. It could have been that the stampeding intimacy of not only that moment but the whole half hour before was just too much, and I felt that I just needed a second. But what I think it really was—because I was on the knife’s edge, it really could have gone either way—was that I figured this was just the tip of the iceberg. That this was surely the beginning of many similar escapades. That I could afford to decline, if only to make the next proposition all the more delicious.

How could I have known how wrong I was?

So I told him, “Not tonight,” and pushed back, swimming away. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time; Eddie smiled at me quizzically and we hung out for a little longer and then got out, but things never culminated for us in the same way again. I kept assuming they would, but I think he thought he had been too pushy, and I was too shy to bring it up. It was as if that moment kicked off a series of misunderstandings that caused us to fall slightly out of step. He went away for the summer and by the time he got back things had ramped up for me swimming-wise; I hardly had any free time, and that was that.

I began to think of that moment, when I pushed away from him and swam to the other side of the pool, as being where my fate changed, where I branched off and started living a parallel life that wasn’t supposed to be.

In the other life, having lost my virginity at a young age in a hotel pool, I’m sexed and supple and swanning through a series of relationships, through life. The hang-up of losing my virginity would never have impeded me. It would never have started to worry me, only slightly at first, but then more and more as my friends each lost theirs and I got older and it seemed that I had lost some beat, some essential rhythm.

It would never have been something that started to curdle inside me, that I started to think about all the time. I’m a twenty-four-year-old virgin, I’d think, as I hit my hip on a gate and sneezed at the same time. I’m a twenty-five-year-old virgin, staring at the tiles of a mural on a city street. I’m a twenty-six-year-old virgin, catching my reflection in a car window.

Untouched. Like a flower suffocating in its own air. Like something pickling in its own juices. Something that badly needed to be turned inside out, banged right.

I watched a bumblebee leadenly explore a rose next to the porch. In the distance were the faint sounds of construction, something grinding and then hammering.

I thought, The further down this path I go, the more freakish I’ll become. The stranger of a species I’ll be, curling with my own horrible, weird hair. It was time to jam the key into the lock and force it, because I didn’t have time to step back and meditate my way onto the right path.

I needed to make a plan for the summer, a surefire strategy. I had to shed whatever preconception I had before about how it was all going to be.

Three

I stood in a room in Viv’s house filled with hanging plates. There was a tall cabinet in the corner, and on top of that was a clock embedded in what looked like a porcelain flower bank. It ticked heavily.

The plates were lined up in sets of four or five, and on each one was a meticulously painted scene. There was a jellyfish, painted in purples and pinks, gliding through the water toward the surface. It was part of a series that had to do with the ocean. Another one showed a craggy turquoise mountain under the sea. Another an underwater city, with clusters of towers and twinkling lights. A school of fish swam through, giving a sense of scale.

A different group showed a bright, teeming garden outside some kind of ominous estate with dark windows. There were twisting rosebushes, sculpted shrubs, and orange paths; flowers spewed out of small pots and the tops of statues. The perspective was all off, as if a child had done it. It was like the ground leading up to the estate was tipped up, slanted wrong. One plate showed the property from a different side, where a gray wall cast a shadow across a birdbath, and it looked like someone had just left a picnic, a golden fork and knife strewn on the ground. They were meticulously detailed. You could see the designs, some flicks of a thin brush, on the pots, and the small wells of shadows on the statues.

Other plates showed scenes of horses and cowboys, migrating bison and teepees on great plains, a Wild West theme. In another series was a line of camels following a colorful sultan across the desert, their bodies making long shadows across the sand.

It wasn’t so hard to see why people would buy these. On each of them were Viv’s tiny initials, “VG.” My favorites, or the ones I stared at the longest, depicted two mice constructing a multi-tiered card house on a red carpet in a dark living room. In the last plate, a mouse was standing on its tiptoes, balancing the final one on top. You could see tiny dots on each card—spades, hearts; it must have taken forever. Next to each mouse was a gold goblet. I stared at them for a really long time.

