And Then Things Fall Apart (14 page)

There is not much going on in my life right now that does not infuriate me. I'm angry at, well, the parents. Amanda. Duh. Fate or whatever would make my cousin escape the womb before she was quite ready. My body for getting the stupid chicken pox. Myself, just because I'm always making regrettable decisions and messing up and misinterpreting things. But really, right this minute? As I pound out each letter in perfect two-hundred-word-a-minute typing? I am sofa king furious at—Matt.

Matt the Ratt. Oh, Sylvia would love that. That's a fact.

We were in the freezer right before I got sick. Okay? For
all I know that freezer is cursed. Maybe some greedy mob contractor poured the concrete for its foundation directly over an ancient Native American grave. Maybe
that
is why it is the site of such infamy, pain, betrayal, and heartbreak.

Since the whole Amanda-Dad tryst, I have pretty much avoided the freezer. But Matt swung by, all casual. I was in the back, taking pizza delivery orders, and he showed up, freshly showered after wrestling practice, smelling like Active Ice or Alpine Rain or whatever that deodorant he wears is called.

He was acting all nice. Real in-love-like. He had brought me a bunch of lilacs from his mom's garden tied up with some kitchen twine that he thrust at me like a third grader on Mother's Day. They smelled amazing. We took turns plucking the blossoms from the bunch and sucking the honey from the tiny stems.

The Active Ice, the lilacs, the honey, the soothing sound of water churning in the dishwasher—it was all really beautiful, and I actually thought, like a total adolescent idiot, how
lucky
I was to have such a great guy as my first real boyfriend. How of all the girls in the entire school, I was the only one he wanted to be with. Ha.

So we kissed a little and it was getting really hot in the back, and Matt said—
his idea
—“Let's cool off in the freezer, Keek.” And for a second it was as if he'd asked me if I wanted to crawl into a coffin with a dead body and take a
nap. But I got over that once he took my hand and our palms touched. Then we were standing in the center of the freezer. Swooping billows of condensation whirled around us like we were death metal rock stars. Once the steam cleared, it was as bright as an operating theater in there. Fluorescent light shone on giant jars of giardiniera and ten-pound bags of frozen French fries. I was tired and, unbeknownst to me, prepoxian. I slumped my weary body down and sat on a drum of rainbow Italian ice.

“Hey, you,” he said.

I felt hyperalert, exhausted, and quivery and hot all over. “Delirious” is pushing it, but I was not myself. Being cool felt good, and my bottom lip chattered all on its own every now and again as Matt sat next to me on a pallet of tomato sauce cans and began to kiss my ear, his hand on my bouncing knee. I stopped him, sweetly. I'm nothing if not a loving sweet-as-sugar effing lollipop of a girl.

“Um, Matt.”

“Um, yeah, Keek?” And he was being so cute and cuddly and koala bear-y, but I felt compelled to ask, as it was something I hadn't really asked before. Like a total SEXUAL AMATEUR.

“So, you've never, like, been with other girls before, right?” Matt is so good at all this making-out business that, what did I really think? That he'd gotten this good practicing on pillows?

“?” No words. Just a weird puzzled-liar-caught-in-the-headlights sort of moment. If we hadn't been in a freezer, Matt would have started to sweat. He wasn't looking at me but at some far-off place in the distance. Maybe looking for the cue cards with the right thing to say to me. Keek, the girl he cooked curries with and showed his spider to, and whose nipples had been in his mouth. I was regretting asking him with everything in my being, but once I started, I needed to know the answer.

“I mean, like”—and I couldn't believe he was making me say all the words out loud—“you're a virgin, same as me. Right?”

Still, silence. Crickets. I asked again, in case his jockian brain didn't understand the question. “Matt, you haven't had sex with anyone before? Have you?” I phrased it very carefully, in a high squeaky about-to-freak-out Minnie-Mouse-on-meth voice so all he had to say was no.

“Oh, hey, no way, Keek. I love you. I have been waiting my whole life up till now so you would be the first person I would ever do these things with. You are amazing and this is so special, I can't believe how lucky I am that we get to be each other's firsts.” This was what he was supposed to say. But didn't. This is, actually, what he said. Ver. Ba. Tim.

