wintertime when we’d frost the glass with spray snow from a can.
It’s all closed up, and our house too. It’s like coming back from a week at the shore and pulling up the drive and thinking,
Is this our house? Could this really be our house? It’s like the doors and windows shut and shuttered themselves, tucking
themselves within.
Ted clears his throat, and I see that I’m still holding onto the open car door, my fingers tight on it.
“We’re okay, right?” he asks. I can see myself in his sunglasses and I think I look thick and monstrous, with a grave line
furrowed across my forehead.
“Yeah,” I say, and I watch myself say it, and we both turn and look at the house again.
Inside, it’s so quiet and lonely and I wish I could knock the soccer ball around in the yard, but I don’t want the Ververs
to see me.
Walking from room to room, feeling like a burglar, I poke inerrant places, touch my fingers to the peach-skinned covers of
Hustler
on the floor of Ted’s closet, the womens’ mouths so open and red, and the way their legs open so redly. It makes me touch
my hand to my neck and the dizziness comes fast.
Ted, who’s likely buried at this moment in a swirl of his girlfriend Nina’s white blond hair, her fingernails always painted
lilac, her fingers always clawed over Ted’s denimed knee.
In my mother’s room, I finger her bottle of Je Reviens, screwing off the gold-tone top and running the dauber along my wrists
like when I was seven years old and would stare at the box: “Recommended for romantic wear” in foil script.
The room is orderly, hushed, and my socks spark on the carpet. It’s a room I’ve hardly been in since the first few weeks after
Dad left and she’d ask me to crawl into bed with her and, phone cord wrapped around us both, call him and ask him how he could
do this to us and did he mean to destroy the family.
Later, she made me promise to forgive her for all that because she should never have been so weak and she meant to set a good
example of self-proud womanhood. But she could say it and say it and say it, yet I wondered if I’d ever see that tender-soft
way about her again, the way she’d put on her special silky wine-colored dress for Dad and the Je Reviens daubed on the bow
in the middle of her bra—a secret mother passed to daughter, even as she blushed to tell it. I was nine and it was the most
enticing slip of adulthood that had ever passed through my fingers.
It’s with a stub of my toe now that I nearly trip and my eye catches something peeking out from under the creamy doily-edged
duvet on my mother’s bed. Leaning down, I see it, a man’s dark sock curled on the floor like a bat wing. Plucking it between
thumb and forefinger, I lift it, turning it around.
I think imaginative thoughts of him, her nighttime guest, herDr. Aiken, tripping down the hallway, like a man on fire, hurtling out the front door, bare foot to gas pedal in his silver
Lincoln before he realized what he’d left behind.
My tour landing me in my own room, I pull my new graduation dress from the closet, still in its plastic bag, slickery silver.
The cabbage roses blare grotesquely. It didn’t seem that way in the store at all. Turning fast in the dressing room mirror,
shaking off my mother’s barks (“Pull your hair off your face, Lizzie”), I’d surveyed myself and felt glamorous, the roses
spread across my chest, sprouting there, the illusion of full-flower breasts, and across my hips the illusion of curves and
womanliness, or teen-girlness at least. On my bare tiptoes, battered shins hidden by starchy folds, I was nearly Dusty, if
you squinted, from far away.
I think about how, while I was spinning, ballerina style, before the trifold department store mirrors, it was all happening.
Evie, gone in the blink of an eye. Did he blindfold her and shove her in his backseat? Or worse, like in that TV movie, was
she locked in the trunk where she
It’s all closed up, and our house too. It’s like coming back from a week at the shore and pulling up the drive and thinking,
Is this our house? Could this really be our house? It’s like the doors and windows shut and shuttered themselves, tucking
themselves within.
Ted clears his throat, and I see that I’m still holding onto the open car door, my fingers tight on it.
“We’re okay, right?” he asks. I can see myself in his sunglasses and I think I look thick and monstrous, with a grave line
furrowed across my forehead.
“Yeah,” I say, and I watch myself say it, and we both turn and look at the house again.
Inside, it’s so quiet and lonely and I wish I could knock the soccer ball around in the yard, but I don’t want the Ververs
to see me.
Walking from room to room, feeling like a burglar, I poke inerrant places, touch my fingers to the peach-skinned covers of
Hustler
on the floor of Ted’s closet, the womens’ mouths so open and red, and the way their legs open so redly. It makes me touch
my hand to my neck and the dizziness comes fast.
Ted, who’s likely buried at this moment in a swirl of his girlfriend Nina’s white blond hair, her fingernails always painted
lilac, her fingers always clawed over Ted’s denimed knee.
In my mother’s room, I finger her bottle of Je Reviens, screwing off the gold-tone top and running the dauber along my wrists
like when I was seven years old and would stare at the box: “Recommended for romantic wear” in foil script.
The room is orderly, hushed, and my socks spark on the carpet. It’s a room I’ve hardly been in since the first few weeks after
Dad left and she’d ask me to crawl into bed with her and, phone cord wrapped around us both, call him and ask him how he could
do this to us and did he mean to destroy the family.
Later, she made me promise to forgive her for all that because she should never have been so weak and she meant to set a good
example of self-proud womanhood. But she could say it and say it and say it, yet I wondered if I’d ever see that tender-soft
way about her again, the way she’d put on her special silky wine-colored dress for Dad and the Je Reviens daubed on the bow
in the middle of her bra—a secret mother passed to daughter, even as she blushed to tell it. I was nine and it was the most
enticing slip of adulthood that had ever passed through my fingers.
It’s with a stub of my toe now that I nearly trip and my eye catches something peeking out from under the creamy doily-edged
duvet on my mother’s bed. Leaning down, I see it, a man’s dark sock curled on the floor like a bat wing. Plucking it between
thumb and forefinger, I lift it, turning it around.
I think imaginative thoughts of him, her nighttime guest, herDr. Aiken, tripping down the hallway, like a man on fire, hurtling out the front door, bare foot to gas pedal in his silver
Lincoln before he realized what he’d left behind.
My tour landing me in my own room, I pull my new graduation dress from the closet, still in its plastic bag, slickery silver.
The cabbage roses blare grotesquely. It didn’t seem that way in the store at all. Turning fast in the dressing room mirror,
shaking off my mother’s barks (“Pull your hair off your face, Lizzie”), I’d surveyed myself and felt glamorous, the roses
spread across my chest, sprouting there, the illusion of full-flower breasts, and across my hips the illusion of curves and
womanliness, or teen-girlness at least. On my bare tiptoes, battered shins hidden by starchy folds, I was nearly Dusty, if
you squinted, from far away.
I think about how, while I was spinning, ballerina style, before the trifold department store mirrors, it was all happening.
Evie, gone in the blink of an eye. Did he blindfold her and shove her in his backseat? Or worse, like in that TV movie, was
she locked in the trunk where she
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