Born Confused (28 page)

—Well, one turntable and a boom box, to be specific.

—That’ll do for now.

Karsh got his record bag out of the trunk and clanked it shut, locking it even. This was a too familiar scene, me stuck in park and third-wheeling uselessly in Gwyn’s driveway. But this time she wasn’t begging me to stay.

—Well then, see ya, I guess, I said, embarking on a pedestrian three-point turn.

—Why are you going home? said Karsh.—Right, Gwyn? Why should Dimple go home?

—Well, she
is
old enough to decide what she wants to do, Gwyn said.

This was interesting.

—Is a DJ lesson a little too
Titanic
for you, too? Karsh challenged, looking me square in the face. I tried to go shadowy near the pines.

—No! I love DJs! I mean, I’d love to DJ! To learn how to DJ! It’s just…

I felt awful, but he didn’t look so wounded, actually. The boy sprang back fast. I had wanted to just casually vanish, but now my departure was turning into such a dramarama it was getting embarrassing. You know, like when you say something that’s really funny at the time and then someone who didn’t quite hear asks you to repeat it and by the time you finish explaining it all you just sound lame?

—Well, I’ll drive you home then, said Karsh, reaching for his keys again.

—Don’t worry, I said.—It’s only around the corner.

—Exactly. It’s only around the corner. So I’ll take you. It can be a dangerous neighborhood—look at all these shady sorts lurking in driveways and all that.

He half-twisted.

—You need a strong man beside you.

—Are you a strong man, Karsh? said Gwyn, smiling coyly at him.

It was settled. There was no way I was leaving them alone together.

—Okay, I’ll come in for a few minutes, I said.—That is, if I’m invited.

—Oh, don’t be such a baby, said Gwyn.—Of course you’re welcome.

—Then it’s settled, said Karsh, and he slid off his sneaks on the porch. Gwyn giggled shyly, as if they’d been his Calvins.

—Why are you doing that? she said.

—A home is a sacred place, said Karsh.—Like a temple.

—Not mine, said Gwyn.

—Of course it is, said Karsh.—You live in it, don’t you?

Her breath caught in her throat and she immediately flung off her shoes. I kept mine on. My feet were killing me by now, but I would still resist and make my point. Whatever it was.

By the time we got inside, Gwyn was melting like a chocolate kiss in direct sunlight. And the more she melted the more irresistible she became, a soft sweetness melding with all that swank slinkiness.

Mine was a different kind of dissolution, one that neither transformed me nor made me more delectable. To the contrary: I was vanishing before my eyes.

—Dimple, are you okay? said Karsh. Had I been staring at him? I nodded, looking down at my callused feet.

—She’s fine! Gwyn assessed.—Better than fine!

She was digging around the sewing cabinet in the hallway and now produced three shot glasses and a bottle of Tia Maria.

—Nightcap?

Who were we to refuse? We clinked glasses. I didn’t know whose aunt this was named after, but she must have been the life of the party. The drink was like spiked ice cream, and it snapped alligator-jawed down my throat, singeing my already overheated belly.

—Would you like the grand tour, Karsh? Gwyn offered, running her hand along the banister.—Dimple’s seen it all a million times, haven’t you, Dimps. Honey, if you want to go watch TV or whatever, you know it’s your home.

Hello—did that even qualify as a hint, or more like a whack on the head with a two-by-four?

—Come on, what’s a million and one? said Karsh.

—One too many, Gwyn replied, smiling brightly at him.

I plopped down on the second to last step with my shot glass.

—One too many, I said.—Go on. Enjoy yourselves. I’ll just hang out here a minute.

Before the words were even out of my mouth Gwyn had set the bottle at the foot of the stairs and reached audaciously out to take Karsh’s hand, and the next thing I knew she was marching him away, up along the wall lustrous with all those framed photographs of her childhood, most of them leading one to believe it never rained in Springfield, New Jersey.

These young golden images of Gwyn were plastered all throughout the house—even in her own bedroom. Gwyn beaming out from under a straw hat, a bunch of daisies in her hands and rake fallen by her feet. Gwyn stretched on star moss in a fairy-queen outfit, one wing crushed beneath her and a half-built playhouse in the foreground. Mrs. Sexton was always out of focus or cut off, decapitated or delimbed by the frame. (Perhaps on purpose, it occurred to me now, as Mr. Sexton had been the cameraman on all the shots.)

