The Juliet Stories (25 page)

“Juliet.” Aunt Caroline removes the plate of uneaten pasta and replaces it with a cup of unsweetened Very Berry tea.

“Don’t,” says Juliet. She is surprised by her own tone: harsh, not kind. She opens her mouth to soften, to apologize, but Caroline shakes her head in disappointment and stares up at the blank television, which Grandpa Harold affixed to the ceiling like the televisions in hospital rooms. Now that he is gone, Grandma Grace has cancelled the cable, but the television remains, prepared at any moment to rip out the screws and crush whoever lingers beneath.

Grandma Grace enters the room, rage all around her like a blaze, bends her long, graceful bones and yanks open the pullout sofa. “You can sleep here, Caroline,” she says. “It’s about as comfortable as the rack.”

Gloria’s plane lands in the morning and Aunt Caroline volunteers to collect her. Mike says he will grab a cab from the airport; he is calling from standby in Toronto.

When they come through the door, Caroline has been crying, the evidence all over her face, but Gloria’s eyes are clear, her skin taut and lightly tanned, her travelling outfit a casual, flattering, unwrinkled shift that shows off lean arms and calves. She does not hurry, but comes directly to Juliet, who is hunched in some discomfort on a chair at the kitchen table, there being nowhere else to sit; before her, an uneaten bowl of cut exotic fruit arranged as if in a Dutch still-life.

Wordlessly, Gloria strokes Juliet’s hair and face and pulls her into her rib cage, humming a low tune that Juliet does not recognize, that may not be a tune so much as a response to the moment: a flight of the voice, an answer. This is the longest Juliet can recall being held by her mother and touched with such tender regard. That may not be fair, or true. But it seems so.

The tenderness is too much, a crush of weight, and Juliet hears herself breaking beneath it, dissolving, undone. Wild sobs are a release, but there is no relief, and almost immediately Juliet resents with intensity the scene she is creating. She is doing what her mother wants her to do: she must be made hysterical in order for Gloria to calm her.

Juliet shudders. Her tears are scant. She has slipped to the floor and kneels in her mother’s embrace, breathing the scent of lavender body lotion and an expensive hair product that holds in submission her mother’s carefully untended locks. She sees that her mother’s hair is streaked lightly with threads of pure white. When did that happen?

“Oh, my baby, how I love you,” says Gloria.

Juliet thinks, She only loves me because I need her.

“I remember when you were small enough to sleep curled on my chest. And now you are a woman. If I close my eyes, I can see you as you were, right at the very beginning, when all we had was each other.”

Juliet lifts her head out of her mother’s lap. “And Dad.”

“And your father. But he was busy studying. I would bundle you into your little snowsuit and pull you along the sidewalk on a sled. We got more snow back then. The banks were up to my knees and the stroller wheels wouldn’t roll. So I tied you onto the little sled with a red scarf to keep you from falling off.”

Juliet knows this story.

“But you were so strong. You were already the strongest little thing, and you rocked back and forth on the sled and screamed and screamed until you were purple, and I don’t know what people thought of me. But out I’d go anyway. It was that or lose my mind. Do you remember, Mother? We were living in Canada?”

Juliet can’t see Grandma Grace, who stands somewhere behind her.

“And of course you finally grew big enough and strong enough to tip over the little sled. A faceful of ice and snow. You looked like you’d been attacked by killer bees. And instead of coming for a visit, Grandma Grace kept asking for a baby photo, so when does your father decide to take one and send it down to Pennsylvania?”

“Enough,” says Grandma Grace. “Leave the child be.”

“She loves this story. It’s one of her favourite baby stories.”

Juliet lifts her head out of her mother’s lap. “I’m not keeping it,” she says. “We made the appointment.”

“Is this true?” Gloria looks at her mother. “Of course, it’s your choice, Juliet. Of course.”

“There is no concern,” says Grandma Grace stiffly, “about money.”

“Money is the least of my concerns,” says Gloria.

“While you are here, you will visit your father,” Grandma Grace tells Gloria.

“You say that like I wouldn’t.”

Grandma Grace’s nostrils flare.

“We’ll all go together,” says Gloria. “Today.”

“Not me,” says Juliet.

“And how is your new husband?” asks Grandma Grace.

