The Uncoupling (19 page)

Marissa had been working all year at Froze, the dessert place in the mall, which she sometimes referred to as “Cottage Cheese for Suckers.” The product did have a curdlike, highly textured quality as it slowly emerged from a nozzle. It wasn’t cottage cheese, but it wasn’t officially yogurt either, or ice cream. No one really knew what it was, but three evenings a week Marissa sold it to customers, almost all women. Customers who admitted that the one thing they looked forward to in the evening was a cup of Froze that they could put a lid on and take home to their house, or else just eat right in the store, blunting the pointed peak with a grateful tongue. So many women who came to the store in the mall said they
craved
Froze; that was the word they used. Just the other evening, Ms. Cutler had been in, and she’d ordered a large cup with jimmies and coconut shreds and cookie crumbs, saying, “Now you know my guilty pleasure.” Marissa watched as the guidance counselor went and sat on a stool, hunching over her little dish protectively, as if she were from some primitive culture and thought someone might take away her kill.

Marissa Clayborn was one of those girls who was not interested in sweet desserts, or in food of any kind, really. She’d never had an eating disorder, but had been thin and rangy as long as she could recall. She had been given the female lead in the school play virtually every year; one year, though, when she was thirteen, she’d contracted mono and couldn’t even audition. That year, Paige Straub had been cast instead, but everyone quickly realized that it was a mistake, for Paige was like a robot in front of an audience. Marissa was known throughout the school for her talent, her speaking voice, her composure, and the way she looked. If her face wasn’t completely beautiful, it was angular in a way that made it appear faceted, and her skin was closer to black than brown. There were twenty black kids in the grade at Elro, and she was friends with a few, though almost none of them had been in middle school with Marissa, when her most intense friendships had begun. She was good friends with a girl named Jade Stills, who was a drummer. (“African drumming?” Carrie’s mother had asked with interest when Marissa and Jade went over to the Petitos’. “No, just
regular,
Mom,” Carrie had hurried to say, mortified.) Marissa’s friends from middle school had remained her real crowd; they were the ones she truly knew, even if, she sometimes thought, they did not know her that well anymore.

During ninth grade, Marissa had sex with one boy, and then, over the summer before tenth grade, with another. She did not feel strongly about either of them at the time, but when they had showed an interest in her she had been curious to see what would happen. Quite a few other girls at Elro were sexually experienced too. There was Chloe Vincent, obviously, who had been sleeping with Max Holleran since last year, the two of them in love, though since their breakup he now loathed her. And there was sad-sack Becca Nilsson, who drank insanely and slept with anything. And there was talented Eva Scarpin, who’d had apparently enjoyable hookups with a couple of different senior boys and a man in his twenties. Eva wanted to be a designer, and she drew detailed pictures of models in gowns across the covers of her notebooks and even her textbooks. All of the women in the drawings had the same half-smile on their lips that Eva had. It was as if they all
knew
something. Jen Heplauer had had sex too, of course, but certainly no one wanted to follow her example. Laura Lonergan, another non-virgin, was an interesting emo girl who submitted short stories to the literary magazine
The New Deal
about a moody young girl involved with an older guy.

In a high school like Elro, people knew things about you; and by now a certain number of people had heard that Marissa Clayborn had slept with two boys. It had become common and acceptable in recent years to go far with a guy, or with different ones. If someone called you a slut it was probably one of your friends saying it as a joke, and you could justifiably reply, “Thank you.” But as the first girl in her immediate group of friends to have hooked up in any capacity—and then as the first one to actually lose her virginity—Marissa had been expected to report back to the others in detail.

Willa Lang had been particularly interested in hearing a step-by-step account back at the end of ninth grade, and she’d asked Marissa a series of exhausting questions:
What was it like? Did it hurt? Did you like it? Did you love it? How would you rate it on a scale of one to ten?
They were up in Lucy Neels’ room at the time, all of them piled onto the bed and the rug, the other girls looking worshipfully at Marissa, who had become their de facto spiritual and sexual leader.

She didn’t know how to respond, for she didn’t like the idea of disappointing them the way she had been disappointed. Ralph Devereux, age seventeen, the son of her parents’ good friends, was a senior over in Deer Heights, his skin light brown and touched with old, faint acne scars. He and Marissa had known each other since they were small and their families had frequently gotten together for warm-weather backyard parties. Her mother would light citronella candles and the Clayborns and the Devereux would sit at the picnic table and on lawn chairs until it grew late and Mrs. Devereux reminded her husband that they had a drive ahead of them.

For a long time Ralph had just seemed mildly annoying, teasing Marissa about how thin she was, but once he hit fifteen she noticed that he had begun to lift weights, and his previously soft arms were different. Also, he teased her less, and when he arrived in the backyard with his family, he now hung back, sitting on the redwood glider by himself, watching everyone as if from a great distance. Then, when he was seventeen, he returned to the house without his family, just for the purpose of seeing fifteen-year-old Marissa, which pleased her, not because she particularly liked him, but because the way they might be with each other was potentially private, unrelated to anyone else in either family.

Their first evening together was unremarkable, filled with talk that went nowhere, and occasional jabs at each other about nothing. “So what’s your situation?” he asked as he drove her home from a diner in his parents’ car. He had eaten a fish fillet sandwich, onion rings, and a large square piece of seven-layer cake. She had had a Sprite.

“What do you mean?”

“In school.”

“I’m in honors classes.”

“I mean are you in a relationship?”

She almost laughed. She was fifteen, and relationships were what you heard about from other people. But as soon as Ralph said it, she didn’t want to tell him anything about herself, to give it all up so quickly. “I might be,” she said.

He was going off to Rutgers to study business next fall, and the third time he took Marissa out, he turned to her in the car and said, “I’m going to be working my balls off at my uncle’s paint store this summer, and then I’m leaving for college in the fall. So if you want anything from me, you’d better get it now. Kitchen’s closing.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” she said.

“Okay, whatever, just letting you know,” he said, and then he put an arm around her. Marissa didn’t move away, but sat under the weight of it, trying to decide what she thought. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it wasn’t much of anything either. She would let him keep it there, she decided as he drove them to a defunct overpass and then parked. Ralph looked at her, raising his eyebrows, which was meant to be a question of some sort. She raised her eyebrows back, which, she supposed, was her answer.

He said, “You’re cute,” and put a finger on the tip of her nose. She didn’t move away. Then he said, “Now, we’re on the same page here, right?” and she said yes. “Okay,” Ralph said. Then he nodded gravely and cast his eyes downward toward his fly, which he unzipped with a loud single syllable, revealing an anatomical part that was pretty much as Marissa expected, since she and her friends had been studying them online since seventh grade.

Marissa was shocked by his action, but abstractly interested. He motioned to her, and for some reason she slid toward him. They sat unmoving, and then he nodded again, encouragingly, and dipped his head in suggestion. She understood, and she followed, tentatively ducking down low and putting her mouth on his penis. But as soon as she did this, he put his hands on the back of her head and steered her as if she were a video game console. Within moments he was moving fast and repeating a word that sounded like
“jeez
,” or “
sheese,
” or “
cheese,
” and she understood what this was all about; she picked up the nuances of this episode quickly, the same way she always memorized lines from a play or French verbs to conjugate. The end, the little explosion
,
was not too different from what she’d thought, and anything she could think about the way semen tasted had already been thought by someone else more descriptive, so she did not even try. After he cried an awful strangled cry—“
gaaa
”—he recovered quickly, zipped his pants, and said, “Who would have thought?” and then touched her nose again and drove her home. “I guess the kitchen hasn’t officially closed yet,” he said.

“Shut up, Ralph.”

“Okay,” he said cheerfully.

That night, she told a few friends, and they were quietly awed. “It just happened?” Willa said. “I mean, how did you know what he meant when he said that thing about being on the same page?” Marissa couldn’t explain how she knew—“I just knew,” she said cryptically—but Willa also had other questions for her. She wanted to know if Marissa felt very different, and Marissa realized the answer was no, which she supposed was good, because not feeling different allowed you to view sex as a normal part of life. As a reasonable activity that you could engage in with another person whenever you were both in the mood.

