The Wrong Heaven Page 15

  “You’re probably right,” said Katie.

  They got out of the car and switched places. But when Doris reached down to put the car into drive, Katie interrupted the motion, grabbing Doris’s hand and clasping it in her own.

  “I don’t want there to be any secrets between us anymore,” said Katie. “You know?”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t you want that too?”

  “Of course.”

  “So.” Katie clasped Doris’s hand tighter. Her blue eyes widened like a child’s. “Do you want to tell me anything?”

  In Katie’s anxious, expectant expression, Doris could tell that there was something specific her friend was hoping she’d say. A dark feeling passed over her, like a cloud between her body and the sun. “Katie,” she said. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Of course,” said Katie. “How selfish of me. You need to go home and get some rest.”

  “You’re never selfish,” said Doris. She put the car in drive and pulled out into the road.

  That night, Doris sat in front of the TV, gin and tonic in hand, attempting to watch Law & Order. But she couldn’t stop thinking about Katie’s question.

  Had Katie discovered, somehow, about the lump? No: that was impossible. Doris had told no one, and Dr. Patel would never have broken confidentiality. So what secret could she possibly have had in mind?

  The longer Doris sat there, letting the troubling question marinate within her, the clearer the answer seemed. Katie must have known about that time—about her and Evan. She’d known for years, perhaps decades: keeping it to herself, afraid to embarrass them both by dragging it into the light. Today, a minuscule amount of weed had temporarily dislodged her inhibitions—or simply provided an excuse.

  Doris and Evan had agreed it wouldn’t happen again, and it never did. But the details of that night burrowed into her mind and lived there. For years, at regular intervals, they popped their heads up, like prairie dogs, and looked her in the eye. She knew what Katie’s husband’s thing looked like—sallow and tapered, like a melted-down candle. She knew his one-two-three, the sneer that seized his face when he came. It especially tormented her later, when Katie was pregnant again: those awful pastel maternity smocks, the great pity of her friend’s innocence.

  But perhaps Katie wasn’t so innocent after all. She was stronger than she looked—weathering all those years of childhood crises and marital strife with a stoic smile and a stocked refrigerator. She’d probably live to be one hundred, surrounded by her complicated children and their gorgeous, life-gobbling offspring.

  Since she discovered the lump, Doris had been playing a game called Write Your Own Obit. Doris Lansing, 65, beloved high school English and drama teacher. Doris Lansing, 65, known for daring experimental productions of “Our Town” and “The Diary of Anne Frank” at Oak County High. Doris Lansing, 65, wife of Dr. Fareed Ahmed (Professor of Law, deceased), known for good jokes and impeccable poker face.

  Doris Lansing, 65. Survived by no one.

  Katie barely slept that night, racked by questions. Should she tell Doris she knew, or wait for Doris to admit it herself? Perhaps there was nothing to tell; perhaps the lump would turn out benign. No, no, it wouldn’t: this was a time bomb beneath the skin, the beginning of the end.

  The next morning, as soon as light began to filter through the curtains, she banished these thoughts and arose with a sense of purpose. She excelled in times of crisis: at least during the daytime, when there were things to do. She moved like a triage nurse, agile and efficient. First order of business: she’d go to Stop&Shop, buy some rhubarb and apples, bake something for Doris. It wouldn’t help, but it was something to do.

  While scanning the fruit aisle, though, she heard a low voice speak her name. She turned around, startled, and said, “Mitch!”

  Mitch Durbin had been a physics teacher at the same school where she and Doris had taught. Now he and Katie served together on the library board. “Listen, Katie,” he said. “About that email I sent you—you don’t have to—”

  “I’m sorry for not responding.”

  “Oh, it’s all right, I shouldn’t have—”

  “No, no. Not you. Look, I—yes.”

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, I’ll have dinner with you.”

  He smiled. “I’m surprised,” he said. “Surprised and pleased.”

  She was surprised too; she’d expected to hear herself rejecting him. She hadn’t been thinking of Mitch at all, she realized as she pushed her cart away, but of Doris. Doris had been subtly pressuring Katie, for weeks, to go on this date. She’d be pleased to hear about it; it would give them something to talk about, something that wasn’t that.

