Fourth Comings (8 page)

twenty

A
fter Hope left for the Chateau Briand Country Club and Gardens (“Where Only the Bride and Groom Outshine Our Spectacularly Opulent Ambiance”), I dedicated the rest of the day to unpacking those boxes. That was my plan, anyway. It seemed like a constructive, productive thing to do on an otherwise eventless Sunday. Boxes would be removed, floor space would be discovered, and quantifiable progress would be made. I had taken over far more than 50 percent of the square footage of Claire and Chloe’s pastel playland and it was time to even things out. I would carefully cut the Cupcake in half, making sure Hope got her fair share of closet room and floor space, vanilla batter and butter-cream frosting. Oh, how I looked forward to Hope’s evening return and hearing her marvel over my finger-licking equanimity.

Only I didn’t get very far.

According to my useless labeling system, the first box blocking my path purported to contain
MOM AND DAD.
Hmm. I was fairly certain that they were still alive and well in Pineville, and that I had not dismembered them in a sick reenactment of a
CSI
episode titled “In Loco Parentis,” guest-starring that angelic actress from
The Gilmore Girls
going against type as the homicidal daughter. I carved open the cardboard with Hope’s X-Acto knife, if only so I could find out what I might have meant by that mysterious, possibly murderous label. I pulled back the flayed cardboard and winced at my hasty, X-Acto–wielding handiwork: I had ruined the mosaic Hope gave me on the day she moved to Tennessee nearly seven years ago, just before my sixteenth birthday.

Hope had meticulously pasted together innumerable confetti scraps to reconstruct our favorite snapshot, an arm’s-length view of two thirteen-year-old best friends, our teeth gleaming and eyes blazing with manic energy after staying up all night to watch the sunrise.

Hope would surely be embarrassed by this mosaic now, deriding it as untrained and immature. But her youthful lack of pretension distinguished this work of art from her other, more accomplished pieces. I’ve always thought it was the best thing she’s ever made.

And I ruined it. I’d sliced it right down the middle. Not in a way that separated Hope from me as if we were conjoined twins surgically transformed into our whole, independent selves. No, I had sliced the page horizontally, slitting our throats, separating our minds from our bodies. Or our heads from our hearts.

I sunk into the bottom bunk and cried when I realized what I had done.

twenty-one

T
ry to imagine us as the girls captured in that self-portrait, two thirteen-year-olds whiling away the stagnant, swampy summer in New Jersey. Hope was too tall for all the boys, with wild orange tresses. Her complexion was as delicate as an eggshell and almost as pale, and she always sought refuge from the relentless sun under the leafy protection of an oak tree. I had muddy hair and dark eyes that were ever-ready for a sardonic roll in the sockets. I was shorter and skinny to the point of scrawny, and I defiantly subjected myself to the UV rays in pursuit of the perfect tan even though my melanin never deepened beyond the shade of a bruised persimmon.

It was the summer before the start of eighth grade, and Hope and I had invented a game of hypotheticals called Would You Rather?

Would you rather have Manda’s impressive rack OR Bridget’s perfect ass?

It was an escapist coping mechanism, in which we inserted our boring, Brainiac selves into fantasy scenarios often involving the Pineville Middle School hoi polloi. Eventually the game evolved (or devolved) into a series of pseudo-philosophical inquiries that probed the shallow depths of our adolescent psyches.

Read minds OR have X-ray vision?

We believed that we had elevated conspicuous boredom to a higher art form. (In fact, publishers later developed a series of books with page after page of either/or hypotheticals. Hope and I felt royally gypped out of the tremendous profits made from what we self-centeredly considered
our
idea.) At the time this favorite photo was taken, we were less than a year into our best friendship, having found each other at the start of seventh grade when our town’s separate elementary schools merged into Pineville Middle School. And yet while we already appreciated our friendship for the rare and precious thing we knew it was, we had no way of knowing that we’d only have two more summers together before Hope’s family would decamp to Tennessee in the wake of Heath’s death….

Wait.

It just occurred to me, right now, in the middle of all this reminiscing, that these events harken back to the summer of your druggy precocity. It’s quite possible that you don’t need to imagine the scene because you had eavesdropped on it while altering your own reality in Heath’s bedroom on the opposite side of the wall. As day turned into night and again into day, Hope and I stayed awake playing round after round of Would You Rather? Meanwhile, you and Hope’s doomed older brother passed the bowl around and around, laughing over inscrutable insider stoner jokes, laughing at
us.
Chances are that you and Heath even earwitnessed the most controversial question in the history of the game.

“Would you rather kiss the same guy for the rest of your life,” I asked, “or
never
kiss the same guy more than once?”

Neither Hope nor I had kissed anyone at this point in our young lives, and we could think about little else. It was somewhat miraculous that this question hadn’t already been asked. Hope cried foul, claiming that I had broken the cardinal rule of the game.

