Crestview Way, October 1985
Victoria Lancelotta
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It’s Saturday night almost Sunday morning when Jimmy and Abby do it. They’re at Ryan from AP European History’s house, the front door open and the back patio slicked with spilled beer, an October wind spinning wood smoke and brittle leaves. The party’s roar has settled into a tranquil boozy purr. The kitchen is fluorescent and empty, the couch in the living room anchored by couples panting at either end, the staircase littered with plastic cups and discarded sweaters and moccasins with the heels crushed down.
Jimmy and Abby have been on the sofa in the den drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and slugs of root beer schnapps for hours. They’re drunk but not drunk enough to quit looking: Jimmy for KeriAnn with the braid and Abby for Sam who
just moved from Chicago. They look furtively, through lidded eyes and over shoulders as they lean together, foreheads almost touching, sharing the bottle of schnapps as they pantomime a serious conversation, laughing too readily and brushing damp hair away from each other’s flushed brows to telegraph to anyone passing by how interesting each finds the other.
They know, they do, that KeriAnn and Sam are not looking for them, and maybe they even know that KeriAnn and Sam would go the long way through the dining room for a beer to avoid talking to them, or having to think of a reason not to talk to them.
It’s not that KeriAnn and Sam are unkind, or cruel; it’s just that they’re used to being forgiven their mostly insignificant slights and inattentions, if these are even noticed beyond the pretty hair and awesome accent and the effortless ease with which these two navigate the treacherous currents of eleventh grade.
Neither is it that Jimmy and Abby are stupid. They’re just tired of being a little lonely a lot of the time, and pretending they’re not, or pretending it doesn’t bother them. They’re tired of the constant dull ache of the bother they won’t admit to, this boy and girl who are smart enough to suspect that this loneliness won’t last and young enough to hurt anyway, anyway.
So here they are, these two and a few dozen more, not the football players and cheerleaders who are at a nastier party in a fancier house where already three boys are bleeding and two girls are weeping and a dining room chair has been put through a window screen; not the crowd with green hair and black nail polish and
studded boots and belts who are gathered at the playground throwing the I-Ching and smoking clove cigarettes under the bright moon.
No: in this warm and bright and only slightly-trashed house are the well-liked and well-groomed, the promising and polite, the goofy and awkward and decent, the ones who might stand in front of their mirrors at night and wish to be special but not odd, unique but not different; the ones who believe this is somehow possible and for whom anything more would be too much, too soon.
They are not long past crying for their mothers if they wake from nightmares—if they were birds they would still be damp. The boys blush, remembering how when they slow danced in middle school they rested their hands on the girls’ hips and the girls leaned in just enough for the boys to feel through shirts and sweaters what they dreamed of touching. The girls blush remembering how much they wanted to be touched.
So they pretend not to remember what may as well have happened yesterday, these conscientious girls and responsible boys, curved and muscled but awkward still, hearts stuttering and shy. They try on bravura anyway, shimmying into it together—safety in numbers. When they slow dance now the boys pull the girls hip to hip and the girls wrap their hands around the boys’ necks and their sweaters float up just enough: sliver of belly, gut-flutter, butterfly fingertips.
Saturday night balanced on Sunday morning and Jimmy and Abby are teetering between drunk and hung over, their eyes burning with exhaustion but still bright. They’re tired and ready to abandon the illusion that if they just wait long enough, smile hard enough, laugh loud enough, KeriAnn and Sam will
materialize before them, backlit and gauzy and moving toward them in paradoxically eager slow motion, the euphoric end of a movie they’ve seen before and can’t decide if they like or not—if they believe or not. They can’t decide if they’re hungry or nauseated but they know they’re ready to stop pretending to be fascinated by each other in the unlikely hope that this feigned interest will generate around them a radiant orb of irresistibility.
So they sigh and draw back from each other. Abby kicks her shoes to the rug and curls her socked feet beneath her on the couch but not before Jimmy grabs at a toe—her socks are purple; Space Invaders march around her ankles in thready green rows—and laughs.
What’s funny? Abby says, annoyed.
Nothing, Jimmy says, too tired to tease, I like them, and Abby smiles, says So do I, too tired to be angry, and once they stop pretending they start meaning it. (Meaning what? They never meant to find themselves doing what they could not have imagined doing three hours ago, not with each other at least, not in this lifetime, and yet here they are, and they are doing it with a heat and urgency they’ve never felt, shoes off shirts off pants undone, gasping, close to laughing though there’s nothing funny about how much each of them wants this person they’re suddenly not at all sure they’ve ever seen before.)
They pull the afghan from the foot of the sofa over them—there are other people in the house, after all—and beneath it they shove at the clothing they haven’t got off yet and now they’re laughing for real.
What’s funny? Abby says again, not annoyed anymore, she’s so not annoyed she can barely get the words out,
Nothing, Jimmy says again, and it’s true, nothing has ever been less funny, nothing has ever felt scarier or better, nothing has ever sounded like her breath on his throat or felt like her hair on his face or tasted like the soft quiver of her belly.
—I think—he says,
—I know—she says,
They are in such a chaos of bliss, of relief and disbelief, that they can hardly see, so they squeeze their eyes shut because what good are they now that they have hands and tongues, now that their skin is on fire, now that the dry leaves are blowing cold outside, blowing before away.
They will forget closing their eyes before they can regret it.
