In Every Way
Authors: Nic Brown
IN EVERY WAY
Copyright © 2015 Nic Brown
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brown, Nic, 1977-
In Every Way : A Novel / Nic Brown.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-61902-505-9
1.
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Women college students--Fiction. 2.
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Mothers and daughters--Fiction. 3.
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Domestic fiction.
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I. Title.
PS3602.R72242I5 2015
813'.6--dc23
2014034099
Cover design by Kara Davison Faceout Studio
Interior Design by Megan Jones Design
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Distributed by Publishers Group West
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For my mom
CONTENTS
M
ARIA IS FOUR
minutes late to Life Drawing. It's the first time in two weeks she has even attended the class. The professor has been told that this is because Maria is not comfortable drawing the nude male modelâa pale little specimen with a limp ponytail and an overabundance of molesâbut that is a lie. Maria is no prude. Truth is, Maria's been avoiding her ex-boyfriend, Jack, and her own mother, both of whom are enrolled in the class.
Maria is nineteen. Notes in ballpoint pen tattoo her hands. A thick veil of bangs hangs just below her eyes. Usually she would keep her eyes there hidden, cast down upon her dirty red Keds, but today she's tingling with a rush of rare confidence. In her portfolio are six charcoal drawings of herself wearing nothing but a Hello Kitty mask. They vibe from her bag like hot-wired batteries of possession. So she brushes aside her bangs and steps into the studio as the eyes of her classmates rise.
At the long, paint-spattered drafting table where Maria usually sits, her mother and Jack are seated together.
“Hey,” Jack says.
“Hey,” Maria says.
These terrifying words are the first they've spoken in weeks.
Jack wears a Detroit Tigers baseball hat askew atop a frozen explosion of teased blond hair. He's all sinew and angles. He says that he was
born full-grown, that he's going to wang chung. That he has tapped into the source. Maria doesn't always know what he means, but she knows he must be right because he looks so cool that it makes her chest feel hollow when she looks at him. Thing is, Jack hates stressing out and he has to make it stop. Maria knows this because he told her so the last time they spoke. He said, “If this is going to make me feel stressed out, then I have to make it stop.”
“You mean us?” Maria said.
“I guess.”
The reason Jack was stressed out is because he got Maria pregnant.
But today, on this soft March morning, Jack doesn't look stressed out. He smiles. The light shines through the wide black plug in his earlobe. Maria remembers the night he placed her finger in that hole. “You're inside me,” he'd said, “but you aren't even touching me.”
Jack pulls up a stool and motions for Maria to sit. For a moment she considers not doing so, but cannot see any other option. The room is full, there are no seats left, and she does not have the fortitude to turn and walk out of the class. She tells herself to show no fear. And she sits.
“I've been reading
The Three Musketeers,”
Jack says. “Total mind fuck, m'lady. God your mom was right.”
“M'lady?” Maria says. Jack has a short list of favored lingo, but thisâm'ladyâis one she has yet to hear. It is, to Maria, the sound of two weeks apart.
“Dumas style,” Jack says, in proud explanation.
“Gross,” Maria says, the very name of the author reviving years of oversaturation. Her mother, an English professor, is what they call the leading Alexandre Dumas scholar in America. Not the world. Claude Schopp in Paris has the world. But her mother has the States. Or did.
Now she's retired and ten months into life with stage four breast cancer. Both of the diseased breasts were removed months ago, but the cancer has spread to places that cannot be cut off. Since the operation, Maria's mother has had her daughter's name tattooed onto her wrist. She has visited her old college roommate three times. She has created a Facebook profile. She has enrolled in Maria's section of Life Drawing. She says she has never before been this alive.
Despite Maria's lack of interest in Dumas, Jack's still worked up. He says, “But it's good. Seriously. I had no idea. It's all about fighting and getting pussy.”
“Jack,” says Maria's mother. At the drafting table beside him she sighs.
Jack lightly punches Maria's mother on the shoulder and she laughs girlishly. A laugh that never before existed. A laugh that has appeared only since her sickness, like some spark sent up from a slowly burning house.
