Love in Mid Air (4 page)

It’s almost six. I stand before the sink letting water run over the mushrooms and tomatoes. I blow air into my imaginary trombone.
Tory is climbing Phil’s back, putting her feet into the pockets of his pants as if they were steps. He cups his hands to make
her a better push-off point and she struggles her way to the top of his shoulders. She shifts her weight back and forth, gripping
his beard with her small fingers, knocking his glasses unsteady as she stretches up and slaps the ceiling with her palms.
There aren’t too many more years he will be able to lift her like this. I stand at the sink and watch them, my daughter and
this thoroughly decent man whom I cannot seem to love.

K
elly is hosting book club this month, which means she gets to choose the book. Kelly isn’t much of a reader so what we’re
reading isn’t much of a book.

Kelly is the rich one in the group, although it would make her mad to hear me describe her like that. Her house is in the
kind of community where you have to call down and give the gatekeeper somebody’s name before they’ll let them in—just dropping
by to visit in this neighborhood is completely out of the question. But I come over so often that Kelly finally took a picture
down to the guardhouse—a snapshot of me at her wedding that she copied at Kinko’s and printed beneath it:
LET THIS PERSON IN NO MATTER WHAT.
Now all the guards know my Mini Coop by sight and this one looks up from his newspaper and waves me through. I am not a dangerous
woman. Anyone can see that at a glance.

Mark’s car isn’t there when I pull into the driveway, which I assume means he’s having dinner at the clubhouse. Most of the
husbands have found a way to avoid being home on book club night. Kelly is fanning out brownies on a platter when I walk into
the kitchen.

“Look at these,” she says. “Just like a fucking magazine, huh?”

“You amaze me,” I say, and it’s true. Kelly is liquid—her personality takes on the shape of any container you pour her into.
She only started cooking when she married Mark, and now she’s probably the best hostess of the group. She’s the kind who will
see a certain dish on the Food Channel and spend the whole morning tracking down obscure ingredients at the organic market.
Kelly throws her heart into things. Kelly knows how to fill a day.

“How was Phoenix? You haven’t said much about the trip.”

“I cut it really tight on my connection in Dallas. I wasn’t sure my bag would even make it.”

She turns to me, spatula in hand. “You’ve told me that part twice already. Why do I have the feeling there’s more to the story?”

“I’ll tell you, but not with everybody else on the way.”

She nods, gives me a quick distracted hug, and runs upstairs to put on a clean shirt. I sit in her designer kitchen with its
speckled marble countertops and shiny potted herbs and catch myself smiling at the sight of an avocado perched on top of a
wooden bowl. Kelly hates the way avocados taste but likes the way they look. “The texture’s fantastic, isn’t it?” she asks,
sometimes rubbing one against my cheek for emphasis. “They’re so slick and bumpy.” So she buys an avocado every week for her
fruit arrangement and at the end of the week she throws it out to the birds, a fact that infuriates her husband. Once Phil
and I were over here for a cookout and Mark took the avocado out of the bowl and shook it in my face and said, “Do you know
how much these goddamn things cost?”

“Yeah,” I said. I know how much everything in this house costs. I probably know a lot more about it than he does. “They’re
a dollar eighty-nine.”

“Did you know she throws them out in the goddamn yard?”

“Women do weird things,” Phil piped up helpfully. He tends to agree with everything that other men say, one of the personality
traits I didn’t notice until after we were married. Plus, I think he’s a little intimidated by Mark. We all are. He always
seems to be on the verge of losing his temper and he makes so much money.

“Humph,” Mark said, smacking the avocado back into the bowl. “She acts like they grow on trees.”

For the record, I did not meet Kelly at the church. Kelly and I go all the way back to high school and she’s my best friend,
even though I am too old to call anyone a best friend and we’re careful not to flaunt our closeness in front of the others.
At least we try not to flaunt it, but I know they can tell. It’s always like there are two conversations going, the one that
everyone hears and then there’s the one between me and Kelly, the one that is just beneath the surface. It’s this unspoken
conversation that makes other people nervous. They think we’re laughing at them, and sometimes we are, but mostly we’re just
trying to figure something out. It’s like Kelly and I share a secret that neither one of us can quite remember.

And there’s one other thing. Kelly is beautiful, so beautiful that people stop in their tracks just to watch her walk by.
Sometimes, even after knowing her so long, I forget this and then I see her coming toward me and I am like those strangers
on the street. Shocked by her blondness, dazzled by her height. Amazed by the ease with which she navigates the world, and
I remember how I’ve spent twenty-five years wondering why someone so tall and thin and perfect would ever have wanted to be
my friend. Because me, me at fourteen, I wasn’t that cool.

I never even would have made cheerleading if it hadn’t been for her.

T
hat’s where we met, at tryouts in the summer before ninth grade. I’d cheered for two years in middle school, but you don’t
have to be that good to cheer in middle school. It’s not like you need gymnastic skills or anything, you just have to be cute
and loud. So when I showed up for the high school tryouts it was obvious at once that these girls were on a whole different
level. Especially Kelly. I noticed her the very first day. Lots of the girls were good, but she was the only one who was casual
about it, lithe and nonchalant as she went through her fallbacks and kicks.

On the third day they taught us a pyramid formation and I was placed, along with the other girls who were sure to be cut,
in the bottom row. Kelly was top tier and she put her foot on my thigh as she climbed me, then her other foot on my shoulder,
and then there was this strange moment where the length of her body dragged across my face. And then, with the arches of her
feet trembling against my shoulders, she slowly stood. I held her ankles, but once she got herself righted, which took her
only a few seconds, she was completely still.