She got together with Ralph on two other evenings, and then he thought it was time to take it to the next step. She knew he thought this, because he said to her in a text, “lets be together longer 2nite.”

When it happened, Marissa regarded the experience of going the distance with Ralph Devereux from somewhere high above, like a hawk circling the car. She couldn’t decide what she thought about it, beyond the fact that it hurt far too much at first for something that was supposed to be natural. With their pants at their ankles and a condom safely snapped onto him, she felt it was a point of pride not to express pain here. He didn’t know whether or not she was a virgin, and she didn’t want him ever to know. That was her business. It was entirely possible that he had never done this before either; his style wasn’t so suave. Willa, of course, begged to know everything again, which not only included the technical parts but also the feelings, the sensations. She wanted a subjective description of sex and a catalogue; she also wanted something poetic.

Marissa couldn’t imagine what she was meant to say, but finally she just coolly said, “That’s kind of private.”

In the summer, Ralph Devereux started his job at his uncle’s store and had no time to come over anymore, which was fine with her. But almost as if she gave off some signal that she was now more available, a boy named Dean Stanley who was a swimming counselor to little kids at the Y, where Marissa had a volunteer job stuffing envelopes, hung around her all the time before and after work, finally asking her to go out with him. “Why would I want to do that?” she asked, which threw him.

“Because you’re nice?” he said hesitantly.

Dean, a white, extremely white, 6’5” swimmer with greenishgold hair from pool water, was forthright in a way that was similar to Ralph; he seemed to enjoy being a young male and all it entailed, and why shouldn’t he? Marissa would probably have enjoyed it too. When he kissed her with a muscley tongue at the multiplex, she let him, and when it progressed from there at the studio apartment he had borrowed from an older lifeguard, she didn’t try to stop it, even though she didn’t feel much of anything beyond the enjoyment once again of having an experience that was hers alone, and that she could master. Marissa knew that most people did not approach sex the way she did. Even Eva Scarpin, who had supposedly been to bed with her father’s business partner, a handbag importer of
twenty-seven,
said it was “amazing,” though Marissa knew instinctively not to ask Eva the kinds of questions Willa had asked
her,
like,
Did you feel a lot?
and,
Was it wonderful?—
because she was afraid she knew what the answers would be.

Once, years earlier, Marissa Clayborn’s toddler brother had had to be rushed to the hospital after eating a dozen aspirins one by one. In the ambulance, their mother had said to him, “Conrad, didn’t they taste bad?” And Conrad had said yes, yes, they had tasted horrible. “Then why did you keep eating them, sweetheart?” she asked. “Because,” he explained as he cried, “I wanted to find one that tasted
good.
” A rationale that his sister definitely understood.

At age sixteen now, neither of the two boys she had been with so far had tasted good, so to speak. Truthfully, sex bothered her, because it was not nearly as intense as it was reported to be. She liked being in charge of herself, being responsible, being pokerfaced and serious and precocious and skillful; she had conducted herself this way in all other areas, to real success, so why not in sex too? But sex didn’t fill her with a warmth that she had never previously known. Melissa Clayborn was dexterous in sex, she didn’t mind it, and, most of all, it was
hers
. This was how she felt about acting in plays too. Dean Stanley disappeared after the summer, and he occasionally texted her, but they had zero to say.

So there she was, leaning against the counter one winter night at Froze, reading the
Lysistrata
script, her mouth moving silently as she committed her lines to memory, when Jason Manousis walked in with his young son. Jason, of the legendary Jason Manousis and Cami Fennig high school pregnancy scandal of several years earlier. He had gotten Cami pregnant and they had immediately left school. Cami had had the baby, and Jason had wigged out about fatherhood and enlisted in the army and gone to Afghanistan, where he was blinded in one eye, and was sent back home looking like this.