Y: A Novel (16 page)

Back at the town house, Miranda is waiting for us in the living room. Her face is
screwed up in a tight little knot. She looks at us and I can tell that she wants to
laugh but knows she can’t. Someone’s got to be in charge. And so we are lectured—at
length and it goes too far—until Lydia-Rose’s nose begins to leak blood.

As punishment, when we get home from school the next afternoon it’s Spring Cleaning
Day with Miranda, except that it’s not spring. We clean the bathroom, walk and bathe
Winkie (who for some reason smells like duck poo), clip her toenails (hell), prune
the dead parts off plants, pick up every single leaf that Winkie has tracked into
the house, vacuum all the animal fur off the carpet (at first we tried to lint-brush
it, in an attempt to avoid lugging the heavy vacuum out of the closet, but this proved
futile), beat the rag rugs, disinfect the kitchen, launder every machine-washable
thing in the house, water and fertilize the newly pruned plants, and then clean something
we’ve never cleaned before, just for the sake of cleaning. For example, the paper
towel dispenser. Which I wasn’t aware could get dirty. Miranda calls our activities
a “blitz.” After dinner we iron the pillowcases and the cloth napkins, which we use
once a year.

The only thing that makes this ordeal bearable is that Miranda puts on the
Edward Scissorhands
soundtrack—to promote speed and efficiency and to create a sense of whimsy, she says,
somewhat lightheartedly, dishcloth in hand.

The next morning I take the dog for a poo, then pretend I’m walking to school but
turn back once I’m sure that Miranda has gone to work. I’ve decided to take naked
pictures of myself with Lydia-Rose’s fancy digital camera.

I’m hoping to angle the camera so that the mirror won’t capture the flash, but I’m
scared Miranda or Lydia-Rose will come home, so it ends up being a series of haphazard
snapshots—amateur angles, ill-thought-out poses, poor facial expressions. It is a
cliché thing to do, but I have no choice. I want to know what my future lovers will
see when I undress for them. And I can’t tell from looking in the mirror because a
mirror reflection is actually your reflection backwards, i.e., your left hand becomes
your right hand; therefore, it isn’t accurate. I need accuracy. So I take eight fast
clicks, throw on my bathrobe, jam the USB cable into the back of the computer, wait
for the icon to appear on the desktop, and double-click on the first image.

We have an old Apple ColorSync monitor, which is only a good thing if it’s working.
It’s not. The RGB settings are all fucked up, and instead of “Millions of Colors,”
I get green. So I read the Help files, which suggest I recalibrate my monitor. So
I do it, and all that happens is I get an error message that says “Error. Factory
settings have been restored,” and then everything turns a brighter shade of green.
I feel like taking a big Jiffy marker and writing
GreenSync
on the bottom of the monitor, just to clear things up around here.

The point is that thanks to the ColorSync monitor, my mission to spend the day deconstructing
an accurate rendition of my naked body is left unfulfilled. My skin is a kind of pasty
chartreuse mixed with putty, and my nipples are outlined in deep emerald. Not what
I am looking for. Plus, the flash has indeed been caught by the mirror and my head
looks like a big ball of pale-green cotton on fire. Again, inaccurate. But that’s
not the ColorSync monitor’s fault. It’s the digital camera’s, for having its Flash
selection menu be a series of ambiguous icons instead of words like “Flash On” and
“Flash Off.” How am I supposed to know the difference between a lightning bolt and
an eyeball?

When I am fifteen and Lydia-Rose is sixteen, she goes to a party with a boy she has
a crush on and tells no one about it, not even me. A little after midnight, she walks
into our bedroom, face pale, and climbs into my bed. This is something she hasn’t
done in years. My feet are instantly hot and uncomfortable. I am drinking NeoCitran
(
three
packets) and wearing flannel penguin pajamas because it gets cold here at night,
even in the summer. I’ve been reading bits of Judy Blume books to Winkie for hours,
waiting for Lydia-Rose to come home, and feeling like I’ve spent my whole life with
a head cold.

We lock eyes. She has become the classic beauty that everyone predicted. But there’s
a pimple on her cheek that looks like a tapioca bead. It is swollen and red from her
picking at it.

“Put some toothpaste on that thing,” I tell her. “It’ll shrink by morning.” I push
her out of the bed and worm off my socks. Sometimes I think
I have the sweatiest feet in the world. There’s no way other people’s feet sweat as
much as mine.

Lydia-Rose sits at the end of my bed and kicks off her sneakers. She’s wearing a sleeveless
wraparound sweater with a little belt around the waist and flared jeans. Her socks
are bubblegum pink. She lifts up the sweater and shows me her purple satin bra.

“I bought this for tonight. I feel like such a fucking idiot.”

I stare at the bra. It is lined in black lace and exposes the tops of her breasts.
It is an amazing-looking thing. But what really catches my eye is the long red welt
that runs down the length of her stomach, puffy and raw.

“What the fuck happened?” I reach up and trace the welt with my finger.

She flinches and drops her sweater. “Don’t ever have sex, Shannon. Just fucking don’t.”
She unbuckles her jeans and lets them drop. Her thighs are covered in red welts, too.
She stands in front of me in her underwear.

“He said it would be fun,” she says and looks at her feet, still in the pink socks.