She didn’t speak to me until it was time to drop out, always the most perilous part of any formation. She called down, “You’re
going to catch me, right?” and I said, “Absolutely,” and I did, even though the force of her falling weight jolted me and
for a moment I lost my breath. One of the coaches stood in front to spot us, but it wasn’t necessary. I caught her perfectly
and the other girls, the returning cheerleaders for whom tryouts were just a formality, clapped.

“You’re good,” Kelly said. “I’d even let you catch me in a flip.”

On the first full day of school I was at the end of the cafeteria line, ready to pick up my tray and go sit with the girls
I’d known from middle school, and I heard her call out, “Elyse?” We’d worn nametags at tryouts but I was still surprised she
would remember my name or know how to pronounce it. Most people don’t. Half the time in middle school I’d answered to Elsie.
Kelly was sitting at the table with the other cheerleaders, the most popular girls in the whole school, and she said, “Come
eat with us.” The room blurred. She was a star—of course they’d wanted her, and apparently she had somehow managed to convince
them to bring me on too. I looked down at my tray, ignoring the faces of my former friends who had already cleared a place
for me to sit, and took a deep breath. That’s it, one casual invitation, and I knew in that moment that my whole life was
going to be different.

Our periods were synchronized within a month. We used to—I can’t for the life of me remember why—slip into the bathroom between
classes and switch shirts, and then I would smell her baby powder scent all day. Kelly would sit in class drawing medieval-looking
pentagrams on the backs of her spiral notebooks and then coloring them in purple and magenta. I learned to draw these patterns
from her and for years they encircled my pottery. Her mother, in fact, was the one who first taught me how to throw pots,
and Kelly slept over at my house so much that my father, who used to call me Baby, started calling her Baby Two. We got the
same haircut—a long curly shag that was known as a “Gypsy” and required twenty minutes in hot rollers every morning. We lined
our eyes in kohl and our mouths in a light shimmery lipstick by Yardley called Berryfrost. We bought matching pairs of black
platform boots and wore them with long V-neck sweaters and short pleated plaid skirts, a juxtaposition that struck us as sophisticated
and ironic, as if we were prep school girls hooking on the side. Looking back at pictures from that time, it amazes me how
much we willed ourselves to look alike.

At one point we even dated twins, shy studious boys that I doubt we ever would have noticed if there hadn’t been two of them.
Fridays were for ball games but on Saturday nights we would go to the drive-in with the twins, whom Kelly insisted on calling
the Brothers Pressley. Frank and I were always in the back, Kevin and Kelly in the front, and we knew each other so well that
there was no pretense about watching the movie. Even as the previews were rolling, we were shifting into position, and almost
the minute Kelly would lie down, with Kevin poised above her, her foot would begin to tap out a nervous rhythm against the
seat.

Now I hear that it’s all about blow job parties, that it’s all about what the girl can do for the boy, but I grew up in a
time when girls weren’t expected to do anything, when you could render a boy speechless with rapture just by leaning back
and letting your legs fall apart. Every Saturday night for most of our junior year and into the summer that followed I would
lie there passively while Frank bent over me, his face gone sweet and serious with concentration. He studied me as if I were
a lock.

I was as mysterious to myself as I was to him. Frank would unzip my jeans and turn his hand… I can still feel it. The hand
slowly sliding, the middle finger grazing the full length of my opening, the palm cupped around the mound, the grip, the slight
shake. Once I finally got him going on the right spot, once I finally managed to persuade him that—despite what logic dictated—it
wasn’t down there but actually up somewhere higher, once I finally got him to stop rubbing me in that hard, systematic way
that he undoubtedly used on himself and got him instead to do this small delicate flutter… then something would begin to build
and my foot would shake too, answering Kelly’s taps in the same nervous rhythmic pattern. Such bad girls we were, so bad,
so conspiratorial, and it was always worse when we were together. She tapped. I tapped back. We may as well have been convicts
passing news of a jailbreak.

Frank was intent on his mission, but somewhat confused by my constant navigational redirection. Once he whispered to me, “Are
you sure this is right?” I was sure, suddenly so sure that I put both of my hands on Frank’s wrist. “Yes,” I said, and I think
I said it out loud. I gripped his wrist with both of my hands and guided him up and down and in small circles, just there,
holding him back to where he had no choice but to touch me lightly. Over and over again we traced a pattern of curves and
circles, my hands clamped around his, almost as if I were teaching him to write. “Are you sure?” he said again, and now I
realize that he probably could hear me just fine, but that my muttered “Yes, yes, yes…” must have excited him, that it must
have pleased him to think he’d made me so lost in the moment that I didn’t even care if Kelly and Kevin heard me cry out.

Years later Kelly and I were drinking wine and the conversation fell to the twins. Older and kinkier then and slightly drunk,
I said, “You know, at some point or another, we should have swapped them.”

And Kelly said, “What makes you think we didn’t? They were totally into the twin thing, remember? Always switching off to
fool teachers, so why wouldn’t they have tried it with us?”

I was shocked even at the suggestion, but she’s right, it isn’t hard to picture. The two of them plotting at the snack bar,
walking back and simply sliding into different seats. It isn’t hard to imagine them sharing notes later in their bedroom about
the ways she and I were different, or alike. I imagined them smelling their hands, as boys do, as men do, and breathing in
the combined scent of her and me. But I hid my unease and said, “Well, that would explain why I had to keep teaching him the
same things over and over,” and Kelly laughed, still willing to accept, as she has always been willing to accept, the myth
that I am the more sexual of the two of us, that I am the risk-taker and trailblazer, although her tapping from the front
seat all those years ago should have told us that this was never so.