Shout Her Lovely Name (24 page)

Nora’s elbow hurt. She was completely unprepared for tomorrow’s final. Her backpack slumped like a sad little gnome in the wheel well. She would have to lie when she got to Thad’s condo. With her jeans and hair damp, her arm in the makeshift sling, what could she possibly say? She imagined opening his door to the spacious warmth, the lingering smell of dinner gone cold, freshly showered fit Thad, worried and angry, sitting beneath the bright circle of clean light on one end of the couch. He would know about BRAT and RICE. He had no obligation to forgive her but he would. Thad would tend to her and love her and she would not be bored. No, instead she would fill with self-loathing.

“Ta-da!” Aaron held up the two-for-one coupon.

“Did I inspire you?”

“I have definitely moved into a simmer mode.” He tapped his forehead. “Things are composting in here.” His tender eye skin was gray as raw shrimp.

In the parking lot seagulls scavenged near a tipped trash can, stabbing at foil wrappers that glinted in the streetlight. Tonight Nora would eat tacos for her dinner and sleep beneath Aaron’s orange blanket. She shivered, knowing it would be cold. Tomorrow she and Aaron would say goodbye. Nora would bomb her final. Tomorrow she would call Ruby and listen as her mother described the amazing friends she’d made at camp. Tomorrow when she finally saw Thad, she would be unforgivable.

Developmental Blah Blah

Mini cupcakes—iced, sprinkled, and dressed in ruffled paper wrappers—lined the pastry case like a jolly marching band. Cassie leaned forward to peer in at all the tiny perfection. “I don’t know . . . He’s going to be fifty.”

The young woman behind the counter, bleak and gothic with kohl-lined eyes, a metal stud flashing high on her cheek like a hammered-in beauty mark, and thick black sweatbands on both wrists, was a flesh-and-blood contradiction to the buoyant mural on the wall behind her—rainbows and bluebirds.

“Little cupcakes seem appropriate for an eight-year-old girl’s birthday party. Are these too hopeful?”

“You mean like too much hope?”

Cassie’s daughter, Edith, loudly sighed but didn’t look up from the blur of her thumbs stabbing out a text message on her cell phone. Edith had a package of Manic Panic Bad Boy Blue hair dye in her backpack and was supposed to already be coloring her hair with Pammy. Her mother dragging her along on this unscheduled stop at Hello Cupcake! on the way home from the orthodontist was just One. More. Thing.

“We sell out every day.” The bleak girl shrugged. “The audacity of hope and all.”

“Every day?” Comfort food was all the rage. At a recent dinner party Cassie and Ben were served poshed-up mac and cheese as the main course. The hostess said she was nostalgic for a pre-al-Qaeda evening. “Do you think it’s because of uncertain times? Seeking comfort from a cupcake.”

“Sometimes people buy cupcakes just because they want a tiny cake.” Edith took the German chocolate samples the girl offered, passed one to her mom. “Everything isn’t always about something else.”

Cassie’s mouth was swamped with cloying sweetness. The older she got, the less she craved sweets. And what did that mean? What was it Seth said at her last session? Cassie had asked him about developmental milestones in midlife. What should she expect going forward besides the appearance of mysterious dark neck hairs and sudden bouts of inertia sometimes with her arms halfway submerged in lukewarm dishwater or sometimes behind the wheel in her own driveway? Pausing just long enough to show mild amusement, Seth told her that the sense of one’s life in a constant upward spiral vanishes. He gestured too, his finger describing a tiny tornado pointing forever higher. “That’s no more,” he’d said with his frustratingly unflappable tone. If Seth didn’t (1) hang on her every word, (2) find her funny, and (3) sport a thick brown ponytail, which she fantasized about lopping off and stashing beneath her pillow, she might have slugged him for his cavalier nonchalance. Either that or quit therapy. What did he mean, the possibility of ascent was over? Perhaps Ben on his fiftieth birthday deserved the gravitas of a bittersweet chocolate sheet cake. To Cassie everything was absolutely about something else.

“Oh my God, I’m about to have an orgasm,” Edith said.

Cassie flinched. The girl behind the counter was unfazed. Only Cassie was fazed by Edith, small and sweet, whacking her clumsy new language bat against Cassie’s sensibilities.

“Dad will love them.”