I then wandered with my laptop into the sunroom, a frayed, faded area with a row of windows you could crank open. There was a pouchy purple velvet couch and a glass coffee table with some craft books stacked on it.

Here was the list I made:

– Take some kind of community class

– Hang around the university or audit a course

– Internet dating

– Go to a bar

– Join a gym

– Go to a sales conference or a convention at a local hotel

– Join a singles-outing group

– Take a language class

– Get a job

– Don’t think too much

– Just be relaxed about it

I studied the profile picture of a man with the screen name “TheMeeksShallInherit.” He was outside, at what appeared to be an electronics fair, standing next to a table with a neon-orange tablecloth on it. There was another picture of him against the Golden Gate Bridge. Then a picture of him holding a huge kite and giving the thumbs-up.

“He sounds like an alien. Those are the kinds of pictures an alien would put up,” said Grace, my old roommate whom I’d lived with in Tempe and who was now my closest friend.

“Really?” I said.

“To convince you he was human and knows how to do things.”

“Sure,” I said.

I clicked through a few more pictures.

“Well, at least he’s not holding a huge pencil at an imaginarium,” I said. “Like, ‘Look at me!’”

“Totally.”

After I’d left, she’d stayed in Arizona and gotten a job at the historic public library in Tucson. I’d been there once. As we talked, I could hear her heels click on the marble floor as she walked around in the giant, day-lit atrium.

“He’s sent me a bunch of messages. Lots of exclamation points. He seems really jazzed about everything.”

“Well,” she said, “that’s not a bad quality, necessarily.”

I could feel her choosing her words. I’d let her think, over the years, by alluding to it or not correcting her when she made assumptions, that I’d had sex. That I’d been having sex. But there was something about the wide berth she gave the subject that made me think she knew the truth. Once, when she’d visited me, I told her about a flirtation I had at Quartz to keep apace with a story she was telling, and a troubled, questioning look had come over her face.

“So what’s she like?” she said. “Your aunt?”

“She’s nice,” I said. “She’s polite. She’s got a kind of inner poise. She’s very poised.”

“Okay.”

“She’s artistic. She has been to Orlando.”

“Okay.”

“Recently.”

“Got it.”

I heard the shrieks of children over the phone. A school group, bustling by.

“You’re really painting a nuanced picture,” she said.

“There’s a sort of hard quality to her. Like, if you said, ‘What do I do with this hen that’s bullying all the other chickens?’ and you were having all these qualms, she would take it from you and snap its neck, just like that.”

“So she has leadership qualities?”

“I’m not not saying that.”

“I get it.”

“I do think she’d be a good person to have in some survival situation. Like some kind of space mission that crash-landed on another planet and lost touch with Earth.”

“I’d be like, ‘Might as well rampage through the dessert rations!’” said Grace.

“Me too,” I said. “Except if it was only little boxes of golden raisins. In which case I’d be like, ‘Has anyone gone ahead and tried these cyanide tablets?’ Oh, hey, Aunt Viv.”

She stood in the doorway. I hadn’t heard her come in.

“Grace,” I said, “I have to go.” I put down the phone.

She was wearing a sheer white cotton overshirt-type thing that seemed to float around her body.

“Hi.” She looked around the room. “I didn’t know you’d be in here.”

“Yeah, I— It’s nice and calm.”

“I agree.” She tried on a bright smile. “Did you have a nice day? I was afraid you’d be bored.”

“No, I got a lot of writing done,” I lied. “It was great. No, this is just what I was hoping it would be like.”

“Good, good.”

We both looked at my bare feet, which were up on the coffee table. I lowered them. She pinched her ear. “It’s my friend Alice’s birthday tomorrow. She’s having a small get-together. I was wondering if you’d like to come?”

There was a slight quaver beneath her veneer that made me realize that perhaps she, too, had thought our conversation at dinner the other night had been lacking and that she was trying to make up for it, reaching out.

“Sure, yeah,” I said. “What time?”

“Three o’clock. In the afternoon.”