“What?”

“If we did it rough.”

“Jeremy?”

“He said we should have filthy sex. I don’t know. Fuck. What the fuck is wrong with
me?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“Do you know what he said to me after he finished? He said, ‘You’re due soon, I can
smell it.’”

I pull back the covers and pat the mattress. She climbs in. I feel a rush of sympathy
for her, but there’s something stronger—more selfish—and it’s my own shame and jealousy.
I’ve never gotten a period. I don’t radiate sexual. I could stand on the corner in
a nightie and spike heels and men would walk on by. Miranda says I’ll get my period
soon, but I just don’t think I have it in me.

Lydia-Rose picks up a book about Marina Abramović and starts reading out sentences
from it. Lately I am so sick of her I could scream. She spends all day browsing art
books, then delivers minilectures to me when
I try to use paper towels for dinner napkins or wash our whites with colors or don’t
say
Excuse me
before I answer the phone. I find it nauseating. I want to eat with my hands.

And then I have this funny thought as we’re lying in bed. It kind of bursts into my
head, like a bright flash. I want to carve a little star into my calf. Where did this
thought come from? Regardless, here it is, ping-ponging around in my head, restless
until I do something about it.

“This woman lets people do whatever they want to her,” Lydia-Rose says and points
to a picture of Abramović in crotchless leather chaps. I fling the covers off, rescue
Winkie from the comforter burrito I’ve turned her into, grab my Swiss Army Knife,
and lock myself in the bathroom.
She let someone hold a gun to her head!
I turn on the water so I don’t have to hear any more of this crap and roll up my
pajamas to study the hideous white flesh of my calf. I have such ugly legs. I’ve made
a habit of studying women’s legs, and no one’s legs are as ugly as mine. My knees
are so fleshy that I can grab handfuls of fat. No one else’s legs look like this,
I’m sure of it. When I have money, I’m going to get liposuction. Suck the fat right
out of these things.

My calf is so white, it looks blue. My shins are covered in bruises because I’m still
so clumsy. I must hit my shin five times a day. I flip open the Swiss Army Knife and
drag it down over my lower calf, about an inch. It seems right, somehow, to do this—to
carve this star. But the knife doesn’t break the skin. It leaves a white line and
that’s it. Is the blade too dull? I close my eyes, push as hard as possible. The skin
is red, but there’s still no blood. I think about the knives we have in the kitchen.
A serrated knife is what I need. My heart pounds. I like having secrets, doing weird
stuff. I like being stealthy. I open the door to the bathroom. “Gonna trim my hair,”
I say to Lydia-Rose. “I need the good scissors.” Lydia-Rose doesn’t look up.
This woman took pills for catatonia and had a seizure!

I push past our beaded curtain and stumble into the kitchen. Part of our kitchen wall
is mirrored, a white lattice dividing the large pane into a checkerboard. It gives
me nine different faces. I balance a steak knife in the elastic of my pajama pants
and walk stiffly past the bedroom, past Lydia-Rose and her stupid book, and into the
bathroom. I take her blue shirt out of the laundry basket and rip it a bit.

The steak knife does its job efficiently. I don’t even have to press that hard. I’m
surprised at how well I handle the pain. My hand is shaking but I make one clean cut,
about an inch long, on my lower calf. Tiny beads of blood bubble out and I mop them
up with my finger and swirl them around in my mouth. The blood tastes dark, like molasses.
I make two more cuts until I have a triangle. The next part is more difficult—the
next triangle. For some reason, I am making a Star of David. It’s difficult because
I have to cut over the parts I’ve already cut. I hold my breath and press down with
the knife. I get a weird sensation in my stomach, something like guilt or shame, like
how I felt when Lydia-Rose and I threw rocks at a suckerfish until it died. An evil
feeling. I put the knife under the bathroom sink; I’ll deal with it in the morning.

I blow my nose and walk into the bedroom, catch a stack of
YM
s with the side of my foot. “Damn.” They fan out on the floor.

“Filthy sex,” Lydia-Rose says. “What is wrong with me?”

“Nothing’s the matter with you,” I say to her. “Do you want to go to sleep?”

“No. Do you?”

“No.”

Lydia-Rose flips onto her stomach and fights with the covers for a second. She spits
out some of Winkie’s fur that has found its way into her mouth. “He didn’t know it
was my first time. I never want him to know.”

I stare at her and want to slap the back of her head. My calf is burning but it’s
a pleasant, warm burn.

I climb into bed and wince when my pajamas rub the cuts. “Why’d you fuck him if you
didn’t want to?”

“Don’t lecture me.” She pushes herself out of my bed and climbs into her own. “You’re
a stupid freak sometimes. Grow up.”

A week later, I have to break the news to her.

“He has another girlfriend. I’m sorry.” I’ve seen them at the Vietnamese restaurant
downtown. The new girlfriend wears a pink coat and has long black hair. She is short
and bucktoothed and hangs off Jeremy’s
arm as casually as a rag. I sit at the bus stop and watch them in the picture window
of the restaurant, where they huddle like chipmunks over their food. The girlfriend
slurps her noodles and wipes the end of her nose with her hand. Jeremy doesn’t notice
because she has wiggled her toe into the corner of his shoe. He looks smug, and high,
and happy.