Forever in Blue (14 page)

She hadn’t said yes, Lena said to herself as she got out of the shower the morning after her dinner at Leo’s loft. Maybe she had indicated assent, but she hadn’t said the word yes.

He would be so disappointed if she backed out.

She looked at her naked self in the steamy mirror. The mirror was too small to see all of herself, which was just as well.

She was a prude. She had to admit it. She was modest. Overly modest. She was Greek. Her parents were traditional. She couldn’t even look at herself without feeling embarrassed.

She tried to imagine Leo seeing her like this. Just the thought flooded and fizzled her circuits. How could she actually do it?

She was uptight. She wished she weren’t so uptight. What was the problem, anyway? Her body was fine. She wasn’t overweight or awkwardly built. There were no major patches of cellulite, as far as she knew. She didn’t have hair in unexpected places. Her nipples went in the right direction. What was the big problem?

She wished she were more like Bee. Bee showered in the staff locker room at soccer camp next to guys she barely even knew. When Lena gawped and stuttered in disbelief at this revelation, Bee just ignored her. “It’s not that big a deal,” she said.

She thought back to Kostos and the swimming episode in Greece the summer they’d met. For a girl who liked to keep covered, fate had played a couple of pretty mean jokes on Lena.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: YAAAAA!!!

*

Carma! I screamed so loud when I read your message my co-digger almost called an ambulance.

I am so proud of you!

Set builder turned star. You can’t keep your darn light hidden, can you?

If it didn’t come on Tuesday, Tibby would buy a pregnancy test.

If it didn’t come on Wednesday she would buy a pregnancy test.

If it didn’t come on Thursday.

If not by Friday.

Tibby stood in Duane Reade on Saturday morning. She studied the box as though it were a cobra. Aptly, it was kept behind the counter, behind Plexiglas. You couldn’t just snatch it from the shelf and toss it facedown on the counter. They made you ask for it. How could she ask? She tried the question in her mind. Can I have the blllllllll? One of the rrrrrrr, please? The box with the mmmmm?

If she couldn’t think it, what were the chances she could say it?

The nearest salesperson was a man with extravagant sideburns. She couldn’t ask him. She’d come back.

She touched her belly. Her fingers related to it differently than at other times.

She walked outside. She looked up. The sun carried on its serene business of exploding, unmuffled by a single cloud. She had a free day, a blue sky, but she felt a throttling sense of claustrophobia. There was nowhere to go where the worry wouldn’t go. Not even sleeping gave her respite.

Her legs went along and she found herself in Washington Square Park. Clumps of friends hung by the central fountain. A man and a woman kissed on a bench. Tibby wondered if part of what she felt was loneliness.

She thought of her friends. She felt a melting sensation in her muscles begetting a looser kind of sadness.

Oh, you guys. I had sex! I’m not a virgin! Can you believe that? I did it. We did it!

But then there was the other part of the story, inseparable from the first. Tibby was a natural believer in the other shoe dropping, and this time it had really clobbered her. It had turned happiness into agony, love into umbrage.

Wasn’t that just how the world worked? You had sex for the first time with a person you really loved and the condom broke, leaving you most likely prrrrrr.

Cynicism was a great hedge, of course. When the bad thing came true, at least you had the pleasure of being right. But that pleasure felt cold today. She didn’t want to be right. For the first time in her life, she longed to be wrong.

“Do you know what time it is?” a young man in a corduroy cap asked her.

“I have no idea,” she replied. She could have looked at her cell phone, but she didn’t.

She couldn’t make herself sit down anyplace. She walked past Duane Reade again.

Did she really have to buy the test? She couldn’t. Did she have to find out? Maybe she could just play dumb for the next nine months. How far could she take the denial? She could be one of those girls who gave birth in the bathroom between classes.

She walked downtown. She crossed Houston Street and headed into deepest SoHo, packed as it was with shoppers. Tourists flocked here for the supposed urban grit, but all they found was each other.

