And Then Things Fall Apart (12 page)

This morning I was typing and thinking. Thinking and typing beneath the hundred-pound coverlet. It is as heavy as a dead body, and using it is creeping me out. What is it made of? I was compelled to reveal its mystery. There are small wood buttons fastening the bottom of the duvet cover together. I unbuttoned them, one by one, and peeled the top back to reveal its innards. It is made of wool. Four wool blankets, one on top of the other, attached at the corners with big knots of orange yarn, the kind girls like my mom wore in their hair in the 1970s. Exhausted suddenly, I buttoned the outer cotton envelope and slid beneath it wearing my clothes. I shut my bruisy eyes and let the thing, now innocent and benign—yet still unnaturally heavy—crush me to the mattress.

I had been asleep ten minutes, an hour, the whole morning—who's to say?—when there was a polite knock on
my door, and Gram popped her head in. “Rise and shine, doll face. You have some visitors.”

Visitors? I was still a little asleep and kept saying
Vis-i-tors
in my head, like
Glad-i-a-tors
, and my stomach turned, like a yappy little dog doing a flip, because who would come to visit me? I am the girl that time forgot. I redid my ponytail, sprayed some ancient chartreuse-colored Muguet Des Bois cologne from my great-grandma's dresser onto my neck to mask any poxian funk, made sure my bra was on straight, and padded out to the living room.

“KEEK!”

“Neeeeee-co-laahhh!”

And we were hugging like chimpanzee sisters on the cover of a Hallmark card. As we put our arms around each other, I felt lighter, supported, and happy. I hadn't hugged Nic in forever. And it felt so great—like, normal. It was as if there had never been any weirdness between us, as if I had never chosen Matt or Amanda over her, not even once. Nic is no fool. She gets it. She was forgiving me without talking about it, because she simply wants me in her life as badly as I want her in mine. I guess that's true friendship in a nutshell.

So my face was over her shoulder and I was practically floating with happiness when who did I see, sitting in my grandma's upholstered chair, knee bouncing up and down like a sewing machine needle, but Earl the Squirrel. With
the least amount of acne he has ever had. And a hickey. On his neck.

“Yo, Keek. You don't look as bad as Nic said you would.” He gave me an embarrassed kind of smile. My eyes were bulging from my head, asking Nic,
What's with the Squirrel
? But she ignored the question.

“I just said to not recoil in horror,” Nic said, “just in case you were totally covered in pox, or whatever. Which you are not. So, whew!”

Nic looked so cute. She wore this white sleeveless mod minidress with a mandarin collar and had all kinds of random plastic bracelets up her arm, like a kid playing dress-up in her mom's jewelry box. A good look, for sure. Her hair was shorter than I remembered, and as I tried to think of the last time we were actually in the same room together, all I could come up with was our last English final, before school let out. Which was hardly together. And was a long time ago.

“So, chicken pox, huh?” she said. Then she tossed herself down onto the couch and ran her fingers through her new short hair, her bracelets clacking with little bursts of applause.

“And Amanda. And my Dad. I don't know how much—”

“I saw yer dad at the D&D and heard whatever Matt's told Earl. So I'm up to speed. You can give me a detailed debriefing another time. You look kind of good, dahlink, considering.”

Nic is a lot of things, but she is always honest, good, and down to earth (also nice to her mother), and I had a lot of forgiveness to beg from her. We never did not have fun together. It was her idea to open an Etsy shop selling bracelets made by half-melting toothbrushes in boiling water that we then bent around our wrists. She was the one who encouraged me to test for honors English before high school started. She knew me when my parents were happy together and I thought divorce was a sad, destructive thing that other, more screwed-up people went through.

“So, um, what do you do all day here? Lose your mind?” Earl asked, and he wasn't half-kidding. “Oh, and sorry, but are you contagious, or what?” There was something different about him. Instead of the buzzing energy that usually made him seem like a walking ball of TV static, he was more, I don't know, still? Serene? I could actually see him, as if for the first time. He looked like Ichabod Crane, but in a good way, sitting in the chair with his pointy elbows and long legs all over the place, like a game of pick-up sticks. He wore baggy black linen shorts and a vintage bowling T-shirt with the name Stan embroidered over the pocket. Which I'm sure was a gift from Nic.