JACK FIRST APPEARED
to Maria on a friend's porch arguing about the drummer for Wilco. He blew his bubble gum into an enormous orb and then popped it with a lit cigarette. Eleven weeks later Maria took a pregnancy test in the bathroom of the Carrboro Harris Teeter. Through a sheen of her own urine, a red cross appeared like a message delivered from God. She considers it a testament to her mother's judicial personalityâone that imbued the house with frank discussions of conception and religion from the earliest ages memorableâthat Maria's first instinct was to go home.
At the kitchen table, her mother was brushing loose hair from her scalp, collecting the limp gray strands in a stainless steel mixing bowl.
Maria said, “I'm totally screwed.”
“Who isn't?” her mother said, twirling her hair like spaghetti.
“I'm pregnant,” Maria said.
Maria's mother set her hairbrush on the table. She had not yet thinned the left side of her scalp, and it was significantly more full of hair than the other. Maria considered the fact that so many of those strands were already dead, just hanging on to their few surviving neighbors like some weave made from her mother's own locks.
“Well shit,” her mother said.
Sitting in her old chair at the table, her own initials carved into the food-stained oak before her, Maria said, “It's like three weeks since I missed my period. So it's too late for the morning-after pill or anything.”
“Now just a minute,” her mother said. “What exactly do you want?”
“Not a baby,” Maria said. She chuckled. She started to cry.
“Seems you already have one of those,” her mother said.
“It's just a blob.”
Maria's mother shrugged. She lifted a handful of hair from the bowl, then dropped it back in. “It Jack's?” she said.
Maria nodded, dragging the back of her index finger across her now running nose. She then instinctively wiped it under the table, only to discover the harsh topography of a miniature inverted mountain range built from the petrified chewing gum of her own childhood.
“He's a good guy,” her mother said. “People wait their whole lives for that.”
“What are you saying?” Maria said.
“When you're dying,” her mother said, “you just start to think about babies. You see the whole world through hippie glasses.”
The doctor had said her mother could expect another six months. Maria did the math. There would be no overlap, even if having a child were anything more than some weird slumming fantasy.
“You suddenly pro-life?” Maria said.
“Yes,” her mother said. “In like every way.”
“ON THE WALL,”
the professor says to the class. “Hang 'em if you got 'em.”
He says this every class before critique. He considers himself wacky. His name is Milton Rigby. He is elderly and the most celebrated professor in the department, yet still teaches intro classes by choice. Rumor has it he teaches for only one dollar a semester, but Maria has her doubts. It's all campus myth. But unlike most of the students who are now delicately removing drawings from their portfolios and pinning them to a long corkboard, Maria and her mother have known Rigby for decades. Maria has seen his paintings in the Museum of Modern Art. She thinks of him as a species of human perfection and aspires to his achievement. But it is not celebrity that Maria admiresâit is his skill. She is embarrassed that her situation with Jack has kept her out of his class. She is ashamed that she has lied to him.
Jack makes no motion to hang any drawings. Instead, he lifts a thirty-two-ounce Bojangles iced tea from a Florida-shaped puddle on the desk and sucks at the straw until it gurgles. Maria wonders if the life growing inside her is already engineered for stupidity.
“So, m'lady,” Jack says, and leans his head back until the Tigers hat falls to the floor. He spits a piece of ice high into the air and then catches it in his mouth as it falls. He gazes down the bridge of his nose
at Maria and exhales dramatically, air hissing through his teeth. He motions at her stomach and says, “You OK?”
Because they have not spoken, Jack does not even know if the pregnancy is still a pregnancy. He does not know that Maria has done nothing about it, spoken about it with no one other than her sick mother. He does not know that she has cried almost every night, sometimes while knitting, sometimes while streaming
Masterpiece
off PBS, sometimes while comparing the rates for abortion in Chapel Hill, sometimes while reading the canned internet messaging of adoption services and teen pregnancy helplines. She feels like she has yet to even convince herself of the truth of the situation she's in. It is an indisputable fact that she is pregnant, but what exactly will that fact mean? This is the mystery filling her days.