I nodded with a little too much exaggeration. “Great.”

“Great,” she said.

And then, because the moment seemed to require something more, I said, “I really like your plates. The hanging-up ones? In that room? They’re really good.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Those are from earlier. When I was first starting.”

“Oh, okay.”

She hesitated in the doorway. Then we started talking at the same time. “So, did you just get home?” I said. She said, “I’ve actually submitted a few of my latest ones to an art show.”

“What?” I said.

“I’ve submitted a few. To an art show. I’m doing a series about Arthurian legend. The Knights of the Round Table.”

“Cool,” I said. “Great. Like a local, community type of deal?”

“Well,” she said. I had insulted her. Something shifted between us and I immediately felt terrible. I also realized why Viv’s first impulse was to pull back and be aloof, because otherwise her face would unlock and every raw emotion would visibly travel across it. In this case, she flashed with hurt.

“It’s actually much bigger than that,” she said. “It’s sponsored by the folk art museum of Durham. It’s widely known. Have you heard of Southern Living magazine?”

“I think so,” I said quickly.

“Well, they do a feature.”

“That’s awesome,” I said. “That’s really cool. So are you—”

“Well, I’m going to eat something,” she said. “There are leftovers in the fridge.” And then she turned around and walked away.

And that was how I ended up driving into town the next day with Aunt Viv in her Honda Civic. It was hot and bright and everything was bursting with full summer lushness, the sky a chesty blue.

“Alice is in the last stages of lymphoma,” she said.

“Oh.” I was picking the sticky protective shield off the screen of my cell phone. I put it down and looked at her. “That’s horrible. I’m sorry.”

“Well, she’s got a good support system.”

“How long have you known her?”

“Many years,” said Viv. “We worked together.”

She was wearing diamond-shaped emerald earrings and her hair was swept back into an elegant French braid.

She glanced at me. “Have you spoken to your parents?”

“A little,” I said. “They seem to be doing fine. They’re, like, meditating every day and doing psychic weaving with a shaman or something.”

This little dash of sarcasm did not seem to go over with Aunt Viv. It was quiet for a while. We passed someone hanging up a row of small white dresses for a yard sale.

“It must be very interesting,” she said. “It must be a very interesting culture. There in South America.”

“Yes. Yes! It must be,” I said, nodding. “So, would you— Is that somewhere you’d want to go?”

“Perhaps,” she said. “I think I’d rather go to Europe. Verona. I haven’t really been out of the country much.”

“Why there?”

“The music,” she said. “The opera at the outdoor amphitheater, with everyone holding candles at night.” She sang a tune, a few notes of something, as if she were in a daydream, and then looked at me expectantly. My eyes darted around the car.

We drove along a street with many old Southern mansions set way back from the road. After a while we turned onto a narrower street, with smaller houses, and pulled up in front of a shady, flower-petal-covered walkway.

We got out of the car at the same time as a woman with long, earth-mother gray hair who was carrying some kind of pickled thing leaking out of a plastic bag and so had to hurry in ahead of us.

We were greeted at the door by a large woman named Karen wearing a purple dress with many layers. Her face was filled with happiness, her eyes dancing, her cheeks flushed. “Vivi!” she said, and then gave my hand a vigorous shake.

She led us down a hallway into a living room with zebra pillows and decorative spears on the walls and other foreign-looking artifacts. Viv introduced me around, and then the crowd parted to reveal Alice, swaddled in purple scarves, sitting stoically in a wicker chair like a village elder or seer.

She had a weak chin and warm brown eyes, and a trembling shine about her—like a bulb of water on a leaf right before it breaks. She smiled up at me and said, “I’m so glad to meet one of Viv’s relatives.” Viv knelt down beside her and took one of her hands and held it like it was the most fragile thing in the world while her face broke into a smile of bald admiration and sadness.

I said hello and then backed away to give Aunt Viv and Alice some room, and then weaved back through the house to find something to drink. It felt like I was intruding to stay talking to them longer. I was wearing tights even though it was a hot day, and they were itchy and sagging down and I had an eyelash in my eye.

“This was my aunt Cassie,” said a woman named Diane, who had intercepted me and then led me into a room—it was her house—where she showed me how she’d lacquered old pictures of her relatives onto the top of her desk. Cassie stared sternly out from a rocking chair.

“Great,” I said.

“And this is my great-grandfather Francis. They called him Franny.”

“Oh, okay.”

Diane obviously had a lot of time on her hands. I sensed she had more money than the other women. From what I’d gathered, they were all part of a core friend group that met while working at a hospice before it closed.

“It’s so I can have them all around me,” she said, sweeping her hand around the room. “All my ancestors, whispering from the eaves.”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling, trying to seem appropriately receptive to that concept. “I can see how that would be nice.”

After about twenty minutes, I managed to extract myself by saying I was thirsty and wanted to get some water. Then I slalomed between a few other people who looked like they wanted to talk and ended up positioning myself by a set of glass shelves. I pulled out various photography books and pretended to look at them, but really I was studying the women.

I watched Karen—the one who greeted us—walk around offering people cups of juice, stopping now and then to chat. Her arms were mottled red and she had a bustling and helpful way about her. I wondered if that’s how she’d be in bed—cheerfully helping things along in a brusque and no-nonsense manner, like a fishwife who’d seen it all. She would probably just want to get to the next thing and it wasn’t that complicated. I wondered if she was married and thought about how the right man could have a lot of happiness with a woman like that. She wasn’t what you would call attractive in a conventional sense, but now and then she shrieked with laughter and seemed to find mischievous humor in everything and you could probably have a kind of ribald joy with her of the kind that wasn’t seen in movies or porn.

I watched Diane massage the back of her neck and tilt her head serenely to the side while talking to someone. She was sort of beautiful in a strategically tousled way. She had a self-consciously throaty manner, like she wanted the world to know how deeply she felt things. I imagined she was really theatrical in bed and had deep, oaky orgasms and saw herself from the outside the whole time and threw a bunch of colored scarves into the air when she came.

Then there were people you couldn’t imagine having sex. I studied a woman sitting on the couch whom I hadn’t been introduced to. She had the prim face of a prairie schoolteacher and was irritably rummaging through a lime-green bag. She pulled out a bunch of receipts and pawed through them in her hand. I noticed middle-aged women like that sometimes. They’ll be wearing a hand-crafted vest over a turtleneck or something and pretty much expressing to the world that sex or the idea of sex was generally not on the table. But I couldn’t tell if, this lady for instance, if she had done this to herself or if everyone else had done it to her.

My thoughts were interrupted by Karen. We got into a conversation about how her father had been a door-to-door salesman in Nevada.

“‘It’s a forgotten art,’ is what he always used to say,” she said.

“Gosh,” I said, thinking about walking around hot, flat, gridshaped neighborhoods wearing a business suit.

“How long do you think you’ll be staying with your aunt?” she said, turning back to me and reaching for an olive. We were now standing in the kitchen, where some snacks had been laid out.

“A few months, until the end of summer.”

A wistful look came over her face. She looked into the distance. “You’re lucky.”

“What do you mean?”

“To get to spend so much time with Vivienne. She’s such an adventurous soul.”

“Yeah,” I said, somewhat confused.

“We were all so impressed when we heard about Bora Bora.”

“Bora Bora?”

She nodded, popped a cube of cheese into her mouth. “You know, not that many people would do what she did—just go and live there by themselves for a year. It takes a lot of guts. She’s hilarious about it, too. The coconut pantomime? You should ask her about it. I wish I could have gone.”

“Yeah,” I said, impressed. “I will.”

Someone came up to us and said it was probably a good time to start thinking about serving the cupcakes and our conversation ended.