“Well, er, um.” And then, “Umm. Hmmm. Um, just, um—a few times. With this girl in Decatur. Um, and another girl in, um. La Grange.” And just when I thought
it couldn't get any worse, he said, “It was wrestling-meet craziness. Way, way before I even met you.” And then. He looked at me like a drowning dog and almost started to cry. “I swear.”

Decatur.

Wrestling.

Meet.

LaGrange.

Few.

Craziness.

I felt like Esther at that New York party, like I was filled with tears that were threatening to spill out and drown me if I dared let them escape—and I was really about to lose it, thinking about these girls. There is a term for these girls, and it is “ring rats.” Which I am so not. They are mean. A little dumb. Wear blue eyeliner in all seriousness.

I started shivering and felt the color drain from my face and the floor disintegrate under my feet. And Matt was talking but I couldn't hear anything but this droning like a hundred bees swarming between my ears. I could hardly keep myself upright, like someone had just punched me and I couldn't breathe. And I was cold. Colder than I have ever been—and I live in Chicago.

And Matt turned toward me, his arms open to catch me or trap me or hug me, and as I stood to escape him, I pulled my cell out of the pocket of my jeans and threw it at Matt's face.

Mature, I know, but I was not the sophisticated picture of precocious wisdom and élan I usually am. My cell missed him and hit the wall and broke, and the # key chipped off, etc.

And then I calmed down—but not much. He talked a little. He said things that made me feel less unhinged, things like:

“I love you.”

So?

“It's different with us.”

And?

“I'll do whatever you want to do.”

Because?

“I never said that I'd never done it. You just assumed I never did, and it was easier to not make a big deal out of it. It's
not
a big deal, so why are you freaking out?”

Am I?

“Anything that happened before has nothing to do with you. It's like eighth grade compared to sophomore year.”

Is it?

“Please don't hate me for something I can't undo.”

I'm going to puke.

“You don't look so good, Keek. Let's get out of the freezer.”

Although all those things made me feel slightly better, I couldn't respond to him. My eyes blurred as I imagined my father and Amanda cavorting in the freezer, kissing and
tumbling in their underwear against the very same boxes of frozen sausages and cola syrup I was bashing into on my way out the door. My mouth was as dry as paper. Maybe I was freaking out for a lot of reasons. Nothing was as it seemed. I couldn't count on anyone to be what they said they were—loyal, faithful, upstanding, attentive, Mom, Dad, best friend, virgin. I knew I should have manned-up, like Esther. She discovered way earlier than me that if you never wanted to be disappointed, you had to expect nothing from everybody. I started walking, one foot in front of the other, up to Matt and kissed him on the cheek like a brother. I slid the wilted and half-eaten lilacs in their floppy twine off the order counter into the trash, and walked all the way home, where I collapsed in a sweaty virginal heap on top of my bedspread.

Mom away.

NICU.

Chicken pox.

Gram's.

Resurrected cell phone.

Michigan.

Furious texting.

Broken up.

Absence does
not
make the heart grow fonder, apparently. And then he's going to get my letter when he gets back and be all heartbroken over me. I don't think he will ever be able to
make this up to me, not in the way he thinks, anyway. He just doesn't get me. At all. And he never will. Is my hair still pink? What the hell kind of question is that? Is your pubic hair still straight? I don't know why I'm still so angry at him, but I am so furious, I want to throw stuff around my grandma's bedroom to see if it will bounce off the paneled walls and do some real damage. Heave this goddamn typewriter out the window so it lands on something beautiful and smashes it into a heap of letters and broken shit. Ram my head into the dresser mirror so it makes a giant spiderweb of cracks. Shatter the bottle of Muguet Des Bois all over the sheets. I want to light myself on fire.

Fuck.

I feel like an important part of who I am has evaporated into thin air. Weren't we crazy in love just a minute ago? Weren't we the happiest we could ever be when we were together, laughing? The safest place I knew was in your arms, you liar. This hurts. Everything hurts. My life is one stab and twist in the heart after the other.

God.

I love him sofa king much.

People think
The Bell Jar
is all about suicide and that it is all depressing and melodramatic and what have you. They have obviously never read it. It is, in reality, very funny. Esther is a real badass and is just sick of all the ridiculousness in the world. The fashion industry. Boys. Men. Sex. The suburbs. Dieting. Academic expectations. Poetry. Hypocrisy. The same exact things that are under my skin of late.

It does, admittedly, cover some depressing territory. There are bad doctors, shock treatments, and, yes, suicide and utter despair over the state of being a woman in the world. But what I love so much about this freaking novel is that it is always the perfect book for my current mood, whatever that may be.

I mean, yes, in
real
life, the actual Sylvia Plath offed herself when she was thirty, which I used to think was old, but don't anymore because Amanda is only seven years younger.

BUT. In the semiautobiographical
novel
Esther Green-wood totally lives on and on and writes and goes off to some
fancy college. She wins. And she is funny the whole time. Maybe not, like, hardee-har-har funny but knowing and cynical and able to remember how the very act of being alive puts you in situations that are ridiculous. She is able to see through all the stupid crap, especially when she is as low as you can get.

What I really can't believe about
The Bell Jar
is how nothing is really that different now. Like when people (my parents) ask what I'm going to study in college and I say, “English.” They say, “Oh. So you want to be a teacher?” And I want to cover my eyes and mouth with duct tape and pretend to be
dead
and done with it.

No,
you simpletons. I want to travel and write and live in a big city, and do cool things with my
brain
. This is not to disparage the fine and noble art of educating in any way. My English teachers have made me who I am today and I love them all with a passion that surprises me. I just don't want to
be
one. It's like Esther. She wants to be a serious poet. I'm talking a Nobel Prize–winning, fourth-graders memorizing you in circle time, getting your poems plastered all over the El in CTA's Poetry in Motion program kind of poet. And most people find that—charming. Like, Matt probably finds my lack of sexual experience “charming.” Adorable. Cute as a fucking button. Esther/Sylvia was as serious as a nuclear bomb.

And the whole thing with her and Buddy and his Cape
Cod waitress is the same as me and Matt, kinda. I'd have thought that in the 1950s it would have been so different in that regard. That Esther even talks about sex in
The Bell Jar
is counterintuitive to all my assumptions about the 1950s. I'm thinking debutante balls, and
Father Knows Best
, and women wearing pearls and hats to church on Sunday, and pot roast for dinner, and little girls wearing saddle shoes and boys wearing coonskin caps. Cars with fins. I have never (I mean, before
The Bell Jar
) thought of the 1950s as a time when girls with blood on their cheeks could run around with suitcases full of avocados. Girls could get drunk with sex-crazed cowboys. Girls could try to kill themselves because it's all sofa king depressing.

And really, for Esther to decide that her boyfriend is lower than dirt because he is a hypocrite who is not the virgin she thought he was the whole time they were going together, which ruins him for her forever, is pretty punk rock. She is, as much as she can be in those up-tight and conservative times, true to herself and to her own desires. Which is cool in any era. And precisely what I need to be reading about right now, what with Matt's deception and all.

Despite his usually magnificent and gentlemanly behavior, Matt was more of a con artist than I realized. When you are so in love with a person, you tend to overlook their faults. You register the slights, the odd behaviors, the tiny betrayals, and collect them in a little velvet bag you wear on
your hip. I have collected hurts with my father. My darling mother. Best-Friend-of-the-Year-Award-Winning Amanda. And I have, until recently, been able to look past them all. As long as these people were not directly hurting me, my screwed-up logic went, they could do what they liked.

But then when dad and Amanda “hooked up”—a phrase that is so indistinct and deceptively casual, I find it insulting—I started to remember all the crappy things she said and did since we first started hanging out. And I felt stupid that I didn't see it coming. Amanda really had me fooled. She sweet-talked me through her tales of experience with her spectacular sense of humor. I ignored my true self, which was trying to warn me. It was like the smoke detector in my soul was filled with dead batteries. Maybe if I had kept Nic around, she could have warned me. Maybe if I had done a lot of things, then a lot of other things would have never happened at all. Live and learn.