“No. I'm not contagious. But your parents probably had you vaccinated. Right?” This was the most I had ever said to him. “How're
you
?” And I looked straight at his ridiculous hickey and he turned twenty-five different shades of red/crimson/scarlet/vermilion/ruby.

“I'm pretty good,” he said, and looked at Nic, then started blushing all over again. I didn't know how else to approach this. I didn't want to seem all desperate and needy, but if Nic and Earl could find me, surely that man of mine could too?

“So, hey. Have you heard from Matt or anything? I haven't, um, for a while, and my phone . . .” And kill me now that I even had to ask in the first place.

“You know, it's weird. I haven't really. I've been kind of, er, busy lately.” Earl gave Nic this puppy-dog-in-love gaze, which was simultaneously cute and nauseating.

“Yeah, Earl and I have been garage sailing, Keek, and when you get better, you are so coming with us. It's been an amazing season.”

Nic and I had been garage sailing—our own oh-so-clever term for it—since we were old enough to ride our bikes through the alleys. We talked about it with clenched teeth, like we were talking about yachting or cotillion at the country club.

Nic stood and spun and clacked her bracelets at me. “Score, right?” Meaning her outfit in its adorable entirety cost less than ten dollars.

Last summer, before high school started, we would get a
Suburban Life
newspaper and a red Sharpie and circle the most promising sale events, mapping out our route and filling our handlebar baskets with crap we could not live without. Record albums and fondue paraphernalia,
dresses, jackets, square-toed patent leather boots. Cocktail rings, Adam Ant posters, fish tank toys, and giant daisy pins. How we loved the ephemera of suburban living, repurposed with knowing worldliness for our own lives, making everything we did seem unique and full of unearned gravitas because the very objects themselves had a history separate from our own.

I get all loquacious thinking about vintage crap.

“Here, Keek.” Earl stood up, a gallant skeleton, and handed me a brown box with a blue bow on it. “We got you a present.” Then he went over to sit next to Nic and
held her hand
. And all of a sudden I loved them both so much, I got dizzy.

“For real?” I said, because here were two people I had not been especially nice to, particularly of late. And they were giving me a gift. I so desperately needed someone to be nice to me for no good reason that I didn't even need to open the stupid box. They could have given me a rock they'd found in the alley, and I would have loved it.

Dear reader, it was not a rock.

It was a book.

And not just any book. It was—Are you sitting down?

The.

Bell.

Jar.

A 1966 Faber and Faber hardcover edition with black-and-white concentric circles on the
intact
dust jacket! A collector's item if ever there was one. I had to grab on to the armrest on the wingback chair so I wouldn't fall over. I squealed like a maniacal porpoise with delight.

“Got it in Berwyn,” the Squirrel said.

“For one dollar!” Nic screamed, and we spontaneously high-fived while the Squirrel gave a giggle-snort out of his nose. “I just knew you would love it to death,” Nic said, and we were all laughing and happy. Then the Squirrel had to “take a leak,” so I pointed the way to the bathroom.

As soon as he was out of earshot, Nic put a hand in my face in a talk-to-the-hand gesture and dramatically pulled one half of her mandarin collar down to reveal a hickey of her own—the size and color of a flattened penny souvenir from the Sears Tower.

!!

And then she said, “Before you say anything, he is Awe. Some. And really funny. And we have so much fun together. And holy crap, Earl-the-freaking-Squirrel is my boyfriend.” She looked drunk, she was so giddy with happiness. And then the Squirrel came out with his long hands wet from washing them. (I think he was afraid of catching the pox from my towels.) Nic and I stopped giggling and being best friends. And then suddenly it
dawned on me that if Nic were Esther, I would have been
her
Doreen, with my selfish, quasi-slutty, and rude behavior. And I guess this is how it is. One man's meat is another man's poison and all that. Obviously the rest of the world doesn't stop when yours crashes to the ground. I'm happy—for the both of them, really.