I talked to a few more people, and then wandered around a little with a cup of juice. I was studying some framed pressed flowers when I happened to look over and see Aunt Viv talking to a group of the women. She was holding up a decorative crystal goblet—the light glinted through it—and telling a story. She was talking quickly. Her hair was coming out of her braid a little, and her face was flushed. It was something funny; the people listening were giggling and paying close attention. I could see that in this context, with these women, she had a kind of power. She was presiding, divvying out attention and eye contact while they all stood around with open faces. Everyone burst out laughing at the same time, and she looked around in a happy, calculating way.

Later, in the car, I asked her about it.

“So you went to Bora Bora?”

“What?” she said, looking over at me, bemused.

“Didn’t you live there for a year?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Karen said—about the coconut pantomime?”

“Oh.” She reddened. She became visibly flustered. She started messing with the radio dial and accidentally hit the turn signal, which started clicking.

“This thing,” she said, annoyed, poking at it, and then the windshield wipers came on.

“So you went there?” I said, prompting her again, once she’d turned them off and a few moments had passed.

She nodded quickly without looking at me. The atmosphere in the car became warped and strange. We sat in silence the rest of the way.

It was only later that night, thinking back on the incident and trying to decipher her behavior that I realized what had happened. Aunt Viv had acted exactly like someone caught in a lie. She’d never gone to Bora Bora. She’d made up a story and then forgotten about it until I brought it up. I thought of the imperious way she presided over her friends at the party, how she basked in their admiration; her obvious pleasure as she conducted the moment, and the look of triumph on her face when they burst out laughing. I could see embellishing a little bit, but what kind of person would make up a story that outlandish completely out of nowhere? What did Viv want the world to think of her?

Four

I stared at a colossal man named Ed Branch. He was like a mountain in a swivel chair. His huge face appeared to be melting, his cheeks sagging, the shiny skin under his eyes dripping down in two wide, flat drops. He was smiling at me in a jovial way. I took a sip from a glass of water on the heavy mahogany desk in front of me. There was a framed picture of an equally robust person—his wife, I assumed—caught unawares and laughing with a watering can, her face plump and happy, and I imagined they regularly had bawdy, baseboard-pounding sex, and then every once in a while she would watch him doing little boyish things, and her heart would burst.

And then there was Wes, sitting next to him. Wes seemed like a nice guy, too. He was young, grave, and ex-military. He had a knee-jerk politeness about him, old-fashioned and Southern. I wondered if that meant he’d be the same in bed, attentive to your every need with perfect decorum. Or maybe that consideration could turn cold and sharpen into cruelty. I wondered if this was something you could tell about a person.

“What was it you said you did at this Quartz Consulting?” said Ed. His hand absently wandered over to a nut bowl.

I was interviewing with them for a job at a firm called Kramer Branch, a week after I’d arrived in Durham. My third day there, with Viv gone again, the house quiet, I was stretched like a piano string. Everything had sputtered out—the essay I started writing; it was too hot to go for a walk. I tried reading in different rooms, but I couldn’t get into a book. I ended up in the sunroom, feeling half deranged, looking at a dusty craft manual on weaving. Finally, in defeat, I pulled over my laptop and started looking for part-time work. Plus, I thought, how was I ever even going to meet people? I needed to get out of this house and into town.

This job, part-time afternoon receptionist, was the first thing that had come up for which I looked remotely qualified, and I’d only have to come in after one o’clock every day.

“I facilitated communications by sourcing available online assets about solutions on higher education and applied them to a dynamic Web portal,” I said. “I was the social media pulse of the entire company.”

Wes and Ed looked at each other uncomfortably.

“Well,” said Ed, “what we really need here is someone to answer the phones for the afternoon shift. Run the odd errand.”

“I think I would thrive at that,” I said.