  But driving home, as Katie imagined sitting across from Mitch at some candlelit table and pretending to feel whatever one was supposed to feel on a first date, she felt extremely tired. Did Doris think Katie would enjoy acting out these rituals of romance like some silly girl, just because it was what she herself, in different circumstances, might have done?

  It was only as she pulled into the driveway that Doris’s true motives occurred to her: she’d been pushing Katie toward another partner, a spare.

  Back home, Katie went into the bathroom and stared into the mirror. Her hair was gray and brittle (she’d always refused dye, which felt dishonest and vain), her skin still translucent but now creased in some places, heavy in others. It was a face that bore the signs of abandonment, like some parched and weed-choked yard.

  Are you guys, like, partners? Katie pulled the elastic out of the base of her braid, shook her gray hair long around her shoulders. She gathered her hair behind her head and pulled it tight; then she loosened her grip, so that the shortest layers fell close around her face. She watched her blue eyes grow wide. She had an idea.

  The next morning around eleven, Doris’s doorbell rang.

  “Doris,” said Katie, when her friend opened the door. “I made you a pie. Also, I want you to give me a haircut.”

  Katie bustled into the house, Doris following behind, and set the pie down on the kitchen counter. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a pair of scissors. “You know how you always told me I should get rid of my braid? That it’s too old-ladyish? Well, I think you’re right.”

  Doris raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Doris sat Katie down in a chair in front of the hall mirror and arranged a fluffy pink bathroom towel around her shoulders. “How short do you want it?”

  “Not too short,” said Katie. “Maybe shoulder length? But, you know, do whatever you want to.” She looked up, locking her eyes with her friend’s. “I trust you.”

  Doris took the scissors in one hand and held Katie’s braid in the other. She looked down at Katie, who now sat with her eyes closed and a slight smile on her face. What had prompted this sudden makeover? Yesterday’s walk on the wild side, the hit on the hospital balcony? Or had Katie finally agreed to go out with Mitch Durbin? Doris had enjoyed teasing Katie about Mitch’s overtures, but she’d never expected Katie to actually go through with it.

  She reached down and snipped off the end of the braid, just above the elastic.

  Katie gasped at the first snip, as at an unexpected electric touch. She opened her eyes, then closed them again. She smiled. She had always enjoyed the sensation of someone touching her hair, the tingling points that danced across her scalp and then down her spine. Evan had never done this. Sometimes, in bed, he’d yank on her braid, and she’d cry out. Had he thought she liked it?

  Now, as the silver points danced from her scalp toward the edges of her body, she felt pricked open all over, like a sieve. It was a wonderful feeling. “This feels nice, Doris,” she said. “Really nice.”

  With every snip of her scissors, Doris grew a little bit angrier.

  She had not slept well the night before. All day, her mind had circled like a vulture: to think that Katie had watched her go through chemo, a mastectomy, bru
shes with death, withholding a piece of knowledge that might have set her at ease? It would have cost Katie nothing to tell; Evan had been dead for two years.

  Now, to think of the months ahead. Throwing up, swallowing jars and jars of pills, lying in a hospital bed too weak to move. Katie paying her pitying visits, her mind somewhere else, with her children or grandchildren—or even, perhaps, with some new love.

  This haircut, the arrogance and affront of it: how lucky, how innocent and lucky, to be able to choose the way your life would change.

  Some red urge possessed her, and Doris watched her hand holding the scissors swoop upward, toward the nape of Katie’s neck, and cut away an enormous chunk of hair. Now there was a gaping hole at the back of Katie’s head.

  Doris looked up at the mirror. First she saw herself: dark and pale-faced, with her scissors raised in the air; then Katie, sitting there like some tranquil martyr. She lowered the scissors again, tore them across the back of Katie’s head in another wild shearing motion.