Juliet, Gloria, and Aunt Caroline stare at her in confusion. Gloria bursts out laughing and Aunt Caroline follows; she is the elder by three years, but in Gloria’s presence she is always behind, anxious to catch up. “You mean mine?” says Gloria. “We’ve been married for two years; he’s too old to be new. Unless there’s some other horrible secret Juliet’s keeping.”

Grandma Grace’s lips quiver. She will not smile. “Where did I go wrong, raising you two?” Her question is plaintive, fury revealed as sorrow. “You will come along too,” she says to Juliet, a return that draws fresh mirth from her daughters. An inescapable order is amongst them: mothers, daughters, sisters. Each is losing the struggle to be other than who the others believe her to be.

Juliet does not go along.

Instead she goes to the bathroom, sits on the toilet, and stands to discover blood. It is warm and then cool on her thighs. An ache in her lower abdomen, which she has been ignoring while ignoring all the symptoms of her condition, grips with urgency. Juliet sits back down. Her legs are shaking. She reaches for the toilet paper and unrolls a long loop, unravelled across her thighs and onto the floor like a sash. She can hear the voices of the women in the living room, dulled by the white carpet. She thinks of the white carpet. The pain is a shimmer, a smear. Nothing. She’s imagined it.

She stands again, and sits.

She thinks, If only my flight had been a week later. No one here would ever have known.

She is back in Nicaragua, in a
barrio
in Managua, a city unrecognizable from the map of her childhood. She is circling the sprawling city, swooping over verdant mountains and blasted volcanoes. She is twenty-one. She believes the body can express what the mind cannot.

She is back in the bedroom she shares with four Nicaraguan sisters, and with their arguments, which she cannot fully understand. She has no sisters and she wishes to understand. She is so certain she will find what she is looking for — here, in this country, in this city that glimmers with magic, with music and elation, with something lost that she believes can be found. Here.

The pain grabs.

She is back in Managua, in the office of an American nun, who says to her, You will not stay. The truth is too painful to keep; irrefutable, it devastates and confounds. She is an undeclared arts major volunteering abroad for a term. Her Spanish is weak. She has never been needed less.

She is in a white bathroom in Florida, on the western peninsula. She is losing an early pregnancy. It is an event both commonplace and utterly extraordinary. She is unavailable for comment. She breathes heavily. She checks, but there is nothing specific to be seen in the water: unnamed tissue, blood.

She is glad that the door is locked. But she has forgotten that Grandma Grace is a woman of resource.

When they burst in, four of them, Juliet is not ashamed, naked as she is from the waist down, only perplexed. “How did you get in?”

Grandma Grace wields a hairpin.

“Young lady, you scared us all half to death!” Gloria kneels before her.

“I’m not a young lady, I’m an old girl,” Juliet replies automatically.

“Oh! She’s bleeding, there’s blood.”

The fourth is Mike. He knows he is not wanted, though the others insist on pretending that, even if not wanted, they are needed. But he goes, he steps backwards down the hallway, and where he goes Juliet does not know, and forgets to ask.

The bleeding slows. She is treated to Chinese takeout in bed and a hot water bottle against the belly. She senses that this is how she would be treated had she given birth to a real live baby: with a kind of reverent caution. But something is missing, along with the baby: the element of celebration, of joy and wonder.

She lies flat on her back in the Murphy bed. Slatted blinds are open to light cast by this day’s setting sun, shadows settling thick across the carpeted floor. Everything in here is white; but it looks grey. Outside, humidity rises like vapour off the cooling swampland. Juliet feels herself rising.

She hears the apartment door open and close. She hears him breathing in the hallway, and she says, “Come in.”

He enters and sits with crossed legs on the floor, facing her, their heads level.

“We’ll have another one someday,” he says to her.

They look at each other, and she thinks, I have a secret. Everyone else in this apartment thinks one thing has happened today, when in fact something else has. The thing that appears to have happened is something she would never have imagined happening to her. But the thing that actually happened leaves her even more breathless, its layer of mendacity a skein across her mouth, a lie she will have to sustain perhaps forever, to disguise faithlessness: her own.

It wasn’t yours, she says to him silently.

He says, “I love you.”

She says, “I know.”

He says, “Marry me.”

She says, “We’re way too young.”

“I just wanted to ask. It seemed like the thing to do.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ll ask some other time.”

“Okay.”