“Can’t be answered with the information given!”

“Yes, it
totally
can,” I said, slipping down my training-bra strap to compare the pale, unexposed flesh against the dangerously red “tan” I’d roasted all afternoon.

“No, it can’t!” Hope was—and still is—incapable of sounding pissed off, even at her most pissed off. “The most crucial variable—the Guy!—is unknown.”

Then she went on to explain how if the Guy was an amazing kisser but a jerk, she’d ditch him for a wandering, wanton lifetime of one-time-onlies. But if the Guy was her
soul mate,
she would forsake all others…even if he came on with all the finesse of a saliva-soaked toilet plunger.

My rebuttal came in two parts:

1. By its very definition, her
soul mate
wouldn’t be a mediocre kisser, because true
soul mates
bond on all levels: physical, emotional, spiritual, and so on.

2. The question was
still
answerable even without the specification of
soul mate
or non, as it had less to do with the Guy and more to do with one’s attitudes about the familiar versus the mysterious. Security versus freedom. Guarantee versus risk. Monogamy versus polyamory.

Before I continue, and before you can beat me to it, I’m just going to call bullshit on my revisionist history. You know as well as I do that I wasn’t capable of using those exact words back then, as my vocabulary was still steeped in “likes,” “totallys,” and “no duhs.” I didn’t even attempt to make vague approximations of those arguments. And as yesterday’s debate in your dorm deftly proves, I’m barely capable of making such arguments now, nearly a decade later.

Okay. So I didn’t really make that apocryphal speech. In truth, I simply told Hope she was right and the question was invalidated because it couldn’t be answered with the information given. We moved on to a more straightforward hypothetical.

“Okay,” I said with a sigh. “Would you rather make out with Bender from
The Breakfast Club or
Jake from
Sixteen Candles
?”

And then we started laughing hysterically for no good reason at all, a moment that was first caught with a quick click of my camera, then captured once more through Hope’s painstaking clipping and pasting.

twenty-two

T
he mosaic is just the first of a collection of keepsakes that had me wallowing in my emotional archives for the remainder of the afternoon. It turned out that
MOM AND DAD
was shorthand for
THE BOX FROM MOM AND DAD’S HOUSE THAT THE FORMER THREATENED TO THROW AWAY UNLESS I TOOK IT OFF HER HANDS BECAUSE THEIR NEW CONDO HAS MANY AMENITIES BUT ABUNDANT CLOSET SPACE FOR JESSIE’S JUNK IS NOT AMONG THEM.
(My mother had, in fact, once labeled an earlier version of this same box
JESSIE’S JUNK.
)

And all this reminiscing has made me long for a cab to speed down Sixth Avenue blaring:

It’s a miracle! (Miracle!)

A true-blue spectacle, a miracle come true!

Barry Manilow would give this all-out extravaganza of nostalgia an added layer of depth and meaning. His overwrought ballads have served as the cheesy leitmotif to our relationship, going all the way back to when I was sixteen and you were seventeen, and you put his
Greatest Hits
into your ancient Cadillac’s eight-track for our first drive to Helga’s Diner. That same night, after we bonded over French fries and our mutual disappreciation for fake Xmas trees spray-painted with aerosol snow, you suddenly pulled over on a deserted side street and taunted, tempted, teased me with your teeth, gently biting my bottom lip instead of giving in to the predictability of a first kiss…. I know Barry Manilow’s synchronistic impact has not been lost on you, Marcus, otherwise you would not have chosen to show up last Christmas Eve with a toilet-seat cover decoupaged with his polyester jumpsuited likeness—an apologetic peace offering for your two-year absence.

No taxi has obliged me with Barry; there’s only the omnipresent hip-hop, competing beats that bump and fade with the stop and go of the traffic light. And, alas, the Barry Manilow toilet-seat cover was not among the memorabilia recovered safe and sound in the
MOM AND DAD
box today. Herewith is a catalog of artifacts stored inside:

JESSIE’S JUNK

(Cataloged in the order in which the items were removed.)

• One (ruined) mosaic by Hope Weaver

• Rubber-banded bundle of forty-four handwritten letters sent by Hope Weaver between January 2000 and August 2002, postmarked Wellgoode, TN, to Pineville, NJ

• Rubber-banded bundle of twenty-six handwritten letters sent by Hope Weaver between August 2002 and June 2006, postmarked RISD, Providence, RI, to Columbia University, New York, NY

• Purple Post-it from Professor Samuel MacDougal originally attached to the envelope containing his letter recommending me for Columbia University: “Be great in act, as you have been in thought.”—William Shakespeare

• Copy of 2004 National Book Award nominee,
Acting Out,
autographed by Professor Mac; inscription reads: “To my best student, I’ve quoted this before, but it bears repeating: ‘We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.’—Kurt Vonnegut”