  When Doris finally stopped, the woman in the chair bore almost no resemblance to the Katie she knew. Katie’s silver hair was cut close to her head in the back, and in the front it jutted out in odd tufts. Doris felt a momentary thrill of satisfaction; then the thrill plummeted inside out. “Jesus Christ,” she said. She heard the scissors drop from her hand to the floor.

  Katie opened her eyes. Slowly, she raised a hand to her head. Then she got up from the chair and ran into the bathroom.

  Doris remained in place, arms folded. She heard a sound like a choked sob, then a second one. She picked up the scissors from the floor, steeled herself, and followed Katie into the bathroom.

  Katie stood in front of the mirror, staring at her mutilated reflection, tears streaming slowly down her face. She did not move; she appeared to be in a state of shock.

  Doris came and stood next to her friend. She didn’t say anything. What could she say?

  Instead, she raised her hand, opened up the scissors, and snipped off a chunk of her own hair: a hard-won, much-loved tress that curled around her left ear. It had taken months to grow back after the chemo; now it fell to the floor, a dark little comma.

  She reached over to the right side of her head, about to make a bigger, sloppier cut. But Katie, without taking her eyes from the mirror, reached up and halted Doris’s hand, grabbing it around the wrist.

  “Don’t do it,” said Katie. “Stop. Just stop.”

  Neither of them moved or spoke as they gazed at the strange tableau in the mirror: Katie gripping Doris’s wrist, the scissors held up like a trophy. For a long time they stood and watched their joint reflection, breathless—as if the image might reveal which woman was stopping the other from moving, which was holding the other one up.

  Goddess Night

  I met Sharon at something called Goddess Night. I had come to meet girls. I wasn’t a lesbian, but I hoped to become one.

  Everyone knows now that heterosexuality isn’t real, it’s basically brainwashing. Plus I had heard women kissed with softer lips and knew what to do down there because they had the same business going on. Also, women probably did not do things like ask you to “play dead” and then jerk off onto your face, or if they did, they’d Obtain Consent first and it would be called Play. Men just did what they wanted and didn’t call it anything. At that point I was twenty-three and I had slept with three people:

  1. When I tried to lose my virginity, at seventeen, Thomas couldn’t get it in. He kept saying I was too dry. “Then just jam it in there,” I said, “even if I scream. It’s for my own good.” But he flopped down on the shiny hardwood floor and said, “I can’t do this anymore. I feel like I’m in fucking Vietnam.” I don’t know how many sexual partners he had had before me. He was thirty-four and my piano teacher.

  2. When Tony, my TA from Freshman Statistics, took me out for curry at India Palace, I asked him about his first name, which I had always thought of as Italian and found unusual for a Korean man. He just shrugged, and I realized I had been unintentionally racist. Guiltily, I invited him up to my room. It wasn’t exactly rape, because he said, “I want to fuck you,” and I said, “Um, OK,” but what happened next bore no relation to what I had thought would happen next. Afterward I said, “I’ve only had sex once, sort of,” and he said, “There’s no need to be ashamed of that,” and I said, “That’s not what I meant,” but he was already asleep. I was sore the next day.

  3. When I moved to Brooklyn and started working at FLOAT (Friends and Lovers of Animals and Trees), I met Ben at my local Fair Trade coffee shop. He was a software engineer from Vancouver. He wore a hemp-rope necklace with a seashell on it. We kissed on our second date, engaged in “heavy petting” on the fourth, and slept together on the sixth. During sex he referred to my body parts by their proper medical names. He kept asking “Do you like that?” in a polite voice, like a waiter, but I just kept thinking of new NGO vocabulary words I was learning, like “low impact” and “value neutral.” I stopped returning his calls.

  The Goddess Night email said, “Do you feel connected to your creativity? Where are your dreams located in your body? Has your personal vision been silenced in this heteronormative, patriarchal world? Come and watch Goddess Almighty and discuss these questions with other like-minded women. Friday at 8, Mindy Kalman’s apartment, Prospect Heights.”

  Mindy Kalman sat across from me in the cubicle foursquare at FLOAT. She had long frizzy hair and wore heavy, stunning, ambiguously ethnic earrings. Every day I watched her thick eyebrows moving over the low foam-board partition, like caterpillars doing a symmetrical dance.