She walked all the way to Canal Street, dipped briefly into Chinatown. She passed the stairwell to a second-floor restaurant where she’d once eaten gelatinous, scary, and delicious things with Brian and two of the girls from her hall. They’d sat at a table by the big picture window and watched the snow fall that night. Now it was ninety-five degrees. That night she’d been happy and now she felt miserable. Tibby turned north again. Her legs led her, without asking, back to Duane Reade. She paced in front of the store. She couldn’t go in and buy the thing, but she couldn’t do anything else. Denial could be very absorbing.

She walked past a homeless woman for the third time. She reached into her bag and found a five-dollar bill. As the puffy-faced woman graciously accepted the money, Tibby wondered what had happened to this woman. Why had she ended up like this?

Tibby put her head down and walked on. Probably all started with a teenage pregnancy.

Peter was as crazy about the dirt floor as she was. Usually Bridget was attracted to people who were more solid than she, but in this case it was the feeling of finding a soul mate that really got to her.

It was Sunday. Everyone else had gone to the beach. Bridget and Peter were left at the site, working on their floor.

“You two are crazy,” Alison had commented before she left. They had both nodded acceptingly.

They were more than two-thirds done. They had cleared and exposed a generous square room, a source of excitement to everyone at the site, finding two perfectly beautiful and intact late-sixth-century Attic pots and the pieces to comprise at least five more. It had turned out to be a bigger find, a more prosperous house, than even the director had imagined. Other members of the team had worked on the walls, exposing patches of plaster and the suggestion of a fresco.

“I don’t know what I’ll do with my life after we finish this thing,” Bridget said musingly, her hands alive in the dirt.

“I know what you mean,” Peter said.

“I love it. I’ll miss it. I think my life’s meaning will be gone.”

He nodded. He didn’t act like this was so strange. He was as consumed, moment by moment, as she was.

“This is a satisfying way to dig, you know?” he said. His voice was a bit lazy under the hot sun. “It’s not always like this.”

“I’m spoiled.”

“You’ve had a lucky start,” he agreed.

“I am lucky,” she heard herself say.

“Are you?”

“Yes. In all but the important ways.”

He stopped and sat back. “What does that mean?” For days he’d been disinclined to look right at her, but now he did.

She put both hands flat on her dirt floor. “My mom died when I was pretty young.” It was always clarifying to get that out there. She always knew she was somewhere once she’d said it out loud. It was like her version of scent marking.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” The fact of her mother’s death seemed to connect to her dirt floor, but she wasn’t sure how.

“That’s why you don’t like to talk about your family.”

I don’t have a family to talk about, she was going to say, but she realized that it wasn’t true. She did have a family. They were all under twenty and none of them related to her by blood, but they made her who she was. They represented the best of her. “I have an unconventional family,” she told him.

He left her alone with the digging for a while. She appreciated that.

“These people lived big, I think,” he said, after the sun had begun to dip. “They painted their pots, they painted their walls, they made their sanctuaries and told their stories on every surface they had.”

“They did, didn’t they?” she said wistfully. She was starting to feel tired.

“That’s why I picked this specialty, instead of something closer to home, as I probably should have done. These people left so much of themselves for us to find.”

She nodded and yawned. She sat back against the wall to rest in the shade. In these long days outside, the sun had turned her skin brown and her hair a whiter yellow.

She thought of her own house, where she lived as small as possible. What could an archaeologist ever find of her? Of her mother? They told their stories nowhere. What about the old photographs, their old things? Where were they now? Had her father thrown them all away?

She crawled back on her hands and knees to where she’d left her love, the floor. She’d go slower. She’d make it last.

“Hey, what are these?” she asked. She rubbed off the dirt and passed the heavy pieces of metal into Peter’s hands.

He studied them carefully. “You know what they are?”

She shook her head, even though it was a biding-time kind of question.

“I think they’re loom weights. I’ve seen pictures, but I’ve never found any before.” He seemed excited about them. “Make sure you record the location.”

She nodded. She wiped her hands on her shorts and took the digital camera out of her pocket. She took out her Sharpie to make the label.

“You know what this makes me think?”

“No,” she said.