• Nine-by-twelve envelope containing sixty-seven photos all dating between 1996 and 1998; includes one snapshot taken at Pineville Middle School’s Halloween Dance 1996, in which four out of five seventh-grade girls are posing as four out of five Spice Girls in PVC platform boots and totally age-inappropriate Girl Power! gear: Hope Weaver as Ginger Spice, gamely rocking the iconic Union Jack minidress; Manda Powers as Posh Spice, spilling provocatively out of a black pleather bustier; Sara D’Abruzzi as Scary Spice, pre-rexy and still chubby, bursting obscenely from a chartreuse spandex tube top; Bridget Milhokovich as Baby Spice, relatively demure in a pink thigh-skimming baby-doll dress; and yours truly, caught on camera sulking stubbornly in the background, wearing all black, having refused to dress up as Sporty Spice because I thought the group costume concept was “lame”

• Clipping of
New York Times
article from September 3, 2000, “Will Cinthia Wallace Be Gen-Y’s Literary ‘It’ Girl?” annotated by Bridget Milhokovich in pink Magic Marker; commentary includes: “OMG! A billionaire’s daughter? Part of the Park Avenue Posse? HOW COME I’VE NEVER HEARD OF HER?” And: “SHE LIED TO US TO SPY ON US!! TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT US AND GET INTO HARVARD!!” And: “
BUBBLEGUM BIMBOS AND ASSEMBLY LINE MEATBALLERS
IS A SUCKY TITLE!!!” And, finally: “OMG!!!! WHAT A SUPER BITCH!!!!! I HATE HER!!!!!!!!!!”

• Wally D’s Sweet Treat Shoppe employee T-shirt, wrinkled, torn around the collar, stained with chocolate syrup, smelling of rancid sweat and skunky Budweiser, worn during a one-night stand in the basement of Wally D’s Sweet Treat Shoppe on July 31, 2005

• Handwritten note dated August 1, 2005, on linen card stock personalized in Engravers MT font (
L
EN
L
EVY
) thanking me kindly for the one-night stand that had unburdened the author of his virginity

• Printout of first e-mail ever sent by [email protected] to [email protected], dated March 1, 2002: an invitation from Paul Parlipiano—my high school crush-to-end-all-crushes, obsessive object of horniness, and gay man of my dreams—to a Snake March, a nonviolent demonstration protesting all forms of tyranny thrown by Columbia University’s People Against Conformity and Oppression

• Pink gingham print birth announcement for Marin Sonoma Doczyl-kowski; born May 30, 2002; six pounds, four ounces, nineteen and a half inches long; handwritten note from my sister: “Congratulations on becoming an aunt!”

• Rainbow-colored silk ribbons that decorated my grandmother Gladdie’s walker when she lived at Silver Meadows Assisted Living Facility; removed after her death in May 2002

• Pair of malodorous low-top Converse worn almost exclusively throughout high school

• A handwritten poem titled “Fall,” inspired by the Adam and Eve Creation myth, dating back to Spring 2000, written by Marcus Flutie on a torn-out piece of notebook paper that was and still is origami-folded into a mouth that opens and closes; sample lines: “But if I am exiled/alone/I know we will be/together again someday/naked/without shame/in Paradise”

• Handwritten lyrics to the song “Crocodile Lies,” written and performed by Marcus Flutie on June 8, 2002, also known as the date of Pineville High School’s Senior Prom, and the night I was blissfully unburdened of my virginity; sample lines: “You, yes, you linger inside my heart/The same you who stopped us before we could start…”

• Red T-shirt, neatly folded and washed, though not in recent memory, with iron-on letters spelling
ME, YES, ME
across the chest; handmade by Marcus Flutie and given to me to wear under my high school graduation gown as I delivered my salutatorian speech on June 30, 2002; inside the front breast pocket, a folded-up handwritten draft of that graduation speech, titled “Real-World Revelation: A Malcontent Makes Peace with Pineville” final sentence reads: “For better or for worse, you have helped me become the person I was always meant to be: Me, Yes, Me.”

• Thirty-three printouts of Poetry Spam, in which junk e-mail was rewritten into haikus, e-mailed between September 2002 and December 2003 from [email protected] to [email protected], including the very first one that arrived during my own college orientation program precisely
four years ago today
(see attached)

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Date: September 3, 2002

Subject: Poetry Spam #1

jumbled nonsense in

quixotic combinations

becomes meaningful

Original message:

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Date: September 3, 2002

Subject: in price gambit

looking momentous histamines very combinations good suave regarding money kahn rich upside anode multifarious jumbled flavor cursor look becomes what calypso giving christmas spectacular incredible summit caleb perfect abscissa allegheny segregation local nonsense russian girls reunion waiting right email quixotic they’re exclusive meaningful bleary residual income biz low journey introduction peacetime