  My official job title at FLOAT was junior project manager, but it was never clear what projects I was meant to manage. Mostly I made spreadsheets. I put names into boxes—donors and potential donors—and Mindy called them and asked them to donate to FLOAT DAY!, our big yearly event where we invited one hundred low-income New York families to a spot by the Brooklyn Bridge and gave them each a small potted tree. Sometimes the name and location made them think a boat was involved, and when they found out it was only trees they got upset. But usually they took the trees anyway, so technically the event was successful.

  Before FLOAT, I’d worked at a Mexican place called Don Pepito’s. No one who worked there was actually Mexican. The line cooks always grabbed my ass when I walked by, and they made me wear a shirt that was one size too small because it “helped business” by making my boobs look bigger.

  When I got the job at FLOAT, I was so grateful I was terrified. I resolved that the universe would never again mistake me for a Don Pepito’s waitress. I made myself a twofold promise: 1) I would drink one bottle of Life Expanding Kombucha per day, and 2) I would become more generally daring. The former was to transform my life at a cellular level, as the bottle promised; the latter was to transform it at a plot level.

  Which is why, when I received Mindy’s email, I stood up, peered over the top of the partition dividing our desks, and said, “Um, Mindy?”

  Generally I tended to avoid Mindy’s half of the cubicle foursquare, because she sat next to Trent, who had perfectly tousled hair and sang in a postpunk band called Ronald Reagan’s Eyeball and who I had accidentally/on-purpose kissed at the Sustainable New York Conference after-party. It turned out he had a beautiful girlfriend who made homemade lip gloss.

  “Yeah?” said Mindy, not looking up from her computer. “What’s up, Emily?”

  “Um, I’m gonna come to your party. Can I bring apples?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, I’m pretty sure apples are vegan.”

  “Oh yeah, sure. Apples are good.”

  “What party?” asked Trent.

  “Sorry,” said Mindy, turning to face him. “It’s a women-only space. Er—women and nonbinary people.”

  “Too bad,” he said with a sigh. “I’m, like, super into binaries.”

  Mindy sighed. Trent smiled at me, like we had an inside joke. Sometimes we shared joke moments like this, and they kill
ed me, though I didn’t usually understand his jokes and suspected I wouldn’t like them if I did understand. But he never knew what I was talking about when I tried to refer back to them later. It was part of his charisma: he went around creating secrets with other people and forgetting about them, so that they became secrets even from himself.

  On Friday night we sat in a large semicircle in Mindy’s living room, fifteen women and nonbinary people on embroidered pillows of various sizes. Because I didn’t know anyone, I mostly kept my head down as the other guests settled into position, but I kept furtively staring at the woman directly across from me. She had emerald-green eyes, high cheekbones, and a tremendous cloud of black hair. It was impossible to say what color her skin was, partly because it seemed to faintly glow.

  I wasn’t the only one staring. In fact, it seemed like everyone else in the room was either staring at her or trying very hard not to. By the way she carried herself, you could tell she was used to being stared at, that not only was she comfortable in her own skin, but she also wore a second skin over her own, which consisted of people’s stares, and she was comfortable in that too. When she moved—for example, raised her knee and rested an elbow on it—you could see her moving within this invisible cloak of stares, rearranging it around herself like a long flowing garment.

  “All right,” said Mindy. “Let’s begin with a moment of silence for the women of Brooklyn and the world who could not be here with us tonight.” We held the moment, silently, and then Mindy pressed Play.

  It turned out Goddess Almighty was a documentary about two feminist anthropologists from the University of Vermont who go to live for a year among the P’Buxupi tribe. The P’Buxupi are a little-known people on a small island in the Pacific Ocean. They are completely matriarchal. The women control things like laws and trade agreements with other tribes, and the men just build huts and find food, like worker ants. Women have sex with men for procreation, but also with other women, and this form of sex is highly revered, because all women are goddesses and when two goddesses copulate the universe takes a deep breath. Or something like that. The subtitles were very confusing.