It's just—

I felt as demoralized as Esther watching Doreen dance with the cowboy, knowing they were growing more and more in love with each other by the second while I sat there all alone, scratching the one remaining pox on my ankle into oblivion. And if Matt and the Squirrel start to talk about us and compare notes about us, Nic and me, and share how far they've gone and whatever, I will happily spend the rest of my days in the Cook County juvenile detention center without parole for a double homicide. But then I look at the Squirrel, and he's cool. He looks scared and quiet and more like a decent fellow than I have ever seen him. And Nic? She looks like the cover of freaking
Seventeen
magazine, she is so pink-cheeked, fashionable, and self-assured.

I, however, look like something the proverbial cat dragged in.

Miaow.

(Which is how Sylvia spells “meow” in
The Bell Jar
, Faber and Faber edition, 1966).

I am feeling so much better today that I actually feel like eating. I am not a vegetarian, but one day I would like to be one. I can totally eat meat formed into other shapes, like chicken nuggets, hamburger patties, hot dogs, fish sticks, etc. It's when the meat is just, like,
meat
that I have a hard time with it. The chicken leg, the T-bone steak, the salmon fillet, all look like they were just on the actual animal a minute ago, helping them walk, graze, swim, whatever.

Besides, someone has to offset the D&D's industrially slaughtered cow consumption. We provide prepared meats of all kinds to half the Chicago suburbs. Free delivery. I can't wash my hands of it if it's paying for college, now, can I? Gram has been very supportive, what with the egg salad sandwiches and such. And I really appreciate that.

She also brought all the ingredients I requested for my recipe festival and is going to look in the basement for some
of her old Fiestaware and Corelle and teacups she got as wedding gifts. For the remainder of my incarceration/recovery/breakdown, I am going to prepare food items from
The Bell Jar
and report my findings. I will eat what Esther ate. I will consume the foods of the 1950s with glee and a sense of adventure.

It's something to do.

Gram said the store carried only eight cans of Spam.

She is totally apologizing for invading my privacy by reading my pages.

If
The Bell Jar
has taught me anything, it is that everyone, no matter how seemingly normal, put together, and successful, is complicated. Everyone has lived through traumatic life events that you would never guess just by looking at them. Which is comforting to know as you go through your own screwed-up stuff. This was never truer for anyone than for my gram. We had a total girl extravaganza yesterday, complete with tea drinking, chitchatting, and the trying on of vintage dresses.

All she had to say was, “I have a bunch of old clothes in the guest bedroom you might get a kick out of,” and I was down the hall and in front of the closet door, as perky as one of Santa's elves. At first I thought it was going to be clothes from a few years ago or, be still my heart, the 1980s. But when I opened the door, I saw cotton belted dresses, beaded cardigans, cigarette pants. Clothes from the 1950s. Some
were Gram's and some were her mom's, and most were still in dry cleaner bags. I had to sit down on the carpet—SO I WOULDN'T FAINT.

The recipe festival would have to wait.

As Gram pulled out each garment, she told a little story about wearing it, which was hilarious and weird and inspiring. It was like I was on the sidewalk in front of the Amazon Hotel and Esther Greenwood was in her room tossing her city clothes out the window and I was catching them in my outstretched arms, one by one, as they fluttered down. Some items were a little worn, but some looked brand new. Most of them—miracle of miracles—fit me. Or would when I wrapped a black studded belt around my waist a few times. On the top shelf were round boxes that contained hats with veils and churchy head covers with webs of daisies. A box on the floor was a treasure chest of melamine bracelets. But my favorite by far is a sea foam green beaded cardigan with white pearls and rhinestones along the collar. It doesn't have buttons but a tiny hook at the top to keep it shut. Thanks to my constant fever and constant air-conditioning, I am more than comfortable wearing it around the house. Plathware.

So we were talking and laughing, and Gram was spraying us both with Muguet Des Bois cologne and pulling out scatter pins from the back of her jewelry box and pinning them to my T-shirt, and I was having the time of my
life, learning all kinds of things about her that even my own mother and father probably didn't know. Information that made Gram (even more) amazing to me, knowledge that I wouldn't have been able to handle before this summer. Here's the lowdown, in no particular order: