Читать книгу Girl Trouble - Kerry Cohen - Страница 13

Nina

WHEN I THINK OF NINA NOW, I THINK OF HER FINGERS. Long, delicate, cool fingers. She entwined them with mine, soft and fragile, like a baby bird, as we walked down the elementary school hallway. Fingers that lightly held me together against the chaos of my life at home. Which is what best friends were supposed to do.

Days I came home from school unsure what I’d find. My mother crying on the phone. My mother in bed with the door shut tight. When my father came home later the silence between them was so loud I could barely think. I ducked away, not wanting to hear the things said, things like, “You could have called if you were going to be late. I made this fucking dinner.” Things like, “How dare you come home night after night like this?” Sometimes my mother screamed at him, so out of control you couldn’t understand what she was saying. Sometimes she spat out things I knew I shouldn’t have heard, things about another woman and fucking and pain. My father, though, was always quiet. His lips pursed in disgust. He didn’t love her anymore, and a part of me was terrified that I didn’t either.

But then Nina. Nina with the caramel skin and thin silky hair the same color. She had a high, quiet voice. She wore red tortoiseshell glasses and thin white blouses that buttoned to her neck.

My mother painted the house room by room. Paint chips splayed on the dining room table. She didn’t bother with dinner anymore. She stood over the colors, forehead furrowed, and pulled one to the side to examine it. She moved certain ones next to others. She left paint chips taped to walls. Everywhere I went in the house, there they were, like emblems of something about to arrive. Tiny passports. She started with the downstairs bathroom. Then she moved on to the guest room. Then the master bedroom. My father came home fewer and fewer nights. When he did come home he slept in the guest room, now a soothing cappuccino brown, while my mother sobbed upstairs. I stayed in my room, afraid to disrupt this strange, bursting silence. Once, though, I came into the hallway to see my mother standing there by the stairs. Her eyes were faraway. She was frozen, a strange statue.

“Mom?” I said carefully. “Are you okay?”

She didn’t seem to hear me. I waited. Finally, she walked toward her room and shut the door.

So whenever I could, I stayed at Nina’s for dinner. Her mother was a psychiatrist who saw clients in her home office. Her father was rarely home. Sometimes Nina and I hid behind the banister upstairs and watched her mother’s patients arrive. I wondered about them, all those people, about what they talked about behind the closed door.

In the summer, Nina planned to go to the camp where she went every year with her old best friend from Saddle River, Anastasia. I’d never met her, but Nina kept a picture of the two of them on her desk in her bedroom. A stack of correspondences, replete with red and pink hearts and sparkly rainbow stickers, sat in the desk’s drawer. The day she showed me, I smiled and nodded politely, doing my best to mask my jealousy. I begged my mother to let me go to the camp with Nina.

“You’re not the only one around here who wants things right now.”

“I know,” I said.

But my father paid for me to go; and Nina, Anastasia, and I traveled on the bus into the Adirondacks. They knew the other girls, and I watched as Anastasia leaned to whisper into select girls’ ears, her long blond hair falling lightly against her face. The girls listened eagerly, and by the time we stood to exit single file from the bus they were all speaking her name: “Anastasia,” they said. “Look.” “Anastasia, over here. Come stand by me.” But Anastasia leaned against Nina.

We slept twenty girls to a cabin. Rows and rows of bunks, like in an asylum, lined the musty room. Nina and Anastasia had already claimed each other as bunkmates, so I smiled at a small girl with dark eyes and frizzy hair and threw my duffel on the lower bunk.

“Do you know Anastasia?” she asked in a small voice.

I shook my head. “Nina’s my best friend,” I told her. “And Nina knows her.”

“Oh.” I saw the confusion in her face as she watched Nina and Anastasia across the room, where Anastasia was French braiding Nina’s hair.

During dinner we stood in line to get trays of rice and hot dogs and pale iceberg-lettuce salads with tiny strips of carrot. We sat at the long wooden tables. My hair was in a ponytail and Anastasia leaned close, peering into my face.

“What?” I said.

“What is that?”

“What?” I tried to cover whatever she saw with my hands. I looked at Nina, but she was busy eating, trying to look like she hadn’t heard a thing.

“Do you have a hair coming out of your chin?”

“No!” But later, I examined my chin in the cloudy mirror of the bathroom and found an eyebrow hair that had fallen and gotten stuck there. I considered telling Anastasia, to even save the little hair, but I thought better of it.

The next day, we lined up at the swimming pool. I could feel the way my thighs pressed against each other. Anastasia, like Nina, was sleek and lovely, like the horses we could see grazing in a pasture across the way. The other girls admired Nina’s braid. They begged Anastasia to do theirs next.

We splashed into the water, one at a time, to reveal our swimming skills so we could join the appropriate instructor. I was given a tag with a yellow sticker to signify I was in the lowest group. The best, like Anastasia, got blue stickers. Intermediate got red. Yellow stayed, while red and blue got to move on to crafts. Their instruction would be later. I watched as Nina and Anastasia walked off together, arm in arm, a gaggle of girls in their wake. Our yellow group got kickboards and traveled up and down the length of the sparkling pool kicking and blowing bubbles.