Two days later I was in my business clothes, making the twenty-minute drive back there for my first afternoon. The offices were in an old dry-goods store next to the train tracks, repurposed and outfitted with beige carpeting and wallboard and new windows in shiny plastic sashes. I walked inside, letting the glass door sigh shut behind me. Midday light came through some blinds and striped the floor. It was quiet except for an ambient electric drone. I looked around—maybe everyone had gone to lunch. I walked past a fraying taupe sofa and a glass coffee table with dingy magazines and up to the front desk, behind which was sitting one of the oldest people I’d ever seen in my life. She had sparse, short gray hair. She was wearing a patterned prairie dress with a frilly collar. Her face was an elaborate network of wrinkles and she looked wind-beaten, like she’d spent her life wandering through desert cliffs. She was trying to pull some cotton out of a huge bottle of vitamins, and her glasses were about to fall off her nose, and everything about her seemed to be teetering on the verge of disaster and I wasn’t sure if I should help or intervene in any way.

I stood there and waited for her to notice me. She teased out some strands of cotton.

“Excuse me?” I said. No response.

“Hello?” I said, and then, after a moment, “Can I help with that?”

Still nothing.

I stared at a plushy stuffed dog sitting up and hanging its legs over the edge of the table.

I was about to go knock on a door when I heard someone bustling down the stairs. It was a woman with a helmet of gray hair wearing flowing pastel vacation clothes. “Hi there,” she said. She arrived in front of me and extended her arm and about fifty bangles slid down. “You must be Julia.”

“Hi, yes,” I said, shaking her hand.

She turned to the old lady.

“Caroline,” she said.

Nothing.

“Caroline!” She banged on a desk bell a bunch of times.

The old lady looked up. “Jeannette,” she said loudly.

Jeannette took the vitamins from her and yanked out the cotton and gave them back. “This is Julia,” she said loudly. “She’s our new afternoon receptionist.”

“Hi,” I said.

We stared at each other.

Jeannette and I went up the stairs. “She’s James Kramer’s mother,” she said. She glanced at me sideways and rolled her eyes. “She used to be a judge. Down in Florida? Now she helps out around here.” And then, as an afterthought, as if she felt bad: “A lot of grit there. A lot of wisdom.”

“Sure,” I said.

We walked around and she pointed out all the things I would have to do each day. I was to keep track of the supply closet, water the plants, make sure the conference rooms were ready when there was going to be a meeting by putting coffee out, answer the phones at the front desk for a few hours, dust a row of glass clocks that were awarded at a yearly conference, run a package up to the titles office on Green Street now and then, and other low-grade tasks. Since there wasn’t much to say about the job, most of our conversation centered around the cruise Jeannette had just taken with her husband.

“Did anyone jump overboard?” I said.

She shrieked with laughter. “No, hon,” she said.

“Was all the food free?”

“It was, it was. And get this, there was a different ice sculpture in the shrimp every night. I said to Ken, I said, ‘What do they do with the old ones? Lick ‘em?’”

I laughed. “That’s right,” I said. “They just lick them down.”

“They say, ‘Now lemme get that shrimpy ice thing. I wanna lick it!’”

We both cracked up, with her elbowing me in the ribs a little. I thought I had found a kindred spirit, and later I would be a little crestfallen to realize that Jeannette had this dynamic with pretty much everyone and would laugh at anything you said as long as it was under your breath and in a secretive manner.

I met Wes again. He was on the phone and gave me a polite nod. Ed Branch was tenderly pruning an office plant. I was introduced to a paralegal roughly my age named Allison Block. She looked up from her salad in a friendly way and shook my hand over her desk. I met James Kramer for the first time. He was on the phone and waved us away.

Just like that the flurry of activity was over and I was sitting at the front desk, by myself, in the quiet. I could see a pebble walkway through the glass front door. I was on the ground floor of the building, and something about the awning outside, and the way the light slanted in, gave the impression of the room filling up with shade from the ground up, like an aquarium would with water. Everything was becoming submerged: the taupe sofa, the coffee table, a picture in a heavy brass frame. I swiveled around in my chair. I checked my e-mail. I contemplated quitting, if not tomorrow then the day after that. Because what was I doing in this staid, afternoon-y place when what I should really be doing was working at a restaurant or something like that—a place with people my age and alcohol and energy and lines that could be crossed? I probably would have made up some excuse and found a way out, if it wasn’t for what happened the next day.