“It gives me an idea of this room, what it was. The orientation of it, away from where we think the road was. The kind of pots we’ve found. Now these.”

She waited patiently. She let him think and talk.

“I’m guessing it was the gynaikonitis. We’ll talk to David when he gets back. He’ll be thrilled with this.”

“What do you call it?”

“It means the women’s quarter. Big houses had them. Men didn’t like to let women be seen in public or even in their own homes. Women usually stayed in a remote part of the house where they wouldn’t be seen.”

“Why?” Bridget asked.

“Why? Because—” He paused to think. “Because men are jealous, I guess. What else is there?” He looked at her with a certain frankness. Maybe too much frankness. “We are jealous, fallible creatures. We look in our hearts and that’s what we see.”

“Hello?”

There was one reason Tibby picked up the phone Sunday evening and one reason only: She was waiting for a soup delivery and she thought the security guard was calling her room to tell her to come down to get it.

“Hello? Tibby? Are you there?”

She never would have picked up if she’d known it was Lena.

“Tibby? It’s me. Please talk to me. Are you there?”

At the sound of Lena’s voice, Tibby felt the long-suspended tears take position. Up came the worry, the misery. Up, up, and over. Tibby tried to keep her noises to herself. She held the phone away. A tear made a dot on the thigh of the Traveling Pants. One dot and then another. Her body was shaking. A sob made it out.

“Tibby. I’m here. I’m not in a hurry. Just say something so I know you’re there.”

Lena’s softness opened Tibby up in a way that sharpness never could. She tried to suck in enough air to make a word. Her nose was full of snot and tears. Her hand was wet from wiping it. The thing that came out was more of a gurgle than a word.

“Okay, Tib. That’s good. I hear you. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want.”

Tibby nodded and cried. Discordantly she remembered how she once yelled at her little sister, Katherine, for nodding into the phone rather than saying yes.

“I’ll just hang out here for a while,” Lena said.

“Okay,” Tibby gurgled.

Tibby thought of the times in middle school, before IM’ing really caught on, when they would hang around for hours on the phone playing songs for each other, watching TV shows together.

She thought of the nights she would stay on the phone with Carmen when Carmen’s mom had to work late and Carmen thought she heard noises in the apartment. More than once Tibby had fallen asleep with the phone beside her on the pillow.

Tibby struggled to make some words, if only not to be spooky. “I’m scared—I could be—I might be—” The critical word drowned in salt water. She couldn’t get it out.

Lena hummed in sympathy. Most people when they sensed a crisis got despotically curious, needing to stake out the far boundary of trouble. Tibby appreciated that Lena wasn’t doing that.

Lena was patient while she cried. It took a long time.

“Lenny. I’m a mess,” Tibby said finally. She laughed and accidentally blew her nose at the same time. She was a mess, but even so, she felt a tiny bit closer to sane for admitting it.

“I’m coming, okay?”

“You don’t need to.”

“I want to. It’s easy to.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

Tibby sighed.

“Is there anything I can bring?” Lena asked.

Tibby thought. “Actually, there is.”

“What?”

Tibby tried to clear her throat. “Do you think you could bring a pregnancy test?”

“I thought I was going to be working on sets, actually,” Carmen said to the loosely assembled group drinking iced coffee together on the steps of the theater Sunday evening.

“I heard you didn’t even try out for the other two plays,” said Michael Skelley, a guy from the floor below her.

A certain myth was developing around Carmen’s ascent, she recognized, and she was trying to both cultivate it and set the record straight at the same time. “Only because I didn’t think I was going to try out for any of them. I was watching auditions and Judy told me to read Perdita. That’s kind of how it started.”

Many heads nodded.

“So what’s Ian O’Bannon like?” Rachel asked.

He was the well-known Irish stage actor playing Leontes.

Carmen laughed. “I’m still getting up my nerve to say something to him. At the first read-through you would have thought he’d been playing Leontes for the last twenty years.”

It was strange having all these people look at her, after having almost no one look at her for months. They didn’t know she was adrift in the world, standing outside the current and watching it go by. They didn’t know it, maybe, because she didn’t feel that way right now.