She says, after a little while, “I want to be needed.”

He says nothing. Perhaps he knows she does not mean by him.

The room slides towards darkness. His hand paws the sheet, looking for hers.

“I was needed for a little while, but it didn’t work out,” she says, as if she is talking about something that happened a long time ago, not today. “I’m not especially useful. But I want to be.” She does not mean that she wants to be a mother. She does not think a mother is especially useful.

Still he says nothing. Her palms are pressed flat against her stomach and he is afraid to touch her there. She rolls away from him and wonders what it will take to roll back, to let him reach for her, to give of herself and her body, again.

The mysteries are deep and she cannot use them. They are closed to her.

She tells herself, I had a Nicaraguan baby, but the story doesn’t hold. Even tonight, when she thinks she could tell herself anything and believe it, the story doesn’t hold. A mother brings a baby to life and it breathes and kicks and screams. She has done nothing like this, most egregiously not even in her imagination. The possibility of
life
has not entered her mind during these last few weeks; she refused it utterly.

Yet she feels no guilt. Where is the guilt that she’s certain she should feel? What should she do now?

She rolls the other way, back to him.

Sober, they talk about the dog. Esther and Teddy have a brand-new puppy, a St. Bernard with rolls of fat at its neck and a need to chew.

“Put your shoes up high or leave them on,” says Esther as Juliet and Mike come through the door. She kisses each on the cheek and takes orders for drinks before they are halfway down the stairs.

Juliet keeps her boots on, wet with snow. They make her look taller; she is young enough in her vanity to think this matters.

“I’ve never had a boot I could wear with a skirt,” she says. The puppy worries at her laces. She leans to stroke its scruffed head, and it bites her with fresh baby teeth. She closes its jaw with one hand and whispers,
no!
while Esther is distracted with the martini shaker. The puppy presses its ear into the palm of her hand. Juliet can feel it quivering with life that is almost too much for it to bear.

Drunk, the men take turns examining Juliet’s ring. Altogether they are not a large party: four couples in varying states of fidelity. One pair is known to Juliet and Mike only by proxy, through Esther and Teddy. The woman is a model, emaciated but with breasts. Juliet and Mike have brought another couple, Dane and Laura, good talkers, sarcastic: their fights are entertainment.

Teddy and Esther are official. Juliet has never been more ravishing than at their wedding reception: a transparent dress, gold gladiator sandals, so intoxicated that she and the groom, without anxiety, danced together to a slow song.

Esther did not want an engagement ring.

“I had sex four times last night,” Esther tells Juliet as they reach for the same bottle of wine. Juliet assumes she means with Teddy.

The man who came with the model grips Juliet’s hand and peers drunkenly at Mike’s offering. “Did he get down on one knee?” he asks.

“Yes,” says Mike even as Juliet is saying “No.”

Laughter.

“I designed the ring myself,” Juliet says as the stranger bobs over her fingers. “I mean, we decided to get married months ago — well, probably years. The ring wasn’t part of it.”

“I did get down on one knee,” says Mike.

“Maybe you did.”

“Of course he did. He would,” says Esther. “Teddy tried, but I made him stand up again.”

Teddy staggers from the kitchen, in his arms a platter of homemade ravioli stuffed with spinach and ricotta cheese. These prove underdone, but everyone raves. Teddy folds Juliet’s palm inside his own to better see the ring. He strokes her knuckles with his spare hand. Esther is watching from the other end of the table. Juliet pulls free. They are seated boy-girl-boy-girl, not by couple, at Esther’s bidding.

Juliet stumbles upstairs to the bathroom. Something green is stuck between two teeth: spinach. She digs at it with a toothbrush from the cabinet; she hopes it is Teddy’s.

I have a crush on this friend, Juliet told Laura in the taxi on their way here.

Laura shrugged. As long as you don’t fool around.

Actually, Juliet whispered, this is worse than a crush. Like being sick.

Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know, Laura said.

Who can I tell? Juliet asked.

Tell Mike. Laura laughed.

Tell me what? From the front seat.

She thinks, He already knows. It is an assumption she makes often of him: that he can read her mind. It keeps her from worrying about the things she does not tell him.

When Juliet exits the bathroom, Teddy is waiting on the unlit landing.

“Oh!”