These things matter: Jimmy and Abby both hate gym class. They’re smarter than they let on. They shared a crushed Snickers once in the back of study hall. They’ve never flown on an airplane. Jimmy works the front desk at the emergency vet on Monday and Thursday nights, and when someone is crying too hard to fill out the paperwork he does it for them. Abby fills take-out orders at the Old Line Cafeteria on weekends and if a ticket has a senior citizen discount code she adds extra slices of chocolate cream pie in the bags, extra pints of vegetable soup, extra crackers. They’ve never danced together and they never will.
These do not: the music that’s playing in Ryan from AP European History’s den—Jimmy and Abby aren’t listening to it. They aren’t listening to the discount furniture warehouse commercial on the television in the next room or the choking
laughter of the couple from Drama Club in the yard or the blue sizzle of stars above them, so pretty in their dying. The trig test on Monday doesn’t matter and neither does the fight they’ll have in the hallway after, Jimmy trying to take Abby’s hand and Abby yanking it away hissing not here and Jimmy trying to shake the hurt off as he walks past KeriAnn without seeing her and Abby blinking back tears she does not understand.
(The blood-pound in Jimmy’s ears is oceanic; the hot rush in Abby’s veins deafening, and when they finally do what they never expected to be doing the world contracts around them; a hole burned through film, edges black and curling, dust motes dancing in a ring of hot white light.)
It doesn’t matter that Abby has done it before and Jimmy hasn’t, or that neither knows this about the other. Abby decided long before that the two times with the breakfast waiter from the hotel on vacation in August didn’t count: the first because she still isn’t sure it actually happened and the second because all she wanted was to get it over with.
That’s not what she wants now. What Abby wants this third charmed time is more, even if she’s not sure how to ask, or what that means. What Jimmy wants is to do it right and for her to like it, even if all he can think of now is how he doesn’t want to die before he finishes.
What they both want is to know Have you always been this person have you always been right here?
What they both want is to know Will I always be the person you’re making me?
These sweet foolish children in the universe of their bodies, their blood ready to burn through the roof of the sky, their words blown to ash and useless. They still believe it’s possible, probable, definite that they’ll be happy. They have no idea yet what small things they’ll learn to tell themselves happy is made of.
What they want is the next time before this time even ends.
Right now, though, their hearts hammer and pulse with astonishment.
It doesn’t matter that there won’t be a next time, not yet. By the time they realize this they will have misremembered everything about this night and morning except the saltwater taste of each other’s skin. By the time they realize this Jimmy’s mother will have passed out in a tub of cooling water with an empty bottle of pills on the rim and a cigarette burning its way to her scraped and twisted fingers and Abby’s brother will have sprawled bleeding in a frat house basement while the other pledges close in to spit and kick, screaming faggot faggot faggot.
Right now, though, their fingertips spark and sing: they don’t believe yet that everything ends, or that they will greet some of those endings with a relief so vast and blinding it will seem more like death than deliverance.
A car horn honks and the couple from Drama Club shout, crash and stagger through the fallen leaves to the driveway, to the waiting day that Jimmy and Abby want no part of. No matter: Saturday night has tumbled into Sunday morning. The clocks insist.
They will not remember separating, tugging at their clothes under the afghan, shy again and nervous, wet throats cooling. They will not remember the drive home, Jimmy driving his mother’s car alone and Abby squeezed in a
backseat between the girls she came with, the radio murmuring over their exhausted quiet. They will sleep without dreaming and wake in their own beds, in their new skins. They will open their eyes and the furniture and walls they’ve been looking at for years will be funhouse strange, their own faces in the mirror two mysteries, and they will be elated by this, and terrified.
They will forget, sooner than is imaginable, that for a few October hours the world was perfect, and they were perfect in it. The clocks will not remind them. In one month Jimmy will wait by his mother’s naked body for the ambulance to come and in two Abby will sit in a plastic chair bolted to the police station floor while her parents wait for her brother to give his statement. The mirrors will not remind them. In three months Ryan from AP European History will throw a Christmas party and the football players will show up, staggering, high-fiving, shouldering through the door in twos to move furniture from the living room out onto the front lawn. Jimmy and Abby will hear about this on the Monday before winter break, Jimmy in homeroom and Abby in the cafeteria, and they will receive this information with the perplexed frustration of people who cannot understand the language they hear; who are unable to parse the customs they see. When they pass each other in the halls they will suddenly find reasons to rummage through backpacks and purses, heads down, hearts galloping. They will not remember the weightless bodies those hearts lived in.
They will not remember the cold from the open patio door, the crocheted afghan, cigarette smoke and root beer schnapps, the silvered world stretched wide, branch and star and frost.
Jimmy will learn to clean his mother’s feeding tube and Abby will learn to be silent when her brother refuses to press charges and February will erase itself. They will learn to find the derivative of f at the point x = a and they will learn how easy it is to forget what is impossible to have. The snow will melt and freeze again and Jimmy will think once she can feed herself—
and Abby will think once he transfers—
and the last freeze will sink into warm soil and Jimmy and Abby will think
once the insurance pays
once we can get away for a weekend get a little time to breathe
once the home health aide comes full time
once we find new doctors new lawyers new friends
once I stop caring I get out I forget
once he leaves
once she dies
and they will not remember the fizz and skip of breath and pulse and wanting. Abby’s brother will be found with his skull cracked open in the back lot of a package store by campus and Jimmy’s mother will drown silently in her own pulmonary fluid in her own dry bed in her own warm house and Abby and Jimmy will accept all this as the best ending they could hope for.
And if they accept it, what tired god would intervene?
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Victoria Lancelotta is the author of the story collections Ways To Disappear and Here in the World, and the novels Farand Coeurs Blesses. Her short fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. She is the recipient of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Award, multiple Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grants, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She was born and raised in Baltimore, MD.
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