Truth be told, Ben would prefer whatever was cheapest. A pile of Twinkies still in their cellophane wrappers would delight him. Ben took the joy out of gift-giving because she could see him calculate the cost of, say, a dove-gray cashmere scarf as he twined it around his neck in front of their Hanukkah bush. Whatever lay beneath the wrapping was too extravagant in Ben’s view. He’d returned that scarf, bought an electric drill, claimed he was looking forward to being handy once they moved to the East Bay. The scarf, it turned out, would have been more practical. He’d used the drill only once in the new house, to attach a bookcase to the wall in Edith’s room. When he severed an electrical wire, he called a handyman, who ended up earthquake-proofing the rest of the house.

But the cupcakes weren’t really for Ben, they were for the women in the neighborhood who would attend his surprise party with their husbands, the women who hadn’t quite accepted Cassie into their ranks, even after five years of living in Rockridge. Yes, they’d invited her to join their book club, but when she’d blurted a contrary opinion about the selection, an unsurprising novel set in Afghanistan, she’d felt them pull away. Cassie always blurted. Ben described her personality as
pungent
and then, when she let him know it hurt her feelings, he chided, “Oh, stop,” with a diminishing tone, as if he had no clue why the adjective upset her.

“Honesty is admirable,” Seth had agreed at another of their sessions, “but at what cost?”

At the book-club meeting, Blythe Cooper (rhymes with
supper,
she instructed Cassie at their introduction), wife of an orthopedic surgeon, gripped the novel in her manicured hands like a stone tablet and claimed it the best thing she’d ever read. Perhaps Cassie shouldn’t have responded, in her quietest, most careful voice, that she found the novel’s perfectly balanced shape boring, as if the novel itself had been raised in a confined space, like a veal calf. Perhaps she shouldn’t have gone on to explain that she preferred messy to symmetrical, feral to polite, because isn’t feral the truth? Her flushed cheeks and strong opinion were met with a long pause, furtive glances, and the sipping of good pinot noir from the surgeon’s wine cellar. Then, maintaining her smile-royale, Blythe said, “If one reads only to feel better about oneself, then I suppose shitty real-life stories make sense. This novel soared.” Cassie could tell by the way her hostess touched her throat that it pained Blythe to swear.

“Hello? Mother?”

Edith and the counter girl stared at Cassie, who brought her fingertips to her own throat—another moment of inertia. Then she realized what they wanted: her cupcake verdict. “You’re right,” Cassie said. “Orgasmic.”

Edith’s mouth fell open, revealing chunks of frosting in her braces. “Never-ever. Never say that word again.” The counter girl too looked pained and wouldn’t make eye contact as she wrote up the order.

On the way home, Edith informed Cassie that the counter girl was a cutter; that’s why she wore sweatbands on her wrists, to cover up new and old wounds. It knocked the wind out of Cassie. The girl worked around cupcakes. Damn it, she’d spoken to them about hope. Edith went on to say that cutters break light bulbs and slice their skin with the thin shards. “You’d have to be so shitting strong-willed to make yourself bleed like that.” The fact that Edith knew about the light bulbs and the ruse of sweatbands also shocked Cassie. Was it common knowledge because it was so common? She reached her hand toward Edith’s wrist. It must be shitting awful to be a teenager today. Edith inserted her earbuds, and tinny, flea-size Nirvana music ended their conversation. But Edith let her mom’s hand remain.

After the book-club debacle, Cassie hadn’t gone back. She was stung by the truth of Blythe’s comment. She did read to soothe the constant nattering in her head. Didn’t everyone? Maybe that was why memoirs were all the rage. If you read about triumphant drug addicts, families who lived in Dumpsters, or the brutalized children of megalomaniac alcoholics, your own mundane story didn’t seem so impossible. Maybe the women of the book club all lived perfectly orderly lives with casseroles and paid bills, appliqué and soccer games. Maybe Cassie was the only one with a seventeen-year-old son who no longer seemed to have room for her now that he had his first serious girlfriend. Maybe she was the only one who had a fourteen-year-old daughter who swore and had developed a taste for the vodka Cassie kept in the freezer for penne à la vodka, Ben’s favorite dish. Maybe she was the only one whose husband whistled in the kitchen while making her coffee every morning and accused her of being joyless. As she pulled in the driveway, even before she’d come to a complete stop, Edith jumped out and ran down the block to Pammy’s, leaving Cassie to idle in front of their home.

Thursday mornings the neighborhood women racewalked past Cassie’s dining room window, a flock of house finches dressed in their serious name-brand sports gear, arms swinging to optimize calories burned, hair confined in tidy ponytails, tugging on leashes. “Come on, Phil,” “. . . Wilson,” “. . . Larry,” she heard them say in frustration. The dogs bore manly names and were yanked away from tree trunks. Occasionally the women erupted in laughter, and Cassie felt a slight jab near her heart.