“My turn.” He moves to brush by but brushes against instead, and they stall, her breasts pressing his ribs, arms stiff at their sides.

“I hear you had sex four times last night.”

He glances into the bedroom with the dark duvet pulled over the pillows. He is thinner than he was this summer, when he danced with Juliet. Some days he cannot walk.

I had to marry him, Esther told Juliet. This is my life. I will look after Teddy, Esther told her. I am his wife.

Esther did not need an engagement ring.

Juliet and Teddy turn away from each other. Juliet waits for one moment outside the bathroom door, swaying, but Teddy does not switch on the light. Soon this apartment will be too much for him. Too many stairs. Juliet has never seen Teddy fall.

Even Dane admires the ring. “You’ve seen it before,” says Laura in disgust.

“I’m just looking.”

“You just want to hold Juliet’s hand,” says Laura.

“I’m looking at the ring.”

“Look at mine.” Laura is not really jealous. The couples have had this conversation and they share it now: how Laura and Mike could get married and live contentedly, if not passionately, while the marriage of Dane and Juliet would end — though who would wield the instrument? — in murder.

Juliet carries dishes to the kitchen. The puppy whines from the corner, where she’s been confined to a cage.

“That looks so cruel.” Juliet kneels, the back of her hand against the wire, the puppy’s tongue wet on her skin.

“For her it’s a cave. A safe place.” Teddy comes in with a handful of forks.

Behind him Esther bends, crawls in her shiny beaded skirt across the tiles to join Juliet. “She’s sad, poor little beastie,” says Esther. “She needs a walk.”

“What about the dishes?” says Teddy.

“Leave the goddamn dishes,” says Esther. “It’s a party.”

For the walk, Esther squeezes the puppy into a little red sweater that her mother has knitted for it.

“When did you become little-red-dog-sweater people?” asks Mike. He has finished half a bottle of Scotch but is still not slurring his words.

Laura has to be pushed off the couch. “I need a nap.”

Dane thrusts her arms through coat sleeves. “It’s a party.” Everyone is saying so, as if they’d all forgotten.

The model’s boyfriend pukes in the street. Effluvium hits the tail end of a BMW, setting off its alarm.

“I should take him home,” says the model.

The cold freezes nostril fronds, paralyzes lungs, and they cough as they run down the sidewalk, away from the noise. The model and her boyfriend flag a cab and are driven away.

“Remind me why we hang out with them,” says Esther.

Teddy says, “You always invite them last-minute. When you can’t think of anyone else.”

“It isn’t a party with only six people.”

“Don’t forget the dog,” says Juliet.

“The dog,” says Teddy. “No one else wanted to come to our fling.”

“Not true,” argues Esther. “I was deliberately selective.”

They cross the street and skid along a hilltop that was crammed earlier this evening with families on sleds: mothers, fathers, children, sliding through postcard scenes.

The puppy is off her leash, barking and weaving, snapping at her sweater. She tears a corner and threads dangle. “Oh no, your little poo-poo sweater!” Esther attempts a mittened repair. The puppy growls and nips, rolling in the snow; the hole grows.

Juliet runs along the brink of the steep and slippery hill, away. Below, cars pass on a highway that is carved like a river through the sunken valley. Juliet pretends that it
is
a river and the noise and exhaust of the cars a constant tide pulling towards the unseen but believable ocean. Why are some things more believable when unseen?

And then, some things are less.

In the middle of a silent fountain a fat cherub rises, cheeks bulging to blow on a stone bugle. Neutered stone, it ridicules love, and the need for love. Juliet has run so fast that she is alone. She sinks onto the curved concrete rim, tugs off her mitten and bends over the finger that is blessed by the ring; but the diamond does not glisten as it should.

She hears their voices laughing and shrieking, spreading in all directions.

But here is Teddy.

He falls at her feet, breathless, and buries his lean, dark-skinned face in her lap, draws the exposed fingers into his mouth. She slips from the fountain’s rim and into the snow, knees bared beneath the coat that is not quite long enough, boots that are not quite tall enough.

“We won’t,” she says. It is impossible to tell who presses whom into the cold.

“We could,” he says, but he doesn’t.

They examine each other as if there is time to spare, because they have never let themselves — artificial light from tall black lampposts, glare from the snow. They can’t stop smiling; is it predatory, an animal’s warning?

