Suicide's Girlfriend (8 page)

“Ha! Little Clare!” says Jimmy Doran. He falls over on his side, laughing.

Ann throws up in the Dorans' powder room. I check out the guys to see if they heard, but they just start talking about Dane's golf scholarship to Arizona State in the fall. Ann does it again. Rex says he knows a guy Jimmy knows. “That's right,” says Jimmy.

Ann has promised me she isn't anorexic or anything, and it is true that she eats lots of good salads, and hard-boiled eggs, which supposedly burn more calories than they contain.

I couldn't eat another hard-boiled egg to save my life. I weigh 118. Oh, guys act like they love it, they just spatter me with deranged compliments—lust and disgust—when Ann and I go down the street, but I know: at five foot five, I am already eight pounds beyond okay. I look at my mother and see myself headed toward skirted swimsuits and vertical stripes, fast, no resources but willpower and a shaky promise of one hundred hits of speed from a kid at school.

Sure
, Jimmy and the golfers say. And,
All right!
But eventually sports and mutual acquaintances fail them, they're high and dry.

Dane sort of laughs and leans forward on the counter, spreads his big fingers out there like something we might cook up if we get hungry. “So Jim,” he says, “we're an odd number here, did you notice that?”

“I should have known it was going to be love at first sight for you and Clare!” Jimmy says. “Ha, ha, ha!” Then he digs his car keys from his jeans, swings them in his usual menacing and energetic way, and, just like that, he's out the door.

Ann wobbles into the kitchen, pale, stricken.

“Are you okay?” I whisper.

Her breath is sweet and sharp, toothpaste and bile. “I know where he went,” she says miserably. “To get Micki Traub for Rex.”

To make Ann feel better, I pretend to gag in revulsion. I don't know Micki Traub, but would recognize her on the street. She's pretty in a murky way, like ladies you see on the news, scurrying down the streets of Iran, dusky brows, dusky lashes.

“Annie.” I follow her into the Dorans' front hall. We both know Jimmy sometimes stops by the houses of Micki and other girls after sleeping with Ann, but Ann always treats it as fresh news; in the dark, her skinny face is shadowy, like a skeleton. It makes me want to cry, to see her so sad. “Don't worry, honey,” I say.

Ann looks out the door. She says, “Go away, Clare.”

I shake my head. When I first saw the face of my true love, I felt I'd been hit by a poisoned dart, and I was falling, falling through leaves and branches. I didn't give him my heart; love and beauty
stole
it, and I don't, as they say in books, suffer the loss gladly. Which means nobody admires me for my love, not him, not anyone. But at least I don't rattle when I walk. I am, even, a virgin still, though no one believes it—that the battle makes me carry my intact thing like a shield before me each time I meet my love.

“Another beer, Clare?” Rex calls from the kitchen. Such a bright blue square, that kitchen, when you stand out in the dark hall. The kitchen at our house is white. White enamel pots hanging on white walls. White tile, white grout. When a guest asks for a glass of red wine at our house, my mother winces.

Somehow—I think because it takes so long for Jimmy to return-Ann agrees with Rex that we ought to play strip poker. Down she sits on the living room carpet, laughing, like we're old hands at this game, which she has played exactly once, with the girls in Cochise Cabin at Camp Potawatomi, and I have played exactly never.

“Ann,” I say. She gives me a secret, ferocious look. “Well,” I say, “as long as I can quit whenever I want . . .”

Ann and Rex laugh. “Sit down and play,” says Dane.

I think Rex takes off his pants first in order to keep his soft belly covered by his shirt. This makes me sorry for him. I look away, at the Dorans' carpet—pale green—and the chrome legs of the coffee table, and Dino looking up at me through the table's glass top. Rex's pants make a slippery, grown-up noise as they fall, like Dad's pants when we were little and all had to stay together in motel rooms on trips.

I smile across the circle, hoping to cheer Ann when she loses her
shirt, but
my
Ann has gone off, the way she's been able to since we were kids, and this other Ann acts as if we're strangers. She slaps her knees and laughs at Rex's moronic jokes, she gives
me
a creepy look when I have no choice but to remove my own blouse.

Fast, I yank it off. I don't want anyone to think I imagine myself provocative in my sturdy white bra, this thing made for grown-up women with large breasts, which must make me look like a lewd nurse, repellent with creepy desires.