It was about three in the afternoon and I was sitting there, looking through a calendar featuring North Carolina’s flora and fauna when Jeannette swished by and asked me to take a file up to one of the lawyers, someone I hadn’t met before.

His office was upstairs and at the far end of the building, next to a line of windows that overlooked the train tracks. It was deserted in that part, except for an abandoned copy machine and some dusty boxes of files and a secretary’s desk to the side of the door, where I saw that Caroline, the old lady, was now sitting. She appeared to be dozing in her chair, the same prairie dress bunched up around her neck, her head lolling to the side. I crept past and knocked. No answer. I knocked a little louder.

I was about to walk away when something stopped me. I stood and looked at Caroline and the crumpled way she was sitting. Her head was lying back against the chair. Her mouth was open. She was positioned like a rag doll that had been thrown from across the room and happened to land that way—one hand resting in her lap, the other dangling down by her side. Her legs were lolling open under her dress. She looked deflated, inanimate. My eyes rested on her chest, searching, I realized, for the rise and fall of breath. I didn’t detect anything and my heart started beating faster and I was just raising my hand to cover my mouth when there was a voice behind me.

“She’s not dead.”

I turned around. It was a man a little taller than me. He had a ponytail. He looked to be in his forties and had thick brown eyebrows and a forehead that cropped out over the rest of his face.

“Oh, sorry” I said. “I wasn’t—”

“No, no, it’s fine, I do that a lot, too. Not stare at her,” he said quickly. “But, you know, wonder if she’s dead.”

I turned back around. I squinted.

“Are you sure she’s not?” I said.

“Well, ninety-nine percent.”

We stood there.

“Man she’s old,” I said.

“Yeah.” He leaned back on his heels. I felt him look me up and down. “She’s basically a wizard at this point.”

We stared for a moment longer.

“She’s a great woman,” he said, as if he felt bad. “Very wise.”

“Sure,” I said.

He turned to me, smiled in an open way, and stuck out his hand. “I’m Elliot.”

“I’m Julia,” I said.

We turned back.

“Why does she have all those seashells on her desk?” I said, pointing to a chalky pile of shells and rocks.

“It’s just … Don’t ask. Her grandson. I don’t know.”

“Is she your secretary?”

“Technically, yes.”

We continued to stare.

Caroline’s eyes snapped open.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“I’ll just be getting back to my office,” Elliot said loudly.

“Elliot Grouse?” I said. “Here.” I shoved the folder at him and we quickly walked in opposite directions.

Back down at the front desk, I kept thinking about the interaction. I ate some mints from the mint bowl. I swiveled around. I ripped off a bunch of pages from the flora-and-fauna calendar. Elliot. Elliot Grouse. He had big eyebrows and sleepy eyes and features that sat low on his face. I answered the phone. I searched through the drawers and sharpened all the pencils. It was something about the way he’d looked at me. There was an ingredient there that I needed to isolate.

I finally put my finger on it—it was appreciation. He’d so appreciatively appraised me and shaken my hand and smiled. It was a smile that was approving and receptive and open to all possibilities.

I felt jittery. I ate another mint. I turned the floppy, plushy dog over and over in my hands. There was something there, definitely, I thought. Maybe this was going to be easy. Maybe it wouldn’t be hard to pour myself into the opening that smile had given because there was a touch of desperation there, too, on his part, I could tell. I thought of his ponytail and his wet appreciation, and the way he looked at me as if I were smeared across the universe and he was dazzled but also wistful.

He reminded me of this couple I’d seen on a tour of the Air and Space Museum in D.C. They both had really long hair and the guy was wearing a cape and holding a stuffed animal, and the woman was wearing a bustier like a medieval wench would wear and they were just drinking each other in the whole time. A sense of hostility and suspicion rose against them from the rest of the group, but I was fascinated. The woman wore dark red lipstick and was overweight but walked as if she had gold coins jingling in her limbs. You could tell they were just really happy to have found each other and they didn’t care what anyone thought and there was nothing either of them could do that would be embarrassing in front of the other person.

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