“You won’t die.” The lie splits her lower lip, right down the centre.

“It’s degenerative,” he says. “Look at me.”

“I see you,” she says.

Teddy’s breath is bright, frozen heat. “In six months you’ll be afraid of me. I’ll be afraid of me. I want what I want right now.”

She thinks, We are lit from beginning to end, until our light goes out. No one knows where the light goes, smoke rising oily and vanishing, a stillness and darkness that has to be seen to be believed. How completely the light is extinguished. How empty the body’s house. She thinks, Life is light. It weighs next to nothing. No one can hold on
to it.

Juliet closes her eyes, leans into him, tongues meet teeth, wet and cruel, the scamper of blood through veins, flickers on the skin like shock. His hands smother her ears, push her into the snow. She is fallen.

Sadness spreads like a leak, pooling inside her mouth.

“Hey, kids.” Dane has found them. He kicks sparks of snow onto Juliet’s boot, rests heavily on the fountain’s rim and searches his pockets.

Teddy breathes on her red hand, crippled by the ring, as she pushes to sitting. Dane pulls out a crumpled cigarette packet.

“You don’t smoke,” Juliet says.

“And you’re getting married.”

“It’s not what it looks like.” Her knees are numb.

Teddy lurches onto the fountain’s rim beside Dane. “It’s exactly what it looks like,” he says. “I’ll take one, thanks.”

The two men fumble with the lighter, heads bent together, united. Before tonight they had never laid eyes on each other. But Juliet floods with relief that it is Teddy sitting beside Dane on the fountain. She could not bear to sit with Dane and look down on Teddy in the snow. She would rather be the foolish one, the fallen one, under their feet. Her sacrifice is temporary but she is certain that it matters: it protects them inside a moral universe of her own creation.

“Esther,” says Teddy.

“Oh my God, you’re smoking? You gave him a fucking cigarette?” She snatches it out of his mouth and tosses it, spinning and flaring, and the puppy gives chase.

Juliet stands. “Do you have any idea how enormous that dog is going to be?” Stiffly, she follows the puppy. She finds the cigarette, glowing, undampened by fiercely chilled snow, and bends and puts it to her lips. Lightly, experimentally, she draws. The last thing his lips touched, she thinks, and the thing before that.

“Off the wagon?” Laura and Mike hold hands in their approach.

“I’m so drunk it doesn’t count.” But in truth, she’s certain she’s sober as sin.

“How is it?” asks Mike.

“Do you know when you’re dreaming, and you find yourself in the middle of a cigarette, inhaling, even though you can’t remember lighting it — it just happened to you? The cigarette found you, and you think, ‘This is not happening. I will make this not happen, but already it’s too late.’ Do you know that dream?”

“Yes,” says Mike.

“You think, ‘This isn’t me. I’m not doing this.’”

“I know that dream,” says Mike.

One last drag, and Juliet drops the cigarette into the snow, kneads it beneath the surface with the toe of her boot. Gone, as easily as that, as easily as tonight will vanish.

Dane struggles to his feet, grabs Laura’s free hand. With Mike on the other side, arms swinging, the three of them are children playing: Red Rover, Red Rover, let Juliet come over.

The puppy is at her laces again, tugging, growling; everything is a game. Love for the animal rushes through Juliet, for its newness, its capacity for destruction. She bends to the puppy’s snarl and snap. She gathers its surprising and lively weight into her arms, against her chest: fur tough, claws smooth, rolls of fat around its ribs. It nips her ear, and a tooth catches on the tiny silver ring Juliet wears in the lobe, and the wince of pain gleams.

It is how her own lies catch her, when they do, off guard, bright stabs that remind her that she is alive. She thinks of what she is willing to sacrifice in order to burn, to feel her light burning. It is dangerous close to the fire, and she does not feel afraid.

Teddy is standing, Esther wrapped around his arm; or he is bent onto her and she is holding him upright. He is hungry — ravenous — against the stillness that is coming for him, and Esther would feed him anything he wanted, anything at all.

“Nightcap.” Teddy’s teeth are chattering.

“Please,” says Esther. “Please, can we just go home?”

Juliet looks at Mike. He swings his arm, promising
I will catch you no matter how hard you crash.
She thinks, He knows, he knows, he knows. She is comforted. She backs up three steps and takes a run at them all.