Rex rocks back onto his elbows, laughing, at something Ann whispers to him. Dino takes this as a call for affection and, ever faithful, slowly gets to his tired feet, tacks in the direction of Rex's head, and gives Rex a little lick on the nose.

“Yuck, man!” says Rex, and sits right up. Rex wears boxer shorts of baby blue. That's all. “Here, you dumb pooch,” he says, and pours half of his drink into an ashtray. “Here you go, you dumb old pooch.”

He's startled when I snatch the ashtray away, but, oh, Dane, loony confusion lights
his
face, and, yes, I've seen it before, on other boys. First they believe I'm a kind of dartboard at which to aim a triple-X fantasy. Then something makes them see I'm human, and they feel just terribly noble because of this change of vision. Then they think
I'm
noble. And isn't it grand?

You might imagine I want to kick Dane in the teeth, but that loony look feels better than the other, and I'm a little moved myself. I feel pretty okay as I stand at the kitchen sink, dumping scotch and water down the Dorans' disposal. Maybe I do love Dane after all. Maybe my love for my true love is only a deep infatuation, something childish and never capable of maturity.

“Ah-hem! Miss Clare!” says Jimmy, entering the kitchen through the garage entrance. The shadowy Micki is behind him, smiling. Jimmy must have shut off his engine a way up the street, just hoping to catch us doing something stupid. Like playing strip poker, maybe.

“Fetching wardrobe, Clare!” says Jimmy.

I remain cool. All of us do. We have to with Jimmy dancing around us, laughing, his hands on his cheeks like he's shocked, my, my, my,
while we put on our clothes, and act like,
Well, yeah, we finished up that game, so let's just get dressed.

“Are you working at Hy-Vee this summer, Micki?” asks Ann as she steps into her pants. As normal as if they meet in the hall at school. Believe it or not, the two of them do have a kind of relationship. Whenever Ann and Jimmy break up, Ann calls his newest flame and—in order to keep tabs on jimmy—offers advice on how to handle him. She has become, amazingly, an instant best friend to confused blondes and brunettes all over town. Crazy, but in a week, three at the most, Jimmy's back, he never left. I think sometimes the girls miss Ann more than Jim.

“Gee, I'm glad I was off work tonight,” Micki says.

Rex nods. He's happy as a lark with Micki. And Dane's happy, too. “Here,” he says, and, with big fingers, fixes my earring—unclasped during all the dressing and undressing—and smooths his hand down my back, and, without even asking if I want one, gets me a beer.

I say hi to Micki, as if we know each other, because I don't want her to feel like I think I'm better than she is. I do, of course. Not on purpose, but I do. All day long: greater than, less than. Like in math class. When I think of that, I think of seventh grade, when Mr. Kuhn put a lot of different mathematical symbols and their meanings on the bulletin board, and he included those two tipped-over Vs, Greater Than, Less Than, and then somebody drew nipples on the points of the Vs, and then, a few day ; later, somebody else wrote beneath them: “I don't know, we look about the same size to me!”

“Well, what about SMU?” says Micki Traub to Rex, having what I'm afraid she imagines a kind of elevated, collegiate conversation: UCLA. UNM. UCSD.

“Stop that!” Ann says to Jimmy, but this time I don't look to see why. Dane's big arm lies on my shoulder, hot as a loaf of bread, and I'm thinking, What's next? Politely, I ask, “You're sure you're not dying, Dane? I can feel the heat from your burn.”

Dane is impressed. He holds his fingers at various distances above his skin, gauging temperatures.

“Well, how about NYU then?” Micki Traub says to Rex.

“Or XYZ?” I whisper to Dane. “LMNOP?”

Dane looks down at me, confused, then a startled blurt of laughter shoots out of his mouth: “Ha!”

Micki Traub turns. I feel bad. I wait for her to say something awful, but she just taps my shoulder. “I've seen you at games. You have the prettiest hair.”

“Thank you,” I say. Under any circumstance, a compliment tends to do me in, and at the moment I feel like a heel, which means my voice warbles all over the place. Ann frowns. She hates it when I get like this so I stick my head into the refrigerator and pretend to look for a lime.