The sun blazed in these pictures, and it blazed unabashedly in Gwyn now. How did she get so ballsy? After all my agonizing at Hot-Pot, with his hand just millimeters from mine unable to traverse that slim barrier of electrons and atoms and Formica, and she’d just reached out and taken it, carp and dee ‘em, job done.

They were upstairs now; as their voices disappeared down what had seemed to me since childhood a mythical labyrinth of hallways, I leaned against the banister I’d slid down so many times and looked up at the photo of Gwyn beside me, the first one, framed on the bot
tom of the wall that followed the stairs up and away into what was fast becoming the heaven of her house.

I’d seen all of these pictures a million times. So many times I’d stopped seeing them at all, in fact. But a million and one was a new experience, especially when compounded by an evening that had sung bhangra and nearly held hands—not to mention a deranged liquid aunt now setting up shop in my body. And when I looked at the girl in the photo it was as if I didn’t know her. Or as if I’d known her once a long time ago and forgotten her for all the years in between.

—It’s like your own little Hearst castle, I heard Karsh say. The two had reappeared before me; they must have taken the second stairway down. Karsh climbed up to the step behind me; Gwyn followed suit, squirreling in next to him.

—It’s incredible, all these photos of you everywhere, Gwyn, he said.

—Incredible? said Gwyn, a little indignantly. She was passing the Tia Maria around, fortifying our glasses.

—Obviously I can see why someone would
want
to take a load of pictures of you, that’s not what I mean, said Karsh.—But I hope you don’t mind my saying this, it’s just a little strange—all these shots of you alone, as a kid growing up. And then suddenly—poof! No more, as if you disappeared at puberty, like at the first sign of underarm hair or something.

—Well, I did in a way. At least, that’s when my photographer—my father—disappeared. I guess I wasn’t pretty enough or entertaining enough to hold his attention when I grew up.

She downed the Tia.

—And I don’t even have underarm hair, she added.

—Are you kidding, Gwyn? I said.—You got
more
beautiful if anything!

—Well, I worked at it, believe me. I thought about it, planned it all before I ever went out to Venice Beach to find him. But then that didn’t turn out to be such a good idea—seems I got everyone to fall in love with me except him. His friends, that is. It irritated the hell out of him—he accused me of trying to steal them from him. Yeah right! I mean, I was what, twelve? As if I really went all the way across the country looking for him just so I could seduce his geezer pals.

She tipped her head back, emptied a fresh shot, and nodded for us to do the same.

—You went all the way across the country by yourself at twelve? said Karsh, in disbelief.

—Well, I was handling all my mother’s accounts anyway, Gwyn shrugged, looking up at the photograph as if speaking to the girl she used to be.—You know, paying bills, balancing the checkbook. So I just balanced it a little in my favor and told her I was gonna bring him home and got on the train.

—Gwyn, you never told me that, I said. So that was what had been going on around the time she’d disappeared?

—There’s nothing to tell. I got there and did my best but I still got sent back. In the end it was as if it never happened. I don’t even know what got into me to talk about it now.

We were all so huddled together in this small space, such a tiny piece of such an expansive house, the way people always gravitate to the kitchen at a party, as if staving off a slowly encroaching unspeakable loneliness, all those empty rooms. I had a habit of keeping my feet off the foyer floor when I was on the stairs—so many years imagining it was a sea finned with danger, the edge of a battlefield blood blooming, a sheer drop to a distant pavement on hostile territory. Even now I sometimes caught glimpses of the house the way I’d viewed it in my childhood—rooms revealed a plethora of hiding places at a glance, ceiling lamps metamorphosed into gargantuan
stained glass flowers with burning bulbs at their hearts, chandeliers to octogenarian birthday cakes with flipped-candle skeletons, nearly effortlessly, from all those stretched afternoons spent on our backs imagining we inhabited the world upside down. Back in the day when friends would lie on their backs side by side and do things like this. And outside, too, we would lie in the dandelion gauzy with wishes to blow and stare creatures and kingdoms and everyone we’d ever known or would know into the bobbing cumulus, the drifting cirrus, the rain-swollen clouds, and I would always see what she would see, she could always see what I saw. We had time and telepathy on our side, and in those days we never ran for shelter when it rained. But now I realized it had always been a different landscape for Gwyn, that her beautiful house had always had a broken heart at its center, splintering further with every beat.