When we got out an hour later, one of the younger counselors approached me.

“You’re burned,” she said.

I looked at her, confused.

“Your back,” she said. “It’s all red.”

I pressed my shoulder and watched as the angry pink turned to white, then back to pink.

“Come with me,” she said. “I’m taking this one,” she called to the other counselors.

I followed her across the way, near where the horses were, into a small shack. She turned me around, clucking and shaking her head.

“I’m a CIT,” she told me, which meant she was fourteen years old, a counselor-in-training. She said, “You poor thing.” I stood still as she went into a cabinet and then squeezed white cream from a tube. Her fingers were light on my back as she rubbed it in. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying not to cry. “Does it hurt?”

I nodded, afraid to speak. She was so pretty, with feathered black hair and a heart-shaped face. Her eyes were lined with blue and she wore heavy mascara. She smiled at me, and as soon as our eyes met the tears came. She pulled me into a hug and I rested my head against her shoulder.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Whatever it is, I promise it will be okay.”

I closed my eyes.

“Can I stay with you?” I asked.

She searched my face, concerned. “For a little while.” She unfolded chairs for us and we sat facing outside toward the horses. She watched them intently.

“Do you ride?” I asked.

Her face lit up. “Yeah. Do you?”

I shrugged. “I’ve never tried.”

“I can teach you.”

“I’d love that.”

She turned to look at me. “What bunk are you in?”

I told her.

“You guys have lessons Thursdays.”

I shook my head, imagining Anastasia here, ruining this, pulling the CIT’s attention from me. “I don’t want to have lessons with everyone else.”

She cocked her head and laughed. “Not sure we can do private lessons.”

“I don’t want to do anything with them,” I said too quickly.

She watched me for a moment. “It gets better,” she said. “It does.”

When I didn’t say anything, she added, “If things get really bad you can come hang out with me.”

Later, the CIT walked me back to the bunk. They were all there, Anastasia and Nina, the girl with the frizzy hair. They all looked up when I walked in. I tried to meet Nina’s eyes, but she looked away.

In the cafeteria, I didn’t bother trying to sit with Nina anymore. Nina was gone, long long gone. She laughed and whispered with Anastasia and their followers. I sat with the CIT who’d been so nice to me, or with the frizzy-haired girl.

One time after lunch I saw Nina outside the dining hall barn vomiting up the red Jell-O we’d had for dessert. She cried, and someone rushed inside to get a counselor. Anastasia came right out, her best friend, there for her. The counselor gestured to everyone to go back inside, to go about their days. I did exactly that. I didn’t even look at Nina. I didn’t care anymore. I wouldn’t. She wasn’t mine to care about.

I don’t know how long I’d been at the camp. All I know is that it hadn’t been that long—maybe a week, maybe two—when I woke in the morning to the feel of something wet and slimy on my pillow. I blinked, confused, staring at the white mess. After a moment I realized the girls had put shaving cream on my face after I fell asleep. I sat up, furious, humiliated. A few of the girls turned to look and laugh. I felt my face grow hot. I reached for a towel and scrubbed, and I yanked my sheets off the cot.

“What happened?” I heard Anastasia’s voice through the laughter. “Did you forget to wash off the shaving cream after shaving your beard?” More laughter.

Tears pressed into my eyes. “Screw you, Anastasia.”

“Come on.” Her voice was close now. She stood right next to me. “We just had a little fun.”

I didn’t say anything. I gathered my sheets and the towel and headed for the door.

“You’re going to tattle?” Anastasia yelled after me. “Like a little baby?” But I was crying too hard to respond.

“Kerry.” Nina’s voice, soft and lilting. I turned around and looked at her, the pain heavy in my chest. Her eyes searched mine, but I gave her nothing. “Don’t be mad,” she said. “It was just a joke.”

I walked away, clutching my linens, out into the commons, where a counselor found me and took me to the main office. After a few minutes I calmed down enough to call my mother.

Four hours later she arrived, harried, annoyed, but also concerned. We piled my belongings into the car and took off down the country road. All around us were grassy meadows and forests. The sky was a blinding blue. My mother didn’t say anything, just turned up the Fleetwood Mac cassette playing on the stereo. I opened the window and let the warm breeze flutter at my face, thankful for my mother’s silence, that she didn’t ask about what happened. I knew she’d been dealing with her own catastrophe this summer, with the impending divorce. And now here we both were, ruined, despairing, hurtling in our silence back home.

Years later, when I was eighteen, I visited a lover at Columbia University. He didn’t love me. I knew this. But I opened myself to him anyway, eager for attention. Eager to feel his breath on my neck, the flutter of his eyelashes on my cheek. Above his desk was a picture of a woman. I moved to get a closer look. Of course I did. To see who he would love, if not me. In the picture, a woman lay supine on a couch, her eyes soft and sad. With shock I saw that it was Nina, grown up now, still unbearably lovely. I brought my hand to my throat, the jealousy and hatred rising as thick and black and unmovable as it had that summer so many years ago.