Jimmy winks at the rest of us after Micki and Rex head for the family room. At that moment, he reminds me of his dad, a well-known lech of a lawyer who supposedly tries to put it to his clients whenever possible.

“I can't believe you brought that bitch!” says Ann.

“Oh, Christ,” Jimmy says, “her neck's even dirty! She looks like she spent the day rolling in the newspaper! What do you care about her?”

“Jimmy!” Ann laughs into her hands. “Not so loud!”

“Come on,” Dane says, and with his hand on the back of my neck starts me moving toward the front hall.

“Here.” He points to the bottom step of the stairs leading up to the Dorans' bedrooms. “We can talk here.”

It's all the same to me. Basically, a boy will steer you toward dark and some sort of horizontal surface, though vertical will do, too, if you have dark.

“So what do people do for fun around here?” he asks.

I laugh, I shrug. Nobody except Ann and my friend Maureen ever talks about anything of interest to me. Maureen and I each have copies of
Sonnets from the Portuguese
and
The English Romantic Poets
and we read poems to each other over the phone. We agree that if we were boys we would be so nice to our girlfriends.

Every once in a while, a car drives by the house, its lights tracking
the ground like the hound dogs in cartoons. Dane says some stuff about Jimmy and Phoenix, and how Jimmy screwed girls right and left at Briarly Academy, and that he was the one who told Jim—in a letter to Ann, which upset our household for a good week—to put a line through “Love” at the end, and close “Sincerely.”

While Dane talks, I twist the big red and gold ring on his big finger around and around I think that ring might be very nice, the ring of my boyfriend Dane, worn on a gold chain around my neck to show I love him so.

“What are you thinking about?” Dane asks me.

“Oh, negative capability,” I say.

Dane laughs. He leans close to me, I think for a kiss, but instead he pushes my hair behind my ears. “That girl liked your hair, but she's a skag,” he says. “You shouldn't wear it the way you do. You should wear it this way.”

I laugh to conceal how pained I am at such correction. The
ease
with which boys tell girls what to do, and after we spend half of our days trying to think of ways to please them! Once, I had a pimple on my cheek, and, as we said good-bye, my true love said to me, “Get rid of that before next time, okay, baby?”

“Hey!” Jimmy and Ann start when they come around the corner and find Dane and me talking on the stairs.

“What time is it?” I ask with a yawn.

“Not even ten,” says Ann, and runs with Jimmy up to his bedroom.

“You're not going to fall asleep on me, are you?” says Dane. “Here. Stand up. Come on!”

I stand on the first step, but no, says Dane, you have to be higher.

His eyes don't have any color in the dark. This happens to my real love's eyes, all boys' eyes, in the dark. How much black and white and gray time I have spent with boys this past year, talking and then kissing and then struggling!

When I stand on the third step, this Dane kisses me. It's okay. Even if it weren't okay, what would I do? I kiss Dane back. “All right,” he says, as if we've struck a bargain, and he lifts me into the air, and he
carries me upstairs—the first person to pick me up in ages. Though it certainly does not feel like being carried used to: end of the night, pajamas, sweet sleep.

Dane carries me right into the dark of Mr. and Mrs. Dorans' bedroom and places me, and himself, on the pale island of their bed in one movement.

“Well, hey!” I say, and sit up and swing my legs over the edge.

Dane pulls me down. The bed is stripped. A loose mattress button pokes into my angel wing. After a little while, Dane stands up. “Stay there,” he says, and unzips his pants—zip—and they fall in the same whispery way that Rex's did, earlier.

A tremendous amount of Dane covers that suddenly small double bed: long pale legs covered with a roof of puffy hair, like dandelions when they're at the blowing stage; and arms, half white, half dark with the burn; and the big dark face, and his feet sticking over the end. I've never been in bed with anyone, just in my true love's car, where everything is close up, hard to see, and even reach. Because of Dane's sunburn, I feel bad about the usual scuffle. “Sorry,” I say.

Dane takes courtesy as encouragement, pins one of my arms above my head with new determination.

“Don't be fourteen,” he says between clenched teeth.

“I
am
fourteen,” I say. “And I'm keeping my underwear on, too!”

You know all the things he says; if I tell you, he'll sound more stupid than he is, and I'll sound more conceited than he'll sound stupid.