—Your mom wasn’t worried? Karsh asked quietly.

—She wanted him back, too. And she knew she was no bait. I wouldn’t have even gone, but he sent me this postcard—you know that one of Marilyn Monroe with the wind blowing up her dress? I had never seen anything like it.

Of course I knew the photo. It was the one Gwyn scotched up on the inside of my locker every year, but I’d never seen the other side, the sender’s name. In fact, it had never occurred to me that there’d been a sender; I’d always thought it was just a pretty picture for a pretty person’s locker wall.

—To me it looked like she was about to take off, fly away, Gwyn said.

—Yeah, I know what you mean, I said, closing my eyes and picturing it.—Like from even a sewer on a street she could fashion a set of wings.

When I opened my eyes Karsh was staring at me. I wondered if I’d sounded foolish.

—Exacto, said Gwyn, plucking the rubber bands off the ends of her braids and beginning to unweave them.—Dimple, sometimes the things you say are so on, you know? Anyways, I read it as a sign that I should go out there and be a star—he always thought I looked like her when I was little. Lillian says great, he compares me to a dead person, what does he want, a bone? She says he was never emotionally available to begin with. But I get there, I wear my nicest dresses, I try to cook, to do the shopping. But I’m cramping his style, he tells me. He’s finally finding himself then I have to go and come along—he married too young, he had me too young, and he doesn’t want to die in a cage. He hopes I can forgive him like he’s forgiven me.

—But you didn’t do anything wrong! I said.

—Have you forgiven him? asked Karsh.

—I don’t know, said Gwyn softly. She was undoing the last braid now, and her hair struck out in waves as if it had been dammed water. She was sitting just below her picture and she suddenly looked like a stretched-out version, a circus mirror reality of the same little girl who was gazing back at me through the bars of the very banister on which I was leaning.

In the photograph the carpeting was a deeper shade of rose, and Gwyn was all conch curls and sea-wet eyes; her lips bore a valiant smile, upper protruding over lower and pressing into it, as if to stop the quivering. Her elfin fingers gripped the banister bars; these filled the frame, made it seem she was gazing into a cage with a frightening and fascinating creature inside. She was staring straight at me, and for a moment I wondered illogically if I’d made her cry.

—I hear shouting and I can’t sleep so I come down the stairs, Gwyn said now.—They’re fighting. They don’t even notice me for a while. They fight a lot, but this time it’s different. He’s telling her she isn’t gonna trick him into having another one; one kid’s enough.
And my mother says, Do
you really feel that way? So you really feel that way?
And she tips a bottle to her lips and then she’s coughing and says,
Don’t worry, you won’t be tricked again.
A few days later she’s in a hospital. I know something serious is happening and I know I am a trick somehow, which I don’t completely understand, but I suppose it means I’m not real in a way, or that it’s as opposed to being a treat. I guess I must be sobbing or something because they turn and see me. And my father tells me I look so beautiful like that, hold still, don’t change a thing.

—And he took a picture? Karsh said, expressing my incredulity exactly.

—Yeah, said Gwyn.—And he took a picture. But maybe he was just trying to cheer me up; he knew I would always smile for the camera.

She smiled now as she said it.

—Well, enough about me, she said brightly.—You? What are your folks like?

—Oh man, I’m still reeling from all that, said Karsh.

—Please, said Gwyn softly, her smile wobbling slightly as if choosing between directions. And then I realized it was to gate back the tears.

—Well, me, said Karsh, seeming to catch on at that moment, too.—Let’s see.

And then he went on to say how his mom was the bomb, a total self-made self-actualized person and that he had no end of respect for her. And how his dad, well, he was kind of the opposite of Gwyn’s but the same: Whereas hers left her in this huge house surrounded by pretty things then disappeared, his was around, but a compulsive gambler, and he made all their pretty things disappear one by one, nearly to their very home. He wasn’t a bad man, just weak. Too weak. His mother said their presence enabled him and he’d have to
hit rock bottom to get up on his feet again. So they packed up and left and went west to America, not New Jersey yet, but way west, where Radha completed her residency training.