“Loneliness,” Seth had suggested. “That’s the cost of your honesty.”

Never mind the walkers; Thursdays at noon she had Seth for fifty minutes. Should she ask about the cupcakes or would it be a waste of time? She found she’d been using her fifty minutes more and more to talk about the things one normally discusses with a spouse—a funny conversation with the butcher, the rescue of a stray dog from traffic, a social blunder at the posh-mac-and-cheese dinner party. Seth hung on her every word as if he really wanted to know her. If only she didn’t have to pay someone to show that kind of interest in her life. It was pillow talk sans pillow. She sometimes left his office feeling like she needed a shower. When she told him this, he extrapolated from Cassie to women in general, saying a woman’s need to be known is as basic as a sexual urge.

Before leaving that morning, Cassie blew through her house, the usual tidy. Syrup back in the fridge, coffee spoon traces wiped from the counter, towels gathered from the floor, her son Ethan’s socks and boxers as well. Edith’s heavy-soled black boots and her science text splayed on the living room floor in front of the TV where she’d fallen asleep studying the laws of physics and watching
So You Think You Can Dance,
not connecting the two at all. In fact, she’d rolled her eyes with long-suffering forbearance when Cassie brought it up, the dancers’ bodies arcing through space, flouting gravity and inertia. The show was cruel, its very title a taunt. It’s so depressing what we consider entertainment. She placed Edith’s textbook on the coffee table, carried a wineglass to the kitchen. And what about that show that makes people eat disgusting things like pig snouts. What’s the entertainment value? Cassie allowed a smug smile. She had it, her entrée at Seth’s office. Each week she dreaded the moment she settled on his couch, and he appraised her with his dark eyes, hands coolly resting on his thighs, then, his voice languid and, yes, sexy, asked, “So, Cassie, what’s on your mind?” The first time she was taken aback. She’d been imagining incisive therapeutic questions that divined why she was quietly unhappy in her wonderful life and then specific directives to make everything better—walk in the mornings, volunteer, medication, keep a journal. “Cassie?” Was it his voice or the question? Whichever, she found it daunting, deciding what to say. The days her answers came easily were when she had endured some argument or disappointment she could rail against from his couch. Slow news weeks were hard. This was a slow news week; she had Edith’s minor language infractions and disturbing knowledge of cutting, and now a diatribe on reality TV.

Throughout her quiet house Cassie gathered clothes, the bathroom rug, hurrying so she wouldn’t be late. She’d start a load of wash and then head out. Downstairs, passing through Ethan’s dim and cluttered room to the basement laundry, she smelled the tang of boy. Not a small boy’s uncomplicated scent—grass and dirt and red vine licorice—no, a mysterious yeasty smell, skin and greasy hair. She thought to open windows. Then she heard a shivery moan and in her peripheral vision caught furtive movements on the bed, arms and legs, a bare ass, tangle of blond hair, rustling, and then an
OhmyfuckingGod,
and a startled Alice, Ethan’s girlfriend, flew past her and up the stairs.

Cassie’s breath escaped, her ears thrummed. Amazingly her first thought was not of what she’d walked in on but of Ethan’s sheets. They were filthy. How could he bring a girl to that stinky bed? Next she thought of Alice’s extravagant car. Alice drove a Saab. Ben joked with Ethan all the time that if he planned to pursue his passion for drumming, he should keep Alice by his side. He then rolled on with his favorite comic question.
You know what they call a musician without a girlfriend? Homeless.
Alice’s car was cleaner than Ethan’s bed. Why hadn’t they had sex in the car like Cassie had with long-limbed Jeremy Deak? That’s what Ethan’s room smelled like, sex! A hot fistful of pennies. All of this raced through her mind and then the words came to her:
in flagrante.
The only Latin she knew.

Ethan sat on the bed in his hostile Miles Davis T-shirt;
BITCHES BREW
it screamed. A sheet covered his lap. He gaped at her from behind lush and greasy bangs. “Haven’t you heard of fucking knocking?”

Cassie started mumbling, somewhat apologetically, about not knowing they were home. But then she thought,
It’s Thursday.
Ethan was having sex in the basement when he was supposed to be at school. “Why are you home?” she demanded, mostly because she could think of nothing else to say. She picked up a hoodie from his floor and threw it at him. “Cover your boner.” She winced after she said it. Where did that come from? Her inner Edith?